Highlights from ‘Answers’ made last week

Last week we started the ‘Answers’ series to the ‘Questions’ post. These are the summarized conclusions we came up with.

A Socrates can never be convinced about magic. He either has the magic a.k.a, the primary/basic rules, or not.

You cannot convince a rock, you cannot convince an infinitely powerful computer about south sudan, or a very very smart dog that can talk.

We have these primary rules, somehow. We can use them to understand the territory better. Initially we thought, blacks should be slaves, women should not have equal rights, but then slowly, we realized that they are also just people like us. It just happened by chance that we were not born black. If we would not like this to be our treatment, then it should most likely not be theirs. And then we modify our understanding of the rules. So, we have primary rules somehow, and we can use these rules to improve our understanding of our rules.

It appears that as these rules cannot be taught to you- as Socrates can never be convinced as he doesn’t have that rule- the only place possible to receive it from is like from our “father”, Evolution, just like how we carry characteristics in our genes.

We have answered the ‘basic’ questions from the ‘Questions’ post, mostly off of the 1st discussion with an STM.

Rules

This is the model we are using.

It is like a rough map of some terrain. Initially, it just marks out some hills and a river (“Don’t kill me, I won’t kill you. Let’s hunt together”). Nothing is to scale. There are vast parts unmarked (“how to treat women, blacks, gays, etc.”). Then, as we gain more and more knowledge, we fill in the vaguer parts of the map (“Ah! Black people are basically just like me. It is wrong to treat them like slaves”)

We start now with our current understanding of our primary/basic rules (“Look at evidence to determine reality as you have seen your feelings fail you again and again”, “Modes Ponens”), the ones that you cannot be actually convinced about. From this understanding we formulate new rules (“Religion is the shizzz”). Now we use the primary/basic rules to re-understand our newly formulated rules (“Is religion really the shizz?”), and also try to clarify what our basic/primary rules actually mean in various extrapolations, cause they are so vague now (“how do I use evidence correctly, as I have limited computational ability and moreover my thoughts are clouded by my H&B”).

Shouldn’t everyone have the same values?

Looking at the rules we saw in the previous essay gives us more insight to answering the question I think.

If A => B is accepted, then if A happens, then B can be inferred. (intellectual rule) Look at evidence to decide what the reality will be like (intellectual rule) When people are suffering we should help them (value rule)

Without Modes Ponens, I suppose education would be really hard, or for that matter communication. Evidence based understanding is there everywhere. It’s in science, even in religion and literally everywhere else. But there is a catch, the understanding of evidence seems to differ between the different patrons. Recently, I joined a group on fb that was debating about flat earth and globe earth. The earth is not flat(let’s not get into the details of it). But Flat Earthers (FEs), made wild claims, and supported every claim with some sort of evidence. Every piece of explanation someone gave FEs regarding Flat Earth seemed to their eyes as evidence. They definitely think it is a good idea to look at evidence, but their understanding of reliable evidence is quite something else. We use science, they contradict science. Science works whether you like it or not. It was no surprise that all the FEs came from the school of Christianity. They went out of their way to make the bible right. Bible is right and from there they worked on finding “evidence” to fit it. It appears that we do have the same true rules, but our current understanding of the rules are twisted.

Peter Singer writes in Famine, Affluence and morality, “I suppose, most of them would want to save a drowning baby, even if it means that you get your clothes dirty”. Time and again we see several people donating money because it pains them to see others suffer. Although they don’t take it to the logical conclusion. Let’s for now say that it is due to some H&B’s misfiring. But it appears that the rule still holds for most of us. ‘Suffering is bad’.

Looking at the 3 rules we now know it appears with some decent confidence that most people have the same/similar basic/primary rules, the difference comes in understanding and using them as we saw with the FE example. Other examples, could be belief in astrology, homeopathy, ghosts aka paranormal activity etc…

How do you know your understanding is the best?(added to backlog)

Looking in detail: Religion H&B and more

As we saw last week, we are able to change our understanding of the rules, by reasoning, looking at evidence, using methods that show reliable and repeatable results every single time (for example, science). One of the understanding of the rules changed in the past for me was religion. It just didn’t hold up to the questions asked.

