as good as

Three moves are as good as a fire.

One day, over thirteen years ago, my parents helped me pack up a car-sized quantity of my worldly possessions, and, upon setting off for college, I unknowingly entered into a new period of my life that I now call the era of continual moving-around.

Yesterday the Era showed that it's going on as strong as ever as I undertook a one-day, solo effort to move everything I own from one apartment to another about ten miles away. No, that's not entirely true. It was a bit more than a one-day effort; with Laura's help I moved my bicycles the night before. And I used her car to move everything else, which is why the move took one day and not five. I actually did think about doing the move sans car, but “think” never progressed to “consider” as, alas, my current work schedule these days pretty much bars me from enjoying such luxuries as taking off five days to haul around a lot of junk on my bike.

Excluding college, in the remaining nine years of the Era, I've moved exactly once for every year. Calculated proverbially, that means I've suffered three fires. Make that: benefited from three fires. There are two positive statements I can say about myself that not many other 31-year-olds can:

• I weigh about the same as I did when I was 18.
• I own about the same amount of stuff as I did when I was 18.

But I still own a lot of stuff, and only moving exposes this unpleasant little fact for what it is. All this stuff that I'm packing and lifting and moving—somehow at the time of each thing's acquisition it seemed important. Now it's a burden, and I find myself wondering what exactly I need to maintain happiness.

Each time I move, it seems I find that I've amassed one thing in particular. In the past it's been hydrogen peroxide, mason jars, and other mundane things. This time it was toothbrushes. I had no idea that I was hoarding toothbrushes. How does this happen?

One thing I was not hoarding was empty boxes. When you move frequently, you get good at it, and one of my tricks was to keep about ten to twelve empty boxes around, so that I could pack everything into in a couple of hours. This time I discovered I had only two empty boxes, so I resorted to using Trader Joe's paper grocery bags for my move. It turns out that those grocery bags are a convenient way to move stuff, but they're not so great for packing a lot into a car for one trip.

This move ended up being only a minor fire. I have a modest-sized giveaway pile that will sit around in my new place for a week or two until Goodwill or another thrift place becomes the beneficiary of my junk. Maybe while I'm there dropping off my donations I can see if they have any good deals…

Why we should outrightly dismiss (some) repugnant ideas

Some people argue that we should not outrightly dismiss repugnant ideas. They are wrong. Outrightly rejecting some repugnant ideas provides a people with an overall evolutionary advantage over a people who, collectively, refuse to dismiss all repugnant ideas outrightly.

Before examining why this is so, we should first consider the evidence. In this case, the evidence is that no civilization, either historic or present, has consisted entirely of individuals who do not outrightly reject repugnant ideas. Rather, all civilizations foster society-wide taboos and other social structures that, among other effects, limit individuals' modes of thinking. Religion (including secularism), politics, art, economic ideology and so on—these are all mechanisms by which societies outrightly dismiss repugnant ideas and become self-policing. For example, democracies outrightly dismiss, in theory, the idea that some people should have a greater voice in governance than others and that inherent inequality between people is repugnant. If, as the pro-repugnance people argue, we are better off not outrightly rejecting repugnant ideas, then why is it that humans have not already evolved not to reject outrightly repugnant ideas? The implication of their argument is that there is a benefit to be gained in considering the validity of a repugnant idea, and yet we exactly do not observe a trend away from the rejection of repugnant ideas. Clearly there is no evolutionary advantage, at least with humans' current relationship with their environments.

Why is this? How could it be that an individual or a society can be better off by limiting their modes of thinking, possibly even to ones that do indeed project falsehoods onto the universe? (It has not escaped this author's attention the irony that the optimal survival strategy for humans may entail the acceptance of falsehoods is itself a repugnant idea that the pro-repugnance arguers would be, by their own argument, burdened with considering.)

