Humans are unbearable with their little imaginary obsession with "who is at fault"... fault is a construct with almost no relevance.. there is an infinite chain of events leading up to everything that happens and any one of them could have changed the course. All we do is obsess over the one that pisses us off the most like it is somehow special.

@freemo There’s a general feeling that we can’t solve a problem before we place blame on the person who caused the issue in the first place

@realcaseyrollins @freemo > why do people studying cause and effect want to know the cause

:neocat_floof_mug: couldn't say
Follow

@icedquinn

Ther eis a linguistic subtlety that is hard to capture here...

We need to look at actions that are good because they **usually** have good effect and actions that are bad because they usually have bad effects. Not if one particular action in one particular case had the bad effect.

Let me give an example... shooting a gun in the air for no reason is a bad action.. its still a bad act even when it doesnt hit anyone. To say. So perfectly ok to say "You did something you shouldnt have done, you should be punished"

But cause and effect would be different... that would be like saying "This guy got shot in the head, and after investigating we found out it was because bill shot a gun in the air randomly.... therefore we would have given him 1 year in prison if it hadnt killed anyone, but now that it has there will be murder charges to it will be 20 years"...

The fact that two people taking the same action, with exactly the same motives will get drastically different punishments due to a happenstance, a roll of the dice... that seems like a very silly and counter productive way of operating.

Now take that idea and extract away from law and crime.. that same realization is valuable in life and our reasoning more generally.

@realcaseyrollins

@freemo @realcaseyrollins
:neocat_floof_mug: sounds like a whole lot of things that weren't in the OP.

@icedquinn

They were, they were just hidden in the subtlety of english

(Translation: I communicated it very poorly but I wont admit that :) )

@realcaseyrollins

@freemo @realcaseyrollins credit assignment remains a hard problem, admittedly, and nature never solved it. the most complex meat machines look at maybe one or two antecedent actions and assume those are directly related.

i tend to look at fault/blame as a chain of events, since somebody might rob the bank because their child was taken hostage (and the legal apparatus doesn't really care about that so much), but this can run in to the Horizon Problem of how many actions do you include during the evaluation, and then you need Bayesian Regret to quantify the individual actors... bleh.

the natural method seems to work more than it doesn't, though rather inaccurately, though that seems to be the kind of thing nature likes to do.

@icedquinn

You and me, we know enough to think of it as it is, as a staticician with an understanding would... you cant judge most people by those standards though.

@realcaseyrollins

@freemo @realcaseyrollins somebody at some individual level shat in the well or the well wouldn't have shit in it.

its just hard to look through fields of probabilities to find who that is if you didn't see it happen.
Sign in to participate in the conversation
CleverLibre Social

CleverLibre Social is an inclusive social instance for open discussion, learning, and community.
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.