Choice Blindness Ethics
{{ | date=04/10/2018 | time=06:00 EST | summary=Alma grills Zach | cast=
| place_name=Textville | place_desc=Alma texts Zach out of the blue. There are a lot of thoughts whirling around in her brain because of the floods and Maria last night. Zach and Maya helped her find her niece, and she is curious about the extent to which Zach would act to help someone and what choices go in to him making a decision like that. Plus, he is wrong about everything and she must argue with him.
It's a brainstorm. Her texts come rapid fire, and she interrupts a lot and types over the guy. Her puncuation and spelling are worse than they normally are. She is more emotional here than she normally presents. | log=Alma:choice blindness group!!!!
Zach: ???
Alma: its oh no I'm sorry I did a thing
Alma: :( :( :(
Zach: I... Wat?
Alma: i was rude. it is a psychology thing. it is soooooo weird but it is like you said.
Alma: hate when I blurt out jargon
Zach: What's it mean?
Alma: I thought abuot doing research with the gruop but they have a corvid cognition stagion at the place and I met None the raven just a raven kay so
Alma: first it started with card tricks
Alma: they asked participants to choose between two pictures and then they'd take a picture away and asked why they chose the one they did
Alma: so many people didn't notice the switch but they'd explain like they choose that face
Zach: People do that?
Alma: I think it was an easy mistake. usually reality is a dependable storage medium
Alma: so then I wonder, are the faces too similar?
Alma: I don't know maybe? but they did vary them
Alma: so then their next paper was about tea and jam in a marketplace
Alma: like if I set something on a table isn't it reasonable to think the table would keep the same thing there?
Alma: and the flavors sometimes were really different and people didn't comment. I couldn't tell if it was what they were measuring or not
Alma: so many different things but I studied memory in undergrad
Alma: I mean, I set the culture and a bunch of stuff aside for now!!!! but it is important too
Alma: recognition memory works different from recall and the memory task for the photos sort of causes both
Alma: and you can vary things to improve performance on recognition memory.
Alma: but culture, I think I wouldn't always tell someone if I they made a mistake like giving me the wrong jam. how big a deal is it? why should I bother them?
Alma: maybe I would think more about this if someone varied the risk or the cost like a laptop or a surgery
Alma: so I don't now how the brain works with it but if it does have to do with memory and reality being a reliable storage medium for the most part then what they did is like someone changing reality
Alma: like you said
Alma: do you get charged for texts?
Zach: I do, but it's like, two thousand and I barely use them.
Alma: ok I didn't want to be rude and spam you
Alma: did you notice you never eat with me?
Alma: maybe you don't like park food from my duffle bag or something
Alma: is that a tradition thing???
Zach: I think it's more of an 'I don't eat with a lot of people' thing. I don't put as much sigificance in breaking bread.
Zach: Or having distinct meal times, for that mater.
Alma: I didn't even think about it until you didn't want any. it's just a habit and camping and stuff and then WOA what if it is a mage thing
Alma: like what if I am doing a thing and I didn't know it yeah like bread and salt or water or somthing
Alma: it is not a thing it was just food
Alma: labs have internal review boards do you think that experiment is ethical?
Alma: the next thing was polls!!!!!! opposites!
Alma: is that worse?
Zach: I don't see any reason why it's not ethical. I haven't looked into resarch ethics much. But like, I think as long as you're telling them, after the fact, 'yes we deceived you, here's how, and here's why' the fact that they signed up for a psych research study is a measure of informed consent.
Alma: I don't know it really bugs me, like for ht epoll one they don't tell the people it's actually a psyc experiment they say they are polling political attitudes
Alma: people always get debriefed afterwards unless you want to go to researcher hell
Alma: I actually don't know that. I remember having to read and sign stuff so I could experiment on humans
Zach: How do you not know that a thing is a psych experiment when you show up? Like, are they grabbing people off the street?
Alma: and then explain how we lied to them. not using hte word lie
Alma: like for polling it is walking around in a park
Alma: for tea and jam it is in a grocery store
Alma: in Sweden. I wanted to try the same thing in my neighborhood in chicago but I hate people and everything
Alma: I mean, not really
Alma: birds win
Zach: I mean, I guess the question boils down to: what is the harm being done? I figure if you find that you've done some real harm and are prepared to make someone well and truly whole (none of this money bullshit) then that might be okay. Or at least there are measures of okayness.
