Someone finally put into words what I absolutely hate about "The Cold Equations" · 2:05am Jun 1st, 2020
Thought-experiment designers often attempt to finesse the problem through an omniscient authorial voice that, at a glance, takes in and relates events in their essentials. The voice is able to say clearly and concisely what each of the thought experiment’s actors is able to do, their psychological states and intentions. The authorial voice will often stipulate that choices must be made from a short predefined menu, with no ability to alter the terms of the problem. For example, the reader might be presented with only two choices, as in the classic trolley problem: pull a lever, or don’t pull it.
All this makes reasoning about thought experiments strikingly unlike good ethical reasoning about real-life cases. In real life, the skill and creativity in ethical thinking about complex cases are in finding the right way of framing the problem. Imaginative ethical thinkers look beyond the small menu of obvious options to uncover novel approaches that better allow competing values to be reconciled. The more contextual knowledge and experience a thinker has, the more they have to draw on in coming to a wise decision.
BOO-YAH JAMES WILSON, BOO-YAH!
(Soon to be a children's television series, Terence the Ethical Trolley )
Oh man, we nerds have been arguing about The Cold Equations for ... how many decades now?
But yeah, very well put.
Not to mention the sheer engineering problems you get from building a system with absolutely no redundancy. It’s just bad craftsmanship!
The problem with The Cold Equations is that the tragic outcome only happens because the story is carefully rigged to prevent any other result. (Apparently, John W. Campbell sent the story back to the author three times, because he kept coming up with ingenious ways to save the girl's life, but Campbell wanted a forced tragedy.)
What would that series be like, I wonder...
And aye, the thing about the Cold Equations, bearing in mind it's been some time since I read (listened to?) to... I get that every gram counts, but the margins are that thin? The safety systems are that absent; there's not even a way to jettison some weight, and not a single alternate trajectory that would, even if suboptimal in some other way, be safely usable? If that's how the ships are being run, I'd say the issue isn't the cold and unforgiving nature of spaceflight but the polices of the company running the ships, and there're probably going to be some investigations and forced changes coming down the line after the events of the story.
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Ah, I didn't know that; thanks.
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I see we're in agreement. Yeah, maybe it's really efficient if everything goes exactly right... and if everything doesn't, when a more robust, slightly less efficient ship and operation could potentially recover, you lose the whole thing. Whatever incentive structure led to that expected value being acceptable, well, like I said, unless we're going dystopia (and not even some brutal but effective system; even if they care nothing for human lives, most issues wouldn't be resolvable by just throwing the stowaway out the airlock, and spaceships aren't that cheap, even before getting to the cargo) or something, I'd expect some changes once the story got out.
It sounds to me like maybe what you hate about The Cold Equations is the message of The Cold Equations: that sometimes there is no good solution, and you need to pick the least-awful of two alternatives.
I think that trying to think up ways of saving everybody in that story is not just missing the point, but deliberately shutting your eyes to it.
Tom Godwin, the nomimal author of the story, felt the same way you do. According to Wikipedia, he wanted a story with a happy ending; the story we have was John Campbell's idea.
5273219
You are mistaken. You made that mistake because you wanted to swan into this conversation and demonstrate your superiority. The patronizing tone of your post makes that clear.
In fact I have no problem with the point that awful choices must sometimes be made. What I have a problem with is that "The Cold Equations" uses a contrived and fundamentally dishonest argument to make that point. That is why I linked to the article in question.
But if you like, fine, I acknowledge you as the tougher-minded and more emotionally realistic Brony.
Kinda reminds me of the STTNG episode where Troi is taking the bridge officer's test. She gets put in a similar scenario where the only solution is to sacrifice an underling. She spends most of the episode looking for a technical solution, but in the end she is taught that being a bridge officer means tough choices sometimes. At least there they acknowledge and praise her for doing everything possible before sending someone to their death.
5273160
HEY, KIDS! Grab your controllers because it's time for another trip down the line...
"...with ME, Terence the Ethical Trolley! Whee!..."
Use your controllers to change the switches on Terence's route! Help him make ethical choices!
"...and keep me on track!..."
But watch out for--DEAD ENDS!
"Oh no! It's either run over that poor man, or run over that cliff with all these passengssszzzzfft
"G-Gosh Rick, kids' programming does seem more challenging on interdimensional cable..."
5273255 I respect you more than you know. Sometimes I think my opinion on an issue is superior to your opinion on that issue, but that doesn't mean I'm trying to display a general superiority.
