alt Hacker NewsI think this is an artifact of any large organization of people.
Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them. The challenge of large-organization-designers (governments, companies, etc.) is how to design a system that 1) leverages this behavior; ie maximize the value of ambition to the system, and 2) is not vulnerable to this behavior; ie checks & balances
Small organizations can get around this because outcomes are easier to share, and selecting people who aren't selfish is possible.
We can do our best to put guidelines around selfishness, but history tells us this is hard
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We live immersed in an industrial society that highly values productivity and individualism. All we can say is that large organizations of people in these circumstances are observed to default to doing what's best for them, maybe because that's what they were raised to think.
Maybe in a welfare society centered around the community you'd see people naturally acting different.
That's without disputing the naturalization of an observation of state (people act this way so they must always act this way) which I think is also problematic.
The large organization also breeds more selfish behavior. When you see clear misbehavior near you, and you know reporting it will achieve nothign but get you in trouble, then it's difficult to behave well yourself. Eventually the large organization is just layers upon layers of misaligned incentives. The same complaints people correctly made about the soviet system also applied to the Japanese zaibatsus and the modern US conglomerate. It eventually shows us that the modern product enshittification isn't really a matter of a company maximizing its long term profits, but some middle manager pissing the company reputation away to meet some badly aligned KPI that hands them an extra bonus. And the only time execs are better off intervening is when the product line is already on the brink of being destroyed by competitors. It's principal agent problems all the way down.
From this perspective, the main advantage of technology has been to increase how much a single person can do, leading to more capable small organizations. And this should also make us wonder whether an LLM-heavy org is going to be better or worse aligned than one that has just people and more predictable tech.
I’ve built a career specifically not joining organizations that do evil (by my definition). It’s a privilege, I suppose.
But I do sometimes hold those in contempt who I know have the means to not do evil and choose to anyway.
That is all to say, no it’s not just human nature.
This is the default capitalist view. Anthropology disagrees. For much of human history we’ve exhibited altruistic behaviour towards one another. There are plenty of instances of that today: coalitions, unions, mutual aid groups, community volunteer groups… not to mention the individual choices people make in the interests of others over their own.
There is always some selfishness in people but it is a choice to structure society and economic activity around it.
> Humans tend toward doing things that are best for them.
I don't think that assumption holds. People routinely vote for candidates that will worsen their lives, gamble, smoke, don't exercise, some people even don't brush their teeth.
On the other hand, there's as many examples of people being selfless as of people being selfish.
Human behavior is much more complex.