Comment author:[deleted]
29 October 2014 04:42:31PM
28 points
[-]
I kind of predict that the results of installing heroic responsibility as a virtue, among average humans under average conditions, would be a) everyone stepping on everyone else’s toes, and b) 99% of them quitting a year later.
There's a reason it's called heroic responsibility: it's for a fictional hero, who can do Fictional Hero Things like upset the world order on a regular basis and get away with it. He has Plot Armor, and an innately limited world. In fact, the story background even guarantees this: there are only a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of wizards in Britain, and thus the Law of Large Numbers does not apply, and thus Harry is a one-of-a-kind individual rather than a one-among-several-hundred-thousand as he would be in real life. Further, he goes on adventures as an individual, and never has to engage in the kinds of large-scale real-life efforts that take the massive cooperation of large numbers of not-so-phoenix-quality individuals.
Which you very much do. You don't need heroic rationality, you need superrationality, which anyone here who's read up on decision-theory should recognize. The super-rational thing to do is systemic effectiveness, at the level of habits and teams, so that patients' health does not ever depend on one person choosing to be heroic. An optimal health system does not sound melodramatically heroic: it works quietly and can absolutely, always be relied upon.
Last bit of emphasis: you are both realer and better than Harry. He's a fictional hero, and has to fight a few battles as an individual. You are a real nurse, and have to do your part to save hundreds of lives for decades of time. The fucked-up thing about children's literature is that we never manage to get across just how small children's heroes are, how little they do, and just how large the real world inhabited by adults is, and just how very difficult it is to live here, and just how fucking heroic each and every person who does the slightest bit of good here actually is.
Comment author:morvkala
30 October 2014 04:34:31PM
2 points
[-]
This seems to misunderstand the definition of heroic responsibility in the first place. It doesn't require that you're better, smarter, luckier, or anything else than the average person. All that matters is the probability that you can beat the status quo, whether through focused actions to help one person, or systematic changes. If swimmer had strong enough priors that the doctor was neglecting their duty, swimmer would be justified in doing the stereotypically heroic thing. She didn't, so she had to follow the doctors lead.
If everyone else cares deeply about solving a problem and there are a lot of smarter minds than your own focusing on the issue, you're probably right to take the long approach and look for any systematic flaws instead of doing something that'll probably be stupid. However, there's lots of problems where the smartest, wealthiest people don't actually have the motivation to solve the problem, and the majority of people who care are entrenched in the status quo, so a mere prole lacking HJPEVesque abilities benefits strongly from heroic responsibility.
And sometimes you can't fix the system, but you can save one person and that is okay. It doesn't make the system any better, and you'll still need to fix it another day, but ignoring the cases you think you can solve because you lack the tools to tackle the root of the problem is EXACTLY the kind of behaviour heroic responsibility should be warning you about.
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There's a reason it's called heroic responsibility: it's for a fictional hero, who can do Fictional Hero Things like upset the world order on a regular basis and get away with it. He has Plot Armor, and an innately limited world. In fact, the story background even guarantees this: there are only a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of wizards in Britain, and thus the Law of Large Numbers does not apply, and thus Harry is a one-of-a-kind individual rather than a one-among-several-hundred-thousand as he would be in real life. Further, he goes on adventures as an individual, and never has to engage in the kinds of large-scale real-life efforts that take the massive cooperation of large numbers of not-so-phoenix-quality individuals.
Which you very much do. You don't need heroic rationality, you need superrationality, which anyone here who's read up on decision-theory should recognize. The super-rational thing to do is systemic effectiveness, at the level of habits and teams, so that patients' health does not ever depend on one person choosing to be heroic. An optimal health system does not sound melodramatically heroic: it works quietly and can absolutely, always be relied upon.
Last bit of emphasis: you are both realer and better than Harry. He's a fictional hero, and has to fight a few battles as an individual. You are a real nurse, and have to do your part to save hundreds of lives for decades of time. The fucked-up thing about children's literature is that we never manage to get across just how small children's heroes are, how little they do, and just how large the real world inhabited by adults is, and just how very difficult it is to live here, and just how fucking heroic each and every person who does the slightest bit of good here actually is.
This seems to misunderstand the definition of heroic responsibility in the first place. It doesn't require that you're better, smarter, luckier, or anything else than the average person. All that matters is the probability that you can beat the status quo, whether through focused actions to help one person, or systematic changes. If swimmer had strong enough priors that the doctor was neglecting their duty, swimmer would be justified in doing the stereotypically heroic thing. She didn't, so she had to follow the doctors lead.
If everyone else cares deeply about solving a problem and there are a lot of smarter minds than your own focusing on the issue, you're probably right to take the long approach and look for any systematic flaws instead of doing something that'll probably be stupid. However, there's lots of problems where the smartest, wealthiest people don't actually have the motivation to solve the problem, and the majority of people who care are entrenched in the status quo, so a mere prole lacking HJPEVesque abilities benefits strongly from heroic responsibility.
And sometimes you can't fix the system, but you can save one person and that is okay. It doesn't make the system any better, and you'll still need to fix it another day, but ignoring the cases you think you can solve because you lack the tools to tackle the root of the problem is EXACTLY the kind of behaviour heroic responsibility should be warning you about.