How to live well

While some people just drift through life, others are driven towards certain belief systems and attitudes aimed at taking control of how good or bad their life turns out to be. This is a very good and important thing to do in principle for the obvious reason that it's empowering. The alternative would be to hand over your future happiness to lady luck.

The trap one can fall into, however, is having too rigid an idea of what one must do to live well.

It happens all too often that a person gets so convinced of a particular approach that they actually completely miss that they're miserable and not getting any closer (or as close as they could have gotten) to where they'd like to be. Some people identify the wrong thing they want and live towards that goal. Such people may suffer from the pains of forcing themselves towards a goal, and feelings of disappointment/loss when they get there and realise they're still not happy. Other people try to live the best life by having generally the 'right idea' about things like career, love, friendship and so on. Such people can suffer because their ideas are so set for them that they miss out on good stuff that aren't covered by their philosophies. Or because it can be hard to expose these more detailed philosophies to rigorous criticism, because you have to make time to do so.

The weird thing is, if you look at people who get life right, often they're more like drifters than planners or deciders. It seems to me that the difference between an aimless drifter and a purposeful drifter is exactly the life lesson that these planners and deciders miss out on. And it's a matter of methodology.

Purposeful drifters have error correcting criteria for the things they do in their lives, while aimless drifters tend to be more inductivist. They achieve happiness by repeating the things that have worked for them in the past, but perhaps at the cost of re-living a lot of the same problems again and again.

Some examples of purposeful drifting might be to have a criterion such as 'does doing what I'm doing make me feel happier or not?' This works by having a theory, i.e. happiness, that identifies progress towards good living or not. This works well because it allows for a standard by which to criticise what you're doing, but in fact involves very little in the way of presumptions (the problem had by the 'planners and deciders'). It also focuses narrowly on what information you actually have, i.e. your feelings about a thing right now, and doesn't delve into information you don't have such as what you'll want in the future.

Or, for another example, one can have a rule of thumb of doing something every time their life gets comfortable to shake things up. If one felt like their job wasn't challenging any more, but weren't sure what else to do, quitting forces one to try out new conjectures and gather new information. All of this again is good for error correction. This approach in particular works a lot like natural selection, since you add selection pressures to your current ideas by virtue of making things less comfortable for yourself.

'Planners and deciders' have the right idea in trying to use knowledge creation to make their lives better. That is to say, they identify possible problems and come up with possible solutions. But their problem seems to be that their approach doesn't lead to much new knowledge being created--it is set up to be biased towards their first theory, whether that be their first theory on how to approach career/love-life/whatever or their first idea on what their goals are. Similarly the 'aimless drifter' creates no improved knowledge on how to live because they 'let what is, be'. But between the two appears to be a golden mean of drifting, but with error correcting/knowledge creating mechanisms in place to improve ones situation and engage with better and better thing in life. This seems to be the approach that is needed if one wants to live well.

Selfishness

In a cringy 1959 interview, Mike Wallace asked Ayn Rand this question:

"Should husbands and wives tally up at the end of the day and say, well wait a minuet, I love her if she's done enough for me today, and she loves me if I've properly performed my functions?"

Almost any interview with Rand involves this question in some form. The question concerns a confusion that the only kind of selfishness is a utilitarian kind. That selfish people are only ever trying to maximize their own utility--that nothing is valuable to the selfish person for its own sake. Now, of course it's an ignorant question to ask of Rand. Rand is quite clearly a virtue ethicists, and quick to praise beauty, rationality, love, human life, and so on as having some sort of intrinsic value. But the mistake doesn't happen because people read Rand and get confused, it happens precisely because the people that ask it don't read Rand, hear 'the virtue of selfishness' and jump to conclusions about what selfishness entails.

Selfishness in common-day English has two distinct meanings.

To act with disregard for others

OR

To act with regard for yourself

On the surface of it, it might appear as if these were two sides of the same coin, but in action they lead to two entirely different ways of life. To act with disregard for others is to preclude yourself from any concern for other people, and because acting with concern for other people can be both profitable and rewarding for its own sake, would consequently lead to less value for the self overall. On the other hand, to act with regards for yourself, only entails that your actions are in-line with your intrinsic and extrinsic values, so will include lots of concern for other people where appropriate. Particularly in the example of loving someone.