If the path to wisdom is “the ability to see things different ways”, then it's worth considering the possibility that having an expanded world view is not a net benefit. Take as example the idea that the future will be better than the past (or present), or, expressed as a Beatles's song lyric, the idea that things are getting better all the time. (And people often forget that that song has an undertone of deep pessimism.) The pro-repugnance argument takes the viewpoint that there's a likely possibility that things are not getting better and that progress is illusory. They allude to the ever present phenomena of poverty and warfare as examples of how, despite our seemingly continual technological innovation, humanity is stuck in a rut of folly and real misery. But what are we to do about this? Would collectively changing our dispositions and rejecting the idea of progress enable societies to reduce poverty and war? It seems strange that the route to reducing poverty and war would be exactly accepting the idea that poverty and war are necessary burdens of humanity. Though it is possible, it seems that either poverty and war are indeed burdens some of our kind must suffer (presumably for the good of the species) or else we are powerless to affect a lasting reduction in either.

This is a truly repugnant idea, and doubtlessly many people are quick to reject it out of hand. Why bother at all trying to make things better if we are fated to such widespread and everlasting poverty and war? It is not hard to see how rejecting the repugnant idea and thus opening oneself to the possibility that the problem can be alleviated if not fixed outright—even if the actual possibility is zero—may provide societies with exactly the sort of illogical framework needed to induce social efforts needed to keep the society flourishing. For, though the widespread existence of poverty and war is unfortunate, if the alternative is the eventual extinction of the species, then, evolutionarily, we are doing quite okay, though as individuals we may not feel that way. The idea of progress, however illusory it may be in fact, may be the force that equips individuals with the mental resolve necessary for dealing with an imperfect universe.

Progress and its antithesis, undirected adaptive change, together make up only one repugnant idea. There are many more, such as covered by religion and politics and other ideological frameworks. However, many repugnant ideas that are frequently outrightly dismissed by individuals deal within the realm of self-policing, whereby a society's culture feeds back on its individuals to limit behaviors. People who argue that we should all be open to accepting any idea, however repugnant, are carelessly suggesting that we discard these evolved self-policing mechanisms. If it weren't that doing so is an impossibility due to the physiological characteristics of the human mind and its proclivity for myth and mythic thinking, the pro-repugnance argument would be folly.

Why we should not outrightly dismiss repugnant ideas

Consider the Ptolemaic system, otherwise known as the geocentric model. According to this system, the Earth is at the center of the universe, and the heavenly bodies in the sky, such as the Sun and the planets, revolve around it.

Geocentrism is a simple idea in theory. Indeed, to us here on planet Earth, it feels as though our planet is unmoving, and our day-to-day language still reflects such an attitude, such as when we say that the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west. (The Sun doesn't rise or set; the Earth rotates.) However, in practice geocentrism must deal with the reality that the planets don't appear to move in simple, smooth orbits around the Earth. For example, Venus and Mercury appear (from Earth) to move backward at times. How could this be so if they orbit around the Earth?

Ptolemy, who lived in the 2nd century, is credited with a solution that explains such odd phenomena, like backwards-moving planets. According to his system, the planets do not follow simple, smooth orbits but instead follow a sort of double orbit whereby each planet revolves through an orbital path, called a deferent, whose center itself revolves around the Earth along yet another orbit, called an epicycle. It's an orbit following an orbit. The end result is a convoluted, overly complex system that actually did a pretty good job of predicting the motions of the heavenly bodies for about 1,500 years, up until the system was replaced with the Copernican system, also known as heliocentrism. What heliocentrism says is that the planets indeed do follow simple, smooth orbits; only, the planets orbit around the Sun, not the Earth. The end result of the this system is an elegant, simple system that has even more predictive power than the more complex one that it replaced. The replacement of the Ptolemaic system with the Copernican system marks one of the great triumphs of Occam's Razor.

* * *

Much of human thought and behavior is constrained by the avoidance of repugnant ideas. Repugnant ideas are those that suggest inescapably insulting or deplorable facts about the universe. Here are some examples of repugnant ideas:

• The universe is unfair.
• Life is meaningless.
• The future will be no better than the past.

The list could go on. The common theme here is that these are ideas that present (or result from) a world view that is just kinda depressing and sad. In the case of these three repugnant ideas, what makes them even sadder is that there doesn't appear to be enough objective evidence to suggest that they're false, though most people do reject them as false. Karma, God, and American Exceptionalism are each examples of ways that people justify a rejection of these repugnant ideas. Call these justifications comfortable ideas.

