Decision-Making in Context and across Contexts

One creates nested default groups to make moral judgements and decisions. These groups become the contexts in which to apply principles or analysis to decide, and the final decisions comes from the group which wins when its contextual relevance is given supremacy. For example, if we discuss whether to kill someone is wrong, the universal contextual answer is, "It is wrong." Or perhaps, the universal answer is unknown or is both right and wrong together, and the context of an environment filled with humans, the context of humanity, makes killing wrong. Looking further inward, killing in accordance with the death penalty is right, if we accept that laws are the societally accepted moral framework relevant in a given time and place. If the individual executioner has inside knowledge about the inmate's innocence which was known to be excluded from the legal process, the killing becomes wrong again. So, how does the executioner make the decision.

The spectrum of default groups must reach from the context of the individual to that of the universe. In between the two extremes, there are several natural intermediates: earth, life, animal life, humanity, jurisdictions of law, companies, families, tribes, etc. The time-limited process of making a decision must be imperfect.

Do We Care about the Future?

I often wonder what others would think about various thought experiments I run in my head. In particular, how would the various potential futures I contemplate rank in terms of desirability. Given that each of our ideal futures has a unique composition of features, what would be some of the common trends? Could we agree on any goals at all? And if not, could we agree on a process for determining the goals even if we can't all agree on what they are? There are so many people that don't even speak the same languages that I do; what do they want? Where do we agree and disagree?

Additionally, I'm curious about the prospect of global visions for humanity, rather than today's focus on the meager expression and internal agreement in nation-states. While there is clear, if ineffectual process for guiding nations, the international community's process is certainly less developed. In considering potential futures on this scale, it strikes me that I find some of them very displeasurable.

***

Specks of light dotting the night sky gleamed meagerly in the distance. As the cool artificial breeze of the Martian domes brushed gently against Kaiya's cheeks, she couldn't help but wonder what became of her grandmother's friend's grandchildren. Her Terran peers' parents lost the technology for communicating with the colony Mars over two decades ago now. As the population surpassed one million in 2081, just a few years ago, the celebration was bittersweet, unshared with so many friends from humanity's home world.

***

Do others fear cataclysmic rifts in our species as I do? The Martian example is particularly illustrative for its physical divide, but techno-socioeconomic partitions scare me just as much.

Already, we see segregated communities around the globe - in the Arab States, Nigeria and the United States and elsewhere - stratified greatly along economic lines. When groups with money tend to see positively reinforcing feedback loops that grant them privilege to compounding gains, they stand positioned to run away with our global civilization's power and control. Even now, elites often control laws or have the money to evade them. The top tier of human society stands apart from the rest.

Technology also feeds into the feedback loops. Technology can be adopted first by elites. They know about it first, and they can afford it. If technology Z is build on Y which is built on X and so on, and if an elite group gains access to Z before anyone outside the group has access to A, it may well be fair to say that the elite group has sufficiently separated itself from the rest of humanity. The specific technology could further reinforce this idea. For example, genetic control of our offspring down to the level of individual base pairs and epigenetic fingerprinting would be a game changer in terms of our evolution as a species. Evolved intelligence where humans are integrated with AI in a manner that gives some individuals orders of magnitude more cognitive processing power might also render the unprivileged people powerless and obsolete.

If we really care about human inclusion, equality and the value of individual human lives, we soon must contemplate the implications of technology, resource distribution and economic stratification on the development of our species. Extrapolating backwards the idea of inclusivity in the face of such major technological progress of our potential future, are we in the right place today? While I think we are still largely okay - it's been less than a generation since cell phones and the internet became common - I do worry about the next generation. What if 10% of the world is still without cellphones in 2030? That would mean that many children in developed nations have parents that grew up with cell phones while 1 of every 10 humans couldn't even get one then.

More broadly though, my question is about whether or not we are, as a species, simply alright with that prospect. Do we even care? If we have 9 billion people and the top 7 billion don't really notice when the bottom 2 billion suffer, why would we change? And if the top 10 million can simply ignore or even subjugate the rest of the 9 billion, would there be enough impetus within the elites to prevent it? If your children are part of the future mainstream, if you are, do you care?

