A discussion of heroic responsibility

I kind of predict that the results of installing heroic responsibility as a virtue, among average humans under average conditions, would be a) everyone stepping on everyone else’s toes, and b) 99% of them quitting a year later.

There's a reason it's called heroic responsibility: it's for a fictional hero, who can do Fictional Hero Things like upset the world order on a regular basis and get away with it. He has Plot Armor, and an innately limited world. In fact, the story background even guarantees this: there are only a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of wizards in Britain, and thus the Law of Large Numbers does not apply, and thus Harry is a one-of-a-kind individual rather than a one-among-several-hundred-thousand as he would be in real life. Further, he goes on adventures as an individual, and never has to engage in the kinds of large-scale real-life efforts that take the massive cooperation of large numbers of not-so-phoenix-quality individuals.

Which you very much do. You don't need heroic rationality, you need superrationality, which anyone here who's read up on decision-theory should recognize. The super-rational thing to do is systemic effectiveness, at the level of habits and teams, so that patients' health does not ever depend on one person choosing to be heroic. An optimal health system does not sound melodramatically heroic: it works quietly and can absolutely, always be relied upon.

Last bit of emphasis: you are both realer and better than Harry. He's a fictional hero, and has to fight a few battles as an individual. You are a real nurse, and have to do your part to save hundreds of lives for decades of time. The fucked-up thing about children's literature is that we never manage to get across just how small children's heroes are, how little they do, and just how large the real world inhabited by adults is, and just how very difficult it is to live here, and just how fucking heroic each and every person who does the slightest bit of good here actually is.

Brienne, my consort, is currently in Santiago, Chile because I didn't want to see her go through the wintertime of her Seasonal Affective Disorder. While she's doing that, I'm waiting for the load of 25 cheap 15-watt 4500K LED spotlight bulbs I ordered from China via DHgate, so I can wire them into my 25-string of light sockets, aim them at her ceiling, and try to make her an artificial sky. She's coming back the middle of February, one month before the equinox, so we can give that part a fair test.

I don't think I would have done either of these things if I didn't have that strange concept of responsibility. Empirically, despite there being huge numbers of people with SAD, I don't observe them flying to another continent for the winter, or trying to build their own high-powered lighting systems after they discover that the sad little 60-watt off-the-shelf light-boxes don't work sufficiently for them. I recently confirmed in conversation that a certain very wealthy person (who will not be on the list of the first 10 people you think I might be referring to) with SAD, someone who was creative enough to go to the Southern Hemisphere for a few weeks to try to interrupt the dark momentum, still had not built their own high-powered lighting system. Some part of their brain thought they'd done enough, I suppose, when they tried the existing 'lightboxes'.

But no, you can't make a heroic effort to save everyone, as Dumbledore notes:

There can only be one king upon a chessboard, Harry Potter, only one piece that you will sacrifice any other piece to save. And Hermione Granger is not that piece.

True story: when I first heard the phrase 'heroic responsibility', it took me about five seconds and the question, "On TV Tropes, what definition fits this title?" to generate every detail of EY's definition save one. That detail was that this was supposed to be a good idea. As you point out - and eli-sennesh points out, and the trope that most closely resembles the concept points out - 'heroic responsibility' assumes that everyone other than the heroes cannot be trusted to do their jobs. And, as you point out, that's a recipe for everyone getting in everyone else's way and burning out within a year. And, as you point out, you don't actually know the doctor's job better than the doctors do.

In my opinion, what we should be advocating is the concept of 'subsidiarity' that Fred Clark blogs about on Slacktivist:

Responsibility — ethical obligation — is boundless and universal. All are responsible for all. No one is exempt.

Now, if that were all we had to say or all that we could know, we would likely be paralyzed, overwhelmed by an amorphous, undifferentiated ocean of need. We would be unable to respond effectively, specifically or appropriately to any particular dilemma. And we would come to feel powerless and incapable, thus becoming less likely to even try.

But that’s not all that we can know or all that we have to say.

We are all responsible, but we are not all responsible in the same way. We each and all have roles to play, but we do not all have the same role to play, and we do not each play the same role all the time.

