I really dislike speculative fiction, but I really want to like it.

I grew up loving science fiction in particular, but I find most entries into the genre aren’t to my tastes. So when I get a solid recommendation I’m usually ecstatic, because it increases the odds that I’ll like it from 1% to maybe 20%. So when Robin Hanson, a thinker I very much respect (here’s his blog!) started talking about Ted Chiang’s Exhalation, I was eager to pick it up.

I’m 4 stories into the collection, and so far I’m not disappointed! But this isn’t a review; rather, I want to talk about a specific idea he explores in one of those stories. Minor spoilers, but I’ll try to avoid anything that would ruin your enjoyment.

So, let’s start with a basic premise: You have a small device that consists of a button and a light. The light always lights up exactly one second before you push the button, because of something called a “negative time circuit.” Basically, if you push the button it turns the light on one second ago. So if you see the light and try to push the button faster, you’ll always fail, and if you try to wait for the light and then not push the button, the light never comes. Supposedly this disproves free will.

Now, people way smarter than me have grappled with issues of determinism and free will for a long time, and I’m far from an expert on that discourse. But I don’t know that I believe that this device, functioning as described, means you don’t have free will.

For starters, there still seems to be a free choice involved in pushing the button, it’s just being made by a slightly-future you. The light isn’t telling you that you have to push the button; the light is reacting to the fact that you did push the button, only it’s sending that reaction back in time. But the light is still reactive. And it’s reacting to my own free choices that I make – at least some version of me.

Robin raised a point on Twitter – can I see the light and then decide not to push the button? The device says no, and thus I don’t have free will, argues Robin. But maybe I can – maybe I see the light, and choose not to push the button, and since I don’t push the button no light goes back, and that’s what’s happening when I look at the device and there’s no light. How could I tell the difference between that scenario and one where I never pushed the button at all?

My head is starting to hurt.

When should you change your mind?

Inspired by a question asked on Twitter by Zach Weinersmith, I’m giving some thought to how, why and when we should change our beliefs.

First, it’s helpful to categorize our beliefs. Ultimately there are only two categories of beliefs that matter: those that change your behavior in some way, and those that don’t. For instance, let’s say you currently believe that eating spiders would kill you. Even if I were to convince you that it won’t, you might go on not eating spiders just because you find the idea disgusting. In that case, your belief that spiders are deadly when eaten is a zero-impact belief; it doesn’t change your behavior.

A high-impact belief is one that heavily affects your behavior. If you sincerely switch to being an ethical vegan, you’re likely to change a lot about your life. Certainly your diet, but maybe a host of related behaviors as well.

“Actions speak louder than words,” so one way to measure whether a belief is sincerely held is whether it actually changes someone’s behavior. I can say “I care about animal cruelty” all day, but if I don’t change a thing about my diet or behavior, you’re probably safe to guess that I’m not sincere.

For better or worse, people care about how their beliefs are perceived by others. You not only want to have your beliefs respected by those you respect, but you also want to be taken seriously. If all your peers are vegans, that might make you want to be a vegan as well – and if you become a vegan, you certainly want your peers to believe in your sincerity in the adoption of that lifestyle.

In addition to the actions a belief requires today, people often want to signal to their peers a credible, long-term commitment to those ideals. If you care about being perceived as a vegan, then you also probably care that people believe that you’ll remain one for some time – that your beliefs are solid, not mercurial. It’s easy to signal your current devotion to veganism by not eating meat today, but how do you give the impression that you’ll remain that way tomorrow and ten years from now?

One of the ways people do that is to attach their initial devotion to a belief to some significant event. If you just wake up one day and decide to be a vegan, your peers might assume that you could wake up some other day and decide that you’re not. But if you don’t claim to be a vegan until you go on a month-long backpacking trip through Africa and have a profound experience where you “find yourself” or something like that, then you give the impression that only an equally-profound experience in the opposite direction could shake you from your new worldview.

