Your post confuses me a lot: I am being entirely honest about this, there seem to be illusions of transparency and (un)common priors. The only part I feel capable of responding to is the first: I can perfectly imagine every human being having as much medical care as the chief of the wealthiest most powerful organization in the world, in an FAI-regimented society. For a given value of “imagining”, of course: I have a vague idea of nanomachines in the bloodstream, implants, etc. I basically expect human bodies to be self-sufficient in taking care of themsleves, and able to acquire and use the necessary raw materials with ease, including being able to medically operate on themselves. The rare cases will be left to the rare specialist, and I expect everyone to be able to take care of the more common problems their bodies and minds may encounter.
As for the rest of your post:
What are people’s rationing optimixation functions? Is it possible to get an entire society to agree to a single one, for a given value of “agree”? Or is it that people don’t have a consistent optimization function, and that it’s not so much a matter of some things being valued over others as a matter of tradition and sheer thoughtless inertia? Yes, I know I am answering questions with questions, but that’s all I got right now.
Your post confuses me a lot: I am being entirely honest about this, there seem to be illusions of transparency
Thank you for leading with that.
In an FAI-regimented society
This seems to sidestep the limited resources issue, making your argument not clearly apply outside of that context.
Let me give an example outside of health to discuss the resources issue. I have read that when a guy tried to make a nuclear power source in his garage from clock parts, government agents swooped in very soon after it started emitting radiation—presumably there are people monitoring for that, with field agents ever-ready to pursue leads. This means that, for some 911 calls where the nuclear team would be the first to the scene, we allow the normal police to handle it, even at the risk of people’s lives. If that isn’t the case, imagine a world in which it were so, and in which it would be easy to tell that the police would be slower than the nuke guys (who don’t even leave their stations most days). I think having such an institution would be worthwhile, even at the cost of crimes in progress being responded to slower.
Similarly, I think many things would be worth diverting resources from better policing, such as health—and from health to other things, such as better policing, and from both to fun, privacy, autonomy, and so forth. I’m only referring to a world in which resources are limited.
It is possible that there is a society wealthy enough to ensure very good health care for those it can influence by eliminating all choice about what to eat, mandating exercise, eliminating privacy to enforce those things, etc. It’s not obvious to me that it’s always the right choice to optimize health or that that would be best for the hypothetical society.
Considering the principle of diminishing returns, there’s no plausible way of describing people’s preferences such that all effort should be put towards better health. we don’t have to be able to describe them perfectly to say that being forced to eat only the healthiest foods does not comport with them—ask any child told to eat vegetables before desert.
Your post confuses me a lot: I am being entirely honest about this, there seem to be illusions of transparency and (un)common priors. The only part I feel capable of responding to is the first: I can perfectly imagine every human being having as much medical care as the chief of the wealthiest most powerful organization in the world, in an FAI-regimented society. For a given value of “imagining”, of course: I have a vague idea of nanomachines in the bloodstream, implants, etc. I basically expect human bodies to be self-sufficient in taking care of themsleves, and able to acquire and use the necessary raw materials with ease, including being able to medically operate on themselves. The rare cases will be left to the rare specialist, and I expect everyone to be able to take care of the more common problems their bodies and minds may encounter.
As for the rest of your post:
What are people’s rationing optimixation functions? Is it possible to get an entire society to agree to a single one, for a given value of “agree”? Or is it that people don’t have a consistent optimization function, and that it’s not so much a matter of some things being valued over others as a matter of tradition and sheer thoughtless inertia? Yes, I know I am answering questions with questions, but that’s all I got right now.
Thank you for leading with that.
This seems to sidestep the limited resources issue, making your argument not clearly apply outside of that context.
Let me give an example outside of health to discuss the resources issue. I have read that when a guy tried to make a nuclear power source in his garage from clock parts, government agents swooped in very soon after it started emitting radiation—presumably there are people monitoring for that, with field agents ever-ready to pursue leads. This means that, for some 911 calls where the nuclear team would be the first to the scene, we allow the normal police to handle it, even at the risk of people’s lives. If that isn’t the case, imagine a world in which it were so, and in which it would be easy to tell that the police would be slower than the nuke guys (who don’t even leave their stations most days). I think having such an institution would be worthwhile, even at the cost of crimes in progress being responded to slower.
Similarly, I think many things would be worth diverting resources from better policing, such as health—and from health to other things, such as better policing, and from both to fun, privacy, autonomy, and so forth. I’m only referring to a world in which resources are limited.
It is possible that there is a society wealthy enough to ensure very good health care for those it can influence by eliminating all choice about what to eat, mandating exercise, eliminating privacy to enforce those things, etc. It’s not obvious to me that it’s always the right choice to optimize health or that that would be best for the hypothetical society.
Considering the principle of diminishing returns, there’s no plausible way of describing people’s preferences such that all effort should be put towards better health. we don’t have to be able to describe them perfectly to say that being forced to eat only the healthiest foods does not comport with them—ask any child told to eat vegetables before desert.