Why did I get into it in the first place? And why was I in it for so long and then why did I just get out of it after such a long time? What was different, if your true rules don’t change? We can change our understanding of our rules. It doesn’t just happen by itself normally. We need to really put some effort to understand it better, despite what we might feel is right (owing to H&B’s). And make sure it stands up to all our questions asked.

It appears that H&Bs is where shit went cray. Terrorists, republicans, democrats, socialists, etcetera. We have this amazing thing called H&B. These were probably a mechanism to bridge the billion rules and billion facts that we would need to process in order to understand the true rules. But hey, we don’t have the computational resources to do that. So what does the brain do? H&B’s are to be understood as shortcuts that connect us to our true value system, in a really bad way. They might have worked well for small problems back in the days, but right now they massively back fire, with circular preferences, misinterpretation of the true SITH, etc…

Then Why do terrorists exist? When will Achilles be wrong?

H&B’s such as social proof, social conditioning etc… can really twist the understanding of a persons SITH. It was very easy to believe in religion. We might think we are doing something right. Screwed up logic can sound perfect (H&B). We are not trained to critically analyze what people say to us, the analogies they make and how it affects us. Imagine a small kid, growing up with terrorists, reading the kuran every single day, being told that death is the penalty for leaving religion, being shown and told conservative views about how women should dress and repetitive saying of “the world should have only muslims”, to the extent that he doesn’t mind even giving up his own life.

Social proof (also known as informational social influence) is a psychological and social phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior in a given situation.
-Wikipedia

Get this!If the same kid was brought up in a different part of the world, there is a high chance he would not be a terrorist. Social proof, social conditioning are no joke. He would have completely different world views. When you see from a high level, you see that the kid is same, but his surroundings make him understand his SITH very differently. If you are not taught the scientific way of understanding things, which means to trust evidence of repeatable and reproducible experiments only, then higher chance of you being fucked and getting dragged into random ideologies for no better reason other than things like Social proof. However, it appears to be possible that everyone can come to similar ideas in the end, if only they followed a rigorous, scientific process of understanding themselves, and the things around them; Even terrorists. When you are ready for change, when evidence strongly points that your understanding is wrong, when you look to understand your rules better, I guess, you will start your own vishwaroopam transformation. Change is hard, change is painful, but certainly change is possible. We can definitely do it. So many people have done it.

I say everyone can come to similar ideas because, even though Eliezer and Robin Hanson have the same end goal, ‘to turn the world into an advanced civilization’, both differ in their way of handling the problem, in some aspects (Not going into that now). It’s hard for everyones subjective probability to completely align I guess (Not getting into this either). I suspect this is the reason. To a point its all numbers very distinctive and straightforward, but then after that. Our powers are still finite.

Terrorists seem to exist because of a misconception in their understanding of their true values.

Achilles will go wrong, will take the other tracks, only when his understanding of the “right track” is out of sync with reality.

Updating your rules based on evidence

For me what to do in life, has changed mighty much. Initially, just like the herd it was about ‘being successful, getting lot of money and bitches’, then it moved on to ‘god’, then ‘Tim Ferrise’s 4 hr work week and about taking constant mini-retirements, giving less of a fuck about making more money’, then ‘PUA and gaining social status’, and then random stuff for a while, and then back to this.

An stm said this last weekend, and I quite agree with him.

Looking at the big picture it might appear that you can’t commit to one thing, you are fickle minded, you are “easily convinced”, you don’t stand your ground. What ever that means! Now you might say that you won’t marry and later you might end up marrying. But in the end, we need to understand that we need to change in front of the mighty evidence. Just staying your current ground, just because you have been believing in it for so long, doesn’t sound like a solid argument. And what are the chances you got it right in the first try anyway? It is surprising that people refuse to change even despite the weight of the evidence, still clinging to the past. Are they saying they got everything right the first time itself, that no amount of interrogation can change it. What are the chances? What are the chances? Look at the whole population that is marrying, without a single point of doubt or even any analyses. And look at those people advising people to marry. Haha. Its I who knows the statistics, it’s I who has done the research not them.

