178 - Distributed Consequences

Cognitive Biases encourage us to categorize, and by categorizing to draw arbitrary lines dividing up a continuous spectrum, unconsciously, and often along many axes (Axis plural) at once. This point is eloquently stated in the quote: "Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree."

Our modern understanding of the human brain and our decision-making process makes it clear that humans couldn't function at anything approaching a "human level" in the absence of these myriad cognitive biases, as well as the system of emotional motivation (another system of learned and variable categories) that heavily influences and guides those biases. However, it is also very clearly measurable just how far most human decision-making processes fall from reaching any optimal solution under these dynamics.

In traveling to and living for a time in so many countries these past 2 years I've observed how this process plays out in different ways according to resources, culture, and regional dynamics. Each country reaches some portion of very clearly sub-optimal pain points as they attempt to adapt, and the specific points of low optimality vary wildly, but perhaps not unpredictably. Different kinds of markets, governments, import restrictions, levels of tourism, trading partners, moral systems, and local cultures strongly influence which aspects adapt exceedingly well, as well as which fail miserably.

Wasting 220K hours of people's time is equivalent to murdering someone with 25 years left to live. As only waking hours can be spent in this way, a less generous figure would be 145K hours being equivalent to that murder, since hours of sleep are more or less unavailable to waste. This time may be wasted in traffic, the sludge of bureaucracy, inefficient healthcare systems, or any other avoidable byproducts of low optimality.

Legal and moral systems are relevant to the adaptation process that takes shape, and where low optimality emerges from it, but have no bearing on accountability in terms of ethics. Those arbitrary lines dividing categories within a spectrum remain purely imaginary. When crimes are committed at massive scales, even if the harm is highly distributed, with low impact on the average individual, the net result can still be calculated to a murder equivalence, and within any ethical system, those responsible must still pay for the crime in full.

Humans didn't evolve to make ethical decisions at local scales, let alone global ones, so many of the worst criminals in human history, by at least an order of magnitude, reside within or adjacent to the tech industry today. The long term and highly distributed consequences of these crimes are far greater than any recorded genocide, but much like several ongoing genocides they are also entirely preventable. "The problem is choice.", "You lack the will to change."