Alma: I don't know what was right with Maria why did you decide to intervene?
Alma: I'm not angry or anything. maybe I can just ask you about it later
Zach(several texts): I have a soft spot for kids in trouble. You presented me with a situation. Once its in front of me, I have to make a decision. I made one that aligned with my values: 1) Life, 2) Soothing hurt, 3) it sucks to be caught out in a storm, even if you DO know how to manage exposure. Besides. I like you, so... 4) I help people I respect and like to actualize their desires.
Zach: To not act once faced with the thing would be to deny my values, to act against myself. It would mean fighting my own Entelechy.
Alma: I think want pushed me over to interfering was being afraid of the storm and thinking she might be. and I thought maybe she'd be freaking out for getting in late and I didn't want that.
Alma (after a delay): She made such a kickass plan with her school and I don' tknow why she didn't do that to me
Alma: like it would be ok if I never found out and it was a success. except that I'd rather know how she felt and what she thought about her parents and that she'd talk to me about it
Alma: you work with Maya?
Zach: She may not even know why she kept you out. She may have been trying to spare you being triggered by the stuff she was planning to dig into. And, frankly, she's sixteen, this may simply have been all about her, to her.
Zach: Not in the sense most people mean that. Maya and I met in New York. I crash at her space. We're some flavor of involved, but I think we don't agree what flavor.
Alma: she helped calm me down. I guess I want to know what you think of her moral compass except that's intruding her privacy so maybe I should ask her permission
Alma: why do you have a gun? I hate them. if you have a gun it means you choose to kill someone
Zach: My opinion of her isn't part of her privacy. It might be part of mine. But here's my hot take: She tries. She's not used to thinking much about the present, though. She's not so great at examining her values. So the execution can be a little... passive.
Zach: Having the gun doesn't mean you've chosen to kill. You're right that it does mean I've chosen to leave the option on the table. I very very very much prefer not to. But at the end of the day, if it comes down to my life or someone elses? I'm fighting for mine to the utmost. It takes a tremendous amount of strength and skill to win a fight someone who wants to kill you without lethal force. I'm good, but there are always people who will be stronger. Also, aren't you the person who hangs with the euth?
Alma: My teacher in this is euth. I only know my teacher but I just met another. Graham called us judges. Judges exonerate
Alma: maybe I can do jury nullification too
Zach: Judges only exonerate because of the presumption of a right to pass err judgement. You can't meaningfully judge an equal.
Alma: peer review?
Alma: that was snark :( but seriously
Zach: Peer review doesn't kill, or refrain from killing. Not killing someone, because you have concluded that they're okay, is not the same thing as saying 'yeah this thing you did is fine.'
Alma: the analogy kinda falls apart for me. I hate people too
Zach: You can review someone's work. But not them.
Alma: I mean, not the same way probably
Alma: it's not right. but I have a calling
Alma: I have to protect people from them? I mean everyone. I don't
Alma presses return too soon here, but she's got a brainstorm and never finishes the thought.
Alma: oh I have to figure out who is people too. like mushrooms. and now there is a person inside of me?
Zach: I don't get to judge you for deciding what you believe your calling is. But I do get to point out that judgement assumes superiority. What you do with that is up to you. I would never kill you for doing something with that, that I disagreed with. But a judge WILL kill someone for doing a thing they disagree with, if that disagreement is strong enough. And the whole institution of deciding who we will kill because we feel like we get to decide that? Hard pass.
Alma: like I'm against the death penalty because it shouldn't be easy for the government to kill people. well, not just that. that's just one reason
Alma: some people deserve to die. no one deserves to kill them
Zach: I can't follow you to that first premise.
Alma: I can't honestly tell you that no one deserves to die because of how my body and mind react to some people when I see horrible things.
Alma: if I ever have a unified reaction then I can tell you that honestly
Alma: do you know about the Stanly Milgram experiments?
Zach: "I want those people to die for the horrible thing they did." and "Those people deserve to die." are very different statements.
Zach: Is that the Stanford Prison thing?
Alma: oh my god no I can't decide which is worse. right now I feel like the Stanford thing is worse
Alma: peopel got tricked in to thinking they shocked people to death. the majority.
