Heuristics can be incredibly useful and can also mess you up. In the interest of not just repeating Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s life’s work, I’d like to talk about heuristics in moral decision making only. Here is an interesting encyclopedia article for those who want a background on what heuristics and cognitive biases are, from the world’s most popular encyclopedia. Example one: Freegan vs. Vegan A good example of the failure of moral heuristics is militant veganism. I am of the opinion that one person’s consumption habits make practically no difference on the welfare of animals. People (myself included) make decisions like this to feel good about the effect they have on the world. With this in mind, let’s look at “freegan” vs. vegan. “Freegans”, by my definition, are vegan when it comes to increasing the demand of products (buying things), but not when their action has neither a real nor theoretical effect on demand. Take the following example: Morgan Freegan and Dolly Vegan are sitting next to each other at a wedding with shared platters for the main. They both received special meals due to their diet choices, and did not add to the amount of meat required on the shared platters in the middle of the table. They have finished their meal, but are both still a bit peckish because they are in a bulking phase. There is plenty of food left in the middle of the all the tables (meat and sides), and everyone at the tables has finished eating. Morgan Freegan makes a moral choice in the moment and loads up his plate with fish and devours it. Dolly Vegan refers to her moral heuristic and hits a delicious quinoa salad like a freight train. Once everything is cleared, the leftovers go in the bin. Who is making the decision more in line with environmental and animal harm minimisation? My take on it is that neither contribute to increased meat consumption in this case, which is a mutual goal. I would say though, that Morgan eating lots of fish will add things to his diet that vegans don’t usually get, meaning he requires less supplementation and is less likely to have diet related health issues. Another view is to look at what goes in the bin. If Morgan eats 200g of fish, which represents higher environmental impact being saved from becoming waste than Dolly’s 200g of quinoa salad. It’s surely a good thing to be consuming the most ethically expensive thing when it’s all going in the bin otherwise.Yet I feel that many people would see this and think “Morgan Freegan isn’t a real vegan, he cares about deliciousness more than what really happens to the animals”. I’m also not saying deliciousness isn’t a factor. If I don’t see a moral difference between eating fish delish and quinoa salad, I’m going to end up with fatty omega-3s in and around my face. Example two: Gun Control in America The Land of the Free and Home of the Imbecile (and a host of other generalisations about the most diverse country in the world). A lot of people in America love the Constitution and its Second Amendment. Many others do not love it at all. There isn’t much middle ground. The people who are “pro gun” will arc up at any mention of even a slight tightening of the laws, even if it’s super reasonable (selling guns at gun shows). Those on the “pro gun safety” side seem unwilling to settle for any position other than somewhere around where Australia has landed (need a “good reason” to own a gun). Then you have a jabroni like Sam Harris piping up in the middle of all this, essentially saying “people should be able to own a gun based on them being fun, but they need to be super trained in safety”. This idea cops absolute flak from both sides. People stick to their guns on both sides, either “no changes” or “no guns”. Taking Sides I feel like this speaks to one of the things that’s beginning to frustrate me: tribalism. On individual issues, people are in one tribe, at the opposite end to the opposing tribe (at least it’s reported that way). Even though it’s only Jihadists blowing themselves up in stadiums, and 100% of Jihadists are Muslim, putting more focus in the airport line on a mid-20s man of Middle-Eastern appearance than a late 80s woman with a walking frame is profiling and shouldn’t be done according to people on the left. According to people on the right, Muslims shouldn’t be let in the country at all, even though the majority are fleeing the horrible things we are accusing them of perpetrating. Progressive: transgender people should be allowed in whatever bathroom they identify with and called by their preferred pronoun. Conservative: a man goes into the bathroom my daughter is in and I’ll drop him. Green: solar power is the way forward and we should all install it as soon as we can because in Australia we can afford to do it. Blue: climate change isn’t a problem. Traditionalist: drugs are bad mk. Liberal: people should be able to do what they want with their minds and bodies. PC Principal: everyone is exactly equal. Free Speech Exponent: I can tell you to keep your fat homosexual religious blind Asian dog away from me. Capitalist: trickle down economics works. Socialist: the poor deserve your money because they need it. I feel like a few in there are stereotypes and not representative of real actual people’s views, but when you look at the way things are reported, you often hear from only the people on the extreme ends of the argument. Which makes sense in a way. If I hosted a chat show (omnipotent God forbid), and the issue of immigration came up, my producer would be booking people to make it balanced which means hearing from both sides of the topic. You don’t want to turn on your TV and hear someone say, “this is a really tough topic and there’s no clear cut right answer” because that infers that whoever is making the decision might not be fully convinced of what they are doing. It’s nice to feel like someone is in control and that things aren’t left up to chance. It’s better to have someone say “we should stop all the boats and immigration and only us original Australians can stay” which some people will relate to, and someone else say “let all these disadvantaged people in, how are they different from us, have some compassion” which other people will relate to. The whole immigration situation is so murky because yeah of course we want to help people, but of course we can’t have a million people come here in the next year, and funding and deficit and the future and hungry children and a million other factors that can’t be explained in anything less than a ten week special which takes a year to make and even then only brushes the surface because we don’t have enough data on what potential solutions might work and I’ve only got a 15 minute segment to talk about it and people’s attention span is only the length of a snapchat or headline anyway, so here’s P. Dutty and Dick di Nat who will throw pre-made word salad over each other’s heads, thinking that they are convincing people of their message and that any concession to reason will lose them voters. Deep consecutives. Maybe it’s all perspective. Maybe people on the left of the topic hear the left and right people on the TV and think of the left-leaning commentator as being balanced and reasonable, but the conservative personality as being bang out of order, and vice-versa. Maybe I’m asking for a “centrist” view, but that’s because I’m a centrist so of course I would see a centrist as reasonable and balanced. So when I’m listening to Sam Harris making “reasonable” comments and being attacked for it, he’s not being reasonable at all and there’s no such thing as objective reasonability, it’s just how much someone aligns with your views. I don’t buy it. I know this comes across in an arrogant way, because I’m basically saying “think about each issue on it’s merits” which implies that people currently don’t and that I currently do, so I’m superior. I don’t mean that at all. Every day I do things because I’m following a heuristic that doesn’t hold true in that situation. The way I indicate when cycling. The way I chop food when cooking. The way I decide whether or not to shop in the morning. The way I prioritise emails at work. The way I think about Australian Politics. And half the time I only think I have a system for things that I’m following, and it’s not even that, it’s just how I feel about it at the time, based on nothing. What I want is to encourage people to pull me (and others) up if I’m doing something that seemingly doesn’t make sense. I want to improve the way I do things. I want to see the faults in what I do and either accept them and move on, or take some accountability and address them. What’s the actual effect if I actually watch something silly on YouTube for an hour? What’s the difference if I donate money to MND Australia instead of the Against Malaria Foundation? Should I buy slippers from Kmart or would I be screwing Bangladeshis by doing so? Action I’m trying a new thing where at the end of each post, I’ll write a thing that’s actionable and ideally relevant to that post. I’m doing it because I’m thinking about what constitutes a “good life” (not being a good person, but being happy), and I think there are a lot of things I’d like to think I do, that I actually don’t do. So if I do things that make me happy and share them, then other people who do those things might be a bit happier too. This one is simple: if something is dubbed “controversial”, think about what your default stance on it is, then try to see the other perspective.
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