Surely there are all kinds of other ways to cooperate. A friend can help you move your stuff. You can exchange gifts. You can fend for each other. But objectively none of these are worth the huge chunk of resources we allocate to maintaining friendships and relationships. Only the upgrades to your worldview you get from interacting with other people is worth the trouble of interacting.

I think this is a very narrow, Straw Vulcan [LW · GW] way of viewing the world. The primary value that other people have is the information and updates they can bring to your worldview? That seems like an awfully narrow conception of the value that other people can bring.

Moreover, how can you say, "objectively" that these benefits are not worth the effort? Do you presume to speak for everyone's utility function here?

Bar the lone soul on a heroic dissent, I don't think most of us are able to keep meaningfully developing our worldview if there is no one to enthusiastically share our findings with.

Some version of this feels pretty important.

I had this same thought recently regarding friendship and connection as "divide and conquer" for understanding the world.

WRT why people cling to collective worldviews despite contrary evidence... one answer lies in interesting work in Social Psych called "Terror Management Theory."

Basically, people seek to avoid death, but we all know that we will die. To avoid being paralyzed by this fear, we are socialized by our parents & society into worldviews that grant us "immortality" of sorts: religion, prestige, being "good" to be remembered by loved ones, survival our "our people", hedonism of the "now" to block out the future, etc.

It sounds to me like you are looking for Circling.