I received my bachelor's in Philosophy! This was a great video. Being obsessed with the mind and ideas of Plato, I really began to like the line of thinking Chang proposed about comparing large life choices to small life choices to see what similarities we can find -- I bring Plato up as this suggestion by her is basically the inverse of what he suggests we do to find the true nature of man in his greatest work, The Republic.
In that book, Plato implies that the way in which mankind conducts itself within a society is a reflection of the way a singular man conducts himself in terms of the component parts of his mind/soul. Essentially, he imagines (in a quite figurative way, of course, but also a very powerful one) that society is what man's mind/soul looks like under a microscope... But I'm going to cut short the Plato talk for now because I can go on forever about him. =P
So, while Plato suggests that we examine society-at-large in order to more precisely see how man's mind/soul works (and as an INTP, if you haven't read The Republic, please do... okay okay) what Ruth Chang in this video suggests is that 'big' choices might be too big, so perhaps we should look at analogous small choices.
At 1:45, she continues along this line of thought and describes two choices of breakfast cereals -- a bran cereal with its clear health benefits, and a chocolate donut with its clear taste benefits. As soon as she stated this, I thought I knew where she was headed, paused the video, nodded slowly with a look of approval and agreement on my face, and parsed out the rest of what she would say before unpausing the video because, yeah, I like to occasionally prove to myself that I'm smart as shit and can watch only the first 1/5 of a video lecture (or book, or movie...) and accurately predict the ending, or whatever. However, she unfortunately veers quite tragically from this ingenious course of Platonic reasoning and never quite returns to it after 2:30; and in fact contradicts this line of reasoning in the conclusion for what is at worst a more feel-good cop-out, and at best a noble lie that would provide a sort of mental antidote to overwhelming (, unnecessary, counterproductive, paradoxically correct and simultaneously contradictory...) feelings of 'slavery' to the obvious best course of action available to you.
So here I am in /r/INTP, presenting my counter-argument of Ruth Chang's TED lecture on Hard Choices. The first thing I want to say is that Ruth Chang is super insightful, and I really liked this video and where she is going with the brunt of her thought process. The idea and explanation that two options that make for a tough decision are not 'equal' options (6:00-6:45) I both agree with and respect for its simple yet masterful explanation that the difficulty between the two options is one of quality rather than of quantity. However, I disagree with her statement that, "It's a mistake to say that one decision really is better than the other; but that we are too stupid to know which."(4:10-4:20).
There is clearly a better and a worse option, and this has to do with your nature as an entimed human mind/soul a la Plato. Let's take entimed to mean anything that is not outside the influence of the beloved fourth dimension of time -- something, in other words, that is susceptible to change over time. Let's go back to the small hard choice, and see that line of reasoning through, as Ruth herself suggested we do near the start of the video. So what is intuitively the 'correct' small hard choice -- the tasty chocolate donut, or the healthy bran cereal? (1:52-2:04). Keep in mind as you are pondering this that Ruth herself ends her presentation with the ultimate conclusion that, "People that don't exercise their normative powers in hard choices are drifters. . . they let mechanisms of reward and punishment, pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option, to determine what they do" (3:11-13:43). Now let's compare the priority of health to the priority of taste -- is there a clear priority that so-called drifters would have? Is taste not a mechanism of reward and punishment, and of easiness?
Elsewhere, she says, "Each of us has the power to create reasons. . . a world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons!" (9:55-10:40) But are we not enslaved to reasons one way or another -- albeit reasons of our choosing? Now let's return to this entimed bit from before. So, let's say we choose the tasty donut this morning. We err in two ways when we do this: in the first sense, we err by not choosing our own health. In the second sense, we err by not choosing the correct reasons. The investment (or squandering) of our own predilections is as much a choice as is the investment (or squandering) of our health! Not only are you a 'drifter' in the sense of health; far worse, you are becoming a drifter in the sense of not guiding your actions away from the predilections of drifting.
As far as marrying the sexy trophy wife or the homely soulmate, pursuing the financially practical career or the intrinsically satisfying one, etc... are concerned, there are always clear victors. In every case, the correct choice is that which will engage the higher part of human nature: that which makes us more indulgent upon long-term investments and returns than upon instant gratification. The trouble with this is that we must look upon our lives from outside of time in order to truly make decision in this way.
So cut yourself up into ~50,000 days -- these are all the generations of your very own society, gradually changing and largely dependent upon the last. This makes those small hard choices very easy: eat the bran cereal, you loser! Every you that's not you this morning will regret it, or else you're a moron that is inexcusably near-sighted. Are you at all angry or frustrated at the previous generations in your society for not being more conscious of economic trends, of environmental issues, of overpopulation, etc..? Or of the previous generations of your family not providing adequately for your education? Well it is very morally ambiguous whether you should blame any single person for your position today; but let's think of a much clearer case and ask 'how angry do you think 50+ year old you will be at you for not making all the right choices'?
Now this makes hard choices much more difficult if you're not careful. Sure, if you take that art 'career' in your early-20's, maybe your broke mid-30's self will deeply regret it... but then again, if you become an investment banker, how empty might you feel when you reflect on what could have been but never was of your artistic spirit?
What causes people the most harm about not understanding the human mind/soul as this entimed, multi-tiered system, is not internalizing one's decision while reviewing it. It's like that eugenicist quote that's on /r/getmotivated every week that everyone's always like "Uhh, that quote pretty much has to do with exterminating lesser humans" and then OP replies with something like "Yes, but it also rings true of humanity out of context in some profound way"... (EVERY TIME... LOOK IT UP, SRS)
The quote in context has to do, basically, with how we ought to embrace Darwinism at an organized level to truly 'Make humanity great again' (something grandpa Plato definitely more-than-entertained himself... sure, call him a fascist, but your whole civilization is built upon his ideas, so maybe you don't realize how important a role the culling of the weak has played in getting you here. Also, don't vote Trump, rito plz). On the level of society that is an abysmal idea for the same reason that conviction without trial is; and yet on the individual level that is exactly how you got where you are today, in a way horrifyingly analogous to eugenicists in society: you mercilessly killed (and/or starved off via a lack of provided resources, and/or prevented from reproducing due to a superiority on your part of libido and drive...) every part of you that you despised or thought inferior, and along the path at every step of the way, the 'you' that remained is you today. And guess what: whatever you didn't mercilessly kill is mercilessly killing you right now, so much so that it is slowly taking over majority shareholder of you, or to stick with the analogy, is becoming the majority populous of your city-state.
I'm tired and I lost the $1.5 thousand million dollar powerball jackpot and I want to go to sleep.
