The Design of Everyday Things

Not bad, will jot down some quick notes at some point

If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal *

What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

How To Lead

Wisdom from the World’s Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers

Bill Gates

• Have a clear vision on the potential impact of technology on society and stay focused on your goals, remain committed even in the face of significant challenges and setbacks.

• Success is a lousy teacher because it makes you complacent - take risks and try new things to continue growing and evolving.

Jeff Bezos

• Companies must constantly innovate and take new risks in order to stay relevant and grow over time.

• Reads extensively to inform his thinking on a wide range of topics.

• Day 1 philosophy - the importance of maintaining a startup mentality and constantly challenging the status quo to avoid becoming complacent and bureaucratic as they grow.

• Take on big and ambitious projects.

Warren Buffett

• Humility in leadership - leaders who are more humble are more likely to learn from their mistakes and adapt to changing circumstances, which is critical for long term success.

• Commit to ethical business practices to build trust and maintain integrity - the foundation of any successful business relationsihp.

• Proponent of long-term thinking - successful leaders need to have a clear vision for the future and be willing to invest in that vision.

Phil Knight

• Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. Give your team the freedom to experiment and make mistakes.

• Storytelling and emotional connection are crucial to building a successful brand.

Jamie Dimon

• Known for leadership during 2008 financial crisis - emphasized the importance of transparency and taking responsibility for mistakes, even when they were costly.

• Leaders should surround themselves with talented individuals who are not afraid to challenge them and bring diverse perspectives to the table.

• Leaders must listen to feedback and take actions to address concerns and improve performance.

Eric Schmidt

• More of the same from above - importance of change and being adaptable, innovation and taking risks.

• Importance of data-driven decision making - business should rely on data and analytics rather than intuition or gut feeling.

• Strong advocate for diversity and inclusion - a diverse workforce is essential for driving innovation and success.

• Effective leaders need to be able to communicate their vision and strategy cleray to their teams, and strong communication skills are essential for building relationships and driving success.

The Metaverse

Didn’t like this that much

The Black Swan *

I really liked this man

Notes to come

Determined *

A Science of Life without Free Will

Two Main Takeaways

• There is no free will, or there is much less free will than is generally assumed; we are heavily constrained by the “stimuli > response” nature of our behaviour.

• How life would improve if we stopped believing in free will - prevents casting moralistic judgement and conjures more empathy and understanding towards others.

Though there is no universally agreed upon definition of free will, the essence is that every behaviour is a result of its past.

Four Common Beliefs About the Nature of Free Will

• The world is deterministic and there is no free will - hard determinism/incompatibilism

• The world is deterministic and there is free will - compatibilism

• The world is not deterministic and there is no free will

• The world is not deterministic and there is free will - libertarian incompatibilism

No Justifiable “Deserve”

Sapolsky falls into the first camp, and maintains that it is not just to hold people morally responsible for their actions.

His hard determinism takes absurdism to a new level: the universe is irrational and meaningless, and we are not free to make our own decisions. But due to consciousness, we are stuck with the illusion of agency, which is what we have associated our “will” with. We are simply observers.

But perhaps there is solice in that our wills and behaviours have created a sense of agency that is good enough, where it is helpful to act as if you have free will - to consider all your options deeply when you can, but not be too hard on yourself because it really could not have been any other way.

A heavy implication of this view is that retributive punishment - which naturally activates dopaminergic reward pathways - should be abandoned. Instead, we should opt for models analogous to medical quarantines, and address the social determinants of criminal behaviour.

There is no justifiable “deserve”, and no individual is more entitled to have their moral needs met than the next person. Hating a person for what they have done is no more absurd than hating the sky for raining. While we cannot always avoid it, we should recognize the absurdity of moralistic judgements of behaviour.

The Implications of Compatibilism

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.

Sapolsky really makes the heavy weight of the implications brought by compatibilism felt, and the moralistic judgement of behaviour

• Dennett (compatibilist) describes in a marathon where one contestant starts way behind the starting line. Would this be unfair if it was a 100 meter sprint? Yes. What about a marathon? He argues not, because a relatively small initial advantage counts for nothing, since one can reliably expect luck to average out in the long run.

• This is not what happens in society, if you’re born a crack baby, society doesn’t rush to ensure you are raised in affluence and help you overcome your neurodevelopment problems. You are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there, to be left neglected and abused, to live in a gang-riddled neighborhood with underfunded schools.

  • You start a marathon behind the pack, and at the first rehydration tent the water has mostly run out, 5 miles later you become dehydrated, twenty miles in people think the race is over and you have to avoid people sweeping the street on your way to the finish line.

  • All the while, that runner watches the receding backsides of the rest of the runners, each thinking that they’ve earned and are entitled to a decent shot at winning.

  • Luck does not average out over time, and we cannot undo the effects of luck with more luck. Our world almost guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified.

• Dennett writes that a good runner who starts at the back of the pack, if he really is good enough to DESERVE winning, will probably have plenty of opportunity to overcome the initial disadvantage.

  • This is one step above believing that god invented poverty to punish sinners.

