Rationality, Neurotechnology, Language, Effective Altruism and The Scientific Method

Skippable post. I think my only skippable post that's so lengthy and dense and as you might have guessed by completing the patter, also contains some important and insightful ideas, but I say it's skippable because even though I have tried to explain it somewhat clearly, it's all a huge mess of interconnected ideas- too chaotic even for my taste- so I shall create some new posts covering individual topics I touch upon in this one, and they won't require you to read this one, so feel free to skip this, if you don't wish to make a mental asylum your permanent place of residence, or if you're not interested in reading an Aspie's incoherent ramblings that don't make sense even to him.

Okay, it does make sense to me of course cause I've written it myself, but I was trying to talk from the perspective of an external objective unbiased viewer who has no prior knowledge about my ideas and personal experiences, and for such an observer it's probably better to skip this one, but of course feel free to give it a read; I'm not one to tell you what you should and shouldn't do, and no one should tell you what you should or shouldn't do and you must not blindly follow them unquestioningly (No, I'm not using reverse psychology here, I meant it seriously but just realized what I just did there, promise it was completely unintentional, at least consciously..)

Note: All the ideas presented in this post are not ideas I strongly believe in or endorse, because I am currently not knowledgeable enough to say anything with confidence, nor have I consulted anyone who is an expert on these topics, so please do not adopt any of these ideas as your own, because they are almost certainly incorrect. Read them just as a starting point for further enquiry, perhaps as an introduction that could make you more curious or interested in it, and always keep in mind the principles of Rationality, Scientific Skepticism, Critical Thinking and Open-Mindedness. Or just read it for fun, because I'm just playing with ideas here, everyone is most welcome to correct me wherever they think I'm wrong, and I'd be more than happy to change my mind in light of convincing logical reasons or empirical evidence.

Hello. In this post I describe some of my ideas regarding Rationality- how it can be used to improve our lives going forward and how it could be spread to a wider range of audience. I start with some basic stuff, but later on talk about some more interesting and exciting ideas and possibilities, and every now and then I’ll seem to digress into some seemingly unrelated topics, but I’ll eventually weave everything into an interconnected coherent narrative and plan, so please try to read all of it.

Rationality is still a very small community, and it’s rare to come across LessWrong readers and Effective Altruists who incorporate the methods of Rationality while making decisions and judgments. It is not as widespread as it deserves judging by the potential impact it could have on helping individuals make better decisions and create a better society. Even researchers in the scientific community are not very receptive to such ideas, and it doesn’t help with the unhealthy skepticism that the general public has towards these ideas.

I believe that the Scientific Method could be applied to Rationality to describe its principles in a more rigorous and logically accurate way as well as further develop its ideas in a structured manner. We know that language has flaws that make it a less suitable medium for communication of ideas than formal logic and mathematics.

If we could describe the main principles and ideas of rationality in such terms, and get them published in credible and reputed scientific journals, it could help with the spread awareness about the ideas to the scientific community and speed up the pace of progress as well as also introduce it to a wider range of audience.

There are several university and school clubs focussed on EA but very few clubs about Rationality. There is a need for greater awareness about these topics as they are directly applicable to every aspect of our daily lives and such ideas ought to be taught to children as early as possible while they are still open and receptive to novel ideas and ways of thinking.

The current curriculum is too outdated and doesn’t teach the skills relevant to the modern society. There is less emphasis on critical thinking, creativity, and life skills, and that needs to change. I have a few more ideas about how a curriculum could be designed in a way that actually teaches students how to think, and also how to learn and why, with habits that would help them for life and help them discover their true values, abilities, interests and come up with their own guiding principles that would enable them to grow into educated, socially-conscious and responsible adults.

I noticed that schools are good at killing the motivation of the few students who manage have it in such an environment in the first place, but I was thinking more along the lines of how we could teach such that every student feels the sense of satisfaction and genuine curiosity to learn more and try to understand the fundamental processes governing the universe, as well as have a significant positive impact on society through their projects.

I don't get to see that around me, but I believe that if education is done right, it could achieve this seemingly ambitious goal, and much more, because any subject taught in the right way along with it's why and how can be made interesting for anyone, and there is a lot of hidden potential that could be enabled to flourish only if they're provided with the adequate opportunities and resources, and later go on to make major contributions to science, arts and society.

I have a few more ideas about how this process could be speeded up with psychological and other similar interventions, but this message is already getting too long and I would keep that for later if you're interested in learning more.

It's easier to learn general concepts than specific instances, so I have been practicing trying to generalize different specific instances or events from my everyday experiences, and applying those general principles to other domains of my life to discover connections I had previously not noticed. But the essential component that's left out in the education system here is the experience part. It's too theory-oriented, and students take longer to grasp a concept intuitively unless they experience it themselves, and are allowed to observe it using all their senses and be allowed to play around with it, imagine counterfactuals and what ifs.

