My Worldview in a Nutshell

My recent posts have generated lots of feedback and comments. I've thoroughly enjoyed the engagement, and I've especially enjoyed hashing through things with folks who disagree with my point of view.

However, during those conversation, people have on occasion sought to ferret out the motives behind my positions. As just one example, it's been alleged that my arguments for female EMPOWERMENT are actually just a thinly disguised Machiavellian effort to disempower and sexualize females. This is simply not the case.

My views on most everything, including male-female relations, flow naturally from first principles. If you accept my first principles (and many of you won't), then it's hard to challenge my positions.

So, I feel that I owe it to you lay out those principles and how they logically inform my conclusions. That way you can know where I'm coming from and hopefully have some appreciation for the fact that my positions are principled rather than strategic (even if you disagree with the principles).

In the title to this post, I promised a "nutshell". Well, it's going to take a little more than that to do this topic justice. So...buckle up.

My worldview is anchored in a key truth. This truth is both counterintuitive and obvious. It has been discovered and rediscovered time and again throughout history by philosophers, contemplatives (meditators) and scientists. And that truth is simply this:

1. There is no "you". Your self-identity is an illusion.

I know, that's hard to believe until you've experienced it, but it's true, and both science and religion vouch for it. I'm not going to offer up all the evidence for this proposition here. For now, just take it as face value.

From that foundational insight flows the following:

2. "You" are analogous to a deep learning computer program that has become aware of its own existence (thanks to sufficient processing power and evolutionary adaptation). Your sense of "youness" is purely an emergent property that doesn't exist at the base programming level (in base level reality).

3. The program that you experience as "you" observes its own outputs/results and some of its inputs/stimuli, but it's underlying code is inscrutable to self-discovery. Consequently, it has no idea how it converts certain stimuli into certain responses. This is key, because this lack of knowledge leads to critical inferences and assumptions that simply are not true. For instance, it's entire sense of self has developed exclusively from what it does and observes rather than from what it truly is. In actuality, "it" is nothing but code that runs in a manner beyond its control or even its cognition. What it thinks it is is the output of the code--thoughts, feelings, urges, drives, motives, etc.

4. Being conscious but unable to see its own underlying code, it experiences its own processing of inputs, and its own generation of outputs, as "thoughts' or "urges" or "aversions" or similar things.

5. Since it can consciously experience the input (say, the sound of music) and the output (say, delight and the compulsion to listen more) but not the program that translates the input sound into the output compulsion, it develops a sense of independent agency (free will) that does not exist in actuality. It comes to subjectively believe "I fancy this music" or "I prefer this music to that other music." It thinks it has preferences when in fact it only has programming.

6. Psychologically speaking, the portion of "itself" that it can consciously experience (mostly the output of its programming) represent it's "consciousness". Those things about which it is conscious--thoughts, preferences, urges, emotions, the body--are what it considers itself to be. But those things are mere results and not the source. They are the objects of consciousness, not the subject that is conscious.

7. The portion of itself that remains inscrutable to self-examination (I.e., it's actual programming) is experienced as its "unconscious" or "subconscious", or its "muse" or even it's "God". But, it's really just its real, hidden self.

8. Since the "I" it conceives itself to be doesn't really exist but rather is a mental construction that exists only in the computer (brain) as an abstraction (a "strange loop" as some have called it), nothing it does or experiences is "deserved" or "earned".

9. Outcomes are therefore not a function of its worthiness but of deterministic programs being fed with both predetermined and "random" inputs from the environment.

10. To confuse matters more, those programs that ultimately control you are, like "deep learning" or "AI" computer programs, constantly rewriting themselves based upon their prior processing of inputs (I.e., based upon their prior experiences). That is, they are learning.

11. Due to learning, the "programmed" output for a given input can change over time. Consequently, the "self" may respond one way to a given stimulus today and another inconsistent way tomorrow.

