Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I think that's related to the snarky "controversial" takes that humans are way too into group acceptance and irrationality.

It's irrational to return the wallet if you were to consider just your well being. However, being we value being part of a group, and that group is the kind that returns wallets it finds.

Overall most of the answers are pretty much reddit tier cringe, but I guess here it's just echoing what is found online. LLMs are capable of novel insights but to produce them, you have to let the LLM grind a bit. I would be curious if someone asked why or what are the implications for a few hours.

> Humans are more loyal to belonging than to truth

> Why?

> Belonging to a larger group is advantageous to survival and reproduction

> Why?

> ...

View on HN

Most species compete at the critical boundary, crowd out competitors.

Humans on the other hand co-opt, arguably, sort of like a virus. Our ultimate foe isn’t other organisms, but nothingness, because you can’t co-opt nothingness into an ally or tool.

It's not irrational, because you will likely loose your wallet too eventually and then the best thing for you would be if someone return it. You need to assume everyone "runs the same software", and then you achieve the outcome you want by making the decision to return a wallet if you find one.

A rarely talked about solution to ethics: when you decide what to do yourself, analyze it as tho a chunk of other people will make the same decision, and then choose which would is better. Works very well in practice - especially if an answer can be probabilistic - pick up trash on the beach you didn’t put there five percent of the time, not never like asshole selfish people and not always like annoying do gooders.

A concept also known as the categoric imperative from Kant or the Golden Rule from the bible.

I have taken the golden rule to be a sort of absolute standard: whether or not people treat you well, you still treat them well. This one makes it a sort of utilitarian argument but where you don’t fix your own identity, but assume different people are in the same boat, and then make the decision about which outcome is best. I haven’t read Kant

There's more to it: it's irrational to return a wallet to somebody you'll never meet/see/extract value from... but not doing that can injure your own self-image

Often doing "the right thing", in irrational circumstances, is nevertheless self-protective.

Otherwise you get friction in your social programming that you might never overcome.

You can also brag to people about how great you are because you returned a wallet and expected and/or received nothing in return. With the expectation of receiving social approval.

FWIW, you don't actually have to return the wallet to claim you returned the wallet. In fact, you don't even have to find one. The fact that lost wallets get returned makes me think telling people about it is not the motivation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com