[FRIAM] Heart Rate

[Jon Zingale]

"""
You may be interested to know... that having identified a high risk
population... we were ethically bound to intervene in their young lives.
The result was that we established a Head Start preschool.
"""

It mostly raises questions for me about whom I would want to establish
a Head Start program[†]. The video I posted discusses how making a
"choice of basis" can lead, via category errors, to horrific outcomes.
I often assume that something like this is what Nick is after in his
endless ramblings about classification, "fair" gerrymandering and the
rest. My opinion continues to be that there, more often than not, fails
to exist satisfactorily *unique* or *stable* solutions. It is in these
cases that one probably shouldn't strictly "act on the science".

Relatedly, on Friday, I made some effort to argue for those not in favor
of mandatory vaccination, an argument that is very difficult for me to
raise when I perceive the majority of the room as being ready to strike.
As a result, I feel that I did a very poor job of steelmanning the
position. I may even have disappointed a few of our colleagues.

That said, I feel that bringing balance to the discussion is important
because I live in an ever more polarizing world, one where choices made
over the last century have significantly canalized power structures and
pointed the headlights of the world in the direction of mass extinction.
To argue in against mandatory vaccination among our group (to my limited
reckoning) requires a deeper discussion of what we mean by rationality,
what such a framework gives for free and what it doesn't. I would argue
that like the gerrymandering problem, we are left to make arbitrary
choices of bases and that implies that others that we hurry to classify
as crazy (or anti-rational) may in fact prefer a different outcome. I
suppose I desired acknowledgement, among my fellow rationalists, that
what we perceive as *the* rational solution can often inhibit the search
for clearer understanding of our situation.

As I once read on a bathroom wall in Texas, "The road to hell is paved
in good intentions".

Perhaps, this could be rephrased more awkwardly as, "The road to hell
is paved in an ever more canalizing gradient descent".

[†]
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/751-unmarked-graves-discovered-near-former-indigenous-school-canada-180978064/
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