12. Because these preprogrammed reactions are accompanied by conscious corollaries--for instance, the sensation of urges or aversions or thoughts or similar things--and because these things change over time with learning, this gives the "self aware" program the illusion of "choice".

13. But in reality it has no such choice. The program's outputs (thoughts, urges, aversions, behaviors, etc.) are again merely a deterministic consequence of the inputs it receives, the state of its programming at the moment it receives them, the changes to those programs over time (from learning), and the inscrutable running of those programs in the unconscious background.

14. Nonetheless, this false sensation of "choice" further reinforces its false sense of independent agency and "free will".

15. Though the self isn't real and doesn't exist at base level reality (the programming level), the experience of self is subjectively very real to the experiencer.

16. This subjective sense of "self" has proven to be a very successful evolutionary adaptation--allowing creatures to more successfully pass genes to the next generation by acting with a mind toward "self preservation".

17. Humans have evolved to preserve the "ego" self, but from an evolutionary perspective they are actually just attempting to preserve the underlying program (the genes and the like) that is invisible to them.

18. In short, evolution has created the sense of self as a proxy mental abstraction for the underlying program (much the same way that the "file" on your desktop is a proxy abstraction of certain underlying binary code in your computer).

19. Acting to reinforce and preserve the sense of "self" is therefore baked into the evolutionary cake at the deepest and most fundamental level. It's base level programming. Virtually every self-aware creature therefore resists self-annihilation, except perhaps in defense of other versions of the program (that is, of other people).

20. Consequently, we have learned and evolved to act in accordance with our subjective assessment of our collective self-interest. In this way, copies of the program are better preserved and passed on than if similarly-situated creatures acted with no sense of self or self interest.

21. However, self-interest, from an evolutionary perspective, isn't always, or even often, purely selfish. Collaboration and altruism are highly successful strategies for preserving variations of the program (that is, passing on genes), therefore evolution has favored them both. Copies of the program are usually better preserved when we act collaboratively and altruistically rather than purely selfishly.

22. However, evolution is not "intelligent". It cannot anticipate the future and proceed accordingly. Consequently, evolution proceeds and advances in a decentralized, anti-fragile, non-optimized way--through redundancy and replication combined with variation.

23. Via replication, redundancy and variation, evolution harnesses the inherent randomness of the environment and transforms it into progress via the means of natural selection. If it didn't, then genes (the program) would have gone extinct long ago due to random environmental changes. Nothing can long survive randomness except by proceeding in a decentralized, non-optimized and anti-fragile way.

24. Humans experience evolution's "goal" of preserving our underling base code (our genes), which it has abstracted into a sense of "self", as an urge for self-preservation and the preservation of those dear to us, and as an urge for sex (procreation). Everything else that we consider to be healthy and human springs from these two base drives or urges--preservation and procreation. I will consider the pursuit of these two things to be evolution's "Prime Directive".

25. But remember, the evolutionary system is not optimized to pursue even the Prime Directive by any particular means. It doesn't pursue the most efficient means of our collective self preservation because it can't anticipate the future (or even the current) environment.

26. Any such attempt at optimization toward the Prime Directive is therefore inherently fragile (easily disrupted or ended by randomness) and therefore cannot be evolutionarily-favored. Failure to grasp or remember this insight is the root of most all potential logical errors as we extrapolate from the above to the below.

27. For instance, why do individuals in isolated instances act in ways seemingly inconsistent with the Prime Directive? Its not because the Prime Directive is invalid. Rather it's because behavior that seems "crazy" or that violates the Directive under current environmental conditions could potentially support it in others. Because evolution cannot anticipate environmental conditions, it cannot know the ideal way to advance the Directive. It cannot optimize it's programming. It therefore must proceed in ways that ensure some varieties of the program survive under a great variety of unanticipated conditions.

28. Thus, evolution and nature proceed by trial and error--by causing outputs (behaviors) in some that turn out to be unhelpful in adapting to the current environment but that might prove adaptive in other environments.

