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.

Human Evolution: Biology, Technology, Culture

Evolution for all animal species occurs at the biological level. When gametes undergo meiosis, chromosomal crossover that occurred in the parents' gonads ensures that offspring are significantly varied while retaining the basic traits of their progenitors. Some species are social, and they may well undergo nuanced cultural evolution which makes things like the dolphin version of rape more or less acceptable among larger groups of dolphins. I am not sure if this actually occurs, but one can certainly imagine that it might occur.

Thought Experiment: How Would Standardized Income Distribution Have Impacted That?

As I was reading about the Research Priorities Lawsuit in loose connection with my current work at Code for America, I got sidetracked thinking about how a guaranteed minimum income would perhaps offload a substantial portion of the burdens - strictly the financial portion, and more so, all areas that financial burdens pour over into (relationships, healthcare, education, etc.) - surrounding behavioral and occupational changes, even in the face of nostalgia toward upholding historical values and pastimes. In the face of mounting efficiencies accruing elsewhere throughout the larger national or international systems that comprise humanity (pesticides use in agriculture in this case), the larger population is often clearly and implicitly in favor of such transitions, and yet the dialogue surrounding the process of actually transitioning all too frequently focuses on the large, non-monetary costs associated with the change (historical value preservation, culture change, reeducation, etc.), while ignoring the financial costs, which may be greater still! Assuming that this discourse is largely an unconscious societal byproduct of our emotional nature, how would guaranteed minimum income affect the situation? What important changes would come to the occupational transition process? Would monetary aspects enter into the conversation to a greater or lesser degree than they do currently? How would the conversation be changed in general?

In this case, I was thinking specifically about a minimum income aspect of any hypothetical standardized income distribution scheme, and I was thinking about the context of the history of CAFF and the Research Priorities Lawsuit specifically. In a larger thought experiment, I might try applying the theme of "How would standardized income distribution have impacted that?" to other historical contexts.

Maybe some other time I'll write my own answers to the questions I posed above; however, given the historical precedent of my de-prioritization of blog-posting (most/all posts are either unpublished, incomplete or nonsensical - intrapersonal), that seems unlikely :)

Cap and Trade on Human Life

While attending the HPMOR Wrap party outside the Valley Life Sciences Building this past weekend, CFAR Executive Director and Cofounder Anna Salamon, encouraged a group of UC-Berkeley students and others (myself included) to write more under the premise that anything you convert into a physical artifact provides a natural extension of your memory and is therefore beneficial. So, despite the tradeoffs inherent in recording my thoughts and experiences - particularly for all to see, an aspect which Anna wasn't necessarily considering in her comments - here I am.

Rather than discuss the fun and revelry of the HPMOR gathering though, I'm here to inscribe some thoughts I've had regarding human population management policies dating back originally to sometime in college, between 2006 and 2010, though I think mostly originating in early 2007. The original idea, as I recall, comes from ideating remedies to human overpopulation of Earth while also reading about cap and trade regimes as an effort to regulate carbon emissions. The natural juxtaposition of these concepts led to a policy conception of a cap and trade system on human life, which remains to this day my favorite systemic mechanism for directly addressing the root cause of overpopulation. Please keep in mind, there are many other policies for which I would advocate first or under the most dire circumstances, in addition to human population caps, which would attempt to manage population growth.

For now, I'm going to ignore the various benefits and downsides of having an active human population management policy and simply focus on my preferred the designed proposal for human population management, its benefits and its drawbacks. Perhaps in a later post I'll return to comment on other policies and on why a human population management policy is or is not beneficial to have in the first place. Let's begin with a brief description of why I'm choosing to discuss population management in the first place: because as humans have come to control the evolution of their own species from sociological, technological and, likely soon to be, biological standpoints, population size with respect to our environment and with respect to our goals for own evolution are impacted in a large way by the size of our population. This one aspect of humanity is perhaps the simplest and most direct way to control our own evolution as a species.

As such, the root of any human population management strategy should be to facilitate the desired evolution of humanity while maintaining and advancing the quality of life for the species as a whole and for the individuals thereof. Rather than propose goals for humanity or its evolution, I will focus on the impacts of population on quality of life while trying to avoid assumptions about which futures of our species are most or least desirable. The discussion can be broken up along several spectra, of which we will examine effects on individuals and effects on the whole population and on severity of the effects.

Work in progress (which is also true of the above, just a bit less so)...
First, let's look at the effects of population size on the quality of life provided to an individual. If you have too few people, you likely end up with a relatively less fulfilling life in the sense that one would expect a lower average quality of relationship fulfillment. This is predominately due to the relative lack of other humans with whom to interact, which restricts your choices and lowers the expected quality of interaction that results.