Yes every time it sounded like this was it. ‘This’ is what we were going to do for the rest of our lives. I started planning my life based on and suddenly got thrown off of the bus. Good thing it didn’t happen after many more years. Changing in the face of evidence how many ever times, doesn’t seem to matter. In fact what are the chances others hit the nail in the head the first time anyway. It seems to take a few tries to get it right. It only looks like a good thing that in the face of mighty evidence, we are nothing, we shall change, we need to change.

So Achilles goes wrong when his understanding of the rules go cray.

What to trust?

  • How do we know which feelings to trust? What is the criterion with which we can reliably distinguish false feelings from real ones? Does emotional stimulation and visual stimulation help in determining the real value system?

  • How much is a human life worth to you? how far do we go to save it?

How to understand what we truly want?

Now we are here we are with some basic rules such as Modes Ponens, “Looking at evidence to determine reality”, “People should not die if possible”. We don’t know the true value system. We just have H&B’s allowing us to feel what the true value system might want. Looking at the observations it is hard to determine what exactly we wan’t. For example: the feeling you get when we give food worth 2 Euros to a homeless person; their face, the thanks that you receive, is nothing short of beautiful. Whereas say, you donated a few hundred euros to an NGO that has the best potential to save many lives; You get hardly anything via a feeling. Feelings are skewed max.. How can giving one meal to a human being not even mean as much as 60 good meals via donations. Another example: One moment you are crying your ass off when you see the news that 40k people are in the worst state possible. You put on a shirt and ask what you can do to help. The next moment you forget about it while watching Youtube or hanging with friends. After somemore time you don’t feel like how you felt in the beginning. So you ask, “What the hell do you truely want, Mr. Value system. I don’t fucking get you”. Feelings are circular. If we follow them for sure their ain’t gonna be no difference between us and them cavemen.

We also see that all we know is our feelings. We know important H&B’s from science. How do we go from here with our observations to which might be right?

With the understanding that lives are important (primary rule), I can only say that in the first example of donating in person vs online, the H&B’s are dead wrong. They are not trained for this type of work, and hence they suck. With the second example, it can be thought of as an interplay between availability frequency, and visual stimulation. I can speculate that because it is not a hot topic on the news (unlike syria) played multiple times, because it is not happening in your city, because you don’t continue to see it in person, the relative importance per time instant decreases. This only throws more light on the fact that feelings are shit. It does not tell us how to recognize from this what our true value system is.

Moreover, how do we answer questions like How far do we go? We check with our SITH, when thinking about a drowning baby, and the answer comes from within, that clothes are fucking not important. Then you think how much you can pay, and the thing is there is not one drowning baby but several. Saving every child might not be possible, but saving as many children as possible could be one of the conclusions. This is where you ask for more hardcore evidence to join the EA club. But… As easy as we got an answer to the drowning baby, we don’t have a straightforward the answer to this question. We think we need more solid proof for any statement provided pretty much favoring things that might be uncomfortable for us to do (Canceling our vacation perhaps,). Motivated skepticism much! Doesn’t a man deserve a vacation once a year atleast? He probably does, and is probably going to take it irrespective of the judgement from this series. Motivated skepticism NOT!

Reversing H&B’s

We know that saving lives are important. Example 1: We know that a 2 euro personal delivery of food to a homeless person feels nothing short of amazing. Donating 300 euros, almost gives no feedback. So we say Fuck you H&B. I will use the 2 euro personal delivery to feel good and on the side do the 300 euros donation becuase well saving lives are important. Great. It seems that we can bypass the H&B’s if we already know our value system. Example 2: We see that when visually stimulated our feelings see things much clearer. A drowning baby in front of us, raises our emotional quotient to much higher levels, that we jump into action to save it. Even though there are many metaphorically drowning babies (the ones that need your help), we don’t seem to feel a think or even act when we hear about it. But we can clearly see that this is a stupid bias. Visual stimulation or not, a drowning baby is a drowning baby. It needs to be saved period. Once again we see that we can bypass the H&B’s if we already know our value system. Unless we know our value system, we cannot but evaluate the responses of our H&B’s it seems. We seem need some standard to compare the H&B with to determine if it is right or wrong.

