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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

You mean, by coming in tune with ones own body and mind people start to value themselves? Call me shocked!

In all seriousness, people who know what they want tend to come across as selfish. I don’t know why people consider this bad. All airlines tell you to put on your masks, before helping others (in their emergency videos). The idea being, you must be capable in order to help others.

I think this is something many altruists miss. Society is best when everyone is healthy and capable. Teach a man to fish, as opposed to giving him a fish, so to speak.

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I agree in principle, but anecdotally, I've seen lots wealthy folks in California get very into mindfulness which makes them feel great about themselves and feel more enlightened, but they do absolutely nothing to help others in any way. They only seem to become more self absorbed. Actually, it's not just wealthy people, I've seen it happen to poor folks who get into that too.

‘You are what you do, not what you think.’

- badly paraphrased from Gary John Bishop

The headline gave me the same initial thought. I assume the experiment controlled for this, but so much of the mindfulness stuff is associated with self-optimizing hustle culture types that it seemed obvious to me it would correlate with higher-than-baseline selfish behavior.

I basically agree.

"Selfish" is a sloppy word that combines unlike things. Which means it's a toxic word.

People should be self-interested. We are organisms, after all. Like animals.

However, people should not be fixated on their own self-interest to the point that they neglect the bigger picture. If you neglect the bigger picture, you will not be successful at being self-interested.

For example, if you neglect your spouse's feelings, people will say you're being "selfish." But you aren't being self-interested, because you aren't promoting a good life for yourself.

For a good critique of altruism, which is really a separate topic, see Ayn Rand.

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