Relationship, proximity, office, ability, means, calling and many other factors all shape our particular individual and differentiated responsibilities in any given case. In every given case. Circumstance and pure chance also play a role, sometimes a very large role, as when you alone are walking by the pond where the drowning stranger calls for help, or when you alone are walking on the road to Jericho when you encounter the stranger who has fallen among thieves.

Different circumstances and different relationships and different proximities entail different responsibilities, but no matter what those differences may be, all are always responsible. Sometimes we may be responsible to act or to give, to lift or to carry directly. Sometimes indirectly. Sometimes our responsibility may be extremely indirect — helping to create the context for the proper functioning of those institutions that, in turn, create the context that allows those most directly and immediately responsible to respond effectively. (Sometimes our indirect responsibility involves giving what we can to the Red Cross or other such organizations to help the victims of a disaster.)

The idea of heroic responsibility suggests that you should make an extraordinary effort to coerce the doctor into re-examining diagnoses whenever you think an error has been made. Bearing in mind that I have no relevant expertise, the idea of subsidiarity suggests to me that you, being in a better position to monitor a patient's symptoms than the doctor, should have the power to set wheels in motion when those symptoms do not fit the diagnosis ... which suggests a number of approaches to the situation, such as asking the doctor, "Can you give me more information on what I should expect to see or not see based on this diagnosis?"

(My first thought regarding your anecdote was that the medical records should automatically include Bayesian probability data on symptoms to help nurses recognize when the diagnosis doesn't fit, but this article about the misdiagnosis of Ebola suggests revising the system to make it more likely for doctors see the nurses' observations that would let them catch a misdiagnosis. You're in a better position to examine the policy question than I am.)

I have to admit, I haven't been following the website for a long while - these days, I don't get a lot of value out of it - so what I'm saying that Fred Clark is saying might be what a lot of people already see as the meaning of the concept. But I think that it is valuable to emphasize that responsibility is shared, and sometimes the best thing you can do is help other people do the job. And that's not what Harry Potter-Evans-Verres does in the fanfic.

As I interpret it, heroic responsibility doesn't mean not accepting roles; it means not accepting roles by default.

Heroic responsibility always struck as me the kind of thing that a lot of people probably have too little of, but also like the kind of thing that will just make you a miserable wreck if you take it too seriously. After all, interpreted literally, it means that every person dying of a terrible disease, every war, every case of domestic violence, etc. etc. happening in the world, now or in the future, is because you didn't stop it.

The concept is useful to have as a way to remind ourselves that often supposed "impossibles" just mean we're unwilling to put a real effort into it, and that we shouldn't just content ourselves to doing the things that our socially-prescribed roles require from us. But at the same time, some things - like preventing every nasty thing that's happening on Earth right now - really are impossible, and that won't change just because someone tells themselves otherwise. And feeling guilty about all of it won't do anyone any good.

Basically, "heroic responsibility" means telling yourself that yes, it's possible for you to fix that problem, regardless of how difficult or challenging it feels. Which is obviously a falsehood, because some problems genuinely are unsolvable. But a small dose of that falsehood can be helpful in counteracting our biases towards self-serving behavior. Since we have those biases, introducing a small dose of an opposite falsehood into our reasoning can bring the system towards an overall more correct state. But if we introduce too much of it, we'll end up more distant from the truth again, and believing in heroic responsibility too much may be worse for our well-being than believing in it too little.

There may be Dunning-Kruger effect though...

I don't know about the medical context but in the software context, the "heroically responsible" developer is the new guy who is waxing poetic about switching to another programming language (for no reason and entirely unaware of all the bindings that would need to be implemented), who wants others to do unit tests in the situation where they're inapplicable or do some sort of agile development where more formal process with tests is necessary, and fails to recognize unit testing already in place, etc.

He puts himself and his need to be the hero of the project's story ahead of the needs of the project, which is irresponsible, he doesn't actually take time to critically evaluate his own proposals before making them (not fun), which is again irresponsible. His need to heroically save the project is more important than the success of the team. People like him are the starters of those 90%+ start-ups that fail, wasting other people's money and time.