Real talk

Refugees from South Sudan (40k in number), have fled to Uganda. It’s clear their life is hell. 10 children are dieing everyday, and their death is going to be the one that’s slow and painful. How can I say to the 40k people from South Sudan who are currently in tatters, that I have other important things to do; that I need to fuck women as often as I can, that I want to have flow in my life, that I want to play video games and enjoy life, all the while looking hot as long as I can. Every generation of Germans are taking the blame for the mass slaughter of the Jews, and what are we being blamed for? nothing? How about inaction? How can I knowingly give up on all the people who are suffering, so as to have some pleasure; say by spending on products (a 200 Euro cycle perhaps), spending on getting girls (learning salsa), spending on travel and other “amazing” things. What about [this video of boyfriends meeting their girlfriends after a long time][video of hugging], imagine how this would feel? The question still stands, how can you tell those 40k people, “Bruv I need a girl like in the video. I don’t think I can do anything for you. I am sorry”. We are talking about first world problems here.

I have no argument other than the above in favor of choosing EA. Neither do I have any better argument for buying a cycle, or getting girls. #Motivated Skepticism.

It somehow feels right to put your money and change as many lives as you can? but what is the logic you ask? Well! I have thought about it. I don’t want to be a rock. All I have is my existing SITH. I can’t imagine my SITH wanting anything else. However, the feelings will do their own thing. My SITH asks me to not heed to those things as well. I can’t imagine anything to be worthwhile.

And one thing I might know is that, ‘Father’s got you’. He has your back. Surely. And from what I have seen from the talks of people like Martin Seligman, Father definitely has your back.

Will the real slim shady please stand up

Can the real slim shady, please convince me about “saving a drowning baby while getting your shirt dirty in the mud is a good thing”? No contest!

But this is obvious!

What? How? Why?

I feel it with all my heart. My SITH and feelings in sync for once. Everyone in the world will agree with me about the isolated event of saving the drowning baby. Even if they don’t its what I strongly feel because of the SITH. You can’t stop me.

Is this it? Is this the best argument we can give? Is there not a mathematical proof that clearly derives from things that we know regarding ‘what we should be doing in life’? I don’t have any problem in accepting that I deserve a vacation. But what I have a problem with is accepting with this very little proof, that I have to do EA. In other words I need proof for things that I feel uncomfortable doing. But I won’t get any proof. Why? Because I cannot be convinced. SITH seems to be all I have. The SITH reasoning is all I have. Why treat blacks and whites equal anyways? So what if they are also people like us who feel pain? Where did this magic come from?

I cry when I see 40k people dieing, but only for a few seconds. I am back to my usual shit, in almost no time. I think about getting girls, getting flow, sporting, and engaging in consumerism. The question has always been which of this emotion is right? Which should I extrapolate and why?

Somewhere I belong

It’s better that all of us suffer a little than any of us suffer a lot -Imaginary Bob from this TED talk

Man, this resonates big time with my SITH. What a divine saying. This was said by the CEO of a company in the time of recession. Amazing. But why stop with companies, why not go beyond. Why not we all “suffer” a little so that any of us doesn’t suffer a lot. I say “suffer” in quotes because I suspect its not all going to be that bad for the “sufferers”.

But Mr. Pandian, what is the proof that your SITH is right? Feelings are shit because they are circular. Feelings want us to act according to the heuristics and biases which suck. By golly we have another mechanism with which we reason, think and are able to update what we might truly want. Feelings sometimes is in sync with this, and sometimes not. The SITH tells us, “Drowning baby must be saved even if our shirt gets dirty”. Unless there is a good reason to believe otherwise, I see no necessity to update the SITH.

