‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't think so. I'm a heavy dark souls fan plus Bloodborne and Sekiro. I've been playing since Demon's Souls. Probably one of my top 5 favorite franchises of all time, aggregate playtime probably in the high hundreds maybe thousands of hours.

Personally, I can play the game more than maybe a couple hours at a time because they require a level of attention so great that I'm exhausted after a couple hours. I have to put it down after some time.

I think you interpret that passage to mean: "All influences must be from science OR religion, but not both. It is from religion. Therefore, it is from science." However, I interpret it more along the lines of: "Science has not backed up this idea of free will. So, how did we get this idea in our culture, you might ask, if it's not real? Well, it is inherited from Christian myth." This second reading is not an argument (he's not proving why free will is not a scientific reality), but an explanation of why the idea of free will exists.

You may still not be convinced by his assertion, but I don't think it's a false dichotomy. Additionally, he may make such assertions in his work Homo Dues (which I have not read), but I don't think this is necessarily an example of fallacious reasoning.

> Well, self-interest is not unavoidable

We agree, don't we, that below a certain level, a lack of self-interest will lead to our rapid death, or inability to do anything useful (and indeed even make us a burden on others).

I.e, if we don't take care of our own safety, warmth, sustenance and health, we'll soon die, or become unable to function and cease to be able to do anything beneficial for anyone, ourselves included.

On this basis, it's normal and healthy for us to take care of our own basic needs first, then those of our family members and near neighbours, then any with any surplus energy and resources we have to share, we can contribute to the wellbeing of others less close to us.

This reality applies regardless of the economic system under which we live, however the incentives of that economic system will be a significant influence on the extent to individuals focus more heavily on their own interest vs those of others.

But it's not as if self-interest and benevolence are polar opposites. The better resourced and energised one is, the more good they are able to do for others - whether it be via running non-profit organisation, a public organisation, or a private company where one is employing people and producing goods/services for the benefit of customers. So in this sense, taking care of one's self-interest can easily lead to better outcomes for others.

None of this is consistent with the assertion that "capitalism" or the economic philosophy described by Adam Smith (who never used the word "capitalism") is a philosophy that celebrates greed or selfishness, and only alternative economic philosophies celebrate benevolence.

Selflessness and generosity is broadly celebrated and admired by most people in countries that are largely "capitalist". Gordon Gecko was an anti-sympathetic caricature. People who idealise and engage in excessive selfishness are largely shunned and isolated by polite society.

On the flipside, writers and activists who have idealised "seizing the means of production" could hardly be presumed blind to the power self-interest.

Please understand, I'm not making any black vs white argument. I'm not any kind of "capitalism" activist. I'm personally deeply interested in working towards economic systems that are most effective at providing for the wellbeing of all. I live in a country with a mixed economy (Australia) with a socialised health system and a large welfare system (much like Scandinavian countries), and I think our system works well but I'd love for it to work better for those less well off.

So it's a topic I think/read about and care about a lot.

Which is why I think it's important for us to have more sophisticated positions than "capitalism celebrates greed", when the reality, like human nature itself, is far more nuanced than that.

Right -- in most cases through a voluntarily elected representative democracy, or something similar. In the US, a decent portion of these taxes are even imposed by individual state laws, not just through the federal government. This is, maybe not the complete opposite of totalitarianism, but it's pretty close to the opposite.

But you might be missing the point of what I'm saying. If you want to move to a totalitarian system where we centralize all decision-making power, it's not enough to find a couple of things we all agree on. You have to be right nearly all of the time.

Go back to the Right to Repair analogy I made earlier. There are generally accepted best practices for most devices (for example, I don't want to be able to overcharge the battery until it explodes). But just because we can think of a couple of examples of this, it doesn't necessarily follow that a single company should control everything I can do with my device. Why? Because my concern isn't that Apple or Google will never get anything right, it's that their priorities won't in general align with mine, and that if something goes wrong, I won't have a recourse to correct the problem (The Defense in Depth analogy).

The same concerns are present with any system of government. If you want to remove user/citizen agency, you need a consistent framework or set of tests that can be applied to every decision you make. You need a way to make a decision and, without getting the consent or input of the general populous, figure out whether it's in their best interests. That's the difficult, impossible task.

Not passing the law; not quieting the companies that opposed it. That stuff might not be trivial, but we know how to do it. We do it all the time. We don't have any idea of how to objectively determine whether or not a random policy is in the public's (or an individual's) best interest without their input.

And it's worth noting that even in drug policy, even representative democracies struggle with this. In the US, we had prohibition, which was an attempt to say, "come on, alcohol is obviously bad for society". That failed pretty spectacularly. Now we do cigarette taxes, but we haven't gone so far as to actually ban cigarettes, even though we're all pretty much agreed it would be better if they stopped existing. And more recently, we're starting to see states decriminalize marijuana, which is a clear example of citizens/states rejecting a centralized "common-sense" decision about what was good for them.

Corrections like this are examples of the system working as intended.

You're looking at this through a government vs. corporation regulatory lens that I'm not really following. I'm arguing that voluntary delegation of a decision making process is different than involuntary delegation, and that preserving individual freedom doesn't mean you can't ever delegate a decision to someone else. I don't understand how cigarette taxes relate to that idea.