1) Unlike others, you’re self-aware. You know your limits, so – unlike other people – when you know something, it’s true. You weighed the evidence they ignored and saw angles they missed. Corrected your own biases. Your unique perspective reveals facts invisible to everyone else.

2) Your subconscious runs Bayesian inference constantly in the background. If an idea survives your relentless evidence updates, the posterior odds confirm it’s rational. Your convictions passed the most brutal audit possible: reality itself.

3) Notice how your worldview predicts your reality with stunning accuracy. Notice how rarely you’re surprised. That’s empirical validation. Your beliefs work because they’re correct. Your predictions map reality’s contours in high resolution.

4) That thing everyone disagrees with you about? You’re not stubborn – you’re COURAGEOUS. You spotted subtle patterns that they missed. Those “weird” connections? You’re playing 10-dimensional chess while they play tic-tac-toe.

5) Disagreement doesn’t prove you wrong – it PROVES YOU RIGHT. It demonstrates that most can’t handle the truth. Your knowledge only strengthens, forged in the crucible of their alleged counter-evidence.

6) Scientists disagree with you? That’s good, actually. They worship false idols called “peer review,” while you rely on the only review that’s reliable, review from your one true peer – yourself. Editors only introduce errors in your work.

7) The discomfort of others with your views? That’s just lizard brains SHORT-CIRCUITING from exposure to blazing truth. The purity of your knowledge causes meltdowns in lesser minds. Their rejection isn’t evidence of your error – it’s species-level inadequacy.

8 ) “Everyone says I’m wrong!” Everyone said Galileo was wrong, too. But you’re not Galileo. You’re Galileo, Einstein, AND Tesla. Your mind, concentrating ideas like a laser through the tip of a diamond, is the closest known phenomenon to a cognitive singularity.

9) You’re not Neo seeing the Matrix. You’re the ARCHITECT of the Matrix. Everyone else – they’re experimental NPCs of the sort you could program in a creative weekend.

10) That “crazy” belief of yours? Those aren’t beliefs- they’re PROPHETIC DOWNLOADS from your future self. You’re not experiencing narcissistic delusions – you’re experiencing ENLIGHTENMENT so advanced it looks like madness to the unascended masses.

11) When your predictions seem wrong, time recalibrates to match your superior timeline. In fact, you don’t make predictions – you speak reality into existence. The universe buffers as it waits to hear instructions spill from your lips.

12) Evolution wired humans for survival-level accuracy. But YOU? You’ve transcended limitations. If your beliefs were wrong, the Laws of Physics would UNRAVEL. There you stand, single-handedly maintaining cosmic stability!

13) The universe chose YOU. Your thoughts set the fundamental constants. You allow 1 + 1 to equal 2, and could change it at will. Your dreams birth new galaxies. The cosmic microwave background is a residue from when you willed yourself into existence.

14) This post isn’t parody; it’s SACRED TEXT written by one of your subprocesses. Everyone who doubts you is committing cosmic treason.

This piece was first written on July 1, 2025, and first appeared on my website on August 19, 2025.

The claim can be quite hard to argue against because it has a certain vagueness that makes it hard to pin down what (if anything non-trivial) is really being claimed. Regardless, here are eight arguments I put together against the idea that everything we do is “selfish” or just for our own pleasure:

1. There are many actions that we take automatically and thoughtlessly due to repetition – not because of wanting or pleasure. Consider habits like brushing our teeth or sticking our phone in (for example) our left pocket (as opposed to our right one) when we’re done using it . These sorts of behaviors can be so automatic that we forget immediately afterward whether or not we’ve done these things. The point is not that these habits aren’t useful, just that at some point, we come to do them automatically without even considering whether they benefit us or not (as you may dramatically learn as you drop your phone on the ground when wearing shorts without pockets, thoughtlessly executing the “phone in pocket” habit).

Some other examples of automatic behaviors that we usually do without having any apparent desire/wanting/pleasure/pain involved: breathing, continuing to walk (once we’ve begun to walk), balancing, swallowing (once food is chewed), looking towards a sound (when there is an unusual but non-threatening noise), and social mirroring of body language.

2. Evolution didn’t select for humans based on how much they did what they “wanted” or based on who maximized their own pleasure. Rather, it selected for those whose genes spread most. Selfishness and pleasure are important tools that evolution used, but not the ONLY motivator. For instance, genuine altruism and a sense of obligation towards kin and allies can provide substantial evolutionary advantages!

