Marc Andreessen's blindness

Marc Andreessen is a wealthy venture capitalist who got his money from the IPO of his first company, Netscape. Recently he gave an interview to Vox explaining how he doesn't believe that we're on the way toward higher income inequality in the future.

The first point he makes is that economic gains must come from increases in productivity. This is just plain wrong. Another source of growth is simply population growth. Imagine an agricultural village with per capita income of 100 money. Add one more person working at the same potential. Now the economy is 100 money richer, without any increase in productivity.

Next, it's not even clear that productivity will all of a sudden stop improving  Productivity has been rising steadily, and while it's hard to pinpoint the exact cause of this, it is a definite upward trend. Saying that trend will stop is an assumption that should be backed up by evidence. The fact that there are no signs of stopping the existing automation trends seems to discount this theory.

Thridly, he says that the annualized return rate of S&P500 is flat for the last 15 years. While basically true, he picked the absolute worst period of time for returns. According to Wikipedia, the 5 year annualized returns are 18%, and 10, 20, and 25 year returns are 7, 9, and 10% respectively. There is no evidence that capital growth is slowing down.

The next point he makes is there is high turn over at the top, and therefore there doesn't seem to be solidification of family wealth. First of all, looking at only the very very top is misleading. The economy is not so static that people will stay at that position for very long. However, it's not as if those families and people are falling back down to even the 99% income level.

Additionally, we're only about  20 years away from the massive growth in income inequality. We won't see evidence of real solidification until the next generation, probably 30 to 40 years from now. The families at the top .1% will still be there, and their income will primarily come from capital rather than earned wages, if Piketty's hypothesis is correct.

Andreessen also says there is no mechanism by which the wealthy can benefit at the expense of the rest. This should be pretty obvious. The influence of money in politics controls the agenda of government. While they won't get everything they want, the it will be very hard to create policies which harm them. Policy solutions only hurt other groups. For example, despite the fact that there is no crisis in social security funds, pundits and politicians still discuss cutting benefits. Even if there were a shortfall, a small tax increase would cover it, but the solutions presented always end up damaging lower income workers.

In recent years, productivity gains have risen substantially, yet all the gains have been captured by capital (source). Political decisions also favor those of the donor class, and are almost completely unaffected by general public opinion (source). Both of these phenomenon point to increasing concentration of wealth.

Andreessen makes a comment that Marx was wrong that all the capital would flow to the capitalists. The VC must not have heard of the Gilded Age. The huge accumulation of wealth by the capitalists was only halted by the exact type of government Andreessen decries during the New Deal era of the 40s through the 60s. Not coincidentally, that was also a period of massive economic growth for the country.

Anthropology

People usually have an image of hanging out with preindustrial people in the middle of a jungle. While interesting, I wonder if there is any such research into modern culture. For example, is there any research into the fanbases of sports teams or music personalities?

Depending on the group, each fan base has a form of loose societal bonding of varying strengths. How these groups form and create these bonds when the members don't often meet should tell us something about the fundamental social wiring of human beings.

Personally, I have a hard time fitting in to new social groups. Yet tons of people on the internet can identify as fans of the same pop group or tv show. For example, the K Pop group Girl's Generation fans call themselves SONEs, (pronounced so-won) which just spontaneously arose form the lyrics of one of their songs. No one planned that. Yet thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands (who knows) of people came together with this common identity.

If that phenomenon isn't worthy of study, I don't know what is.

Those Other People

One thing that bothers me a lot about some people's prognostications is how little they trust other people. Everyone knows how much everyone else is a hard core moocher. But of course, they themselves would never do such a thing.

If everyone says everyone else is a moocher, but they aren't, what is that supposed to mean? Do we really have such little faith in other people that we can't come together to solve problems in the most obvious way?

Universal social security could help all people with financial security. Such a system wouldn't work if everyone decided to quit their jobs and just live off of the pension. But I wouldn't do that. I bet you wouldn't do that. Would so many people do it that it would break the system? Even if the pension was such a small amount of money, you'd be barely scraping by with it? Somehow I don't think that's very likely.

Still, everyone knows everyone else is a terrible person. Just not them.

The Naivete of Libertarianism

Libertarians are either naive or cruel. Somehow they all seem to have a condescending attitude whenever they write about thinkers of competing ideologies, but really it's their own ideology that makes the least sense.

