Story so far

In the essay What is the purpose of life (2), it became clearer that feelings cannot be trusted selectively, to determine the true value system. However I thought I had landed on a gold mine when I realized that Biases could be the only clue, connecting us to our value system. In the same essay, I detail a “plan” to expedite the process of making the discovery of the true value system. In it I have started with the Idea of first getting an overview of the biases.

In the article Heuristics and Biases, I have written in brief of some of the human biases as got from the Wikipedia page on heuristics and biases. The leap to the true value system doesn’t seem straight forward or for that matter even possible.

I also state that I would like to look at visual vs auditory reception of data. I currently don’t have any data and a quick Google search suggests that I might need to read papers, to know if I can get an answer or not.

What do you expect

I expect to know what I should be focusing on in life. I don’t need to know the full solution, i.e., something that can guide me to eternity. I just need right now, something that can inform me what is more important to my true value system and why it is important. Something in the range of “Yo, people are the only thing that is important to you and you need to go to the extent of being called of being an extremeist because …” or “ Yo, people are not important at all, you should focus on buying ferraris, because …”. The reason cannot be just any reason, it should be backed by science. For example, “Yo, people are the only thing that is important to you because, when we look at “X” bias, we see that although the bias sucks, it appears to be intended so that you save as many people as you can, hence pointing to your real value system.”

Thus what I expect to find out or hear is something as written above, something which is highly objective, i.e., it should not be an opinion at all. Everyone in their right mind should concur on this, irrespective of whether they can put their mind to doing what the prophecy as a result informs you to do.

Most importantly, the thing thats been running in my mind is that there can only be one right answer, Right? What I mean by that is it cannot be a matter of opinion, its science. Hence only one right answer.

Will the solution inside your head agree with the solution that comes from outside?
The solution in side your head evolves or adapts to reason. Black people needn’t be slaves, they are also people like us. Women should get voting rights as well, as they are also people like us. At this point it appears that the whole chapter on the solution being inside my head seems almost useless (will spec into it later).

What if there is no solution, after a point its just a leap of faith?
No idea.

Over the past few days

Over the past 4 days, I have been trying to read about biases, morality and their possible connection and hence an answer to my earlier questions. But it has been rather hard.

“Morality and biases” has been my primary search point, but I guess there is no simple answer, or I’ll have to read some papers online. The article by peter singer on “Famine, affluence and morality” is no good, neither is an STM’s story of the ice cream truck. They all seem flawed in the sense that they selectively choose feelings to inform us what we should be doing in life, similar to the discussion in this post on “purpose of life”.

I looked at some other articles in Google, but didn’t get any where. Found this blog on meta-ethics, read the FAQ partially, only to figure out that I didn’t get any real answer to the standard I expected (as mentioned above). The author starts with “My view on this topic is …”. I can’t seem to wrap my head around, why they say my view, as though there is a possibility for disagreement. He also says the following:

But if you’re looking for a rock solid argument that you should give 50% of your income to the most effective charities or something like that, there’s not much I can say. It might make you happier, I guess?

TED seemed to be a huge let down as no one seems to talk about the primary source of all this morality. Maybe its a complex ideology that cannot be just gotten in one essay or googling at my current ridiculous pace. More and more I read online, the more and more I feel like the questions I have in my physics assignment. It’s one of the things that’s just not possible with googling alone. You need to know A, then know that A leads to B, and then make it until Z where you make sense of it all. More like a derivation.

Maybe I am trying to rediscover the wheel, which might not be required. Standing on the shoulders of giants I think I might have a better opportunity. What I mean by that is to read more and stop trying to rediscover stuff. For example, it maybe would be a better direction to go systematically on Eliezer Yudkouskys either HPMOR or his essay series. I would like to hear an STMs feedback on this.

Direction

I have some ideas on availability bias. Will materialize them first. Things I can work on in the future are, points related to HPMOR, or unanswered questions in the previous posts, and look at an STM blog and discuss things based on that.

Evaluation (Dear Reader, Please skip the below)

At least no pressure, but I acted everyday to look for info and write. Info was not enough to produce content. Once this house thing is over, I want to up the ante and maybe do one post a day, for example, eliezer yudkowsky level stuff!