• Dennett says one more thing that summarizes this moral stance - “if you don’t like the rules, don’t play the game; play some other game”.

  • Unfortunately, the crack baby doesn’t have the option of being offered a second chance to be born into an affluent and educated family of tech executives in Silicon Valley who pay for your ice skating lessons and cheer you on from the sidelines.

• Thinking that it is sufficient to merely know about present intent is far worse than intellectual blindness. In a world such as we have, it is deeply ethically flawed.

Chip War *

Fight For The World’s Most Critical Technology

Author: Chris Miller

Recommended by Tesla teammate and fellow ex-Amazonian Lukas Wolff on the RE1 train from Erkner (GigaBerlin) to Berlin Ostbahnhof

This book is so intertwined with where I was born, where I work, where I live, and where I am in time. For me it was as much of a history lesson, as a story about my heroes, as a textbook on innovation.

Before I even finished the book I was able to apply the patterns and pacing of how the chip industry innovated to my work, which in the week prior to me finishing this booked ignited a new culture of rapid iterating and pushing for improvements within a small group within our team.

Honestly I’m so backlogged on notes I just prompted ChatGPT to generate some the notes in the format I wanted:

Key Takeaways

• Semiconductors as a Geopolitical Lever: The book illustrates how semiconductors not only power virtually all modern electronics but also serve as a significant geopolitical lever. Nations that lead in semiconductor technology can influence global economics and military strategies.

• Innovation, R&D, and Competition: The relentless pace of innovation in the semiconductor industry is driven by fierce competition among global powers. The U.S., China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan are key players, each investing heavily in research and development to gain or maintain a technological edge.

• Government Intervention and Support: Semiconductors are so critical that governments often intervene with funding, policies, and infrastructure support to bolster their domestic capabilities. This has included everything from subsidies and tax incentives to direct involvement in research initiatives.

• Vulnerabilities of Global Supply Chains: The book stresses how the intricate and interdependent global supply chain for semiconductors is vulnerable to disruption from political tensions, trade wars, and natural disasters, making it a focal point for national security strategies.

Notable Historical Events

• Invention of the Transistor (1947): The invention at Bell Labs revolutionized electronics, leading to the development of smaller, more reliable, and more efficient devices.

• U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Agreement (1986): This agreement was crucial in addressing intellectual property theft and market dumping practices, reshaping global trade norms in high-tech industries.

• Rise of TSMC and the Foundry Model (1987): The founding of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company marked a significant shift with its dedicated semiconductor foundry model, which allowed companies without their own fabs to compete in the semiconductor market.

• China’s "Project 909" (1990): Launched to develop its own advanced microprocessors, this marked China's ambitious entry into the semiconductor sector.

• Intel's Pentium Microprocessor Launch (1993): The introduction of the Pentium microprocessor reinforced Intel’s dominance in computer processors, illustrating the importance of continual innovation.

• Financial Crisis and Semiconductor Industry Impact (2008): The financial downturn led to a reevaluation of global semiconductor strategies, including consolidations and a heightened focus on supply chain robustness.

• U.S. Export Restrictions to China (2019): The U.S. imposed significant export restrictions on semiconductor sales to Chinese firms like Huawei, influencing global supply chain alignments and market strategies.

Current Landscape

• Technological Arms Race: The contemporary semiconductor landscape is described as an arms race, where leading-edge capabilities in semiconductor technology are directly tied to national security and economic dominance.

• Impact of Geopolitical Tensions: The book discusses how rising U.S.-China tensions are reshaping the industry, from R&D collaborations to manufacturing dependencies, with significant implications for global technology strategies.

• Advanced Manufacturing and Innovation: Current innovations focus on ultra-small process nodes, like 3nm and 2nm technologies, which are critical for the next generation of computing devices, including powerful AI systems and sophisticated military hardware.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Even Within Nihilism, It Is Possible to Proceed Beyond Nihilism

Author: Albert Camus

Recommended by half-Danish descendent of the father of modern Iranian dentistry Niles Christensen during a day trip to Half Moon Bay.

[still in progress and it took me 3 hours to read the first 23 pages but man this is so interesting]

An Absurd Reasoning

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem - suicide.

Judging whether or not life is worth living amounts to answering this question. All other questions are preceded by this one.

If Nietzsche’s claims that a philosopher must preach by example to be deserving of respect is true, you can appreciate the reply to that question, for it will precede the definitive act.

The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions

• Scientists such as Galileo were not willing to die for ontology - he was willing to abjure scientific truth with ease as soon as it endangered his life. And he was right in doing so - whether or not the earth orbits the sun is a matter of profound indifference after you are dead.

• On the other hand, many people die because they judge that life is not worth living

• Others paradoxically get killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (paradoxical in that, what was a reason for living is also a reason for dying).

So, the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it?

On all essential problems - those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensity the passion of living - there are two methods of thought.

• The method of La Palisse (seems to go along the lines of logicism)

• The method of Don Quixote (seems to go along the lines of existentialism)

It is solely the balance between evidence and lyricism that can allow us to simultaneously achieve emotion and lucidity.

