[MatthiasWandel]

I have come to that conclusion myself over the years too.

But "bad people" or aholes also have usefulness. You sometimes need people to challenge things that only an unreasonable person would challenge. And you need the occasional Steve Jobs too.

But unlike altruistic people, we generally don't give the aholes as much credit. So, ironically, perhaps altruism is the better self serving strategy.

[jacquesm]

You can't have too many altruistic people. You can however have too many assholes and the number of assholes where this effect starts to dominate is not all that high. The fact that our societies reward asshole behavior as much as they do is a huge problem.

[naasking]

Not sure that's true. You're assuming altruism has no failure modes or pathologies. I know plenty of people whose altruism is driven by various anxieties and neuroses, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation, at the very least. A whole society of altruists could easily be very fragile and thus vulnerable to the slightest defector or adversary (cf. Galaxy Quest).

Some degree of assholes and psychopaths make for robust systems that protect against abuse, intentional or accidental.

[jacquesm]

Interesting viewpoint. I'm sure some assholes and psychopaths would love to have a figleaf to explain their behavior. But in my experience: you can have 90% nice people and 10% assholes and it will wreck your life. Even 1:30 is probably still too many.

And the failure modes and pathologies you describe are external: an exploiter is by definition not part of the group of altruists and that makes them a perfect example of how few assholes it takes to ruin things.

[naasking]

Suggesting we benefit from and should tolerate some degree of assholes is not some kind of justification for asshole behaviour. It's a similar effect where we wouldn't care about computer security if criminals and black hats didn't exist, which would leave us incredibly vulnerable. This doesn't entail that we should proactively hire or encourage criminals and black hats to attack us.

The fact that the problems I pointed out are external is because those were just the most obvious failure modes, do not take it as an exhaustive list.

[PakG1]

Interestingly enough, it's the a-holes that seem to be getting the most credit and rewards in recent years. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, all the populist elected heads of state, etc. The kind people seem to be the losers in recent history. Wish it were the opposite.

[coldtea]

>The kind people seem to be the losers in recent history.

You mean like back when it was kind people and not warlords, and rich scum, and Genghis Khan being the winers?

[vacuity]

Recent history, so maybe Jimmy Carter.

[coldtea]

My much older examples are on purpose.

Meaning "this is the case only on recent history? What about those examples from thousands of years ago".

[vacuity]

Ah, I misread. I doubt there was such an extent of political and corporate corruption or anything analogous. Maybe that isn't fair for me to say as I'm a product of recent history.

[astrange]

Those people weren't assholes and successful at the same time, it happened in different phases of their lives.

(I think it's notable Steve Jobs's largest business successes happened after he got married.)

[NL807]

Because they are more visible due to their flamboyant personalities. I think this was always the case historically.

[_a_a_a_]

selection or reporting bias. You don't hear of the arseholes that fail.

[PakG1]

The ones that had a chance? Sure I do. The ones that didn't have a chance? I don't hear of the kinder people who failed either.

[hliyan]

In other words, societies that consist only of members who are highly strategic in their self-interest (i.e. altruistic) may be overly stable and lack the sort of disruptions or "mutations" that short-term thinkers introduce. Such societies are likely to stagnate. Consider, as very rough approximations, twentieth century America vs. ancient China.

[kibwen]

While acknowledging the social utility of disruption, I see no reason to conclude that altruism is either incompatible or inversely correlated with the ability to disrupt.

[MichaelZuo]

There's a caveat though, the challenger needs to be a world beater nowadays since so many things are intertwined, a mediocore ahole just adds noise.