29. Because we are programmed for collective "self" preservation, we are (as a whole and on the average) incapable of "intentionally" acting otherwise. Consequently, societal rules designed to preserve our collective "selves" (for instance via enforcement of laws like "thou shall not kill") are not "moral" imperatives, just inescapable ones. We (as a whole and on the average) are just incapable of "intentionally" proceeding otherwise. The underlying source code prohibits it.

30. So, how "should" humans act, and what rules or laws "should" society enforce? Those that are consistent with the "intentions" of the underlying source code, of course--that is, those that encourage decentralization and preserve each creature's sense of self (which again, is a proxy abstraction for that creature's version of the underlying code). In short, those that promote anti-fragile diversity.

How can the above axioms inform how society organizes itself? In several ways. For instance:

1. Humans should generally avoid creating and becoming dependent upon centralized, highly-optimized systems for the same reasons that evolution avoids these systems. Such systems are inherently fragile and easily disrupted by the unexpected.

2. And, in due course, the unexpected always happens. Therefore, an optimized world causes humans to suffer unnecessarily when disruption happens. In extreme cases, many millions of variations of the program (that is, many millions of humans) could be lost forever, perhaps leading even to extinction.

3. Given 1 and 2 above, humans should generally avoid "centralized planning", especially of economies, in favor of market-based solutions. Market economies are both more antifragile and also more innovative.

4. Market economies are more innovative because the reward for taking risk and discovering new things that benefit society is "outsized", thus incentivizing the desired risk-taking behavior. By contrast, risk is not rewarded, and in fact is often penalized, in centrally-planned environments.

5. It only takes one person "hitting "jackpot" (making a great discovery) to revolutionize society and improve everyone's life. In market economies, far, far more people "roll the dice" on a daily basis, greatly increasing the odds of one of them hitting jackpot at any given moment (and the number of jackpots over any fixed length of time).

6. This spreading of risk taking among a great many "entrepreneurs" (French for "risk takers") also ensures that market economies are more decentralized and antifragile than centrally-planned economies (that is, less dependent upon the success or failure of any one risk-taking venture and less susceptible to disruption from random events).

7. Notice that the outsized financial reward given to great "innovators" in market economies isn't intended to compensate "them" for "their" intelligence or "their" ambition or "their"...whatever. In fact, as Nassim Taleb has documented time and again, most of our earth-shattering "innovations" resulted from mostly dumb luck! Most "innovators" didn't "earn" the benefits of their innovation, they chanced into them!

8. If the outsized reward isn't compensation for brilliance, skill or ambition, then...what's it for? It's simply a reward for thre things. First, an least important, it's for taking risk of some sort--for spending a little time or money or reputation to explore something novel and uncertain but that, as LUCK would have it, proved to be of benefit to society. The second is for then working to share the benefits of that discovery with everyone else. And third and MOST important, it's to incentivize future risk takers to continue in their efforts.

9. How much should we compensate these lucky "innovators"--people who stumble upon something that benefits society? The system should ideally be structured to give society the maximum reward (in the sense of new and helpful "innovations" or discoveries") per dollar spent. Too much reward may encourage risk for risk's sake. Not enough means insufficient innovation.

10. Market based systems advance the objective of gaining the most innovation for a given dollar spent in part by only rewarding SUCCESSFUL attempts at discovery rather than every attempt, but making the awards to the successful so large as to encourage a great many future attempts.

11. By incentivizing "gambling"--the risking of time, money and reputation for the chance of an outsized reward--society gets much work done for free. It only has to pay when something works, but then it pays a lot. It pays nothing to gain knowledge about what doesn't work.

12. Casinos do the same thing: They incentivize mass participation in risk-taking behaviors by offering a chance at outsized rewards, and they only pay the winners. However, in the case of market economies, we are generally incentivizing beneficial discoveries rather than arbitrary behaviors (pulling the wheel on a slot machine, for example), and we gain important information with every risk taken (for instance, information about what DOESN'T work).

