So would he recommend that the politicians do the “objectively wrong” thing?
For a wrong outcome B, you can usually imagine even worse outcome C.
In a situation with perfect information, it is better to choose a right outcome A instead of a wrong outcome B. But in a situation with an imperfect information, choosing B may be preferable to having A with some small probability p, and C with probability 1-p.
The lesson about the ethical injuctions seems to me that we should be aware that in some political contexts the value of p is extremely low, and yet because of obvious evolutionary pressures, we have a bias to believe that p is actually very large. Therefore we should recognize such situations with a large p (because that’s how it feels from inside), realize the bias, and apply a sufficiently strong correction, which usually means to stop.
For a wrong outcome B, you can usually imagine even worse outcome C.
In a situation with perfect information, it is better to choose a right outcome A instead of a wrong outcome B. But in a situation with an imperfect information, choosing B may be preferable to having A with some small probability p, and C with probability 1-p.
The lesson about the ethical injuctions seems to me that we should be aware that in some political contexts the value of p is extremely low, and yet because of obvious evolutionary pressures, we have a bias to believe that p is actually very large. Therefore we should recognize such situations with a large p (because that’s how it feels from inside), realize the bias, and apply a sufficiently strong correction, which usually means to stop.