I am currently writing about rules for patterns of use of goods and services produced for resource protection. These rules determine priorities for equipment, response and other important components of resource protection in cases where there are too many incidents competing for the goods and services. A practical example is the percent of unfilled requests for aircraft to fight wildfire through the federal ROSS system (details here).
In thinking about this I was reminded of the rules about how we decide to send an ambulance to an emergency. If one person decides that a situation warrants an ambulance, EMT, police officer, or fire fighter they call 911 and most likely, based on the information provided to dispatch, there will be a response.
Why is this interesting? Because in most major metropolitan areas, these services are paid for by mandatory taxation, and those that pay for the service have no say in how these resources are dispatched. If someone wants a service, they call for it, and we pay for it (or at the very least subsidize it). They can make that call unilaterally. No other person in an equivalent position can call off the ambulance. Why is this OK? Of course we all want to be able to get assistance when we want it without someone else keeping it from happening. This is an important part of the discussion. This does not keep people from abusing the system. There are many ways that we attempt to make people pay for these services rather than making everyone bear the burden, but if you call an ambulance and are not taken to a hospital you are not billed for the call. These costs are still borne by everyone.
This is where the "Boy who Cried Wolf" comes in. This story propagates a norm that reinforces appropriate behavior when calling for assistance. In the story, a boy cries "Wolf" when there is not one, either for attention or to mess with the townsfolk. There is no emergency, but people run to assist when the hear the call. There is no wolf, and the townsfolk are upset with the boy for wasting their time and energy. This happens at least one or two more times, with a call for help resulting in a collective effort to help the boy. The boy gets pleasure from the response and the townsfolk get annoyed. Then one day the boy stumbles upon a wolf and is truly in danger. He cries "Wolf!!" but is cries go unheeded. The townsfolk believe him to be faking. He ends up dead, and the moral of the story is to only call for help when it is needed.
This is a very prominent tale in the US, with the statement "don't cry wolf" a regular part of our language. It has a specific meaning to us about the consequences of calling for help when it is not needed. It is a dire take, with a child losing a life. The story reflects a norm in our society about how we should behave.
It is very possible that this norm reinforces behavior when calling for emergency services. We know not to call 911 unless it is truly needed. Services will be spent that could otherwise be used productively. We don't need to actually revoke access to services to communicate the costs of misuse of the system. The story does it for itself.
My intention is to include this scenario and discussion in my next class about norms and behavior. I think it provides a rich opportunity to discuss the role of norms in behavior and cooperation that most people in the US are familiar with.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Sunday, January 13, 2013
When someone great is gone
I decided to write here about something unrelated to my academic work. Normally I wouldn't write about more personal things in this space, but without another venue (and since this space is essentially defined only by my own needs in writing) I decided to place this here.
Aaron Swartz was someone I only tangentally aware of, through learning about RSS feeds and reading about some of the early players in Reddit. He was a pioneer in the development of social technologies and a staunch advocate for free and open information. He committed suicide this weekend, and his loss is a terrible one. What I have learned of him and his work in the ensuing days has led me to find his loss even the more tragic. His work in ethics, cognition and sociology are tied very closely to my own, and to discover this as a consequence of his death is in a number of ways troubling for me. I would imagine he would share this perspective, considering the extent to which he applied some of the core quandaries of ethics and social dilemmas in his examination of The Dark Knight. I wanted to write about working through becoming more familiar with is work through this tragedy.
At the core I found myself disturbed that it took this incident for me to learn more about Aaron. Suicide is always a manifestation of an unhealthy mind, either to fill a void, send a message, reach for attention or end unbearable suffering. For his action to prompt mine and others' attention is morbidly successful in some ways, making the attention itself a questionable action. We don't want anyone to be encouraged to take their own life through our actions.
Of course given the directionality of time and consequence, the act of examining the life of a person who has committed suicide does not justify the action that drew the attention. The victim is not alive and able to gain the benefit from the attention resulting from the behavior. That said, the actions of those in this or similar condition who plan and attempt to take their lives are far from what could be considered rational. The projection of the potential attention into the future might lend a perception of benefit to the mind at the time of planning. Being present for the "payoff" matters little at the decision point. It is completely absurd to presume that an act that will end your existence would somehow lead to an improvement in one's own well-being.
Working my way through this as I am, I am reminded of the asymmetry of losses and gains, of pleasure and harm. Economics and decision making theories tend to view losses and gains as relative changes in states. If from the status quo the situation improves by 5 and then decreases by 5, the result is no change. We know that experiencing a gain and a loss is much different than nothing happening (better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all), but the models rarely consider this. Prospect theory suggests that people perceive losses as greater than gains, but this is still a matter of absolute shifts in overall well-being on a single scale.
In experimentation and observation it is clear that people behave differently when avoiding harm than when gaining benefit. It is not only a lack of symmetry in gains and losses, it is a completely different set of preferences when one is attempting to stop pain than when they want to gain pleasure. If you stick your hand on a hot stove you don't want your favorite food to compensate for the pain, you want to remove the cause of pain and lessen it. We project tradeoffs on to ourselves, such as giving children a lollipop when the have to get a shot at the doctor. In reality there is no actual tradeoff. Instead pain and pleasure are simultaneously experienced. In the case of mental illness, it is wholly incorrect to think that the pain a person has experienced will somehow be lessened by an attempt to gain benefit through attention.