And yet karma, God, American Exceptionalism, as well as most other comfortable ideas, each fall prey to same sort of convoluted, overly complex modeling as does the Ptolemaic system. Each requires that we assume the truth of something that cannot be directly observed, and often, as is the case with these three repugnant ideas and their resulting comfortable ideas, the extra complexity does not increase predictive power but likely hinders it. Each comfortable idea necessarily leads to its own equivalent of deferents and epicycles. In the case of astronomical modeling, predictive power was increased by rejecting the comfortable idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe and embracing the repugnant idea that the Earth is just yet another planet revolving around the Sun. With respect to the three repugnant ideas listed above, we might increase our understanding of why bad things happen to good people, why life doesn't offer a clean beginning and end to every life, and why poverty and war never go away despite all kinds of miraculous technological and scientific advances—if only we allow for the possibility that the universe has some depressing fundamental truths going on with it.

The path to wisdom is the ability to see things different ways, and the way to see things different ways requires that we accept the possibility that things are not what we want them to be. This requires a grown-up disposition from us. It may be that the universe is indeed fair, life is indeed purposeful, and things are indeed getting better all the time. But getting hung up on any of these points severely limits our ability, as individuals and as a society, to frame problems in the way that is most practical and makes most sense. We should not outrightly dismiss repugnant ideas.

Ambiguity

Upon not having received a response to any of the 10 most recently sent messages, set X to true; otherwise, set X to false.

Enter the life of the software developer in the requirements specification phase of software development, where words do indeed have meaning, often despite the aim of trying to deliver a useful software product to a customer.

Here's a brief glimpse into the nuances of language that the literalness of computers forces into the spotlight. Read the above statement a few more times, and answer the following question: under what conditions, exactly, is X set to true? How many total responses, assuming each sent message results in at most one response, must be received in order for X to be set to true?

Most people would probably say that X is set to true when (and only when) zero total responses are returned. But is this the only interpretation of the statement? Well, no. It depends on how you interpret the word “not”. Seriously.

To figure out what “not” actually means, imagine the statement without the negation.

Upon having received a response to any of the 10 most recently sent messages, set X to true; otherwise, set X to false.

In such a case, it is clear that if one or more total responses are received, then X is set to true. Else (if zero total responses are received), then X is set to false.

The logical negation of this arrangement is to flip around the true and false assignments: if one or more total responses are received, then X is set to false; else (if zero total responses are received), then X is set to true. Simple enough. And this is how most people interpret the first, negated statement.

However, it's not clear within the rules of everyday English that the “not” applies to the entire statement's condition. It could apply only to the sub-condition “having received a response”, meaning, in other words, “having received no response”. This leads to an interpretation of the full statement better worded as:

Upon having received no response from any of the 10 most recently sent messages, set X to true. Otherwise, set X to false.

This statement means something quite different than our original interpretation (assuming you originally interpreted it as most people do). It means that X is set to true if at least one response is not received. Only if all 10 responses are received is X set to false.

Linguistically, this problem has to do with ambiguity in generating a parse tree for the statement, or not having a rigidly defined order of operations. Is the “not” parsed last and applied to the entire sentence's conditional, or is the “not” parsed before the “to any of the 10 most recently sent messages”, thus changing the sentence's meaning?

There are two takeaway points here. The first is that Craig's job is really boring to a lot of people despite it being a never ending source of curiosity for Craig himself. The second point is a bit more inspiring: all people, regardless of their affinity (or lack thereof) for logic and mathematics, possess the ability to do this kind of parsing without even thinking about it. We communicate with others using ambiguous natural languages everyday, and we seem, more often than not, to make sense of what other people mean (and they make sense of what we mean). It is only when we “condescend” to talk to such lowly entities such as computer programs that we realize just how smart people are.

