Why Are People So Kind? 

Apologies for the unedited ending adobe had a critical error so I decided to hit render.

Kindness is actually fun

“Humans behave with a decent amount of humanity.” Huh.

"Despite meeting several psychopaths in my life" dude are* you okay?

As an addendum to @6:20 There is an African philosophy known as *Ubuntu* (No, not the _appropriated_ Linux Distro brand). Ubuntu is the concept in which ones sense of self is shaped by their relationships with other people. It’s a way of living that begins with the premise that “I am” only because “we are.” Or "I am, because you are. When you suffer, I suffer. When you thrive, I thrive. In practice, Ubuntu means believing the common bonds within a group are more important than any individual arguments and divisions within it.” The word Ubuntu is just part of the Zulu (Bantu) phrase "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu", which literally means that a person is a person through other people. I was hoping you would perhaps Segway into a Tangent regarding human Tribalism. As it would seem humans are initially reticent to show kindness to other humans not within their Tribe. Perhaps this is due to the idea that Tribe Trumps nominalized human behavior. I guess I will still await your treatise on Tribe.

I'm so glad john green gave this channel a shoutout! So interesting!

For what it's worth, I'd be down for longer videos! I mean I've sat through 1.5 hour Contrapoints vids so...

just started watching but commenting for algorithm early

As soon as you said Dawkins' name I thought, "MEMES" 😂

One theory i find interesting is the group evolution theory. In evolution selfish behavior is rewarded, but when you look at groups a group with selfish individuals it is a worse group. A group with selfless individuals does better. The theory states that the best group survives and therefore is the group that passes down their genes

I totally would've watched the other 50%. Part 2? Also, the lines of reasoning you went through in this video reminded me of all the weird theories researchers have developed around why same-sex attraction exists. Sometimes, it's just impossible to find one factor with the explanatory power to characterize something as complicated as human behavior.

I don't care if the episode surpasses 10 minutes or even 30. You make really good and enjoyable content and if one topic is very profound and there is a lot to cover I would even watch an hour of this.

Love the video! Just noticed an error at 4:40, you said Columbia University, when it should be University of British Columbia.

My first thought was that humans are social and in order to create and maintain relationships its beneficial to be nice 🤷🏻‍♂️

I give to a charity called Health Poverty Action and I get quarterly newsletters from them. I have depression but it's made me feel better to read about the good they are doing in the world and that I've contributed a tiny bit.

I am kind because I don't want to just survive but to thrive and know that others desire this too. Life should be enjoyed, not dreaded.

I believe what Freud said about us having a life and death drive. The life drive is the one that drives us to procreate, and friendship and kindness are just byproducts of that, that we have gained over time.

You’re restoring my faith in humanity. I’ve been feeling quite cynical lately and I needed to see this. Thank you.

Great video :) Can't believe you don't have more subscribers, but keep doing what you're doing and it's only a matter of time.

I think you suggest this as part of your integrated approach, but clearly part of the reason kin altruism can turn into a more general kind is that creatures can not necessarily develop a perfect kinship detection feature to decide who to help, so a behaviour to help kin may help strangers. This is why cowbirds and cuckoos can leave their eggs in the nests of other kinds of birds and those birds will raise the foreign chick as if it was their own. So some non-kin altruism that has some evolutionary cause is presumably caused by that sort of "mistake". If altruism can be the basis for a viable human community and indeed a more viable and robust one than a competitive one then that makes it a possible and even a likely stable outcome, this does not seem that mysterious (although it depends on where we are starting from etc.). A more interesting question to me is whether given two or more viable ways of life one of which is more altruistic than another is preference for the paths of greater altruism, cooperation etc. justifiable without some circular reference to latent pro-social biases in our thinking. There is certainly a lot to be said against homo economicus, an issue is that arguably the point is more something like the only consistent predictable trend in behaviour are those of rational self-interest, so for example the efficient market hypothesis applied to the stock market assumes that most moves in prices, buying and selling etc. in the stock market is a random walk, but it assumes that any new information that would create a systematic trend (make a stock more or less valuable) is near instantly (efficiently) incorporated into prices (creates the new baseline the prices will randomly walk about), this means mostly behaviour is not rational self-interest (homo economicus), the requirement is just that it not be consistently/predictably be anything else. Also homo economicus type assumptions tend to assume that the actors are going to behave in a regular way in the market, they will buy and sell not steal and engage in banditry etc. (although models may make more complex assumptions about that sort of rule following and allow for exceptions) , while this is not exactly altruism necessarily it is certainly baking in a lot of pro-social behaviour into one's model of ruthless humans.

I just added this to my writing references playlist, I think I will come in handy when I'm writing about cooperation between groups. Thanks for putting this together Travis!

I was on the phone with my mother discussing just that (I think if people around me have less than me I should give to them, that it is not selfless, because if we are all "garanteed" a minimum of necessity that means I won't ever fall under that level of necessity, whereas she said that she handles money better than other people, so she should not give her money to others because some people will always be in need, no matter how much money they get)...

12 minutes isn't that long IMO

Did we just get "the birds and the beds l bees" talk? It's a little different than I thought it would be.

The set up is gradually improving, I like it.