Who I am

I'm Grant Robert Smith. I'm Zyzzyx of Nal. Actually, that's an alter ego name that I use internally in several ways. Nal is sort of like my word for God. It's a portmanteau of nothing and all - the combination of opposites into a single foundational concept that underpins my conception of the universe. You could take and restate Nal however you like, which is kind of what I think of when you look at the myriad conceptions that individuals have of the notion of God. For me, it commonly appears as 'Doubt everything except and including this.' Or, 'We know nothing for certain, and this we certainly know.' It is the juxtaposition or combination of nothing and everything, doubt and certainty, whatever you want.

Ok, you may be thinking, "That's nice, but it's kind of not saying anything at all." To which I would respond that this is precisely the point. Because on top of this foundational concept (or without or next to or however you prefer), you can build the rest of your conception of reality. For better or worse, our existence seems to have a decent amount of consistency to it, which leads mostly to conceptions mirroring the universe itself. "Cogito ergo sum," as Descartes put it. And then you have science or fantasy. You have fate or free will. You have chaos or morality. These are inclusive 'or's and not intended as opposites. Build a worldview however you like, but be warned that you may not like the world you view.

How I do it

Balance. More specifically, I think of balancing truth and positivity. That consistency of experience I mentioned before comes in use for our small and limited minds. The fact that we can make predictions based on past experience and causal relationships is quite nice. So, I hold the truth in high regard. While you observe a rock hurdling toward you, it might feel nice - for a bit - to have the unshakable belief that 'the rock will be stopped by your mind powers, and that it will fall to the ground before it strikes your face.' This sort of positivity is almost certainly unwarranted. Here, the physical reality is simple and predictable to a degree that positivity should play no part in the matter. On the other hand, positivity is great when reasonable doubt enters the picture. The unshakable belief that 'I will have a pleasant interaction when I go up and talk to a stranger' is hence more reasonable. Obviously, it's not going to be true 100% of the time, but it's still reasonable. It's reasonable because it's going to be true some of the time and because the potential harms of its falseness are negligible.

While this is a simple and reasonable place to start, it's not much of a worldview yet. Truth alone is enough to create most of my view on the world since I exist not in a vacuum but in an observable space. I hope I'm quoting my friend Shane Golden correctly as saying, "I am, now, in this place." Or, incorporating my brother's idea of 'mutually shared experience,' one could rephrase it as, "We are, here, now." This is the basic acceptance of a shared universe with consistency across local observation of space and time. Truth begets physicalism which begets science which begets more truth, and it appears trivial to simply accept the majority of that which is and of that which you hear and see and feel and smell and so on and so on. I even largely extend this acceptance of truth to that which I read and that which people tell me, so long as it's consistent. And, even when inconsistencies arise, it's easy enough to take Occam's Razor approach, the simplest explanation, assuming best intentions and greatest positivity when explanations are comparably simple.

Good intentions and positivity only seem to matter when I start adding the key ingredient - meaning - to existence. The choice to give meaning to existence is logically arbitrary, but almost universally intrinsic in the context of existing in the first place. If I think I am, here, now, in this place without meaning, I can logically justify anything. I can subsequently create meaning in a bubble surrounded by meaninglessness and derive whatever moral framework I want. To some extent, we all do this. It's necessary because we have limited capacity. We can only process so much information, and we can only observe so much of the universe. But, anytime we make an arbitrary bubble without ever thinking about it's context or questioning it, we risk losing our connection with the truth. In turn, we lose true consistency between the universe and our conception thereof. It will still appear to be consistent because the inconstancy is covered in meaninglessness, hidden outside the bubble of meaning we have defined for ourselves. But the truth and our inconsistency are there, lurking in the meaninglessness beyond our bubble of spatiotemporal relevancy.

Instead, I choose meaning, always. Plus, meaning just feels better than meaningless. It seems like a nicely balanced take on truth and positivity. And with meaning, comes morality. Actually, morality requires there to be context and for that context to include other human beings or comparably intelligent forms with which to interact and reason about morality. But since that's pretty much a given, we all have morality in some sense, even if we don't always recognize it as such, especially in others. I'd guess most people define their personal worldview and morality from the inside out, from where they're positioned in the universe. I do this too, and at the same time, I define it from the outside in. What do things look like for the entirety of the universe? Obviously the answer is beyond my capacity, but it's an important question for me in defining my morality. I do my best to take into account all possible context, from where we come and to where we will go. Personally, this thought process comes from a place of decision making. My morality stems from trying to decide how to spend my time and what to do with my life.

