Meghan Sullivan
speaker
520 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2017
last heard Jun 2017
Meghan Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You might think like, sure I can.
I'll just sit down and like I'll try to guess the likelihood of me ending up in the good scenario and the likelihood of me ending up in the bad scenario and compare it to how happy I think my life would be if I stayed home and then whichever option is gonna result in me most likely doing better over the course of my future is the one I should do.
And Paul says like hold the phone.
Like, how are you going to sit down and do that calculation if you have no idea what it's like to be a soldier on the front lines, if you can't even imagine what it's going to be like for you to be on the front lines?
And you say, well, I'll just like you know look at research, at veterans' research, and see like, you know, what are the likelihoods of people with my similar demographics ending up in the good scenario or the bad scenario?
And she says, No, that's not a good way to handle the problem because it's not answering the question that's most important, which is the what is
What is it gonna feel like from the inside?
for you to be in that scenario.
We can call this maybe a projectability constraint on rational planning.
If we took a constraint like this really seriously, we should note it's gonna make it very hard for us to think rationally about a lot of scenarios.
So, not just whether to go to war or, as Paul says in her book, whether or not to become a parent, she thinks that's one of these transformative experiences.
It's also gonna make it really hard for us to plan if we have to have a catastrophic medical intervention.
So suppose your doctor says, like, you have spinal cancer, we can save your life, but only
only by performing a surgery which is gonna leave you quadriplegic.
think.
You have no idea what it would be like to live out the rest of your life as a paralyzed man, so you don't know how to rationally plan or whether or not to accept the surgery.
Or if you're like in a Pascal's wager style scenario, so you're trying to decide whether or not it's worth it to get up to go to church on Sundays because of a minuscule probability of there being a good heaven that you could get access to by doing so.
You might think, you have no clue what it would be like to be in heaven, so you can't even start to think about the wager scenario.
I think Paul raises an interesting question about whether or not we have to be able to project or imagine our futures in order to plan for them.
But I think at the end of the day, it has to be the case that we should reject any such constraint.
Showing 421–440 of 520 · page 22 of 26
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