i’m going to just start RTing people inveighing against the evils of cynicism without comment because a world with more credulous people is advantageous and if you can be made more credulous by that sort of thing then you deserve to be
what even is this late-coming revisionist “cynicism” that everybody hates and nobody likes, anyway? it never seems defined beyond “blob of stuff i don’t like”
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my main association with it is when you point out how basic adversarial advantage seeking will make somebody’s do-gooding program worse than useless they call you cynical to shut you up
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Do you see a distinction between observing that apparent altruism is sometimes self-serving, and denying the existence of altruism?
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yeah, i define altruism in terms such that why you’re doing it has no bearing
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Interesting. I'd be curious to hear this definition, as I'd always taken the word to imply its motivation.
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altruism is when you account costs and benefits to other people at a factor greater than costs and benefits to you
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good is when you account them the same or comparably
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evil is when you account yours much higher
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malevolence is when you account theirs at a negative factor
End of conversation
New conversation -
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it's a fairly clear definition: distrust of motives leading to insincerity in all aspects of life, nothing enjoyed for its own qualities but only for the way it points out the failures in something else, nothing taken at face value leading to nothing being valued at all.
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sounds like a real pathological case that doesn’t follow from the basic principle out of any necessity at all
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it's what the term means, sry
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enh, the meaning of the term didn’t mutate from a philosophical school to a snarl word for newspaper editorial polemics and then magically stop there forever
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it did tho
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nuh uh
End of conversation
New conversation -
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