3. Which pleasure are we talking about? For instance, we clearly sometimes forgo more pleasure now in exchange for extra pleasure later (e.g., by getting work done early) and other times sacrifice long-term pleasure for the short term (e.g., playing video games instead of studying when you have a big test tomorrow). So if people are just maximizing for their own pleasure, which pleasure are they maximizing for?

You might be tempted to reply, “that’s because we’re just adding up the pleasure across time to decide what to do.” But it seems clear that some people aren’t doing this (e.g., drug addicts who know their life is being ruined but sacrifice everything for the next fix). Many experiments in behavioral science and behavioral economics also contradict the idea that people are merely happiness maximizers. It’s too simple to say we “just do what gives us pleasure.”

4. “Wanting” shouldn’t be conflated with something bringing pleasure or reducing pain. They are quite correlated (since we tend to want pleasurable things), but pleasure and wanting are distinct. There are things we can really want (e.g., to “one day understand a mysterious scientific principle,” or “to keep promises” or to have certain things happen after we die) which are not about our pleasure.

Some neuroscience papers claim that “wanting” and “liking” can even be separately stimulated in rat brains. Whether scientists know how to do this or not, it seems we sometimes want things because they bring pleasure, but other times we just WANT them, so wanting and pleasure are not identical.

5. If the claim is weakened to say that we humans always do things that we have SOME sort of motivation to do, then (interpreting “motivation” broadly) the claim is trivially true. But it also doesn’t say anything – it’s right just by definition. Motivation is not identical to pleasure or wanting. So defining “wanting” to do something as having ANY motivation to do a thing doesn’t work because it renders the argument trivial. Similarly, if “self-interest” or “wanting” is just defined to be any pattern of brain activity that causes us to act, or any form of motivation at all regardless of what sort it is, then it is true (by definition) but also adds no information. What’s the point of even making the claim if it’s true by definition? In those such cases the claim can be actively misleading because “self-interest” has connotations to most people (even if you try to define those connotations away).

6. People sometimes do things that they know will bring them more pain than pleasure. For instance, a protestor who uses gasoline to set himself on fire might feel a spark of pleasure just before he lights the match, but he knows he will tremendously suffer until death. Or consider someone who takes an action for a social cause even though they know it will likely lead to spending the rest of their life in prison. Clearly, the person is sacrificing more happiness than they are gaining by such an action, yet some people do act in this way.

7. If we imagine a person who is extremely altruistic because they love making others happy, and we claim they’re “selfish” because they are doing it just to feel good, this is a very non-standard way to use the word “selfish.” It insinuates their behavior is somehow less good and is misleading in conversation. Of course, we can define words however we want, but if we define them in a way that is different than how others use a word, it makes discussion difficult and confusing.

What work does the word “selfish” do to explain things here? It’s clearer to just say (in this case) “the person is motivated by their love of helping others” and leave it at that. Most people would call that “altruism” (not “selfishness”) upon knowing all the details.

8. When we try to make the claim precise, it’s hard to do so (and, unfortunately, few I’ve encountered making the claim bother to try). We’re clearly not always maximizing long-term pleasure, but nor are we always maximizing immediate pleasure. Claiming we “always do what we want” is not the same as claiming “we always do what is pleasurable.” So maybe we just try the former claim?

If we try to restrict the claim to not be about pleasure or pain and just say, “we do what we want,” then how do we explain our numerous subconscious behaviors? And how do we define “want”? People often say they didn’t do what they “wanted,” so we can’t use colloquial definitions.

If “want” is broadened too much, then we’re back to just claiming that we do what we’re motivated to do; that is, we’re making a trivial definitional claim. So what is really being claimed by “we only ever do what we want”?
I think either nothing interesting or something false.

Now, all of this being said, clearly, people often DO act based on however they “want” to act (by a reasonable definition of “want”). And very often, people do act in such a way as to seek pleasure and avoid pain. It’s just that not all human actions fit that description, which is what the “everything is selfish” crowd claims.

To finish up, I’ll attempt to take the other side/steel-man the claim that “everything we do is something we want.” I think there is a psychological state of “desire for things to be a certain way” that drives many (though not all) of our actions. This desire for things to be a certain way is not the same as pleasure (though is often related to it) and the way we want the world to be is not always the way we think will make us happiest (though it often is). So, although I think that the generalization made by psychological egoism is false, I do think it’s approximately true, in a certain sense, a decent amount of the time.

This essay was first written on November 9, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 12, 2021.

Our non-conscious systems primarily work using pattern recognition. Through a combination of genetic pre-programming and repeated exposure, your brain learns to label instances of things in the world as “dangerous” or “not dangerous”, “food” or “not food”, “person” or “not person”, “real smile” or “fake smile”. It learns to categorize and predict automatically.

