Hello folks! I am a 18 year old italian Student who will start studying Mathematics in Germany this year. I was always interested in the way of the rational/scientific method, and since I remember tried to use it to reason about almost everything.
A month ago some friends showed me HPMoR, which I read in like 3 days and really enjoyed it. So finally I came here. I read some subsequences and various single topics, including a lot of the comments, which I found almost always very interesting.
This blog opened my eyes especially on cognitive biases thing. Often had I noted in hindsight that I had made poor decisions or evaluated a situation badly, but I never really saw how this could happen. So I am very glad to learn the causes behind those mistakes in judgment, so I’ll hopefully be able to avoid them sometimes. I finally decided to register, so I might comment from time to time, when I think I have something to say.
But as a doctor, probably you will have to choose non-randomly, if you want to stand by your utilitarian viewpoint, since killing different people might have different probabilities of success. Assuming the lest convenient possible world hypothesis, you can’t make your own life easier by assuming each one’s sacrifice is as likely to go well. So in the end you will have to assume that one patients sacrifice will be the “best”, and will have to decide if you kill them, thus reverting to the original problem.