But in his own mind he's the only responsible person on the whole team. The tech lead spents his near-deadline weekend going over thousands lines of other people's code and fixing up other people's bugs? Doesn't register to that new guy, it's still just him.

Eventually most people grow out of that mindset. (I'd dare say most people exhibit some of such behaviours for at least a short period of time. )

I probably am going to leave nursing.

This makes me sad to hear. It sounds like you've been really enjoying it. And I think that those of us here on LW have benefited from your perspective as a nurse in many ways -- you've demonstrated its worth as a career choice, and challenged people's unwarranted assumptions.

This was really, really good for me to hear. I think permission to not be a hero was something I needed. (The following is told vaguely and with HP:MOR metaphors to avoid getting too personal.)

I had a friend who I tried really hard to help, in different ways at different times, but most of it all relating to the same issue. I remember once spending several days thinking really hard about an imminently looming crisis, trying to find some creative way out, and eventually I did but it was almost as bad an idea as using hufflepuff bones to make weapons so I didn't do it. It was probably also morally wrong, but even now I can't quite get that on an emotional level.

At one point, I thought I was in a position to start doing something about the core problem. I kept trying, but it wasn't working. And then I tried too hard and made everything worse, then temporarily cut ties to avoid doing more damage. Said goodbye a while later, and walked away.

We still talk, occasionally. They're still in hell. I left them there. I walked away without letting the prisoner out of their cell.

I have a lot of roadblocks in my mind, put there to avoid depression and such, which are stopping me from feeling terrible about it. I still wonder at the back of my mind if maybe I should feel terrible, for leaving a friend to their fate like that. I'm trying to think now whether there's anything I still could do, but my brain is putting up a big flashing warning sign not to do that. And when I try to think objectively about it without heading into risky mental territory, expected value of me trying to help again does not look good. I guess maybe this is where equal and opposite advice applies.

Anyway, thanks for this post. I think I did the right think by leaving, but it doesn't feel that way.

My $0.02: it matters whether I trust the system as a whole (for example, the hospital) to be doing good.

If I do, then if I'm going to be "heroically" responsible I'm obligated to take that into account and make sure my actions promote the functioning of the system as a whole, or at least don't impede it. Of course, that's a lot more difficult than just focusing on a particular bit of the environment that I can improve through my actions. But, well, the whole premise underlying "heroic" responsibility is that difficulty doesn't matter, we just do the "impossible" because hey, it needs doing.

If I don't, then I can basically ignore the system and go forth and "heroically" do good on my own.

So, yeah, maybe being a "heroically" responsible nurse (as opposed to a "heroically" responsible person, who as you suggest might find it necessary to stop being a nurse and instead take over the medical profession and run it properly) would involve coordinating with the other nurses on your unit, and not just going off on your own to do what you can do with your own two hands.

Which, I understand, is a very different model of "heroic" responsibility than what's presented in the Sequences (and HPMOR), which is much more about individual achievements against a backdrop of a system that's at best useless and more often harmful.

Another $0.02: this whole notion of "heroic" responsibility seems incompatible with counting the cost. If achieving whatever-it-is requires working 24-hour shifts, according to this model, then by gum you work 24-hour shifts!

So, yes, burnout is inevitable if whatever-it-is is the sort of thing, like sick patients, that is being presented in a steady stream.

There's a big difference between a goal like "invent a technology that optimizes the world for human value," which only needs to be done once, and a goal like "care for my patient" which has to be done over, and over, and over. I'm not sure it's possible for humans to be "heroic" about the latter without generalizing to the root causes and giving up being a nurse.

You might be wrestling with a hard trade-off between wanting to do as much good as possible and wanting to fit in well with a respected peer group. Those are both good things to want, and it's not obvious to me that you can maximize both of them at the same time.