Alma: someone stood over them. but there were different gruops. sometimes an authority. sometimes someone the same. some people didn't obey. some people prevented the other person. sometimes there were three people in the room and the authority would leave
Zach: That's hella fucked up. I feel like that's worse, because at least the Stanford crew didn't know what they were getting into until after they'd started.
Alma: after reading about Standard experiment I felt like it was worse because he didn't seem to have much of a theory? like he just decided to thrwo things together. and then he let himself sink in to this so much. it took his fiance to halt everything, like a sanity check
Alma: but I go back and forth, like what you said.
Alma: sometimes I think Milgram would do the same, like he was trying to figure things out blindly. I think maybe they had some ego and arrogance... I don't know if there internal states matter though
Alma: like maybe intent and what someone things about is not important
Alma: like why judge an internal life
Alma: like psychopaths. I hate this cluster? maybe? I don't know what it is though. what it means. is someone callous? should I care abuot that internal thing?
Zach: I think people find a petty comfort in judgement, and the superiority over another that it implies. If you're not going to actually grow, you can pretend by trying to oppress everyone around you.
Alma: I haven't been around you enough to see but I think maybe you jump to that conclusio n about everyone
Alma: omg and you have so many stupid words i there
Zach: You trying to sell me on the idea that we don't live in a world full of people judging and imagining themselves superior to the people around them?
Alma: I don't know where to start. I know I don't 'try' 'pretend' find judgement 'comfortable' and if I did find it comfortable would I frame it as 'petty' no I would frame it as awesome or probably not have the insight to know about frames I'd probably just feel like myself so I think your words are stupid because you are imagining all these things in people that aren't there like a stupid freudian or something idk
Alma: like i'm not a behaviorist I mean I like ethology so I went away
Alma: but take the freaking point dude
Alma: wait do you literally listen to inside people's heads?
Zach(Text barrage): I don't believe that a lack of explicit intent absolves you of ownership of the consequences of your choices. I don't care if you literally desire to inflict oppression on someone, if the consistent result of your choices is oppression, that's yours to own. When you don't examine your choices, then you inherit the result as your intention. Same thing with being drunk. Just because you were completely shitfaced when you ran someone down with your car doesn't mean you don't fully own that thing. So I get it, these aren't conscious thoughts, but you're still expressing your values and yourself through those actions and you can't escape that by burying your head in the sand.
Zach: HELL NO. Why does everyone keep thinking that?!
Alma: because like it sounded like cognitive distoritions to me but then I thought hey wait maybe people atually know about how people work more than I do so then I should shut up. I learned about this last year when I was sick we would fill out worksheet
Alma: it why I was so freaked out last ight because should I call 911? should I admit to the teacher that she didn't tell me anything about what he was talking about?
Alma: sometimes I look crazy and what if they think I'm unreliable? then what happens?
Alma: digression
Alma: I don't want to know what people think but I try to feel how they feel to understand them. unless they tell me
Alma: you freak me out but I like you but I didn't want you around her with a gun but then last night
Alma: it seemed all different and you are ok to visit
Zach: That's commendable. And important work. But like, look at the society we live in. Look at how people treat each other. Hell, look at the Council. People are SHITTY to each other. They make up all of these stories about each other, and what do those stories serve? Oppression. othering. And fuck all else.
Alma: not presuming you ever want to, just letting you know that I do not mind if you are near
Zach: I guess I grew up in the country. Guns everywhere. Learned to shoot when I was six. I forget that not everyone had that sometimes. For sure, I ain't ever gonna let your kid touch that gun, though. If that helps?
Alma: people basically help each other, strangers, like I never actually saw how much until last year. suddently looking on the past I could see how it was all this network of people all working to help me so basically people reach out and want people to grow and nurture exceptwhen I ame back from New Zealand I saw that and things are SICK and spraeding in to people and some of them start to act like you said
Alma: and yes please never let my kid play with your gun and keep it locked up safe away except I think we should go in and learn about proper care of guns and how they work
Alma: I am from Chicago it is ot like the country.
