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Any reason why you think that should necessarily be so? By implying an ulterior motive, you avoid the need to actually consider the "hard choice" For example,

Any reason why you think that should necessarily be so? By implying an ulterior motive, you avoid the need to actually consider the "hard choice" For example, I was born a long time after world war 2, so couldn't possibly affect any of the decisions. But one can still try to consider (as historians routinely do) what was the right thing to do. Should Churchill have warned Coventry about the upcoming German air raids (learned of through cracked German codes), which would likely have saved lives in Coventry, but might have cost more lives and maybe lost the war by alerting the Germans that their codes had been broken? On a much smaller scale, doctor's frequently have to make these kind of decisions - what if you have 6 patients who will die without a ventilator, but only 3 ventilators available with no way to get more? I don't know anyone making these kind of decisions who is "enamoured" with having to make those decisions - but we recognize that they do have to get made by someone, and would quite happily offload the decision to others as long as we felt there was an ethical, moral, logical basis to the decisions they would make.

edmundsauto 8y ago
Humans tend to naturally do this. The danger is hindsight bias; we can't put ourselves in the same position as those making the decision. (Not just in an informational sense -- people's worldviews were different because society was structured differently). Hindsight bias is incredibly powerful, it's impossible for us to blend "obvious" signal back into the noise. Think about the discussions around whether the US should have "known" about the Pearl Harbor raid -- in hindsight, there were signals that should have alerted leadership. In reality, there was so much information that the actual signal blended into the noise. It's only much later that we know the Japanese telegrams were meaningful.

edmundsauto 8y ago

Humans tend to naturally do this. The danger is hindsight bias; we can't put ourselves in the same position as those making the decision. (Not just in an informational sense -- people's worldviews were different because society was structured differently). Hindsight bias is incredibly powerful, it's impossible for us to blend "obvious" signal back into the noise. Think about the discussions around whether the US should have "known" about the Pearl Harbor raid -- in hindsight, there were signals that should have alerted leadership. In reality, there was so much information that the actual signal blended into the noise. It's only much later that we know the Japanese telegrams were meaningful.