The Pathological Altruist

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

[I]

What connection did you see to this line of thinking and the article's discussion of the new trajectory in academia to study "altruism" and its manifestations in human behavior and the laws of thermodynamics and cause/effect?

Please forgive the large snip of some really good stuff. I wanted to address this question specifically, though, because it is one of my little intellectual obsessions. Selfishness is easy to explain. Darwinian theory would predict that each organism is going full-out to look after its own interests. Altruism is an interesting puzzle and interesting puzzles are where science becomes something of an adventure. Why would altruism evolve?

Altruism evolved because while genes may be pseudo-selfish the world that the bodies these genes make is so complex that it actually pays to cooperate. Despite what we might expect from a very straight-forward reading of Darwinian theory, Nature continues to prove she is more clever than we are. How this gets booted up is through the fact of parents and offspring. Offspring have a cost but they also are an investment in the future. When a female is pregnant the nutrients that go into her offspring are not available for *her*. However, the payoff for her genes is that she passes them on into the future. Thus is altruism booted up. If parents *consistently* did what was solely in their own direct interest then their offspring would die off and the planet would be sterile. If, on the other hand, parents *never* pursued their own self-interest then they could be exploited not only by their own offspring but by their neighbors. Nature has to find an equilibrium between these two extremes and has to do it in a completely blind and haphazard fashion. This is why altruism is interesting.

The relationship between thermodynamics is that despite what we might wish about the world, there are always costs. Always. This means that when we look at the world and either try to explain why it works the way it does or try to envision how it might be improved upon, we must always ask ourselves the cost of things. Costs here do not mean money. Costs here is a synonym for consequences. The other day, my wife was talking about a situation when she was a child that is a perfect illustration. When she was a girl, she had an opportunity to skip two whole grades. This would have put her in the same grade as her elder brother. Her mother did not want to make her brother feel bad so she did not let her skip the grades. Either choice had potentially negative consequences; in one, her brother is, perhaps, humiliated by his little sister proving to be smarter than him. The other is her being held back. Her mother would've preferred solution where she got to skip two grades where both children got what they needed but that was not the situation she was presented with.

This is not about the wrongness of her decision in not letting her daughter jump two grades. Rather, it is to illustrate that there were no *possible* worlds, given the initial conditions, where her mother could have made a decision where there was not even the risk of cost. (In other words, it may have turned out to be the case that her brother might have been fine with his little sister skipping grades and this would actually provide the best possible outcome but the calculations her mother made was not knowing *how* things would work out so she was dealing with the potential cost-benefit.) Too often we ignore these types of considerations or try to dismiss them with hand-waving. But this is, in fact, where the nitty gritty work gets done *and* it is humbling because in trying to solve these kinds of problems one brushes right up against the limits of one's own abilities to grasp things.

I do not think we should look to the natural world for our morality, necessarily. Nature is horribly cruel and wasteful and has tortures that are the stuff of horror movies that various organisms use as a way of feeding themselves or propagating. But I think we *can* and *should* look to Nature for an understanding of ourselves and of the world we inhabit. Not so that we can learn what we should do, but so we can have some kind of ideas about what we can do. I would love for every adult in America to have a grounding in the kinds of trade-offs nature makes because all of the living things we see around us and we ourselves are the results of those trade-offs. That means I would love for every American adult to understand Darwinian theory because it gives people the tools to really start to be amazed at how Nature does things and why our world is so wonderful while, at the same time, training the mind to begin asking cost-questions. I would also love every American adult to understand the second law of thermodynamics because, again, it trains the mind to seek out and understand costs.

Cheers
Aj

[tapu]

Nice, AJ.


Hey, I read a book called Why Things Bite Back: The Science of Unintended Consequences. Informative and entertaining. A bit outdated by copyright but still generally applicable and extendable to current issues.

[SoNotHer]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

But I think we *can* and *should* look to Nature for an understanding of ourselves and of the world we inhabit. Not so that we can learn what we should do, but so we can have some kind of ideas about what we can do. I would love for every adult in America to have a grounding in the kinds of trade-offs nature makes because all of the living things we see around us and we ourselves are the results of those trade-offs. That means I would love for every American adult to understand Darwinian theory because it gives people the tools to really start to be amazed at how Nature does things and why our world is so wonderful while, at the same time, training the mind to begin asking cost-questions.

I like that this is extending tangentially into related areas of great interest to me. I want to focus in particular on this passage. I would like to think that as a species accessing, well, at least two percent of our brains, that me might avail ourselves of four billion years of Earth engineering. Biomimicry, one of my beloved interests, does attempt this. I would also like to think that we can and should come to some understanding of evolution as something worthy of study and emulation and not an idea to run in fear from or see, in the context of religious teachings, as mutually exclusive. Either we have our sacred cosmologies, or we have evolution, but, the twain shall never harmonize like a good PBJ sandwich. (It's late. I'm hungry.)

