I really liked the post, but I couldn’t help ironmanning the so-called fabricated options at every step. Documented below, read at your own peril(or most likely skip the wall of text).
Example 1
Every time price gouging is brought up online, I see it strawmanned. The proper ironman is something like anti-bank run measures.
Price gouging measures are meant to … solve a coordination problem. Supply is … not necessarily as limited as people might think, if everyone just kept consuming at the same rate or even slightly reduced consumption but not to a self-harming degree, we’d make due.
But in a tragedy of the commons/prisoners dilemma style we expect everyone to defect so we all defect. Withdrawal limits and various other mechanisms exist to prevent bank runs, because these sorts of things can be positive feedback loops otherwise. Everyone thinks toilet roll is gonna run out and so they wanna stock up for the whole year today … well yeah, the supply chain is unchanged but it’s expecting smooth consumption not mass psychosis.
Then you have the clowns that are buying up sanitizer or toilet roll anticipating that they’ll be able to resell it on ebay later.
I think a lot of people hate … price changing because of the investment value of a good rather than it’s use value, ie. people buying houses to hold and resell, rather than to live in them. It’s a potentially endless positive feedback loop making the underlying good unusable for practical purposes. See also the cost of using gold or diamond for industrial purposes.
But the market will just make more of house/gold/diamonds! Well, like, the whole reason why these goods are investments in the first place is because it is not market feasible to endlessly boost supply. It’s shocking that housing bubble apologists(talk about straw manning my opponents :D) ignore the rationality of the people purchasing houses as investments. You’d think they’d worry about the supply getting flooded and ruining them! Oh...
Price gouging done by actual corporates(ie. all supermarkets in an area agree to triple prices during a supply disruption) ends up looking like monopoly / oligopoly / market capture pricing. Look at the telecom situation in the US, where most people have access to one provider. Eh, it’s complicated.
Also you get unlucky and an earthquake destroys your house. Now we’ll double up that bad luck by making everything super expensive for you. Society is about the opposite of that. But then the government is the only entity that can do disaster response. Well. Yeah.
Example 2
There’s a cynical joke about pro-life people really loving unborn babies, but not being so hot on social policies for actual born babies. But realistically, I’d expect a lot of pro-life people to also be opposed to free healthcare for expecting mothers, so really they just hate the idea of fetuses dying on purpose, as opposed to due to societal neglect and poverty.
Stepping back from politi-tribal jokes. The real debate for most people is probably about what stage should elective abortion be banned and what should be done in edge cases where the life of the mother is at risk and a medical late-term abortion is needed to protect her(which again, is pretty rare). Vast majority won’t oppose first month abortion and won’t support randomly for no medical reason deciding to abort a baby in the 8th month of pregnancy.
Example 3
I mean, how do you know? If there is a clear cyclical pattern, maybe you expect it to last forever… But people age and change naturally anyway. I’ve seen myself and my people in my friend group pretty ruthlessly cut out crap parts of our behaviours/personalities as we entered our 30s and started feeling what it would mean to carry those anchors around our necks for the long haul. Growing up is a real thing, lots of people do it, surely?
But it’s a mental health thing, not just growing up, etc. Eh? Not enough details, but it could just be shitty mood management. Is it something that requires chemical treatment? Is it something that can be controlled by will power? That being said, it’s probably something a professional psychiatrist should advise on, rather than random friends or even(and perhaps especially) the person in the relationship.
Example 4
It’s 100% true that not having block lists is not acceptable, but block lists taken to an extreme are also unacceptable in a much more insidious difficult to explain way.
People who are trapped in cultish group think always think they are persecuted and perfectly legitimate to be cultish. Mainstream society’s social bubble thinks some cults are legitimate and some are not.
The real victims, usually, are the cult members. Being in a cult-bubble is harmful to the members because they become more and more isolated from the common memespace and thus are increasingly harmed on the rare occasions when some normie meme penetrates their bubble.
Self-isolation continually increases fragility and vulnerability. Once you start self-isolating, there is no clear point at which it becomes easy to rejoin the common environment.
Conversely, I don’t want to spend every day being exposed to abuse or people coughing in my face. And beyond some level of stress, your mental or physical immune systems aren’t actually getting stronger due to exposure, they’re being ground down.
I think block lists are necessary, but every time I mute/block someone I feel a bit worried that I’m building a wall of mirrors around my mind.
The actual healthy alternative is spending time in the real world with people that care about you more or less regardless of what dumb opinions you have and realizing that it doesn’t matter if you dislike X-people in the abstract as long as you are decent with X-people that you actually know. Also everyone spend less time thinking about (and virtually arguing with) straw Bad people and just interact with regular meat people.
Our only hope is irrational empathy and cognitive dissonance.
