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lavendersparkleLately I've been thinking about choice and its relation to information. The question I've been pondering is, does more information about the available options give you more or less of a choice?
So, imagine you're choosing which school to send you children to. There are two schools you could send your child to and usually (at least if you're like my parents) you'd gather information on exam results, sports facilities, transportation options, curriculum etc. and make a choice. Now imagine you're given more information. Imagine you were told, from a source that was completely reliable, that if you send you child to one school, he will be killed in an accident in three years time, whereas if you send him to the other school he'll graduate and go on to university prepared for a reasonably happy life. Would that really be a choice? What if you were told nothing about the schools apart from their names and asked to choose? What if you were told to ask between A or B without being told which letter stands for which school?
I suppose in all of those situations you have a choice. The way they differ is the degree to which you have an opportunity to use your judgement in making the choice and therefore the difference between what would happen if you chose for yourself or someone else picked what they thought the best option was for you. I'm not sure whether this is because we think that people with better judgement are more deserving of shinies or whether we think that we're best at deciding what's good for us so we care more about situations in which the ranking of different considerations would affect the answer so we want to make the choice ourselves so that our ranking is the one used.
This issue was brought to my mind by a discussion about G@d. There's an old chestnut that the reason that G@d doesn't bounce about announcing his existence through sky writing is because that would give us less of a choice because it would be impossible not to believe in him. This argument doesn't make much sense to me. See how well it works in other contexts. Would it make sense for me to hide in the wardrobe so that my husband had a choice about whether to think that I was at home or not? Would it make sense for a doctor to drop hints but not explicitly tell his patient that she had cancer so that she would have more choice about medical treatment?
An argument I like more is that, whilst there might not me sky writing the sky is writing enough. By this argument there is enough evidence of G@d in the world that a reasonable person would who was judging it fairly would believe in G@d. Within this framework I suppose you could argue that not being as obvious as G@d could be allows choice because people who really don't want to believe in G@d have just enough wriggle room to be able to persuade themselves. Another option is that G@d wants some people to be atheists, in which case it makes sense to hide a bit. This seems a bit odd, but given that it's part of G@d's plan to allow genocides it seems to be the least of a theologian's problems.
Moving away from theology, I've noticed another aspect of choice and it's relation to information is the what choice one wants other people to make. In situations in which there is general agreement that one should have 'informed choice' there are differences of opinion about what information a person should have to be informed and that tends to correlate with what information would be most likely to swing someone in the direction of the decision they think they should make. People who are into 'natural birth' think that it's important for pregnant women to have lots of information about the negative effects of standard interventions but generally try to shield them from information about 'natural births' going wrong or positive intervention heavy births. A while ago a quite gruesome account of what an epidural looks like was posted on LJ. A woman who was very into 'natural birth' said that she thought it was reasonable to post so that women would have a more informed choice. Knowing that this woman is also very pro-abortion-choice I wondered whether she'd apply the same logic to grisly accounts of abortions. I somehow doubted it. I guess part of the problem is that there's no such thing as an objective opinion. Obviously your decision and what you think is relevant information are correlated because how else would you have come to that decision and once you've come to a decision is human nature to emphasise the information which backs your decision up and discount information that contradicts it. I think it's called cognitive dissonance.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this. It's really just pondering allowed.
So, imagine you're choosing which school to send you children to. There are two schools you could send your child to and usually (at least if you're like my parents) you'd gather information on exam results, sports facilities, transportation options, curriculum etc. and make a choice. Now imagine you're given more information. Imagine you were told, from a source that was completely reliable, that if you send you child to one school, he will be killed in an accident in three years time, whereas if you send him to the other school he'll graduate and go on to university prepared for a reasonably happy life. Would that really be a choice? What if you were told nothing about the schools apart from their names and asked to choose? What if you were told to ask between A or B without being told which letter stands for which school?
I suppose in all of those situations you have a choice. The way they differ is the degree to which you have an opportunity to use your judgement in making the choice and therefore the difference between what would happen if you chose for yourself or someone else picked what they thought the best option was for you. I'm not sure whether this is because we think that people with better judgement are more deserving of shinies or whether we think that we're best at deciding what's good for us so we care more about situations in which the ranking of different considerations would affect the answer so we want to make the choice ourselves so that our ranking is the one used.
This issue was brought to my mind by a discussion about G@d. There's an old chestnut that the reason that G@d doesn't bounce about announcing his existence through sky writing is because that would give us less of a choice because it would be impossible not to believe in him. This argument doesn't make much sense to me. See how well it works in other contexts. Would it make sense for me to hide in the wardrobe so that my husband had a choice about whether to think that I was at home or not? Would it make sense for a doctor to drop hints but not explicitly tell his patient that she had cancer so that she would have more choice about medical treatment?
An argument I like more is that, whilst there might not me sky writing the sky is writing enough. By this argument there is enough evidence of G@d in the world that a reasonable person would who was judging it fairly would believe in G@d. Within this framework I suppose you could argue that not being as obvious as G@d could be allows choice because people who really don't want to believe in G@d have just enough wriggle room to be able to persuade themselves. Another option is that G@d wants some people to be atheists, in which case it makes sense to hide a bit. This seems a bit odd, but given that it's part of G@d's plan to allow genocides it seems to be the least of a theologian's problems.
Moving away from theology, I've noticed another aspect of choice and it's relation to information is the what choice one wants other people to make. In situations in which there is general agreement that one should have 'informed choice' there are differences of opinion about what information a person should have to be informed and that tends to correlate with what information would be most likely to swing someone in the direction of the decision they think they should make. People who are into 'natural birth' think that it's important for pregnant women to have lots of information about the negative effects of standard interventions but generally try to shield them from information about 'natural births' going wrong or positive intervention heavy births. A while ago a quite gruesome account of what an epidural looks like was posted on LJ. A woman who was very into 'natural birth' said that she thought it was reasonable to post so that women would have a more informed choice. Knowing that this woman is also very pro-abortion-choice I wondered whether she'd apply the same logic to grisly accounts of abortions. I somehow doubted it. I guess part of the problem is that there's no such thing as an objective opinion. Obviously your decision and what you think is relevant information are correlated because how else would you have come to that decision and once you've come to a decision is human nature to emphasise the information which backs your decision up and discount information that contradicts it. I think it's called cognitive dissonance.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this. It's really just pondering allowed.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-06 12:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-12 03:40 pm (UTC)Personally I want to make my own decisions because I believe that I am the ONLY one who has all the relevant information about *my internal state* especially about how I, personally, rank the various possible outcomes. Other people can tell me the % chance of the possible outcomes, or they can try to scare me by describing in vivid detail the possible outcomes (I hate when people do that, but maybe if you were ignorant of the true extent of the possible badness then it can be helpful). But other people can't know what I, personally, value.
When it comes to choosing on behalf of another person (your child, your elderly relative) then the question is much harder. Because presumably you are doing the choosing on account of that other person not being able to understand the incoming information, but you still have the problem with not being able to understand that person's own desires.