@Hyolobrika@berserker.town
A devil's advocate take on your approach (I don't know what I agree with here, but am willing to discuss from this POV):
There are situations when it's generally believed that the person with the skin in the game makes worse choices than someone without. I think the medical field believes that strongly: treating one's family or oneself is considered unethical in most circumstances and always discouraged. Performing noninvasive "fishing expeditions" for problems that show no symptoms is generally discouraged (except some cases where we encourage it for patients from some demographic), lest false positives cause patients to strongly wish for treatment.
All these examples suggest that people with more skin in the game might be over-eager to do something instead of nothing when a choice with unclear calculus of benefits appears. However, we are in a more confused situation regarding war: conscripts have much more skin in the game of war than in the game of suffering from consequences of not entering a war. From a purely selfish point of view, if a war can be avoided by means that cause the same amount of suffering by means other than military, all the conscripts should vote against it, because the suffering will be distributed among the whole population.
I don't think these two problems cancel each other. Each of them is a problem of biased noise, and even if the magnitudes of both are similar, they are likely far from anticorrelated.
in the case of wars the doctor is deciding on what procedures he's going to get paid for and the patient has basically no say in any of it.
@Hyolobrika @dhfir
You can view the patient as analogous to the military, or to all the people in the country. You could say the same about the country as the whole not having "another doctor" to go to.
That said, I'm not trying to say that these two situations are near-exact parallels of each other. I was trying to point out that we often view skin in the game as antithetical to objectivity. My examples did not have all the properties of the decision-to-declare-war one, but the reason we think people might lack objectivity in them is that they have too much skin in the game. Why shouldn't those problems manifest here too, however they are exactly created.
@Hyolobrika@berserker.town @dhfir
