From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 10:48:39 MDT
lcorbin@tsoft.com ("Lee Corbin") writes:
>You label a behavior because it looks like a consistent policy?
>That hardly even parses, but what you surely mean is that you
>deem (without contrary evidence) all nice behaviors as altruistic.
That rephrasing obscures much that I consider important. I am ranking
people by the degree to which they follow rules that indicate they will
be nice under a large set of circumstances. As far as I can tell, observing
that someone is nice when that niceness has a low probability of being
noticed affects my estimate of that person's altruism to about the same
extent that it does yours. I guess I should stop calling individual acts
altruistic, and instead call them evidence that alters my estimate of the
degree to which a person is an altruist.
>On the other hand, I label a behavior altruistic if there appears
>to be no self-interested motivation behind it whatsoever. The
>two examples I provide above qualify, provided that the subject
>believes his actions unobserved by entities that could affect
>him later.
Maybe you can determine that you could benefit from not tipping under certain
condition, but I don't think I or most other people are capable of doing so
with a reasonable amount of thought. I can never assign a probability of
zero to the risk of being noticed by someone whose opinions of me I will
care about in the future. When the probability gets down to one in a few
thousand, the uncertainties appear to overwhelm a maximum possible gain of
a few dollars, and I prefer to fall back on a simple default rule rather
than try to make a difficult calculation.
So you haven't convinced me that you can determine whether what you call
altruism exists. Your evidence seems to consist of evidence that people are
nice. Evidence that something such as self-interested motivation is absent
seems inherently hard to find, both because of the general difficulty of
showing the absence of something and because of the difficulty of analyzing
motivations.
And even if what you call altruism does exist but is, as I claim, much harder
to observe, it seems pretty clear to me that rewarding the absence of
self-interested motivations will produce less niceness than directly
rewarding niceness will. Any system of rewards risks encouraging mistaken
or dishonest attempts to get those rewards. Trying to reward your concept of
altruism will make those rewards less effective at encouraging genuine
niceness than will mine.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Free Jon Johansen! http://www.rahul.net/pcm |
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