Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Graham Cunningham's avatar

An example of this (albeit a fairly inconsequential one):

You are driving to somewhere unfamiliar and are lost. So you wind the window down and ask a passer-by for directions. Three possible outcomes:

1) (the best) the passer-by is knowledgable and spacially articulate and tells you the way to your destination.

2) (next best) the passer-by doesn't know and politely says they can't help.

3) (the worst but in my experience most common) the passer-by feels that they ought to 'help' so they make a guess at where you might mean. And well-meaningly send you off on a wild goose chase.

Expand full comment
plantimals's avatar

there's a potential cross-over between this topic and that of the most recent econtalk episode ( https://www.econtalk.org/if-life-is-random-is-it-meaningless-with-brian-klaas/ ). the author's crucial point is the inherent unpredictability of human action. his prime example is the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and his point that a US official had visited Kyoto 20 years before the war and had a soft spot for the city, and so passed it in favor of Nagasaki. the conclusion is to just do the right thing, as best you can, in every moment, rather than gambling on big outcomes for selected paths of behavior. this also feels like a ripe avenue of criticism against utilitarianism, which absolutely relies on the ability to make such predictions about the outcomes of our actions and post hoc predictions on the relative "utils" gained by everyone involved.

Expand full comment
60 more comments...

No posts