If the concept of God offends you, replace it with "truth" or with "any entity / program / algorithm that can accurately measure the contributions I make". Whe

If the concept of God offends you, replace it with "truth" or with "any entity / program / algorithm that can accurately measure the contributions I make". When we acclaim someone we're praising them because of their contributions. Because our minds are finite, we use heuristics / proxies to measure those contributions. And those heuristics can be arbitrarily poor. To put it in words you might like better, I think what he's saying here is that if he were going to write an algorithm that measures his success, he would have it measure how much he helped each person. Because the supercomputer running the algorithm is better at details than we are, it could bypass the often-misleading heuristics / proxies and measure his contributions directly. When we're looking at our own lives, we have more detail available than when we look at others lives. So why not try to skip the proxies and optimize on the core concept?