This is also one of my academic goals, to uncover hidden connections and analogies between seemingly unrelated fields and apply tools from one discipline to problems of another. It also complements my desire to not restrict myself to a single discipline, and read widely to learn a broad range of topics. The current system is too restrictive and is counterproductive to creativity, learning and innovation.

Focus should be on the motivation and drive of students than their scores, which is something that is currently lacking in the Indian education system, and that I've also talked about to senior members of the academic and curriculum designing committee at my university, and that my new project aims to address. A number can't determine what you are capable of, and there are several external factors out of a student's control that could influence their score on a theory exam taken on a single day. It's ridiculous to sort students into programs and universities based on that number, with no consideration for their motivation, future plans or extracurriculars.

Moreover, I find that the vast majority of students are not too driven here, and I think that system is to blame in part, but I think that the students should make an effort too, or at least the students who are motivated must have some like-minded companions. I have been complimented by several researchers in my field of interest I reached out to that I seem to be motivated and that I must not lose it, and even though I consider myself to be immune to external influence in that regard and not let myself be affected by such things, I can see how a motivated person could be suppressed in a similar environment elsewhere, and how we could be losing on bright students with a potential to achieve great things.

I was also curious about the training that would allow a student to develop transferable skills. This is a question I'm myself very interested in investigating- can playing chess improve real life strategic ability? (Some recent studies suggest the same brain areas light up in both situations, so maybe.) Is it possible to improve short-term working memory by playing dual-n-back? (Conflicting evidence, but most of it suggests that it does not.) Does playing video games improve motor skills and reaction time? Does studying advanced mathematics increase abstract logical and thinking skills? What cognitive skills could be trained by activities that allow skill transfer?

If we really want to be rational, we would have to train the machinery that allows us to be rational; not just be aware of the biases, but use all tools at our disposal to get closer to rationality, including psychological, behavioural, pharmacological, technological, biological and computational. We should train our cognitive skills and find ways to understand the cognitive phenomena responsible for rationality such as intelligence and creativity, as well as finer psychometric aspects such as working memory, pattern recognition and verbal ability.

let's talk about some ways of learning and thinking that might be helpful in teaching you how to think better; the ways of thinking that seem to come naturally to some, but that could be learned by anyone given enough time and motivation. There's learning, and then there's meta-learning or learning how to learn. Anyone can memorize facts and regurgitate them on exams to get a passing grade, but it's an altogether different thing to have an intuitive understanding of a concept to be able to explain it to a five year old or apply it in real-life situations, novel contexts and to different disciplines. This is the stuff that is the most useful yet the least focused on in traditional educational institutions.

Suppose that by using the scientific method gain a very clear understanding of everything there is to know about the world; I am able to use my scientific lens to examine every event objectively in terms of the processes that led to it, and have complete knowledge of the complete chain of cause and effect.

How would this change my perception of the world, and would it differ at all on how I view the events from those of others who are not trained in such a way? Take the example of the new year celebrations; it's just the world completing a revolution and involves the mental construct of time as well as social construct and herd mentality of viewing it as festive season, nothing wrong with that, but would I feel less emotional affect or enthusiasm and intuitive gratification or sense of joy from the fact that the Earth just completed a revolution and we have arrived at a new stage according to how we have compartmentalized time and everyone around me seems to be so happy; that is due to my objective understanding of the universe free of human bias and constructs? Or would I just have the scientific and philosophical knowledge and understand it at a conscious level but feel the same joy as someone completely ignorant of any such thing would?

Let's take a physicist or mathematician for instance- he's been learning and teaching Physics and Mathematics for such a long time, subjects that have been repeatedly shown to shape your thought processes in a way to be able to scrutinize each and every detail of any event in detail and from multiple perspectives, and attempt to mathematically capture that which has eluded humans for such a long time and use your creativity to make new discoveries. Do you believe that your training in physics and mathematics would change his brain's way of thinking and perceiving the world in any significant way? If so, how? And how would it be different from before he started training in physics?

As far as I know, physics attempts to study the fundamental nature of reality itself, to the extent that our current mathematical and computational tools allow us to study the universe as objectively as possible, and if I'm not mistaken, it forces you to think in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes, because humans by default have a simplistic way of thinking about everything that doesn't require much cognitive effort, but by the nature of your discipline you must have been required to break out of all human bias to the best of your abilities and try to comprehend the world in as accurate a way as it's possible. Would that affect him in your everyday life and how he views the world?

Or are the intuitions and the irrational part of my brain so deeply ingrained into my human nature that I would never be able to get completely rid of it? Do you think with adequate training in the right way anyone can learn to not just shape their thinking skills and conscious thought processes, but their very intuitions at a deeper level similar to those who seem to be naturally gifted at it from the start? And what about younger children, can they do it more easily than adults because of their neuroplasticity?

