32 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2021
  2. Oct 2020
  3. Sep 2020
  4. Aug 2020
  5. Jul 2020
  6. May 2020
    1. In evolutionary terms, certainly, because the individuals that show these traits have a higher chance of survival in the long term.

      Not surprisingly, nature is a great teacher. Not until the 1950s and Johnny von Neumann did game theory get developed, but it was found that tit for tat with forgiveness is the optimal model. In other words, altruism or as Henry Ford called it, enlightened self-interest (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Game_theory)

  7. Apr 2020
  8. Feb 2020
    1. there is littleelse on this list which can be considered part of a life history strategy if ‘life history’ is meant to be anchored in evolutionary biological research

      Isn't altruism, the willingness and ability to sacrifice for kin, the rate of drop-off of willing altruism, etc all directly connected to evolutionary biology?

  9. Nov 2017
    1. “The practical implications of this positive feedback loop could be that engaging in one kind deed (e.g., taking your mom to lunch) would make you happier, and the happier you feel, the more likely you are to do another kind act,”
  10. Jul 2017
    1. We do not help everyone equally—some people just seem to be more worthy of help than others. Our cognitions about people in need matter as do our emotions toward them.

      *Social experiment*: Our cognitive perception of others ha s an effect on whether we decide to help or not.

  11. Sep 2016
    1. EA principles can work in areas outside of global poverty. He was growing the movement the way it ought to be grown, in a way that can attract activists with different core principles rather than alienating them.
    2. Effective altruism is not a replacement for movements through which marginalized peoples seek their own liberationAnd you have to do meta-charity well — and the more EA grows obsessed with AI, the harder it is to do that. The movement has a very real demographic problem, which contributes to very real intellectual blinders of the kind that give rise to the AI obsession. And it's hard to imagine that yoking EA to one of the whitest and most male fields (tech) and academic subjects (computer science) will do much to bring more people from diverse backgrounds into the fold.
    3. The other problem is that the AI crowd seems to be assuming that people who might exist in the future should be counted equally to people who definitely exist today. That's by no means an obvious position, and tons of philosophers dispute it. Among other things, it implies what's known as the Repugnant Conclusion: the idea that the world should keep increasing its population until the absolutely maximum number of humans are alive, living lives that are just barely worth living. But if you say that people who only might exist count less than people who really do or really will exist, you avoid that conclusion, and the case for caring only about the far future becomes considerably weaker
    4. The problem is that you could use this logic to defend just about anything. Imagine that a wizard showed up and said, "Humans are about to go extinct unless you give me $10 to cast a magical spell." Even if you only think there's a, say, 0.00000000000000001 percent chance that he's right, you should still, under this reasoning, give him the $10, because the expected value is that you're saving 10^32 lives.
    5. At one point, Russell set about rebutting AI researcher Andrew Ng's comment that worrying about AI risk is like "worrying about overpopulation on Mars," countering, "Imagine if the world's governments and universities and corporations were spending billions on a plan to populate Mars." Musk looked up bashfully, put his hand on his chin, and smirked, as if to ask, "Who says I'm not?"

      Es decir, debemos preocuparnos ahora por los riesgos imaginarios de inversiones que ni los gobiernos, ni las universidades están haciendo para un "apocalipsis Sci Fi" un lugar de preocuparnos por los problemas reales. Absurdo!

  12. Sep 2015
    1. Heroism is about one thing: It’s about a concern for other people in need, a concernto develop, to defending a moral cause knowing there is a personal cause or risk. That’s the key.And you do it without expectation of reward. So altruism is heroism light. Compassion is avirtue that may lead to heroism, but we don’t know. Nobody’s established said link.
    2. A second line of research is about "elevation," which refers to the warm, uplifting feeling we get when we witness someone else's good deed. Research by moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as well as by Simone Schnall, has found that elevation systematically motivates people to perform altruistic acts themselves.
    1. Giving has also been linked to the release of oxytocin, a hormone (also released during sex and breast feeding) that induces feelings of warmth, euphoria, and connection to others. In laboratory studies, Paul Zak, the director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, has found that a dose of oxytocin will cause people to give more generously and to feel more empathy towards others,
    2. A study by James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows that when one person behaves generously, it inspires observers to behave generously later, toward different people. In fact, the researchers found that altruism could spread by three degrees—from person to person to person to person. “As a result,” they write, “each person in a network can influence dozens or even hundreds of people, some of whom he or she does not know and has not met.”
    3. The happier participants felt about their past generosity, the more likely they were in the present to choose to spend on someone else instead of themselves. Not all participants who remembered their past kindness felt happy. But the ones who did were overwhelmingly more likely to double down on altruism.
    1. Some evolutionary biologists argue that organisms may sometimes put themselves at risk in order to help another because they expect that the other organism will return the favor down the line, a concept known as reciprocal altruism.
    2. Altruism: Altruism is when we act to promote someone else’s welfare, even at a risk or cost to ourselves