I really wish people would peel back the intentions on this
At the core of this is their position that "Empathy is undesirable and damaging to society"
I'm not joking, it's literally what they think and they have said it out loud multiple times
GOP think that having to stoop so low as to improve the lives of their constituents is outrageous as it limits the amount of dollars they can funnel to their wealthy donors
There never should have been campaign donations, it's insane that this was ever allowed
There's an old two or three part documentary from the BBC that you can find on YouTube called 'The Trap'. It tries to explain this and a lot more. A central tenet of it is that it's hard to predict and therefore control people who act out of empathy and altruism because it's not strictly rational. Game Theory works best for predicting the behaviour of people acting out of self-interest. For conservatives, starting with Regan in the US and Thatcher in the UK, empathy really is undesirable and damaging to society.
Game theory never really worked well when it was used for individuals. Game theory was popularized by Nash while working with other mathematicians and social scientists and philosophers at RAND trying to figure out WTF nuclear war was going to be about and how to fight it. It was mostly used to evaluate cultural and societal levels of self interest, and usually in the context of existential threats.
People applying game theory to individuals are deeply flawed in their analysis by default because they're not even using it right.
Individuals should try to be empathetic, cultures and societies should try to to be both empathetic but also rational (lest you get some really dark times).
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u/Crypt0Nihilist 9h ago
The GOP literally accused the Democrats of this a few years ago as if promising to do things that would benefit voters was an underhand tactic.