3 ms·

I like this. At the same time, it can be challenging to apply in practice because you have to be mindful of the scope you are analyzing. Let's say you travel f

I like this. At the same time, it can be challenging to apply in practice because you have to be mindful of the scope you are analyzing. Let's say you travel for work for a week. If you analyze just that week, it appears you are living your life completely out of balance. Don't get to see your family at all. No time spent with close friends. No opportunity to deepen ties to your local community. But if you only travel for a week and are otherwise home, and the career affords you the ability to take care of your family and community, then this is a reasonable trade-off. So you have to look at a larger timespan. But how large? A month? A year? What chronological scope is the right one to evaluate one's actions? Now consider the much harder scope: number of people. Humans are social creatures and almost nothing that we do can be evaluated in isolation. Willingly dying in a knife fight certainly fails the kindergarten test. But not necessarily if doing so protects your family from the attacker. But what kinds of sacfrifices do you consider reasonable and for which groups? Many jobs have some level of physical danger. Is it reasonable to take those risks for the benefit of the company? What harm would you accept to yourself to benefit your community? What about your country? Flying a thousand miles to a foreign country to shoot someone in the face who did you no harm certain fails the kindergarten test. But what if your country is at war with that person's country? How does the kindergarten test handle this scenario when it's a member of the SS during WWII versus someone in some other conflict? Morality is hard.

ep103 4y ago
Absolutely. We're on a forum that is largely composed of engineers, business strategists, and other types of work that encourage and reward thinking deeply about their respective topics. So I wanted to point out that human cognition is faulty. It is an important skill to be able to think 10 steps ahead in a chess game, but you have to remember that as much as we desire to be rational, we are imperfect rational creatures, and there's a percentage error on every one of those steps, as a result of our being human. To continue the example, its part of why chess is fun: you try to think X moves ahead, and realize that you miscalculated at step 3 when your opponent does something you didn't expect. The same thing applies to life in general. We build up ways of thinking about things over lifetimes of thinking deeply on subjects. But each layer of learning is built on a previous layer, and each layer has a percentage error. So it is important, from time to time, to stop and reassess. Is your current view of the world faulty? How might I be wrong? What if I am wrong? What would be the repercussions? Is my current way of thinking leading me to live the type of life I want to live? Is my way of viewing the world a positive or negative, for myself and for the people around me? If the answer to any of those answers is no, that's a good indicator that the compounded errors in your way of thinking have lead you down a bad path, and you should stop and reassess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU And the thing is, that's not something that you can notice, unless you really take the effort to take a step back and re-assess, in part by asking such questions. We get so used to our current mode of thinking, whatever it is, that even if it has led us down dark and dangerous and self-destructive paths, it will feel normal at the time, unless one makes a conscious effort to re-asses from time to time, and really, genuinely, consider that our world outlook might really be deleterious or even outright wrong. Its what David Foster Wallace was talking about when he talked about his 'default human viewpoint', or 'this is water'. And one last thing, if you do do these re-assessments, then you have two options. You can stop and reassess your way of thinking, and look for the mistakes in your thinking and evolve (which is always a good thing to do, always, regardless of whether or not you are wrong to begin with, this is how we grow as people). Or you can choose to radically change your life outlook and philosophy, _even if you still believe your initial one was correct_, just because you think a different viewpoint might be beneficial. Because there are a wealth of different life philosophies that have been developed over the years, many of which have been deeply developed by myriads of intelligent people and refined throughout the ages. It turns out life is complicated, and the human brain isn't really capable of 100% understanding all of it, the best we can do is choose which lens we want to view it through. Learning how to view life through a different lens, if carefully chosen, is never a bad thing. So I don't know much about the self-sacrificing monks in the original post. Maybe such self-sacrifice was the right thing for them to do. And I am not trying to come out against suicide, there are plenty of times in life where such self-sacrifice is warranted or a downright honorable thing to do. But I sure hope that each of those monks, before they did it, took some time to really consider that even if this was the right move for them to take, they could still choose not to do so. My suspicion of the average person, is that once they get in that deep, they tend not to do so, even when they are facing their own death, or the taking of another's life. And I think that's a tragic flaw in humanity.

ep103 4y ago

Absolutely. We're on a forum that is largely composed of engineers, business strategists, and other types of work that encourage and reward thinking deeply about their respective topics. So I wanted to point out that human cognition is faulty. It is an important skill to be able to think 10 steps ahead in a chess game, but you have to remember that as much as we desire to be rational, we are imperfect rational creatures, and there's a percentage error on every one of those steps, as a result of our being human. To continue the example, its part of why chess is fun: you try to think X moves ahead, and realize that you miscalculated at step 3 when your opponent does something you didn't expect. The same thing applies to life in general. We build up ways of thinking about things over lifetimes of thinking deeply on subjects. But each layer of learning is built on a previous layer, and each layer has a percentage error. So it is important, from time to time, to stop and reassess. Is your current view of the world faulty? How might I be wrong? What if I am wrong? What would be the repercussions? Is my current way of thinking leading me to live the type of life I want to live? Is my way of viewing the world a positive or negative, for myself and for the people around me? If the answer to any of those answers is no, that's a good indicator that the compounded errors in your way of thinking have lead you down a bad path, and you should stop and reassess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU And the thing is, that's not something that you can notice, unless you really take the effort to take a step back and re-assess, in part by asking such questions. We get so used to our current mode of thinking, whatever it is, that even if it has led us down dark and dangerous and self-destructive paths, it will feel normal at the time, unless one makes a conscious effort to re-asses from time to time, and really, genuinely, consider that our world outlook might really be deleterious or even outright wrong. Its what David Foster Wallace was talking about when he talked about his 'default human viewpoint', or 'this is water'. And one last thing, if you do do these re-assessments, then you have two options. You can stop and reassess your way of thinking, and look for the mistakes in your thinking and evolve (which is always a good thing to do, always, regardless of whether or not you are wrong to begin with, this is how we grow as people). Or you can choose to radically change your life outlook and philosophy, _even if you still believe your initial one was correct_, just because you think a different viewpoint might be beneficial. Because there are a wealth of different life philosophies that have been developed over the years, many of which have been deeply developed by myriads of intelligent people and refined throughout the ages. It turns out life is complicated, and the human brain isn't really capable of 100% understanding all of it, the best we can do is choose which lens we want to view it through. Learning how to view life through a different lens, if carefully chosen, is never a bad thing. So I don't know much about the self-sacrificing monks in the original post. Maybe such self-sacrifice was the right thing for them to do. And I am not trying to come out against suicide, there are plenty of times in life where such self-sacrifice is warranted or a downright honorable thing to do. But I sure hope that each of those monks, before they did it, took some time to really consider that even if this was the right move for them to take, they could still choose not to do so. My suspicion of the average person, is that once they get in that deep, they tend not to do so, even when they are facing their own death, or the taking of another's life. And I think that's a tragic flaw in humanity.