To be clear, I'm not saying that intuitions are useless, I do realize that they are the basis of everything we are and that society has created. My point is that we should use the scientific method to scrutinize our intuitions more often, and investigate more deeply the situations in which we can rely on our intuitions and the situations where we cannot, kind of similar to what we need to do with AI. Even when I asked the hypothetical question of what would happen if we tweak our intuitions to be more in tune with reality, such that, speaking in the language of Rationality and LessWrong, our map of the world accurately matches the territory, and our priors are as accurate and reliable as possible. In that way we could make better decisions more easily and what we hope to accomplish through science would come to us much more intuitively. Could possibly lead to a better society in general. I hope that makes sense.

I believe we are not doing our best to optimize our Rationality, possibly because we don’t grasp the extent to which it actually affects every single domain of our life. In simple language, Rationality is making the best decisions in a given situation to achieve a desirable goal given your constraints and values. This has implications down to how we spend our time and how we process all the information available to us, including each and every one of our actions, attitudes, goals, decisions and judgements. In my opinion, we don’t scrutinize our intuitions, beliefs and actions as much as we should, and by not questioning them we fall into established patterns or thought and action that have the potential of turning us into mindless zombies without our even realizing it.

It means using your time in such a way that makes you the most likely to achieve your desired goal, and time being a finite scarce resource, it’s such a valuable component that most people don’t pay any attention to. You don’t just have to be mindful of the kind of information you’re consuming and understanding how it’s going to help you with your future goals and aspirations, but also focus on the meta thinking processes and techniques planning to figure out the best way to process and manipulate that information to get the most out of it and be able to use it in your own life, which sometimes varies according to individual differences.

I earlier said that Rationality is making the best decision given your constraints. Do we know our constraints? Are you absolutely sure that they are unchangeable immutable constant out-of-your-control constraints? Did you test your intuitions or actually test this idea, or just fall prey to some bias like learned helplessness? This is where I’m going to connect Rationality with Transhumanism and Positive Psychology.

I said that it matters how we process information, and even though psychology and neuroscience hasn’t precisely defined the higher-order cognitive phenomena accurately, we have a good idea of which brain areas are involved, and how our mind processes information and generates novel thoughts and ideas. Shouldn’t we as Rationalists ensure that the machinery we have to process information is the best we could have?

Well, I don’t believe it is the best. We all know that some individuals are more intelligent than others based on natural raw ability alone, though that by itself, even though necessary to a certain extent, is insufficient to be perfectly rational. Some are more creative or predisposed towards being calm or diligent. Why is this the case, and could it be used to improve the situation of those who are deficient in any such areas?

It’s also important to know this because Rationality involves having a goal, and till you don’t have a goal, you’re not just going to let things happen to you and let external circumstances and chance determine how life turns out, unless you are okay with it, which I don’t think any Rationalist would want. When we don’t have a goal, our goal could be to find our goal- explore and discover your true abilities, interests, values, beliefs and ambitions.

You put yourself in new situations and have new experiences form which you get new information that you reflect on, analyze, and extract lessons or derive general principles that you could apply in novel situations to make better decisions or guide your decision making in future. Why just stay restricted to all the senses you currently have?

Just look up synesthesia, these people can experience a combination of senses at the same time. And what about all the hidden senses waiting to be discovered if we can understand the brain? And even with the senses we already have, are we mindful of them, do we notice or pay any attention to how well they are in perceiving the world and whether or not there is any scope of improvement? It would also improve the overall subject experience, and expose you to greater amounts of information where you’re more likely to find relevant bits of info.

Now let’s get to something more realistic, but equally ambitious. Artificial Intelligence, and how it could help Rationality. New research aims to build ANNs more closely resembling the brain, and there’s the whole field of DL and Neuromorphic Engineering that has similar goals. Researchers are gaining insights into the brain by studying the black-box ANNs, but I’ll now attempt to explain how I think AI could augment human rationality.

Considering the current pace of progress, it might even be possible in the near future to develop AI systems that take in information from multiple input sources, like say your phone’s camera or maybe smart contact lens, as well as haptics, auditory, olfactory and other sensory cues and biomarkers to take into consideration your environment and situation and help you make the best decision and plan for any future contingencies.

In this way we could develop systems that can help us know what’s the most optimal decision in any given situation if we give it our goals, values, and constraints as inputs. It could even be taken to the next level- let brain-computer interfaces help your describe your inputs as accurately and clearly as possible with natural language, or maybe even in formal logic to be more rigorous, and let it figure out the rational decision.