I find this to be a disturbing trend for a variety of reasons.

One: You should arrive at your beliefs due to logic and reason, not emotional bias. Whether you’re using the “spiritual journey” as an excuse to signal or you really did come to that new belief because you “found yourself,” you should give serious thought to researching that new position or belief in a serious way before committing to great change. It’s definitely good to explore new beliefs and ways of thinking, but do it with sound purpose.

Two: Anecdotal data sucks. Let’s say I get mugged by a man in a green hat, and I’m injured during the mugging and almost lose my life. That’s a profound experience! But if my conclusion from it is “Men in green hats aren’t to be trusted; we should arrest them all and ban green hats while we’re at it,” then my thinking is seriously flawed. My solitary experience with a man in a green hat isn’t in any way indicative of any broader trends, even though it may feel that way to me at the time.

Three: You shouldn’t make it hard for your future self to change your future mind. Don’t wrap your whole identity inside a single belief, because then you leave yourself no exit strategy if you turn out to be wrong. Imagine after the Green Hat Mugging, I not only proclaim my hatred of people in green hats, but I signal my devotion to this belief in increasingly permanent ways: I post loudly on the internet about my belief, and make new profiles on social media sites with names like GreenHatHater19, I put “GREEN HATTERS MUST DIE” bumper stickers on my car, and I even tattoo some similar logo on my body. Then later someone confronts me with incontrovertible evidence that the green hat thing was a fluke, and in no way do green hats indicate criminal proclivity. Do you think I’ll be easily swayed? Will I suddenly abandon all that identity?

Not a chance. People don’t just hold beliefs; they barricade themselves inside beliefs. They climb inside them like they were bomb shelters and fortify themselves against anything that might sway them. Don’t be that person.

Give yourself room to grow. Leave your back doors open. Change your beliefs gracefully when the evidence calls for it. Don’t hate others for their beliefs, even if you sincerely believe they’re wrong. At best, your reasonableness will sway them to your side, and at worst, you’ll be respected and welcomed if it turns out you were the mistaken one. And leave yourself lots of room in your world for multiple beliefs that don’t have to be right or wrong.

When you encounter the profound, just enjoy it.

There’s this sort of modern business parable I like. Goes like this:

A big-shot CEO is being interviewed for some magazine. Interviewer asks him why he’s so successful. He says “Two words: Good decisions.” Interviewer asks him how he learned to make good decisions. He says “One word: Experience.” Interviewer asks how he got experience, and he says “Two words: Bad decisions.”

I love that. I think one of the worst things that can happen to you is easy, overnight success. If you succeed on your first attempt at something, you almost certainly don’t have a robust framework for your success. You learned exactly one way to succeed and zero ways to fail, and you can’t even be sure if your success was entirely due to your own accomplishments or if the stars simply aligned. Compare that to the way Edison made the light bulb after countless failed attempts – it took him a thousand tries, but he never claimed they were failures, he said he discovered a thousand ways not to make a light bulb. That a light bulb was an invention that took a thousand steps.

The benefits of so many failures is that you carve a path through ignorance and the unknown and gather a tremendous knowledge of the world around your actions. Thousands upon thousands of bits of information about what works and what doesn’t and to what degree, allowing you to mix and recombine these pieces into exponentially greater and greater ideas and plans.

You should go into any endeavor with a plan to fail.

That means while of course you’re trying to succeed, failure shouldn’t shock you or catch you unprepared. You should know that failure is a very real possibility, you should expect it, and you should have a clear framework for evaluating that failure and squeezing all the information out of it that you possibly can. Don’t just shrug your shoulders and try the same thing again – gather your data, evaluate your methods, and adjust your course.

Try to fail at least a few times per week. They don’t have to be big failures, but you should aim for at least a handful every week. Try a variation on your sales pitch. Test out a new formula for the beauty products you sell. Use different software to make your next design. Tweak the dials. Someone who never has even a tiny failure isn’t trying anything and isn’t taking any risks – and thus will never improve.

