High-decoupling vs low-decoupling or decoupling vs contextualizing refers to two different cultural norms, cognitive skills, or personal dispositions that change the way people approach ideas. High-decouplers isolate ideas from each other and the surrounding context. This is a necessary practice in science which works by isolating variables, teasing out causality and formalizing claims into carefully delineated hypotheses.
Nice to see someone else pointing out the failure modes of high-decoupling. I've somewhat recently written about how I think the connection that has been drawn between high-decoupling and rationality is overstated and partially based on a game of telephone that distorted the meaning of the term. I think this is a good example of how thinking good actually comes down to having a sense of when to decouple and when to contextualize. There are mistakes in thinking that are caused by isolating things to much, and there are other mistakes in thinking caused by bringing in additional context in a way that blurs the contours of the problem. One can argue about which way the default bias should go, but to me it's more important to empathize the need for an adaptive flexibility.
I feel like the argument that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” has had at least some success in democratic politics and it is of the exact same form you might want in the case of assisted suicide.
This is thought provoking – feels like there's another question hidden underneath. As an example, an American who supports abortion is probably also worried about climate change. You could talk about how low-decouplers might take these issues as a bundle, noting that because positions on the two are so heavily correlated, you might as well take someone's support for one as a good indication of support for the other. A high-decoupler might acknowledge the correlation but bristle, from a classically liberal sensibility, at the overreliance on that presumption.
But the weird part to me is, how come the correlation is so heavy in the first place? Like, a strong correlation between those policies getting enacted makes sense – people have to roughly arrange themselves into parties. And yet the degree to which people's actual, uncompromised views cluster feels surprising; it's a stretch to argue that abortion and climate change have anything to do with each other. I think when people talk about political polarization, they're usually talking about people having more extreme views on a given issue (eg no contraception ever on the right versus unlimited late term abortions on the left), or about people being more mad at the other side, not so much about people's views on many different issues clustering more tightly. Preferences for actually doing more or less coupling aside, why is it so *easy* to couple on the hot-button issues?
(side note: as an incorrigible low-decoupler, I'd also argue that "holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off" isn't strictly true: for instance, if you've thrown your steering wheel out the window in a game of chicken, you wouldn't be happy to see a second steering wheel appear! Then the issue becomes "to what extent are political questions typically bargaining problems, as opposed to pure problems of individual liberty or zero-sum conflict?")
Right, but 'culture' is wishy-washy, hard to talk about, hard to pin down, and easy to make claims about that are not obviously paying rent in anticipated experiences. Sticking with MAiD / assisted suicide / assisted dying, I don't know if things are different in the US (a very different nation), but in the UK the issue has been regularly polled since the late 1980s, and there have been consistent supermajority levels of support for legalising assisted dying. Latest polls have public opinion at 75% in favour and 14% against, every single 'constituency' (~congressional district) had at least majority support, and the median constituency had support at 77%. (Press release from pro-assisted dying campaign group here: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/news/every-parliamentary-constituency-in-great-britain-backs-assisted-dying-law-new-polling-confirms/.)
Given this polling background, it really is not clear to me that there is any risk that legalising assisted dying changing the law would cause some massive cultural seismic shift. Even assuming that some uniform Christian heritage meant that British society would always have abhorred suicide in past ages (which is not obviously true to me as a claim about history - opinion was always more nuanced, at least in the last 300 years or so), the polls suggest that the 'seismic' shift away from that view has *already happened*, decades ago at least: three-quarters of the population are entirely comfortable with the state helping the terminally ill end their own lives.
When you claim that '[c]ampaigning to legalize MAID in a democracy inevitably means changing cultural attitudes towards it, even if the change is just from ignorance', then, this doesn't ring true to me. Given the number of 'don't knows' in polling are only around 10%, and the level of support really is crazy unanimous, there doesn't seem to be any reason to expect cultural change.
But because it's such a vague notion, campaigners against assisted dying still use the vague cultural argument. And when you present them with these polls, they retreat into a different kind of culture: 'it would change the relationship between doctor and patient', maybe, or 'people would start to devalue the lives of the disabled'. It's slippery and unfalsifiable precisely because they're relying on contextual judgments that aren't made explicit. One virtue of what you call high-decoupler attitudes is that they don't necessarily preclude the bringing in of cultural context, but they do demand that the assumptions being made about culture are made clear, so that an if / if-not decoupling can take place.