Practical Love

There is one good reason to assume that there's a mistake made in how we commonly think of romantic love, even before any arguments are discussed: it's not very successful at delivering what it promises. The promises behind romantic love vary--happiness, fulfilment, to 'feel complete', to make the world a brighter place, and so on and so on--and these things are occasionally achieved, but mostly it just seems to frustrate people, make them act rather strange, and lead to a lot of upset and feelings of unworthiness. When there is an in-congruency like this between the intention and the actuality, something has gone wrong somewhere. The question is, what and where?

"It’s doubly unnatural when the system is based not on rational ideas like good character, similar outlooks and whether or not she owns the next door farm, but on a fluttering change in the brain chemistry that some neuroscientists would say is a form of temporary insanity."

-Ed West on romantic love. See more here 

 Mr West thinks the problem is that people base their decision of who to love on chemicals rather than practicals. It's a common criticism of love--that it's just silly chemicals, but unfortunately it doesn't hold. The chemical reaction responds to ideas the person already holds about who to love. It's not just random firing of dopamine and oxytocin triggered by no cognitive process at all, otherwise we'd have less women falling for swarve, charismatic men, and more people in relationships with toasters, or homeless people, or whatever else would have more odds at being present during a random chemical spray. Indeed, ideas also are needed to interpret the chemicals as love and not something else, as we do feel these chemicals in other contexts such as roller-coaster rides and so on.

If people don't do love practically, that isn't the fault of chemicals, then, but the fault of some bad idea people have about who to love, how to love, and why to love.  And... maybe most importantly, when to love.

One such mistake might be elucidated through looking at the meaning of the word 'practical'.

Of, relating to, governed by, or acquired through practice or action, rather than theory, speculation, or ideals

 One thing that seems true of the bad ideas about love is that they're rather presumptuous. Person A meets person B and, based on the idea that they perceive them to have certain lovable (to them) character traits, falls in love, but without actually checking if they *really* have those character traits or if it was just a good first impression. Or person A meets person B and, seeing how well they get along--they have so much chemistry!--decides this means they'd get along with one another really well probably if they spent every other day together for the foreseeable future. Or person A really like person B for a year, probably they'd like them just as much til death do they part.

This problem goes even deeper, however, in that it ignores not just misunderstandings you might have about the external world (them), but also ones about the internal (you).

There's a lot of deciding 'how something should be' before one really has experience of it in romantic love, and by definition, this isn't very 'practical'. People should be more easy-going about it. More open to surprises. More open to turning out to be wrong. And less often love based on guesswork of what sort of person can make you happy over and above the reality of what makes them happy... in practice.

Tony Robbins: The Bad Guy

Season 4 Buffy arch-enemy Adam isn't the only television bad guy I can think of inspired by personal development guru Tony Robbins. Dexter's Jordan Chase also comes to mind. But while in other cases the similarity is quite superficial, in the case of Adam he is, as the character Spike points out, "... exactly like Tony Robbins." (Yoko Factor, s04e20)


If you don't know who Tony Robbins is this means you're probably not a American, or you've probably never looked at the self-help section in a book shop. But in brief summary, Tony Robbins is the highest paid and most successful personal development guru in the world. His whole thing is that he can help you re-engineer yourself for 'ultimate success' by changing how your mind works (by 're-programming your neural pathways'). Particularly, he helps you by teaching you how to do this thing called 'modelling', where you copy the exact heuristics of a 'highly successful' person as they succeed at the thing you want to succeed at. Which is... pretty much what Adam does.

Adam is a frankenstein style big bad on Btvs, who goes around cutting people and demons up to understand how they work, so that he can eventually execute his plan of piecing together people/demons to make super soldiers free of weakness, just like him. Tools of his trade: he has a knack for being able to motivate people (monsters) towards his mission. Like many problems Btvs aims to explore, this is a literal interpretation of the Tony Robbin's mission in life, put in a monster fighting context.