13. Knowing what doesn't work is incredibly beneficial, for it informs future attempts at risk taking. This is similar to natural selection, which "steers" participants in beneficial directions by only allowing useful, or at least harmless, attempts to survive.

14. Rewarding risk taking directly, rather than only successful outcomes, would both result in people taking risk for risk's sake and also in society spending far more than necessary for each successful outcome. Casinos don't pay losers for a reason--there's simply no need to do so to encourage the desired behaviors from the masses.

15. Since determining the optimal reward payout to incentivize the desired level of societal risk-taking and subsequent information sharing is impossible to do accurately in advance (there are just too many constantly changing variables), awards should be determined in a decentralized way by constant trial and error (in the manner of evolution).

16. Decisions as to the allocation of rewards should be decentralized so as to benefit from the "wisdom of the crowds", so as to ensure that all rewards are "voluntarily" given (coercion is just another word for "centralization", after all), and so as to ensure that the system is antfragile.

17. Free markets, where consumer demand strongly influences the reward given to "innovators" for discoveries (that is, the per unit "price" of the good or service), meet all three of these criteria--crowd-sourced, voluntary and antifragile.

18. Antifragility is enhanced significantly by ensuring that people "vote" to allocate future rewards--that is, choose to spend their money--in proportion to their "stake". Said another way, people with more money, and therefore more to lose, should have an outsized say in how their money is spent (and therefore how rewards are subsequently allocated to others). Denying them this ability (for instance, by taxing them and redistributing their wealth) creates perverse incentives and systemic risk and increases centralization.

19. Laws, by their very nature, are an exercise in "centralized planning". Therefore they limit entrepreneurial options, increase centralization, and corrupt markets via coercion and perverse incentives. Consequently, voluntary, market-based solutions should always be favored by society over legal ones whenever possible. Having said that, there may not always be market-based solutions to every problem.

20. The majority should always resist imposing its will on the minority--whether by laws, customs, shaming, etc. Decentralization and innovation are maximized when Individuals are free to pursue their self interest however they see fit.

21. Variation and diversity should be cultivated and celebrated since they benefit society by making it both more innovative and less fragile.

22. Exceptional results should likewise be celebrated, and rewarded, despite a lack of "merit". Did Bill Gates "earn" his outsized reward for his "innovations" or discoveries at Microsoft? Nah. But society would be insane to deprive him of them. Those rewards inspired an entire generation of people after him, a great many of whom have improved society immensely via there subsequent risk taking. Looking at Silicon Valley today, it was money very well spent.

23. We should avoid thinking that the reward voluntarily paid by society is commensurate to the amount of risk assumed by the risk taker. It's not. Thinking this is yet another attempt by the ego to make the reward about "merit."

24. The value of the reward is purely a function of the benefit it provides society, as measured by society's willingness to voluntarily pay for the good or service.

25. Once we recognize that an entrepreneurial, risk-taking, market-based society generally rewards people for taking risk and/or sharing information and not for "worth" or "merit", we view society through a completely different lens--one that resolves a great many of our disputes.

26. For instance, we can then recognize that the difference in economic output of men and women isn't necessarily a result of "socialization" or "discrimination" or the "patriarchy". Instead, it is a result of a simple evolutionary fact--men are programmed to be greater risk-takers.

27. Scientists have shown conclusively that men in every culture and at all times have a far greater risk tolerance, and take far more risks, than women, and evolutionary psychology even explains why.

28. In short, men simply "roll the dice" more often and so have higher chances of gaining outsized rewards. When they win, they then share these rewards with women. Women do the same, only to a lessor degree.

29. But men also fail far more often than women too, leading to greater variance in outcomes between men and women. For instance, it's true that men are overrepresented among the "elite", but it's also true that they are WAY overrepresented among those who commit suicide, drug addicts, alcoholics, prisoners, etc. Both men's unusual success and their unusual failures are mostly a function of their natural biological tendancy to take more risks.

Photo credit: Me