Next, let's look at the effects of population size on the species as a whole. If you have too few people, you face in the extreme, the existential risk of an extinction vortex, and in general, you face reduced robustness due to external pressures. If you have too many people, you face in the extreme, risk of societal collapse due to resource mismanagement.

Having a greater number of people with whom to interact will presumably increase one's quality of life to some point, and it will require the resources of the system to be split among more individuals, requiring each individual to have a smaller allocation of resources available to oneself. So presumably, there is some optimal number of people that should exist in any system with finite resources (e.g. Earth). Since the optimal number is dependent on a myriad, perhaps infinite number of variables, I'll refrain from trying to come up with a specific target or upper bound. As a lower bound, let's say that humans don't want humans to go extinct (I know that some individual humans argue for human extinction, but this is not a commonly held belief) and therefore, we need enough genetic variation in our population to prevent an extinction vortex.

Complaining in a Positive Tone

I just attempted to write a blog entry in third person, complaining about how feminist and gender queer blog entries sometimes become very dark. Generalizing the bleak, derogatory abyss of <insert links to unnecessarily negative blogs here>, you find articles ranging from mild, that cast blame for how people feel when they're exposed to adversity, to vile articles, that blame others for existing as they are (Or, if we try to look at them more positively: as in their very existence makes me feel bad about myself by comparison, not because they are bad to exist, but because the world is unfair). They range from mopey yet fairly compassionate to people of various identities () to predominately hateful and loathing (). The latter make me feel, perhaps unsurprisingly, hate-filled and loathsome. Here was the start to that blog entry, and I really wanted to keep going, but it was just so hard. It's much easier to rant than it is to write a constructive commentary on the nature of a discussion.

     "Reading a number of feminist and LGBT centric blog posts over the past several years, most of them have the right idea, focusing on awareness and empowerment of groups that have traditionally been underserved and underrepresented. The spirt of the movement seems to be about empowering individuals to live life as they feel compelled to live. Certainly, we all want the freedom to experience the world and interact with others in constructive, mutually beneficial ways, and some groups have been historically, systematically excluded from flowing through society in that way. Emphasizing that fact is important, and should definitely continue to take center stage until it becomes a reality. And, that's where it could end.

     "Sometimes it does end there. Occasionally, though, it continues into shall we say, darker realms, where negativity creeps in and people are encouraged to feel that, simply because they are lucky, they are somehow inherently wrong or bad or evil. Recognizably, usually, the intent of these darker facets is to further the awareness of less well-know societal aspects by prompting the readers to self-examine and analyze how they personally affect and are affected by groups with whom they may otherwise have considered only briefly. This is reasonable, and it can be done in a more positive way. For example, it works to to tell stories where the reader identifies with the primary actor and in which the primary actor goes through a transformative experience in relation to the subject matter. Alternatively, direct questions and answers based on personal experience are a good way to provide perspective. Do you know anyone who is homosexual? Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be physically intimate with someone in order to share a human experience, even if that person is different from you in ways of which you have little understanding? Have you ever tried or even considered being someone you just met and who compulsively repulses you because of who they are? Are you repulsed because that's who you are, or are you repulsed because you have yet to fathom who they are?"

Empower Yourself

Reading a number of feminist and LGBT centric blog posts over the past several years, most of them have the right idea, focusing on awareness and empowerment of groups that have traditionally been underserved and underrepresented. The spirt of the movement seems to be about empowering individuals to live life as they feel compelled to live. Certainly, we all want the freedom to experience the world and interact with others in constructive, mutually beneficial ways, and some groups have been historically, systematically excluded from flowing through society in that way. Emphasizing that fact is important, and should definitely continue to take center stage until it becomes a reality. And, that's where it could end.

Sometimes it does end there. Occasionally, though, it continues into shall we say, darker realms, where negativity creeps in and people are encouraged to feel that, simply because they are lucky, they are somehow inherently wrong or bad or evil. Recognizably, usually, the intent of these darker facets is to further the awareness of less well-know societal aspects by prompting the readers to self-examine and analyze how they personally affect and are affected by groups with whom they may otherwise have considered only briefly. This is reasonable, and it can be done in a more positive way. For example, it works to to tell stories where the reader identifies with the primary actor and in which the primary actor goes through a transformative experience in relation to the subject matter. Alternatively, direct questions and answers based on personal experience are a good way to provide perspective. Do you know anyone who is homosexual? Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be physically intimate with someone in order to share a human experience, even if that person is different from you in ways of which you have little understanding? Have you ever tried or even considered being someone you just met and who compulsively repulses you because of who they are? Are you repulsed because that's who you are, or are you repulsed because you have yet to fathom who they are?