> Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance.
No, we do the things people think are worth solving. In this case a team of scientists regarded a bill to be inconsistent with modern findings, hence they asked the government to keep up with modern science. The government, which was elected by the people, now did exactly that and made the bill more consistent with science.
And you still don't get it, no matter which problem you think is really important and really worth solving, someone will always be able to think of an even larger problem, which could be solved more efficiently. By this logic you're never going to do anything.
> Clearly they didn't drop everything, but they are introducing a new regulation which is going to require resources to implement and enforce. Is preventing 2 seconds of lobster suffering the best use of those resource? I guess if we just have to randomly choose actions and we can't say one action is better or worse than another unless we can list the relative priority of all possible actions, then it doesn't matter.
So what exactly are you asking for? Should those scientist, not work on the stuff they care about, but something more important instead? Should the government not listen to science? Or should the government not make their bills consistent? Should the government not introduce any bill at all for an issue, when someone can think of an even larger issue and who should that be?
> We already have a system. We engage in reasoned debate where people observe what costs an action will have, and demonstrate how many people will be helped by it and they argue for why those benefits outweigh the costs. If your best defense of a given course of action is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people want weird stuff sometimes! Well, maybe that's not very convincing.
What costs does this action have and what would you have the people involved rather be doing?
Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action? Like the number of scientific findings alone, which first no one thought to be of any meaningful use and later revolutionized our lives in so many ways, is endless and none of them would have happened if you simply fund science by the most promising outcome.
> Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action?
And yet, we all must choose at some point to do one thing or another thing. Do you sit at home motionless all day, paralyzed by the inability to do choose the exactly most optimal action? Probably not. You make a choice based on some criteria. Is that criteria “will this make a lobster suffer for two seconds less”? I’m guessing probably not.
First of all I'm wondering where you got the two seconds from? The numbers I find online are usually around 30 seconds or more for a lobster to die in boiling water.
Since I never had to kill a lobster I obviously never had to make that decision. However most of my decisions every day are much less important and don't require much attention, like what movie will I watch that night, what will I eat, how do I name that variable, what album do I listen to next,...
But I had used a similar criteria in the past when I had to do a rather important choice: The way we treat male chicks, like whether it's ok to kill them and how, was among other things one criteria which influenced how I placed my vote (and if I should buy eggs at all and if so, which ones) .
No, we do the things people think are worth solving. In this case a team of scientists regarded a bill to be inconsistent with modern findings, hence they asked the government to keep up with modern science. The government, which was elected by the people, now did exactly that and made the bill more consistent with science.
And you still don't get it, no matter which problem you think is really important and really worth solving, someone will always be able to think of an even larger problem, which could be solved more efficiently. By this logic you're never going to do anything.
> Clearly they didn't drop everything, but they are introducing a new regulation which is going to require resources to implement and enforce. Is preventing 2 seconds of lobster suffering the best use of those resource? I guess if we just have to randomly choose actions and we can't say one action is better or worse than another unless we can list the relative priority of all possible actions, then it doesn't matter.
So what exactly are you asking for? Should those scientist, not work on the stuff they care about, but something more important instead? Should the government not listen to science? Or should the government not make their bills consistent? Should the government not introduce any bill at all for an issue, when someone can think of an even larger issue and who should that be?
> We already have a system. We engage in reasoned debate where people observe what costs an action will have, and demonstrate how many people will be helped by it and they argue for why those benefits outweigh the costs. If your best defense of a given course of action is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ people want weird stuff sometimes! Well, maybe that's not very convincing.
What costs does this action have and what would you have the people involved rather be doing?
Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action? Like the number of scientific findings alone, which first no one thought to be of any meaningful use and later revolutionized our lives in so many ways, is endless and none of them would have happened if you simply fund science by the most promising outcome.