We can clearly define concepts like egoism, selfishness, and selfless altruism when we look at our everyday decisions from a game-theoretic perspective. Think of every possible interaction between people as a game where each party can either win or lose. This gives us the following grid with four possible outcomes: 1. Win-Win (Effectiveness) In a win-win situation, both you and the other group or person benefit from the interaction, and with your plus added to the other's plus, you get a … [Read more...]

When I criticize someone for doing something that I would do myself, I am a hypocrite because my criticism typically implies the pretense that I wouldn't. The same glass house logic applies to hypocrisy itself. Unless I have absolute certainty that I would never be hypocritical, which I practically cannot have, I cannot judge anyone of being hypocritical because this would make me meta-hypocritical, that is, hypocritical about my own hypocrisy. … [Read more...]

The distinction between statistics and the individual is among the most far-reaching concepts of the modern world. We can view everything from science and its philosophy to politics, ethics, and economics in the light of that distinction. Recall that statistics is about averages, trends, and patterns that emerge from large numbers (effects of scale), whereas the individual, though it may appear in a statistic as a data point, escapes most typical methods of quantification. This has … [Read more...]

Is criticizing capitalism and campaigning for redistributive justice with an oppressor/oppressed narrative equivalent to endorsing the revival of ethnic cleansing, forced deportations to Gulags, political purges, and terror-starvations for the sake of a classless, communist society? Is preserving one's ethnicity and not wanting increasingly more tax money to be spent on social benefits for immigrants equivalent to wanting to expand the Third Reich by invading neighboring countries while … [Read more...]