Suicide and Individual Thought

Suicide is usually dealt with as a social phenomenon. Contrarily, if we consider the relationship between individual thought and suicide, it is an act prepared within the silence of the heart. One is usually ignorant of it, but beginning to think of it is beginning to be undermined.

Society has little connection with such beginnings. The beginning occurs within one’s heart, as that is where the answer to the question must be sought.

There are many causes for suicide, and generally the most obvious ones are the least powerful. Rarely is suicide committed through reflection, but what sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. If it is hard to fix the precise instant when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. Suicide is a confession that life - which is never easy - is not worth the trouble. It is a recognition of the absence of a profound reason for living.

A world that can be explained with bad reasons is a familiar world. But in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or a hope of a promised land. The divorce between man and his life leads to the feeling of absurdity, and there is a direct connection between the feeling of absurdity and the longing for death.

Faced with Absurdity, is Life Worth Living?

The problem may seem both simple and insoluble. Approaching the problem a priori, it seems that there are two available solutions: yes or no. This would be too easy, the answer is only so straightforward for a minority.

• Many continue questioning without concluding

• Many answer “no” yet act as if they thought “yes”

• From a Nietzschean criterion, everyone thinks “yes” in one way or another

• Many who do commit suicide are often assured of the meaning of life

Contradictions are constant. In the face of such contradictions and obscurities might lead us to think that there is no relationship between one’s opinions on life and one’s acts to leave it. Yet, there is an attachment to life that is stronger than the suffering in the world, and the body habitually eludes annihilation.

Such contradictions raises an important problem - is there a logic to the point of death?

Absurd Walls

Deep feelings transcend what they are conscious of saying. Great feelings - like the feeling of absurdity, jealousy, or generosity - take with them their own universe, and frames the perspective with which we look at the world. A feeling is a metaphysic, an attitude of mind, a worldview, that comes prior to words. What is already true of specialized feelings, will become even more so of emotions as indeterminate as when faced with beauty absurdity. They are as vague as they are definite, as remote as they are present.

The feeling of absurdity is elusive, but that very difficulty is deserving of reflection.

It is true that some aspect of someone will remain forever unknown to us, but practically we know people; we can recognize them by their behaviour, by the totality of their deeds, by the consequences caused in life by their presence, and as a result irrational feelings which cannot be formally analyzed. It is apparent that we do not know an actor personally after watching all of their works. Yet, if we add up all of the roles they’ve played, it feels true to say we know them a little better by the end of it.

There is a moral to this apparent paradox - a person defines themself by their make-believe as well as by their sincere impulses.

This implies a lower key of feelings that is inaccessible to the heart but partially disclosed by the way one acts and the attitudes of mind one assumes.

These feelings define a method, a way of approaching life, that is evidently one of analysis and not of knowledge. Methods imply metaphysics; unconsciously they disclose conclusions they often claim not to know yet.

The method defined here acknowledges the feeling that all true knowledge is impossible. Certain external aspects of things can be quantified or described (more objectively), some more intangible things elude precise description and are felt as a climate (more subjectively). The climate of absurdity is in the beginning, and the end is the absurd universe as seen through the implacable lens of the absurd.

Our Mathematical Universe *

Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Author: Max Tegmark

A book I recommended to my friends as I was reading it, which prompted the beginning of “Read Between the Minds” book club.

Here are some bullet point notes.

Four Levels of Parallel Universes

• Level I - unobservably distant regions of space

• Level II - other post-inflationary regions

• Level III - elsewhere in quantum Hilbert space

• Level IV - other mathematical structures

Mainstream Physics

• Einstein’s theory of general relativity allows for the possibility that space goes on forever. It also allows the option where space is finite without having an end by being “curved”.

• About 14 billion years ago, everything we can now observe was hotter than the core of the Sun, expanding so fast that it doubled its size in under a second. We don’t know what happened earlier.

• Our Universe spent a few minutes being a giant fusion reactor, converting hydrogen into helium and other light elements, until the cosmic expansion diluted and cooled our Universe enough to stop the fusion. This turned about 25% of hydrogen into helium.

• After about 400,000 years of expansion and dilution, the hydrogen-helium plasma cooled into transparent gas. We see this transition as a distant plasma wall with a faint glow called the cosmic microwave background, triggering two Nobel Prizes.

• Over the next billions of years, gravity transformed our Universe from uniform into clumpy, amplifying the tiny density fluctuations that we see in the cosmic microwave background into stars, planets, galaxies, etc.

• The cosmic expansion predicts that distant galaxies should be receding from us, which is in agreement with what we actually observe.

• The entire history of our Universe is accurately described by simple physical laws that let us predict the future from the past, and the past from the future.

• These physical laws that govern the history of our Universe are all cast in terms of mathematical equations.

• Einstein’s gravity theory is one of the most mathematically beautiful theories, explaining gravity as a manifestation of geometry. It shows that the more mass space contains, the more curved space gets.