You can’t coast. No success is permanent. The world moves around you. It’s fine to define your own parameters of success (and in fact, you should!), and so it’s perfectly fine to be content with a certain level of success and decide that the marginal benefit of an additional dollar doesn’t outweigh the marginal cost of an extra unit of effort put towards making it. You can retire whenever you decide to. But until then – as long as you want to keep it up – don’t let success stand in the way of your failures. Because you need them.

My constant desire to learn about what other people care about drives me with great enthusiasm towards other cultures.

Normally my desire to see inside the minds and motivations of others is a very individual pursuit – I like knowing what makes a person tick more than I generally like learning what makes people tick. I think it’s because my fascination with people generally involves wondering what makes them different from everyone else, but when you study motivations from a more macro viewpoint you’re often looking at aggregates. And while sociology and economics fascinate me to no end, I think even those joys will always pale before the glee I feel when I just get to know one unique individual.

But no man is an island, and no one exists in a vacuum. People’s hearts and minds are swayed by the words and deeds of others, and that constant flowing web becomes the eddies and pools of culture. So that fascinates me too – the way that condition shapes tradition. It reminds me of the way that everything is interconnected, how the pattern of rain will shape the flow of a river, and how the flow of a river will shape the way people swim, and how there will always be people who swim differently regardless.

Tonight I ate at one of my favorite restaurants, a delicious Mexican restaurant run by an immigrant family. While there with my family, we met an multi-generational family of Koreans (some immigrants, some American-born) with two small children of their own. All the children happily played together. It was a nice evening.

For all our differences, some things are universal.

A reader has shared an article with me, and before I get into why I found this article fascinating and my response to it, let me say – thank you! Getting people to share interesting things with me is 90% of my motivation for maintaining this blog, so when it happens I’m thrilled. Please, always send interesting and thought-provoking things my way!

Here is the article – not too long, and definitely worth a read.

I happen to share the author’s relatively dim view of Postmodernism. I believe in ultimate truth (however impossible it might be for me personally to even approach it) as well as the importance and value of socially-constructed beliefs, even as I shout from the rooftops the value of individualism and free thought.

As an aside: I don’t believe you can fundamentally “win” an argument, and I think if you approach arguments like they’re win/lose propositions you’ve already lost the greater impact of the search for knowledge. I don’t like to argue – I like to discuss. I’m not out to change anyone’s mind by force. I’m out to learn, and if you want to learn too, come along! We can do it together, it’ll be fun.

Now, back to that article. Something that stuck out for me was this bit: “I wanted to know what underlying values and beliefs were motivating his critique so I asked him to describe his worldview. He responded, ‘I have no worldview.'” Allow me to respond to that the way you should respond to anyone who says they have no worldview:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Claims of neutrality are preposterous. It always strikes me as funny when people complain about news media being biased. Because… of course it is? Literally everyone is biased, everyone has an agenda, everyone has a worldview. It would be impossible to operate otherwise.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as truth or that everyone is a scheming manipulator. People can be honest and good even with agendas and biases. But all thought and action must have a starting point. You must have something that motivates you to choose one course of action over another. If you’re diligent in your search for self-improvement and you have a good moral code, then over time your biases and agendas may adjust. You might be careful to keep yourself from going so deep into any given position that you can’t even see the other side, let alone a path to get there. You should be able to pass Ideological Turing Tests. But you will never be without an agenda, and neither will anyone else.

So what should you do with this information? Can no one be trusted? Don’t be absurd. Some people’s agendas will line up neatly with your own, and life is all about finding as many of those win/win scenarios as you can. A car salesman has an agenda to sell me a car. But if I want to buy a car, that works out. He also has an agenda to maintain a good reputation and repeat business, and I have an agenda to seek out reputable sellers of automobiles. Our agendas don’t compete. Now, a more unscrupulous salesman who has no plans to remain in the business might have the agenda of unloading a sub-par car no matter what, and then we do have conflicting agendas, but determining which is which is part of life.