In making decisions, I started with what I felt like are the biggest ones. The things that an individual chooses with greatest impact on the universe are what to do with your life's work and wether to have children (since it's going to be a big part of someone's life to raise that child). Because children additionally have a propagating effect of potentially creating more children, that decision seems to have a high chance of being more impactful on the universe over time than even what to do with one's life's work. So first, I decided not to have children. We have enough people for the planet; if I want to raise children, I'll adopt. Plus, humans are evolving faster based on technology than biology, so it's not like genetic propagation matters much. Second, I decided what to do in the 60 or so years I had left to live. This turned out to be a much more difficult decision making process. Apparently I started with the same question as Elon Musk ("What will most affect the future of humanity?"), but I was trying to pin it down to a single answer rather than a list of topics.

I guess as a side note, the rest of my morality, like how to treat people and what laws should be and all that "simple" stuff is taken on a case by case basis within the context of where I want humanity to go with itself in the future. I'll get back to this later because in deciding what to do with my life, I ended up coming up first with a framework for combining goals and desires with inevitabilities and physical trends. This in turn led to a method for deciding what laws should be. And, the remainder comes from evaluating the local context from the inside out (e.i. being nice to people around you) and from balancing contexts against one another based on the consequences.

Explosions!

"I have advice for people who want to write. I don’t care whether they’re 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour — write, write, write."
— Madaleine L'Engle

I was chatting with my friend QuHarrison Terry about his creative process for writing last week, and the theme of repetition - as presented in L'Engle's third point - resonated throughout our conversation. While typically difficult for those unaccustomed to it, even writing and rewriting the same idea over and over helps. As a perfectionist, I usually try to get it exactly right the first time. When I'm writing, this means editing in place over and over as I try to achieve an impossible goal. I remember being taught in school to work in drafts, and it always annoyed me. But coming back to writing as free-time activity in my adult life, I can see how getting the ideas out is more important than perfecting the phrasing surrounding them.

Transitioning from one idea to another is also a struggle. I would guess that the overall flow of the ideas throughout the work is more important than the phrasing of transitions, so similar to the way in which spitting things onto the page beats chewing them up in your head, having an outline to guide the flow of the paper is superior to working through all the transitions as they enter your flow.

The next thing I want to touch on is L'Engle's first point. It's about practice and repetition much like the third, but it's also about diversifying your topics, discovering your interests and developing your voice as a writer. (As an aside, the privacy portion is something I personally would like to think is unnecessary, which is why this blog would make no sense to someone finding it organically on the internet.) In the talk with Qu, I related this to his notion of author authenticity. If you're going to publish something for others to consume, it should at least speak to you. It should be something you're interested in and can get behind and support and defend in the case where you have a discussion with someone about what you put out there. I don't think this means that you have to have such a discussion, just that you'd enjoy it if you were to have it, and that you'd genuinely believe in what you were saying during the conversation in the same way you believe in your original work.

L'Engle's remaining point about reading is the one I'm least certain of. While I think reading helps your vocabulary, reading generically, reading for content, doesn't cut it. In order for reading to significantly impact your writing, I think you have to be reading with that in mind. You have to be focusing on critically evaluating the author's style. You have to be thinking about how different types of content lend themselves to different types of prose. A fantasy novel would be ruined by the terse nature of the prose you find in scientific journals. Jason approached the cliff at 4.5 m/s and extended his arm with hand outstretched, adding an additional 17 cm to his reach as he caught the falling red Farlax just half a meter from the cliff's edge. Reading contributes most toward improving your writing when you're looking for the things you like in the author's work. For example, in writing fiction, which I rarely do, I find that my setup is often lacking and my descriptive prose, imperative to setting a scene, is frequently imbalanced against the scene's action. So, I might read a few of my favorite sci-fi authors to see how they do it.

Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities

PREAMBLE

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and inalienability of the responsibilities of our human family is a necessary corollary to sustain freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human responsibility has resulted in unsustainable overconsumption of resources and environmental degradation and decreased the quality of human life therein, and has stalled the advent of a world in which human beings shall uphold responsible speech and beliefs, and shall enjoy freedom from fear and want, the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against poverty and oppression, that human responsibility should be explicit in the virtues of society,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of responsible practices within and among nations,

Whereas the peoples of the Earth have in their existence affirmed their duty to fundamental human responsibilities, to the societal obligations of the human person and to the responsibilities of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life by adhering to our greater obligations,

Whereas mankind's Nations have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human responsibilities and fundamental obligations,

Whereas a common understanding of these responsibilities and obligations is of the greatest importance for the full realization of our pledge to the UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS,

Now, Therefore THE PEOPLE OF EARTH proclaim THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES as a common standard of decency for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for our rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to ensure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of individual States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article 1.

• All human beings are born obliged to duty and responsibility. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act together in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2.

• Everyone is obliged to all the responsibilities and obligations set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3.

• Everyone has the responsibility to protect life, liberty and security of all persons.

Article 4.

• No one shall hold another in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.

• No one shall subject another to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.

• Everyone has the obligation to recognize each other everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.

• All are equal before the law and are obliged to seek out, prevent and undo any discrimination that would otherwise prevent equal protection of the law. All are required to promote equal participation toward every responsibility in this Declaration and toward incitement of such participation.

Article 8.

• Everyone has the responsibility to participate in the competent national tribunals when called to serve therein.

Article 9.

• No one shall arbitrarily arrest, detain or exile another.

Article 10.

• Everyone is required to participate in fair and public hearings by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of rights and obligations and of any criminal charge when called to server therein.

Article 11.

• (1) Everyone must presume each other innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense.
• (2) No one shall hold another guilty of any penal offense on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offense, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall anyone impose a heavier penalty than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offense was committed.

Article 12.

• No one shall subject another to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the responsibility to uphold the protection of others against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.

• (1) No one may prevent the movement and residence of another within the borders of each state.
• (2) No one may prevent another from leaving any country, including his own, of from returning to his country.

Article 14.

• (1) Everyone must help each other in seeking and enjoying asylum from prosecution in other countries.
• (2) This responsibility may not apply in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of humanity.

Article 15.

• (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
• (2) No one shall arbitrarily deprive another of his nationality nor of the right to change his nationality.

Article 16.

• (1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
• (2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
• (3) The family is a natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State. It is the responsibility of every family to maintain a limited and reasonable number of offspring as appropriate in the context of the family's circumstances and ability to provide for those offspring without undue burden on the state and other members of society.

Article 17.

• (1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
• (2) No one shall arbitrarily deprive another of his property.

Article 18.

• Everyone has the obligation to respect others' freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this includes their freedom to change religion or belief, and to permit others, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest their religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.

• Everyone has the responsibility to ensure unto himself safe and reasonable opinions and expression; this responsibility includes exercise of the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20.

• (1) Everyone has the responsibility to allow and protect peaceful assembly and association.
• (2) No one may compel another to belong to an association.

Article 21.

• (1) No one may restrict another from taking part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
• (2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
• (3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22.

• Everyone, as a member of society, has the responsibility to support the social security of society and is obligated to contribute, in accordance with the needs of his society, realizing that society has provided to him dignity and the free development of his personality in selecting his manner of reasonable contribution.

Article 23.

• (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
• (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
• (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
• (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.

• Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.

• (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
• (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

• (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
• (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
• (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.

• (1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
• (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.

• Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29.

• (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
• (2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
• (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.

• Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Romantic Empowerment

I feel like I grew up completely disempowered to pursue people romantically. It's ironic given the standard cultural problem is boys feeling over-empowered to pursue women sexually, given that I am indeed a cis male. Looking back, I think inconsistent social messaging confused and ultimately combined with an impactful personal experience to paralyze me.

How Do We Engage Everyone?

To some extent I really don't know how to help the people who are the worst off in society. the ones who are unintelligent unattractive and poor. the ones who have mental illnesses that prevent them from participating. I think real help for people in this space would be focusing on their enjoyment of life in addition to their generic well-being and maintenance. (Think assembly line or qc work for physically and mentally handicapped individuals.) We could always have government create jobs that aren’t economically viable but that make the world a better place. Things like cleaning the outside or manual OCR. Ask people to do them for low hours but reasonable pay. To all the anti-intellectual's out there (especially in the group that is technomically incapable), I don't really know what to say. I'm sorry. And we really need your help too, even though you disagree with us. The best we can do is include these people in a conversation and listen to them. The only thing we really can’t do is let idiocracy become a reality, which I don’t think is a serious concern, but it should be studied more. When would it become a serious concern, if ever? Also, if give these people well-being and enjoyment in life, I think they will just stay out of the way. Non-child enjoyment can probably be incentivized.

