Butterfly effects essentially unpredictable, given your partial knowledge of the world. Sure, you doing homework could cause a tornado in Texas, but it’s equally likely to prevent that. To actually predict which, you would have to calculate the movement of every gust of air around the world. Otherwise your shuffling an already well shuffled pack of cards. Bear in mind that you have no reason to distinguish the particular action of “doing homework” from a vast set of other actions. If you really did know what actions would stop the Texas tornado, they might well look like random thrashing.
What you can calculate is the reliable effects of doing your homework. So, given bounded rationality, you are probably best to base your decisions on those. The fact that this only involves homework might suggest that you have an internal conflict between a part of yourself that thinks about careers, and a short term procrastinator.
Most people who aren’t particularly ethical still do more good than harm. (If everyone looks out for themselves, everyone has someone to look out for them. The law stops most of the bad mutual defections in prisoners dilemmas) Evil genius trying to trick you into doing harm are much rarer than moderately competent nice people trying to get your help to do good.
Butterfly effects essentially unpredictable, given your partial knowledge of the world. Sure, you doing homework could cause a tornado in Texas, but it’s equally likely to prevent that. To actually predict which, you would have to calculate the movement of every gust of air around the world. Otherwise your shuffling an already well shuffled pack of cards. Bear in mind that you have no reason to distinguish the particular action of “doing homework” from a vast set of other actions. If you really did know what actions would stop the Texas tornado, they might well look like random thrashing.
What you can calculate is the reliable effects of doing your homework. So, given bounded rationality, you are probably best to base your decisions on those. The fact that this only involves homework might suggest that you have an internal conflict between a part of yourself that thinks about careers, and a short term procrastinator.
Most people who aren’t particularly ethical still do more good than harm. (If everyone looks out for themselves, everyone has someone to look out for them. The law stops most of the bad mutual defections in prisoners dilemmas) Evil genius trying to trick you into doing harm are much rarer than moderately competent nice people trying to get your help to do good.