As Thalaivar Eleizer articulates it really well,

The obvious choice isn’t always the best choice, but sometimes, by golly, it is. I don’t stop looking as soon I find an obvious answer, but if I go on looking, and the obvious-seeming answer still seems obvious, I don’t feel guilty about keeping it. Oh, sure, everyone thinks two plus two is four, everyone says two plus two is four, and in the mere mundane drudgery of everyday life everyone behaves as if two plus two is four, but what does two plus two really, ultimately equal? As near as I can figure, four. It’s still four even if I intone the question in a solemn, portentous tone of voice. Too simple, you say? Maybe, on this occasion, life doesn’t need to be complicated. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? -Eleizer on Truth

BTW, I just used my current SITH to judge what Eleizer says, and it sounds reasonable and non-guilt causing to me to go with the current SITH with its current stand on poverty hunger and death.

But for the sake of clarity, here we go another time.

Luck and meritocracy

You have been very lucky to be in a state like this. It just happened that you don’t have to fight for food, water, shelter and my oh my, health care. It’s not a meritocratic society. Not everyone is born with the same silver spoon as you. You cannot blame it on the people completely, saying they are lazy and don’t want to develop themselves. It’s not that simple, and what about the child that was just born, how is he supposed to fend for himself? Anyways, in socialistic countries, we see people paying a lot of tax, even upto 50% that goes to people who earn less, students who need it, and health care. Health care costs the same for all. The idea being that anyone can get diseases. Some treatments are costly AF. Not everyone is going to be sick at the same time. Treatements are quite pricy that the poor stand no chance. Concepts like universal healthcare thus came by. Poor people will never be able to afford the costly healthcare, especially if they get into an accident or get some serious ailment. Does that mean they should be allowed to die? Its surprising how man-made boundries, dictate who gets health care and who not. Suddenly those man-made boundaries constitute a group of people who are known as ‘X’ and only those people shall be taken care of. Why, why not exclude some people within ‘X’, you know just for fucks sake!

You can’t ask the poor people to die or by inaction leave them to their fate. Free market will decide my ASS.

Somepeople worked for you ad you have a good life. You need to be the “somepeople”, who will help others get the good life. Death is wrong Where is the proof? Mexico is right now in crazy pain due to the earthquake. I was watching a video where rescue workers were working round the clock to save lives, pull them out of debri. Too many people have died. The numbers don’t tell you anything via feeling. But when you see a video with a kid who is still alive trapped in the debri, you gasp. You imagine the trauma the kid might be undergoing. Syria, South Sudan, and any other location where there is pain or death, whether or not translated well enough as pain by our feeling to us, is wrong and should be avoided at all costs.

Everyone is family Where is the proof? You don’t stop crying when it is a pig even. You weep at pain. You weep when the pig fucking shouts in pain, when being manhandled, or choked to death. Everyone is family. Extending that, it doesn’t matter if someone is Indian or a Pakistani. Death is still death. Man-made boundaries, patriotism, can all suck it. It seems stupid to fight against each other. We are all in this together.

3rd world problems > 1st world problems

Whether I have an uber cool social status or not, if more deaths can be stopped, if acid attack victims can live a more normal life, if old people feel less lonely, if motherfucking children can be given a decent chance to live, we consider these as GOOD. There are so many problems that need to be solved. Poverty, hunger and death, to begin with. When I see people dying, I can’t but think of anything else. Death of someone, pain of someone is such a strong emotion, than the joy of having a girlfriend at that particular moment. When you are faced with the option of saving a life from being hit by the train or having a girlfriend, I would imagine we would in the moment choose to save the life.

The same experiment crumbles, when we have 10k $ on one side of the scale and death of another unknown man. I immediately imagine a young man, who has hardly seen money in his life and has a lot of debt. And I see him making a run with the money, not thinking about the life at stake. But this is not the case with me or so many other folk. We are well off. I suspect I immediately imagine that I have a lot of debts, and that this 10k$ will help me to get to a better life. But it won’t. Furthermore, I suspect understanding of money is rather hyped. For example, “More money somehow seems to mean more prosperity”, “More money is awesome, imagine the things we can do with it”. We constantly judge people by how much money they make, by assessing their house, their car, their way of living. Like somehow more money implies amazing things. So I want to take money out of the picture and substitute it with exactly what it can do for you. Ultimately you plan to buy stuff with the 10k right? What is the best stuff you could buy? A 1000 Euro bike + lifetime supply of Xbox games? Well what if we have a lifetime membership of xbox games (worth more than 10k) on one side and a life hanging by a thread on the other side.