A Call to Experiment with Economic Models

MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech still rings true today in many ways. Clearly for the black community in the United States, police brutality, social segregation and institutionalized poverty are still relevant issues. And for this, we all suffer: blacks, whites, Latinos, and all Americans. We suffer together. Injustice continues to oppress our nation. Poverty continues to shackle our brothers and sisters, our fellow Americans. Each day, millions of Americans miss out on their "inalienable Rights" to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And so as the great Dr. MLK said, "We cannot be satisfied... We cannot be satisfied as long as the [poor man's] basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one." We cannot be satisfied so long as the institution of poverty unjustly detains even one of our fellow Americans.

While the task is obvious, we have too long toiled in defining success. If it is self-evident that "all men are created equal," let us aim for freedom from generational transfer of poverty. Let the poor man's son grow up with the rich man's daughter, the rich man's son with the poor man's daughter. Arm in arm they we must let all our children seek in fairness and truth the life, liberty and happiness this nation promises them.

Success is an equal outcome for rich and poor alike. Success is a simple and just tax system. Success is elimination of poverty, homelessness, and joblessness.

Success is solving poverty. Most simply, poverty is solved with a minimum income tied to cost of living. Because cost of living is tied to location, this means that if the government maintains that its citizens have the freedom to chose where they live, migratory trends will impact the cost. In order to achieve the basic level of human rights considered to be universal, this income should cover healthy food, clean water, basic heating, clothing, housing, healthcare and the needs of any children. Children need education, in addition to the basic needs described above. All of these expenses entail a significant tax burden on the working population. Obviously, if too many people are unemployed, this system fails.

Solving poverty is the first real step on the path to global collaboration. Certainly if we have people struggling to subsist, they will be even further incapable of collaborating meaningfully to the progress of our global society. And without meaningful participation in our global society, they lack meaning to it, must fail to derive truth from it. They would be reasonable and right to lack trust in it. Moving forward into a shared truth, a cultivated trust and a collaborative process is, first and foremost, the same as creating a society free from poverty.

How do we liberate ourselves of destitution? There are many solutions we might test. For one, despite having existed as a societal species for thousands of years, we have yet to thoroughly test the successful hypothesis of minimum income: society free from poverty. Oddly, government has restricted information on the one real experiment - Mincome, performed by Canada in the 1970s. Recent attempts in Finland and Switzerland to test the idea more broadly have been rejected by the public.

Even if such an unchecked mincome arrangement were to fail at a local or national level, compromises may also be tested. Perhaps the government only pledges a subset of the universal basic rights. The right to children alone threatens to bloat the cost of social services immensely. Nixing that single provision might well be sufficient to balance the entire system of rights.

Alternatively, requiring people to work might add the productivity required to balance the system. Educating the citizenry to the level required for individual productivity may challenge the system in this case. If people cannot do the jobs available at the precipice of societies productive progress, forcing people to work will negligibly or detrimentally impact the system's overall output. In developed countries today, this is already a problem as many well-paying positions with intense prerequisite knowledge and/or experience go unfilled.

Additionally, it remains unclear whether all people possess the physical and biological capacity to productively participate in cases where all such jobs require high levels of technical expertise. For example, there is some initial evidence that certain people lack the capacity to learn computer programming. Time will tell the extent to which this challenge exists and persists, if at all. However, if more people challenge society to accommodate them, the slower society will progress.

People and the environment together form the system which sustains and enriches us. So similarly, the environment challenges progress in several ways. Resource limitations impose a concrete boundary to the system. Because the energy available comes almost entirely from the sun, we know the maximum capacity at which the entire system operates.

Knowing these limitations actually frees us to design and test different societal and technological arrangements. Without the understanding of how the universe and how humanity operate, the blind assumption must be that anything is possible. We would never know where to start. Given the truth surrounding the challenges to the systems in which we exist, we can finally begin to progress in a guided and methodical fashion, rather than by the chance nature of our stochastic biology.

