[ExI] humanity

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Wed Nov 3 18:19:46 UTC 2021


On Wed, Nov 3, 2021 at 10:51 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Adrian, are you sort of including selfishness here?  That is, if we could
> empathize fully we would understand people better and do more sharing with
> them?
>

One could phrase it that way.  That would not include every definition of
"selfishness" - I can easily imagine someone who telepathically understands
("empathizes with", for some definitions thereof) everyone else and yet
still deliberately chooses to serve their own interests exclusively.


> The question, if taken as Adrian suggests, makes no sense, since logic is
> clearly an asset.
>

No, no, it makes sense.  The answer is clearly "no", but the question makes
sense: there exist people who go around criticizing things that, to the
rest of us, are clearly assets.  They perceive some flaw that, to them,
makes these things undesirable.  Usually these "flaws" are stylistic or
aesthetic only, or confuse the origin of a thing for its present morality -
such as those who claim that everything and anything that white men came up
with, is poison because white men came up with it.

In the case of logic, said people utterly ignore that people other than
white men also came up with it, completely independently.  Their objective
is to find things to be outraged at, not truly to improve the lives of
those they claim to represent.  If they were truly looking to improve
lives, they would look to use the resources at hand regardless of origin -
much like we can make use of the results of Nazi medical research, even if
we would never permit their experiments to be done again today.
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