• Einstein’s theory also inferred the total amount of mass in our Universe. Atoms were found to make up only 4% of this mass, with 96% being unexplained.

• This missing mass is ghostly - invisible and able to pass through regular matter undetected. Its gravitational effects suggest two separate substances of opposite character.

  • Dark matter, which clusters, dilutes as it expands, attracts, and helps galaxy formation.

  • Dark energy, which doesn’t cluster, doesn’t dliute, repels, and sabotages galaxy formation.

• There are serious problems with the earliest stages of Friedmann’s Big Bang model. Inflation theory solves them all, and explains the mechanism that caused the Big Bang.

• Inflation explains why space is so flat, and why on average, our distance Universe looks the same in all universe - the 0.002% fluctuations we observe are quantum fluctuations stretched by inflation from microscopic to macroscopic scales, then amplified by gravity into today’s galaxies and cosmic structures.

• Inflation even explains cosmic accelerations (which triggered a 2011 Nobel Prize), and says that our Universe grew much like a human baby: an accelerating growth phase, in which the size doubled at regular intervals, followed by a more leisurely decelerating growth phase.

• Inflation created our Hot Big Bang, and inflation’s early stages are better thought of as a Cold Little Swoosh, because it was neither hot nor big nor much of a bang.

• What we call our Big Bang wasn’t the beginning, but the end (of inflation in our part of space) - and inflation typically continues forever in other places.

• Inflation generally predicts that our space isn’t just huge, but infinite, with initial conditions generated randomly by quantum fluctuations.

Controversial Multiverse Stuff

• Parallel universes are not a theory, but a prediction of certain theories

• Eternal inflation predicts that our Universe is just one of infinitely many universes in a Level I multiverse where everything that can happen does happen somewhere.

• Inflation is the leading theory for our cosmic origins because it’s passed observational tests, and parallel universes seem to be a non-optional implication.

• Inflation converts potentiality into reality: if a mathematical equation governing uniform space have multiple solutions, then eternal inflation will create infinite regions of space instantiating each of those solutions - this is the Level II multiverse.

  • Many physical laws and ocostants that are unchanged across a Level I multiverse may vary across a Level II multiverse.

  • This could explain why many constants in our own Universe are so fine-tuned for life.

  • This would also give many numbers we’ve measured in physics a new number: they’re not telling us something fundamental about reality, but merely something about our location in it.

  • Critique of parallel universes has largely shifted from “this makes no sense and I hate it” to “I hate it”.

• Everything seems to be made of particles

  • These particles are purely mathematical objects in the sense that their only intrinsic properties are mathematical properties.

  • These particles don’t obey the classical laws of physics.

  • Mathematically, the state of these particles can’t be described by numbers, but a wavefunction, describing the extent to which they are in different places.

  • This gives them properties of both traditional particles and of waves (superposition).

  • Particles aren’t allowed to be in only one place (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), which prevents atoms from collapsing.

  • The future behaviour of particles is described by the Schrodinger equation, which shows that microscopic superpositions can get amplified into macroscopic superpositions. The textbook formulation postulates that the wavefunction sometimes collapses, violating the Schrodinger equation and introducing fundamental randomness into nature.

  • The textbook formation of quantum mechanics is either incomplete or inconsistent.

• In the mathematically simplest quantum theory, there’s something more fundamental than our 3D space and the particles within it: the wavefunction and the infinite-dimensional place called Hilbert space where it lives.

  • In this theory, particles can be created and destroyed, and can be in several places at once, but there is, was, and always will be only one wavefunction, moving through Hilbert space as determined by the Schrodinger equation.

  • This mathematically simplest quantum theory, predicts the existence of parallel universes where you live out countless variations of your life.

  • It also implies that quantum randomness is an illusion, caused by quantum cloning of you.

  • There’s nothing quantum about apparent randomness, which happens even if you’re classically cloned.

  • This mathematically simplest quantum theory also predicts a censorship effect called decoherence, which hides most such weirdness from us, mimicking wave function collapse.

  • Decoherence happens constantly in your brain, debunking suggestions about quantum consciousness.'

• The quantum multiverse is unified with the spatial multiverse, so that a wavefunction for a system describes its infinite copies throughout space, and quantum uncertainty reflects your ignorance about which particular copy you’re observing.

• If we live in an infinite uniform space, it doesn’t matter whether the wavefunction ultimately collapses - all of Everett’s many worlds are indistinguishable, and collapse doesn’t prevent all quantum outcomes from actually happening.

• The wavefunction and Hilbert space, which constitute arguably the most fundamental physical reality, are purely mathematical objects.

• In the internal reality of your mind, the only information you have about the external reality is the small sample transmitted through your senses.

  • This new information is distorted in many ways, and arguably tells you as much about how your senses and brain work as it tells you about external reality.

  • The mathematical description of external reality that theoretical physics has uncovered appears very different from the way we perceive this external reality.

  • Midway between internal and external reality lies the “consensus reality”, the shared description of the physical world that all self-aware observers agree on.