So, as my neighbor likes to tell everyone I introduce him to, if we had some intrinsic understanding that one gallon of ancient sunlight (otherwise known as "oil" or its refined offspring "gasoline") is equivalent to three weeks of human labor @ 40 hours a week, we might understand the implications of the second law of thermodynamics, "that no transformation from concentrated to dispersed energy is every 100 percent efficient, and that the late night love call to girlfriend X across town just demanded a lot of beefy types working at .1 hp for three weeks and so on. This equation and information can be found through many sources besides my rogue, cigarette-bumming neighbor, but for convenience sake, I'll reference Pimentel's "Energy and Power" article for The Social Contract.

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/art...cle_1090.shtml

I would love for Americans to have a much better understanding of trade offs too, AJ, and I would like them to send me ten dollars or at least a Ponderosa gift certificate (still hungry) for me telling them so. If, for instance, Americans had more information on Hubbard's theory and the term "Peak Oil" than they did on what the Khardasians bought this week, we might have a much deeper appreciation for the fact that the suburbia and empire we zealously undertook in the 50s on $2/barrel oil is now far harder to maintain on $85/barrel oil. And if we were to collectively realize that the ratio of energy spent in extraction to energy (oil for our purposes here) obtained continues to tip in the direction of diminishing returns and depletion, we might in fact be able to effectively reinvent our relationship with energy, model a more balanced and enduring kind of altruism, and pack the entire 2000 in the life boats, coolers and all.

I would welcome the continued survival and non-dissipation of this discussion. I would also welcome Planetary threads on the transition movement, Peak Oil, permaculture and biomimicry, all of which I find the most interesting and useful trajectories for discussion and embrace and deployment in these times. Or, if attempting to attract acolytes, perhaps we would all enjoy creating and top dipping into threads like "The Possibilities of Better Living Through Logic," or "Why I Can't Prepare for Post-Peak Oil Apocalypse Homesteading with a Histrionic Harpy."

Meanwhile, Tapu, I fear you have reshifted your onus (that doesn't sound right and conjures that oh-so-pretty name for the 7th planet) back to me. Hmmm. Well, I shall do my best to find excerpts from the play to satisfy your inquiry. Meanwhile, for God's sake read Stoppard because he's funny, brilliant and, well, yes, biologically related. Now if only I could convince his manager that a millenium-old mitochondiral separation is still technically related and that royalty sharing keeps families strong and snuggly close.

In other news, I need to sleep. I'm shooting arrows in a few hours with my shooting arrows friend. Better that I not be so sleep deprived as to think her Envoy's hubcaps a target.

Thank you all for a jolly good discourse, and happy Saturday morning to you.

[tapu]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

Meanwhile, Tapu, I fear you have reshifted your onus (that doesn't sound right and conjures that oh-so-pretty name for the 7th planet) back to me. Hmmm. Well, I shall do my best to find excerpts from the play to satisfy your inquiry. Meanwhile, for God's sake read Stoppard because he's funny, brilliant and, well, yes, biologically related. Now if only I could convince his manager that a millenium-old mitochondiral separation is still technically related and that royalty sharing keeps families strong and snuggly close.

Whut? I think you overestimate me....

[SoNotHer]

Originally Posted by tapu

Whut? I think you overestimate me....

OK, than for God and Goddess' sake just read anything.

I will look forward to the report on your exploration of Stoppard. You have a day, eh? :-)

[Cin]

Originally Posted by ElijahRene

I once posed a hypothetical question to a friend about a discussion we were having along the same vein...I asked if you were on a ship with 2,000 people on board but only had enough life rafts to hold 1,000, would you save the 1,000 or would you attempt to overload the life rafts and in the end, no one survives?

It would be foolish to overload the life rafts so no one survives. However, for me the problem lies in who dies and who decides it. Because it is hard to imagine 1000 people willingly sacrificing themselves.

I would be interested in the plan for making the hard choices. I would also be interested in how the plan once made would be implemented. Who gets saved who gets condemned to death? And who tells the 1000 who need to sacrifice themselves? Perhaps there would be 1000 pathological altruists on the ship. Now that would be a stroke of luck.

[SoNotHer]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

It would be foolish to overload the life rafts so no one survives. However, for me the problem lies in who dies and who decides it.

Agreed. I'm curious if anyone has seen Hitchcock's Lifeboat or read Lord of the Flies recently.