I have many agendas. I want to be successful in my career and provide for my family, so I may prioritize my career over other things. But I also have an agenda to be a moral person, so I won’t rob a convenience store even if I thought I could get away with it and it would be lucrative. I have a strong bias towards personal freedom, and so I’m likely to be swayed more easily by arguments in favor of less government control than more. I have a worldview that says that people are better when they’re more free, more empowered, and more loved – and that worldview will color my decisions and individual points of view.

I make no claims otherwise. I don’t claim absolute certainty that any of my worldviews are objectively correct, but I do claim to sincerely believe them based on the information I have available to me, and I claim a sincere attempt to gather new information every day, even if such information would lead me away from my current beliefs.

“If I listen to your lies, would you say 
I’m a man without conviction
I’m a man who doesn’t know
How to sell a contradiction?”
– Culture Club, Karma Chameleon

By the way, a phenomenal comic about the whole “we can’t know anything so your argument fails” style of debate can be found here, if you’d like an extra laugh today.

After blogging for a while, I’ve started to notice that there tends to be a lot of asymmetry in the communication.

I want to provide value to others, but I also want to learn and listen. So for this post, rather than trying to talk about things I know, I’m going to just write down a lot of the kinds of questions I tend to think about, or the things I’d like to learn. I’m going to talk about the things well outside my wheelhouse!

1. What are good ways to discover your natural talents? You can’t hope to try even a fraction of all the things you might be good at in your limited lifespan. What are good ways to discover your passions? I love to hear stories where people discovered their calling in life in unusual or serendipitous ways.
2. Is your mid-thirties too late to learn to play the piano? I love piano music and have always had tremendous respect for people who play well. That’s true of any musical talent, really, but I’ve always thought the piano was especially awesome.
3. What makes people complain? Is there some evolutionary reason some people are inclined to do it, or have they been conditioned to believe it will help their situation somehow? I almost never complain about things, but it isn’t because I’m somehow more noble or anything, it’s just because I can’t envision a series of events where me complaining leads to anything improving – and I can imagine many series of events where it makes things worse, because people will want to interact with me less. So what causes that impulse – nature or nurture?
4. Advanced mathematics is so fascinating to me. I read Michael Huemer’s Approaching Infinity last year, and while it was endlessly interesting, it was also one of the most challenging books I’ve read in a while, since I have zero background in mathematics. But just knowing how vast and deep the field is makes me want to plunge in.
5. I’d really like to learn more about religion and its history. Due to my endless fascination with anything people care deeply about, this topic holds a lot of appeal to me. But I’ve always felt like something of an outsider looking in when it comes to religious topics. Maybe I’m doing it wrong.
6. What other questions should I be thinking about? The search for truth and wisdom isn’t really the search for answers – it’s the search for better questions. That’s why I love philosophy – what new ways can I stress-test my thought patterns?

There’s a glimpse into the kinds of things that just run through my mind on a regular basis. There’s so much to learn.

What kinds of questions do you love?

Imagine a large glass jar, maybe 10 gallons. You get some big, melon-sized rocks and you put them in there until you can’t fit any more. Is the jar full?

Well, you can’t fit any more of those rocks in there, but that doesn’t really mean the jar is full. Go ahead and take some gravel and pour it in around the rocks until it reaches the top, maybe shake it a little so everything settles down neatly in there.

But guess what? Still not full.

Some fine sand will pour in nicely around that gravel, filling in every nook and cranny, until now the jar is finally full.

Except… wait, you could pour some water in. Slowly but surely, the water would fill in around the sand until it reached the top of the jar. Now it’s probably full for real, unless there’s something about physics I’m not aware of that lets me fit something in between the water. Maybe you could dissolve some sugar in there without raising the total level of the water?

