[adamjb]

This deserves to be shouted from the hilltops

>In human relationships we can't optimize without becoming greedy selfish unethical crooks. And in commerce we prefer relations to transactions, ready to support the local butcher because we feel we are part of a community and we are not alone --we are paid back with a smile and someone who says hello in the street. Indeed the central flaw in optimization is thinking that "everything else" ceases to exist and makes people think the individual, not the collective, is the true unit --when such thinking blows up the system. We humans are punished when we try to optimize, as if we suddenly ceased to be humans.

[danuker]

> In human relationships we can't optimize without becoming greedy selfish unethical crooks.

I disagree. I optimize for myself AND the people around me. That is because I don't feel good when I have everything and others have nothing.

> we are optimized enough for survival already

Survival up to reproduction age, and maybe a bit more for raising grandkids. Past that, everything is our own making - we haven't ever lived so long, and the current epidemic of heart disease and cancer is as a result of never-before-seen ages and chemical substances - like the Standard American Diet.

[ysavir]

> I disagree. I optimize for myself AND the people around me. That is because I don't feel good when I have everything and others have nothing.

How much do you optimize for the people around you? Do you spread things between yourself and others equally, or optimize that everyone still get some, but you still get most?

I don't mean that as a challenge or attack. It's a genuine question.

[amelius]

> I disagree. I optimize for myself AND the people around me. That is because I don't feel good when I have everything and others have nothing.

True. But most try to make sure that they have just a little bit more than anybody else around them.

[simonh]

That is not always true in my experience. Several generations on my and my wife's families put up with backbreaking hard work and privations in order to build a better future for later generations. Simultaneously other branches of our families spent what they had and enjoyed better lives at the time instead. It was a huge investment that really paid off in my generation, my family's debt to them is incalculable and largely unpayable.

[fumar]

I feel the same way.

[sokoloff]

I wonder how true the preference for relationship over transaction is. I buy fish from my local fishmonger because it’s qualitatively substantially better tasting. If that stopped being true, my relationship with him would end immediately and “supermarket fish it is now, because that’s about 50% the cost”. He can basically only stay in business by competing on quality because he can’t possibly compete on price and there aren’t enough people who would pay his rent out of a sense of charity for the local fish butcher.

[lovemenot]

If your fishmonger is good they've correctly identified you as a quality-driven customer. And for you quality means freshness trumps cut, which trumps knowledge, which trumps variety, which trumps packaging and so on.

Another customer was identified as driven by service, banter, tradition, speed, familiarity etc.

It's all relationship.