The big problem/risk with doing propaganda, PR spin, and policy marketing to your own citizens, especially when you are a country with a representative government, is that you are literally harming your own ability to think and make correct decisions over time.
A generation of leaders and voters raised on cleverly designed misrepresentations, selective truths, and reasoning which backs up your current policy and rallies emotions in favor of it... is going to have a harder time seeing the problems and wanting to change course.
If we concede the right to bodily autonomy from birth at least as far as possible (with a person that has yet to orient themselves in the world, but must be taken care of meanwhile), as I believe we should, then the decision of a child in need of medical procedures to survive to reject them in accordance with the believes it was raised in, should be accepted as any other wish to die [1/2]
(after a carefully neutral talk about possible options and consequences respectively perspectives on the matter), no? Currently pondering the issue and interested in other people‘s angle. (Sorry for the awkward phrasing, Englis is not my first language.) [2/2]
I think the biggest thing I want to point out is that "beliefs the child was raised in" might have damaged the child's reasoning ability, and also that the child might have insufficient ability to see that their choice to reject treatment is actually a choice to die or really appreciate the weight of that until it's too late.
---
For that first part, there is a parallel to how trauma, beliefs, and other aspects of upbringing can influence the emotional factors of wanting to die. Suppose upbringing hurt a kid in a way that causes them to feel self-loathing and pessimism about having a life experience worth living through. Hopefully we can all see how infancy and childhood trauma can cause such strong and practically-inevitable cause-and-effect ripples that if a sufficiently traumatized kid asks for death and you grant it, that's less like you respecting a truly autonomous choice and more like letting them drown after they were tied up and thrown overboard. Their autonomy was already taken from them before they got to you. Their mind was chained and weighed down by outside actors and forces... you just don't have any clean, absolutely autonomy-respecting choices anymore. That's not an option that exists. The choices available are respecting/violating their current injured "autonomy" by granting them death, or violating/respecting their potential healthy "autonomy" by healing or freeing them enough so that they can make the decision without their upbringers or trauma violating their autonomy.
So I think it's important to recognize that beliefs can be the same way. It's just that the mechanism of action is more perniciously subtle than the stereotype of severe and blatant emotional trauma. It warps the very faculty with which we reach conclusions, judge evidence and arguments, and so on. If you wouldn't let me reach into your mind and magically shape what your feel/perceive/sense/think is logical, then you recognize on some level what I mean about how external influences that shape your sense of logic could be robbing you of autonomy. And early exposure to beliefs, information, and modeling of logic are poweful influences that shape your sense of logic.
And thus, in principle, I don't think we can just treat all beliefs a kid was raised in as equivalent. In practice there aren't easy answers about how we as a society decide which beliefs are unacceptably wrong... in practice societies are making this decision all the time, and different societies make different choices, and many of those choices are viewed by some people as unacceptably bad, wrong, or downright evil. But those choices are inevitably being made, and there's no non-choice here since a lack of formal policies and choices just defers it to informal cultural norms and smaller-scale power dynamics "on the ground" in hospital rooms, local courts, village mobs, and so on. Best I got for that problem is the same as my answer for improving all problems of governance, rule-making, coordination, and consensus - decision shares.
---
More generally, I think "autonomy" as a value has the problem that "autonomy" (and relatedly, "free will") as a concept fuzzes out the more you "zoom in on it", in particular as you consider what causes you to make any given choice, feel any given feeling, think any given thought, remember or not remember something, and so on, at any given moment. Minds and brains are concentrations of cause-and-effect interplay. Exceptionally complicated, large, rapidly evolving, and slow to totally lose any causal ripple, but cause-and-effect interplay nonetheless.
So to me, respect for autonomy is a derived value - I value respecting autonomy because I can see how in most situations it causes harm and suffering to not respect autonomy, especially when we consider indirect effects, integrate the future, and remember that we are rarely able to see into other minds as well as they see inside themselves. In particular, the odds of us being right when we think we know someone's mind better than they themselves do are low. It's also a game theoretic necessity: brains which don't insist on enough respect for their autonomy get used as a resource by those who for one reason or another end up exploiting them - so as a pragmatic ethics engineering constraint, we are working in a world where it is both common and healthy for people to expect some degree of respect for their autonomy.
