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by another-one-off
2896 days ago
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> Except there's a lot more going on here and a lot more at stake. Beliefs about [...] why bad things happen to good people, can dramatically affect policy decisions and what a given culture considers acceptable. Someone feeling good about themselves is absolutely not a good enough reason to mangle reality. nodnodnod > Rejection of the influence of randomness means [...] people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them. Well, it is complicated and gets very subtle. For every person who is struck by catastrophe through sheer bad luck, there is at least one who is struck by catastrophe after a series of terrible personal choices. Deciding which is which is not an easy choice. For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/. Because they deal with the risk all the time, they see it as a choice to made. Not mangling reality cuts two ways. Just because a choice isn't obvious doesn't mean that decisions don't play a role. In addition we can't attribute success solely to luck. Success strikes randomly in a small pool of people who have the capacity to be successful. That pool is small, and the people in it shouldn't be made responsible for the vagaries of the universe at large. |
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This one will get complicated since it's effectively a discussion on free will. :) I will say that trying to examine why people do what one could call stupid or terrible choices is an interesting exercise.
Consider, for instance, the act of smoking in a smoking-dominated country. I have grown up in such a country and I did not pick up smoking because I considered it bad. But I am also a significant outlier for other reasons (let's say I didn't have a lot of friends growing up). From a 3rd party perspective, especially one originated in a country that doesn't smoke a lot, picking up smoking seems like a very terrible idea, and it seems very straightforward to judge those people.
But consider it from the dynamics of the country: what does it mean to be a smoker, what does it mean to be a non-smoker, in such a country? Are there consequences to each? Why do most people end up smoking? What would they have to give up to not do it? Is a decision of an outlier like myself relevant/useful? What is the breaking point after which a culture switches from an activity being mainstream vs not?
If we say smoking is a terrible choice, we'd be forced to conclude that people in countries that smoke a lot must be worse people in some sense than people in countries that do not smoke a lot. A similar conclusion was once made by Milgram. But I think by now we realize that these conclusions are definitely not the right ones, so we need some other explanation.
> For example, imagine a bush-walker standing at the bottom of a cliff - a rock falls, and kills them. Looks a lot like bad luck. However, in the Australian mining industry, workers are essentially forbidden from standing near cliffs because that sort of thing is /actually quite likely/.
This, for example, doesn't sound like a choice from the perspective of the walker or worker, because they don't have the information. So on that level it looks to me to still be random. It's like choosing a career when you don't know anything about the market or what makes a good career - it's basically random from your perspective, even if there are deterministic paths all around. After all, most physical luck (i.e., accidentally tripping) is also deterministic internally, but it's luck to us because we can't tell.
It is not random for the whoever manages the Australian mining industry, because they have the information. One way to reduce randomness is having more information, which can be extended to educating people more.