[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.