I'll try to be more careful about my tone when talking with you, but I wish I didn't have to be.
I had never heard of The Cold Equestions before now, but I procrastinated giving a proper read of the article you linked because it's such a juicy quote you took from it. Finally found the time to read it.
Turns out the article was a very stressful read to me.
See, I'd always taken the purpose of these thought experiments to be diagnostic - they're not about coming to a correct answer, they're more about simplifying the individual parts of more complex problems. Understanding your own thoughts and feelings, which might otherwise be really abstract or contradictory.
This line for instance - I'd always taken it as the point of asking both "do you pull the lever" and "is it permissable for a doctor to harvest organs from one to save five?" - Far more people pull the lever than harvest the organs. It's not about the rightness of that, but contrasting the two questions together forces people to try to understand why they feel those answers are different.
That's all covered by the internal validity paragraph - that's what I was thinking about. But then the idea that there are intended correct answers? Or they're meant to be used to forward inferences? Bizarre to me.
That's what made so much of this so stressful to read, I think. It's wild to read an article so good at condemning a bad practice I didn't know other people were doing, until I was reading why it was wrong for them to do it.
Also, can I just say? Reading about Cold Equations after clicking the Wikipedia link, I find that Cory Doctorow beat me to everything good I had to say about it.
Then you get the Doctorow quotes;
This is a really, really interesting piece to read to me; It really does seem like Campbell wanted to push the worldview that sometimes "hard choices" had to be made, no matter how contrived the story had to become to justify them. What a coincidence that the 'hard choice' being made was killing a silly girl who broke the very logical rules...
There were always ways to save the girl, until Campbell made sure there weren't. Which is a very peculiar ideology to push. I wonder if-
From "John Campbell was a Fascist"
I need to find more Doctorow. I haven't read something of his since Clockwork Fagin, which was phenomenal.
5273567
Heh. :)
(And just to further the example, in that scenario: why does that track run over the cliff? Is it supposed to? Why aren't there safety systems? What's the system governing them like, and how frequent are runaway trolleys here? As a result of the above, would running the trolley over the cliff kill more people in the short run but lead to reforms significantly increasing the safety of its system over its lifespan and ultimately saving more lives than running over the one man now, which is a common enough sort of occurrence that it won't raise much of a fuss in this area? Or is the man someone important, such that that attention and desire for change would be drawn, without the larger accident? But in that case, why is the man important, and how much good or harm does that importance lead him to do; is it worth killing the larger number of people now to allow that to continue, whatever happens with the trolley system? I could probably go on.
It's almost like the real situation would be much, much more complicated than the thought experiment, to the point where the thought experiment doesn't really apply to the real situation much at all!
I mean, you could say that this is supposed to look at core principles in isolation from complications, or something, debatably useful as that might be, but in that case, why bring in the complex situation of a runaway trolley that should be embedded with all sorts of other things when you could just say something like "Dr. Evilstein the magical supervillain, who is known to be very evil but never lie, has captured you and offers you this clearly explained choice between which other captives to kill and how.", or something? Don't set up a supposedly realistic situation and strip away complexity until it's as unrealistic as you want to force it to be, just start with a situation that's unrealistic to begin with and save the confusion.)
5273883
Aye, this sort of problem is useful for that sort of inquiry. Thinking on that now, though, perhaps a large part of that is the comparison of different but equivalently unrealistic and simplified situations with each other. The lever vs. the organ harvesting, as you say; in either real case, there would almost certainly be a great many complicating factors and uncertainties, but because both situations have those taken out, the two can be usefully compared and thereby perhaps reveal something useful. It's in comparing those abstract situations to real life, with all its complexities, that problems can arise (though that could still be useful for other things, such as contemplating just how much more complex real life is).
I've just thought of that right now, so haven't checked it over extensively, but it at least strikes me as an interesting and currently-to-me-plausible hypothesis.
edit:
...Another thought on the forced nature of the decision in the story (going again off my memories, so apologies if I get something wrong), having looked at some of these comments and MrNumbers's blog post:
The entire scenario was primarily driven be deliberate human action, and I wonder if that's significant.
