> There are actually people that aren't self interested in public service, they do exist.
relying on altruism is not what i would call scalable nor stable.
The rules of the system should be such that the optimal/desirable behaviour is also the selfish behaviour. If something selfish or damaging is beneficial to the individual at the expense of someone else, then the rules must be changed to even it back out.
Selfishness is anomalous if the consensus of research literature on the topic is to be believed.
Without dropping volumes of research, you can derive this intuitively. Think about how people respond in disasters. Running into danger to save strangers is common for things like floods or bystanders trying to save someone in a car crash. Prosocial is the norm.
These days extreme selfishness is an indicator of autistic spectrum disorder.
So when you pivot everything around selfishness what you in practice do is reward people with a certain flavor of autism and those who have that learned behavior. For example, Elon Musk, Richard Sackler, Adam Nuemam, Sam Bankman Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, Martin Shkreli, Mark Zuckerberg...
Selecting for those traits exclusively to administer the public commons sounds fairly dangerous
Always fun to scroll hn and get some drive-by ableism. The majority of autistic people aren't in full time work, they probably don't resemble that remark.
Of course not. There's a really big difference here.
On the one hand, asd people are everywhere including in positions of power.
However, if you had a system which, by design, considers a subsection of asd people as the only ones qualified to hold power, you would be missing out on the contributions of everyone else which we should be including, you know, as a virtue of democracy.
To circle back around, the premise that people are fundamentally selfish is what's being rejected. The reality is (some small minority of) people behave in ways that might be considered fundamentally selfish and they've been thoroughly studied by behaviourists and psychologists.
> On the one hand, asd people are everywhere including in positions of power.
Are they?
Forgive the suspicion, it's just aside from Zuckerberg and Musk the rest of the list you specifically named in the GP comment aren't on the autism spectrum, so I'm finding this line of reasoning a little dubious.
relying on altruism is not what i would call scalable nor stable.
The rules of the system should be such that the optimal/desirable behaviour is also the selfish behaviour. If something selfish or damaging is beneficial to the individual at the expense of someone else, then the rules must be changed to even it back out.