Pretending to be Wise
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
(Regarding the quote, we should remember that Dante lived in a time of extreme factionalism in Italy. In fact he spent many years in exile because his faction lost.)
(a) Passing neutral judgment;
(b) Refusing an interrupt / declining to invest marginal resources;
(c) Pretending that either of the above is a mark of deep wisdom, maturity, and a superior vantage point; and correspondingly that the original sides occupy lower vantage points that are not importantly different and not worth judging between.
As humans most of us rely on judgment of social status as one of the most fundamental ways to allocate resources and interact with one another. It creates an inherent bias when we grant the right of arbitration to a fellow human, because the privilege alone can elevate perceived social status, and possibly interfere with the granted responsibility.
The independence of social status from the right to arbitrate may be a measure of justness and liberty in a social group.
The difference between (b) and the second half of (c) seems unclear: what's the difference between
(b) (the decider) declining to invest marginal resources
and
(c.ii) deciding that the sides-in-question are not importantly different (presumably "not importantly different to the decider"; if not, please clarify) and not worth judging between (again, presumably, "not worth judging between to the decider"; if not, please clarify)
?
What's a scenario which is (b) but not (c.ii) and vice-versa?
The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them -
even the wicked cannot glory in them.
In other words, what you're talking about is "I don't have the time to learn about this, so I can't judge." What Eliezer is talking about is "The circumstances don't matter, so I won't judge." There's a difference between a non-decision and deciding not to decide.
A teacher who sees two children in a fight has likely seen those children fight before. After seeing the same fight occur over and over they just don't care who started it. Figuring out who started it becomes a chicken and an egg situation.
This example from the article reveals an interesting point about passing judgment in general:
...judges in the actual legal system can repeatedly hand down real verdicts without automatically losing their reputation for impartiality
That is because judges rule based on a set of written laws which they interpret depending on the situation. Picking ethical or moral side of a situation has no such standard.
Perhaps the writer also missed the idea that the majority of people in this world do not like conflict. Having to pick sides creates conflict. They are not trying to be wise as much as they are trying to avoid something that makes them uncomfortable.
Arguments are not black and white. Demanding the people pass judgment over situation where they do not know all of the information, do not have a set measurement for passing judgment and most likely do not care is unwise.
Now I might have tunnel-vision because of my peculiar experience as a child, but I recall almost all incidents of physical bullying to be pretty freaking easy to tell who hit who. One heuristic: the aggressor is likely to be the same on the 27th time as it was on times 1 through 26.
I think the article has that right, I just think it just confuses what it means to suspend judgment. Saying you don't care who started it isn't the same as suspending judgment pending further investigation; rather, it's a form of jumping to judgment prematurely. Judgment in the case of a fight doesn't have to take the form of a (false) dichotomy; I'd argue that saying it doesn't matter who started it is a third form of judgment. Truly suspending judgment pending further investigation of who started the fight would in fact be the wisest course of action.
Here's idea. Being mature involves realizing there are many kind of stupidities in the world and that most conflicts involve one kind of stupidity battling another kind of stupidity so neither side is really worth taking.
I think it is sort of silly for somebody to have to kill himself for other people to give a shit about his physical wellbeing, but since suicide fairly reliably makes people actually care about things, I note that most authorities put the number of suicides as a result of bullying at between one and two dozen a year in the US.
This means that bullies are more effective at killing American children than terrorists, school shootings, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, sharks, and kidnappers motivated by ransom. Combined.
But who cares about such things?
"How old is he and he still cares about such things" - this question is the essence of why not caring is a pretension of wisdom, and I'm glad that the illustration was so nicely provided.
It's an example, not the whole of the argument. And the example is more about the principal than the children. The principal should care about who is starting fights, if they actually want to affect whether there are fights in the future. They don't, for many reasons including ones discussed in the article, so they don't care, either.
School examples have the virtue of appealing to most people's common experience.
The same argument applies to the 'principal' or 'Great Powers'. In both situation the parties did not ask to have to expend their resources to absorb information and pass judgment on someone else's problem (fight or war). They are not being pretentious, serene, or pretending to be wise - they are simply using their resources most efficiently to accomplish their own goals.
Its a simple matter of each party estimating that the outcome of action A (without judgment), and the outcome of action B (with judgment) will have a marginal difference.