Their first failure is believing that an unregulated market is a free market. That is not the definition of a free market. A free market requires symmetric information by all parties involved. An unregulated market does not require information to be spread to all participants, so it is not a free market.

Additionally, markets will never take into account externalities. Pollution and public health would greatly suffer if factories were able to pump their toxins into the atmosphere. Without some form of regulation, factors like these would never be checked.

Libertarians also think that any agreement by 2 people should be allowed. However, as any lawyer will tell you, drawing up agreements is very difficult and time consuming. There is a ton of paperwork involved in the purchase of a house, but all of those forms are standardized and governed by various laws. They are designed to protect both parties in the transaction. Imagine if both parties had to comb through each and every word to make sure that the other hadn't changed some wording to completely overhaul the document. It would be an overwhelming burden.

People also have limited brainpower. If every time I went to the store to buy some milk, it would drive me crazy if I had to check every label to make sure it was pasteurized, homogenized, safely transported, and every other imaginable factor in the safe creation of milk. Even if I did manage to get all of that information together, who would stop them from lying? Who would punish them if they did?

Somehow, libertarians think that other political philosophies are naive, when they are the ones who think that if there are no rules, everything would be fantastic. Well, at the dawn of mankind, there were no rules. If it was such a great system back then, why hasn't it lasted until the present day?

Libertarians might say that the rise of governments ruined the pure world that existed before. But if a libertarian world was unable to stop the rise of oppression, doesn't that also mean libertarianism wouldn't protect people from oppression anyways?

Of course, maybe libertarians don't care if oppression happens as a result. Often these types of people also think they're above average and would benefit from a society with less rules. In that case they're pretty much bullies who wish the teacher would go away so they could extract what they're owed by people "beneath" them. In any case, there's no reason to believe their utopia would lead to any better outcomes than those of other misguided idealists.

Dogma

One of the key features of human society is the ability to cooperate with total strangers. For example, coworkers are not likely to have met before starting their jobs, but none the less are able to work towards a common goal. People from the same nation feel a kinship with one another even though they have never met. The same goes for religion and ethnicity.

Some of these bonds are stronger than others. While big box store employees may or may not feel a connection with each other, people from the same church will likely sacrifice a great deal for one another. Part of this binding agent is the shared identity of those involved.

This shared identity has been manipulated by those who wish to create a more cohesive society. Extremist groups often have a very simple if unrealistic view of the world. However, this simplicity allows many people to identify with that ideology, and creates a very strong bond between people with otherwise nothing in common. The communists during the 20th century were great exploiters of this fact. Modern day radical Islamists are similarly able to forge strong bonds and loyalties.

While it is easy for people with less attachment to reality to come up with simple philosophies for people to rally around, the more same people of the world should not ignore the power of shared philosophy. Defining one that is both easy to understand and support yet also appeals to our higher aspirations over our base instincts is not a simple task, but such a philosophy would help bring together the sensible people of the world against insanity.

Freedom

In America, the word "Freedom" gets thrown around a lot. Whenever someone does something that conservatives don't like, they always say it's taking away our "Freedom". Anything from better science standards in education to universal healthcare brings an angry roar to preserve "Freedom".

Strictly speaking, the are right that these initiatives restrict people ability to do certain things. Background checks on guns will force people to reveal more about themselves to the government. Not allowing people to dump toxic waste in the river forces companies to invest in proper disposal.

However, everything is a trade off, and some freedoms are more important than others. Having background checks on gun purchases trades the ability to buy weapons freely for a greater freedom from armed criminals. Stopping toxic waste dumps may cost a company a lot of money, but people who depend on the water will be free to use it without the fear of contamination.

All the ridiculous opposition to any action which restricts an action is blind to the other freedoms we gain from that restriction. With a stronger social safety net, people will be able to take more risks to pursue their passions without endangering their own livelihoods or those of the people who depend on them. Allowing people to fulfill themselves is definitely worth the cost of a few more dollars in taxes.

The End of History

The way history is taught, everything is simply presented as fact. Every event inevitable. The steady march of time takes on a heavy sense of fate. The course was never in doubt. The ending written in advance.

