Orgilmaa Munkhbaatar
SLS 20 Discussion Paper
Although we pride ourselves in being advanced rational creatures it has been demonstrated by the two articles from this week that we often show fallacy in our judgement of opportunity cost and incentive when it comes to make decisions regarding human life. Because we live in a world of scarcity we have finite resources in terms of money and attention to devote to the problems and diseases that plague our society so we have to consider both the economic and moral argument to committing resources to an issue.
In addition, the threats to our survival we face is constantly changing with the advancement of medicine and technology, yet as Professor Gilbert states, the threat-detection system we have is sensitive to the threats our ancestors faced. The review by Christopher Olivola in a sense supports this idea, however pinpoints it on the limitations in our perception, attention and categorizations. This raises the question whether it is necessary for us to change to our way of thinking and if it possible for us to change our way of thinking. …show more content…
But this causes me to wonder whether we should focus less on other issues just because the numbers don’t add up as much and how do we decide to what extent we should devote our resources to tackling which problems especially since every action we take to prevent harm is another action we didn’t take. Does focusing on eliminating a small risk of illness compared to a large one necessarily showcase that we are bad at rational decisions? After all perhaps we self-reasoned that we would have a better chance of targeting a smaller threat, especially if the threat hurts our sense of safety and belonging that would influence other decisions we
SLS 20 Discussion Paper
Although we pride ourselves in being advanced rational creatures it has been demonstrated by the two articles from this week that we often show fallacy in our judgement of opportunity cost and incentive when it comes to make decisions regarding human life. Because we live in a world of scarcity we have finite resources in terms of money and attention to devote to the problems and diseases that plague our society so we have to consider both the economic and moral argument to committing resources to an issue.
In addition, the threats to our survival we face is constantly changing with the advancement of medicine and technology, yet as Professor Gilbert states, the threat-detection system we have is sensitive to the threats our ancestors faced. The review by Christopher Olivola in a sense supports this idea, however pinpoints it on the limitations in our perception, attention and categorizations. This raises the question whether it is necessary for us to change to our way of thinking and if it possible for us to change our way of thinking. …show more content…
But this causes me to wonder whether we should focus less on other issues just because the numbers don’t add up as much and how do we decide to what extent we should devote our resources to tackling which problems especially since every action we take to prevent harm is another action we didn’t take. Does focusing on eliminating a small risk of illness compared to a large one necessarily showcase that we are bad at rational decisions? After all perhaps we self-reasoned that we would have a better chance of targeting a smaller threat, especially if the threat hurts our sense of safety and belonging that would influence other decisions we