The question is: why does Tony Robbins make such a good villain? On the surface, you might think that a guy who devotes himself to helping others get the 'life they deserve' is no one to associate with evil.

Well, the reason Adam made a good villain for Buffy season 4, was because the season was devoted to the idea of being young and independent for the first time in your life, and having to learn how to deal with the 'greys' and uncertainties in life (pure existentialist-style) and *not* rely on having all the answers. Therefore Buffy fought villains that wanted certainty to fight their weaknesses, so as to contrast with her own journey and that of her friends. She fought soldiers who lived by all the moral certainties that soldiers live by, and she fought a Tony Robbins monster set on removing weakness.

In one form or another the 'Tony Robbins as a bad guy' idea usually comes down to a suspicion of how he's conning people. He promises so much... if you just hand over your money. But the above is an interesting variant, where the con isn't a promise he won't deliver, but a promise he couldn't and shouldn't deliver.

So what's so good about 'the grey'?

It can be tiring to see pain romanised. Pain isn't romantic, it's just painful. But if one can learn to find some peace, maybe even enjoyment, from the complexities and uncertainties they will deal with in their life, they're putting themselves in a much more powerful position to be able to error correct. And error correction of ideas is needed to learn anything about how to live. To seek the perfect cure of weakness, then, might sound pragmatic, but it's really explaining away part of the methodology needed to enjoy life.

The principle is exactly the same in any other area of knowledge creation. If one attempts to create knowledge by avoiding or explaining away problems, one only ends up with dogmas. To actually 'problem solve', one needs to be on friendly terms with the idea that there are problems.

How to deal with loneliness

There's something very odd about loneliness. Firstly, it seems to be a misnomer. Though it manifests as a craving 'for people', specifically usually a craving for love or some other form of intimate connection with another human being such as a strong friendship, the PROBLEM itself doesn't seem to have anything to do with not having this contact.

Why do I say this? Well, people can feel lonely with love/friendship or without it. Similarly, not having enough love/friendship in your life and wanting it needn't lead to lonely feelings. So clearly something else is a foot in a lonely mind, and on consideration it seems to be more of an internal problem than anything to do with the external.

There's a wisdom in NLP to the effect of: Loneliness is not liking who you're alone with.

I'd tentatively accept that there's truth to this wisdom, because it seems the case that if you were a happy fulfilled person it would be hard to then be lonely, even if you did crave greater human contact. It also helps explain the unrealistic way in which people get lonely. They want people to come save them from some unpleasant feeling, that seemingly wouldn't be present if they had an otherwise fulfilling life.

The problem with the wisdom is that it's a little vague, there are lots of ways that you could be in some sense unhappy with yourself but still be... happy. Maybe you're OK with the knowledge that you need to make X, Y or Z improvements to yourself to be happier/better off. 'OK' as in it doesn't interfere with your mood.

I have a conjecture, therefore, that loneliness arises when you're not happy with yourself/your daily life, and there is some coercive force that makes you feel that you couldn't do anything about it, so in an eagerness to ignore this unfortunate situation, you focus outwards in the hope that another person can come along to distract you and make you feel happy despite your miserable situation.

This coercion can come from some authority in your life, say a school. It can come from a lack of knowledge, say you feel trapped in a job and you just don't know what to do to get a better job. Or it could come from a more specific ignorance: you've gotten this incorrect idea about how you should live and you're now forcing yourself to live that ways even though it's unpleasant.

Remove the coercive force, make the problem soluble, solve is, and the loneliness should retire.

Euthanasia and the Slippery Slope

"There is no slippery slope and the relaxing of practice is not supported by evidence from the Netherlands or from anywhere else where the law is more compassionate," 
- Terry Pratchett on euthanasia. 

It's interesting that this writer of Disc World fame, who has recently been trying to legalise euthanasia after being diagnosed with alzheimers, would say this. Most people think this. I hear it a lot. But half the time I hear it I can't help but wonder, did they look at the evidence? Or are they assuming that because there hasn't been a huge outrage, no slippery slope has been breeched?