I have some thoughts on your concepts of "special snowflake" and "advice that doesn't generalize." I agree that you are not a special snowflake in the sense of being noticeably smarter, more virtuous, more disciplined, whatever than the other nurses on your shift. I'll concede that you and them have -basically- the same character traits, personalities, and so on. But my guess is that the cluster of memes hanging out in your prefrontal cortex is more attuned to strategy than their meme-clusters -- you have a noticeably different set of beliefs and analytical tools. Because strategic meme-clusters are very rare compared to how useful they are, having those meme-clusters makes you "special" in a meaningful way even if in all other respects you are almost identical to your peers. The 1% more-of-the-time that you spend strategizing about how best to accomplish goals can double or triple your effectiveness at many types of tasks, so your small difference in outlook leads to a large difference in what kinds of activities you want to devote your life to. That's OK.

Similarly, I agree with you that it would be bad if all the nurses in your ward quit to enter politics -- someone has to staff the bloody ward, or no amount of political re-jiggering will help. The algorithm that I try to follow when I'm frustrated that the advice I'm giving myself doesn't seem to generalize is to first check and see if -enough- people are doing Y, and then switch from X to Y if and only if fewer-than-enough people are doing Y. As a trivial example, if forty of my friends and I are playing soccer, we will probably all have more fun if one of us agrees to serve as a referee. I can't offer the generally applicable advice "You should stop kicking the ball around and start refereeing." That would be stupid advice; we'd have forty referees and no ball game. But I can say "Hm, what is the optimal number of referees? Probably 2 or 3 people out of the 40 of us. How many people are currently refereeing? Hm, zero. If I switch from playing to refereeing, we will all have more fun. Let me check and see if everyone is making the same leap at the same time and scrambling to put on a striped shirt. No? OK, cool, I'll referee for a while." That last long quote is fully generalizable advice -- I wish literally everyone would follow it, because then we'd wind up with close to an optimal number of referees.

But what about the other nurses on my unit, the ones who are competent and motivated and curious and really care? Would familiarity with the concept of heroic responsibility help or hinder them in their work? Honestly, I predict that they would feel alienated, that they would assume I held a low opinion of them (which I don't, and I really don't want them to think that I do), and that they would flinch away and go back to the things that they were doing anyway, the role where they were comfortable–or that, if they did accept it, it would cause them to burn out. So as a consequentialist, I'm not going to tell them.

I have known of this concept for a couple of years and I admire people who are moved by it and really attempt to "make a difference" in a heroic way, but I am not one of them and have no inclination to be. I suspect that my mind is more typical than yours in this respect, and that you telling the other nurses about it will not cause a flinch. More like a "oh, that's nice" reaction before going back "to the things that they were doing anyway", without any additional impetus to argue with a doctor, or go an extra mile, or wanting to put more effort into fighting Moloch.

Leaving aside the scale implied by the word "heroic", another word for "heroic responsibility" is "initiative". A frame of mind in which the thought, "I don't know how to solve this" is immediately followed not by "therefore I can do nothing" but by "therefore I will find a way."

I kind of predict that the results of installing heroic responsibility as a virtue, among average humans under average conditions, would be a) everyone stepping on everyone else’s toes, and b) 99% of them quitting a year later.

You are probably right. That would be a horrific lesson in the valley of bad rationality. I really do not want people to start actually acting on their beliefs and values. That makes things (literally) explode.

Someone’s going to be the Minister of Health for Canada, and they’re likely to be in a position where taking heroic responsibility for the Canadian health care system makes things better.

Maybe they are in such a position - but they are gears too. More powerful gears, but they are part of a machine that selects these gears by certain properties and puts them in places where they bear more load. By this analogy I wouldn't want such a gear spring out of place. It could disrupt the whole machine. At best you can hope that the gear spins a bit faster or slower than expected. But maybe the machine analogy is broken.

All of the discussion here has been based on the assumption that heroic responsibility is advocated by HPMOR as a fundamental moral virtue. But it is advocated by Harry Potter. Eliezer wrote somewhere about what in HPMOR can and what cannot be taken as the author's own views. I forget the exact criterion, but I'm sure it did not include "everything said by HP".

Heroic responsibility is a moral tool. That not everyone is able to use the tool, that the tool should not always be employed, that the tool exacts its own costs: these are all true. The tool itself is still a thing of usefulness and value, to be taken out and used when appropriate, and kept sharp the rest of the time.

