Greg Salmieri

speaker

1,054 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2013 last heard Jan 2021

Greg Salmieri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 131: Greg Salmieri discusses egoism and altruism · 3 Jan 2021 podcast

I think a lot of things people want aren't in their self-interest.

But even on a Hobbesian account, uh he thinks, you know, you'd be a fool to be unjust.

And you're a fool to be unjust, you know, to steal from people and so forth, because that kind of activity necessarily puts you at odds with the whole rest of society that has an interest in exposing and destroying you.

and to think you can get away with it for long is to

think you can outsmart the combined force of all of humanity.

And I think he's right that you can't.

Uh you're going to get caught.

You're always going to know that you're at risk of getting caught.

And if you fail to get caught, it's not due to your shrewdness, but due to luck.

because it would only be shrewd if it was a predictable outcome that you'll get away with it.

But it's never a predictable outcome that you'll get away with swindling the rest of the human race.

Behaving in a way that they wouldn't want to have anything to do with you if they understood how you were behaving.

when in fact all the things you get of value out of this interaction.

are things that depend on your continuing to interact with other people.

And it's not even that careful scrutiny that's required, right?

So I mean if for some things it's gonna really take care to think about it.

And there were really hard decisions about what's in your self-interest or not.

But for most people, whether to be a crook or an honest, productive person, I don't think is like that.

I think it takes fairly little thought, if you're really thinking about it, to see like this is no kind of life.

uh to see that Bernie Madoff would have been better off if he, you know, was a kind of mediocre, honest investment banker rather than the runner of a ridiculous Ponzi scheme, even before the Ponzi scheme came to its end.

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