It could even go further and figure out the whole chain of cause and effect that led to this action and the future possibilities, with their associated probabilities, and a comparison of all the alternatives along with a cost-benefit analysis to enable us to see the opportunity costs clearly, plan for any future contingencies, take calculated risks and make more informed decisions.

It could take a topic and find all about it not just from the scientific literature but also analogous and similar concepts throughout different disciplines and historical accounts. I tried generating analogous instances of a general concept from physics applied to several disciplines, and I was surprised by how good GPT-3 already performs, with all its current flaws.

It could produce several analogies in various disciplines with more advanced versions, and possibly even solve some of the hardest problem in any discipline by applying solutions to analogous concepts from different disciplines. Even if it can’t allow us to read all literature faster and understand it deeply as well, it could do it itself, and augment our abilities to allow us to accomplish great feats and solve some of society’s most pressing problems.

We read and learn ultimately for the intellectual stimulation, escapism or to enable us to make better decisions in life. All that could be accomplished with personalized AI and neurotechnology, and it doesn’t stop here, it’s just the beginning. AGI could allow humans to focus on self-actualization by freeing them from meaningless obligations they earlier required to sustain themselves, and the post-singularity human civilization would have the sort of privilege that no one had in the past, and they’d be forced to re-evaluate their true values and purpose in life.

It would also touch a fundamental and primal part of human nature and have the potential to deeply affect our psyche if it could decipher our sense of motivation and aesthetic. Allow me to explain. Everyone has something beautiful in life they value, but we know that some things give us a higher sense of pleasure and meaning than others, as in Eudaimonia vs Hedonia. Why is this the case?

My hypothesis is that such a thing must satisfy two criteria. Upon repeated exposure they must give us the same sense of satisfaction as the first time we were exposed to it for an extended amount of time at once, and that’s why if you eat lots of chocolate at once you won’t feel as good as if you play the piano for a long time and achieve a state of flow.

But this also includes things like intoxicants and superficial things like appearance, so my next criteria is that it should have a permanence that such things don’t; they must not be transient and give us a fleeting sense of pleasure, and leave us worse off when we actually regain our cognitive faculties, investigate the causes deeply and look back on it at a later point of time as an irrational decision. We’re never going to regret it and think that it’s irrational or that it was a waste of time doing such a thing, and it’s going to stay with us forever, like our values, good art and music.

A scientist gets the same sense of pleasure than an artist does by creating and sharing art. It’s their individual passions and activities that induce in them a state of flow. This is the thing I’m trying to describe. If identified using what I described using AI and neurotechnology as well as other cognitive and behavioural tools, it could also help combat loneliness and connect people who share similar aesthetic, and it could be the most powerful predictor of whether or not they could be good friends, because they’d share the same values, interests and aspirations.

Coming back to the system, early participants can use the assistance of tools like GPT-3 to describe their experiences as accurately as possible and teaching AI what is irrational and what isn’t, and it would require the sort of rigorous mathematical description of all concepts in a way that enables a computer to understand it.

We could feed it all the scientific literature as well as history, biographies and personal accounts to enable it to get an idea of similar situations, and generalize them at a level of abstraction that enables it to apply the abstract general mathematical rules of rationality to such general situations, that could be later translated into specific instances of events from everyday life, and as I describe later help us make in the moment rational decisions with the help of AI systems and neurotechnology.

In the near future, advanced versions of natural language systems like GPT-3, with the help of the sort of formal logic and mathematical symbols instead of human language, could enable us to input natural language and let it suggest the possibilities available to us- all the possible precise definitions and multiple meanings and interpretations that may come out of the text.

Then we choose the one that is closest to the ideas and thoughts we wish to describe, and manipulate the logical symbols to generate new insights using the well-established rules of formal logic. Play around with logical and mathematical operations and convert them back to natural language; the most accurate analogy to human language that exhausts the potential of human language, the closest choice. It could also detect logical fallacies and inconsistencies.

It could help us communicate faster and more effectively, and it’s a more realistic goal than Neuralink’s direct brain-to-brain communication concept. This could enable us to express ourselves more clearly with no barriers related to language and interpretation, enable us to empathize with others, speed up scientific progress, clear all ambiguity we face because of natural language and create a better society. Just check out the Wolfram Language, for an idea of what I’m trying to describe.

It could also be applied to psychotherapy and CBT or Stoicism by helping therapists, say, find the silver lining in any past unchangeable events by reframing situations in a subtle and convincing manner so as to generate the most amount of emotional affect and tailored to the intuitive system-1 thinking of the patient.

Another way it could help with uniting humanity by connecting individuals and enabling them to see how they’re fundamentally similar despite their diverse individual differences is by using a brain recording system, such as what I’ll describe very shortly, to enable others to literally experience the world in another person’s shoes, through ways like something similar to what goes on in the brain during hyperphatasia, an overactive mind’s eye, lucid dreaming or really just regular dreaming with strong memory of it upon waking up, or even full-dive simulation of reality.

