Here are all the thing's I've written of which I have a record, unless they are somewhere else on this site or at my parent's house.
Jacob hardly knew Ditya, so he felt more uncertainty than foreboding toward the impending conversation.
Maybe he could swipe right and match with her near the beginning of his prep time (or even right before he met with her). In this case, Ditya would get a notification, which would help her in the upcoming discussion, giving both of them more knowledge but she would clearly have had more time to prepare based on that knowledge since she could have preallocated processing resources to the scenario-event in which they matched. Presumably they are both young professionals around 30 years old. Seems fine to introduce sexual tension right away in this scenario since that would likely play a part in real life if they are both single, successful, smart, attractive, etc. They would naturally make a good pair if they got on well.
He's definitely going to be blindsided at the start of the conversation. He's expecting her to be more typical and less power-seeking.
My goals for this conversation are to develop a romantica interest and power-oriented teamwork between the two figures. I also want to introduce other forces at play, the environmentalists and some specific character representative of them, say J'na, who is originally from South Africa, and the national government. I also want to mention some international force in passing, but not really give anything away about that specifically yet. (Maybe the Galapagos could recently have "liberated" itself as a territory.) Her goals are to get them working together in a way that pushes out other tourism industry players... they can plan regulatory restrictions that make it so only Jacob's enterprise can meet them. His goal is mostly to make more money and not get in trouble and ideally to end up with a new girlfriend. He's less ambitious and more risk-averse than she is. They have tension in that he thinks her plan is to blatant and likely to get a bunch of backlash as such (which is true, but from her perspective doesn't matter as long as they can get away with it).
She'll come in, some heavy contrast from the panel meeting, dressed still very professionally, but showing a bit more skin and with her hair done differently and slighly better fitting clothing. She also talks still very professionally and is the guiding force of the conversation back in that direction when it strays, even if she is the one causing it to stray as she occassionally does.
At the end, they excange personal contact info, even if they have already matched on Tinder, making that technically unnecessary.
He's not a slouch himself, and he can keep up with her, though he's too trusting and a bit less intelligent than she is, but negligibly so.
Balancing Truth and Positivity
Sustainability, Goals and Collaboration
Trust, Truth and Equity
Defining the Box
The title may be a joke, but the content isn't.
XXXXCONTENT
When I remember Ender’s Game, most frequently, it’s not because of the ansible, or the Buggers or the main plot. I remember it for the meaningful, open forum for political discourse that Valentine and Ender subvert before any of the main plot revs up. That’s the type of governmental transparency we’ve been hoping to see evolve for a while now. One where priorities are set in the open, as a result of public discourse and prediction markets, something akin to what you might find in Raikoth. Today, this seems at least remotely possible from a technical standpoint. You can just take the internet, build a public forum with an associated consensus function, and make laws that are goal oriented and metrics driven and accountable to working toward some almighty algorithm in order to increase the amount of contextually defined ‘good’ in the universe. If things don’t collapse into some sort of apocalypse or dystopia, maybe we’ll get there eventually.
That still leaves the big question of what ‘there’ looks like. Equally important to consider is how would the resulting society come about, out of where we are today. At this point though, I should back up and explain where we’re coming from and why this is the society we want and one that we will inevitably build.
Imagine you have all the knowledge of all the people that have ever lived or are living now. You are now, some sort of super being, a single collective consciousness that possesses the memories, thoughts and feelings of each individual human. And, let’s go further. Now, also assume you have infinite processing power so as to be capable of instantaneously simulating the consensus arrived at by grouping any combination of individuals and allowing them to discuss any given topic to they point the decide they fully agree (assuming that states of disagreement have agreed upon methods of resolution). What are you? Well, you’re definitely humanity. You have near perfect understanding of the world we live on. You also have at least as good of understanding of every individual as they have of themselves. You know the consensus that is being worked toward, and the only thing you don’t know is what the best possible route toward achieving that consensus is. Of course, you do know what the consensus is regarding that route, so you know the route you will take. (Note that this is true, even if you lack perfect knowledge of the entire universe and therefore might be making a mistake regarding that route, given some additional information or processing power, etc.)
By induction, if you back out where that entity comes from, you land on ‘a planet with sentient life’ every time. Further, that’s where we’re going as a species if we don’t fail, yet the resulting society could take a variety of forms. One of my greatest fears, for instance, is if our future humanity ends ub being derive from a single personality — or worse, a single person. Maybe that person became a godlike entity through personal exploitation of technology and genocide of every other sentient being. The technology itself will determine the embodiment of the consciousness which will in turn determine its nature. But, its personality will be determined by its past. We are a sentient species - with fleshy human-shaped embodiments that interact with our surroundings in such a way so as to create technology. That technology changes the possible embodiments of consciousness including our own. So, the future of any consciously embodied species will be a newer consciously embodied species. Assuming technology increases the capacities of embodiments, we will progressively become an ever more complicated and powerful species. The members of the species may coalesce or not (destroy one another or not) as they see fit. In any case, you get a ‘more’ collectively conscious entity just because it knows more about its constituent parts given the increases in knowledge and awareness provided via technology and collaboration.
For human beings on Earth, today, the biggest question I have about our desired future embodiment(s) is ‘Where does the will of the individual end and where does the will of humanity begin?’ Removing the modifiers ‘desired’ and ‘future’, I can answer the question right now by simply observing how our species acts and how the institutions we’ve established organize and constrain individuals’ actions. Further, we can look at the past and see how we’ve changed with increases in technology and population. And, we can project that into the future to get an idea of where our species is headed as a global, social species having individuals with our given cognitive capacity. While I think and hope this thought experiment results in a vision of humanity you and I find desirable, our past has certainly been speckled with what I might deem ‘errors’. These errors might be defined as significant deviations from the consensus function, were a consensus function to have existed at the time. More pessimistically, they might be observed as a failed implementation of a consensus function.
Normally, I keep my desired manifestation of humanity to myself and close friends because I feel the importance of my personal desires pales in comparison to the desires of the sum total of our population (the consensus function). I also spend a lot of time trying to predict what those might be and asking other people about their preferred incarnations for our future humanity. Still, the only vision I can present with clarity is my own, and as the consensus function does not yet exist in any form of which I’m aware. I guess it’s at least mildly appropriate that I contribute my opinion openly in the hope that it will one day be factored into that function after or even as it’s being borne out. And thus, we arrive at the purpose of this text. I will now present my desired vision of humanity’s future (a goal you might call it), a definition for when humanity has become collectively conscious, and a general path for how we might go from where we are toward the vision I present. Even more importantly though, I’d ask that you share your thoughts, opinions and visions of the same, humanity’s future, what we are, what we are becoming, the how, the why.
Science fiction presents to us an array of ideas with which we can construct our ideal future reality and future selves, both individually and collectively. Things like interplanetary space travel, artificial intelligence and artificial bodily enhancements exist on the verge of real technology and science fiction. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that some such innovations will come to fruition over the course of the next century. Additionally, with the impact we’ve already had on our environment on a global scale, we are being forced to develop technology that allows us to deal with weather and climate manipulation. But for me personally, the most important aspect of humanity’s evolution is our ability to abstract, merge and alter our conscious experiences and the embodiments that our consciousnesses inhabit. It’s one goal I’d like prioritized highly.
Perhaps the most important feature of the future humanity I’m imagining combines individual consciousness and collective consciousness in a dynamic fashion such that identity of the individuals and the collective(s) in which they participate are mutually dependent. In this state, a collective may choose to create or transfer a given identity from one body to another. An individual might choose to merge back into a collective, with or without a predetermined directive to separate again at a later point in time. While I think there will likely always be some individuals that participate to a very limited degree, if at all, in the collective aspects of consciousness allowed by new technology, the human collective will remain aware of any individuals residing within its local spatial domain. Initially, I imagine this human collective to represent ‘everyone on Earth’ or ‘everyone in the Sun system’ or ‘everyone in the Milky Way galaxy’ as consciousness spreads across the universe. A big question I have is whether the collective should ever possess the ability to intentionally subvert or undermine a non-participatory individual of the species. Say a bunch of humans start sharing bodies and conscious experiences and determine that this mode of existence is clearly superior, but other individuals value their unique and discrete existence as an end in itself. Does the collective have responsibility to maintain the quality of life of such individuals? Do we want to discourage this sort of thing as a species or encourage it? Assuming that individuals who don’t participate in the collective are much less able to contribute to the growth and exploration of the species, how should resource allocation be balanced fairly? While you or I may each have our own opinions, the ultimate answer must somehow reconcile our disagreements.
To think about our progress toward this vision, let’s use Nick Bostrom’s three axis along which he explains our development as a species: technology, insight, and coordination. Technologically, we need to, at a minimum, be able to be connected to the internet at all times. With today’s technology, this would be the same as everyone carrying a cellphone at all times and having an accessible connection to the internet. Insight into collective consciousness refers to our understanding of ourselves and our communities. We need to have a specific physical definition and understanding of our personal needs. What does it take in order to be living a thriving life? How do you measure this biologically? Do we have a survey of how successful we are at creating communities of thriving individuals and does each individual who is not thriving have the ability to state so publicly to any and all other individuals so as to be able to ask for help, should they so choose? This leads into the aspects that we could call coordination. Are we doing things to actually help each other thrive - everyone, everywhere. At a minimum, this would require a global government and some nubile implementation of a consensus function.
Because we all inhabit the same physical universe and because that universe changes over time, you can already look at humans as sharing and influencing each other’s respective conscious. But, this process looks significantly different when it’s happening via the internet than when it was happening via cave paintings and face to face conversations. By this measure, one can expect future communication technology to further enhance the ability to share ideas and influence people. For example, we might have trust frameworks and implants that allow one person to directly control the actions of another person’s body. Say I’m sitting with you in a restaurant, but you’re boxed in (sitting on the inside of a booth) and talking with the person next to you. I’m clearly dozing off and not paying attention to your boring conversation, so you tell me to go get you a beer. And, perhaps without even realizing that it’s not my own idea, I get up and order the beer you want and bring it back to the table. As long as we’ve already agreed that this sort of reasonable, respectful, limited use of body, mind and time is alright, this seems like a fine thing to be capable of sharing with other conscious embodiments. While that level of technology may be a ways off, the definition of collective consciousness I have in mind is already possible. We simply have to universalize our current technologies — smartphones with ubiquitous internet access. By definition, for humanity to be collectively conscious along the technological axis, the internet must exist, and everyone must have access to it at all times, should they so chose to connect. With that as a first goal, newer iterations can be developed and rolled out as we create them.