Coming to this conclusion gives me a greater sense of loss at learning of Aaron' passing. His pain becomes apparent and clear, and his action and my attention to his life are linked only in terms of the coincidence of the act leading to my gaze being drawn. No one would mimic his behavior to increase their visibility or to draw attention to themselves, and even if they would it is only another manifestation of mental illness. His actions and his work live on, and his untimely end serves as yet another too frequent reminder of the failings of our mental health system in this nation.
Aaron Swartz was someone I only tangentally aware of, through learning about RSS feeds and reading about some of the early players in Reddit. He was a pioneer in the development of social technologies and a staunch advocate for free and open information. He committed suicide this weekend, and his loss is a terrible one. What I have learned of him and his work in the ensuing days has led me to find his loss even the more tragic. His work in ethics, cognition and sociology are tied very closely to my own, and to discover this as a consequence of his death is in a number of ways troubling for me. I would imagine he would share this perspective, considering the extent to which he applied some of the core quandaries of ethics and social dilemmas in his examination of The Dark Knight. I wanted to write about working through becoming more familiar with is work through this tragedy.
At the core I found myself disturbed that it took this incident for me to learn more about Aaron. Suicide is always a manifestation of an unhealthy mind, either to fill a void, send a message, reach for attention or end unbearable suffering. For his action to prompt mine and others' attention is morbidly successful in some ways, making the attention itself a questionable action. We don't want anyone to be encouraged to take their own life through our actions.
Of course given the directionality of time and consequence, the act of examining the life of a person who has committed suicide does not justify the action that drew the attention. The victim is not alive and able to gain the benefit from the attention resulting from the behavior. That said, the actions of those in this or similar condition who plan and attempt to take their lives are far from what could be considered rational. The projection of the potential attention into the future might lend a perception of benefit to the mind at the time of planning. Being present for the "payoff" matters little at the decision point. It is completely absurd to presume that an act that will end your existence would somehow lead to an improvement in one's own well-being.
Working my way through this as I am, I am reminded of the asymmetry of losses and gains, of pleasure and harm. Economics and decision making theories tend to view losses and gains as relative changes in states. If from the status quo the situation improves by 5 and then decreases by 5, the result is no change. We know that experiencing a gain and a loss is much different than nothing happening (better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all), but the models rarely consider this. Prospect theory suggests that people perceive losses as greater than gains, but this is still a matter of absolute shifts in overall well-being on a single scale.
In experimentation and observation it is clear that people behave differently when avoiding harm than when gaining benefit. It is not only a lack of symmetry in gains and losses, it is a completely different set of preferences when one is attempting to stop pain than when they want to gain pleasure. If you stick your hand on a hot stove you don't want your favorite food to compensate for the pain, you want to remove the cause of pain and lessen it. We project tradeoffs on to ourselves, such as giving children a lollipop when the have to get a shot at the doctor. In reality there is no actual tradeoff. Instead pain and pleasure are simultaneously experienced. In the case of mental illness, it is wholly incorrect to think that the pain a person has experienced will somehow be lessened by an attempt to gain benefit through attention.
Coming to this conclusion gives me a greater sense of loss at learning of Aaron' passing. His pain becomes apparent and clear, and his action and my attention to his life are linked only in terms of the coincidence of the act leading to my gaze being drawn. No one would mimic his behavior to increase their visibility or to draw attention to themselves, and even if they would it is only another manifestation of mental illness. His actions and his work live on, and his untimely end serves as yet another too frequent reminder of the failings of our mental health system in this nation.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
There are 8!
Ok, so a week later and I haven't posted about writing. Lousy way to stay accountable. This week has been off, and to be honest, I have been productive, but not with regards to word output. I haven't gotten any start on my actual goals either. So here's a reminder that I should be working on comprehensive exam preparation more directly, and prewriting like a fiend.
That being said, I was looking around a web site on public laws and stumbled upon a set of agreements between states for fire protection. I know that the federal government has been horrible about funding anything but suppression, and underfunding that when it does. (Learned that $2.2 billion was transferred from prevention and mitigation programs to suppression between 2002 and 2009). Well, states are apparently trying to engage in some collective action to distribute risk. Not sure what these are yet, but it is quite interesting. There is definitely variation in these agreements, and they go back to the 1950s at the earliest. Notably three have been formed since the 1980s and one was formed as recently as 2007.
The fact is that these have not been written about at all it seems. They are not collaboratives, they are states engaging in collective action outside of the "hierarchy" of traditional cooperative federalism. I think there might be something here.
Today: 381
That being said, I was looking around a web site on public laws and stumbled upon a set of agreements between states for fire protection. I know that the federal government has been horrible about funding anything but suppression, and underfunding that when it does. (Learned that $2.2 billion was transferred from prevention and mitigation programs to suppression between 2002 and 2009). Well, states are apparently trying to engage in some collective action to distribute risk. Not sure what these are yet, but it is quite interesting. There is definitely variation in these agreements, and they go back to the 1950s at the earliest. Notably three have been formed since the 1980s and one was formed as recently as 2007.
The fact is that these have not been written about at all it seems. They are not collaboratives, they are states engaging in collective action outside of the "hierarchy" of traditional cooperative federalism. I think there might be something here.
Today: 381
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