You’re right, I generally think of Level 2 thinking as fighting the hypothetical. For the purposes of our philosophical games, it’s really annoying when people can’t answer the question and deal with fundamental tradeoffs. It’s like fighting the setup to a math problem—“Does Jane really have to divide up her apples?” They are refusing to engage with their values, which is the point. BUT, irl, it is pretty important not to get locked into a falsely narrow idea of what the situation is and leap to bite bullets. You aren’t given the ironclad certainty of the hypo. If you’re not sure this is a triage situation, then devote time to figuring that out.
The fear I was addressing in my Triage essay was that people get locked onto “finding another way” as their Level 1 answer. Because there are situations where a creative solution eliminates a hard choice, there must not be any hard choices! They won’t take decisive triage action, because that’s sub-theoretically-optimal, but they will let the worst outcomes come about (i.e., waiting too long so everyone dies) so long as they didn’t have to get their hands dirty. I think the fear that people will rush to drastic action when there were alternatives is just as valid.
I do get a bit annoyed by the fear that we’ll get so good at triage that reasoning developed under conditions of emergency and scarcity will get locked in. It’s not just you. People seem really afraid of giving in to the logic of triage even if they understand it, like they’ll lose some important moral or intellectual faculty if they do so. They especially fear that they shouldn’t adopt triage ideas if they won’t always have to think that way. It’s like they are worried about taking the utilitarianism red pill and not being able to unsee that way of thinking even if they know it’s unnecessary. It would be interesting to study why this is. Be that as it may, though, triage thinking is the best thing we have in emergency medical situations under conditions of scarcity, which still exists. Acknowledging tradeoffs and scarcity more broadly still seems pretty important to maximizing utility today as well. I don’t think “we may have abundance one day, and then we wouldn’t have to think about tradeoffs” is a reason not to employ triage and lose all those QALYs in the meantime. I also think it’s very unlikely that triage/tradeoffs, if they were embraced where applicable today, would be much harder to unlearn in conditions of abundance than the deeper, instinctive scarcity thinking we’d have to deal with anyway.
Thanks for the cite :)
You’re right, I generally think of Level 2 thinking as fighting the hypothetical. For the purposes of our philosophical games, it’s really annoying when people can’t answer the question and deal with fundamental tradeoffs. It’s like fighting the setup to a math problem—“Does Jane really have to divide up her apples?” They are refusing to engage with their values, which is the point. BUT, irl, it is pretty important not to get locked into a falsely narrow idea of what the situation is and leap to bite bullets. You aren’t given the ironclad certainty of the hypo. If you’re not sure this is a triage situation, then devote time to figuring that out.
The fear I was addressing in my Triage essay was that people get locked onto “finding another way” as their Level 1 answer. Because there are situations where a creative solution eliminates a hard choice, there must not be any hard choices! They won’t take decisive triage action, because that’s sub-theoretically-optimal, but they will let the worst outcomes come about (i.e., waiting too long so everyone dies) so long as they didn’t have to get their hands dirty. I think the fear that people will rush to drastic action when there were alternatives is just as valid.
I do get a bit annoyed by the fear that we’ll get so good at triage that reasoning developed under conditions of emergency and scarcity will get locked in. It’s not just you. People seem really afraid of giving in to the logic of triage even if they understand it, like they’ll lose some important moral or intellectual faculty if they do so. They especially fear that they shouldn’t adopt triage ideas if they won’t always have to think that way. It’s like they are worried about taking the utilitarianism red pill and not being able to unsee that way of thinking even if they know it’s unnecessary. It would be interesting to study why this is. Be that as it may, though, triage thinking is the best thing we have in emergency medical situations under conditions of scarcity, which still exists. Acknowledging tradeoffs and scarcity more broadly still seems pretty important to maximizing utility today as well. I don’t think “we may have abundance one day, and then we wouldn’t have to think about tradeoffs” is a reason not to employ triage and lose all those QALYs in the meantime. I also think it’s very unlikely that triage/tradeoffs, if they were embraced where applicable today, would be much harder to unlearn in conditions of abundance than the deeper, instinctive scarcity thinking we’d have to deal with anyway.