An ecosystem of ideologies

I've read the suggestion that the word “ecosystem” has become overused to describe a system as being complex. This may be so, but it reflects only a deficiency in our language for describing complexity. Need a word to connote a heterogeneous, ever changing system where the parts interact non-linearly to cause the emergence of niches and continuous adaptive change? “Ecosystem” is your only word. “Economy” would also do if it weren't that so many people have the expectation that the economy is not complex at all but is easily fixed, if only the Powers That Be would implement their ideas. (Here, I have a checklist for ya…) So “ecosystem” is what we're stuck with, for now.

One powerful concept of an ecosystem is that of a niche, the idea that there are numerous viable (and necessary) ways to thrive within the various networks of competitive and cooperative relationships in an ecosystem. In a “plant and animal” ecosystem (as opposed to these other metaphorical uses of the word), this means there's much more to survival than being at the top of the food chain. In other, metaphorical ecosystems, this is also the case. For example, if I view my corporate workplace as an ecosystem with its obvious predatory and symbiotic relationships between coworkers, I see that there's no objective teleology of promotion. Rather, there's only adaptive change with how workers control resources (e.g., power, creative responsibility, paycheck, etc.) and many, many viable ways to earn a living, even through only my one employer. Furthermore, these niches are not merely possibilities for us individuals; for the company, these different roles are necessary for the continued, healthy functioning of the company. Not everyone can be at the top or any other one job title.

With this idea in mind—the idea of the ecosystem as a model for complex systems with niche roles—I pose an answer to the following question: why are some problems divergent while others are convergent?

Readers of this blog may remember me writing about Schumacher's idea of divergent and convergent problems. Basically, a convergent problem is one whereby eventually most solutions feature a set of commonalities, whereas a divergent problem is one whereby solutions remain varied and diverse over time. The idea here is that with convergent problems, the solutions gravitate towards a basic pattern that is objectively best^[1] With divergent problems, on the other hand, there is no single objectively best solution over the long-term, and so people continue to offer differing, feasible solutions. In some cases, like in deciding which form of governance is best, the disagreement has been going on for thousands of years.

While hopefully we each have the self-awareness to realize when we believe or espouse something contrary to what a great many others have believed or espoused for a long, long time, and, furthermore, that others probably have their valid reasons for their disagreement, I will take this one step further. I posit that it is not only that there is no universally objectively best solution to a divergent problem, what is best and necessary is that many different, competing solutions continue to be offered, even if they're the same ones over and over. For example, the age-old question, “Which is better: democracy or aristocracy?” is itself an invalid question in the universal sense. That people have justifiably been arguing over the matter for over two millennia—with both sides making valid points!—is itself the big hint that neither form of government is objectively best. Rather, each of those two forms of government is best in different sets of circumstances.

Wherever there exists a divergent problem, there exists an ecosystem of ideologies, and each solution fulfills a niche. In an ecosystem, it is not merely that niches provide available modes of survival to individuals; rather, the continued health of the ecosystem itself depends upon the niches to maintain the resiliency of the system. In the example of governance, it is not that both democracy and aristocracy have “eked” out a survival as ideologies among human populations; instead, both forms of governance are fundamental in their own ways for the ongoing success of the human race.

To see this another way, try the following thought experiment. Imagine there is a problem for which there exists no objectively best solution. I have already suggested one such problem: type of governance. With such a problem, why not converge upon a solution anyway? Pick one of the viable, “good enough” solutions and settle on it. This will, in a way, force a solution to become arbitrarily best. Surely it is better to have an arbitrarily best solution than it is to have no objectively best solution, right? By avoiding millennia of argument over the matter, people will save time and other resources so as to make the arbitrarily best solution, though not objectively best, superior to a multitude of competing solutions where no solution is objectively best. Except, however, that this is exactly what we don't observe throughout history. Divergent problems maintain their multitude of competing solutions despite the “waste” incurred from competition between possible solutions. This can only be so if the competition itself provides a net positive benefit; otherwise, societies that do force arbitrary convergence upon a solution would win out, evolutionarily, over societies that do not force convergence. Thus, disagreement in and of itself is a necessary component of any public discourse concerning a divergent problem.