Currently we have very primitive versions of what I’m describing in the form of VR headsets and some organizations trying to build a metaverse, and by building empathy we could also tackle another important cognitive bias that I’ll describe now.

In EA, it could be used to counter a lot of biases. Take the example of Scope insensitivity- it could use the right rhetoric and language that appeals to the pathos, frame questions in a wat to counter the framing effect, and use advanced literary and poetic devices like mental imagery to generate the amount of emotional affect commensurate with the real urgency of the problem.

Such systems actually exist- Decoding rough words and mental imagery with neurotechnology, though still at a very nascent stage, and this was what I touched upon when talking of the empathy machines. Let’s take it even further. How about a neural implant that detects whenever the brain processes that lead to irrational decision making shortly before it’s about it to happen and automatically triggers some sort of pharmacological or electric signal the interferes with the process and enables the user to gain complete over their actions and get back to a rational state of mind?

Actually, we already have a neurotechnological implant like that for Anxiety, and you’d be amazed at how effective it was at treating anxiety even before it occurred. The same could be done for the areas and processes of the brain involved in making erroneous decisions, forming false beliefs, and generating misguiding intuitions and emotions that lead us astray from the path of rationality and interfere with our goal to be perfectly rational.

The processes that I just mentioned could be figured out through repeated experiments and a large collection of data based on the experience of early users who wear such implants or headsets or bio-compatible nanobots and biomonitoring devices that constantly monitor their brain and that record the process that took place a while ago whenever the user realizes that their decision was irrational and sends a signal.

I covered a lot of stuff that may sound like something straight out of unrealistic sci-fi, but we must keep in mind how fast AI and scientific development is progressing, and how people have always underestimated the time it would take to come up with the next invention, discovery, breakthrough or paradigm shift, and we can already see the beginnings of a general AI.

Even if it is unrealistic, I think that it’s uncertain and so the opportunity costs of thinking it’s impossible and completely neglecting it are too large compared to the potential benefits of developing such a system, which could have implications for the human civilization as a whole, and if it falls into the wrong hands or is developed by groups with more malicious intentions, it could have disastrous consequences. That’s also why the AI Alignment problem is so important to solve before we hit the Singularity.

The personalized biomonitoring devices and brain-computer interfaces that collect information from a constantly updated database consisting of experiences of past users that I described a few paragraphs ago could be used to eventually develop a personalized system that can figure out your true values and goals just from your biomarkers and brain scans and other readings, and possibly even help you discover your true abilities, disposition and interests, keep you safe from excessive unnecessary suffering and other facts that may interfere with your rationality, or at least make you aware of them, and help you achieve self-actualization.

Such a perfectly rational AI agent would be a dream come true, and it won’t even be as hard to build such a system as manipulating the human brain, because it doesn’t suffer from all the human irrationality and cognitive biases; It’s pure logic.

A database such as what I described above would help us store valuable information for new users as well as future generations so they’re not forced to reinvent the wheel every single time. This way we could create a system of intergenerational transfer of knowledge and utilize our collective intelligence to improve every successive generation’s quality of life.

So, after finding what you like doing, you set goals according to that so even if you don't achieve that goal, you have no regrets because you enjoyed the process and would have done it anyway. You were motivated by the journey, not just the goal, and that's great because it's the journey that matters the most, and the temporary high you get from achieving a goal won't last long before you start setting other goals and are never satisfied.

So what is my overarching goal? It's to do everything I can to minimize the influence of external factors out of our control on our life, and reduce the accident of birth in determining your life outcomes. We are often not even aware of all the cognitive biases, biological constraints, social norms and expectations as well as other things related to how we think and act that led us to make better or worse decisions, or that shape our preferences.

For example, all your current personality traits, interests and cognitive abilities are a product of where you happened to be born; your genes, your brain as well as your early environment, all of them things that you never had control over until later in life when they already had a significant influence over you and how your life would turn out to be, and even then you can't change many of these things.

If we could understand all such factors, such as how genes influence traits and behaviour, how the brain develops in young children and what role chance and randomness plays in all of it, or at least understand exactly how many of these factors are under our control, and how much aren't, so that we don't waste time obsessing over factors that we can't control and focus all our attention towards those that we can.

For instance, the brain is the origin of the various aspects of our personality that dictate who we are and how we behave, what we aspire to be and everything that we value in life. It also forms mental models predicting how we expect the world to behave, and it also gives rise to our conscious experiences. But why are some people so creative, other so calm, intelligent, neurotic, or any one of the several traits associated with neurodivergent people?

