(2020-03-29) Hunt Once In A Lifetime

Ben Hunt: Once in a Lifetime. We will never win this war until we regain our sense of empathy, until we regain our ability to appreciate the pain that others endure in their struggle against this common enemy.

You know what people without empathy are, right? They’re sociopaths, and I use that word in an entirely clinical sense. Because that’s what we are today, clinically speaking, a society largely governed by high-functioning sociopaths in both our economy and our politics, humans devoid of empathy for any other human outside of the narrowest bonds of convention. And they’re training us to be just like them.

It’s a Nudging Oligarchy thing. It’s a Nudging State thing. It’s a Long Now thing

we are now TOLD that we must join our leaders in sociopathy and division to be a good American

We are, all of us, old. We are, all of us, chronically ill. We are, all of us, living in a hotspot.

Age, illness, environment … they are unevenly distributed among us. But they are the future for all of us just the same. What is empathy? It is the recognition of this truth. What is our duty? To shout this truth from the rooftops. To require our leaders to bend to OUR will, and not the other way around.

Given the irrevocable life-and-death nature of our policy decisions today … given the profound UNCERTAINTY that governs the impact of a pandemic on society, as opposed to mere RISK … we should not seek to maximize our utility. Instead, we should seek to minimize our maximum regret.

A risk is an event where we can assign some sort of reasonable probability to its occurrence AND some sort of reasonable assessment of its potential impact, so that we can calculate what’s called an “expected utility

To use Donald Rumsfeld’s oft-maligned but in-truth brilliant characterization, a risk is a “known unknown”.

An uncertainty is an event where either we can’t know the probabilities at all or – as in the case of public policy in the face of a pandemic – we’re only going to play the game once.

In Rumsfeldian terms, uncertainty is an “unknown unknown”, and in his mind (he was Secretary of Defense, after all) the classic example of an uncertainty was going to war. Our war is with COVID-19. We get to fight once and only once. Whether we win or we lose is an uncertainty, not a risk, and we need a decision-making process designed specifically for THAT.

the Minimax Regret strategy wants to minimize your maximum regret in any decision process. This is not at all the same thing as minimizing your maximum loss. The concept of regret is a much more powerful and flexible concept than mere loss, because it’s entirely subjective. But that’s exactly what makes the strategy human.

Minimax Regret doesn’t calculate the odds and the expected utilities over multiple rolls of the dice. Minimax Regret says forget the odds … how would you FEEL if you rolled the dice that one time and got snake-eyes?

The motto of Minimax Regret is not Know the World … it’s Know Thyself.

The trick is to take the love you feel for your family even if they are old, even if they are infirm, even if they live distantly from you, geographically or emotionally … and extend the knowledge of that love to everyone else.

I’m not asking you to love that dad in Qom like you love your dad. I’m not asking you to be a saint. I’m asking for empathy

I’m asking you to treat every human as an autonomous being of free will, capable of love and being loved. Just as you would want them to do unto you

Keep our healthcare workers and first responders safe.

Create common knowledge of safe zones, safe towns, safe events, safe cities.

How do we create common knowledge of safety? Ubiquitous and rapid testing. Everywhere. All the time.

until we can manage those two things, we lock it down.