Chris Nolan's Joker is a very clever guy, almost Monroesque in his ability to identify hypocrisy and inconsistency. One of his most interesting scenes in the film has him point out how people estimate horrible things differently depending on whether they're part of what's "normal", what's "expected", rather than on how inherently horrifying they are, or how many people are involved.
Soon people extrapolated this observation to other such apparent inconsistencies in human judgment, where a behaviour that once was acceptable, with a simple tweak or change in context, becomes the subject of a much more serious reaction.
I think there's rationalist merit in giving these inconsistencies a serious look. I intuit that there's some sort of underlying pattern to them, something that makes psychological sense, in the roundabout way that most irrational things do. I think that much good could come out of figuring out what that root cause is, and how to predict this effect and manage it.
Phenomena that come to mind, are, for instance, from an Effective Altruism point of view, the expenses incurred in counter-terrorism (including some wars that were very expensive in treasure and lives), and the number of lives said expenses save, compared with the number of lives that could be saved by spending that same amount into improving road safety, increasing public helathcare expense where it would do the most good, building better lightning rods (in the USA you're four times more likely to be struck by thunder than by terrorists), or legalizing drugs.
What do y'all think? Why do people have their priorities all jumbled-up? How can we predict these effects? How can we work around them?
I'm fully with you but it also implies that we adjust our reaction to the losses due to terrorism or in general to losses due to not selected interventions.
One example from parenting is choosing between
giving children a chance to experience life and to become autonomous
protecting children from all possible emotional and physical harm
I judge the first to have higher utility (and hedons) to the child and future adult even despite the risks implied. But I can already hear the accusations should anything happen during the time the child is not fully protected.
Should anything happen - say a serious accident - how do I deal emotionally with that? Do I accept it as a sad but acceptable consequence of my decision or do I resort to guilt and change my future decision on this issue?
We should make clear that the positive effects of experience and autonomy actually derive from the decision for them. Otherwise the much stronger corrective guilt - or even the fear of guilt alone - will out-compete such approaches.
Your proposal or this approach in general implies that we develop a capability to suffer in certain cases - and sometimes I think that our society is headed more toward a minimization of suffering than toward a maximization of happiness.