Given that most people are low-decoupling, is high-decoupling an effective way to model social systems (culture, politics)?
Never understood why there should be any regulation at all against assisted suicide. Why is the government's business how I choose to end my life?
Nice to see someone else pointing out the failure modes of high-decoupling. I've somewhat recently written about how I think the connection that has been drawn between high-decoupling and rationality is overstated and partially based on a game of telephone that distorted the meaning of the term. I think this is a good example of how thinking good actually comes down to having a sense of when to decouple and when to contextualize. There are mistakes in thinking that are caused by isolating things to much, and there are other mistakes in thinking caused by bringing in additional context in a way that blurs the contours of the problem. One can argue about which way the default bias should go, but to me it's more important to empathize the need for an adaptive flexibility.
I feel like the argument that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” has had at least some success in democratic politics and it is of the exact same form you might want in the case of assisted suicide.
This is thought provoking – feels like there's another question hidden underneath. As an example, an American who supports abortion is probably also worried about climate change. You could talk about how low-decouplers might take these issues as a bundle, noting that because positions on the two are so heavily correlated, you might as well take someone's support for one as a good indication of support for the other. A high-decoupler might acknowledge the correlation but bristle, from a classically liberal sensibility, at the overreliance on that presumption.
But the weird part to me is, how come the correlation is so heavy in the first place? Like, a strong correlation between those policies getting enacted makes sense – people have to roughly arrange themselves into parties. And yet the degree to which people's actual, uncompromised views cluster feels surprising; it's a stretch to argue that abortion and climate change have anything to do with each other. I think when people talk about political polarization, they're usually talking about people having more extreme views on a given issue (eg no contraception ever on the right versus unlimited late term abortions on the left), or about people being more mad at the other side, not so much about people's views on many different issues clustering more tightly. Preferences for actually doing more or less coupling aside, why is it so *easy* to couple on the hot-button issues?
(side note: as an incorrigible low-decoupler, I'd also argue that "holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off" isn't strictly true: for instance, if you've thrown your steering wheel out the window in a game of chicken, you wouldn't be happy to see a second steering wheel appear! Then the issue becomes "to what extent are political questions typically bargaining problems, as opposed to pure problems of individual liberty or zero-sum conflict?")
Right, but 'culture' is wishy-washy, hard to talk about, hard to pin down, and easy to make claims about that are not obviously paying rent in anticipated experiences. Sticking with MAiD / assisted suicide / assisted dying, I don't know if things are different in the US (a very different nation), but in the UK the issue has been regularly polled since the late 1980s, and there have been consistent supermajority levels of support for legalising assisted dying. Latest polls have public opinion at 75% in favour and 14% against, every single 'constituency' (~congressional district) had at least majority support, and the median constituency had support at 77%. (Press release from pro-assisted dying campaign group here: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/news/every-parliamentary-constituency-in-great-britain-backs-assisted-dying-law-new-polling-confirms/.)
Given this polling background, it really is not clear to me that there is any risk that legalising assisted dying changing the law would cause some massive cultural seismic shift. Even assuming that some uniform Christian heritage meant that British society would always have abhorred suicide in past ages (which is not obviously true to me as a claim about history - opinion was always more nuanced, at least in the last 300 years or so), the polls suggest that the 'seismic' shift away from that view has *already happened*, decades ago at least: three-quarters of the population are entirely comfortable with the state helping the terminally ill end their own lives.
When you claim that '[c]ampaigning to legalize MAID in a democracy inevitably means changing cultural attitudes towards it, even if the change is just from ignorance', then, this doesn't ring true to me. Given the number of 'don't knows' in polling are only around 10%, and the level of support really is crazy unanimous, there doesn't seem to be any reason to expect cultural change.
But because it's such a vague notion, campaigners against assisted dying still use the vague cultural argument. And when you present them with these polls, they retreat into a different kind of culture: 'it would change the relationship between doctor and patient', maybe, or 'people would start to devalue the lives of the disabled'. It's slippery and unfalsifiable precisely because they're relying on contextual judgments that aren't made explicit. One virtue of what you call high-decoupler attitudes is that they don't necessarily preclude the bringing in of cultural context, but they do demand that the assumptions being made about culture are made clear, so that an if / if-not decoupling can take place.