So, in my mind, the thing that “dying with dignity” is supposed to do is that when you look at plan A and B, you ask yourself: “which of these is more dignified?” instead of “which of these is less likely to lead to death?”, because your ability to detect dignity is more sensitive than your ability to detect likelihood of leading to death on the present margin. [This is, I think, the crux; if you don’t buy this then I agree the framing doesn’t seem sensible.]
This lets you still do effective actions (that, in conjunction with lots of other things, can still lead to less likelihood of death), even if when you look at any plan in isolation, the result is “yep, still 0% chance of survival”, because maybe some plans lead to 3 units of dignity and other plans lead to 4 units of dignity, and you’d rather have 4 than 3 units of dignity.
[Going back to the crux—I think if we actually had outs, and knew how to play to them, this plan would make lots of sense. “Ok guys, we should do X because when we draw Fireball, we’ll then be able to win.” But the plans I’m presently most optimistic about look more like “when you don’t know where the bugs are, tidy up your codebase”, which seems like a pretty different approach, while lining up with ‘dignity’.]
Of course, you also need a sense of dignity that’s more like “we did things that were sane and cared about whether or not we made it” instead of “we didn’t make a fuss or look too strange” or something like that.
Would you say that this constitutes using dignity as a proxy for indirect increase in survival odds and/or increase in broad preparation to execute on outs such that “dignity” is expected to have easier-to-grasp scaling properties and better emotional binding?
So, in my mind, the thing that “dying with dignity” is supposed to do is that when you look at plan A and B, you ask yourself: “which of these is more dignified?” instead of “which of these is less likely to lead to death?”, because your ability to detect dignity is more sensitive than your ability to detect likelihood of leading to death on the present margin. [This is, I think, the crux; if you don’t buy this then I agree the framing doesn’t seem sensible.]
This lets you still do effective actions (that, in conjunction with lots of other things, can still lead to less likelihood of death), even if when you look at any plan in isolation, the result is “yep, still 0% chance of survival”, because maybe some plans lead to 3 units of dignity and other plans lead to 4 units of dignity, and you’d rather have 4 than 3 units of dignity.
[Going back to the crux—I think if we actually had outs, and knew how to play to them, this plan would make lots of sense. “Ok guys, we should do X because when we draw Fireball, we’ll then be able to win.” But the plans I’m presently most optimistic about look more like “when you don’t know where the bugs are, tidy up your codebase”, which seems like a pretty different approach, while lining up with ‘dignity’.]
Of course, you also need a sense of dignity that’s more like “we did things that were sane and cared about whether or not we made it” instead of “we didn’t make a fuss or look too strange” or something like that.
Would you say that this constitutes using dignity as a proxy for indirect increase in survival odds and/or increase in broad preparation to execute on outs such that “dignity” is expected to have easier-to-grasp scaling properties and better emotional binding?