hikaru755

the argument that "being selfless is selfish" is not useful

Yes, that's my entire point.

and provably false

Depends on how you define "selfish". Again, that's exactly what I'm trying to demonstrate here. Reducing the definition of selfish to mean "getting something out of it" makes it meaningless because every decision is made in the hopes of getting something out of it in some way, even if it's obscure. To make it useful, you need to look at what someone is getting out of it in order to get to a useful definition.

That would be an extremely reductive definition that doesn't really tell us much about how caring for others is actually experienced and how it manifests in the world.

Exactly, that's my point.

How would this for example explain sacrificing yourself to save another person, if the very core of caring is to create positive emotions in yourself?

In this case it would be about reducing negative emotions, choosing the lesser of two evils. Losing a loved one and/or having to live with the knowledge that you could have saved them but chose not to can inflict massive emotional pain, potentially for the rest of your life. Dying yourself instead might seem outright attractive in comparison.

this idea that caring is in its essence transactional

That's not actually how I'm seeing it, and I also don't think it's a super profound insight or something. It's just a super technical way of viewing the topic of motivation, and while it's an interesting thought experiment, it's mostly useless.

Well, but what does "caring" mean? It means that their well-being affects your emotions. At its very core, you wanting to help people you care about comes from wanting to create positive emotions in yourself or avoiding negative ones (possibly in the future, it doesn't have to be an immediate effect). If those emotions weren't there, you wouldn't actually care and thus not do it.

Edit to clarify: I'm not being cynical or pessimistic here, or implying that this means that everyone is egotistical because of this. The point I was trying to make is that defining egotism vs. Altruism is a little bit more complex than just looking at whether there's something in it for the acting person. We actually need to look at what's in it for the acting person.

I mean, you're not wrong, but your point is also kinda meaningless. Of course, you only ever do things because there's something in it for you, even if that something is just feeling good about yourself. If there was truly nothing in it for you, then why would you do it?

But that misses the point of the "people are inherently selfish" vs "people are inherently generous" discussion, because it's not actually about whether people do things only for themselves at the most literal level, instead it's about whether people inherently get something out of doing things for others without external motivation. So your point works the same on both sides of the argument.

The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more.

You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it's just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn't equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you'll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you're just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn't really have an incentive to make it work like that, it's just accidental.

Here's the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI

Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I'm just saying that this example you've brought is not really that.

The meme only says "if ... then ...". It does not imply the reverse relationship of "if not ... then not ...".

Oh awesome, thank you so much!

Seconding this. Legitimately better than Google photos in a lot of ways, even if you don't care about the data ownership aspect. If you've ever been annoyed at how Google Photos handles face detection / grouping, you'll love Immich.

I'd love to know what font was used for the big "Saturday" there!

Eh, that's a bit of a stretch. There's more awareness by default here because of GDPR and such, but I wouldn't say people really care that much more here

Now please explain to me how C works.

That's not what they're asking. It's not about how C works, it's about how specific APIs written in C work, which is hard to figure out on your own for anyone who is not familiar with that specific code. You'll have to explain that to any developer coming new into the project expected to work with those APIs, no matter their experience with C.

Congrats, you completely missed the point. Maybe read the actual article, before going on a rant that's only tangentially related?