But I think that's clarifying. Notably, part of the derivation is about the difficulty of knowing another mind as well as that mind knows itself. But kids are in the most amateur stages of knowing themselves. So while it's important to treat them with a large amount of respect for their autonomy, because that's part of raising them into healthy and competent adults, it's also important to recognize that they have much higher odds of being wrong about themselves, especially for things which require longer experiences of being a human: who they are or what they mean.
---
As a small child I was hospitalized twice.
I had to receive injections, at the peak of my treatment three times a day, including a week or so when I was being woken up while it was dark in what felt kinda like the middle of the night to take them.
I would've absolutely rejected any treatment that involved a needle if I had been given a choice in the matter. As-is, I was the most persistently difficult kid around - thrashing and crying and fighting every time. A couple times I did other creative things that took the full defiance willpower I could muster as a little kid, like running off in the hospital halls and hiding or diving under a table and refusing to come out.
Being literally told at least once that I could die if I stopped getting treated did not change this. I remember kinda knowing death as a concept at the time, but I still would've chosen to stop getting treated if I could. I am pretty sure I explicitly said that death would've been preferable, but...
As a kid, that wasn't choosing to die. That was the result of being chronically triggered and feeling thoroughly compelled to do anything to get out of the cycles of mounting dread, a massive fight-or-flight response constantly in tension with resignation and perpetual real or imagined emotional/interpersonal conflict of my little child will against the authority of my mom and the hospital staff, the vigorous desperate physical flailing at the end, the pain of the actual injection made worse by my fully clenched muscles needing a much more forceful needle jab, and the attendant emotional trauma, two to three times a day, every day, for weeks. The distant abstract risk of a descent into vaguely worse symptoms or whatever and eventual cessation of experiences was scary if I thought about it, but crucially it was totally abstract - the treatments I begged to decline weren't. It wasn't even a decision to take my chances and gamble that I wouldn't die. It was desperately motivated wishful thinking. My emotionally-real time horizon was the next four hours.
As it so happens, in my case I was misdiagnosed. The treatments weren't actually helping (although being outside of the building my family was living in at the time was helping). So you could maybe really charitably interpret this as in part influenced by some sort of accurate awareness on my part - and that maybe if I really was sick in a way that my treatment was helping, I would've sensed it and my attitude would've changed.
But even that implies that someone would've had to violate my autonomy for however many injections it took for me to notice the pattern and make an informed judgement on whether or not it was "worth it".
And if I hadn't been misdiagnosed, if I really was in need of such treatments to not die, and there was an opt-out option, I would've been dead like 25+ years ago.
Not exactly a rejection based in beliefs I was raised in, but factor that in as you will.
---
There's this anecdote I heard recently, about a kid who died because his parents were in the "Christian Science" movement and their entire community thought the right way to deal with the kid's illness was to pray it away. As I understand it they specifically view it as somehow wrong and bad to pursue medical treatment.
But the most relevant bit was that none of the people involved had even remotely enough relevant knowledge to have remotely accurate beliefs about the risks. Towards the end they thought the kid was getting better because he stopped having seizures. He stopped because damage to his brain got bad enough.
What would the kid have said if you had a chance to ask him how he should be treated, at any point after getting sick? What conversation could you have about options, consequences, and perspectives could you have with a kid raised with those beliefs - let alone a carefully neutral conversation - that would've given him a snowball's chance in hell to get out of "faith in Jesus will save me, and to think otherwise is dangerous" or whatever?
Sometimes valuing autonomy for a child is actually functionally equivalent to valuing some adult's autonomy to harm the child - whether intentionally or not.
---
Remember the stories of COVID patients who refused to take precautions and did not bother getting the vaccine, only to die in the ICUs begging doctors to give them the vaccine?
Grown-ass adults, and it still took them until the raw reality of suffocating to death was upon them, until they were viscerally feeling it in-the-moment and it was indisputable.