Of course, that is definitely not the case. No one would have predicted the rise of Rome during the Hellenic era. While later writers wrote that Rome was the successor of the great Greek civilizations that came before it, that was more of a tacked on fiction than anything else. Yet its legacy lives on today, immortalized by their marks on modern European language and culture. Every great nation on the continent claimed bits of Rome's glory as their own.

In 1770, none of the British American colonists would have guessed that just 6 years later, they would be declaring independence from their overseas rulers. Even fewer would dare gamble that the new government would take representational democracy to a whole new level and forgo a monarch, unlike almost every other nation in Europe. Yet by 1790, independence was won, a constitution was written, and the world was changed.

However, despite the great uncertainty surrounding any event in history, all that has come to pass is usually taught as a series of immutable events. The rough spots are smoothed over, giving a false veneer of perfection.

Since everything seems to have wrapped up so perfectly, some may even forgo thinking about current events. The cold war is over! The good guys won! McDonald's and KFC for everyone! Just a few small issues like malaria and global warming will be fixed shortly, and then there's nothing more to worry about! Of course, anyone paying attention will realize there are still more problems to be had.

Even then, by the time it comes to think about continuing history, there is always a disjunction between the pretend perfection of the past and the messiness of the present. What we had been taught were the perfect solutions to past problems are applied with disastrous results to new issues. It seems like the living are less competent and all knowing than our wise predecessors. After all, they solved everything perfectly! The fact that everything seems so uncertain and dire to us must mean that everything will come crashing down. We have arrived at the end of history.

This perspective does no one any good. Glossing over the faults and uncertainty of the past just leaves us scared and confused when confronting the future. Not everything that has happened was meant to happen. Not all the issues that confront us are unsolvable, even if no one has ever solved them before. We must brush away the illusion that history was perfect, embrace the fragility of fate's path, and fight to harness it into a better future.

Luck

It is rather daunting how little people control of their own lives. No one controls who their parents are. No one controls what era they were born in. No one picks how intelligent they are. Disposition to hard work is also just the luck of the draw. Some children are born with crippling disease, despite having done no wrong to anybody.

If pretty much everything about us is determined by luck, it's pretty much impossible to say that anyone really deserves better than anyone else. Even if someone works hard to attain a higher station in life, they may have just been born that way.

A market system can incentivize people to do certain actions. Growing food to feed people. Mining energy to light and heat. While people may deserve their gains from an economic standpoint, it does not directly follow that they deserve it from a moral standpoint. The market is merely a tool to encourage activity needed or desired by people. It is not a tool for determining the moral value of anything.

Agents of Change

Lots of change gets attributed to technology companies. Facebook changed the way we communicate. Google changed the way we search for information. Instagram changed the way we brag about ourselves.

The reality is none of those companies changed anything. All they did was write an app or make a website. Many other people have done that, and nothing really happened. What really changed things was individual people deciding to use these websites or apps instead of something else. There was no government mandate threatening to throw people in jail if they didn't sign up for Facebook. No holy decree came down demanding Google replace encyclopedias. No one made your post that vintage filter selfie of you on the beach with some totally hot guy/girl/man-eating bear on the beach.

To say that any of those companies changed people would be giving them way too much credit. They merely created a tool for doing something people were already doing. To say otherwise takes away the agency from the people actually performing the verbs.

After all, you are the one who is ineptly trying to flirt with people through text rather than in a sketchy alcohol service establishment. You are the one sitting on your butt Googling the best brand of butt plug rather than asking all your friends and neighbors. You are the one passive-aggressively showing your friends you're a better person than they are. None of those companies made you do any of those things. That was you. Active voice.

So the next time you want to blame some tech company for changing the way society works, realize that a company is just a small group of people. The only way change actually happened was that other people, not in the company, thought it was a good idea and started using the product. The next time you share a post to Facebook about how technology is ruining everything, realize that it couldn't have happened without your cooperation.

Fear of the New

There has been a huge amount of technological advancement in the past 20 years. The growth of the internet has made it drastically easier to transmit and receive information. Smart phones push this even further by giving people access in the palm of their hand anywhere, not just at a computer terminal.

