If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm.
-Eliezer YudkowskySuppose a time travelling angel came to you and offered an altruistic choice:
A) Prevent every mass shooting in the last 10 years
B) Reduce the car accident fatality rate by 10% last year
If your heart leads you to impulsively choose A, then congratulations, you're normal. But your heart will be responsible for the net death of about 2,000 people. Why do our hearts mislead us like this? Because Stalin was right when he said, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."
We can't picture 30,000 people dying in car accidents, but we can picture the scene of a school shooting, with all its horror and all its tragedy. As the numbers go up they get more abstract. It becomes harder to empathize with the victims. But that doesn't mean they're not real. And when your heart steamrolls over them to get to more vivid, tragic stories; I'm sorry but that's not altruism.
The true cost of something does not equal how bad you feel when you imagine it.
So the rule is, head first heart second. Your head needs to interpret the world before your heart helps navigate through it. Your heart may change its opinion after you've done the head work. I mean, once you know that choice A would cause 2,000 extra deaths, doesn't your heart change its mind?
I notice people getting caught up with this head or heart dichotomy. I think that's why they get mad at me when I suggest things like basic numeracy when evaluating the cost of school shootings. They think I'm recommending the head over and above the heart. But when did I say that? I said use your head first, then use your heart. Again; your head is good for drawing the map, your heart is good at using the map to navigate the terrain.
There is no angel offering us any choices, so what does it matter? Well, as any fool knows there are tradeoffs to everything. When we radically misunderstand the magnitudes of the costs and benefits because we're so absorbed in heart-style thinking, we're likely to do more harm than good.
In the gun debate, we've framed the entire issue around mass shootings, but lightning causes more deaths. We can't have a serious discussion about gun control until everyone accepts that basic numeracy applies even to the most tragic of the tragic.