The Remmelink Report (1991) was the first official government study into the practice of Dutch euthanasia. The document found involuntary euthanasia to be prevalent, with 45% of cases being involuntary. The study found that in 1990 an average of 3 people a day died from involuntary euthanasia. Of which 14% were fully competent and 72% had never given any indication that they would want their lives terminated. And in 8% of cases doctors performed involuntary euthanasia despite believing that other options were available.

The most frequently cited reasons given for ending the lives of patients without their knowledge or consent were: "low quality of life", "no prospect for improvement", and "family couldn't take it anymore."

In Belgium, a 10-year review found similarly that almost half of patients euthanised had not given their consent.

The thing is, make no mistake, the guidelines in the Netherlands are exactly what you'd think they'd be for there to be no 'slip' into involuntary euthanasia (such as it stating specifically that it must be voluntary). Belgium, too, with it's requirement that a patient not only volunteer but be conscious at the time of the decision.

Sadly, ultimately, if it's written down, it can be interpreted.

There's always been other elements to upholding the law as it should be read and that's: where do the incentives lie on mass? And what's the cultural attitude? And unfortunately, you can currently get a bigger buck taking a life than keeping one. Whether we're talking Dignitas's profits or how State healthcare can save much needed resources here and there. Similarly, culturally, we seem to be a little too compassionate, a little too quick to agree that a person's life must not be worth living. Is it so wrong to tell a severely disabled person that wants to die to keep trying? To figure out how to enjoy the life as they have it?

Until the incentives and the culture can support the moral interpretation of euthanasia legislation, there should be no euthanasia legislation. It is an unfortunate truth, but a necessary one. The cost so far: hundreds of thousands of lives.

Reply: A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper

For more of Popper criticisms see here for the full Martin Gardner article.

Popper recognized — but dismissed as unimportant — that every falsification of a conjecture is simultaneously a confirmation of an opposite conjecture, and every conforming instance of a conjecture is a falsification of an opposite conjecture.

People often notice this thing where falsification and confirmation can be two sides of the same coin. For example, Popper refers to the eddington eclipse test as an example of a theory 'surviving falsification' but most refer to it as a 'confirmation'. So in this instance the meaning is the same. From here, Popper critics generalise that confirmation and falsification are always two sides of the same coin, and therefore Popper wasn't really saying anything, just playing with language. 

But there is a genuine difference between the two. Attempts to falsify makes for tough tests, whereas attempts to confirm are only tough tests in the instances where the test is also acting as an attempt to falsify. So for example, finding another black crow is a valueless confirmation to a popperian in part because it could never falsify that some crows aren't black.

Of course, Popper would avoid this talk of confirmation, because of its association to verification/vindication. (as a historical side note, in the first addition of LSD Popper did refer to corroboration as 'degree of confirmation' and had to change it because it was confusing. But even drawing into the end of his career, in Realism and the Aim of Science he guesses that his followers will eventually have to change 'corroboration' too because, though less confusing, it's still too confusing).

One is that falsifications are much rarer in science than searches for confirming instances. Astronomers look for signs of water on Mars. They do not think they are making efforts to falsify the conjecture that Mars never had water.

one has to be careful not to confuse the psychology of the thinker and the process by which knowledge is improved.

There are many reasons why scientists may be looking for confirmation of water on mars, psychologically, but say when mapping out mars some scientists stumbled upon what seemed like a giant lake. Would their work as scientists be done? No. As Popper says, '...support is little or no value unless we consciously adopt a critical attitude and look out for refutations of our theories."

Falsifications can be as fuzzy and elusive as confirmations.

Popper did know that the auxiliary hypothesis problem applied equally to falsification and confirmation, I'm assuming this is the problem Gardner has in mind. His solution was something like: if you suspect an auxiliary hypothesis is responsible for your test giving the wrong result, then test that auxiliary hypothesis independently.   (I incidentally don't buy this answer, but it is as far as I know it's the Popper answer).