A simple way to improve your thought and conclusions


Take some policy, action, or person whom you regard as morally questionable and indeed is morally questionable.  That same policy, action, or person does some bad things, bad in conquentialist terms I now mean.  Practically bad, utilitarian bad.

The odds are that you overrate the badness of those consequences by some considerable degree.

Even very smart people do this.  Sometimes they do it more, because they can come up with more elaborate arguments for why the bad consequences are completely disastrous.

They might overrate the badness of those consequences by as much as 5x or 10x (gdp is a huge mound of stuff!).

So if you want to have better opinions, look for the cases where you do this and stop doing it.

Easy-peasy!

And good luck with that.

The post A simple way to improve your thought and conclusions appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.



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