Only with a shared understanding of these systems can we build trust among ourselves. For this reason, understanding, accepting and establishing standards for agreeing upon the nature of the universe with which decisions are made and actions taken is crucial. Reasonable doubt is important, and for the save of robustness and diversity within the system, doubt should be tolerated to the extent that it remains unthreatening to the system's sustainability and progression. Utter rejection of basic principals that threaten the system itself must be reasonably contained.

Especially in the transition to a global society, knowing the limitations may yet be insufficient to provide for the security and well-being within any region, nation-state, or local civilization. Unless a subset of society can balance the global impacts of the remaining humans, the external portion of humanity will always threaten the maintenance and progression of any and all subsets. Even when completely isolated economically, they share their environment.

Collaboration therefore facilitates addressing global environmental challenges. At minimum, an isolated nation would require information regarding the external behavior of the remaining society to predict and address its impacts on their environment. Beyond facilitating solutions, collaboration is almost required, as the alternative, proved surveillance, seems likely to activate the vicious cycle of reducing trust, increasing external information protection and increasingly invasive surveillance.

A similar virtuous cycle, increasing collaboration and trust simultaneously, paves the road to facilitating global problem solving. This makes building trust between and among nations just as important as the raw collaboration. And while collaboration between individuals or states may increase trust, the interaction between citizens and their governments is far less obvious. Trust within nations seems instead to be derived from prosperity and wealth distribution. Extending this result to the global society suggests that in a stagnating global economy, only a globally equitable wealth distribution is capable of maintaining the trust required to facilitated maintenance and progress of a global society in the face of passive adversity. (Active adversity, such as an external invader, in itself elicits cooperation among distinct, mutually threatened groups.)

Logically, fairness, including equitable wealth distribution is required for trust. Wealth distribution is determined by social and economic policy and people determine policy. If the system is unfair and produces an unfair distribution of resources, I must ultimately fault people. People control the government by participating in it or by being accepting of it. Some of those people have high levels of influence over the system, others little, and because all people have some level of influence over the system, eventually, the system's unfairness will breed distrust among the people.

Still, equitable wealth distribution is insufficient alone to produce trust. There must be a cultural component as well, such that the rest of the system is perceived as fair. In fact this culture can broaden the wealth distribution curves that are perceived as equitable. In essence, trust must exist and cannot be simply or easily injected into an untrusting society. The transition is eased by equitable resource distribution, good governance, fairness and other social factors, but the generational and learned inmates trust can be strengthened independently of other influences in individuals that chose to trust first. In fact it is the leap of faith to trust first that seems to make interaction building possible at all.

So long as the flame of trust burns, it brightens the future for all.

Even in the light of trust, with strong collaboration among people and nations, false truth can undermine a society's ability to deal with adversity. While individual doubt is healthy and required, societal action must be reasonably permitted, and individuals must be forgiving of the actions flying in the face of their personal doubt. And in time, we must assume that our doubts and mistruths will be resolved in accordance with the universe. To some extent, it is even required that we trust the universe that the resolution process is amicable or at least acceptable. This is just as true for nations and societies as it is for individuals.

When assessing different solutions for the system in its entirety, we need to allow and encourage testing of such solutions. Thorough tests are nearly or completely impossible to conduct. Still, small scale approximations that work well can and should have an accepted process for scaling up to change even the outermost level of organization. Proposing San Francisco, California as a test bed for unrestricted Mincome, we might easily run a thought experiment first to generate our hypothesis.

San Francisco is a popular place to live. Additionally, it has some strong physical limits imposed by the landscape, being surrounded by water on three sides. Already, we know this causes problems with space availability as reflected in the housing market. So, we can easily expect a naive, unrestricted Mincome implementation to fail because no amount of money would allow the people that want to live there to find housing. There is no more housing to find. Even if we allow them to build housing, serious cost and space concerns arise.

On the other hand, if San Francisco is allowed to prevent immigration locally, much as the Galápagos Islands restrict travel, the thought experiment would likely result in a provocative success. Either the city could remove the existing homeless population and prevent their reentry, or they could subsidize away the problem for the existing population and prevent further immigration. This solution removes freedom of travel, making it more comparable to a global implementation of minimum income because immigration to Earth doesn't exist.

Implementing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

While there is at least one fundamental inconsistency within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDoHR) as it’s written, it pretty well covers what we hope a mature human civilization would provide to every member therein, should they choose to take it (a caveat I’ll return to later). At the same time, everything in the declaration is basically a service in one form or another and all services require money to provide. Therefore in practice, various nations are able to implement the UDoHR to different degrees and with different strategies and challenges to their implementations.