I could watch you talk about this for an hour! You are really great at explaining things and have a wonderful personality 😀

I for sure would watch the other half of this, I found it fascinating!

i would absolutely watch a longer version of this. i hope we eventually get to hear the parts that you cut out!

Loved the topic! Have been wondering about similar things myself. Please do make the part 2 if you can I'd love to learn more.

This was super pleasant to watch!

So glad I found your channel. Your videos are always thought provoking and uplifting.

This is super interesting! Thanks for breaking it down like this!

Great episode, didn't feel too long at all.

Great video! Also, great discord, would recommend!

I'm cool with longer videos since I usually have playlists of videos to listen to while working on my art assignments

A good place to learn abt the MEMEs and it's evolution is E. Beck and C. Cowan's book "Spiral Dynamics".

Awesome! The world could always use more kindness 🙂🤗

Yep! It’s always hard to trim down all the ideas into a concise video. You’ve done well though!

loved your perspective on this

Great video!!

Full script, please!! Would love to hear more

My guess is, as a social species it’s mutually beneficial to build positive communities

awesome video !!! i learned a lot :)

Amazing job

Damn I forgot I was subbed to you your content has really improved.

Thank you for teaching me about the birds and the bees

I definitely would have watched/listened to the whole script.

I love the way your brain works. Probably because it's so on par with mine ahahaha i come at questions with the same angles as you

I’d actually like to see more long form content! It’s not too much episode!

This question has been lingering

I would actually love to hear the rest of your script at some point!!

Great video! I thought it was thoughtful.

So far I've loved every video, so thank you for doing this! The jump cuts are slightly overwhelming though, is there a way to make each bit of speech a bit longer so there isn't one every 10 seconds?

I hope you are right.

Honestly the only words how I can explain how hilarious this video was are: I can give you healthy offspring.

thx

Okay right I hope this isn’t annoying and you take it as constructive criticism...The only thing i can think of that would improve this video is the sound first at the intro animation which I think could benefit from a little music even if it’s just free royalty free stuff. Second I think you should keep the background music a little more consistent. All in all thanks for another great video!! Also we always appreciate long videos from you.Personally I would be very happy with a video twice as long!

Shifting the balance of power to 70 comments because not everyone is kind and cooperative when there is humor to be had.

I won't say bees are altruistic, rather they don't know the consequence of stinging a non-insect.

Subbed

0:11 You Stole My Line!

Great content. FEEDBACK: Please, next time you show predators eating a prey, at least do a zoom out. That was WAY too close. Many people are very close to their screen. I was eating breakfast and I had to go back to listen cause my brain got so busy with that vivid image, I lost sight of your narrative.

entomologist here: relatedness definitely has something to do with eusociality, but can't fully explain it

great video travis! in the future, could you put warnings on footage of dead animals? i'd really appreciate it.

I wonder how polyamaory (consensual with all partners involved dating multiple people) relates to how kind someone is

i liked your channel dude, that's my first video who whatched, but why you don't use any soundtrack on your videos? (im sorry for that commentary)

Hey that’s my art on the wall! 🥺💗

I'm a bit curious about the relation of culture and memes to nurture. To me they seem very similar. Also nurture is something that affects animals, a cat that is raised in the street will behave very differently than a cat raised on a home

i shared this video, its fucking amezing.

To give a stranger $100 feels good because I'm flaud and the stranger may have better ideas about how to spend $100. Idk.

Not everyone feels the need to, or want to, have offspring, though.

I don't know what the formal criteria are for video length but I'd hardly call 12 minutes very long. Maybe it's just my particular viewing habits, but as far as I'm concerned 20ish minutes is pretty standard length and this was 40% shorter than that.

While I'm fine with it - might be a good idea to warn people before showing something like the zebra clip.

4:45 Were the people in this study all from a similar economic background? I feel that would effect the results drastically. People who can afford to give away money are generally happier than those who live paycheck to paycheck...

My thoughts before watching the video: Natural selection is all about the survival of the fittest species, and a species is more likely to survive when its members are kind to each other. Our species’ greatest strength was our ability to put our heads together and collaborate to get stuff done. 3:56 False, you have an incredibly high chance of sharing any particular gene because all humans have the vast majority of their genes in common. All the diversity of humanity is in less than 1% of our DNA.

Awesome vid but I scrolled past it a few times bc the thumbnail made me think it was an ad 😫

Commentor's note: You can pause the video and press the "," and "." keys to go frame by frame.

50%? Does that mean we get a part 2?

I liked this video, so I liked the video.

Curious as to your thoughts on this paper: philpapers.org/rec/YAKTAP (I know you didn't go into too much detail on the genetics; and the gist of the video, that being kind is selective, is still correct under this model; but just wanted to share! It's by a former prof of mine.)

Wow really😂

Your Patreon link above is broken.

bussy

+

Fantastic video. You should put your face in the thumbnails - it reminds me that you make good content and I should click on it

ok I'm a psychopath (⁦⌐■-■)

You have a lot of jump cuts, I do not like the cuts, makes it noisy. Try not to make cuts within a sentence, that would help a lot.

So relegion is just organised meme spreading?

Good video but who are you to say that bees and other animals don't have culture? That seems awfully anthropocentric to me.

that title is bollocks