While we are somewhat close to achieving this definition of collective consciousness technologically, our advances along the insight access are relatively less pronounced. Insight toward collective consciousness deals particularly with the awareness of humans and humanity. This includes our individual understanding of humanity, humanity’s understanding of each of us as individuals and the understanding that humanity’s collective consciousness has of itself. Already today, the internet provides individuals with a sufficiently thorough understanding of the world and of what’s going on generally with most of humanity. However, it does not follow that those individuals draw the same conclusions given this apparently uniform access to knowledge. Still, when provided internet access, each such individual meets the technical definition presented for collective consciousness given today's technology. The awareness humanity has of itself is far more limited. Even given the general awareness the internet allows individuals to glean about the global state of humanity, there are so many people without internet access that most of the possible individual to individual human connections are impossible to make. And in order for the collective to be aware of the individuals, individuals would need a means of identifying and expressing themselves to whatever extent they choose. In this sense, humanity’s collective consciousness largely lacks even the ability to be aware of itself.
Further, the disagreement and uncertainty present within and among individuals lacks a consistent presentation. In order for a human collective consciousness to gain the required insight of itself, this sort of presentation must exist. I previously mentioned the idea of a consensus function, which is one rudimentary form that humanity’s collective consciousness could take. Alternatively, or additionally, the example of a meaningful open forum, like that of Ender’s game would suffice to be a consensus function if the forum’s content directly impacted the governing decisions made at a global level. Indeed this would also require a governing body with authority to enforce certain decisions to be implemented globally.
Global governing structures are an example of the coordination required for humanity to be considered collectively conscious. To some extent this level of organization already exists in entities such as INTERPOL, the United Nations and international courts. Yet, these organizations’ abilities fall short of meeting the level of coordination required to tackle some seemingly obvious problems. As an aside, global climate control is a great example. The problem is that global warming is considered a political issue rather than a scientific one. The result is that despite overwhelming evidence and expert consensus, our leaders have been allowed to delay action in accord with undue influence from non-scientific constituencies. And while there is no guarantee that a different system, which allows us to more effectively address issues with global climate, will also be better for humanity overall, it is clearly possible. And given the potential downsides of failing to address such issues, experimentation in an attempt to identify a better overall system is warranted. So while technically, we have met the rudimentary definition of global coordination by operating some authoritative international organizations, there is plenty of room for improvement. There is little doubt that this will happen, and plenty of reason to advocate for great caution in our experimental progression toward such ends.
As humanity progresses along the various axes, we may expect our understanding and definition of collective consciousness to transform with ourselves and the universe we inhabit. At times the changes may be quicker or slower, yet change is ever present. Let’s imagine the changes possible now and how they lead us toward a vision of collective consciousness more or less like the one I presented earlier.
Unlike the way that handheld computers became commonplace over the course of a generation, Living a collectively conscious lifestyle will have a much longer adoption period. While the benefits of sharing the world’s raw knowledge are immediate and one-sided, the benefit of sharing life experiences, trust in our neighbors and even use of our bodies only works when the group members have some level of alignment. There are potential drawbacks; it’s not a obvious, mutually beneficial transformation. At the same time, it is clearly a gain in specific contexts. For example, if you could play a team game and have the ability to take over for other players at opportune moments based on your knowledge and their position, you’d have an advantage over the opposing team if they cannot do the same. While we assume that at a high level of play, teams already work together quite seamlessly, one would still expect a more collectively consciousness style of play to outperform the traditional group of individuals, given a comparable level of skill. Thankfully, the technology allowing that sort of advanced behavior of collective consciousness will itself be potentially slow to arrive.
More quickly, we can build and advocate for some of the previously mentioned features of a rudimentary collective consciousness: ubiquitous internet, universal access to smartphones, a consensus function and a meaningful open forum for prioritizing human goals. Furthermore, it’s possible and probably recommended that we implement collective consciousness first locally, rather than globally. This gives us the ability to experiment on the implementation of our technologies and perfect their ability to improve and augment our current systems’ means of providing coordination and insight. So finally, let’s start designing an implementation of a consensus function. We can build the forum and the consensus function today. What do I want it to be? What do we want it to be? I have my guesses. What do you want it to be? Do I even know you?
I want everyone to be able to express themselves openly, should they so choose, to share who they are and what they want, and for all of that to be taken into account in a known and well defined manner during the policy implementation process. I want to make politicians obsolete because everyone is a politician by default when we want to be. I want to be able to know what everyone else thinks is important, not just the people on television; I want it in aggregate and in specific. I want to vote directly on everything, should I so choose. I want more of the influence that direct democracy promises and that technology will provide. I want to know when the system is broken because humans say it is. Where’s the poll for that?
This new system looks like a ballot box that’s always open, on steroids. It starts with who we are, as individuals and as groups, organizations, collectives, communities, etc. In the governmental sense, the city needs to know who its residents are without those residents living in fear of the government. This goes outside of the technology implementation and requires additional legislative safeguards that protect individuals from prosecution as any result of participating in their own governance. The technology obviously needs to be secure and protect privacy, yet the government must be forced to respect that privacy if and when it’s technologically impossible to implement safeguards. Next, citizens need to be able to share whatever opinions they have about anything, openly. Finally, the technology must be constantly updated to use the opinions provided to directly influence any and all governmental decision making processes.
Let’s say an existing or upstart political party decided to implement a rudimentary system for identity, opinion sharing and consensus- style decision making via a well defined algorithm. What might the implications for an imaginary city of today look like where that party controls the entire legislative process? Picture Quasitopia, a mythical experiment in the early days of consensus function experimentation. For the most part, Quasitopia, which everyone calls Pia, looks like any other city in the region. The first major difference is that Pia’s residents receive notifications, tailored to their individual interests, when the government is working on a project. The second major difference is that all of the projects the government works on come from an analysis of what residents concerns are. These concerns set goals for the city, like “eliminate homelessness, provide clean water, establish clean transportation infrastructure or alter the wealth distribution.” Analysis of the resident’s desires prioritizes the goals. The budget determines the amount of goals that can be addressed. This is all quite similar to how things work now, except that consensus between competing interests is resolved strictly by the public debate rather than by the quasi-public debate of other cities’ representatives. In fact, while Pia still has representatives, they talk to each other in the same forums as the residents talk to each other. They are virtually indistinguishable, except that their votes count for a bit more, as they are the fallback for people without another established means of voting.
If the resulting city is so similar to the way we already do things, is it really worth implementing? The only way to know is to test it out.
One creates nested default groups to make moral judgements and decisions. These groups become the contexts in which to apply principles or analysis to decide, and the final decisions comes from the group which wins when its contextual relevance is given supremacy. For example, if we discuss whether to kill someone is wrong, the universal contextual answer is, "It is wrong." Or perhaps, the universal answer is unknown or is both right and wrong together, and the context of an environment filled with humans, the context of humanity, makes killing wrong. Looking further inward, killing in accordance with the death penalty is right, if we accept that laws are the societally accepted moral framework relevant in a given time and place. If the individual executioner has inside knowledge about the inmate's innocence which was known to be excluded from the legal process, the killing becomes wrong again. So, how does the executioner make the decision.
The spectrum of default groups must reach from the context of the individual to that of the universe. In between the two extremes, there are several natural intermediates: earth, life, animal life, humanity, jurisdictions of law, companies, families, tribes, etc. The time- limited process of making a decision must be imperfect.
My nails dug into the soft rubber of the steering wheel as I leaned forward and pressed firmly on the accelerator. They had passed us, and the immediate surge of anger and humiliation ratcheted my competitive drive into top gear. Without thinking, I moved over into the lane of oncoming traffic as we climbed up the steep hill. They couldn’t see it coming. We were regaining the lead.
They slowed to a halt, jumped out and ran over to us.
As it turned out, I was the one that couldn’t see it coming. And with nowhere to go, the innocent non-combatant crested the hill in line with our path to victory, wiping it away in a head-on (injury-free) collision.
Growing up I learned the wisdom of better safe than sorry. Even if forgotten at times, the phrase was a constant reminder. Contrast that to the lifestyle of today’s emboldened youth, the YOLO generation, and it’s hard to imaging the implications. Oddly, it’s not our youth, but rather our elders plotting a dangerous one-shot trajectory for our nation, and the world. Their paralleled nonchalance (everyone errs) impedes our country’s efforts to lead, to confront the subversive, mounting catastrophe of environmental neglect.
Even if you wanted to doubt the existence of global warming or its causes, you have to be reckless to ignore the threat it presents. And yeah, the metaphor breaks down. This is everyone’s first experience with manipulating the environment on a global scale. We are just learning the rules of the road, even as we drive for the first time. But, let’s not claim an excuse to act like children.
We know that this is new. The newness gave us our doubts in the first place.
Maturity and experience suggest we proceed with caution. If you think you see an oncoming car, you slow down. Now we know you old folks like to have fun too, but let’s take our foot of the gas this time. Better safe than sorry.
I often wonder what others would think about various thought experiments I run in my head. In particular, how would the various potential futures I contemplate rank in terms of desirability. Given that each of our ideal futures has a unique composition of features, what would be some of the common trends? Could we agree on any goals at all? And if not, could we agree on a process for determining the goals even if we can't all agree on what they are? There are so many people that don't even speak the same languages that I do; what do they want? Where do we agree and disagree?
Additionally, I'm curious about the prospect of global visions for humanity, rather than today's focus on the meager expression and internal agreement in nation-states. While there is clear, if ineffectual process for guiding nations, the international community's process is certainly less developed. In considering potential futures on this scale, it strikes me that I find some of them very displeasurable.