Maybe take a more in depth look at some example countries, so on and so forth (not just the ones that are close to UDoHR from a Western sense, but also maybe Saudi Arabia, Italy, China, Singapore and Somalia).

Stepping out of the box, let’s look at how the Universe restricts its shape and one way we might go about trying to implement as many of the UDoHR tenants as possible on Earth today. 

Balancing Truth and Positivity

Balancing truth and positivity is a fundamental aspect of my personal philosophy. It underpins many of my morals, goals, feelings, thoughts and actions. And while it's certainly not a religion, it is my religion or at least an important component thereof. To the extent that every person, organization or group, be it formal or informal, has religion, as in a unique set of guiding principles, from my vantage point, it appears far more common to greater emphasize positivity than to emphasize truth. An inconvenient truth is aptly named for this reason, but global climate change is not the only topic appropriate for that title. Maybe I'd go on to talk about the *socioeconomic struggle* of middle class Europeans, Japanese and Americans in the face of globalization, or overpopulation, or peak oil, or the *potential obsolescence of human labor* and the plethora of *out of work* or unemployed individuals. But what we really need to talk about is how we got to this place of inconvenient truths and how we might yet walk away with scars that fade instead of amputated limbs and *traumatic memory loss* or PTSD (motivated forgetting on Wikipedia).

Our positivity today exists in the context of our past and our conception thereof. Modern cultural understanding comes from a long history of American success over the past 100 years. Perception of human history, dating back centuries and millennia, further reinforces modern attitudes. Schooling, entertainment and almost every other exposure to history focuses on the impressive, the eventful, the progressive and the majestic. Since these times are long gone, we package most historical events together in our minds. We lose perspective on the immense amount of time it took to arrive at our present condition. In reality, civilizations rose and fell across the planet over the course of several thousand years. There were periods of progress and periods of stagnation and periods of regression. Societal and economic growth only happen sometimes. We seem to have forgotten this recently.

Or, rather than, forget the normalcy of economic stagnation and stability, perhaps we lack the education. Living in times of growth and prosperity for generations, we learned to expect it. America has been a global superpower for about 150 years now. The industrial revolution ratcheted a territorial expansion (robbery of natives’ land) and population growth into previously unfathomable demographic transformation. Cities became the size of empires and with more people and more technological experimentation, the acceleration of breakthrough after breakthrough begun over a century ago continues today. Again we lose context; we focus on globalization’s novelty, rather than the typicality of temporary expansion followed by long, steady lulls.

Globalization has brought amazing magnitude and interconnectedness to our growth. At the same time, we’ve moved at different rates, leaving many groups stratified and siloed. Importantly, the groups with greatest influence and power have retained their positivity with their fame, money and success. As an investment banker, programmer, doctor, CEO or any one of so many profitable roles in society, the positivity comes as expected, token, unsurprising. We in the United States miss the mobility required to balance the past’s optimism with the troubling realities of the present. The diversity of opinion reflective of the true state of affairs percolates slowly into the minds of society’s rich leaders and isolated academics.

These societal organization issues thrive also because of our individual biases. In its difficulty, fighting the innate drive of our nature parallels knowing what we have yet to learn. Even after the truth presents itself to our face, *we want to reject it*. Sometimes, personal motives make the desire to deny the truth even worse. As a widely accepted example, take the tobacco industry’s denial of cigarette’s link to cancer. At first, I’m sure the business leaders simply wanted to refuse the results because human nature drove them to favor hope over truth. After tests confirmed the results, however, the fault shifts to their conscious decision making process. What started in their biology was reinforced by their desire to make money, and rejection of fact cemented in their brains. In the worst case, the untruth is a neurological parasite that spreads to infect other hosts. If they too are predisposed to lie because of their incentives, similar complications continue to cause verbal vomit and allow the parasite to continue its lifecycle. Even when the issue is less contagious, hidden only by human nature, it threatens to grow on it’s own. Unfortunately, we as a society make these dangerous subjects commonplace by allowing positivity to outweigh truth.

Any number of inconvenient subjects important to our future avoid meaningful discussion. The most challenging ones endanger our very existence.

