- Joined
- Sep 21, 2019
I agree with your take in general, except the part about it being binary. If you have perfect knowledge, choice ceases to exist. If there is still a random element (you can score all the moves but there's still a theoretical perfect game against you), then choices are deliberate, but ranked. And there are always complicating factors that make easy decisions into (not really) hard decisions (I don't want my baby to have phimosis but 4chan said that foreskin removal makes you jewish and I trust anonymous strangers on the internet implicitly so etc).If you play chess, which is very close to be a computer solved game, then the computer can tell you the precise value of each move. As a result, one move may be worth 0.1 pawns and another 0.15 pawns. The latter is always the better move out of the two.
In that sense everything is binary.
Getting fat is another example that will reduce your lifespan and health. When you zoom in enough, these decisions do become binary.
Let's introduce some things with chances. The chance of natal circumcision giving a baby complications, is nearly nonexistant. Circumcision helps prevent phimosis. But the chance of phimosis is also nearly nonexistant (phimosis is slightly less likely).
Even though there's chances involved, much like a casino's roulette table, you always want to be on the side where the chances are, on average, in your favor. You would rather be the casino than a player at the casino.
Everything does become binary when you look at the chances and outcomes closely enough. We are already at the apex or even past it.
You can't grow a garden if it's infested with snails and rabbits. And the enemies of the type of change that you or I would want are few, but so unspeakably powerful and entrenched that most people look away in fear and denial when encountering it. Amidst such cowardice, we don't deserve change and we certainly aren't earning or achieving it.
Saving the west? What west? It is already dead and gone. Best make plans that take this into account. Nobody is coming to save you and most aren't willing to save even themselves. It's a time where people building arks are seen as madman and they'll be the only to have a chance at escaping the fallout.
I guess what I'm saying is, there are cases where a decision is objectively correct, and there are situations where you'd really like to move where arks are cheaper, but your wife doesn't want to go, so you instead decide the only way out is to build an expensive and massively reinforced ark where you are and set up a contingency plan just in case