Scaled down from heroic levels, it is what on LW has been called agentiness, or being a PC. I called it initiative in another comment in this thread.

A footnote:

I just looked up "initiative" on Google. Does it no longer mean what it used to? The first page of hits gives good definitions and examples from dictionary sites ("the ability to assess and initiate things independently"), but the rest of the hits are to brand names and actions taken by organisations, not individuals. I went down to the 20th page of hits, and apart from a few media companies using the word as a brand name and one more dictionary entry, it was all activities by organisations. I didn't find a single example of the word used in the sense of agentiness.

What does "initiative" mean to people who learned it in the last 20 years?

I'm wary of advice that doesn't generalize.

I'm wary of advice that does claim to generalize. Giving good advice is a hard problem, partly because it's so context-specific. Yes, there are general principles, but there are tons of exceptions, and even quite similar situations can trigger these exceptions.

Kant got into this kind of problem with (the first formulation of) the categorical imperative. There are many things that are desirable if some people, but not everybody, does them -- say, learning any specific skill or filling a particular social function.

What's difference between the nurse who should leave in order to take meta-level responsibility, and the nurse who should stay because she's needed as a gear?

There are several bad answers to this, and you're right to be suspicious of them. In particular, feeling like you're special is not sufficient reason to act like you're special.

But different people have different value systems and abilities. If people are given the opportunity to develop their skills (up to the limit of interest and/or natural ability), then they should differentiate their roles based on value systems.

In this case: some people want stability, family, friends etc., and some people want to change the world. (It gets difficult for those of us who want all of the above, unfortunately.) No, you don't get to dictate what other people can do with their lives. But I really think you're in no danger of doing so -- even if you do make a distinction between yourself and other nurses (which is really not arbitrary, as you seem to be afraid it is), you're just choosing your own path, not theirs.

FWIW, in my estimation your special-snowflake-nature is somewhere between "more than slightly, less than somewhat" and "potential world-beater". Those are wide limits, but they exclude zero.

One possible thing you could do while being a nurse is starting a blog about problems nurses face. A blog where other nurses could also post anyonymously (but you would moderate it to remove the crazy stuff).

There is a chance that the new Minister of Health would read it. Technically, you could just send them a hyperlink, when the articles will already be there.

There's an interesting concept Adam Grant introduced to me in Originals: the "risk portfolio". For him, people who are wildly creative and take risks in one domain compensate by being extra cautious in another domain ("drive carefully on your way to the casino"). The same might apply for heroic responsibility: continue working as a cog in the system on Mondays, write well-written thought-provoking posts on LessWrong (where the median person wants to take over the world) on Sundays. 

I think you're wrong about how the other nurses on your unit, and other people generally, would react to the idea of 'heroic responsibility', depending on you were to both bring it up and present it.

The key part of the quote with which I would expect lots of people to agree is:

“You can’t think as if just following the rules means you’ve done your duty."

I'd expect everyone to have encountered an incompetent or ineffective authority figure. I'd also expect nurses to routinely help each other out, and help their patients, by taking actions that aren't formally or technically their responsibility. Ex. "Did Ms. Smith ever get that pillow she requested?"

But fully accepting heroic responsibility means you're also accepting responsibility for (a) doing what needs to be done despite feelings of guilt; (b) not burning oneself out (unless that's the best course of action); (c) not accepting heroic responsibility for one thing (unless that's all you truly care about).

Accepting heroic responsibility for all your patients very well might be best honored by you doing whatever you need to do "to care less – and thus be less frustrated and more emotionally available to comfort a guy who was having the worst week of his life".

I kind of feel that heroic responsibility works better in situations where small individuals have the potential to make a large difference.

For example, in the world of HPMoR, it makes sense for one person to have a sort of heroic responsibility, because a sufficiently powerful wizard can actually make waves, can actually play a keystone role in the shaping of events.

On the other hand, take an imaginary planet where all the inhabitants are of equal size, shape and intelligence and there are well over a zillion inhabitants. On this planet, it is very hard to imagine a single inhabitant to assume responsibility for the actions of all the other zillion inhabitants that are there on the planet.