Several months back, I was talking with a friend of a friend of a friend at a wedding, and he remarked that people these days have lost the “art of disagreement”. I don't think I can improve upon that. These days, especially in our increasingly polarized mass media news, there exists much disagreement, but there's not much art to it. It's a destructive sort of disagreement that disrespects other sides by failing to view the other sides as necessary to the health of the discourse. It's a single-minded intention to “correct” the other side of their “mistakes” or, more likely, upon failing to change the other side's mind, getting your way anyway. What is lost is not only the popular understanding that it is okay to see things differently but that it is necessary to see things differently. It's an ecosystem.

^[1]Though, it is possible that the “objectively best” solution is only locally best and not globally best. This is a common problem with hill-climbing solutions in general. For example, if I seek to walk my way to the highest point in Phoenix and do so by only going uphill from wherever I currently am, then I may end up on the top of the nearest freeway overpass rather than at the top of Camelback Mountain. In such a case, I achieve merely a locally best solution and not a globally best solution. For the purpose of this essay, I am ignoring the distinction between “locally best” and “globally best” and am using the term “objectively best”.

Economic-solution checklist

Heavily borrowed from the original spam-solution checklist, here's my economy-solution checklist. No more do you have to craft an original rebuttal detailing why some online commenter's proposed economic “solution” won't work. Now, just mark an X for each statement that applies. Save time for something that matters.

Your post advocates a

( ) legislative ( ) private-sector ( ) psychological ( ) vengeful

approach to fixing the economy. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular
idea.)

( ) Democrats won't allow it to happen
( ) Republicans won't allow it to happen
( ) At some point the debt must actually be paid back
( ) Infrastructure requires continual upkeep
( ) The regulations are what are plugging up the tax loopholes
( ) That much bureaucracy cannot be eliminated all at once without
    creating havoc
( ) The "solution" will be worse than the problem we're currently facing
( ) The gap between rich and poor will be widened
( ) The solution will not scale
( ) The solution doesn't do enough
( ) Other countries won't put up with it
( ) It will make our country uncompetitive
( ) Elected leaders will eventually just change the benchmark metrics
( ) Elected leaders will eventually just declare a perpetual state of
    emergency to get around the restriction
( ) Exponential growth will make the solution untenable within a mere
    decade or so
( ) We'll just end up with new rich people who are even worse than the
    current ones

Specifically, your plan fails to account for the following:

( ) The Constitution expressly prohibits it
( ) Unpopularity of raising taxes
( ) Specifics of which taxes are to be increased/created
( ) Unpopularity of reducing benefits
( ) Specifics of which government programs are to be cut
( ) Climate change / environmental concerns
( ) Peak oil / resource-availability concerns
( ) Deadbeats / tax cheaters
( ) Most people do not favor anarchy
( ) The black market
( ) Manufacturing jobs no longer pay what they once did
( ) The laws of thermodynamics
( ) The trade deficit
( ) Special / vested interests
( ) Transition costs
( ) Communism has a poor track record
( ) Free markets have a poor track record

And the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours have been proposed before but have not worked
( ) What worked in the past is not guaranteed to work in the future
( ) What works for anyone does not always work for everyone
( ) The situation is more complex than your simple solution implies
( ) Stimulus money must be targeted at value-adding projects, not
    people who don't create anything of worth
( ) Overspending got us into this mess and will not get us out of it
( ) Whatever makes _your_ personal circumstances better doesn't
    necessarily make the economy better
( ) Your idea is popular ideology and has already been proposed a
    million times before so please shut up already
( ) It's unfair to future generations
( ) Eliminating safety nets causes real pain for individuals and
    families
( ) Those regulations are preventing a lot of bad things from happening
( ) Your idea exemplifies the broken window fallacy
( ) Your idea exemplifies some other fallacy: __________________________
( ) Our interest-bearing markets require continual growth
( ) It's unclear that immigration has anything to do with the problem
( ) Implementing your idea will make the next recession even worse
( ) It's counterproductive to frame the problem as a morality play
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) It creates a dangerous precedent
( ) Do you not realize that, globally speaking, you _are_ a rich person?
( ) You've cherry-picked your facts and are ignoring valid
    counter-evidence

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Well intentioned but try again
( ) Please go bone up on your basic math, logic, and/or economic
    principles
( ) Your "solution" is obviously a thinly veiled attempt at lining your
    own pockets, jerk

Erudite

It's the habit of women to point out the fallibilities of their men, and Laura is no exception to this rule. She often mentions to me various humbling moments of mine that, as far as I can tell, are indelibly imprinted upon her memory. One such event was when I misread a street named “Dove Tail” not to be the bird but as in “dove”, the past tense of “dive”.

