Morality, Religion & Philosophy: June 2007 Archives
An essay by John Perry about structured procrastination -- as a procrastinator myself, this piece is a great explanation of how I still manage to get lots of things done.
Greg Mankiw remembers the late Richard Rorty who once posed this question to his philosophy class:
Aliens from another planet, with vastly superior intelligence to humans, land on earth in order to consume humans as food. What argument could you make to convince the aliens not to eat us that would not also apply to our consumption of beef?
I can think of a few responses:
1. Unlike cows, humans can make some attempt at self-defense, even against vastly more intelligent aliens. We could likely, at the least, find a way to poison ourselves so as to make our meat unpalatable to alien tastes.
2. Unlike cows, humans can express a desire not to be eaten. Even if lesser in intelligence than the hypothetical aliens, we are capable of communication with them and self-aware enough to object to being consumed.
3. Unlike cows, humans have families, friends, and other sorts of emotional connections. These connections may have analogues among the aliens and could be used to gain their sympathy.
4. Unlike cows, humans are intelligent and creative beings who may have more to offer the aliens than our meat. It is possible that we could enter a mutually beneficial economic arrangement that is valuable to the alien culture and could be used as leverage to prevent our consumption.
(HT: Marginal Revolution.)
A surgeon needs to decide whether or not to perform surgery on a patient. The surgery has a 70% chance of saving the patient's life and a 30% chance of killing the patient. The surgeon decides to perform the surgery, but the patient dies. Did the surgeon make a bad decision?
An investor is given the option of buying $5,000 with of stock. There's a 20% chance that the stock will be worth $50,000 in a year, and an 80% chance that it will be worth nothing. He buys the stock and it loses all its value. Did the investor make a bad decision?
If you said "yes" to either question above then you are a victim of outcome bias: you're judging a decision based on information that wasn't known when the decision was made. Given the information available at the time, both decisions were right. Neither the surgeon nor the investor should feel guilty for his decision, even though they both turned out badly in the end.
Unfortunately most people frequently heap guilt upon themselves for decisions that turn out badly even though they were right at the time they were made. This may explain another cognitive bias: loss aversion.
(HT: HealthBolt, GeekPress, and BBSpot.)