  • This ultimately splits the “ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything” into two parts that can be tackled separately:

    • The challenge for physical sciences is deriving the consensus reality from the external reality

    • The challenge for the cognitive sciences is to derive the internal reality from the consensus reality

Extremely Controversial Multiverse Stuff

• Since antiquity, people have puzzled over why our physical world can be so accurately described by mathematics.

  • Ever since, physicists have kept discovering more patterns in nature that are describable by mathematical equations.

  • The fabric of our physical reality contain dozens of pure numbers, from which all measured constants can in principle be calculated.

  • Some key physical entities such as empty space, elementary particles, and the wavefunction appear to be purely mathematical in the sense that their only intrinsic properties are mathematical properties.

• The External Reality Hypothesis (ERH) - that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans - is accepted by most but not all physicists.

  • With a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, the ERH implies the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH), that our physical world is a mathematical structure.

  • This means that our physical world not only is described by mathematics, but that it is mathematical, making us self-aware parts of a giant mathematical object.

  • A mathematical structure is an abstract set of entities with relations between them. The entities have no baggage - no properties except these relations.

  • It is crucial not to conflate the language of mathematics (which we invent) with the structure of mathematics (which we discover).

  • The MUH solves the infamous infinite regress problem where the properties of nature can only be explained from the properties of its parts, which require further explanation ad infinitum: the properties of nature stem not from the properties of its ultimate building blocks (which have no properties at all), but from the relations between these building blocks.

• Mathematical structures are eternal and unchanging: they don’t exist in space and time - rather, space and time exist in (some of) them.

• The MUH implies that the flow of time is an illusion, as is change.

• The MUH implies that it’s not only spacetime that is mathematical, but also everything therein, including the particles we’re made of. Mathematically, this seems to correspond to “fields”: numbers at each point in spacetime that encode what’s there.

• The MUH implies that you’re a self-aware substructure that is part of the mathematical structure.

  • In Einstein’s theory of gravity, you’re a remarkably complex braid-like structure in spacetime, whose intricate pattern corresponds to information processing and self-awareness.

  • In quantum mechanics, your braid pattern branches like a tree.

• The movie-like subjective reality that you’re perceiving right now exists only in your head, as part of your brain’s reality model, and it includes not merely edited highlights of here and now, but also a selection of prerecorded distant and past events, giving the illusion that time flows.

• You’re self-aware rather than just aware because your brain’s reality model includes a model of yourself and your relation to the outside world: your perceptions of a subjective vantage point you call “I” are qualia, just as your subjective perceptions of “red” and “sweet” are.

• The theory that our external physical reality is perfectly described by a mathematical structure while still not being one is 100% unscientific.

• You should expect your current observer moment to be a typical one amount all observer moments that feel like you.

  • Such reasoning leads to controversial conclusions regarding the end of humanity, the stability of our Universe, the validity of cosmological inflation, and whether you’re a disembodied brain or simulation.

  • It also leads to the measure problem, a serious scientific crisis that calls into question the ability of physics to measure anything at all.

• The MUH implies that mathematical existence equals physical existence.

  • This means that all structures that exist mathematically exist physically as well, forming the Level IV multiverse.

  • Exploring the Level IV multiverse doesn’t require rockets or telescopes, simply computers and ideas.

  • The simplest mathematical structures can be listed by a computer algorithmically, each one with its own unique number.

  • Mathematical structures, formal systems, and computations are closely related, suggesting that they’re all aspects of the same transcendent structure whose nature we still haven’t understood.

• The MUH is compatible with Godel’s incompleteness theorem - the mathematical structure we inhabit can be inconsistent even if we can’t prove it.

• The Computable Universe hypothesis (CUH) that the mathematical structure that is our external physical reality is defined by computable functions would make everything provably consistent.

• The Finite Universe hypothesis (CUH) that our external physical reality is a finite mathematical structure implies the CUH and eliminates all concerns about reality being undefined.

• The CUH/FUH may help to solve the measure problem and explain why our Universe is so simple.

• The MUH implies that there are no undefined initial conditions - initial conditions tell us nothing about physical reality, merely about our address in the universe.

• The MUH implies that there is no fundamental randomness: randomness is simply the way cloning feels subjectively.

• The MUH implies that most of the complexity we observe is an illution, existing only in the eye of the beholder, being merely information about our address in the multiverse.

• A collection of things can be simpler to describe than the sum of its parts. Our multiverse is simpler than our Universe, in the sense that it can be described with less information, and the Level IV multiverse is simplest of all, requiring almost no information to describe.

• We probably don’t live in a simulation.

• THe MUH is in principle testable and falsifiable.

Back to “Normally” Controversial Multiverse Stuff

• On the largest and smallest scales, the mathematical fabric of reality becomes evident, while it remains easy to miss on the intermediate scales that humans are usually aware of.

• If the ultimate fabric of reality really is mathematical, then everything is in principle understandable to us, and we’ll be limited only by our own imagination.

