"It Is Not Enough to Succeed; One’s Best Friend Must Fail"

Gore Vidal's vversion is well-known: "It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/06/succeed-fail/

In a survival of the fittest this makes perfect sense

I hadn’t thought about it like this before, but that’s like a twisted version of Kahneman & Tversky’s “losses loom larger than gains.” I wonder if the psychological weighting mechanism is the same.

I think you'll find this paper very interesting, as it distinguishes between pessimistic loss aversion and sadistic loss infliction. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600451

If my reading of that paper is fair, it suggests a third of people deliberately make choices that cause other people to suffer more than they do even if it increases their own suffering by a lesser amount. And that is terrifying.

I think this explains the state of the world, and given the state of the world: why is this surprising to us.

I guess people tend to believe that everyone else is like them, including those of us that aren't sadistic. And if a full 33 percent are sadistic, is it something that even should or can be corrected?

Now that's terrifying.

However, it is much better to simply look at a flower and meditate on how amazing it is that it exists at all than ruminate on the facts of how cruel the world is.

This educational game has some useful insights. While the distribution of people may not be something that can be corrected or easily altered (one disturbing insight of that Science paper is that personality types seem to be firmly established even in early youth), sadistic policies can be made more costly and thus less effective, reducing the incentive to maintain and reproduce them.

https://ncase.me/trust/

Yep. It's had a rather negative impact on my outlook over the last few years, to put it mildly.

Thanks, I’ll take a look.