Alma: because if she ever does accidentally get in your glove compartment then I want her to know how to treat a gun
Zach: Yeah I feel like gun safety should be a thing they teach in schools. It takes about four hours, and if you ever find yourself in a situation where you need it, that class just saved someone's life. Ahana can probably hook you both up. FWIW, if she did get into my glovebox, the worst she could do is club someone. She'd have to find where I separately keep the ammo.
Alma: I guess I should go back there and take a lesson and maybe bring Maria
Zach: It's useful. Even if you're not gonna own a gun, knowing that you would know what to do if you saw one is empowering, and de-mystifies them.
Alma: I was trying to do thta for msyelf but it's hard
Zach: legit. anyway, it's not even the Judgement that I mind so much - it's the enforcement. It's the 'jury and executioner' parts.
Alma: I think execution is wrong. I have to figure it out. you said you didn't beleive in good and evil but I don't know what I beleive about that. it feels like sophistry
Zach: That was shorthand. I believe in good - for me - and evil - for me. I just don't believe in objective or absolute Good and Evil, that I get to determine for other people.
Alma: I can't stop judging yet. it's just how I react to things. I feel things and they are judgements
Zach: Yeah, me too.
Alma: oh milgram. like, if I was in somthing like that I don't literally know how I would act. I can't predict it. most people if you asked them would not say they'd agree to shock someone to death
Alma: so it is a lie for me to say I wouldn't shock someone to death, isn't it? I never want to do that and I have to be vigilant
Alma: some people say the experiment is not about obediance to authority but about trust in science
Zach: Doesn't matter why, though. We all have that capacity for it. So. Yeah. Vigilance. But also: and this is why killing is wrong: just because you fuck up, doesn't mean you can't learn and grow and change. Unless you're dead. Then there's no more growth.
Alma: THAT!!!!!!!!!
Alma: you said manipulation reality is wrong but I want that like if I can slow down someone's experience of insult or let them see potential outcomes maybe they won't flip their shit and die
Alma: tbh I also would like to keep cops away not to see when people make mistakes because of what happens
Alma: if you visit the dmv can you crash their database?
Zach: Now you're making an argument to justify a violent act. I don't believe that violence is always wrong. And I'd even agree that showing someone potential consequences in ways they didn't consent to is less violent than wounding or killing them. Context matters.
Alma: what is the violation there?
Zach: Tresspass of their mind? If I follow what you're describing.
Alma: I thought like slow perception down. mind perceives feelings. the heart races. blood presure. it equals rage or fear. people rationalize it with a narrative 'he insulted me' 'i have to safe face'. no impulse control. they lash out. maybe if time slows down they the impulse is drawn and they perceive their body differently and slower
Alma: this woman insulted me and I'll beat her
Zach: Let's say yo left the lights on at your home, so some stranger picks the lock on your front door to go turn it off for you? Do you see why that might not be a thing that's super okay?
Alma: people are basically nice, so maybe it would be okay with me? it would be okay for me more if they were people in my neighborhood I guess I take your point though.
Alma: it's hard. what are you going to do when you find people who change the city?
Alma: that's personal you don't need to tell me
Zach: Like, now consider that total stranger, but they're breaking into your house because they smelled gas and are turning off your stove before you house blows up? That's more like the situation you're describing. Context matters, but it's still an act of tresspass.
Alma: that makes a lot of sense
Zach(After a fairly hefty delay): As for these clowns changing the City? That's gonna partially depend on them. I don't know yet.
Alma: I'm freaked out about it and so angry and I want to do something to make thing stick but then I think about islands and ecologies and don't know if I'm right
Alma: I want to take Maria to learn to protect herself. I like she wants to dig in to things. Ahana is ok?
Zach: Ahana's okay for a gun safety class. I wouldn't teach someone to use a gun for self defense. If you can't find a dojo with real self-defense classes, I can teach her some solid basics. Most of my own style is Aikido, which I think is the best form of self defense, but it's a very slow path, takes years to be useful.
Alma: gun safety so that she knows not to panic if someone has a gun and also so that she doesn't think i ti sa magic wand
Alma: self defence like what you said the other day or basically I want her to know how incapicate them and run away
Zach: Yep. Throw a punch or kick or two, knock them down, run like hell. That's basic self defense. Also how to escape when someone grabs you - which, sadly, is the bigger use case. Most of what I'd teach someone for that would come from Krav Maga. }}