• Although the Level IV multiverse is eternal, our particular Universe might end in a:

  • Big Chill

  • Big Crunch

  • Big Rip

  • Big Snap

  • Death Bubbles

• Evidence suggests that there’s no other life-form as advances as us in our entire Universe. This is based on three assumptions:

  • Interstellar colonization is physicall possible and can be easily accomplished if a civilization as advanced as ours has a million years to develop the required technology.

  • There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy, many of which formed not only millions, but billions of years before Earth.

  • A non-negligible fraction of civilizations that can colonize space would choose to do so.

• From a cosmic perspective, the future potential of life in our Universe is vastly greater than anything we’ve seen so far.

  • Yet, humans devote only meager attention and resources to existential risks that threaten life as we know it, including accidental nuclear war and unfriendly artificial intelligence.

• Although it’s easy to feel insignificant in our vast cosmos, the entire future of life in our Universe may arguably be decided on our planet in our lifetime!

Elon Musk *

Author: Walter Isaacson

Recommended by my 8th grade best friend and fellow french class underperformer Mehul Khetrapal over late night bubble tea in a park in Cupertino.

I don’t really have any notes for this book. All I really have to say is Elon’s ongoing life story is more eventful than any fiction or non-fiction book I’ve read. I’m so privileged to be experiencing Tesla firsthand, excited to see where it goes.

Meta-Rationality *

Author: David Chapman

Learning to Wield an Invisible Power

Senior professionals with years of experience can somehow deal with problems that juniors can’t. They have a “feel for things” that helps them find shortcuts and make things run smoothly. They may:

• Notice relevant factors that others overlooked

• Point out non-obvious gaps or friction between theory and reality

• Ask questions no one had thought of (!)

• Make new distinctions suggesting different conceptualizations of a situation

• Change the description of a problem so different solutions arise

• Rethink the purpose of the work and its technical priorities

• Apply concepts or methods from seemingly distant fields

• Combine multiple contradictory views

This is meta-rationality.

Meta-rationality involves producing insights by investigating the relationship between systems of technical rationality and their contexts (where, why, and how a rational system was used). Meta-rationality does not operate within a system of technical rationality, but around, above, and then on the system.

Meta-rationality is a craft that must be learned through apprenticeship and experience. It is also rarer than rationality and has more leverage. It becomes increasingly important as you move from being an individual contributor into leadership or entrepreneurship - where your job is to make sense of chaos when standard techniques no longer cut it.

Anti-rational, Irrational, Rational, and Meta-rational

• Anti-rationalists dismiss the truth because they reject reason altogether.

• Irrationalists dismiss the truth because true facts contradict their ideological agendas.

• Rationalists may describe rationalism as the commitment to trying to believe only true statements.

• Meta-rationalists defend “truth” against irrationalists, but reject “truth” as misunderstood by rationalists. It is about more detailed, accurate, and effective senses of “truth”.

Credibility Crisis in a Post-truth Era

The modern world was built on a foundation of rationalism, the ideological belief that some system is guaranteed to be correct.

When rationalism failed, modernity ended. We now live in a postmodern world, a result of abandoning rationality, universality, and coherence.

Postmodernity features cultural triviality, political dysfunction, and nihilistic malaise. Rationalism breaks down in the face of the claim that the truth depends on who is asking and why.

Scientific breakthrough has become scarce and increasingly trivial, and much of it isn’t even true - science is facing a replication crisis. This is one example of a meta-rational problem. Science is a rational system that isn’t working as well as it should.

Meta-rational Reforms for Credibility and Creativity

Many rational systems are overdue for extensive overhauls on individual and institutional levels.

Quantitative productivity is high, scientists are still cranking out papers. Yet, meaningful innovation is certainly not proportional to increase in funding. Most output is not valuable in context.

Qualitative creativity needs work, better selection of research problems in alignment with what actually matters. What actually leads to the creation of knowledge and useful innovation? This is a meta-rational investigation that requires a passion for the subject matter. 

Creativity flows from wonder, curiosity, play, and enjoyment. Current institutions built around rational systems discourage this, in favor of constant competitive pressure for mindless productivity.

The Post-post-truth Era

Irrationalists were inadvertently correct in that truth is highly dependent on context and purpose.

Rationalists would rather double down on overstated claims instead of acknowledging their pragmatic truths were not absolute truths.

Postmodernity is the acknowledgment that claims of absolute truth within social and cultural systems were false; not altogether false, but also not the absolute truth.

Meta-rationality is about forming a more accurate and credible understanding of rationality, including the nature of truth. Remodeling society to acknowledging the meaningfulness of practical truths while recognizing their shortcomings can lead us to a “post-post-truth” era.

Clouds and Eggplants

How does rationality relate to nebulosity? (a more detailed description of nebulosity is covered in meaningness)

• Boundaries - clouds do not have edges, they thin out gradually and you cannot quite say when they start or end.

• Identity - it is hard to say when a cloud ends and another begins, whether a clump of clouds is connected or distinct.

• Categories - types of clouds transition continuously into each other, intermediate forms cannot meaningfully be categorized.

• Properties - depending on context and composition, clouds can take on different properties that cannot be precisely described.

