>It's just my impression, and I could be mistaken, but this sounds overly pragmatic. Living life this way leads to getting entrenched in local maxima.

You find a lot of people who suffer from severe social maladjustment and view life as a zero-sum game all over the place (I blame the rise of using game theory to model real situations without a finite turn limit). It's very rare you'll be able to "argue" these people into conceptualizing other humans as unique individuals, it pretty much always comes from problematic upbringings

I feel this is far more primal than we might think. That it’s wired into some people that everything has to be about, “how does this benefit me?” And I think this would be unsurprising. That sounds like a healthy evolutionary trait.

I think there are people that for one reason or another can overcome this instinct and see a bigger picture of society.

And I think these groups generally coalesce for reinforcement and forms of ideological security. Then they give these groups names.

Empathy appears to be just as wired into us and evolutionarily advantageous for us as a species. Without it, I don't think we could have formed societies or even tribes in the first place.

Ya, humans main strat in the wilderness was being cool to each other and forming strong tribal units. But if your care givers have low empathy, that typically is passed onto the offspring, which is the mechanism behind generational trama

My (unsubstantiated, off-the-cuff) theory is that empathy/altruism and selfishness are held in equilibrium. Altruistic traits lead to cooperation, which leads to civilization and surplus, which makes selfishness less damaging to society (and thus more adaptive for the individual). Too many selfish individuals damage the trust that leads to that surplus, which keeps the number of the selfish in check.

> It's just my impression, and I could be mistaken, but this sounds overly pragmatic.

Well said. This is a frustration I find when giving interpersonal advice to highly analytical, technical folks. Very quickly they're eager to relate what they're experiencing back to mechanisms they're used to (min/max algorithms, video games strats, etc.), usually to their detriment. They're used to the pattern of 1) Gather evidence 2) Understand system 3) Apply actions to system. The art of interfacing with other humans is so profoundly different from any other activity we take part in, I think it's silly to allow the analytical side of our brains to have too much control. The best advice I've been able to give socially stunted engineers is just to think less, and rely more on instinct than on heuristic.

The most socialized, well liked, and gregarious people you remember from high school probably never read a self-help book or a Tips for Making Friends blogpost in their life. They followed their instincts and didn't think too much.

>The art of interfacing with other humans is so profoundly different from any other activity we take part in, I think it's silly to allow the analytical side of our brains to have too much control. The best advice I've been able to give socially stunted engineers is just to think less, and rely more on instinct than on heuristic.

Maybe our basis for measurement is not capable of measuring the data present. Sort of like how when scanning something sometimes the resolution is just too low and thus discards data that is there but we don't see it.

What if my instincts are to not be social...

It is ok for one to not be social if one doesn't want to be social.