Some Things I Believe

I spent a while today working on adding animations to a Jupyter notebook in anticipation of writing a follow-up to yesterday's post, but in a self-own I will never stop repeating I forgot to push them to git and I don't want to spend another two hours rewriting the same code. I'll write that up eventually, but for today, I have been thinking a lot about what people believe and why they believe it. Obviously, the various ghouls and goblins currently in control of America are a big factor in that, as are their feckless opposition who appear to believe more in Doing Things The Way They Are Done than, I dunno, trying to serve their constituents or prevent enormously bad things from happening. I've also been thinking a lot about the Silicon Valley rationalist community - the weird mix of longtermists, microdosers, armchair philosophers and other freaks who code that I think may be the Rosetta Stone to the morally bereft shibboleth American tech has spent the last twenty years becoming.

I really just fundamentally don't understand why any of these people believe the things they do. All of it seems somewhere between obviously stupid and cartoonishly evil to me. I'm sure a lot of it is that we exist in different echo chambers - maybe if I spent all my time on LessWrong and attending float parties with longtermists I'd be an effective altruist right now - but still, I dunno man, so much of this stuff is so obviously wrong on its face. When, at any point in human history, has turning control of a country over to the extraordinarily wealthy made things better? How can you think it's OK to do evil now for some imagined net good you can create in a future that 1, might not exist because of the shit you're doing, or 2, might not exist because you get hit by a bus or Earth gets hit by a meteor or the Large Hadron Collider finally accidentally reverses the big bang. Norms are only useful as long as both sides follow them! Homo economicus doesn't exist! Statistics is a psuedoscience! What's wrong with you people???

Sorry. Had to get that out of my system. Anyway, while thinking about this I realized I've never really put to paper what I believe, and I thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to do so. Maybe I'll notice some obvious contradictions in my own thoughts - doubt it though, I'm different.

Things That I Believe

1) Everyone should have their basic human rights met, no matter what. I include housing, medical care, education, food, and water and oxygen in this category. Maybe nicotine too.

2) It would be eminently possible to make 1) happen in the world we currently live in, if we were to focus more on fair distribution of resources and less on making imaginary numbers go up.

3) Generally, people should be able to do whatever they want in their personal lives as long as they're not hurting anyone else (or they're hurting them with consent - I respect the masochists in the audience). I am kinda libertarian (in the classical sense, not the "knowing the age of consent in every country" sense) this way.

4) What constitutes "hurting someone" is extraordinarily hard to define and is where a lot of things start to go off the rails. I don't think I am going to figure out how to define all the gray areas but I think focusing on the pretty obvious things that fall into the category of hurting someone (harassment, violence, sexual assault, deprivation of fundamental human rights, funding or enabling of the same) is a good place to start. This is an important limitation to (3)! If "doing whatever you want" is fundamentally built on dehumanizing or hurting other people then you don't get to have it.

• 4a) "Being an asshole" falls outside of what I think the law should be involved in but you should expect to get popped in the mouth if you choose this path.

5) If someone hurts you, you have a right to defend yourself. Shoutout to pacifists but I am just not convinced. If you are defending yourself from getting popped in the mouth for being an asshole that's your right but I hope the other guy is bigger than you.

6) Most people aren't fundamentally good or bad and can be either depending on the circumstances.

7) There are exceptions to 6.

8) People can become better. They deserve recognition and forgiveness when they do. No one has to be a pariah forever, but they do have to do the work to get there. Generally I'm a strong believer in restorative and not punitive justice although obviously if somebody keeps going around stabbing people they should probably be put in a place where they can't stab people anymore and are taught coping strategies that don't involve sharp objects. It's a balance.

9) OK, going in a different direction here, but I believe in a fundamentally deterministic universe (with the potential for fluctuations based on weird higher-dimensional stuff I don't need to go into here. Mostly the universe is laid out across time and space exactly as it is, except when it isn't. You get me?).

10) Despite determinism, people are responsible for their actions, because other universes exist where any possible action is true. It is possible for you to have made a choice other than the one you did, even if in this universe you have always made and will always make that choice.

11) One person, or a small group of people, shouldn't get to decide the fate of a large one.

12) On the other hand, tyranny of the majority is real, and a large group shouldn't get to decide the fate of a smaller one just because they're in charge.

13) I dunno man, there's not really any fair way to govern. When in doubt refer to 1) and pick the option that's most likely to get you there. At this point I'd be fine with a philosopher king if it meant everybody could just have a house and a stable income and be able to live the way they want to.

I have more but I am really losing the thread here and I should probably go to bed. Much to consider in the morning.