***
Specks of light dotting the night sky gleamed meagerly in the distance. As the cool artificial breeze of the Martian domes brushed gently against Kaiya's cheeks, she couldn't help but wonder what became of her grandmother's friend's grandchildren. Her Terran peers' parents lost the technology for communicating with the colony Mars over two decades ago now. As the population surpassed one million in 2081, just a few years ago, the celebration was bittersweet, unshared with so many friends from humanity's home world.
***
Do others fear cataclysmic rifts in our species as I do? The Martian example is particularly illustrative for its physical divide, but techno-socioeconomic partitions scare me just as much.
Already, we see segregated communities around the globe - in the Arab States, Nigeria and the United States and elsewhere - stratified greatly along economic lines. When groups with money tend to see positively reinforcing feedback loops that grant them privilege to compounding gains, they stand positioned to run away with our global civilization's power and control. Even now, elites often control laws or have the money to evade them. The top tier of human society stands apart from the rest.
Technology also feeds into the feedback loops. Technology can be adopted first by elites. They know about it first, and they can afford it. If technology Z is build on Y which is built on X and so on, and if an elite group gains access to Z before anyone outside the group has access to A, it may well be fair to say that the elite group has sufficiently separated itself from the rest of humanity. The specific technology could further reinforce this idea. For example, genetic control of our offspring down to the level of individual base pairs and epigenetic fingerprinting would be a game changer in terms of our evolution as a species. Evolved intelligence where humans are integrated with AI in a manner that gives some individuals orders of magnitude more cognitive processing power might also render the unprivileged people powerless and obsolete.
If we really care about human inclusion, equality and the value of individual human lives, we soon must contemplate the implications of technology, resource distribution and economic stratification on the development of our species. Extrapolating backwards the idea of inclusivity in the face of such major technological progress of our potential future, are we in the right place today? While I think we are still largely okay - it's been less than a generation since cell phones and the internet became common - I do worry about the next generation. What if 10% of the world is still without cellphones in 2030? That would mean that many children in developed nations have parents that grew up with cell phones while 1 of every 10 humans couldn't even get one then.
More broadly though, my question is about whether or not we are, as a species, simply alright with that prospect. Do we even care? If we have 9 billion people and the top 7 billion don't really notice when the bottom 2 billion suffer, why would we change? And if the top 10 million can simply ignore or even subjugate the rest of the 9 billion, would there be enough impetus within the elites to prevent it? If your children are part of the future mainstream, if you are, do you care?
I'm Grant Robert Smith. I'm Zyzzyx of Nal. Actually, that's an alter ego name that I use internally in several ways. Nal is sort of like my word for God. It's a portmanteau of nothing and all - the combination of opposites into a single foundational concept that underpins my conception of the universe. You could take and restate Nal however you like, which is kind of what I think of when you look at the myriad conceptions that individuals have of the notion of God. For me, it commonly appears as 'Doubt everything except and including this.' Or, 'We know nothing for certain, and this we certainly know.' It is the juxtaposition or combination of nothing and everything, doubt and certainty, whatever you want.
Ok, you may be thinking, "That's nice, but it's kind of not saying anything at all." To which I would respond that this is precisely the point. Because on top of this foundational concept (or without or next to or however you prefer), you can build the rest of your conception of reality. For better or worse, our existence seems to have a decent amount of consistency to it, which leads mostly to conceptions mirroring the universe itself. "Cogito ergo sum," as Descartes put it. And then you have science or fantasy. You have fate or free will. You have chaos or morality. These are inclusive 'or's and not intended as opposites. Build a worldview however you like, but be warned that you may not like the world you view.
How I do it
Balance. More specifically, I think of balancing truth and positivity. That consistency of experience I mentioned before comes in use for our small and limited minds. The fact that we can make predictions based on past experience and causal relationships is quite nice. So, I hold the truth in high regard. While you observe a rock hurdling toward you, it might feel nice - for a bit - to have the unshakable belief that 'the rock will be stopped by your mind powers, and that it will fall to the ground before it strikes your face.' This sort of positivity is almost certainly unwarranted. Here, the physical reality is simple and predictable to a degree that positivity should play no part in the matter. On the other hand, positivity is great when reasonable doubt enters the picture. The unshakable belief that 'I will have a pleasant interaction when I go up and talk to a stranger' is hence more reasonable. Obviously, it's not going to be true 100% of the time, but it's still reasonable. It's reasonable because it's going to be true some of the time and because the potential harms of its falseness are negligible.
While this is a simple and reasonable place to start, it's not much of a worldview yet. Truth alone is enough to create most of my view on the world since I exist not in a vacuum but in an observable space. I hope I'm quoting my friend Shane Golden correctly as saying, "I am, now, in this place." Or, incorporating my brother's idea of 'mutually shared experience,' one could rephrase it as, "We are, here, now." This is the basic acceptance of a shared universe with consistency across local observation of space and time. Truth begets physicalism which begets science which begets more truth, and it appears trivial to simply accept the majority of that which is and of that which you hear and see and feel and smell and so on and so on. I even largely extend this acceptance of truth to that which I read and that which people tell me, so long as it's consistent. And, even when inconsistencies arise, it's easy enough to take Occam's Razor approach, the simplest explanation, assuming best intentions and greatest positivity when explanations are comparably simple.
Good intentions and positivity only seem to matter when I start adding the key ingredient - meaning - to existence. The choice to give meaning to existence is logically arbitrary, but almost universally intrinsic in the context of existing in the first place. If I think I am, here, now, in this place without meaning, I can logically justify anything. I can subsequently create meaning in a bubble surrounded by meaninglessness and derive whatever moral framework I want. To some extent, we all do this. It's necessary because we have limited capacity. We can only process so much information, and we can only observe so much of the universe. But, anytime we make an arbitrary bubble without ever thinking about it's context or questioning it, we risk losing our connection with the truth. In turn, we lose true consistency between the universe and our conception thereof. It will still appear to be consistent because the inconstancy is covered in meaninglessness, hidden outside the bubble of meaning we have defined for ourselves. But the truth and our inconsistency are there, lurking in the meaninglessness beyond our bubble of spatiotemporal relevancy.
Instead, I choose meaning, always. Plus, meaning just feels better than meaningless. It seems like a nicely balanced take on truth and positivity. And with meaning, comes morality. Actually, morality requires there to be context and for that context to include other human beings or comparably intelligent forms with which to interact and reason about morality. But since that's pretty much a given, we all have morality in some sense, even if we don't always recognize it as such, especially in others. I'd guess most people define their personal worldview and morality from the inside out, from where they're positioned in the universe. I do this too, and at the same time, I define it from the outside in. What do things look like for the entirety of the universe? Obviously the answer is beyond my capacity, but it's an important question for me in defining my morality. I do my best to take into account all possible context, from where we come and to where we will go. Personally, this thought process comes from a place of decision making. My morality stems from trying to decide how to spend my time and what to do with my life.
In making decisions, I started with what I felt like are the biggest ones. The things that an individual chooses with greatest impact on the universe are what to do with your life's work and wether to have children (since it's going to be a big part of someone's life to raise that child). Because children additionally have a propagating effect of potentially creating more children, that decision seems to have a high chance of being more impactful on the universe over time than even what to do with one's life's work. So first, I decided not to have children. We have enough people for the planet; if I want to raise children, I'll adopt. Plus, humans are evolving faster based on technology than biology, so it's not like genetic propagation matters much. Second, I decided what to do in the 60 or so years I had left to live. This turned out to be a much more difficult decision making process. Apparently I started with the same question as Elon Musk ("What will most affect the future of humanity?"), but I was trying to pin it down to a single answer rather than a list of topics.
I guess as a side note, the rest of my morality, like how to treat people and what laws should be and all that "simple" stuff is taken on a case by case basis within the context of where I want humanity to go with itself in the future. I'll get back to this later because in deciding what to do with my life, I ended up coming up first with a framework for combining goals and desires with inevitabilities and physical trends. This in turn led to a method for deciding what laws should be. And, the remainder comes from evaluating the local context from the inside out (e.i. being nice to people around you) and from balancing contexts against one another based on the consequences.
"I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write."— Madaleine L'Engle
I was chatting with my friend QuHarrison Terry about his creative process for writing last week, and the theme of repetition - as presented in L'Engle's third point - resonated throughout our conversation. While typically difficult for those unaccustomed to it, even writing and rewriting the same idea over and over helps. As a perfectionist, I usually try to get it exactly right the first time. When I'm writing, this means editing in place over and over as I try to achieve an impossible goal. I remember being taught in school to work in drafts, and it always annoyed me. But coming back to writing as free-time activity in my adult life, I can see how getting the ideas out is more important than perfecting the phrasing surrounding them.
Transitioning from one idea to another is also a struggle. I would guess that the overall flow of the ideas throughout the work is more important than the phrasing of transitions, so similar to the way in which spitting things onto the page beats chewing them up in your head, having an outline to guide the flow of the paper is superior to working through all the transitions as they enter your flow.
The next thing I want to touch on is L'Engle's first point. It's about practice and repetition much like the third, but it's also about diversifying your topics, discovering your interests and developing your voice as a writer. (As an aside, the privacy portion is something I personally would like to think is unnecessary, which is why this blog would make no sense to someone finding it organically on the internet.) In the talk with Qu, I related this to his notion of author authenticity. If you're going to publish something for others to consume, it should at least speak to you. It should be something you're interested in and can get behind and support and defend in the case where you have a discussion with someone about what you put out there. I don't think this means that you have to have such a discussion, just that you'd enjoy it if you were to have it, and that you'd genuinely believe in what you were saying during the conversation in the same way you believe in your original work.
L'Engle's remaining point about reading is the one I'm least certain of. While I think reading helps your vocabulary, reading generically, reading for content, doesn't cut it. In order for reading to significantly impact your writing, I think you have to be reading with that in mind. You have to be focusing on critically evaluating the author's style. You have to be thinking about how different types of content lend themselves to different types of prose. A fantasy novel would be ruined by the terse nature of the prose you find in scientific journals. Jason approached the cliff at 4.5 m/s and extended his arm with hand outstretched, adding an additional 17 cm to his reach as he caught the falling red Farlax just half a meter from the cliff's edge. Reading contributes most toward improving your writing when you're looking for the things you like in the author's work. For example, in writing fiction, which I rarely do, I find that my setup is often lacking and my descriptive prose, imperative to setting a scene, is frequently imbalanced against the scene's action. So, I might read a few of my favorite sci-fi authors to see how they do it.