Even in the examples discussed above, the minister having a lot of power is in a better position to take heroic responsibility for the functioning of the system as opposed to any of the individual nurses. I know it sounds like i'm saying heroic responsibility should be left to the heroes, but my point is more subtle than that.

The prime considerations as to whether you should take up heroic responsibility or not is the situation in front of you and the extent of your capabilities.

In short, I don't see any "philisophical" points to discuss here, just practical ones. I appoligize if I'm being too literal and missing out on something. Please let me know if I am.

All I got from the idea of heroic responsibility is, "Delegating responsibility to authorities is a heuristic. Heuristics sacrifice accuracy for speed, and will thus sometimes be inaccurate. People tend to apply this heuristic way too much in real life without thinking about whether or not doing so makes sense."

Concrete questions:

• How should a nurse act if she was optimizing for societies aggregate happiness?
• How should a nurse act if she was optimizing for her own happiness?
• How should a nurse act if she was optimizing for a blend between the two?

Wrong question:

• How should a nurse act if she was optimizing for "heroic responsibility"?

Take the Standard Definitional Dispute, for example, about the tree falling in a deserted forest. Is there any way-the-world-could-be—any state of affairs—that corresponds to the word "sound" really meaning only acoustic vibrations, or really meaning only auditory experiences?

Is there any way-the-world-could-be that corresponds to the phrase "heroic responsibility" really meaning something?

Why does the mind formulate questions of responsibility?

I don't know, but I have a hypothesis. My hypothesis is social pressure/conditioning. Personally, even though I think it's a Wrong Question, I nevertheless feel like it's a real thing (to some extent).

I feel some sort of drive toward "heroic responsibility" and away from "heroic irresponsibility". Even when I dissolve the question, there's still a force at play: my emotions telling me, "Bad Adam. I don't care if you dissolve the question. Heroic Responsiblity is Good and Heroic Irresponsibility is Bad".

Being a well functioning gear.

• There is a downside to "going against the grain". The machine seems to be somewhat fragile, and a deviant gear is likely to screw stuff up.
• There's also the obvious upside of possibly making the machine more efficient.
• Whether or not it's worth it to go against the grain depends on the cost-benefit.

What's different between the nurse who should leave in order to take meta-level responsibility, and the nurse who should stay because she's needed as a gear?

1) What they optimize for, and 2) EV of trying.

The machine does need fixing–but I would argue that from within the machine, as one of its parts, taking heroic responsibility for your own sphere of control isn’t the way to go about fixing the system.

My impression is that that's true for the majority of people in the majority of situations, because they're not smart enough for the EV of them going against the grain to be worth it.

As for whether or not it's worth it for you:

1) It depends on what your goals are. Largely the personal happiness vs. altruism question: what is the blend you're optimizing for?

2) My impression: situations like the one you describe in Something Impossible seem unlikely to be worth deviating in. However, my impression is that if you put your mind to it and took a more intermediate-long term approach to pursuing change, you could do incredible things.

It seems you have just closed the middle road.

I think the problem is mixing heroic responsibility with the idea that responsibility is something you can consistently fulfil. You can fulfil your responsibility as a nurse. Just do your job. Heroic responsibility isn't like that. You will let someone die about 1.8 times per second. Just save as many as you can. And to do that, start with the ones that are easiest to save. GiveWell has some tips for that.

I think for most things, it's important to have a specific person in charge, and have that person be responsible for the success of the thing as a whole. Having someone in charge makes sure there's a coherent vision in one person, makes a specific person accountable, and helps make sure nothing falls through the cracks because it was "someone else's job". When you're in charge, everything is your job.

If no one else has taken charge, stepping up yourself can be a good idea. In my software job, I often feel this way when no one is really championing a particular feature or bug. If I want to get it done, I have to own it and push it through myself. This usually works well.

But I don't think taking heroic responsibility for something someone else already owns is a good idea. Let them own it. Even if they aren't winning all the time, or even if they sometimes do things you disagree with (obviously, consistent failure is a problem).