Following this change, many business models have been upended. Advertising used to depend heavily on the reach of newspapers. It was hard to get the attention of a large number of people any other way. However, with the internet, it's much easier to target specific audiences. Data mining of searches can determine what kinds of ads a particular person will respond to. Combine that with the fact that it's much easier and cheaper to consume news over the internet than in a physical sheet of paper, and you get a floundering newspaper industry.

While this is a boon for consumers of news, it's a huge negative for people in the business. If you could get your news form the New York Times about world events, why would you bother bother reading the local Podunk Paper for worse content? If you could reach people everywhere with Google, why would you advertise in the New York Times?

The quickly changing face of business has many sectors of the economy struggling to keep up. People are afraid that their livelihoods are in danger. And rightly so. If change is unpredictable, who knows whose jobs are on the line? And when change happens quickly, there's not a lot of time to plan for sudden career changes.

All this shows that if we want to have an economy with new ideas as well as protect people from market forces outside of their control, we need to have a strong social safety net. That way changing conditions in the economy won't run the risk of throwing people into destitution due to bad luck.  Hopefully people will be able to evaluate different ways of doing things without worrying about a life of poverty.

The Failure of the Humanities

I'll admit, I used to have a pretty low opinion of those studying the humanities. For me, the biggest strike was the lack of accountability. If you made up a totally bs story, it would have to receive the same consideration as the most well thought out of treatises. Heck, in the AP English and History tests in school, you could write any number of crazy ideas in your paper, as long as you followed the format and used (or abused) the appropriate sources.

However, looking back, the true failure of the humanities was convincing me the humanities are important. After all, communication, persuasion, and art all fall under the humanities. Would it be too much to ask that the fields use their own powers to defend themselves?

I'm not sure why that's the case, but I have a few theories. Chief among them is the fact that those in those fields don't want other people to learn them. It's become a part of their identity, and having other people share in the study of their subjects violates their sense of self. It's a well known fact that mathematicians deny the applicability of their studies while physicists and others would beg to differ. I imagine the same can be said of those in the humanities.

It could also be that those who teach humanities can't relate to the type of person who could use some humanities studies but isn't as interested. Instead of showing how the humanities could be used to forge one's own identity or interpret history and modern events, classes are spent fetishizing obscure passages by long dead authors, with only passing context given. While I'm sure the instructor finds the subject interesting, it doesn't exactly give a strong lead in interest.

I did have a class in college which I thought gave a great introduction to philosophy, but the professors real favorite topic was the deep introspection of a medieval author, and suffice it to say I declined to even find out when it was scheduled.

Another theory is that bs is not challenged enough. Often writing assignments were one off papers, so even controversial topics were never really explored. Some comments might come back in the margins of the paper, but there was never any deep critical analysis that could have sparked true introspection.

It's a real shame, because looking back at my education, even though I only took two humanities courses, they were easily more thought provoking than many of my scientific ones. Perhaps if someone had shown me the true power of history or philosophy or english earlier on in my schooling I would have given them more of a chance in college. Now I can only stumble through such topics, like a child that never truly learned to walk.

Activism

I read some pretty political blogs so it's inevitable that I'll read a post by a frustrated activist. These posts are easy to remember because they always make you feel angry after reading them, and not in a sympathetic way. The post is dripping with self righteousness, self pity, and condescension. Anyone who disagrees with them is just one of the oppressors/corporatists/the establishment. They may feel better after this post, but the fact they wrote it makes me wonder if they have any idea what an activist really is.

The way I see it, the point of activism is to leverage the power of the people to affect change. In a democratic society, if enough people are willing to spend their time and money to get something, they will get it. Despite all the body blows that system has taken recently, I still believe it holds up. Therefore, an activist should try to get as many people to spend their time or money on a cause.

However, what I see instead is a digital totem measuring contest to see who is the most right. Believe it or not, yelling at people that they aren't pure enough doesn't convince anyone to join your cause. If a man tries to write something in support of feminism and is a little off base, cussing him out on the internet does not advance your cause. You convince very few people to join you, and many more to oppose you.

Of course, the activists them shout back (and it is always shouting) that they are sick of taking a positive tone, that they shouldn't have to submit to the humiliation of correcting other people's mistakes. After all, THOSE people are wrong, and they deserve every bolt of lightning the activists can muster from their quiver of indignation.