I feel like I grew up completely disempowered to pursue people romantically. It's ironic given the standard cultural problem is boys feeling over-empowered to pursue women sexually, given that I am indeed a cis male. Looking back, I think inconsistent social messaging confused and ultimately combined with an impactful personal experience to paralyze me.
To some extent I really don't know how to help the people who are the worst off in society. the ones who are unintelligent, unattractive and poor. the ones who have mental illnesses that prevent them from participating. I think real help for people in this space would be focusing on their enjoyment of life in addition to their generic well-being and maintenance. (Think assembly line or qc work for physically and mentally handicapped individuals.) We could always have government create jobs that aren’t economically viable but that make the world a better place. Things like cleaning the outside or manual OCR. Ask people to do them for low hours but reasonable pay. To all the anti-intellectual's out there (especially in the group that is technomically incapable), I don't really know what to say. I'm sorry. And we really need your help too, even though you disagree with us. The best we can do is include these people in a conversation and listen to them. The only thing we really can’t do is let idiocracy become a reality, which I don’t think is a serious concern, but it should be studied more. When would it become a serious concern, if ever? Also, if give these people well-being and enjoyment in life, I think they will just stay out of the way. Non-child enjoyment can probably be incentivized.
MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech still rings true today in many ways. Clearly for the black community in the United States, police brutality, social segregation and institutionalized poverty are still relevant issues. And for this, we all suffer: blacks, whites, Latinos, and all Americans. We suffer together. Injustice continues to oppress our nation. Poverty continues to shackle our brothers and sisters, our fellow Americans. Each day, millions of Americans miss out on their "inalienable Rights" to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And so as the great Dr. MLK said, "We cannot be satisfied... We cannot be satisfied as long as the [poor man's] basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one." We cannot be satisfied so long as the institution of poverty unjustly detains even one of our fellow Americans.
While the task is obvious, we have too long toiled in defining success. If it is self-evident that "all men are created equal," let us aim for freedom from generational transfer of poverty. Let the poor man's son grow up with the rich man's daughter, the rich man's son with the poor man's daughter. Arm in arm they we must let all our children seek in fairness and truth the life, liberty and happiness this nation promises them.
Success is an equal outcome for rich and poor alike. Success is a simple and just tax system. Success is elimination of poverty, homelessness, and joblessness.
Success is solving poverty. Most simply, poverty is solved with a minimum income tied to cost of living. Because cost of living is tied to location, this means that if the government maintains that its citizens have the freedom to chose where they live, migratory trends will impact the cost. In order to achieve the basic level of human rights considered to be universal, this income should cover healthy food, clean water, basic heating, clothing, housing, healthcare and the needs of any children. Children need education, in addition to the basic needs described above. All of these expenses entail a significant tax burden on the working population. Obviously, if too many people are unemployed, this system fails.
Solving poverty is the first real step on the path to global collaboration. Certainly if we have people struggling to subsist, they will be even further incapable of collaborating meaningfully to the progress of our global society. And without meaningful participation in our global society, they lack meaning to it, must fail to derive truth from it. They would be reasonable and right to lack trust in it. Moving forward into a shared truth, a cultivated trust and a collaborative process is, first and foremost, the same as creating a society free from poverty.
How do we liberate ourselves of destitution? There are many solutions we might test. For one, despite having existed as a societal species for thousands of years, we have yet to thoroughly test the successful hypothesis of minimum income: society free from poverty. Oddly, government has restricted information on the one real experiment - Mincome, performed by Canada in the 1970s. Recent attempts in Finland and Switzerland to test the idea more broadly have been rejected by the public.
Even if such an unchecked mincome arrangement were to fail at a local or national level, compromises may also be tested. Perhaps the government only pledges a subset of the universal basic rights. The right to children alone threatens to bloat the cost of social services immensely. Nixing that single provision might well be sufficient to balance the entire system of rights.
Alternatively, requiring people to work might add the productivity required to balance the system. Educating the citizenry to the level required for individual productivity may challenge the system in this case. If people cannot do the jobs available at the precipice of societies productive progress, forcing people to work will negligibly or detrimentally impact the system's overall output. In developed countries today, this is already a problem as many well-paying positions with intense prerequisite knowledge and/or experience go unfilled.
Additionally, it remains unclear whether all people possess the physical and biological capacity to productively participate in cases where all such jobs require high levels of technical expertise. For example, there is some initial evidence that certain people lack the capacity to learn computer programming. Time will tell the extent to which this challenge exists and persists, if at all. However, if more people challenge society to accommodate them, the slower society will progress.
People and the environment together form the system which sustains and enriches us. So similarly, the environment challenges progress in several ways. Resource limitations impose a concrete boundary to the system. Because the energy available comes almost entirely from the sun, we know the maximum capacity at which the entire system operates.
Knowing these limitations actually frees us to design and test different societal and technological arrangements. Without the understanding of how the universe and how humanity operate, the blind assumption must be that anything is possible. We would never know where to start. Given the truth surrounding the challenges to the systems in which we exist, we can finally begin to progress in a guided and methodical fashion, rather than by the chance nature of our stochastic biology.
Only with a shared understanding of these systems can we build trust among ourselves. For this reason, understanding, accepting and establishing standards for agreeing upon the nature of the universe with which decisions are made and actions taken is crucial. Reasonable doubt is important, and for the save of robustness and diversity within the system, doubt should be tolerated to the extent that it remains unthreatening to the system's sustainability and progression. Utter rejection of basic principals that threaten the system itself must be reasonably contained.
Especially in the transition to a global society, knowing the limitations may yet be insufficient to provide for the security and well-being within any region, nation-state, or local civilization. Unless a subset of society can balance the global impacts of the remaining humans, the external portion of humanity will always threaten the maintenance and progression of any and all subsets. Even when completely isolated economically, they share their environment.
Collaboration therefore facilitates addressing global environmental challenges. At minimum, an isolated nation would require information regarding the external behavior of the remaining society to predict and address its impacts on their environment. Beyond facilitating solutions, collaboration is almost required, as the alternative, proved surveillance, seems likely to activate the vicious cycle of reducing trust, increasing external information protection and increasingly invasive surveillance.
A similar virtuous cycle, increasing collaboration and trust simultaneously, paves the road to facilitating global problem solving. This makes building trust between and among nations just as important as the raw collaboration. And while collaboration between individuals or states may increase trust, the interaction between citizens and their governments is far less obvious. Trust within nations seems instead to be derived from prosperity and wealth distribution. Extending this result to the global society suggests that in a stagnating global economy, only a globally equitable wealth distribution is capable of maintaining the trust required to facilitated maintenance and progress of a global society in the face of passive adversity. (Active adversity, such as an external invader, in itself elicits cooperation among distinct, mutually threatened groups.)
Logically, fairness, including equitable wealth distribution is required for trust. Wealth distribution is determined by social and economic policy and people determine policy. If the system is unfair and produces an unfair distribution of resources, I must ultimately fault people. People control the government by participating in it or by being accepting of it. Some of those people have high levels of influence over the system, others little, and because all people have some level of influence over the system, eventually, the system's unfairness will breed distrust among the people.
Still, equitable wealth distribution is insufficient alone to produce trust. There must be a cultural component as well, such that the rest of the system is perceived as fair. In fact this culture can broaden the wealth distribution curves that are perceived as equitable. In essence, trust must exist and cannot be simply or easily injected into an untrusting society. The transition is eased by equitable resource distribution, good governance, fairness and other social factors, but the generational and learned inmates trust can be strengthened independently of other influences in individuals that chose to trust first. In fact it is the leap of faith to trust first that seems to make interaction building possible at all.
So long as the flame of trust burns, it brightens the future for all.
Even in the light of trust, with strong collaboration among people and nations, false truth can undermine a society's ability to deal with adversity. While individual doubt is healthy and required, societal action must be reasonably permitted, and individuals must be forgiving of the actions flying in the face of their personal doubt. And in time, we must assume that our doubts and mistruths will be resolved in accordance with the universe. To some extent, it is even required that we trust the universe that the resolution process is amicable or at least acceptable. This is just as true for nations and societies as it is for individuals.
When assessing different solutions for the system in its entirety, we need to allow and encourage testing of such solutions. Thorough tests are nearly or completely impossible to conduct. Still, small scale approximations that work well can and should have an accepted process for scaling up to change even the outermost level of organization. Proposing San Francisco, California as a test bed for unrestricted Mincome, we might easily run a thought experiment first to generate our hypothesis.
San Francisco is a popular place to live. Additionally, it has some strong physical limits imposed by the landscape, being surrounded by water on three sides. Already, we know this causes problems with space availability as reflected in the housing market. So, we can easily expect a naive, unrestricted Mincome implementation to fail because no amount of money would allow the people that want to live there to find housing. There is no more housing to find. Even if we allow them to build housing, serious cost and space concerns arise.
On the other hand, if San Francisco is allowed to prevent immigration locally, much as the Galápagos Islands restrict travel, the thought experiment would likely result in a provocative success. Either the city could remove the existing homeless population and prevent their reentry, or they could subsidize away the problem for the existing population and prevent further immigration. This solution removes freedom of travel, making it more comparable to a global implementation of minimum income because immigration to Earth doesn't exist.
While there is at least one fundamental inconsistency within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDoHR) as it’s written, it pretty well covers what we hope a mature human civilization would provide to every member therein, should they choose to take it (a caveat I’ll return to later). At the same time, everything in the declaration is basically a service in one form or another and all services require money to provide. Therefore in practice, various nations are able to implement the UDoHR to different degrees and with different strategies and challenges to their implementations.