Death from a lack of treatment is far too often only abstract until it's too late to treat, especially when you're so so so far away from truly understanding any of the science or filtering out the bullshit....
When you're not feeling like you're literally about to die, it's very easy to convince yourself at an emotional level that your chances of survival are really good actually. Abstract medical knowledge is something you really have to learn to trust and feel as predictive.
But at least for an adult, you could say they have had enough opportunity to know better, to learn enough of the necessary logic and evidence and find their way to the truth if they had just made enough effort. (Given how bad at reasoning and truth-finding many people are, and how the deck is stacked against many people circumstantially, I feel like society should seriously start to recognize that this is a kind of ableism and classism, but at least an argument could be made.)
So again, what chance does a child have, armed with the kind of beliefs that would cause them to refuse treatment, to really understand and appreciate what risk they're taking on?
---
So my own view is that in principle, sure, there's something correct in this thought - but in practice, I think there are some serious ethical risks with letting a child opt out of medical treatment, due to beliefs or otherwise. I'm open to the possibility that those risks could be overcome on a case-by-case basis with at least some children, but I think if you want to be maximally ethical for the children, the bar needs to be really high and you'd need to be really careful (higher and more careful than just a few really good conversations with the child) or you end up effectively just respecting upbringers' autonomy to launch their kids into a suicide trajectory before they even have the ability to meaningfully decide if they want to change course.
Another possibility that's interesting to me is Putin suffering actual injury to his brain's logic and prediction trees from spending too much time in an environment without any truly viable opposition, and from getting away with what he's gotten away with so far.
One problem with reading comprehension problems on tests is that sometimes the author of the piece you're supposed to be comprehending is just wrong.
But the people writing the test do not see the error strongly enough to actually make the question about detecting the problem.
And sometimes instead of asking a question like "The author thinks: [multiple choice]", the test asks a question like "This is true about [thing discussed in the piece]", as if the author and the piece is objectively correct on this matter, and there's no question or debate about it. This style is fine when the author of the piece is explaining something like birds, the answer options are all a matter of consensus or are trivially disprovable like "all birds have wings", "all birds have webbed feet", "all birds have teeth", etc. This style is not fine if the topic is something non-trivial, which might be invalidated with cutting-edge knowledge or nuanced logic or philosophy, etc.
And sometimes the test writers fail to realize their own incompetence (which is normal - we almost by definition cannot see our own mental flaws, unless there are obvious and trusted external measurements thereof) and write a question as if they're in the first category when they're in the second.
So the answer the test considers correct ends up actually wrong - like no, that option is not true about [thing discussed in the piece]. You concluded that, when you wrote the test, because you're similarly stupid to the person who wrote the piece.
And if you're experienced enough, that's fine, because you can just tell that both the author and the test writer shared the same thinking error or didn't try to find how they might be wrong critically and creatively enough or whatever. But this is no longer just a reading comprehension test - it is a test comprehension test.
Even if you're not experienced enough, sometimes the other answers are all much more obviously wrong than the correct one, and you can use that to realize that instead of "this is true" the question really means "the author thinks that this is true".
This distinction matters, and tests that fail to make it correctly are at best unpleasant to the best takers, at worst do mental damage through logic bending and penalize the scores of people who are better at thinking (unless you're better by a wide enough margin to spot this problem).
If this intentional, this could be wise as part of a test you might use on candidates to upper management, tenured philosophers, top-tier judges, the people who write laws, and so on. The kind of people who really should be able to notice this kind of stuff.
But think about the experience as a kid in school. Most kids in school are used to being wrong-er than their test authors. Every test problem that they get wrong might be something they trust to train their logic on. "Oh, I see, if I had reasoned like this, I would've thought of the right answer (the answer that the test says is right)."
To be fair, I've rarely actually seen a test screw up like this. But that's what makes this problem so insidious. When we're kids, "this test is wrong and I am right, because multiple adult authors were stupid and made a misstep of reasoning or didn't know something that I know" is often wrong. So good learners get much more evidence that in a situation like this they should warp their mind to match the reasoning implicit in the test question.
