Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by maroonblazer 2014 days ago
>eg. Working a job is better than robbing a bank. You know this intuitively based on years of internal reasoning, now think of why? Try to make that logic explicit.

It's better because robbing a bank means I have to expend more energy covering my tracks/on the run/etc. This strategy doesn't scale because if everyone is robbing banks then the incentive to collaborate on solving the world's problems is compromised. And if the world's problems aren't solved then everyone is worse off.

>The most extreme form of it is that can choose to end our life (i.e. commit suicide), and no animal can do that.

Some mammals, e.g. whales, beach themselves.

>So then, what are human things? Why is "taking care of ourselves and our loved ones, helping others in need, better ourselves" good choices?...Try to make that logic explicit.

Consider the counterfactual: What does a world where I don't take care of myself and my loved ones, trying to help others, etc, look like? Scale this behavior to the entire population. I don't think it requires a lot of imagination to imagine what an objectively worse world that would be.

1 comments

But you're not scaling it to the entire population. You're just doing it yourself. I don't see why that step has to be a part of your logic.

Robbing a bank is bad because it hurts people. It's not a very sustainable way to make money, in that (if you want money to buy food, give to charity, buy a bike) you only have to get caught once and it'll be very bad. In contrast, you don't have that risk in a normal job.

It’s possible I never get caught and live like a king.

You have to scale it to the population because the thought experiment doesn’t apply to just one individual. Everyone has to answer the question “Why don’t I just rob a bank instead of getting a job?”