Clouds are an extreme case, but nebulosity is pervasive. 

The First of Many Eggplant Examples

Imagine a refrigerator containing only an eggplant. Now suppose someone posed the question “Is there water in the refrigerator?”

• A rationalist will say yes - it’s in the eggplant.

• A meta-rationalist will say it depends - in what sense is “yes” true or false? There are water molecules, but there is nothing to drink.

Considering eggplants in fridges, it is not that we are uncertain whether or not water molecules are in the fridge, or that we don’t know what water means - it is that what counts as water depends on what you want it for.

Key Concepts

• Rationality - Systematic and formal methods of thinking and acting. Systematic and formal are nebulous terms. A system vaguely means anything complicated, and formality is a matter of degree. For practical purposes, think of it as the activities that happen if a set of rules are consciously followed.

• Rationalism - Belief systems that make exaggerated claims about the power of rationality, involving a formal guarantee of correctness. Rationalism is how we would like the reality to work, but lacks an adequate mapping between the clearly defined mathematical realm and nebulous reality, so it fails to realize that rationality is unreasonable.

• Reasonableness - Thinking and acting in ways that are sensible and likely to work, but are not formally rational. Reasonableness is not merely a primitive approximation to rationality, it captures the nebulosity of the world effectively, in a way that formal rationality can’t.

• Meta-rationality - informal reasoning about how to best use reasonable, rational, and meta-rational methods in a given context. Meta-rationality combines resources from both to understand how to act effectively when/where others can’t.

Some Unavoidable Philosophy Jargon

• Epistemology is an explanation of knowing, it is the investigation of what distinguishes justified knowledge from opinion.

• Ontology is an explanation of what there is. What categories of things are there? What properties do they have? How do they relate to other categories? Ontology is intrinsically irreparably nebulous. Ontologies cannot be true, but they can be practical and useful.

Rationalism

There are three obstacles to rationality that rationalism addresses

1. Representational vagueness - inability to clearly define what a rationally conceived object means, and how it relates to reality.

2. Epistemological uncertainty - “known unknowns”: unknowns due to insufficient evidence; and “unknown unknowns”: relevant factors that you are unaware of.

3. Ontological nebulosity - The nebulosity that pervades the world

They are all fuzzy, and make it difficult to make claims about truths and falsities.

Rationalism mainly concerns itself with the first two obstacles, as they are about human cognition - maybe we can fix them. We can gather more data, use more precise language, and maybe one day solve these obstacles. Since nebulosity is about the world itself, we can’t fix it, and rationalism ignores it.

Encountering Representational Vagueness

Rationalism considers ordinary language defective and tries to replace it with more precise systems. One example is formal logic in mathematics.

While these sharper representations are often valuable and do give power to rational methods, fully eliminating vagueness is infeasible, and attempts to do so are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of language.

Ordinary language contains extensive methods for working with nebulosity, which are lost when replaced with technical abstractions.

Encountering Epistemological Uncertainty

Rationalism assumes well-formed statements are either absolutely true or false, and the task is to find out which through rationality.

Some things are true, and knowing truths can be highly effective in many situations. Unfortunately, uncertainty cannot be entirely eliminated, and formal reasoning isn’t built to handle this - probabilisticity can handles some things, but not all.

Unknown unknowns can’t be incorporated into formal systems; to treat an uncertain fact requires specifying it in advance, which cannot be done.

Encountering Ontological Nebulosity

Rationalism typically misinterprets this as one of the earlier concerns. However, nebulosity does not boil down to linguistic sloppiness or lack of knowledge; there exist no definite, absolutely true answers to most questions.

Nebulosity negates any possibility of strong claims about rationality. Most rationalisms act on the supposition that beliefs are either absolutely true or false - in the process denying or ignoring nebulosity.

Acknowledging epistemology while ignoring ontology is impossible, the two can’t be separated - most beliefs are about things that are inherently nebulous, so truthiness generally is too. Most of the time, the best we can get are “pretty much true” truths where no amount of additional information would resolve them into absolute ones.

Rationalism often formulates explicit denials of nebulosity on the basis of fundamental physics.

• Subatomic particles have absolutely definite properties, described by quantum field theory, which are absolutely true.

• Everything is made out of particles, so everything is also absolutely definite. Thus, the world is well-behaved, and there is an absolute truth to everything.

The problem is, quantum physics doesn’t have much to say about ontology - what we care about in objects, categories, properties, and relationships cannot be understood in quantum terms. We need a better explanation.

Logicism and Probabilism

Epistemology has traditionally distinguished rationality from empiricism.

• Rationality derived new knowledge through deduction from existing knowledge or from intuition

• Empiricism derived new knowledge from sensory experience

Rationalism and empiricism were opposing theories, but it became clear that knowledge rests on reasoning and experience. The word “rationality” now covers both reasoning and experience, and it is intuition that has been discarded as it proved unreliable.

Deductions can be made public and checked against each other, intuitions are inherently private, leaving no way to resolve disagreements.