“It's when I first realized that you're not that smart,” she says of it.

“Well, it's a good thing your expectations were brought down to match reality,” I reply.

Laura's initial confusion on the matter likely stemmed from my odd habit of pursuing, well after college, self-education. “Self-education” may ascribe to it more than it is. Basically, I read a lot of non-fiction and like to strike up idea-oriented conversions with people. And “odd habit” may be the wrong phrase to use here. “Anachronism” may be a better fit, for not too long ago, “professional” types made an effort to impress upon others that they were literate and erudite. Sometimes, these efforts were made not merely to impress others.

I read a lot of non-fiction because I feel joy when learning new ideas. New facts are interesting, but new ideas are like whole new worlds opening up before me. Some people like to travel to new places see new things. I can get the same effect by staying put and modifying my world view to see differently the same goings-on around me.

Of the non-fiction that I read, some is a continuation of my “formal” education, such as when I read about theoretical computing science or philosophy, and some is wholly new, like when I learn about classical history or religion or appropriate technology. In either case, there's so much knowledge out there that I feel by my efforts that I am merely scratching the surface of a mountain.

One disconcerting realization is that at the age of 31, my brain does not work the same as it did when I was half as old. Back then my brain was a sponge, and what I learned became a part of me as intimate knowledge. Nowadays, my memory is much fuzzier. Like how one can squeeze 6 to 10 music albums in the space of 1 using a lossy compression algorithm like MP3, what I learn now is similarly reduced in quality from the original. The way this feels is that new knowledge I acquire is less intimate, not as firsthand. It requires a more deliberate act of recollection to use and is not as trustworthy.

It's theorized that there exists a critical age for learning language—a window of opportunity, which, once passed, bars a human from acquiring language as fully and “naturally” as otherwise. I suspect that there further exists a critical age for acquiring knowledge. Past some window of opportunity, probably ending sometime within one's mid to late twenties, and the human mind cannot acquire new knowledge with the same ease, fullness, and fluid grace as otherwise. Past that critical age for knowledge acquisition comes the unending opportunity for acquiring wisdom, which is the application of knowledge already gained towards good and right ends.

In this view I judge my formal schooling as woefully inadequate. Perhaps this is an inevitable regret, for there is that veritable mountain of available knowledge out there that we are, individually, only scratching at. And yet it is while I read about history even in a broad and coarse scope, which, above all else lies at the core of knowledge prerequisite to wisdom seems it ought to be more common to people than it is, that I question at the efficiency and empowerment of my formal education.

The preponderance of my schooling was, I think, largely a practical matter that happened to educate as a side effect rather than an end unto itself. Based on the existing evidence, it succeeded in that it provided me the means to earn for myself a living. But cannot we do better than this? Should we not lift our expectations above reality?

Stateful ethics

Much of ethics, historically, is what I call stateless ethics: it does not tie what is right or what is good with time. As an example, take a utilitarian system that weights each person's happiness equally and claims that we should maximize happiness. How can this be so? Does one unit of a person's happiness today equal one unit of a person's happiness tomorrow? What about the happiness of a person not yet born? How should their happiness be valued? Should we be concerned with persons' happiness 100 years from now? If so, how much? According to such a system, how we are to act right now, such as deciding between two possible courses of action, A and B, depends on whether A produces more units of happiness than B. But if we don't know how to relate future happiness with present happiness then how can we ever expect to valuate A and B meaningfully? This is a difficult question, and much of ethics flatly ignores it.

