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.

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.