And it's true. If someone is doing something wrong that actively hurts someone, they probably do deserve some opprobrium. But it doesn't matter. If you don't convince people to join your side, you are not helping your side. All the righteous fury in the world is useless if your cause is still defeated. You are no closer to your goal than when you started, ind in all likelihood farther behind.

Activists also dangerously intermingle their own sense of self into their cause. This makes it hard to accept new people as members of the cause, which is the whole point of being an activist. I read an article about a black woman helping a white administrator educate some white teachers about defeating black stereotypes. "We showed them," the administrator said to the black teacher.

Did the black woman accept the white administrator as a member of the cause to eliminate racism? No. She instead thought to herself "No, you are not one of us. Fighting racism is my identity, not yours." This sort of rejection may preserve the self but in the end hurts the cause. For an activist cause to succeed you can't kick people out just because they don't meet your definition of what such a person should be. You must grow the cause even at the expense of your own comfort.

Most so called activists are not what I would call an activist. They are martyrs. Their identity is wrapped up inside of the cause they champion. So much so that they are unable to do what is necessary to advance the cause. Any attack on them becomes an attack on the cause. Anyone who is not them is an enemy to the cause. And thus the cause falters, and the so called activist thrives on the bitter leaves of self righteous indignation.

Malleable Identity

I like to think that I'm me, no matter what. If someone describes me as something I'm not, it's comforting to think that whatever it is they make me out to be, and no matter how many people say it, it won't affect me. However, the reality is a person's identity is never set in stone. The public perception of anyone can change in an instant. And, if one isn't careful, their very definition of their own self can be knocked astray.

This is especially true in children. All children have a certain disposition, but depending how outside stimulus, the end result can vary drastically. This doesn't mean that all you have to do to a child to force them in one direction is to just tell them that they are so. For example, telling a rebellious kid he is good doesn't make him behave any better. He will probably just become entitled and spoiled. Personalities are more complicated than to accept a direct contradiction

However, if you them they are a bad kid, that framing can have an impact on their long term conception of themselves. Whether or not they want it to, it becomes a part of their identity, and they will have a hard time shaking it, even if they'd rather be something else. Instead of being just a kid who threw a tantrum one day, they are that kid who always throws tantrums, who challenges authority, who has problems with parents and teachers. Of course nothing is a one to one cause and effect, but how someone perceives themselves determines who they are.

Although adults have a stronger self perception, that doesn't mean they can't be affected by outside interference. It takes a thick skin to suffer accusations or receive praises without impacting the ego. Adults are somewhat aware that they can't let other people dictate who they are, but the battle is still a tough one. If you undermine someone's identity, that is the surest way to receiving a scathing, defensive response. We have all spent our entire lives building our selves and trying to make sense of who we are. There is nothing more unsettling than a false attack on the self we believe to be. Nothing, except a true one.

Philosophy and Science

Occasionally I read an article talking about how philosophy gives us insight into science, or how science defeats the need for philosophy. This misunderstands what the point of both of these disciplines are. The two fields are orthogonal to each other and there is no reason to suspect one has priority over the other or obviates the other.

Philosophy is the assumption of axioms and applying logical rules to derive conclusions. What separates philosophy from math is subjectivity. In math, the logical steps are incontrovertible. In philosophy, given the same set of facts, no 2 people will come up with the exact same answer, and none of them have to be wrong. However, though an imperfect tool, it is the only one we have that can attempt to attribute concepts such as justice, good, or evil to the real events and objects people experience.

Science is the acquisition of universal knowledge through experimentation. It is a tool that explains the universe we live in and how it works. The results of good science are not logically contestable. There is no room for debate. The data shows what's true and what's false.

However, science cannot prove anything which is not testable. There is no objective test for the purpose of human existence. There is not definitive way to measure of justice. The subjectivity involved means that science is incapable of answering.

Science explains how the universe works. Philosophy tells us what it means.

Justice

Since I don't believe there is any such thing as a supernatural being, and there is no inherent purpose to the universe, it's hard to see how there could be such a thing as universal justice. That is, a justice where which is fair to all participants.

There are a few painful points of reality that make this sort of justice impossible. For example, nothing is perfectly reversible. If someone gets punched, there is nothing that can go back in time and save the person from that hurt at that moment. If someone is killed, they're dead. No amount of money or grief will bring them back.