The crisis could have been, say, the girl was a passenger, maybe one that shouldn't be there, pushing regulations, but still shouldn't be a problem and there's more than enough safety margin -- until a micrometeor hits the ship and damages the life support system. Now their air supply is extremely limited, just barely enough to perhaps get the ship to safety on the fastest available course with traffic control clearing the decks -- with one person aboard. And it has to be the pilot, because with the available technology, the ship has to be piloted; the whole thing will be destroyed if it isn't. That's a single point of failure, so let's even go ahead and say there was a copilot killed in the accident. So, two people in a ship that, due to freak damage, can only get one to safety. And if the ship isn't piloted down, it and everything on it is lost; sacrificing the pilot for the girl probably just means they both die and the ship's destroyed too. Maybe we can add some tension, have a frantic debate over whether it would be possible to talk the girl through what she needs to do over the radio, or we could add tension a different way and say that the radio's out. Maybe we'd want to say that the girl got on this flight because she's the daughter of someone important in the company, and she really wanted to fly along -- we could bring back some of the human foolishness as a cause that way, if we made her a spoiled kid (who we nevertheless don't want to die) who begged her dad for a joyride she shouldn't have gotten (which also means the pilot's decision might be complicated by wonder how her dad will treat him after this), or we could make her an aspiring pilot, who wants to do this job some day and came along because the flight crews like her, and has been intently studying things -- and maybe she even could land it on her own, but she's still a kid and an amateur.
That has all sorts of complexity and potential for plot, and hard decisions dealing with uncertain variables and more difficult ethical questions, I think, and it doesn't have the issue of "Why on Earth or Luna is this shipping company running with such nonexistent safety margins, and apparently very poor spaceport security to boot?"
It does, though, have the inciting incident being a random, external event. Man the Conqueror of Space did more of less everything right, and it still went wrong, and a hard decision had to be made.
In the actual story, though? The cause is entirely human, and as I recall, the story ignores Man the Conqueror of Space's terrible engineering and spaceship operation practices to put all the blame on the Foolishness of the Weaker Sex. Everything would have been just fine, with Nature and Fortune unable to stop us (as evidenced by the fact that this company exists operating the way it does), if only that silly girl hadn't gotten in our way!
Again, just something I came up with on the spur of the moment (...while I should have been doing something else and in fact missed a timer, bother, well, at least I had left some margin there), but it looks like an interesting view on the situation to me.
5273884
I didn't set out to go read a lot more of Cory's words - but I am now!
5273160
Yes. The margins are that slim.
Not that there aren't horrible choices to be made in life, but philosophers, when trying to make an illustrative example, are nearly always reductionist to the point of absurdity.
My wife worked on a tourist railroad for several years, and has the real-world solution to the Trolley Problem: Wait until the first set of wheels has cleared the switch, and then throw it. That trolley will come off the tracks and grind to a halt very quickly, saving both sets of people.*
What that teaches me, is that knowledge, intelligence, and the will to do good are much more important than any rigid set of ethical rules.
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* I'm sure there are plenty of people who, reading this, will experience a strong desire to amend the original problem to make this solution impossible, and by "moving the goalposts," make the premise even more ridiculous. Just don't, okay?
5274236
Fixed it.
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5273884
I read Doctrow's article. I could stand a little less cant (can't stand any, in fact) but it's true. What it leaves out is that many SF writers thought Campbell was horrible in his own lifetime. And said so.
But delicately, since his influence in the field was so great. I'm reminded of a little song I learned straight from the lips of Randall Garrett at the 1978 WorldCon:
On yonder hill there stands a building
And upon the fourteenth floor
Stands a group of authors moaning
As they've never moaned before:
"Oh, no, John--no, John--no, John--no!"
There, in manner quite pontific
Speaks the Master from on high:
"Slaves are better off than free men
Surely, you can all tell why."
"Oh, no, John--no, John--no, John--no!"
"There are supermen among us;
We must now discover Psi."
Says the Master, and the authors
Groan in agony and cry:
"Oh, no, John--no, John--no, John--no!"
"Well, then" says the Master, smiling
"Since my gospel you deny,
Would you rather sell to others
Where the rates are not so high?"
(con brio:) "Oh, no, John--no, John--no, John--no!"
--via The HOPSFA Hymnal
5274162
Which is why literary critic Gary Westfahl put it pretty well when he said: "the story is good physics, but lousy engineering."
5274317
Circumstances can force horrible choices upon us. But when those circumstances are created by the systems we made, then those systems are are ill-made.
5274162
Well, yes, in the story.
5274301
Heh, nice. :)
5274236
Ah, neat; thanks!