You may have heard of the dichotomy drawn between ‘high decouplers’ and ‘low decouplers’. High decouplers are people who are able to isolate a

Decoupling as a Moral Decision

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2022-01-17 17:30:09

You may have heard of the dichotomy drawn between ‘high decouplers’ and ‘low decouplers’. High decouplers are people who are able to isolate an idea from its context: as Tom Chivers writes, they can perform a ritual of ‘If we accept X, then we might think Y’, and then explore the implications of X being true without knowing whether it is true. For instance, a high-decoupler might be happy with a thought experiment that starts ‘If we accept that IQ is heritable, then…’, whereas a low-decoupler wouldn’t be happy just assuming that IQ is heritable - they don’t regard this ritual as sufficient in moving on to the next part of the conversation, they might reply to the argumentation that followed with ‘But I’m not convinced that IQ is heritable…’, and feel the need to continue with that part of the conversation. Then a back-and-forth may follow where the high-decoupler says ‘But let’s just assume for the sake of argument that it is true’, and the low-decoupler replies ‘But I’m not sure we can assume that’, and you can probably imagine how the conversation proceeds from there.

But the way that the decoupling dichotomy is often presented is that you are either a ‘high decoupler’ or a ‘low decoupler’, and it is a fairly immutable characteristic. Either, the ritual ‘If we assume X, then Y’ works for you, or it doesn’t. But I’m not really convinced this is true, at least not when being used during the political discussions in which it’s often brought up. Much of the original research on cognitive decoupling comes from Keith Stanovich - the rough idea is that the ability to understand counterfactuals and imagine a world that is basically the same as the real world but differs on some small number of dimensions is useful and important for making causal inferences. This ability is correlated with IQ - Stanovich writes that:

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