Something that gets in the way of my making better decisions is that I have strong empathy that “caps out” the negative disutility that a decision might cause to someone, which makes it hard to compare across decisions with big implications.
In the example of the trolley problem, both branches feel maximally negative (imagine my utility from each of them is negative infinity) so I have trouble comparing them, and I am very likely to simply want to not be involved. This makes it hard for me to perform the basic utility calculation in my head, perhaps not in the literal trolley problem where the quantities are obvious, but certainly in any situation that’s more ambiguous.
Something that gets in the way of my making better decisions is that I have strong empathy that “caps out” the negative disutility that a decision might cause to someone, which makes it hard to compare across decisions with big implications.
In the example of the trolley problem, both branches feel maximally negative (imagine my utility from each of them is negative infinity) so I have trouble comparing them, and I am very likely to simply want to not be involved. This makes it hard for me to perform the basic utility calculation in my head, perhaps not in the literal trolley problem where the quantities are obvious, but certainly in any situation that’s more ambiguous.