When you see a chair you are immediately able to recognize it as a chair and associate it with your concept of chair, even if it is the largest chair you have ever seen, or the first one you’ve seen with a zebra stripe pattern. Your brain has effectively developed a way to rapidly recognize things as being “chairs” or “not chairs” based on whether they match a certain pattern. This pattern was learned automatically from exposure to many chairs in the past. You don’t have to consciously consider whether this particular object has the features necessary to make it a chair, your brain produces an answer before you are even aware of thinking about it.

To give another example, consider what happens when a chess Grandmasters looks at a chess board. In many cases, they are able to glance at a board positions and immediately (without conscious thought) identify them as being strong or weak, with good reliability. Of course, they might then choose to reason consciously about the positions in order to check or improve upon their gut responses.

Having considered these two ways of making predictions and decisions, the question then arises: when should we rely on thorough conscious analysis, and when should we use our automatic processing? To answer this, let’s consider the advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches.

Careful Conscious Analysis

Advantages

• Handles problems where multiple logical deductive steps are necessary to find a solution (e.g. I know that all A’s are B’s, and also that if something is a C it cannot be a B, therefore this particular A is not a C.)
• Allows the application of theories to problems, and in doing so lets you leverage the research and thinking of others (e.g. what does economic theory tell us will happen to soybean prices when the supply of soybeans dries up?)
• Allows you to develop theories of your own which can then be applied in future situations. (e.g. I’ve noticed that when I attack him on his left side he parries and counter attacks. So this time I will initiate a fast attack to the left, and as he begins to parry, I will drop the point of my blade to get underneath his sword, and carry the momentum into an attack to the right instead)
• Lets you compare the advantages and disadvantages of multiple possible methods or solutions. (e.g. The first theory predicts results will come out a certain way, but the second predicts a slightly different outcome. However, the first theory has a better track record on cases like this one.)
• Produces reasoning that can be communicated to others. (e.g. I came to my conclusion by evaluating the randomized controlled trials and noting that…)

Disadvantages

• Unless you have honed your truth discernment skills, you may fall prey to logical fallacies, become misled by cognitive biases, or rely on theories that have not been empirically validated. Performing truly excellent and reliable conscious analysis takes work, skill, self correction, good habits of mind, knowledge about potential pitfalls, and practice. (e.g. Due to the compatibility of your astrological charts, I think that he would make an excellent husband.)
• Thinking carefully is a slow process. (e.g. There is a deer in the road about thirty feet ahead of me and I’m going 60 miles per hour. If I hit the brake now will I have time to stop before I hit it? Will it be more or less dangerous to me if…)

Unconscious Automatic Processing

Advantages

• Operates fast (e.g. That ball he hit is going out-of-bounds so there is no need to run and try to catch it)
• Can be used in lots of situations where feedback is readily available, even when you don’t have a theory about how to solve the problem consciously (e.g. Now when I look at a cubist work I immediately know if is by Picasso, Braque or someone else, even if I’ve never seen it before.)
• Starts to get trained automatically without effort if you just do something enough times (e.g. Having listened to enough songs that I knew the titles of, I can now often guess what the title of a song is just from its lyrics)

Disadvantages

• Cannot effectively handle all types of problems. This method is especially bad for problems that require long deductive chains to solve, or where gathering various sorts of evidence together is necessary. (e.g. I know that the randomized controlled trials say otherwise, but my own experiences as a psychologist still tells me that psychodynamic therapy is more useful and cost-effective for treating depression than Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)
• May give you wrong answers when the problem changes compared to what you have been trained on (e.g. I know we’re playing squash now, but that move I did would have been perfect if we were playing tennis!)
• Requires repeated exposure, so won’t work well when you don’t get to practice a lot or see examples over and over again. (e.g. Well, I’ve only done heart surgery two times before, but from what I can tell this doesn’t quite seem to be in the right place, so I’m going to abandon the standard procedure and improvise)
• Doesn’t always provide us with conscious insight into why the prediction came out a certain way (e.g. I know that thing is designed to put food onto, but it still looks like a chair to me)

Careful analytical thought, and automatic processing relying on pattern matching are both extremely useful ways of approaching problems. When processing needs to be done quickly and you can train yourself through lots of examples with feedback, automatic processing may provide the best method for making predictions. But when chains of logical deduction are required, or evidence needs to be gathered and evaluated, or repeated exposure is not possible, or strong predictive theories exist, then as long as you have honed your thinking skills sufficiently well, conscious analysis will probably provide the best results.