On Thu, 2002-12-12 at 20:51, Robin Turner wrote: > How can you irrationally act in your own interests?
Well, I smoke, for example. That is certainly NOT in my material interests. It is totally irrational. But in a totally irrational way, the cancer is better than the stress of quitting. Notice that "interests" is a very ample word. > You seem to equate > interests with benefits with desires, which include, for example, avoiding guilt from indeleble conditioning, though conforting thoughts can dress such behaviour quite nicely > which is certainly a tenable > position, and has the virtue of simplicity, but then may include > genuinely altruistic behaviour - if I desire to help people more than I > desire to act on what an econmist would class as my interests, I will do > so, and in your terms, I am acting in my interests. Of course. And why you should desire one thing more than the other is nobody's business, and most of us normally don't delve that deep. There are fouler and more ancient creatures there, my dear Frodo, etc. (yes, I know. Been one all my life). As I said, I use "egoism" a lot, so I'm no longer surprised at the resistance it provokes. It's an altruistic thing I do, you know, purely out of the kindness of my heart, to jibe people, specially the most self-righteous ones. None of that sort in this thread, and surprisingly few in the Linux community. I'm having wonderful experiences since I switched, and since we are way off topic anyway, let me recount just one. I have an USB ADSL modem for which the manufacturer provides no Linux drivers (surprise surprise). The people at http://eciadsl.flashtux.org/ write and maintain one. I couldn't get it to work, but they have a specialised chat channel. I'd never used IRC, but I dowloaded a client for windows, entered their chat, and got real time analysis of the files I kept sending them as they asked, retrieved from my Linux partition thanks to a program they recommended. They found the problem, provided the solution, and here I am. Windows is rotting in a corner of my hard disk. At the same time, these people were answering questions, in french and english, to a lot of other lost newbies like me. You can't pay for help like that. I have a debt of gratitude to these folks. But they do it because they want to, they are Mother Theresas to me, but then she went to the lepers 'cos SHE wanted to, also. Money is not the only thing that moves people, but "altruism" is at least as ambiguous as my use of "egoism". I refuse to take it at face value. I hope this deep down the thread nobody who is likely to be shocked by the misplacing of such discussions is reading. If anybody, however, should be offended, I apologize. I guess I too got a button inadvertedly pressed... :) Meliton.
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