As Nagel put it in his now classic paper on the hard problem of consciousness, what’s it like to be a bat? You have no idea if the other person experiences the world in the same way as you do. If they experience the colour red the same as you do, or if they experience the same levels of stress, you do when you are required to appear for an exam, or if they share the same strong sense of excitement you feel when discussing certain social issues or any other topics. We can't quantify and measure them, and some people even say it's altogether out of the realm of science itself.

Once again, why study these factors? Well, these factors make life easier for some than others. You may notice that some highly intelligent people seem to be capable of grasping complex topics quicker than others, some people are able to maintain their calm attitude under demanding situations that helps them make decisions with a cool mind, and some people are more prone to experiencing intense negative emotions such as high amounts of anxiety and depression that affects their daily functioning.

If we could pin down all the biological and social factors including the genes, neural makeup, social environment, as well as all the other biological, psychological and behavioural aspects that contribute to such things that are more favourable for some and less for others, we could minimize the role of chance and blind luck to alleviate suffering, or at least determine all such factors and determine to what extent it's possible to control them.

We push for egalitarianism in other domains of life, but we should also consider what are arguable some of the most important factors that are not very well-known and are responsible for inequitable outcomes in personality traits and cognitive abilities that make life harder for certain people compared to the rest.

I am motivated to uncover all such factors that have a significant influence over some of the most important outcomes of our life; I am driven to understand the rules that govern the game of life, and use them to minimize suffering and enable every individual to realize their complete potential and live a fulfilling life. Use the scientific method to investigate philosophical questions like what constitutes a good life, or a life well-lived?

How could we discover our true abilities, interests, beliefs, values, and set worthwhile goals? How could we alleviate suffering, or at least minimize it, and is such a scenario even desirable, or is there any truth to the idea that suffering gives meaning to life? If it's only suffering in moderate amounts, what's the optimal amount of suffering that's required for human flourishing? To extend Feynman's game analogy described earlier in this post, what are our character's true attributes, how do we change the difficulty level, have fun while not making it too challenging, and how do we win?

If we could achieve this, we could create a society where no one is disadvantaged based on the accident of birth. It also relates to Rawl's idea of the Veil of Ignorance, which asks you whether or not you would be fine with being born in any part of the world and section of society without knowing whom you would be born to and what your environment would be. If the answer is no, which it is and I think very few would disagree with that, then things need to change in the society.

On a similar note, let's turn to language. I actually had a discussion about this with our English professor a few days ago when she was teaching persuasive speech. I asked her- I do understand that all these things - micro-expressions, body language, tone, direction of gaze, eye contact, gestures, appearance etc. - influence how effectively we are able to communicate our point to the audience, but shouldn't it ideally be that none of this matters and they only focus on the logic and reason of what I'm saying?

Even when people think they are not, they are still influenced by their cognitive biases all the time. And ma'am told me that you just can not say what you want to say without the appropriate tone and even that differs from culture to culture; certain gestures and words have completely opposite meanings in different cultures. So she said you have to be understanding of their culture and adapt yourself according to the context.

I said that's fine, but won't it be more efficient, more productive and less confusing to just be clear and direct, like also convey what you intend with your gestures and tone so there's no scope of any misunderstanding. Just convey everything through your words, no language games or hidden agendas. Why can't we do that? Won't that also be more accommodating for the people on the spectrum?

So I just ended the conversation with ma'am there, but later I came up with my own idea of what an ideal system should be like. Just be direct and use language in as clear and concise way as possible. Don't expect others to pick up any confusing cues or expect them to read your alien sign language. And don't do it yourself, because you're under no obligation to make yourself understood to others in such confusing ways; you're going to try your best with language, and it that doesn't work then it's on them.

Just stay calm and as I said don't bother too much about what others think, because it is too inefficient and you have much more important things for your scarce and valuable cognitive resources and time. The only exception is when the stakes are high, like if not using all the non verbal communication techniques would result in consequences much larger and worth the time and effort you can spend on employing them. In this case you would be completely justified in using the best methods and techniques at your disposal and considering your audience and goals. Anyway, that's what I think. I may modify it at a later point of time. I will still try to keep in mind other people's worldviews as well.

Another related point also concerns my criticism for the education system in the west, a system that to be fair I don't currently have too many criticisms for and that is much better than the Indian education system, but this problem must be pointed out.

I have noticed that in many universities you are told that it's not really your activities and extracurriculars, but the way you are able to convey your story, weave it into a coherent narrative connected to your personal experiences, interests and future ambitions, and use rhetoric to frame it in a way that increases your chances of getting in.

If you don't see any problem with this system, it's that they're not really evaluating the worth of your activities, but your language skills, and if a highly intelligent kid whose primary language isn't English has say solved cancer (I could probably come up with a better example but if I can exaggerate for dramatic effect then why not?) isn't able to convey their achievements in a very pleasing manner that delights the admission officer's language receptors or whatever, then they'd lose a spot to a kid who's not done anything that extraordinary but has excellent language skills and was able to use just the right rhetorical tools in the right way to make the officers want to admit them.

