The Dangers of Dilly Dallying
March 20th, 2010
After writing my last post, I decided to spend some of my free time rewatching parts of Star Wars. Perhaps more on that later, but for now, a quick thought.
On the slim chance a reader wouldn’t know the scene, I’ll provide an introduction. In the third episode (the last movie released) Mace Windu goes to confront Chancellor Palpatine, along with a group of Jedi who are quickly killed off. After landing a solid kick on Palpatine, the Chancellor loses his lightsaber and is backed against a wall by Windu. At this point Anakin steps in, believing that the evil Sith Lord Palpatine is the only one who can save his wife from death in childbirth. Mace Windu knows of the friendship between Anakin and Palpatine and asked Anakin to stay behind, though Anakin did alert the Jedi Council to Palpatine’s danger.
There’s a lot of silliness in Star Wars, but I’m not going to go into that. While Mace Windu’s actions here may not be entirely consistent for someone of his reputation, his mistakes are common among most people – myself included – and interesting in their consequences. First he seems intent on arresting Palpatine, then seemingly changes his intent after blocking a great deal of Palpatine’s “force lightning” with his lightsaber. Perhaps this presented new information on his threat level, most likely it was more dramatic this way. Importantly however, in my experience this flip-flopping of intent is common in most people: a good reason to develop increased rationality and to think of goals before you think of solutions.
Even so, after deciding that Palpatine is too dangerous and politically powerful to let live, Windu dilly dallies. He takes the time to discuss this with Anakin, though apparently didn’t think his acceptance was necessary. He also winds up for a large strike, instead of just lowering a knee and bringing the saber down.
The consequences of this dawdling are what make this worth writing about: immediately, his arm is cut off by Anakin, he’s electrocuted and thrown out the window. Ouch. Much more significantly, Palpatine then executes his plan to kill all the Jedi everywhere, including the seemingly hundreds of young Jedi in training. He reformulates the Republic into an empire, eventually disbands the senate, builds a machine which destroys an entire planet, and brings about galaxy-wide repression and slavery which lasts roughly 20 years. Whoops.
By no means am I suggesting that people be killed without hesitation; in our world, I don’t believe any single person is remotely as dangerous as Palpatine. What I mean to provide is an exaggerated but illustrative prodding towards action. Action when you believe your model is good enough to act on under the time constraints, action when you know the course that will maximize expected utility via your metric, and action when you know you should be seeking more information. Admittedly, the chances are small that any single act of akrasia will mean the death of you and everyone you care about, but the chance is there. What’s more, the more practice you get in fighting akrasia may make it easier in the future; each choice to get yourself working is helpful for more than just doing that work itself.
Existential disasters possess the well known difficulty of not being able to learn from your mistakes in dealing with them. If we keep at it and manage to pull through, it may not be immediately obvious how close to danger we may have come. Had Windu made his strike with more promptness, the corruption in the senate would have provoked an outrage, but regular democracy would return. The clone war would have been allowed its resolution, the casualties would have been minimized to that conflict alone, and the Jedi would still have been around. I think that everyone who’s a non-contrarian would agree this is a much better outcome. All of this without anyone knowing the extent of damage Palpatine would have caused, the secret order 66 which causes the clone troopers to kill Jedi, etc. Similarly, success at existential disaster avoidance (by itself) probably wouldn’t look like much at all. The problem is, dilly dallying (by itself) also doesn’t look like much at all. You may know that you shouldn’t “really” be browsing the net right now, but it’s not like the whole world is going to end if you don’t do what you know you should be doing. At least, not immediately.
Tags: Bad Stuff, Existential Risk, Heroism