This is a metaphor about time management, but maybe not the one you’re thinking.

See, the wrong lesson to take from this is that no matter how full your schedule is, you can always fit in more. That might be true, but there’s a cost there – for instance, this very full jar is now very heavy and no light can get through it. That might be an important metaphor about the spiritual burden of too full of a calendar, but that’s not the point I’m making.

The point I’m making is that if you don’t put those big rocks in first, you’ll never ever fit them in. As soon as you start pouring the gravel (let alone the sand or the water), the ship has sailed on getting those big rocks in place.

Put the important things on your calendar first. Do them first. Front-load them. Don’t organize your tasks based on how much time they’ll take or how much you enjoy doing them – organize them based on which ones need to be done. Your total life satisfaction will thank me for it.

What do you want your ideas to do?

All great change and progress in the world starts with ideas, but not all great ideas become change and progress in the world. The vast majority of ideas sit idle and never take form in the world. They languish in the minds of the few and don’t take root where they could become real.

I want the values I care about to help my fellow humans. I want them to be more free, happier, and more successful. In fact, that’s the reason I have the values I do – I care about things that will accomplish those goals.

But it’s not enough to have the idea. It has to be given shape. It’s like the difference between a great idea for a new invention and seeing the finished product on the shelves.

Visualize the world you want, and work backwards to your idea. Can you find a connection – a viable path that leads from your idea to that vision? If so, it’s time to act. If not, it’s time to evaluate: is there such a path, but you need help to see it? That’s fine – enlist that help! Network, hire, and communicate to make the idea a reality. And if after doing all that, no one can see a path that leads from your idea to the better world you envision, then maybe the idea needs to be taken back to the drawing board. This constant revision process is healthy to your thinking; it will sharpen you.

When you find that right idea and that right path, don’t sleep. Change the world.

It’s important to have a guiding principle in life.

You won’t always have time to analyze every decision you make. You wouldn’t have the mental processing power to do so even if you wanted to. There will be many times in your life where you’ll have to trust your gut instincts.

Guiding principles and foundational values are worth thinking deeply about, because they’ll inform your gut instincts if you internalize them into a solid foundation. It’s all too easy to avoid ever seriously thinking about them and to end up with a guiding principle of “always be lazy and complain” or “take whatever you can get.” Those are lousy guiding principles.

A great guiding principle is “always adventure!”

When in doubt, choose the good story. Choose the bold move. Take the road less traveled. You could do worse!

I love weird people.

I love when people are passionate about things. One of my favorite things in the world is listening to people geek out about something they care about. Whether it’s your favorite TV show, a project you’re working on, a cause you care about or even just a cool dog you saw. Even if I don’t love that thing, I assure you that I love your love of it.

And while I’m a great supporter of the love of common things and I’m no hater of the basic, I’ve always found that there seems to be a direct relationship between how weird your “thing” is and how much passion you have for it.

When new ideas change the world and shape our cultural landscape, we must always remember that it’s not the ideas themselves that did it. Ideas don’t exist. It’s the people that do it – the physical manifestation of a brilliant idea is the sweat of someone who has it.

Society all too often creates crab pots: strong incentives to stay normal and not deviate too far from what’s expected from an average member of your culture. We’re bludgeoned by it as children and adolescents, and it’s the path of least resistance as adults.

I say break away from all that. Break away young and never look back. I would never advise you to not care what anyone thinks about you, because I think that’s terrible advice. But I would strongly advise you to not care what everyone thinks about you. Be very choosy about whose opinions you value.

But always remember: It’s twice as much work to be strange. If you want to be weird, you have to be right. If you do what everyone else does and you fail, you get a surprising amount of sympathy from people who say, “Well, it’s not their fault, they did what they were supposed to,” or garbage like that. If you strike off the path and you stumble, you’re often on your own. But it’s still a better path. Robert Frost was right.

The weird ones change the world.