Does that sound fair? I'll leave it for you to decide and just end this topic here because I really don't have any realistic ideas for a better method of evaluation, except some far-fetched moonshot ideas involving AI systems, Brain Computer Interfaces and Behavioral science. Nothing realistic and cost-effective at the moment.

On the same note, I have observed that in my locality and on news channels, people seem to forget the purpose of the debate and get seem to get consumed by their passions. In the newspapers, I regularly read about people commiting heinous crimes over petty issues.

Do these people think that getting aggressive while putting forward their opinion would help them win an argument? Don't they realize the effectiveness of logic and civilized debate?

It's almost like they need to be taught basic manners and the importance of keeping their impulses under deliberate conscious control. And made to read books like Cheng's The Art of Logic and Seo's Good Arguments. Maybe that would make their lives easier and help them reach an agreement faster.

My Uncle recently said that staying silent and not fighting back is a sign of cowardice. I disagree because I believe that it takes a lot more effort to stay calm under pressure and understand the other person's POV. But could there be a limit to that, when tolerance turns into cowardice? What could it be?

I concede that I am biased; I'm a Ravenclaw and we believe that turning to violent means indicates that your brain is too weak to beat them the right way. We are driven by our desire to know things, which is not at all the same quality as being intelligent, so sorry if I'm being ignorant and missing something here. Feel free to enlighten me if you have good logical arguments in favour of using emotions to change someone's mind.

Finally, I'd like to talk a little about EA and share some ideas built upon Peter Singer's ideas. If I have understood it correctly, Peter Singer believes that all the money you are left with after fulfilling your basic survival needs- and maybe a little to satisfy your desires- must go to charities and organizations working to reduce suffering in the world, and if you don't do that, you're morally responsible for all the suffering you could've prevented with your money that you instead used to buy say a new video game or clothes you're never going to touch again.

Now just a gentle reminder: I'm not saying I personally hold such beliefs (or that I don't) and this also holds true for every idea I am going to present now and every other idea I've presented in my other blog posts. This reminder is important because the ideas I'm going to present now may seem a bit extreme, so it'd help to know that I'm just playing around with the ideas, not saying I believe in them or that you should. With that out of the way, here it is.

So I just thought- what if we extend the idea to an even more important scarce resource than money- time? So if you are an Effective Altruist, you would try to find the best way to achieve your goal of doing the most good with your given constraints and resources.

That's similar to Rationality- depending on your values and constraints, you try to make the best use of your resources to figure out the most optimal decisions and actions that would maximize your likelihood of achieving your desired goal.

So it seems to follow that time being one of the resources- one of the most valuable, in fact- you would spend all your time in a way that maximizes your ability to do good and have a significant positive impact on the society in a way that utilizes all your abilities, money and time to minimize suffering to the best of your abilities. And continuing the analogy with Peter Singer's ideas, all the time you don't spend in such a way would make you guilty of all the suffering you could've prevented either directly by helping people or on activities that would have indirectly enabled you to help people.

If you haven't realized the implications, this includes all leisure time like watching movies and listening to music, as well as any time you are not actually doing something that is either directly helping others or is a part of a plan with the outcome of helping others.

Now the upsides are that you would become more aware of all the technological distractions like sitcoms and comics that people spend excessive time on, and they'd try to utilize their time in a more productive manner. Moreover, this includes things that are contributing to your greater plan to help people, so you'd obviously need time to wind off so you don't overwork and burn out, so a limited engagement with hobbies if that is necessary to optimize your performance by putting you in a desirable mental state of peak mental health so you can be more productive. In other words, you help yourself before helping others.

This may sound too controlling and restrictive, but it could help people lead more meaningful and goal-oriented lives, especially those who are very dissatisfied, nihilistic or prone to wasting time, this would help them set meaningful goals and force them to manage their time and reevaluate how to spend all their time and build better habits if nothing else.

An important distinction I'd like to make before I end, is the difference between normative theories that tell you what you should do and so naturally involve value judgement which are subjective, and positive or descriptive theories that describe how the world actually is and what actually happens in the real world. Now I'll attempt to explain why this is important and how it is relevant to this topic.

So I already feel dissatisfied whenever I'm not reading or learning and spend any amount of time watching tv shows or playing video games or engaging in any activity that is not meaningful to me, so I'm naturally inclined in a way that compels me to make the best use of my time to maximize the time I spend learning and acquiring knowledge in subjects I'm interested in and doing activities aligned with my aspirations and ambitions.

