Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…Yeah, and I don’t agree with that. He likes to judge only on the results, but I think because the world is as it is, we can never fully anticipate the consequences of our actions. The important thing is to try our best to do so and not to be feckless about ignoring likely consequences. But to ignore the difference between someone who is trying to do something that is genuinely good and someone who is doing the opposite seems to me deeply wrong. If you’re an extreme altruist, are you too subject to manipulation by others? If you care so much about so many other people, and those people actually can be harmed pretty easily at low cost, does this mean that you, the extreme altruist, you just go through life being manipulated? MACFARQUHAR It’s funny you say that because one thing that I have noticed about the extreme altruist . . . You know what? I don’t want to call them extreme altruists. I think they’re people with a very strong sense of duty. The people I met were very, very different from each other, but one thing they had in common is they really, really barely cared about what other people thought. They had to feel that way because almost everyone they met thought they were at best weirdos, and at worst dangerous megalomaniacs. So they were unconventional in their degree of duty but also in many other ways. They didn’t care at all what people thought about anything they did like how they dressed or . . . ? Things like that. I don’t mean they didn’t care about anything about what people thought because obviously —…

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