Furthermore, justice is purely in the eye of the beholder. Living things seem to more or less care about fairness, but this is more of a tool to further the future survivability of the group, not a fundamental concept of the universe.

Thus we should not try to think of justice as a way of fixing past wrongs. That is impossible. Justice is a tool to encourage people to function in a way that advances the group, not just the individual.

The Obligation of Success

If it's true that all people should do what they want, does that mean we can dissolve the bonds of society and all just live disconnected lives? After all, there is no heavenly mandate or true moral code anyone can refer to, so if all people thought this way, there would be no reason to have bonds of community or family, right?

While anarchists might disagree, society is not something that was imposed from on high. People built societies for a reason. As I've mentioned before, people are social creatures. Most of us cannot live isolation. We are stronger in numbers. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Social organization is a tool for people to further their own goals.

In order to ensure people can chase their fulfillment, we need to make sure that they can take the risks necessary to do so. Without the bonds of family and society, there is no safety net. Spending a year of your life trying to create the next great work is just too risky if the cost of failure is destitution. Those who succeed in their ambitions must share the burden of those unable to do so, otherwise only the foolhardy would ever have a shot at self satisfaction.

After all, there are no guarantees in life. Those who enjoy success and those crushed by failure are, in the grand scheme of things, only separated by a roll of the dice. There will always be people who are unable to provide back as much as they take. But, as long as there is food and shelter to spare, it is heartless to deny anyone at least a base subsistence.

Human Potential

Teenagers are famous for being acne ridden, rebellious, shallow, and angsty. These traits aren't particularly useful, but they do have a good reason to be angsty. Not only are their bodies going through weird changes, but their understanding of a non kid friendly world expands, and with that understanding comes some cold hard facts of reality.

However, possibly even bigger than that, their life potential is draining away faster than it ever did before. If you think about humans in terms of potential, the ones that have the most are undeveloped babies. Of course, they haven't realized any of it, but the possibilities are still open. Maybe they'll become a young Mozart, cranking out masterpieces before they reach puberty. Who knows? After all, they're still just a baby.

While the child grows up, the maximum realm of possibility contracts. Instead of being an endless sea of possibilities, the child trades some of those for a much smaller but a totally realized existence.  They no longer might be good at soccer, badminton, lacrosse, or tennis, but are simply good at a few or one or none of them.  There is nothing wrong with this process. It's all just part of growing up. The kids themselves don't have much agency over how things turn out, anyway. There is a tinge of guilt that better things could have been, but it's not really a big deal in the child's well being.

As children become teenagers, though, things change. The teen has much more agency in how they spend their time, and how they develop themselves. This creates opportunities but also responsibilities. If the teen has had high expectations on them in the past, then this increases the pressure to aim for the most optimal outcome, causing pain whenever it isn't achieved. And when things aren't going perfectly, it's easy for a teen to blame themselves.

Not only do the teens now have responsibility for their own fate, but adolescence is the period of one's life where possibilities slip away the fastest. Not doing well in science for a couple semesters means that they might never get into CalTech, which means they'll never become a renowned scholar in the field of robotic underwater basket weaving. If they neglect to try a sport that they later like, it turns out they will never have the chance to give it their all and join a college or professional team. For sports this pain can be especially sharp because there are pretty much no second chances to make it professionally.

To top it all off, teens lack any perspective on how much this shrunken possibility space really matters. While their possibilities are shrinking fast, they're not shrinking all the way down to bum-on-a-street-corner. Sure, a few select avenues will be closed off, but life is pretty long these days, and there is time for a few next chances.

In other words, in addition to all the other things teens have to be angsty about, such as parents, siblings, social issues, etc, they also have existential crises to deal with that are more or less legitimate concerns.

Yeah, I'm glad I'm not a teenager anymore.

Morality

Many people say that without fear of eternal damnation, there is no reason to be good to anyone. People would just go around stealing from each other, deceiving each other, and hurting each other. Atheists are considered about as trustworthy as rapists. After all, it's only human nature. If no one gets punished, why would anyone ever do the right thing?

If you look back at my axioms, I mention that I don't believe there are any supernatural powers or beings. It's a rather round about way of saying I don't believe in a god of any type. I didn't say "I don't believe in God" because I also don't believe I should be forced to assume that believing in a monotheistic God should be the default assumption.