What if we increased the amount of money to 1 million euros worth of stuff vs a human life to save. Let’s assume that this one million euros worth of stuff can be used on everything else other than saving lives in any way possible because apparently that is not your intention for now.

Assuming you don’t have debts. And looking at the above, I feel more relieved, that there is actually an answer to this. It appears that if all money can do is buy stuff; big house, jewels, games, babes, friendship even, earliest retirement, constant vacations, then when I am asked the question 10k$ of stuff or a life, then the solution is clear.

Now taking the whole discussion one step further. What if I had to pay 10k$ from your own fucking pocket to save that fucking life. If you make a lot of money, and if all money can do is buy stuff, and all stuff is not comparable to the worth of a fucking life, then? Better yet, imagine that the life you are going to save is the life of that baby girl stuck in the pile of debris barely breathing. GOD comes to you and says, pussy for the rest of your life vs saving that baby doll. Are you a rock? Also pleasurable life dawg, really?

Material pleasures

Consumerism has its high, but it doesn’t last, novelty wears off pretty quick. I remember my cousin who bought a mother fucking BMW saying this to me, “ First month was cool, I was pretty excited that I was going to get one, but after that, well… Nothing much.”. I agreed with him.

I want to buy a new cycle, because I think that going fast and changing gears will improve the quality of my workout. First of all thats a BS statement as it comes with no proof what so ever. This is not one of those primary rules that cannot be tested. It appears that I have somehow engraved into my brain that having a fast cycle will be amazing. But weren’t you saying all these material pleasures don’t last or something?

You want to do activities in high flow. Not engage in material pleasures. You want your life to be like a game.

Everyone wants to help There is enough evidence I think that people want to help others, whether they know the person or not. Look at the fb pages: Humans of Bombay, ‘Humans of Newyork,’milaap’. See what this guy did during the holocaust. And this guy muhammed example. Fund-raisers have never gotten over this quick. Humans of Bombay boasts about getting crazy Fund-raisers over in < 1 hr. People want to help. People are highly appreciative of people who want to help. Of course there is a catch. What wins at fundraisers seems to be the presentation , the emotional arousal, likes and other silly things. A life is not seen plainly for its value. #H&B.

Given the option of choosing great lives for everyone, or great life for only me and my parents, what would you choose? What would anybody choose? What would you want? What would anyone want?

Everyone seems to want to help. But they are trusting to be emotionlay stimulated. God help all those kids who couldnt get the necessary coverage on media, to get their sad-ass life saved

Cant trust them feelings - circular We can’t trust our circular feelings. One moment, we feel sad about the people dieing and the next moment we are back to other 1st world problems. We will get no where if we go by them. Our current SITH seems to be the only thing we have.

Realize that EA objects or not, both sides need convincing I keep thinking that EA needs convincing. Yes, But so does every other non-EA activity I indulge in. Get it?

Fending for themselves

How can I knowingly give up on all the people who are suffering, so as to tend to some of my first world problems; leaving people who can’t fend for themselves, people who are in no position to fend for themselves, to fend for themselves. And all of this knowing that there are not many people who are actually doing stuff to help them out. Most of the people busy with making money to buy another car, another house, save for generations and generations etc. It is quite clear, that we need to step up. Is it still unclear, what the purpose of life is?

What would I be doing when there is a fire? There is a motherfucking metaphorical fire now. What would I be doing if I had an invincible suit that can go into the fire and bring people out safely? I have a the metaphorical invincible suit. Granted it’s not going to be as dramatic as the life of a firefighter. People are not going to be clapping for you at the end of an epic save. Are we in here for the glamor? It seems the right thing to do, at least as far as my SITH goes in agreeing about this, that I should pay up as much as I can, spend less on retarded stuff and work more on saving lives.