Maybe take a more in depth look at some example countries, so on and so forth (not just the ones that are close to UDoHR from a Western sense, but also maybe Saudi Arabia, Italy, China, Singapore and Somalia).
Stepping out of the box, let’s look at how the Universe restricts its shape and one way we might go about trying to implement as many of the UDoHR tenants as possible on Earth today.
Balancing truth and positivity is a fundamental aspect of my personal philosophy. It underpins many of my morals, goals, feelings, thoughts and actions. And while it's certainly not a religion, it is my religion or at least an important component thereof. To the extent that every person, organization or group, be it formal or informal, has religion, as in a unique set of guiding principles, from my vantage point, it appears far more common to greater emphasize positivity than to emphasize truth. An inconvenient truth is aptly named for this reason, but global climate change is not the only topic appropriate for that title. Maybe I'd go on to talk about the *socioeconomic struggle* of middle class Europeans, Japanese and Americans in the face of globalization, or overpopulation, or peak oil, or the *potential obsolescence of human labor* and the plethora of *out of work* or unemployed individuals. But what we really need to talk about is how we got to this place of inconvenient truths and how we might yet walk away with scars that fade instead of amputated limbs and *traumatic memory loss* or PTSD (motivated forgetting on Wikipedia).
Our positivity today exists in the context of our past and our conception thereof. Modern cultural understanding comes from a long history of American success over the past 100 years. Perception of human history, dating back centuries and millennia, further reinforces modern attitudes. Schooling, entertainment and almost every other exposure to history focuses on the impressive, the eventful, the progressive and the majestic. Since these times are long gone, we package most historical events together in our minds. We lose perspective on the immense amount of time it took to arrive at our present condition. In reality, civilizations rose and fell across the planet over the course of several thousand years. There were periods of progress and periods of stagnation and periods of regression. Societal and economic growth only happen sometimes. We seem to have forgotten this recently.
Or, rather than, forget the normalcy of economic stagnation and stability, perhaps we lack the education. Living in times of growth and prosperity for generations, we learned to expect it. America has been a global superpower for about 150 years now. The industrial revolution ratcheted a territorial expansion (robbery of natives’ land) and population growth into previously unfathomable demographic transformation. Cities became the size of empires and with more people and more technological experimentation, the acceleration of breakthrough after breakthrough begun over a century ago continues today. Again we lose context; we focus on globalization’s novelty, rather than the typicality of temporary expansion followed by long, steady lulls.
Globalization has brought amazing magnitude and interconnectedness to our growth. At the same time, we’ve moved at different rates, leaving many groups stratified and siloed. Importantly, the groups with greatest influence and power have retained their positivity with their fame, money and success. As an investment banker, programmer, doctor, CEO or any one of so many profitable roles in society, the positivity comes as expected, token, unsurprising. We in the United States miss the mobility required to balance the past’s optimism with the troubling realities of the present. The diversity of opinion reflective of the true state of affairs percolates slowly into the minds of society’s rich leaders and isolated academics.
These societal organization issues thrive also because of our individual biases. In its difficulty, fighting the innate drive of our nature parallels knowing what we have yet to learn. Even after the truth presents itself to our face, *we want to reject it*. Sometimes, personal motives make the desire to deny the truth even worse. As a widely accepted example, take the tobacco industry’s denial of cigarette’s link to cancer. At first, I’m sure the business leaders simply wanted to refuse the results because human nature drove them to favor hope over truth. After tests confirmed the results, however, the fault shifts to their conscious decision making process. What started in their biology was reinforced by their desire to make money, and rejection of fact cemented in their brains. In the worst case, the untruth is a neurological parasite that spreads to infect other hosts. If they too are predisposed to lie because of their incentives, similar complications continue to cause verbal vomit and allow the parasite to continue its lifecycle. Even when the issue is less contagious, hidden only by human nature, it threatens to grow on it’s own. Unfortunately, we as a society make these dangerous subjects commonplace by allowing positivity to outweigh truth.
Any number of inconvenient subjects important to our future avoid meaningful discussion. The most challenging ones endanger our very existence.
Bringing balance back to our positivity is a challenge we can and must pass. Thankfully, we posses several tools suited to this undertaking. We can focus on evidence-based policy. We can run more frequent experiments to test policy initiatives. We can give experts more authority when our external environment challenges us. We can recommit to inclusive politics, where all voices are heard and valued. A combination of all these strategies will give the best chance of balancing truth and positivity in America and throughout the world.
It’s true that humans have optimistic goals. We have policy for the sake of reaching these goals. For example, when we wanted to go to the moon, we created a space program. When we want to reduce homelessness, we alter zoning and economic policies to spur development and job growth. Yet, the goals rarely exist in the written policy itself. By pursuing goal oriented legislation, we hold ourselves more accountable to our history of goal achievement. Goal oriented legislation prevents us from hiding or forgetting failures to meet goals and deadlines. It creates a framework for evidence based policy and experimentation, and it makes the truth more plain.
Experimenting with policy implementation and using the results as evidence for altering our policies and platforms will help us find the downsides we miss in our organic social organization. While ideas for goals, metrics, prioritization and experiments should come from the people, evidence and experimental results should inform the policies based on those ideas. While higher levels of government sometimes use lower levels to experiment with various social policy implementations, cities could be leveraged far more as proving grounds. In this way, even if the state or federal government is divided, experiments can be designed to test a proposed policy from either side. Suburban or rural communities could similarly be used as test subjects for new policies. In this way, social ills and internal challenges can be addressed systematically over time.
Challenges to society arise from our external environment in addition to our internal structure. To prevent external threats from blindsiding us, we must remain ever watchful of changes in our surroundings. One way to institutionalize this observation and to incorporate it into policy is by giving communities of experts earned influence in the legislative process. Typically, this is unnecessary because leaders see the obvious external threats without expert influence. For example, if scientists informed the government about an imminent asteroid impact, policy makers would move to fund programs to address the danger. However, as discussed earlier, there are times when biases and misaligned incentives cause individuals or even groups of leaders to turn a blind I to such threats. In this case, we need to change the system so that expert consensus is capable of counteracting lobbying biases.
Finally, we must make an inherent commitment to overcome a social bias. While perhaps less of a threat, a bias to exclude those different from us hurts our strength as an inclusive nation. It prohibits us from reaching bipartisan consensus and from effectively discussing controversial topics. Therefore, we must recommit to our founding principle that all people are created equal. We all have a vote. We all have a voice. And we all have a need to be heard by the systems that organize us. And beyond that, we all have human needs that an effective government empowers us to address - basic needs, but also the need to create, and the need to love, and the need be accepted and be loved. Only with a commitment to inclusion can we truly use the rest of the tools to solve the difficult problems of a global society.
These tools to converge on a healthy balance of truth and positivity are all things we can do today. The sooner we enact changes to discover and address threats unseen by our leaders today, the safer we will be in the future. Together, let us build a better future.
Masturbation is a normal and healthy behavior for both sexes, and in fact several, studies identify improved health in subjects who masturbate more frequently, as compared to those who masturbate less frequently. Though as with many scientific investigations in which the subject biological, there are studies which draw both beneficial and detrimental conclusions. But enough with the physicalism, masturbation feels fucking great! Sadly, the nature of masturbation habits remains a largely personal and privately maintained aspect of one's self identity. Let's examine masturbation, common practices, how it fits into society, and the consequences of various actions surrounding masturbation in order to explore how we feel about when it's right and when it's wrong.
About the author: Given that I personally hold the right to privacy in very low regard with respect to many other freedoms, discussing anything about myself is relatively fun and easy. Even publicly. Even with strangers. On the topic of masturbation, blurring into sexuality and other preferences at times, I tend toward fantasizing primarily about female human forms enjoying sexual pleasure, especially orgasm. When I'm not masturbating, my thoughts about sex in general, as with my thoughts about generally everything, stray in all directions. For example, I may consider the nature of a society in which bestiality is normal, or under what circumstances you might sleep with a blood relative and have it be considered by most people as reasonable and moral acceptable (eg. accidentally, under extreme duress, etc.). I have thought about what it would be like to be raped and how to (attempt to) enjoy being raped even if the circumstance is highly undesirable, such as anal, then oral penetration by an ugly, dirty stranger with a very large penis.
Well over two hundred years ago now, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “All men are created equal.” Today, we still struggle with the essence of that historic truth.
What does it really mean that all men are created equal? We could go back many centuries to look at the nature of land ownership and how it’s dispersal has moved gradually from those who came up with the idea to the general populous. We could reflect on the ever expanding nature of civil rights protections, the extension of basic civil liberties to people of every race, creed, sex, gender, etc. We could note how we often think of meritocracy and diversity as ideals yet to be realized. But, if we conceive of societal equality as newborns entering into the world with an equal shot at success, rebellion ensues.
No parent would think it equitable to restrict the ability to pass on wealth or privilege to its offspring. In this manner, as a society, we clearly practice social Darwinism; the success and influence of each generation is transferred to the next through wealth, fame and even power. At the same time, we have long established institutions (e.g. estate taxes) to reduce our natural tendency toward social Darwinism. Ultimately, there is a balance between equality and pure social Darwinism that represents our current definition of equality. However, the current state of affairs differs significantly from our intuition of true equality, which would provide basic rights and healthy living conditions for all people. How is this possible?
First, social Darwinism is a self-reinforcing tendency that promotes social stratification. Money makes more money, and people in positions of power or fame tend to cling to their circumstances by whatever means necessary. On the other end of the spectrum, the most neglected people will exist in whatever state society has deemed acceptable. As long as we feel like situational homelessness is okay, people who want shelter will sleep on the street. As long as we feel like it’s fine for people to suffer in pain because they can’t afford medical treatment, people will suffer. Certainly there are limits to what can be sustained as acceptable, and we will always be forced to recon with the balance between that sustainability and what we deem to be minimally acceptable circumstances. Even so, is the status quo what we want that balance to be? Intuitively, we know we can do better.
Second, humans have yet to create a policy framework that successfully counter-balances our tendency toward social Darwinism. And for good reason: it’s very difficult to accomplish. Perhaps even historically impossible. It’s been said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And because the equal distribution of power in society is and has always been inhibited by a need for efficient decision making processes, we consolidate power. Maybe that’s why some people say that democracy is the worst form of government people have ever tried, except for all the other forms of government.
