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Post No.: 0689inconsistent

 

Fluffystealthkitten says:

 

Due to the ‘false consensus effect’, we assume others see the world as we do, hence we assume everyone would come to the same conclusions as we would based on the same presented information. (And, due to ‘naïve realism’, if others disagree with us then it’s them, not us (too), who must be irrational or biased!)

 

As individuals who evaluate various things in our daily lives, we seldom consider how other individuals could or would come to different conclusions to ours on the exact same issues; or how we might even be inconsistent and disagree with ourselves from one day to the next depending on our current mood, whim or situation. Sometimes we’re in the mood for a particular genre of music, or for an ice cream, and sometimes not. We might predict a win for our sports team in the upcoming match if we’ve just secured a job promotion ourselves, or alternatively a loss if we’ve just been fired ourselves. We might organise a luxury shopping trip for the weekend because we feel melancholic right now and like ‘we should spend like there’s no tomorrow’, even though come the weekend we may be feeling much better. The same joke can make us laugh because we know we shouldn’t take it literally, or groan because we dissect the life out of it, depending on our present frame of mind. For a product review, would we have given a better review if we were feeling less tired or unwell on the day we gave it? We might update our review a week later to reflect our change of heart; or most likely not bother.

 

The order that a teacher marks papers matters since the first papers become the reference for later ones. Perhaps a teacher will think she/he cannot give a streak of top grades in a row so will adjust and mark the next paper more harshly? Random luck, like which interviewer you got and how they felt that day, appears less of a problem than systemic or structural biases – like how women generally face more prejudice than men – but it is just as big a problem. This extends on the issue first explicitly thrown light on in Post No.: 0681 by Furrywisepuppy.

 

It’s not so much because everybody, as humans compared to other animals, are fundamentally inconsistent in soul as to why noisy judgements between everyone can manifest. Given the exact same genes, background experiences, educations and present situational factors – everyone would theoretically make the exact same decisions. Hence why these inconsistent whims do exhibit consistent patterns to them, like when a group of people are feeling hungry or tired compared to not, when taking into account other factors that interact in inordinately complex yet ultimately determinable ways. (So people are inconsistent in consistent ways.) It’s just that feeling hungry or tired, coming from a deprived or privileged background and/or having different genes, for example, shouldn’t be a morally acceptable factor in influencing decisions such as parole decisions at all. We might have to accept inconsistent ‘acts of God’ like different weather conditions when different competitors take their time trials in a sporting competition – but it is (or should be) harder to passively accept inconsistent human decisions that affect others.

 

So a judge, teacher or other decision-maker might come to a different verdict depending on her/his idiosyncratic frame of mind at the time – perhaps because a nice cup of tea put them in a buoyant mood, which made them behave more generously and leniently; or because their team lost the night before so they’re in a grumpy mood, which made them behave more cruelly and harshly towards those affected. Situational factors like a different environment or different company can lead to a different mood, not just one’s own usual long-term disposition or being in a different general place in life. Our mood now is influenced by things like how thirsty we are right now, what happened yesterday, the history of the relationship we have with the person we’re judging right now, who they’re allied with, and so on – things that again shouldn’t matter yet will. Professionals may believe that they’re never affected by such factors yet experiments have shown that they are, like judges statistically behaving more kindly after lunch compared to just before lunch.

 

Moods can thus be manipulated, such as by priming happy or sad thoughts before a decision. We might interpret a smile as friendly or suspicious depending on this priming. Our frame of mind – and in turn interpretations of things – speak about us yet affect how we treat others. Yet we’ll assume that our own judgements of others speak solely (and objectively) about them! If we’re feeling fabulous, we’re more likely to be less sceptical and more suggestible (cognitive ease is correlated with trust) – for instance, we may be impressed by meaningless philosophical statements like ‘wholeness quiets infinite phenomena’(!) We might vote or buy differently depending on how we’re manipulated to momentarily feel. This is why negotiations are often made during business lunches or working dinners.

 

It’s not just disposition but information that can manipulate us. People will discern a red drink as fruitier than a clear drink even when the only difference is a tasteless and odourless red food colouring added to one of them. A painting can be judged as outstanding or at least interesting if we’re told it’s by a famous artist, or as nothing to write home about if we’re told it’s by someone unknown.

 

Our sense of morality is therefore somewhat malleable and inconsistent if, via a change of mood, we’re not the same individual from one context or moment to another. We are extremely noisy… or maybe just a little bit on second thoughts… or on third thoughts quite a lot(!)

 

One counterargument we might hear is that noise cancels itself out, or luck balances itself out, on average. But that’s not fair for the individuals who receive the harsher decisions! If, for the exact same offences, 5 people receive soft 1-month sentences, and another 5 people receive harsh 11-month sentences, then that would make the average 6 months, which most people in the population might believe is about right for that offence – but that won’t matter one iota to those individuals above! Would it be fair if I got overpaid and you got underpaid for doing the same job so that the luck averages out or cancels out?! Some people are starving in this world and some are eating too much – but that’s fine because it all evens out on average(!)

 

Luck does not necessarily even out for each individual in the long run either. It should even out according to the probabilities if we carry out a sufficiently large enough number of independent ‘rolls of the dice’, as it were, for each person. And I think that’s what most people think when they believe that luck balances out for everybody in the end. But that doesn’t really happen in many important cases in real life. For example, we all only get born once, not dozens of times, so we don’t each ‘sometimes get born into riches or with congenital birth defects and sometimes don’t’ – we each get only one dice roll here. And then our luck compounds in this life instead of evens out due to the Matthew effect too. We don’t get independent dice rolls but dice rolls with dice that are loaded one way or the other depending on what happened to us before in our lives. So if I was a rich girl (nana nana nana nana nana nana nana na), or were born into a wealthy family anyway – then I might go to a privately-funded school, hence get a better education and make advantageous connections there, hence get a better job, hence live in a better neighbourhood, hence live with less stress and health problems, and hence retire comfortably. So it’d be luck whether I’d be a sourpuss or the cat that got the cream. Meow.

 

We don’t have infinite lives like in a videogame so our first fatal misfortune is it. Or we don’t begin each year like each sports season restarts with all teams starting back at zero points again (not that there aren’t some carryover effects from one season to the next even here). If we all get one, and only one, ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’ each, then our luck will depend on whether that personally happens to us early in our life or just before we pop our clogs! We may win some luck and lose some luck but that doesn’t mean these wins and losses will always balance out within our lifetimes – as if, metaphorically or literally, everyone who plays the lottery will inevitably eventually win!

 

Summary statistics like averages/means, medians and modes apply to the sample or population group they pertain to – not necessarily to any individuals within those groups. In fact, any errors due to inconsistent verdicts wouldn’t cancel out but add up – multiple wrongs in different directions don’t make a right but make multiple wrongs! The average is not necessarily the true fair or correct answer anyway because it could be systematically biased, like the average sentence for black criminals could be systematically longer than the average for the overall population for similar crimes.

 

Meow. So, like Furrywisepuppy stated – inconsistent evaluations that affect other people are unjust and need to be consciously reduced. Life is unfair – so let’s do our utmost to make it fairer!

 

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