Nor do I think dropping everything to fix the system as a whole is necessarily a good idea (but it might be, if you have specific reforms in mind). Other people are already trying to fix the system; it's not clear that you'll do better than them. It might be better to keep nursing, and look for smaller ways to improve things locally that no one is working on yet.

I think heroic responsibility is essentially a response to being in a situation where not enough people are both competent at and willing to make changes to improve things. The authority figures are mad or untrustworthy, so a person has to figure out their own way to make the right things happen and put effective methods in place. It is particularly true of HPMOR where Harry plays the role of Only Sane Man. So far as I can tell, we're in a similar situation in real life at the minute: we have insufficient highly sane people taking heroic responsibility. If we had enough sane people taking heroic responsibility, things would look rather different and likely a lot better run. It would be easy to be a happy gear, if you knew the machine was properly designed, the goal was a good one and the plan was likely to succeed.

There is clearly some ratio of heroically responsible:useful gears that works the best for each situation, some optimal equilibrium. Too many people trying to unilaterally change things in different directions and you get chaos and infighting. Too many useful gears and you have a wonderfully maintained, smooth running machine working at 40% maximum efficiency towards a goal that doesn't make much sense. I propose heroic responsibility be fit into a larger framework, that of filling the role that is required. I can't think up a snappy name for it, but you essentially mould your actions into the shape that best maximises your group's outcome given your abilities. If there is already someone doing the job of heroic responsibility and doing it well, you aim for the next empty or poorly-done role down where you do most good. If all the important positions are filled by competent people or by people more competent than you, then be a gear.

The problem lies in knowing whether you actually could do better in someone's situation with the resources available to them. The ethical injunctions seem to say that humans are rather bad at figuring out when they could do better than those in power. There is only an injunction against cheating to gain power though, not against legitimate means. Still, it's difficult to say whether one is actually more competent and a large amount of research into the potential role should be done first before action is taken. If you can see a decision for the role coming and make a strong prediction of what a good choice would look like, then seen what the actual decision the person made was and predict the effects and finally get it right, with a better batting average than the person in the role, if you can do that, then it's time to go for the position.

Disclaimer: There is a possibility that this theory is an extension of my belief that I should eventually be in charge.

I think heroic responsibility is essentially a response to being in a situation where not enough people are both competent at and willing to make changes to improve things. The authority figures are mad or untrustworthy, so a person has to figure out their own way to make the right things happen and put effective methods in place. It is particularly true of HPMOR where Harry plays the role of Only Sane Man. So far as I can tell, we're in a similar situation in real life at the minute: we have insufficient highly sane people taking heroic responsibility. If we had enough sane people taking heroic responsibility, things would look rather different and likely a lot better run. It would be easy to be a happy gear, if you knew the machine was properly designed, the goal was a good one and the plan was likely to succeed.

There is clearly some ratio of heroically responsible:useful gears that works the best for each situation, some optimal equilibrium. Too many people trying to unilaterally change things in different directions and you get chaos and infighting. Too many useful gears and you have a wonderfully maintained, smooth running machine working at 40% maximum efficiency towards a goal that doesn't make much sense. I propose heroic responsibility be fit into a larger framework, that of filling the role that is required. I can't think up a snappy name for it, but you essentially mould your actions into the shape that best maximises your group's outcome given your abilities. If there is already someone doing the job of heroic responsibility and doing it well, you aim for the next empty or poorly-done role down where you do most good. If all the important positions are filled by competent people or by people more competent than you, then be a gear.

The problem lies in knowing whether you actually could do better in someone's situation with the resources available to them. The ethical injunctions seem to say that humans are rather bad at figuring out when they could do better than those in power. There is only an injunction against cheating to gain power though, not against legitimate means. Still, it's difficult to say whether one is actually more competent and a large amount of research into the potential role should be done first before action is taken. If you can see a decision for the role coming and make a strong prediction of what a good choice would look like, then seen what the actual decision the person made was and predict the effects and finally get it right, with a better batting average than the person in the role, if you can do that, then it's time to go for the position.

Disclaimer: There is a possibility that this theory is an extension of my belief that I should eventually be in charge.