Example 5
Kids are ephemeral idiots. Who cares what 5-year old me wanted. That dumbass was dead by the time I hit 7. Parents think their kid would thank them later for X, because the parent would have thanked their own parent for X. I would have thanked my parents for a whole bunch of Xs that at the time I would have hated(god, why didn’t they force me to exercise more and take those dance lessons when I was like 8-10… I didn’t even whine that much about it and it would’ve made my teens so much better).
Really young kids are not actually the people you should care about. The person you should care about is their twenty something incarnation, since that’s probably around when their personality stabilizes. At least that’s what it was like for me. 16 year old me was a moron. 25 year old me was sort of figuring things out. I’d hope 40 year old me looks at present me with some measure of tolerance and perhaps even gratitude.
Under no circumstance should a parent favor their 10-year old, who won’t meaningfully exist in 3 years time, over their 20-year old, whose gonna be around for decades as a reasonably stable entity. Of course, the real problem is that predicting the future is hard and you can think that you’re setting the kid up for success but aren’t actually.
Also it’s true that the child shouldn’t form a continuous and stable over time impression of the parent as an enemy. Like, throw them some bones and as they enter their teenage and especially late teenage years give them increasing autonomy, since they’ll need to practice that with the parental safety net before entering adulthood. That being said, lots of parents are super future focused with their kids and lots of those kids turn out well and drag their family up the class structure of their society. I’m emotionally predisposed to suggest a happy medium is the place to be, but I don’t know if rationally that’s even true. Certainly don’t push the kid to a mental breakdown, though.
Regarding the direct example
I feel like it’s self-subverting. There’s an old canard about https://www.watersafetymagazine.com/drowning-doesnt-look-like-drowning/ Given how staggeringly disproportionate the utility losses are in this scenario I think even a 1% chance of my assumption that ‘I have 15 seconds to undress’ would lead to death means I should act immediately.
In general when thinking about superfast reflex decisions vs thought out decisions: Obey the reflex unless your ability to estimate the probabilities involved has really low margins of error. My gut says X but my slow, super weak priors-that-have-never-been-adjusted-by-real-world-experience-about-this-first-time-in-my-life-situation say Y… Yeah just go with X. Reflect on the outcome later and maybe come up with a Z that should have been the gut/reflex response.
There’s an old video game Starcraft 2 advice from Day9 that’s surprisingly applicable in life: Plan your game before the game, in game follow the plan even if it seems like it’s failing, after the game review and adjust your plan. Never plan during the game, speed is of the essence and the loss of micro and macro speed will cost you more than a bad plan executed well.
Don’t plan during a crisis moment where you have seconds to react correctly. Do. Then later on train yourself to have better reflexes. Applicable when socializing, doing anything physical, in week 1 of a software development 2 week sprint etc.
Regarding the more general point of people having … self-consistent utility functions/preferences
I fundamentally disagree that you shouldn’t criticize someone for their utility function. An individual’s utility function should include reasonably low-discount approximations of the utility functions of people around them. This is what morality tries to approximate. People that seem to not integrate my preferences into their own signal danger to me. How irrelevant is my welfare in their calculations? How much of my utility would they destroy for how small a gain in their own utility?
People strongly committed to non-violence and so on are an edge case, but I’d feel much more comfortable with someone not in control over their own utility function than someone that is in control, based on the people I have encountered in life so far.
How intrusively should people integrate each other’s preferences? How much should we police other individual’s exchange rate from personal utils to other people utils? No good answer, it varies over time and societies.
Society is an iron maiden, shaped around the general opinion about what the right action is in a given scenario. Shame is when we decide something that we know others will judge us badly for. Guilt is when we’ve internalized that shame.
The art of a good society is designing an iron maiden that most people don’t even notice.
It seems irrational to me to not internalize the social moral code to some extent into my individual utility function. (It happens anyway, might as well do it consciously so I can at least reject some of the rules) If the social order is not to my taste, try and leave or change it. But just ignoring it makes no sense.
I’d also argue that the vast majority of preferences in our, so-called, ‘personal’ utility function are just bits and bobs picked up from the societal example palette we observed as we grew up.
People’s utility functions also include components for the type of iron maiden they want their society to build around other members. I want to be able to make assumptions about the likely outcomes of meeting a random other person. Will they try to rob me? If I’m in trouble will they help me? If my kid is playing outside unsupervised by me, but there’s always random people walking by, can I trust that any of them will take reasonably care of the child if the kid ends up in trouble?
I strongly do not want to live in a society that doesn’t match my preferred answers on those and other critical questions.
I absolutely do not want to live in a society that has no iron maiden built at all. That is just mad max world. I can make no reasonable assumption about what might happen when I cross paths with another person. When people are faced with situations of moral anarchy, they spontaneously band together, bang out some rules and carve out an area of the wilderness where they enforce their rules.