Whereas I'm pretty much always underconfident
That's a bit of self contradictory statement, isn't it? (People can be unassertive but internally very overconfident, by the way).
So you have that patient, and you have your idea on the procedures that should have been done, and there's doctor's, and you in retrospect think you were under-confident that your treatment plan was superior? What if magically you were in the position where you'd actually have to take charge? Where ordering a wrong procedure hurts the patient? It's my understanding that there's a very strong initial bias to order unnecessary procedures, that takes years of experience to overcome.
I suspect it's one of things that look very different from the inside and from the outside... None of those arrogant newbies would have seen themselves in my description (up until they wisen up). Also, your prototype here is the heroic responsibility for saving the human race, taken upon by someone who neither completed formal education in relevant subjects, nor (which would actually be better to see) produced actual working software products of relevance, nor other things of such nature evaluated to be correct in a way that's somewhat immune to rationalization. And a straightforwardly responsible thing to do is to try to do more of rationalization-immune things to practice, because the idea is that screwing up here has very bad consequences.
Other issue is that you are essentially thinking meat, and if the activation of the neurons used for responsibility is outside a specific range, things don't work right, performance is impaired, responsibility too is impaired, etc, whether the activation is too low or too high.
edit: to summarize with an analogy, say, driving a car without having passed a driving test is irresponsible, right? No matter how much you feel that you can drive the bus better than the person who's legally driving it, the responsible thing to do is to pass a driving test first. Now, the heroes, they don't need no stinking tests. They jump into the airplane cockpit and they land it just fine, without once asking if there's a certified pilot on board. In most fiction, heroes are incredibly irresponsible, and the way they take responsibility for things is very irresponsible, but it all works out fine because it's fiction.
That's a bit of self contradictory statement, isn't it?
No, that is an entirely coherent claim for a person to make and not even a particularly implausible one.
[Originally posted to my personal blog, reposted here with edits.]
Introduction
Something Impossible
The Well-Functioning Gear
Recursive Heroic Responsibility
Heroic responsibility for average humans under average conditions
I can predict at least one thing that people will say in the comments, because I've heard it hundreds of times–that Swimmer963 is a clear example of someone who should leave nursing, take the meta-level responsibility, and do something higher impact for the usual. Because she's smart. Because she's rational. Whatever.
Fine. This post isn't about me. Whether I like it or not, the concept of heroic responsibility is now a part of my value system, and I probably am going to leave nursing.
But what about the other nurses on my unit, the ones who are competent and motivated and curious and really care? Would familiarity with the concept of heroic responsibility help or hinder them in their work? Honestly, I predict that they would feel alienated, that they would assume I held a low opinion of them (which I don't, and I really don't want them to think that I do), and that they would flinch away and go back to the things that they were doing anyway, the role where they were comfortable–or that, if they did accept it, it would cause them to burn out. So as a consequentialist, I'm not going to tell them.
And yeah, that bothers me. Because I'm not a special snowflake. Because I want to live in a world where rationality helps everyone. Because I feel like the reason they would react that was isn't because of anything about them as people, or because heroic responsibility is a bad thing, but because I'm not able to communicate to them what I mean. Maybe stupid reasons. Still bothers me.