Human Nature Pessimism

It's a common line of thinking that forcing a greater good onto others will lift them up to your level of moral righteousness. Those on the downward arc of the evolution are learning to deal with the world around them. They can be greedy selfish predators and it's good and appropriate for them. If you stopped predators in the wild from hunting the peaceful animals, you would derail evolution of both kinds. If you somehow ended greed, the vast majority of people would go lethargic as yo

You're perfectly describing capitalism's essence, with a cherry on top, labelling it 'bad'.The point I was aiming for, is that people like what's easy, what's natural.You're saying 'they're bad'. That's actually the Christian axiom from what I understand, that people are inherently sinful and bad. I'd like to suggest that feeling that way is a dead end.In other words - I actually agree with everything you're saying, minus

I think humans are like corrupted, selfish and evil LLMs that like to think Utopia is possible if you think about it that way it’s super easy to understand

Honestly, it just sounds to me like you’ve come up with some axioms in your mind about the “fundamental nature” of humanity - and then granted yourself the luxury of certainty about them. That, with a dash of misanthropy, is something I’ve been seeing more and more on HN these days.

After the world solved the scarcity problem with respect to everyone's ability to survive a normal, healthy, dignified lifespan, most of the economy continued to shift towards conspicuous consumption.If you look honestly at humanity, the motivations of the average person are selfish and unenlightened. An internet mod enjoys authority and an elevated sense of self worth by putting other people down.There really are some people genuinely enthused by virtues such as intellectual discover

Sometimes I get the sense that people hate that we exist, in the numbers that we do, because of our impact on the earth by merely existing. A self-hatred if you will. And before you respond with "if only we did X, it would be fine," consider that the difficulty of convincing/coercing lots of people to do things is also an inherent part of our existence. Also part of our existence is the incentive to cheat to get ahead (in whatever economic system you pick).We can't live li

Seems like you're confusing societal incentive structures for human nature there, bud

Unironically this is how most of us think about the world. I believe as humans we’re innately selfish and want to feel like we’re usually good or at least justified. Everyone is the protagonist of their own life and sometimes the antagonist of other people’s lives, so it’s worth considering how you could do better to others rather than continuing to justify yourself.

I think people in western countries have been a victim of our own successes, where we enjoy such a prosperous (relative to most of history) life that we now unwittingly afford the luxury of forgetting how raw human behavior actually works.People don't start out being nice, altruistic and self sacrificing. That is socially conditioned and a learned behavior. However, we have conflated those positive traits as the base class of humanity, when it's really not.I worry that we will n

"humanity" wouldn't really be humanity anymore if it did that. biases are part of our nature. societies are always built on sacred fictions.