In principle, logic is entirely empirically defined. But in practice, our brains also take a shortcut: our sense of logic is trained on our beliefs too. If our reasoning reaches something we already believe, our brain tends to treat that as evidence that the reasoning was correct. Similarly, reaching something we are certain is wrong is often treated as evidence that the reasoning was wrong.
This is because correct beliefs can be the distilled result of entire lifetimes of empirical evidence and correct reasoning. So brains gain the ability to train up logic faster and more reliably if they can also use correct beliefs as training data. And the brain machinery for matching predictions to perceptions can be easily adapted to also match reasoning conclusions to beliefs.
But the consequence of this is that if we are taught or motivated to believe something that is actually wrong or that is not really justifiable with reasoning, this can do actual damage to our ability to reason correctly - it can bend our sense of logic by giving our brain "this is correct" feedback for reasoning errors and "this is wrong" feedback for totally correct reasoning.
Someone replied to my prior post about figuring out what we really like and enjoy, behind all the learned narratives and judgements:
but how?
Great question. Off the top of my head, the most important stuff:
Get comfortable with cognitive dissonance. Practice wearing ideas about yourself that you disagree with or judge or reject, that make you feel weak or ugly or bad.
Get comfortable with the feelings of shame, of being judged, of being rejected, etc. Every negative feeling, really. Review memories and scenarios that invoke emotional reactions that you immediately eject out of, the more reflexively the better - and try to find cognition that will avoid the reflex out of those feelings long enough to inspect them.
Keep learning how minds work. A lot of introspection and critical self-review ultimately depends on our ability to think of more possibilities. We can't identify a thing in our cognition until we can think of something close enough to it.
Work to explain every want and motivation in your mind either as a raw experiencial preference/pleasure, or as prediction trees leading to them, possibly with bent logic.
Currently discovering analyzing the ontological argument for the existence of (a certain kind/type/notion of) god from the perspective of the empiric definition of logic.
Some background: the ontological argument has never jived with my sense of logic - it has always immediately invoked a reaction such as "wait what? this is an actual argument people genuinely make? how can that even make sense to anyone?". So much so that if you asked me to explain what's wrong with it I would really struggle to, but the struggle isn't "I can't find flaw with it", it's "I have never had a moment in my conscious life where logic of that shape did not feel obviously wrong to me" - it's the struggle to decode that wordless error detection.
But the empiric definition of logic finally lets me really slice into this from the ground up. What does the reasoning used in the ontological argument actually predict if used towards anything else other than the question of god existing? Are those predictions ever correct? Is there implicit reasoning for selecting only the questions that it makes correct predictions for? Does this reasoning have a history of correctly predicting? Is there some form of the ontological argument, some nuanced refinement, some combination of implicit conditions in the logic, that do reliably predict correctly?
If not, then it is simply outside of logic. And I guess some people are fine with that given their definitions of logic, but I'm not convinced that anything exists "outside of" logic other than cognition that amounts to just raw experiences and freeform truth-ignoring associations?
But I'm not really interested in dismissing it right now. I don't want to just call it a day at dismissing it as merely bent logic - a sense of logic trained on the already trusted conclusion that there is a god. Obviously from the above I find it easy and comfortable enough to do that. But I'm interested in looking around for any way that logic of that shape might empirically seem to work outside of the god existence question.
Having said all that in my last post, y'all have my blessing to use "logic bending" to just refer to the problem outlined in the logic bending post - to mean it in the negative sense and not in the general sense.
The more general meaning of bending a mind's sense of logic in any "direction" (rather than just to fit wrong things) is useful to label too, and I think the same term can be used for both to start with, but I think it's fine if the value-independent meaning is more esoteric or something that independently creative thinkers have to derive on their own.
I think labeling the problem is the most important application of the idea, and I chose the term first and foremost precisely to enable saying things like "that is logic-bending" to say that something necessarily, probably, or on average harms people's ability to reason correctly.
If there does need to be disambiguation, we can say "harmfully/adaptively/correctively logic-bending" or "that bends logic harmfully/adaptively/correctively".
But I might be using it with the "harmfully" implied more often than not, and I encourage y'all to do the same. I think for this term, a negative implication by default is probably okay.
