From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Aug 08 2002 - 00:43:36 MDT
Peter writes
> I am ranking people by the degree to which they follow rules that
> indicate they will be nice under a large set of circumstances.
Yes, that appears to be what is important to you in this discussion.
I happen to be less interested in that, and more interested in
whether altruism exists. I continue to claim that it does.
> 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.
Yes.
> >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.
I've never had any problem with the calculation, because
it went this way for me. When I was young, I was poor
and very tight. I seldom tipped. The direct cost to
me mattered (so much for looney theories that I was
making the world somehow worse for me by being tight).
Now I'm much better off, and I tip generously. I do so
(so far as I know) because of the empathy I feel for the
waiter or waitress, and because I want to complement them
on a job well done, because that also will make them feel
good.
So let's say that I finally decide to cross the Atlantic,
and go to Paris, which I'm sure I'll never re-visit. I
think that I ought to leave a $20 dollar tip, if I don't
want them to think I'm a cheapskate. Twenty dollars is
not trivial to me. It's *very* safe to assume that no
one who knows me knows that I am in the restaurant. I
would leave the tip, because I don't want to defect against
them, and want them to feel appreciated. So far as I know,
this is genuine altruism. (Having such genes enabled some
of my ancestors to reproduce better, quite possibly because
they helped my male ancestors appeal to females.)
> 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.
Yes, but I believe that an evolutionary case can be made for
its evolution, and that Ridley and others have made the case
that it exists. You're right that being sure there is no
self-interested motivation is extremely difficult. I finally
convinced myself of my own altruism by use of my VR Solipsist
thought experiment; in it, I would *never* tip if I thought
my act unobserved by people who knew me, and I didn't expect
future service from them.
Lee
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