Amerika

The White House likes posting the magic phrase “decline is a choice,” which mirrors our reasoning around here which suggests that if you make a bad decision, you stop doing that, do something else, and clean up the mess through equal parts aggression and nurturing.

But for most people, you just go with the inertia, even if it leads you to total doom. We call this plan continuation bias and it refers to the feedback loop between sunk cost and future decisions:

Plan Continuation Bias: the tendency of people to continue with an original course of action that is no longer viable. An example would be an airline pilot who unexpectedly encounters bad weather at the scheduled destination but decides to land anyway rather than divert to another location. Plan-continuation bias appears to be particularly strong toward the end of the activity and has been theorized to result from the interaction of such factors as cognitive load, task demands, and social influences.

The basic point of this is that bad decisions resemble jobs. You set out oriented toward a method, and so you discard everything else to achieve it, even if Moby-Dick-style it leads to ruin in terms of consequences. Humans love repetition.

As a pathology, this line of thinking is similar to sunk cost fallacies, which surmise that because you have already invested lots of time in something, you might as well git ‘er done:

The sunk cost fallacy is the mindset of continuing with a decision just because of past investments, even when logic would say otherwise. It is a flawed process of thinking. This happens because of the human aversion to waste and the need to justify our decisions.

When you have already bled for something, you tend to want to see it to the end, but more likely are no longer analyzing it as a whole, only as a method. Something thwarted your will, so you double down on what you were doing.

These moves create an implicit begging-the-question fallacy, in that the question contains its own answer, a thesis in search of data instead of data in search of a thesis:

Begging the Question: A form of circular reasoning in which a conclusion is derived from premises that presuppose the conclusion.

Insofar as the conclusion of a deductively valid argument is “contained” in the premises from which it is deduced, this containing might seem to be a case of presupposing, and thus any deductively valid argument might seem to be begging the question.

When you are no longer asking “what is the optimal approach to reach this goal?” but “how do I make this method finally succeed?” you have changed the question from goal to method, and methodological questions can only be answered by method, which will be the one you have chosen because you already decided it was vital.

Now consider the pathology of “good guy badges.” The person wants to appear socially likeable, so he neuters himself and adapts the form of people around him in order to avoid contradicting their choices and revealing through their reaction their emotional dysregulation (this is what every good troll aims to do) and settles into a method of “good” as defined by the group:

We propose that because self-reported moral character partly reflects a desire to appear good, people who self-report a strong moral character will show moral harshness towards others and downplay their own transgressions — that is, they will show greater moral hypocrisy. This self-other discrepancy in moral judgements should be pronounced among individuals who are particularly motivated by reputation. Employing diverse methods including large-scale multination panel data (N = 34,323), and vignette and behavioural experiments (N = 700), four studies supported our proposition, showing that various indicators of moral character (Benevolence and Universalism values, justice sensitivity, and moral identity) predicted harsher judgements of others’ more than own transgressions. Moreover, these double standards emerged particularly among individuals possessing strong reputation management motives.

Once you fall into the belief of “good” and “evil,” you make yourself controllable by continually trying to be “good” instead of asking how a method can be a goal. Sometimes, achieving “good” results requires “evil” acts.

This is the difference between the transcendentalist and the individualist. The individualist sees a static world where the effect of something on him right now is its eternal essence, and therefore methods can be tracked to goals.

A transcendentalist on the other hand sees goals as important, uses whatever methods are necessary, and judges the results in terms of their quality of aesthetics, efficiency, power, and endurance. He aims for excellence on the terms of the whole not just himself.

Any other approach, when you think about it, is simply projecting ourselves onto the world through our fears and consequently, our desire to control the beneficial acts of others as well as the deleterious acts.

A society that chooses to avoid decline takes the transcendental view; it looks at the whole. Societies in decline on the other hand spend all of their time and effort fighting over definitions of “good,” never paying attention to the consequences of their actions.

Tags: moral character, plan continuation bias, sunk cost fallacy