Bringing balance back to our positivity is a challenge we can and must pass. Thankfully, we posses several tools suited to this undertaking. We can focus on evidence-based policy. We can run more frequent experiments to test policy initiatives. We can give experts more authority when our external environment challenges us. We can recommit to inclusive politics, where all voices are heard and valued. A combination of all these strategies will give the best chance of balancing truth and positivity in America and throughout the world.

It’s true that humans have optimistic goals. We have policy for the sake of reaching these goals. For example, when we wanted to go to the moon, we created a space program. When we want to reduce homelessness, we alter zoning and economic policies to spur development and job growth. Yet, the goals rarely exist in the written policy itself. By pursuing goal oriented legislation, we hold ourselves more accountable to our history of goal achievement. Goal oriented legislation prevents us from hiding or forgetting failures to meet goals and deadlines. It creates a framework for evidence based policy and experimentation, and it makes the truth more plain.

Experimenting with policy implementation and using the results as evidence for altering our policies and platforms will help us find the downsides we miss in our organic social organization. While ideas for goals, metrics, prioritization and experiments should come from the people, evidence and experimental results should inform the policies based on those ideas. While higher levels of government sometimes use lower levels to experiment with various social policy implementations, cities could be leveraged far more as proving grounds. In this way, even if the state or federal government is divided, experiments can be designed to test a proposed policy from either side. Suburban or rural communities could similarly be used as test subjects for new policies. In this way, social ills and internal challenges can be addressed systematically over time.

Challenges to society arise from our external environment in addition to our internal structure. To prevent external threats from blindsiding us, we must remain ever watchful of changes in our surroundings. One way to institutionalize this observation and to incorporate it into policy is by giving communities of experts earned influence in the legislative process. Typically, this is unnecessary because leaders see the obvious external threats without expert influence. For example, if scientists informed the government about an imminent asteroid impact, policy makers would move to fund programs to address the danger. However, as discussed earlier, there are times when biases and misaligned incentives cause individuals or even groups of leaders to turn a blind I to such threats. In this case, we need to change the system so that expert consensus is capable of counteracting lobbying biases.

Finally, we must make an inherent commitment to overcome a social bias. While perhaps less of a threat, a bias to exclude those different from us hurts our strength as an inclusive nation. It prohibits us from reaching bipartisan consensus and from effectively discussing controversial topics. Therefore, we must recommit to our founding principle that all people are created equal. We all have a vote. We all have a voice. And we all have a need to be heard by the systems that organize us. And beyond that, we all have human needs that an effective government empowers us to address - basic needs, but also the need to create, and the need to love, and the need be accepted and be loved. Only with a commitment to inclusion can we truly use the rest of the tools to solve the difficult problems of a global society.

These tools to converge on a healthy balance of truth and positivity are all things we can do today. The sooner we enact changes to discover and address threats unseen by our leaders today, the safer we will be in the future. Together, let us build a better future.

Morality of Masturbation

Masturbation is a normal and healthy behavior for both sexes, and in fact several, studies identify improved health in subjects who masturbate more frequently, as compared to those who masturbate less frequently. Though as with many scientific investigations in which the subject biological, there are studies which draw both beneficial and detrimental conclusions. But enough with the physicalism, masturbation feels fucking great! Sadly, the nature of masturbation habits remains a largely personal and privately maintained aspect of one's self identity. Let's examine masturbation, common practices, how it fits into society, and the consequences of various actions surrounding masturbation in order to explore how we feel about when it's right and when it's wrong.





About the author: Given that I personally hold the right to privacy in very low regard with respect to many other freedoms, discussing anything about myself is relatively fun and easy. Even publicly. Even with strangers. On the topic of masturbation, blurring into sexuality and other preferences at times, I tend toward fantasizing primarily about female human forms enjoying sexual pleasure, especially orgasm. When I'm not masturbating, my thoughts about sex in general, as with my thoughts about generally everything, stray in all directions. For example, I may consider the nature of a society in which bestiality is normal, or under what circumstances you might sleep with a blood relative and have it be considered by most people as reasonable and moral acceptable (eg. accidentally, under extreme duress, etc.). I have thought about what it would be like to be raped and how to (attempt to) enjoy being raped even if the circumstance is highly undesirable, such as anal, then oral penetration by an ugly, dirty stranger with a very large penis.