What makes the question difficult is that the answer clearly fits somewhere between the extremes. The first extreme is that future happiness is worth nothing compared to present happiness. In such a framework, we, if faced with the possibility, wouldn't hesitate to cause 6.7 billion people to suffer tomorrow if it meant we could make one person happier right now. This defies our intuition. The other extreme values future happiness as exactly equal to present happiness. This would have us concerned with the heat death of the sun and all sorts of long-out, future scenarios when an asteroid could very well smash into the earth next year and cause the suffering (and extinction) of all humans. That the future is necessarily uncertain means that there is some natural bias towards present happiness over future happiness. If we knew for certain that a killer asteroid will smash into the earth next year, then we may as well begin the end-of-the-world party right now and forsake all human happiness two years from now because there won't be any humans alive in two years.

The answer, clearly, is that we should value future happiness somewhat less than present happiness but how much less? What is the happiness discount rate? Now we are talking about stateful ethics, where the decisions and events of today inexorably affect the decisions and events of tomorrow, and what is right or good is complex and probabilistic.

Say, for example, we value happiness at a 10% discount rate, meaning that one unit of happiness one year from now is worth 90% as much as one unit of happiness right now. It's not that happiness is worth less in the future when it is occurring; rather, the 10% discount figures in the uncertainties such that if decision A causes a net increase of 9 units of happiness today and decision B is expected to cause a net increase of 10 units of happiness one year from now, then A and B, valued right now, are equally good decisions. After all, that killer asteroid (or whatever contingency) may make B inconsequential, so its expected 10 units of happiness are discounted.

With a 10% discount rate, a unit of happiness about seven years from now is worth half as much as a unit of happiness today. A unit of happiness 30 years from now is worth about one-tenth as much as a unit of happiness today.  You don't have to go out very far before units of happiness become negligible, which I think accurately reflects humans' abilities of predicting the future.

But 10% is only an example. What is the best happiness discount rate? Utilitarianism is likewise only an example. Should we be more concerned with discount rates that have to do with goals other than happiness? Should we study history and asteroid deflection technology to help us better both predict the future and ensure our survival? Can we make the discount rate lower? Should we? This goes meta in a hurry.

The September Post

September is here at last, and with that I can say “I made it!”—another summer without air conditioning at my apartment. This makes two out of three years since I undertook the no-AC goal. I resorted to using the AC a few times last year, which is why it's two out of three and not three out of three. This year, I was never once tempted. I think last year's summer was hotter than this summer.

There are many things I forgo that are somewhat exceptional given my demographic membership in the American middle class. Here's a quick list off the top of my head.

• No AC at home
• No Internet access at home
• No furniture at home, notably a bed
• No television, of course!
• No microwave
• No car
• No traditional underwear—well, not often
• No deodorant and/or antiperspirant
• No QWERTY keyboard (except when I must)

This list contains many things that many people consider necessities, and yet the two things that most people don't get when I talk about them are the no-AC and no-bed things. The no-bed thing I try to explain by saying that after sleeping on the floor, you can sleep comfortably on nearly any surface and that this is a practical form of self-empowerment—ever sleep overnight in an airport?—but this is not easily understood by most people. I can accept this.

However, residential air conditioning has not been around that long. My father grew up in one of the warmest, muggiest areas in the country and without air conditioning. As a nation, we're far from having removed the generational experience of the no-AC lifestyle, and yet we treat cool air during the summer as a necessity. Whereas not owning a bed will save you, more or less, almost no money over the long term, not using AC will save the average household a good chunk of change over the course of a single year. You might think that people would be interested in pursuing an AC-free or AC-lite lifestyle if only for the monetary savings, no?

I think the money-saving issue is the small gain to be had. Since going without AC at home, I've discovered myself to become progressively mentally tougher in dealing with physically unpleasant situations. I've turned a need—and a rather demanding one at that—back into a want (or even a lack of a want). That's a really powerful thing to do. In fact, I would say it's one of the only real freedoms in life.

Then again, maybe my valuing money less and self-empowerment more has to do with how the apartment complex where I currently reside doesn't have individually metered units and I pay a flat fee for electricity—meaning, I pay the same every month regardless of my use. Maybe it's when people hear a guy who gets “free” electricity and voluntarily decides not to use AC that they stop listening. I can accept that.