From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Aug 12 2002 - 21:34:47 MDT
Peter writes
> >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
>
> It doesn't sound like a safe assumption to me. I don't have enough
> data about my friends travel habits to make a good estimate of the
> probability that one will be in Paris at any particular time.
This is getting absurd. The odds of you meeting an acquaintance
in a restaurant in Paris are ridiculously small. Moreover, the
point is that your failure to leave a tip has to lessen your
status. Would you disagree if I said that if you at random (a)
pick a restaurant in Paris and (b) a time, then the chance of
someone being there that you know is less than one in a thousand?
Now, if you did know someone there, would you agree that the
chance that you will lose status or respect because this person
finds out that you left a tip is also vanishingly small? After
all, maybe the service was bad (for you). You obviously have
something going on here, Peter.
> Also, determining whether any current friend is present isn't
> quite what I want, as there's also the chance that someone
> there will become my friend in the future.
How many friends do you have that you met in a restaurant and
who observed what tip you left, and would have discriminated
against you if they had learned that you didn't leave a tip?
Again, this is getting quite strained.
> >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.)
>
> Why would such genes have enabled your ancestors to reproduce better than
> someone whose genes caused him to tip in order to establish his reputation
> for niceness, or to tip in order to create warm feelings inside himself?
Here is one theory. Men need to convince women that they're good
providers who'll look out for their children even when it's in
their better genetic interest to split and spread their seed
elsewhere. So women evolve mechanisms whose purpose it to detect
genuine altruism. Men then evolve the ability to appear genuinely
altruistic, so that they get the girl and can then later "find that
things aren't working out". Thus an arms race develops.
Now as the course of this arms race progresses, some men become
genuine altruists (i.e., their genes reflect the altruist strategy).
This means that they don't incur the cost of putting on a show to
the same degree.
> I strongly suspect that it is easier for evolution to insure that a
> person's self-interest becomes whatever is needed to reap the evolutionary
> benefits of niceness than it is to evolve a feeling that it is in his
> self-interest to not be nice, and conflicting mechanisms to override
> that self-interest.
What is this "evolve a feeling that it is in his self-interest". I don't
understand your paragraph at all.
> There is, of course, much less evolutionary pressure for being conscious
> of one's self-interest than there is for being conscious of one's niceness,
> so I'm rather skeptical of your reports of your introspection.
I'm not talking about consciousness here at all. And yes, you
are perfectly right: one must be EXTREMELY wary of introspection.
We all have many mechanisms conscious and unconscious for convincing
ourselves that we're the good guys, or the nice ones, or whatever.
I came up with my VR Solipsist thought experiment precisely to
avoid the constant rationalizing I do of my behavior. So I now
have pretty good cause to suspect that I'm a genuine altruist,
because I know that if "the other people" weren't there, I'd
stop a number of behaviors that I have consistently evinced for
decades. I certainly would stop tipping in strange places (I
see no chance of any real benefit to me in it), and I'd stop
letting people go ahead of me in crowded traffic.
Lee
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