Because social Darwinism is such a powerful force in modern society, and because it’s a prevailing force throughout recorded history, we need to try new things if it is a force with which we truly want to reckon. We need to experiment with stronger policies that ensure we are living our self evident truth: “All men are created equal.” Currently, we allow social Darwinism to the extent that some people have nothing, others too much. Regarding both the destitution and the extravagance we allow today, “That shit cray!”
As our most fortunate members improve even beyond our natural human limits while some still starve in the streets, we can reflect on individual human experiences as the most stratified and most disparate that they have ever been. Sooner rather than later, we should decide how we want to carry the present panorama of our shared experience into the future.
When I brought up the topic of self-guided human evolution as a soon-to-be relevant topic concern, especially for well-off individuals, a friend of mine paused. In a brief silence, his demeanor shifted slowly from dismissive to disgusted. He went on to explain how the related topic of technology as a barrier had recently confronted him at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. As a child of Chinese immigrants, he grew up hearing the praises of technology as a great equalizer. Now, as a 38-year-old technology professional, he was taken slightly aback by the realization that no longer could the basic tools for breaking ground in tech be acquired through the local thrift store or the public library.
Times have changed. And while realistically there always have been — and likely will be for a long time to come — unequal barriers to success, right now, these barriers — supported by the practices of modern American and global society — continue to grow. Unfettered, some groups will start pulling away from the pack, not just financially, but experientially as well. We live in an age where artificial bionic devices are starting to outcompete our natural abilities. Replacement lenses allow you to see up to three times farther, and artificial limbs outperform traditional ones. To prevent known genetic diseases and anomalies, you can screen for your offspring before they are even conceived. And, biology isn’t the only frontier where technology is dramatically pushing the basic human experience to previously unreachable heights.
From Elon Musk’s mission to colonize Mars by 2030 to Google’s self-driving cars hitting the road and displacing millions of workers, the future is coming — in all of its glory and in all of its horror. At the same time, the past has not left. Less than half the world has access to the internet, over 1 million Americans lack indoor plumbing, and people still pass away daily from preventable disease, dehydration and malnutrition. Stratification is commonplace and ever more extreme each day. In San Francisco, it’s possible to see boys on shiny, minimalist, motorized transportation devices pass by dirty, old men sleeping in the street with less than 5 dollars to their name.
To be cliche, the future holds endless possibilities. As a species, we will chose a path to venture down. Pre-emptive though this may be, we ought to start strongly considering which paths we most prefer. With the privatization of space travel and the further stratification of wealth, dystopian scenarios from science fiction become ever more tangible. At one extreme of unlikeliness is that humans establish a sustainable Martian colony while the overpopulation and environmental degradation on Earth creates widespread famine and decay. Alternatively yet also extremely, we may see humankind come together globally and put our world-wide issues in front of any issues of national or personal pride. Will we work toward defining a box — a boundary, within which, human experience must be able to fall, and simultaneously, be prevented from spilling out its top?
The core philosophical issue is perhaps no more complicated than, “How should we treat our fellow human beings, our brothers and sisters?” And yet, when asked on a universal level for all mankind, the question becomes mired in policy and politics, culture and creed. Personally, I have little preference as to exactly where we go. Simply, I want to go together, with as many people as possible. To grow up as a family.
While Govtech Fund manager Ron Bouganim was speaking to a group of us at Code for America Headquarters today, I couldn’t help but fixate on a specific statement. Only tangentially related to his main point, the statement was simple: “My investors are expecting a 4x or 5x return on their investment.” Not, “hoping for,” or, “wanting,” but, “expecting.”
He went on to clarify the period over which the return was expected and that it came out to a 25% per annum ROI. Given that investment is basically a form of big picture gambling, I kept asking myself how intelligent, successful human beings could expect results that differ so tremendously from the expected ROI in the market as a whole. For example, even over a relatively good period (since January of 2009), the S&P 500 only produced a 15% per annum ROI (as calculated here). A more solid investment strategy will likely yield such high returns only in the best years.
The best explanation I can come up with is that very successful individuals (Govtech Fund has some high-powered investors — e.g. Jeff Bezos) have access to specific investment contexts that the rest of us don’t. When you can afford to invest millions of dollars in a single place, the current economic climate lets you ‘expect’ to make money at a much higher rate of return than the average investor.
While I think this is pretty common knowledge — that super wealthy investors are privileged to a specific context with specific expectations, expectations well above what I would consider ‘normal’ — it consistently makes me wonder, “Do I really want to live in a world where power, influence and the course of human evolution are decided by such a small portion of the species?” And, does my answer change if that world just happens to be more or less awesome?
Evolution for all animal species occurs at the biological level. When gametes undergo meiosis, chromosomal crossover that occurred in the parents' gonads ensures that offspring are significantly varied while retaining the basic traits of their progenitors. Some species are social, and they may well undergo nuanced cultural evolution which makes things like the dolphin version of rape more or less acceptable among larger groups of dolphins. I am not sure if this actually occurs, but one can certainly imagine that it might occur.
As I was reading about the Research Priorities Lawsuit in loose connection with my current work at Code for America, I got sidetracked thinking about how a guaranteed minimum income would perhaps offload a substantial portion of the burdens - strictly the financial portion, and more so, all areas that financial burdens pour over into (relationships, healthcare, education, etc.) - surrounding behavioral and occupational changes, even in the face of nostalgia toward upholding historical values and pastimes. In the face of mounting efficiencies accruing elsewhere throughout the larger national or international systems that comprise humanity (pesticides use in agriculture in this case), the larger population is often clearly and implicitly in favor of such transitions, and yet the dialogue surrounding the process of actually transitioning all too frequently focuses on the large, non-monetary costs associated with the change (historical value preservation, culture change, reeducation, etc.), while ignoring the financial costs, which may be greater still! Assuming that this discourse is largely an unconscious societal byproduct of our emotional nature, how would guaranteed minimum income affect the situation? What important changes would come to the occupational transition process? Would monetary aspects enter into the conversation to a greater or lesser degree than they do currently? How would the conversation be changed in general?
In this case, I was thinking specifically about a minimum income aspect of any hypothetical standardized income distribution scheme, and I was thinking about the context of the history of CAFF and the Research Priorities Lawsuit specifically. In a larger thought experiment, I might try applying the theme of "How would standardized income distribution have impacted that?" to other historical contexts.
Maybe some other time I'll write my own answers to the questions I posed above; however, given the historical precedent of my de-prioritization of blog-posting (most/all posts are either unpublished, incomplete or nonsensical - intrapersonal), that seems unlikely :)
While attending the HPMOR Wrap party outside the Valley Life Sciences Building this past weekend, CFAR Executive Director and Cofounder Anna Salamon, encouraged a group of UC-Berkeley students and others (myself included) to write more under the premise that anything you convert into a physical artifact provides a natural extension of your memory and is therefore beneficial. So, despite the tradeoffs inherent in recording my thoughts and experiences - particularly for all to see, an aspect which Anna wasn't necessarily considering in her comments - here I am.
Rather than discuss the fun and revelry of the HPMOR gathering though, I'm here to inscribe some thoughts I've had regarding human population management policies dating back originally to sometime in college, between 2006 and 2010, though I think mostly originating in early 2007. The original idea, as I recall, comes from ideating remedies to human overpopulation of Earth while also reading about cap and trade regimes as an effort to regulate carbon emissions. The natural juxtaposition of these concepts led to a policy conception of a cap and trade system on human life, which remains to this day my favorite systemic mechanism for directly addressing the root cause of overpopulation. Please keep in mind, there are many other policies for which I would advocate first or under the most dire circumstances, in addition to human population caps, which would attempt to manage population growth.
For now, I'm going to ignore the various benefits and downsides of having an active human population management policy and simply focus on my preferred the designed proposal for human population management, its benefits and its drawbacks. Perhaps in a later post I'll return to comment on other policies and on why a human population management policy is or is not beneficial to have in the first place. Let's begin with a brief description of why I'm choosing to discuss population management in the first place: because as humans have come to control the evolution of their own species from sociological, technological and, likely soon to be, biological standpoints, population size with respect to our environment and with respect to our goals for own evolution are impacted in a large way by the size of our population. This one aspect of humanity is perhaps the simplest and most direct way to control our own evolution as a species.
As such, the root of any human population management strategy should be to facilitate the desired evolution of humanity while maintaining and advancing the quality of life for the species as a whole and for the individuals thereof. Rather than propose goals for humanity or its evolution, I will focus on the impacts of population on quality of life while trying to avoid assumptions about which futures of our species are most or least desirable. The discussion can be broken up along several spectra, of which we will examine effects on individuals and effects on the whole population and on severity of the effects.
Work in progress (which is also true of the above, just a bit less so)...
First, let's look at the effects of population size on the quality of life provided to an individual. If you have too few people, you likely end up with a relatively less fulfilling life in the sense that one would expect a lower average quality of relationship fulfillment. This is predominately due to the relative lack of other humans with whom to interact, which restricts your choices and lowers the expected quality of interaction that results.
Next, let's look at the effects of population size on the species as a whole. If you have too few people, you face in the extreme, the existential risk of an extinction vortex, and in general, you face reduced robustness due to external pressures. If you have too many people, you face in the extreme, risk of societal collapse due to resource mismanagement.
Having a greater number of people with whom to interact will presumably increase one's quality of life to some point, and it will require the resources of the system to be split among more individuals, requiring each individual to have a smaller allocation of resources available to oneself. So presumably, there is some optimal number of people that should exist in any system with finite resources (e.g. Earth). Since the optimal number is dependent on a myriad, perhaps infinite number of variables, I'll refrain from trying to come up with a specific target or upper bound. As a lower bound, let's say that humans don't want humans to go extinct (I know that some individual humans argue for human extinction, but this is not a commonly held belief) and therefore, we need enough genetic variation in our population to prevent an extinction vortex.
