When there’s time to consider it, that’s certainly a valid approach. But when the elephants are stampeding towards you and your greatest enemy is sweeping down to steal your girl and the MacGuffin is rolling towards the edge of the cliff… just to use an example… then you just may be a teensy bit too busy to calmly and rationally consider the various consequences—all you may /have/ to go on are the thoughts you’ve pre-cached.
That’s pretty much I’ve been trying to get across as my definition of ‘rules-of-thumb’ for this post, yes. (Of course, it’s hard not to overestimate how clear your explanations are, which is why I’ve been trying to re-explain that definition in different ways.)
It was clear that you wanted heuristics. The line for how cheap they need to be isn’t clear, and is hard to define. I can’t think of a situation I’ve personally faced where “check consequentialism” would have been too expensive.
What I’m really hoping to see are heuristics that take less than a second to think through; but if you want a well-defined line, how about I draw on a completely inapplicable cliche, and define it as a five-second rule—if it takes more than five seconds to think through, it’s almost certainly too complicated for what I’m hunting for.
For example—at a bar, a bar fight breaks out next to you. The Pacifism rule-of-thumb is simple—don’t start fighting, or even fighting back. ZAP doesn’t take much more effort; don’t start fighting, unless someone attacks you. (ZAP with ‘common defense’ is almost as easy—don’t start fighting, unless someone attacks you or the people you’ve previously decided you’re willing to fight to defend.) Proportional response is slightly more complicated still, but still doesn’t take much thought—if nobody attacks you (or the people you’ll fight for), don’t get involved; if it’s a relatively harmless fistfight brawl, don’t pull a gun and start shooting; etc. At any given point, the limits on your actions that any of these ethical rules-of-thumb place are clear enough that you almost don’t have to do any thinking at all to figure out.
‘Check consequentialism’ seems to be a guideline of a somewhat different nature. In the sort of nearby bar-brawl described above, it’s hard to tell ahead of time what this heuristic would lead you to conclude—or to tell how long it would take you to figure out what to do—or make any predictions at all, really. It doesn’t seem to place any specific limits on your actions, limits which may reduce your short-term benefits but also provide long-term gains (eg, “For the good of the tribe, don’t murder”).
It’s entirely possible that I’m mixing up aspects that my baseline rules-of-thumb have in common with what’s actually most useful about them; but since I seem to have gotten as far as I can in my reasoning on my own, it seems worthwhile to try to evoke some assistance from anyone I can here.
When there’s time to consider it, that’s certainly a valid approach. But when the elephants are stampeding towards you and your greatest enemy is sweeping down to steal your girl and the MacGuffin is rolling towards the edge of the cliff… just to use an example… then you just may be a teensy bit too busy to calmly and rationally consider the various consequences—all you may /have/ to go on are the thoughts you’ve pre-cached.
So you’re specifically looking for extremely cheap heuristics to use.
That’s pretty much I’ve been trying to get across as my definition of ‘rules-of-thumb’ for this post, yes. (Of course, it’s hard not to overestimate how clear your explanations are, which is why I’ve been trying to re-explain that definition in different ways.)
It was clear that you wanted heuristics. The line for how cheap they need to be isn’t clear, and is hard to define. I can’t think of a situation I’ve personally faced where “check consequentialism” would have been too expensive.
What I’m really hoping to see are heuristics that take less than a second to think through; but if you want a well-defined line, how about I draw on a completely inapplicable cliche, and define it as a five-second rule—if it takes more than five seconds to think through, it’s almost certainly too complicated for what I’m hunting for.
For example—at a bar, a bar fight breaks out next to you. The Pacifism rule-of-thumb is simple—don’t start fighting, or even fighting back. ZAP doesn’t take much more effort; don’t start fighting, unless someone attacks you. (ZAP with ‘common defense’ is almost as easy—don’t start fighting, unless someone attacks you or the people you’ve previously decided you’re willing to fight to defend.) Proportional response is slightly more complicated still, but still doesn’t take much thought—if nobody attacks you (or the people you’ll fight for), don’t get involved; if it’s a relatively harmless fistfight brawl, don’t pull a gun and start shooting; etc. At any given point, the limits on your actions that any of these ethical rules-of-thumb place are clear enough that you almost don’t have to do any thinking at all to figure out.
‘Check consequentialism’ seems to be a guideline of a somewhat different nature. In the sort of nearby bar-brawl described above, it’s hard to tell ahead of time what this heuristic would lead you to conclude—or to tell how long it would take you to figure out what to do—or make any predictions at all, really. It doesn’t seem to place any specific limits on your actions, limits which may reduce your short-term benefits but also provide long-term gains (eg, “For the good of the tribe, don’t murder”).
It’s entirely possible that I’m mixing up aspects that my baseline rules-of-thumb have in common with what’s actually most useful about them; but since I seem to have gotten as far as I can in my reasoning on my own, it seems worthwhile to try to evoke some assistance from anyone I can here.