The greatest misunderstanding in the history of morality is that “selfish” motives taint actions with immorality

Altruism, selflessness, is not a virtue, not even a little bit. It’s a vice, and it’s going to be the end of us

Doing things that have no benefit to you isn’t noble or admirable; it’s facile and reckless.

The charitable impulse is logical in situations where small groups of people are subject to variance in survival-critical resources; it’s a way of distributing risk

That’s all charity is! It’s not some higher calling from heaven, it’s an evolved strategy for hedging against starvation in hunter-gatherer groups

In other words, a selfless emotion has a selfish genesis and a selfish telos. Of all our instincts which are maladaptive in the modern world, the will to charity is among the worst

Generosity can be good, freely sharing information or resources is a way of building social credit. But when someone gives you something, they aren’t doing you a favor. Everyone subconsciously keeps mental accounts

Say you see a beggar on the street, and you decide to give him some money. You did a good thing, right? Wrong! You subsidized his failures. Charity begets only more dependence.

But he will pick himself up, maybe. “One day your roles might be reversed!” Then give money to an organization that rehabilitates bums. If you fall back on social credit to defend charity, you’ve already lost

There are two reasons to give to a bum: 1. You tell no one, it was your stupid charitable lizard brain, the same one that makes you eat shitty industrial junk food, running roughshod all over your rationality or—

2. You did it for social accolades from bystanders, or from yourself; or so you can brag about it, “oh I’m such a good person”. In which case you did get something out of it, it wasn’t irrational, just a lie

You may think “saving lives” is noble, as if all lives had the same worth, as if “all lives matter”, a repulsive slogan for precisely the opposite reason that most people cite

The fact is that everyone has a quantifiable value and some people are strictly better or worse than others, no matter how rude it is to talk about

Anglos especially bristle at this obvious assertion. It would be a mistake of course to use this truth as a license to think yourself above others; the more one cleaves to hierarchy, the more one must be humble, but humble doesn’t mean stupid

Everyone seems to agree that the earth is overpopulated, that most of our environmental worries are simply questions of scale—the solution is so obvious

Shall we ourselves become paperclip maximizers, except the paperclip is low quality human lives? https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1038056707979530240

What effective altruists get wrong is that when you can save someone’s life for $5, all you have done is preserve a life that was worth $5. You can easily put a price on human life, we do it every day, and you get what you pay for

So is it moral to let people starve? Or die of a curable disease? Often yes. If you raise up a man who cannot feed himself, and through your subsidies he raises a family who go on to require your largesse, you will destroy yourself and him and his family when you run out of money

Children will grow into adults; if they are your children you should of course care for them, as one cares for all of one’s property, to the utmost. Caring for your own children is a selfish impulse, and a good one

But feeding adults who are sound of body, this is often immoral: it robs them of their own moral duties to themselves, It fosters the degeneration of their soul, it degrades them and it makes you an accomplice

“I want to feed the hungry so they will be able to grow spiritually later”. Bullshit. You want to feed them so you can feel superior to them, and also to your friends, who are not as charitable as you

For fucks sake they have effective altruist conventions where “altruists” get together to brag about how selfless they are. Did you know pity is the same emotion as contempt?

Always and at all times, multiplying the number of mankind is multiplying suffering. You think saving lives is good and suffering is bad? Just look at yourself.

Even rationalist EAs know that suffering is good, it’s why they teach the parable of the wirehead, a cognitive dissonance that keeps them up at night: wireheading bad but suffering bad? Uh oh.

If you really think suffering is bad you should try to immanentize the eschaton. Only the death of all humans will bring the end of all suffering.

The only reason Buddhists don’t commit suicide (aside from obvious evolutionary imperatives) is their belief in reincarnation.

Instead they try to sit still and eliminate all cognitive activity from their mind, like a rock. Rocks are the pinnacle of enlightenment, no suffering, no mental chatter at all. I can prove it with an EEG

Aside: Buddhism is the quest to become an NPC (Drake voice: Yeah)

Oh but it’s only _needless_ suffering I want to eliminate. Meaningless. You should not seek suffering but nor should you run from it. There is no pleasure without pain and masochists get way more done than hedonists

Suffering tempers us and when you take it away from others you rob them of spiritual growth. Life without pain is decadence and decay. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1037330250961575936

Is altruism never good? What about the man who nobly sacrifices himself in battle to save his fellows or his country? His action is good, but NOT because it was selfless. With his life he tried to buy glory for himself and safety for his loved ones. Selfishly.

Aiding your friends and allies is never a selfless act. Those whom you love are extensions of yourself.

Every supposedly selfless act has a selfish benefit, even if it’s motive is “pure”. Mostly people act selflessly because it builds their reputation as a moral or trustworthy person, selfish gain that they perceive instinctively, and keep their conscious mind in the dark

On the rare chance that you do something selfless and no one ever finds out, then was your selflessness “pure”? Let me answer a question with a question; is jerking off the most refined form of sexual expression?

Altruism is always self-serving, but we are very good at maintaining the fictions around it.

Great thread explaining why altruism used to be “good” and is now maladaptive. https://twitter.com/amk2934/status/1061725598458888192