I just attempted to write a blog entry in third person, complaining about how feminist and gender queer blog entries sometimes become
very dark. Generalizing the bleak, derogatory abyss of
Reading a number of feminist and LGBT centric blog posts over the past several years, most of them have the right idea, focusing on awareness and empowerment of groups that have traditionally been underserved and underrepresented. The spirt of the movement seems to be about empowering individuals to live life as they feel compelled to live. Certainly, we all want the freedom to experience the world and interact with others in constructive, mutually beneficial ways, and some groups have been historically, systematically excluded from flowing through society in that way. Emphasizing that fact is important, and should definitely continue to take center stage until it becomes a reality. And, that's where it could end.
Sometimes it does end there. Occasionally, though, it continues into shall we say, darker realms, where negativity creeps in and people are encouraged to feel that, simply because they are lucky, they are somehow inherently wrong or bad or evil. Recognizably, usually, the intent of these darker facets is to further the awareness of less well-know societal aspects by prompting the readers to self-examine and analyze how they personally affect and are affected by groups with whom they may otherwise have considered only briefly. This is reasonable, and it can be done in a more positive way. For example, it works to to tell stories where the reader identifies with the primary actor and in which the primary actor goes through a transformative experience in relation to the subject matter. Alternatively, direct questions and answers based on personal experience are a good way to provide perspective. Do you know anyone who is homosexual? Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be physically intimate with someone in order to share a human experience, even if that person is different from you in ways of which you have little understanding? Have you ever tried or even considered being someone you just met and who compulsively repulses you because of who they are? Are you repulsed because that's who you are, or are you repulsed because you have yet to fathom who they are?
Reading a number of feminist and LGBT centric blog posts over the past several years, most of them have the right idea, focusing on awareness and empowerment of groups that have traditionally been underserved and underrepresented. The spirt of the movement seems to be about empowering individuals to live life as they feel compelled to live. Certainly, we all want the freedom to experience the world and interact with others in constructive, mutually beneficial ways, and some groups have been historically, systematically excluded from flowing through society in that way. Emphasizing that fact is important, and should definitely continue to take center stage until it becomes a reality. And, that's where it could end.
Sometimes it does end there. Occasionally, though, it continues into shall we say, darker realms, where negativity creeps in and people are encouraged to feel that, simply because they are lucky, they are somehow inherently wrong or bad or evil. Recognizably, usually, the intent of these darker facets is to further the awareness of less well-know societal aspects by prompting the readers to self-examine and analyze how they personally affect and are affected by groups with whom they may otherwise have considered only briefly. This is reasonable, and it can be done in a more positive way. For example, it works to to tell stories where the reader identifies with the primary actor and in which the primary actor goes through a transformative experience in relation to the subject matter. Alternatively, direct questions and answers based on personal experience are a good way to provide perspective. Do you know anyone who is homosexual? Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be physically intimate with someone in order to share a human experience, even if that person is different from you in ways of which you have little understanding? Have you ever tried or even considered being someone you just met and who compulsively repulses you because of who they are? Are you repulsed because that's who you are, or are you repulsed because you have yet to fathom who they are?
2014-09-19. This is a public diary.
I love <
And still, we are so different that any union is sure to be rife with compromises. Big important compromises: children, career, friendships, hobbies, etc. So why is it that one still wants something so fundamentally problematic. Is it timing, luck, fate or fortune? Is it biology, physiology or psychology? Is it romance, magic or something else?
I think for me it's balance. Being able to respect and identify with another competent, rational, intelligent human being and share our observations, thoughts and interpretations having them be different, even mutually exclusive, and yet still valid to each individual separately. Having the divergence be so close to the core, the most desirable, passionate relationships are inherently the most problematic. Hopefully I'm just too young and have yet to discover true love, something similar yet simpler.
I'm making this into a public diary. It is not a blog. It is for me. It's public, perhaps selfishly, for me as well. Because I want to live without secrets, it is for me, my freedom.
The below content was written a few months ago and is unrelated to the above decision.
I received my undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from UW Madison in 2010. Still trying to develop life goals, I worked at Epic in the Technical Services role for 2.8 years where I gained a wonderful respect and appreciation for technology's ability to transform entire sectors of the economy. In order to pursue a greater understanding of software and business, I left Epic and started work at EatStreet.com, a Madison startup creating an internet ordering platform for independent local restaurants and small chains. Currently, I do freelance work for another pre-market venture aimed at helping accounting practices go paper-free, while also continuing to learn and work at EatStreet.
Passion for understanding others' ideas, community, equality and global human development motivates me far more than money, influence, power and at times even more than relationships. At TEDx Madison 2014, I want to learn about and to try to understand other people's motivations, ideas and experiences and how they relate to my own passions and motivations. If requested, I would happily want to put together a talk on observations regarding current trends in the development of global human culture and society (diplomacy/international law, economic and financial trends, language/housing/clothing/food, technology, health, education, etc.; basically an overview of - as a species - where we've come from, where we are, and perhaps touching briefly on some places we might yet go); I would want to present it if I thought it was good enough and if others validated that opinion.
Basically two things can happen when one of the leading super powers finally goes so far as to simply not pay back our debts in an agreeable manner. War and forgiveness. For the sake of understanding how the citizens of the lender nations feel in this circumstance, let's pretend that the US is actually a lender nation, and that the EU is actually a debtor nation that owes the US trillions of dollars and is about to default on it's debt and working on renegotiating that debt with the US. The president is working with Congress to decide
If all of mankind were represented by a single individual, how well are that person's needs being met? And, what could that person change to more adequately meet it's own needs? I'm American, specifically united statesian, so I'm going to go ahead and assume this person has needs based off an average American lifestyle, but if you're reading this from another country, go ahead and extract and augment facets of individual need as you see fit. Yes, I'm applying global statistics to an American mindset of needs (just to be clear).
Air, food, water. A human being expends about
Choosing your relationships is largely considered a fundamental right in our society. True, this is not necessarily the case in other cultures, but in the United States, you can marry, divorce, disown, disinherit, inherit, etc. pretty much at will. There are a few notable exceptions: 1) you cannot choose to add to your family outside of the one living spouse per person rule (and in some states that person still has to be of the opposite gender) and 2) acknowledgement of children is forcible under certain circumstances. These circumstances disproportionately affect men, as physically, pregnancy disproportionately affects women.
Sex should never, ever be tied directly with offspring unless it's someone's, and preferably multiple people's choice. Abortion should be legal because a person's right to the pursuit of happiness through sexual pleasure should trump the state's right to protect the potentiality of human life (context matters, so certainly there are other epochs when this is not true). Abortion should be legal right now. But it's not.
Somehow, the state still maintains that it has a vested interest in protecting the well being of a fetus, and that it's interest in doing so increases as the fetus matures. This is probably wrong, but most people cannot yet see it that way; they don't want to see it. Why does the state have a vested interest in protecting an unborn human? Presumably, we assume from a legal standpoint, reflecting societies values, that human life is inherently valuable to the society, and therefore this makes sense. The value of the human life comes in many forms - it's joyous and harmonious relationships to others, the contributions is makes to maintaining our species and our societal structure, etc. I think we can all agree that human life is generally valuable in both quality and quantity. But, like anything, too much is not good. If the planet were filled entirely with humans we couldn't move, we couldn't leave, and we would all pretty much get bored and want to die. Economically, we probably want a population size that optimizes for both quantity and quality of life. At some point, we don't want more people. What would be some good indicators that we have enough people? And at that point, does the government still have a vested interest in protecting an unborn human? The answer is that we have a vested interest in agreeing to policy structures locally, nationally, globally that help regulate the population in such a way that we generally all agree is mutually beneficial. This is incredibly difficult. Ideally, we would not regulate, people would just have a small number of children, and thankfully, this happens naturally to some extent.
People are unjustifiably hubris when it comes to defending the nature of our species. We have failed before, and we will fail again. What we can hope to achieve is to learn from our failures and lessen the magnitude of each one consecutively. In a way, that will happen when we ruin our planet and or have a lasting catastrophic global depression sometime over the course of the next several decades. Let's compare our global civilization to that of the Easter Islanders. We likely won't fail in the sense that we will all have to leave the planet, because 1) we can't leave and because 2) extinction would require an incredibly extreme change of global climate, potentially beyond the likes of climate change and/or nuclear war (though I would be interested in a well though-out counter claim). We will fail in the sense that we're effectively lowering the carrying capacity of our planet in the long run and at a minimum we will undergo massive penalties to the quality of life experienced by human beings across the globe, and potentially a sizable loss in the quantity of that life as well.
Ultimately, my point isn't that abortion should be legal - it should, but that's not my point really. My point is that it should be legal so that we correctly balance our desire for quantity of life against our desire for quality of life. We want abortion to be legal, all abortion. And, we want everyone to feel safe and secure about meeting their sexual needs. Let's legalize all abortion where it's someones choice. Forward!
Today sucked. I wasn't able to focus at work, partially because I was attempting to do things that are fairly boring like write and validate unit tests for a bunch of old xml endpoints, and partially because I was distracted by my incessant desire to feel in control. Grams asked me recently if I felt in control of my life and I just sort of laughed. I think that I would have said yes until about six or nine months ago. It's still quite a strange question, what is control. Our understanding of the universe seems to be that things are largely determined by the nature of random details, and that control is largely an abstract illusion. Even when I know what I want, why I want it, and approximately how to get it, I can fail to actually act toward what I want, or I can be distracted or realize that maybe I don't want it after all. Worst of all, you can end up getting either something you didn't plan for that is perceived as negative (this made me cry today - http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-hardest-thing-you-have-ever-done) or you can get something that you explicitly planned against.
This post sucks, but I'm not editing or making it longer because I'm tired, and I'm going to go do flips and go to bed.
Good things about today... I ate good food (http://www.goodfoodmadison.com / http://www.maharanimadison.com/home.html).
I talked with Alex about work, and I have clear goals for tomorrow.
I live in a world with other people.
I intentionally listened to opera and actually enjoyed it, which might be a first.