At any rate, this puts me in the same level of trustworthiness as people who psychologically or physically abuse other people in order to forcibly smush their nasty bits into them.  Great.

However, I don't believe that fear of punishment is the only reason people Do the Right Thing. Human beings are social creatures, and caring for the group is a natural motivator. Of course there are exceptions, and it doesn't take many people doing wrong to wreck everything everyone else was working towards. Even so, I would bet most people would consider themselves trustworthy, even if they believe most other people are not.

On a personal level, not believing in some arbiter of good and evil makes me more likely to act justly, not less. If there's no all powerful entity around to clean up the mess, there's only people. And if I don't do my part to maintain our society, help my friends, or help my family, I'm leaving it to other people to pick up the slack. Leaving it up to other worldly beings abdicates my responsibility for the situation. I believe the true measure of honor is not what you do when people are watching, but what you do when no one is watching, when no one will blame you, and when you will never be caught. Doing the right thing out of fear is merely saving face, not true morality.

In my view, humanity is a tiny bit of the universe on a tiny speck of dust that could be destroyed at any time. It has no significance in the large scheme of things. But even if the rest of the universe doesn't care, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care. Our finite existence will one day come to an end. I believe we should make the best of it, and help each other fulfill ourselves as much as possible. Subscribing to basic morality the just the first step of doing that.

Being Wrong

One of the things about blogger is Google really wants you to track your blog views and aim to get more.  I guess to feed their hungry ad selling machine. My initial reaction to this was actually screwing me up a bit. I was becoming a bit more self conscious about random people reading it. After all, I'm going to be writing a bunch of stuff that's probably going to be wrong. That distracted me a bit from what I was trying to do.

Part of why I'm doing this is to refine my own thinking, and inevitably means being wrong. Thinking the wrong things, writing the wrong stuff. Realizing you're wrong is the first step in making yourself right. Being worried too much about other people laughing at your wrongness isn't helpful.

Hypothetical readers will also wonder why I don't just make the blog private, so no one will get to witness my wrongness. But I think that makes it too easy to cover up and run away from past mistakes. Not from other people noticing them, but from myself noticing them.

Idealism Meets Reality

Alright, so if it's so easy to get people to work together, why don't we all live in a perfect, harmonious society? Everyone knows that everyone is better off if the whole works together, but it's a lot better for a few is they make things a lot worse for others. A serf is going to have a hard time chasing his dreams of starting a medieval metal rock band when the local lord is forcing him to work day in and day out to farm the land or die in a war.

Also, the world puts limits on how much time a person has to pursue their own goals. Practicing sick shredding skills on a guitar is hard to do if you're accidentally starved to death. As any Adult will tell you, you need to work first and deal with your interests on the side. Nothing is more Adult than accepting that fate.

Thanks to advances in food production and industrialization, the basic needs of humans are now easily met. However, our political and economic institutions haven't caught up to that fact yet.

Small Dreams

Still, even if you subscribe to the idea that there are people who are naturally inclined to Do Things rather than laze about all day, you still have to wonder how anything gets done. After all, most things worth doing require more than one person. The pharaohs of Egypt didn't haul rocks into giant geometric shapes themselves, did they?

Maybe not[1], but people are really good at getting their goals to interleave in such a way that everyone can get a little of what they want. Basic econ tells us that as long as 2 people aren't identical, they can derive some benefit from trading.  Every new person is a potential asset. So even though the pharaoh's tomb doesn't really benefit anyone, it still got built. Great things were achieved despite the fact that the pharaoh was probably the only one who wanted it.


[1] I dunno, maybe they did! Were you there?

What's the Point, Then?

Going off of what I wrote previously about freedom choice, there are a lot of ways to feel about that. If everyone individually decides the purpose of things, how can there be a society? How do we prevent people from just believing the point of existence is to eat ice cream until you die of diabetes?

One response to that is it doesn't matter how anyone feels about that freedom, it is inescapable that it exists. Gravity pulls things do the ground. Is that fair? Is that good? In the end, it doesn't matter, we just have to deal with it. So too do we have to deal with our freedom.

