# We need new mental tools for thinking about population-level vs individual effects COVID has driven home the fact that there are interventions which can be helpful at a population level and harmful at an individual level and vice versa. The statistical nature of these interventions means that for any given individual, it’s impossible to say “this intervention helped *you*.” Smoking is the quintessential example here. It’s well-established at this point that at a population level, reducing cigarette consumption saves lives and is generally net positive. However, we can’t predict whether for an individual person cigarettes would be deadly. We understand well what happened *after* someone gets cancer but no matter hard we try, we can’t predict whether an individual smoker will get cancer. This leads to the subtle point that in reality, each individual smoker is not simply rolling a die with population-level odds. There are most likely factors (genetic, environmental, truly random) that can drastically change a given smoker’s odds of getting cancer. There are 90-year-olds who have smoked a pack a day for their entire lives and are fine. For these people, taking away their cigarettes is *not* significantly changing their *individual* ‘expected health value’. At the individual level it isn’t a *tradeoff* it’s just straight up bad. Perhaps you could make an argument at the individual level that it’s a tradeoff of a probabilistic downside vs. a deterministic upside. But the trick is that at the individual level, so many things affect the probabilities that any population-level probabilities are probably bunk. These circumstances abound: population-level probabilistic thinking says any given entrepreneur is going to fail, but intuitively in at least several situations you can confidently give much higher odds of *specific* entrepreneurs. <[[Two contradicting things that are both true is a strong signal that you need more theory]].> The same goes for parachutists, or scientists, as [[Donald Braben]] points out in [[brabenScientificFreedomElixir2008]].[^1] Perhaps another way to look at it is that population-level dynamics are an emergent phenomenon of individual dynamics. [[Emergent behavior happens when a system has properties that none of its subsystems have]]. And in the same way that we don’t have good tools for connecting emergent dynamics in complex systems with subsystem dynamics, we don’t have good tools for going between individuals and groups. The absence of mental tools isn’t just a navel-gazy observation: I would argue that it is at the core of 21st century political strife. Not only do people inconsistently reason from either individual or group effects but right now it is literally impossible to compare them and think about tradeoffs. You can’t just add up all the individual utils to figure out population things, nor can you divide the population level utils to figure out individual things. People on any point on the idealogical map tend to reason from either individual or group effects based on which jives with their beliefs. < [[The three languages of politics]] is particularly relevant here.> Progressives want laxer policing because individuals are unjustly imprisoned or killed. Conservatives want stricter policing because it makes crime statistics go down. Progressives want to address poverty at a group level, conservatives want to enable individuals to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Capitalists emphasize how free markets make GDP go up while anti-capitalists point out how many lives are ruined by them. The list goes on. You could potentially hold both views in your head but the fact of the matter is that we don’t have the mental tools to reconcile them. ### Related * [[If an effect is only shown statistically does that mean it only works at a population level?]] * [[The Hidden Half]] * [[Individual rights conflict with societal progress]] * [[Individuals vs Collectives]] * [[The question of whether individuals or institutions are more important for innovations is insoluble]] * [[Is it possible to have a collectivist government built on top of inalienable individual rights?]] * [[Human flourishing may be limited by the individual being the only unit that matters]] * [[Virtual Addiction Is Not An Individual Problem]] * [[Liberalism worked because human flourishing could be maximized with the individual reigning supreme]] [^1]: Interestingly, this may suggest that [[Knightian Uncertainty occurs when you hit the limits of theory]].