I'd like to introduce myself and explain the impossible moral predicament , okay, perhaps that's overly dramatic, but no one would deny that it's a tough situation, in which I find myself. My name is Grant Robert Smith, and I currently don't know what to do. I have never wanted to be a parent, and I currently still do not want to be a parent. I have been forced by the universe to strongly reconsider whether being a parent is the right thing to do, and despite the nature of my current situation, my moral conviction currently leads me to believe that it's still not the right thing for me to do to be a parent. My problem is that the nature of the laws in this country at this time (USA, Earth - 2013 AD) do not permit me to ask, in good conscious, that the court determine that I am not a parent - despite my fundamental moral resolve to such an end. To do so would, perhaps, undermine the nature of society by forcing upon it a change so vast and so fundamental that the law itself, at least in certain regards, might not sustain us. This is my story:
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After graduating college nearly three years ago, I started working at <
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First, I should explain this: who is R, to me? R is a wonderful person, capable of much compassion, joy, hard work and love. She has added a lot to my life. I have learned about how to phrase my thoughts in a more empathetic manner and what it means to be romantic from her (though I’ll admit I have a lot of room for improvement yet in both areas). I have also learned how to better empathize with people, especially those who want to be parents, a concept which is quite foreign to me. I'm very grateful for that. I'm quite certain, that like most parents, she loves her daughter E more than life itself. To the best of my knowledge she loves and respects me, but her world view is so disparate from mind that I'm failing to help her understand who I am or why my situation is impossible, despite my continuous and consistent efforts. Recently, she stopped talking to me all of the sudden, and I don't fully understand why, and it saddens me. But, I'll get back to this part.
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For the weekend of New Years 2012, I planned a trip to visit friends and family in Mequon and Chicago, and rather spontaneously. I asked R if she'd like to "drive me" (those were my exact words, haha) to Chicago because she didn't have any plans and our roommates were also going to Chicago to see friends. Rather to my surprise, she said yes; she packed a bag and we drove to Chicago shortly thereafter.
In Chicago, we stayed at my friend Jorge's house. Jorge's a relatively unique individual in my mind because he has an incredible commitment to the truth, much like myself. Additionally, he enjoys helping people and understanding who they are and how they think. The nature of the company with whom we spent New Years Eve and the atmosphere of the conversations had were incredibly open. It was then that I learned about how R had been molested by her grandfather as a child, and that she had a history of depression and difficulty trusting others. It was also that night when I realized that she had a romantic interest in me (apparently the direct question about whether I had an interest in her didn't tip me off - yes, I can be that dense). I shared that I did have some interest in having a more intimate relationship with R, but that I was opposed to the idea because I knew she wanted children, and I knew that I did not, and therefore I knew that it could never work out as a long-term relationship.
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I also said that I wasn't physically attracted to R, which was a poor way of saying that I find it difficult to respect people, especially women, who don't respect their bodies; I don't know if this is important to the story, but it kind of feels like it, so I'm including it anyway. For the record, I lose some respect for men who don't respect their bodies too, but my pursuits of physical intimacy with men are generally more focused on their desire of me, so I prioritize their respect for their bodies somewhat lower...
Generally, I'm pretty idealistic, and I've always been rather more interested in long-term relationships than short-term ones, but I was 23 and a half years old, had never been in a consistently emotionally and/or physically intimate relationship (I had never even kissed a girl - reads: but I had made out with guys - except maybe once on a dare, but I don't remember if that was before or after this though), and R was obviously interested in me. One of the things that Sarah, another friend visiting Jorge that night, said to me which has stuck with me is that part of relationships is "the mess." You can sit back and analyze and contemplate and plan and ponder, but eventually, the only way to learn is to jump into the mess for yourself and see what happens. It probably sticks with me because of the irony: 'cause I sure am messy now.
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We wrapped up the weekend by meeting up with Matt and Michelle and then driving home to Madison. In the car, I continued with the openness of the previous evening and shared with R the things that came to my mind that I felt were most important or troubling to me at the time. I remember a few of them: I have trouble initiating physical intimacy because I don't want to make other people feel uncomfortable. This causes me extreme sexual frustration at times because I don't know what the right thing to do is in many situations, and because societally, women aren't attracted to sexually non-aggressive men, even if they are incredibly self-assured in almost every other aspect of life. After I get back to a point where I'm able to form intimate relationships without unduly interjecting my emotional burden on potential partners, maybe I’ll get a chance to work on that :)
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(To Do: Finish the story.)
[The short version: we start having sex. She agrees that she will abort any life inadvertently created as an unwanted byproduct of our physical intimacy. She starts talking about her plans to have a child in 2 years (at age 28/29), this includes talk of the cost of artificial insemination and of the cost and adoption as well as mentions of the difficulties in attempting to adopt as a single mother. She gets pregnant (by accident - her claim is that she was on birth control of a low dose and occasionally would take it at different times of the day, which her doctor says would reduce the efficacy of it to 94%. We used condoms also, though not consistently). She tells me that she has changed her mind and decides not to get an abortion; I am outraged. I become as angry as I have ever been; I say very mean things and feel very badly for saying them. I cannot remember specifics of those conversations because I mostly blocked them out of my memory. Eventually, I rectify the scenario in my mind by considering myself the sperm donor and stating as such to her. I call a lawyer and ask if the state will recognize a written contract stating our intention for me to be considered the sperm donor in the eyes of the state. He tells me that he’s never heard of such a thing, but that it would be a waste of my time because the state would almost certainly find the contract to be invalid given the nature of parenthood. In retrospect, I think that he’s probably right, and at the time I trust his judgement and do not pursue the contract further. I state that I am not nor will I ever be the parent of her child; this makes her sad, but I continue to say it anyway over the entire course of the pregnancy and even to this day, for it is the only way I have ever felt or thought. We continue sleeping together because I love R as a person and because the relationship fulfills a lot of my needs: I have a companion who appreciates and desires my company, emotionally and physically. She is capable of entertaining herself, and I trust her to support herself as a human being on her own, even when she is very depressed. I am intellectually engaged by the nature of her mental state, which seems to be internally inconsistent, and is therefore difficult for me to understand. I now realize that most people, even those who are stubborn have the ability to change their mind in certain circumstances, even on very important moral issues. Many people also have the ability to misinterpret their own intentions and change their moral frameworks because their frameworks are not solidly founded on guiding principles like mine (The one absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth; everything depends on context. After that I have a firm and steadfast commitment to doing what’s right. I attempt to determine this by considering the context of my situation in combination with my guiding principles of truth, balance, and positivity.) ]
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Finally, I'd like to answer one more question for you: Who am I? Who is Grant Robert Smith? I've spent a considerable amount of time answering this question, so please do not take my answer lightly:
I live my life trying to align what I want, with what is right: I want to do what is right, and I try to make that which is right the thing that I do. I do my best to define what is right be looking at the context in which I find myself...
Example: What is the right thing to do with my life? I think that the right thing to do with my life is to devote myself to the development of software tools to aid in the transparency, accessibility, and openness of government. I think this because when I look at humanity in the context of the era and in the context of the world in which we live, I see many large problems without obvious solutions. I see the nature of software solutions changing the world around us more quickly than the changes of any other field. No matter what my contribution, it will therefore likely be greatest and most efficacious if focused at least in part on a software based solution. The internet and the ever expanding nature of global trade are transforming the world into a single cultural unit, slowly but surely. Humanity as a whole requires certain basic elements in order to meet its needs, and they are obvious and well-established, yet they are seldom made explicit and prioritized; therefore, I see room for relatively simple improvement in that area.
(To Do: Add more content on how I think and why I think that way...)
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My fate is now largely in the hands of complete strangers, and I don't even know if I have a valid moral grounds on which to defend myself, my dignity, the very essence of who I am and what I do as a human being with the life that I have been granted. What do you think I should do? How do I balance my moral obligations to myself, to humanity, and to all of the individuals whom I love and interact with on a regular basis? Should I go to court? Should I defend myself? How? To what extent? Should I forgive R? (Yes.) To what extent? (I have no idea. Ideally, fully - done; but how should I act?) Should I ever talk to her again? (Probably, because the only way to prevent someone from knowing you is to intentionally deny them all interaction. Does that make me weak? I know many people who would say yes. I think that the answer is yes and no at the same time; it depends on how you look at it. What is weakness after all?) Should I forgive my country? (Ideally, yes - done.) Should I leave a country that has defiled my humanity? (Probably not, it’s largely the nature of things; the law denies itself the ability to chose in this case. The law has a more obligation to uphold itself and the judges and jury as agents of the law and I myself as a citizen of this nation of a moral obligation to uphold the law. I also have a moral obligation to point out where it’s wrong and how.) Should I go on a hunger strike? (Probably not.) Have I dishonored myself? Have I done anything wrong? What does it mean to be a parent? Are there moral obligations implicit in the act of having consensual sex? Do the moral obligations extend unambiguously and universally to all situations? (No: that would defy logic since the one absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths. Similarly (from a legal lexicon), the one fundamental right is that fundamental rights are subject to the context of the universe and therefore cannot be universally applicable to all situations. There are always exceptions.)
(Just had this thought... Isn’t it ironic that if I were a bad person, I would be forcibly denied paternity by the state, even if I desired with all of my being to be a parent, but that because I’m a good person, I’m forced to bear an obligatory moral burden with considerable liberty considerations, even though I deny that moral framework with all of my being as inconsistent and wrong.) These questions plague my mind; I’m having trouble sleeping at night. I’m obsessing about Constitutional law, the origins of parenthood, the modern definition of parenthood, what it means to be a sperm donor, the moral ambiguity and inconsistencies of the law. These topics, those questions, they distract me from the work that I want to be doing for my new company at my new job. I have a moral obligation to do a good job at work and this burden of doing the right thing in a most difficult situation overcomes me. I am nearly lost. The nature of the situation gives everyone a public forum on which to discuss the nature of my morality and who I am as a human being. What effect does this have on my ability to form relationships in the future? How can I trust people? There is so much uncertainty, and it all feels so meaningful and overwhelming. Thankfully, there is one thing I know for certain, it will all be over in 19 years. :)
2018-12-17: What a stupid final sentence!?