Comment by benwhalley on The Fallacy of Gray · 2021-05-04T08:02:22.326Z · LW · GW

I think one important problem, elided here, is that when problems are highly multidimensional then shades of grey will be harder to distinguish. At the extremes, yes, we can say that Gandhi and Stalin are imperfect in quantitatively different amounts. But most of the important life decisions we make can be evaluated on so many different dimensions of value that discriminating and integrating across them feels intractable. Even 3 or 4 dimensions makes the problem so effortful (and perhaps impossible if the dimensions are not commensurable) that falling back to intuition becomes the only pragmatic solution.