Other people may be- and I can say with a level of certainty that the majority is- inclined such that they don't feel any such compulsion, so they might not feel like thinking about how they spend their time or habits too deeply unless they're made aware of it, and that's perfectly fine if that's what makes them satisfied, because after all it stems from our genes and environment and we never got to choose these things.

But my point is, they do what they feel is right for them, and you do you. And the ideas related to EA and Rationality I played with earlier in this post are a part of my attempt to figure out the most rational normative theories (things you should do) that would make me the most likely to achieve my desired outcome.

It is completely separate from what I do, or anyone else might be doing, and this is important because as I mentioned it involves value judgement, and so it's hard to figure out what is good for any given individual as every individual has several significant differences. But these are ideas that anyone can grasp, and they could have thought something that never occurred to me, that's why exchange of ideas is so important, especially in topics like these that involve moral philosophy and ethics.

In EA, you try to get to the best possible solutions to the problems most worth working on. But people feel passionate about different causes, and even regarding topics and methods they have different interests and abilities. You can't realistically expect everyone to use, say, mathematical techniques to work on ai alignment problem if that happens to be the most important problem and most effective solution to solve it; most people wont feel passionate working on it and that would affect their motivation and performance, and even for math they may not have the skills and abilities and interest so it'd be better contribution on their part if they do something else.

Maybe a workaround is to tweak intuitions of all people to only be passionate about problems and have cognitive enhancement techniques to enhance the abilities for techniques that are the most effective to solve the given problem. To take it to another level, you could create sentient AI or designer babies that are predisposed in such a way to work on the most pressing problems and inclined in a way to quickly grasp concepts related to the technique that's the most efficient.

But then you need to figure out if creating sentient slaves who derive pleasure from slavery is ethical. For those who have read or watched Harry Potter, if Hermione was doing the right thing by encouraging the house elves who liked doing their jobs to leave it and break free, when in fact she was just projecting her own idea of freedom, her personal interests and preferences and her own moral standards on them.

But those are some significant changes, and it's unclear whether it's ethical or not. And couldn't that lead to like sorting people based on birth to tasks someone in a position of power thinks they grow with abilities to solve it and their genes in embryo tweaked such that they feel passionate about that problem, and make it easy for them to rule over humanity as a dictator by having everyone conform, or feel inherent pleasure in conforming to them? Well is that ethical or not?

Also couldn't we just tweak intuitions of people to feel passionate about every problem, or about none at all to lead a satisfactory life? Do the same for abilities to help everyone have the levels of intelligence to function smoothly in every domain of life at the cost of diversity and natural selection, if that could prevent suffering? Why or why not?

Because Rationality is a normative theory, and even though its a part of coming up with bets decisions and methods, in reality it'd be unrealistic if people if try to be rational against their nature (same goes for EA) and they'd end up unsatisfied and not perform as optimally, not be as productive as if they were satisfied; for example if I'm intuitively emotionally motived by EA or neuroscience, but I don't feel the same amount of interest for geography and accounting, similarly some people may not feel attached to the ideas proposed by EA, or even the idea of EA or Rationality itself.

Two possible solutions I can think of: 1) develop psychological, behavioural, neuroscientific, pharmacological and technological interventions to tweak intuitions or make their abilities aligned with the most important problems and the disciplines involved in using the most effective methods to solve them, or 2) change the plan to accommodate people's irrationality, values, preferences, interests and abilities, and take into account individual differences in interests and aptitude.

The third one is the most cost-effective, easiest to do and would eradicate all suffering in one go, but it involves wiping out the whole human civilization through a painless biohazard or atomic bomb or terminator-like AI, so it's not socially acceptable but hey it would be acceptable when there is no society left to judge it! Kidding. Must preserve the human experience and the miracle that has bestowed us with this great opportunity to experience life, though we still need to figure out the rules of the game. And I believe we eventually will, with the help of Rationality and the Scientific Method.

I also read once that happiness and meaning is a trade off in life, because if you focuso n being happy, you'd try to be present in the moment while if you plan to maximize for meaning, you'd constantly be planning and be in your head while sacrificing the pleasure of being present in the moment.

At first I agreed with that paper, but later I realized that maybe it's not that clear and neat division, happy and meaningful. It's more complicated than that, because if someone who likes having a meaningful life and working on stuff to improve human lives or work on scientific research or whatever tries to live in the moment and be more "happy", he would miserably fail at it because that's just not how he's inclined to behave.

So maybe the trade off is true, but maybe it's also the case that we are not free to choose for ourselves, and the trade off is already made for us. Kinda fits with my belief in determinism and randomness. I myself find it hard to stay present in the moment when my brain is giving me all these ideas and planning for the future, but I still somehow manage to, or at least try to, strike a healthy balance. So it depends on the individual, and we can't generalize.. yet. Hopefully in the near future.

Please let me know any thoughts or comments. Thank you.