Comment by xpe

> You're talking about this in such a sanitized, anodyne manner.

From this I would guess you are very close emotionally to the situation. Please recognize that not everyone has the same proximity nor the same kind of emotional response. Some cry, some hate, some oversimplify, some want heroes and villains. Some analyze it to death, trying to find a way through. We struggle with it in different ways.

I strive to look at the overall situation. This includes suffering all around. It also includes culpability, which isn't the same as harm. Then I try to make sense of it. From different lenses: ethical, legal, geopolitical, and humanitarian. They all matter and all have different blindspots.

What I'm seeing you do here is very common. You want me to recognize the pain. I try, but I can't: the scope is impossible and overwhelming. You want me to recognize your pain. Again, I can try. But I will never be able to satisfy you. I cannot; this is too awful.

Nor do I really want to feel all of the pain. It would be completely immobilizing. I do not want to be paralyzed by the emotions. I strive to use reason in service of ethics, for reason informed by emotions. I oppose rationalization and oversimplification, which tend to be driven by emotions.

I'm not crafting a political message here. I'm seeking the truth, best I can. Relatively few people do this. Most people have an agenda in play. My agenda is this: we need clearer thinking and less exaggeration. We need to be guided by reason in _service_ of our values. Emotion alone, particularly short-term outrage, would steer us wrong.

You may seize upon any perceived difference of opinion to criticize me. Because I'm here in front of you, because it is something you can do, something that will make you feel better. I get it.

And I'm listening, I'm considering your points. I just can't respond to _all_ of them all at once.

Back to your claim:

> You're talking about this in such a sanitized, anodyne manner.

I can do both: I can talk about percentages, and I can care about people as individuals.

It a common flaw in people to think that asking mathematical questions is somehow fundamentally callous or perhaps even immoral.

In my conception of ethics, the deliberate _avoidance_ of rigorous thinking is a huge mistake. Mathematical thinking is part of the toolset for rigorous thinking. We need to avoid reasoning errors lest me make poor moral decisions. To ignore mathematical aspects (such as probabilities and statistics) would only leave language, which is notoriously imprecise, loaded. We don't need to avoid mathematical analysis; we need _better_ analysis.

As an example, how does the organ transplant system work? By having everyone call in favors? Perhaps there is some of that, but that is not the intended standard. Is the hope to somehow sort out a constrained situation only using _words_? No, there is a big component of mathematics involved, such as factoring in tissue compatibility and the expected lifespan for each candidate.

Please, let go of any claims that mathematical thinking is inherently callous. Would it feel any better for someone who didn't get a transplant to hear "Don't worry, the committee didn't use any callous math. We painstakingly went over all the candidates. We just felt your case wasn't as important, relatively speaking." What's the difference? And "not using math" would totally miss the point. The best we can hope for is something approaching justice by way of some kind of trusted system. I'd rather have a system with some mathematical components than none at all. It is hard to imagine any system at scale not doing some kind of ranking or scale at all. Otherwise it would have to be some exhaustive pairwise comparison over all options... But I digress.

Of course the application of mathematics to most real world situations has some degree of imprecision and uncertainty. But typical language is much worse! And, it depends on how you frame up the math. Choose the better ways rather than rejecting the entire approach. At least mathematics can be written down and criticized clearly. In this way, it is just a more precise form of language. So don't blame the math nor people that want to consider it as one lens. I'm not saying mathematical calculations are the _only_ lens. I'm saying that avoiding all mathematical thinking is clearly worse.

When I hear people say (not your words but I think it conveys your feeling) 'stop being mathematical; use your heart' ... to me that comes across as often (a) a false dichotomy; (b) making too many assumptions about that other person; (c) a rhetorical technique that discourages careful thought; (d) as I explained above, actually a flawed way of doing ethical reasoning to the extent it avoids rigor.

It is hard to do proper ethical reasoning shortly after your neighbors are killed. Emotions are too high. But that it is when it is most needed; to temper some of our worst instincts.

Clear thinking and reasoning invites _more_ information, not less. But when you look at purely emotional reasoning, it too often takes the form of e.g. "Listen to my emotions! Acknowledge them! Treat them as central!". However, doing that would be to fixate on emotions only. We don't want to exclude the full range of useful perspectives on the situation, which include mathematical analysis.