Another way to look at it is to say that if humanity has come this far with those ground rules, those ground rules can't be so terrible after all. When human beings first developed thought, there were no concepts of good or evil, of society, of great works. Those first humans could have just gone on eating their boogers and sleeping all day. But somehow, thousands of years later, we know that didn't happen. (At least not forever.)

And maybe you, my hypothetical straw man reader, think other people, if given the choice, would spend all day eating ice cream. And maybe some would. But you wouldn't. Maybe for a couple days that might be fun, but eventually you'd get bored of that and move on to something else. And, as human beings, we almost universally respect and aspire to be people who Do Things. We might say that we wish we could just spend our days partying or sleeping or eating, but I bet there are enough people out there willing to go out there and realize their own purpose. After all, if not, how did we even get to modern society in the first place?

Nihilism

Boring

Looking at my axioms, it seems like they would naturally lead to a pretty boring outlook on life. Nothing ever changes, there are no higher powers, and there's no point to anything.  Ok, fine, if you put it that way, it does sound really boring.

However, I don't see it that way. First of all, if you have faith that the universal will spontaneously combust tomorrow or won't tear itself apart at any instant, that gives you some leeway to affect your own future.

Secondly, the lack of any external or unknown supernatural intervention means that you are free do things you believe you should do without having to worry about some unknowable force messing up your plans.

Lastly, if nothing has a set purpose, if you assign another purpose to an action or item, you are not "wrong", since there is nothing to contradict.

In other words, I believe people have the freedom to make of their existence what they see fit. I believe this is a miracle of human existence. The ability to ascribe, defy, and fulfill purpose in otherwise simple air vibrations (sound), inert objects (paintings and sculptures), physical manifestations (uh, things...happening..?), and even the fleeting abstract whims of the mind and be satisfied with that is an unappreciated gift to human beings.

Some may behold my axioms and despair, but I disagree with their nihilism. The very blank slate nature of our existence is the greatest freedom we could ask for.

Axioms

Axioms

From what I remember of geometry, an axiom is a fact that is asserted rather than proven. It serves as a basis from which the rest of the ideas are proven from. Math is often interesting because even though the number of axioms on which it is based is fairly small, the ramifications of those axioms are still not understood and are still being explored.

In the future, if some of these happen to be proven false, I'll have to revisit a lot of what I write later, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to change my mind on these. (Famous last words...)

1. Natural laws are immutable and observable. That means they will never change and it is logically possible to test them.
2. There is no such thing as a supernatural entity or effect. Powers or beings that cannot be observed and tested cannot be presumed to exist.
3. Nothing has an intrinsic purpose.

A reader (in the case of this blog, a purely hypothetical reader) may note that this is a pretty short list, and some or all of those points are pretty boring. How could someone develop a theory of Theory of Life from that?

Well, like I said before, even a small number of axioms can have complex interactions. Since this is all about touchy feely philosophy, my interpretation of what these things mean is probably more important than the axioms themselves.

Also, I might later find out that I've painted myself into a corner, and everything I ever thought was a lie. While I might feel like a piece of worthless poo for a while, at least I'll learn that I was full of logical excrement.

Lightly Angsty

What is this?

You know the story, or maybe you were the story: at some point, in the dark depths of adolescence, a young nascent thinker ponders the deeper questions of the universe. Why they here? How does the world really work? What should they do? Who are they? Wrapped up in existential dread, they worry relentlessly about the future and what it means to be. Maybe they even write emphatic essays or diaries or blogs. They become the epitome of angst. Raw, soul crushing, depressing, pimply angst.

Then they graduate school, and end up busy with college or a job, and start thinking in more practical terms. How can I make money with my degree in underwater basket weaving? Should I move so I can get a better job? How did I get so fat?

They either get over all those difficult philosophical questions that troubled them in youth, or find good enough answers that let them move on.  The angst fades away. Being angsty is soooo pubescent.

Honestly, though, that half baked child philosopher deserves some credit.  Just because the answers they came up with are ill informed and naive doesn't make the questions they were asking any less relevant to the later self proclaimed adult. Of course, all the moody low burning pain of growing up is something no one wants to relive, giving a little thought to how a person views the world can give them valuable insight into who they really are and what they've become.

In short, the point of this blog is to recover some of my worry about what the universe truly is and my place in it that I felt in earlier, much crappier days. Just a little hint of angst to keep myself honest.