There are two major varieties of rationalism

• Logicism - a descendant of the rationalist tradition and predicate logic

• Probabilism - a descendant of the empiricist tradition and probability theory

(Predicate logic is the set of rules for mathematical proofs. They guarantee absolute truth, so many believe they are the essence of rationality.)

Logical Positivism

This is the framework of the logical positivist:

1. Apply rationality to itself. Use logic to prove that logic works. This gives us a foundation to apply logic to other things.

2. Use logic to prove mathematics is correct.

3. Prove that the mathematical, scientific understanding of the world is correct, that scientific empiricism is reliable.

4. Reduce squishy things like ethics and aesthetics to science and solve those too.

Unfortunately, we failed at step 1.

In the early twentieth century, logical positivism tried to marry predicate logic with scientific empiricism, attempting to generalize results from experimental data to universal truths, forming an unassailable proof that the theory of rationality was correct.

Around 1960, Kurt Godel and others proved mathematically that some logical defects cannot be fixed, even in principle. Logic is inherently broken, nothing can be done about it.

Predicate logic no longer works because there exist mathematical truths that cannot be proven, rationalism cannot be extended to everything.

The discovery of fundamental limits to what can be known produced the crisis of confidence that eventually led to postmodernity, or “incredulity towards all grand narratives”.

Step 2 also failed.

The mathematics mostly works, and its internal problems are largely irrelevant to its applications in the real world (through science, engineering, economics, etc.). Nevertheless, it does contain some highly technical issues if you dig deep enough.

Induction - the problem of step 3.

The dilemma in scientific understanding is that it does not provide an absolute verification criterion. No matter how much evidence we have, we are faced with the question of “How much evidence is adequate to verify a general conclusion?”

After failing to find an answer, proponents of logical positivism reluctantly concluded one could only have degrees of belief in universal truths; full confidence is impossible.

Some epistemologists proceeded to develop probability theory as a means to quantify the concept of being “more confident” in a truth. The attempt to unify predicate logic and probability theory failed, but probabilism did replace logicism as the dominant school of rationalism in the mid 20th century.

Typical discussions of rationalism’s collapse cover only:

1. The foundational crisis in logic

2. The failure to solve the problem of induction

This gave the hopeful impression that if these two issues were overcome, we could have a viable general epistemology.

The first poses less of a problem because the internal technical problems with mathematics had no practical consequences

The second was more-or-less addressed by scientists and statistical software that promised reliable answers to the problem of induction through statistical significance.

Even given these, logical positivism still failed for several other reasons, which apply generally across all forms of rationalisms.

Aristotelian Epistemology

For over two thousand years, rationalist philosophers held the Aristotelian view of logic:

• You have a list of sentences in your head

• Each sentence is labeled with whether you believe it is true or false

• Separately, each is actually true or false in the world

If you had a wrong belief, rationality was the way to fix it. Once inside and outside correspond, you are done. This seemed to accord with common sense, and much of the time it is adequate.

However, we inevitably express ontological nebulosity in reasonable everyday activity

• What if a clear answer isn’t available? (eg. I’m not sure)

• What if an answer can only be given with a weak degree of confidence or high degree of uncertainty? (eg. I think so…)

• What if it doesn’t make sense to assign an answer? (eg. I believe in America!)

Is “America” something that could be true or false? Is believing in the same phenomenon as believing that? Maybe the statement is an abbreviation for “I believe that America is Good”? But this is so vague that it doesn’t seem that it could be either true or false.

Law of the Excluded Middle

Philosophers have found several other intrinsic problems with the Aristotelian framework, one of which is the violation of the Law of the Excluded Middle, which essentially states that either a proposition or its negation must be true.

However, consider the statement “The president of the world is bald”.

• There is no president of the world, so it false that he is bald.

Now consider the negation, “The president of the world is not bald”.

• There is no president of the world, so it is also false that he is not bald.

So clearly, Aristotelian theory contradicts with logical epistemology.

Everything is Wrong

It turns out that every part of traditional logical epistemology is wrong.

• Knowledge is not made of true beliefs, you don’t simply believe all statements to be true or false

• Beliefs aren’t sentences, there are no list of beliefs in your head

• Beliefs can’t be true or false of the world

However, the main features of this theory have been retained up until now, with modifications and elaborations. In fact, complicated versions are invented to try to deal with failures of simpler versions, but those don’t work either.

The problem doesn’t lie in any of the details. The whole approach is wrong.

Natural Language is Broken?

Sentences are often unclear - this is a problem if we want to know whether or not our beliefs (expressed as sentences) are true. A sentence might be true in some sense, and false in another, or even meaningless in a third.

Consider the ambiguity that arises when considering a “pretty little girls’ school”:

• Does “little” apply to the girls or the school?

• Does “little” refer to age or size?

• Does “pretty” apply to the girls or the school?

• Does school mean a building? or an intellectual lineage? (or a co-moving group of fish?)

A sentence depends on the meaning of its parts, and logical epistemologists attempted to find a fixed scheme for extracting sentence meanings from word meanings. This is also impossible.

Consider the statements “the eggplant is a fruit” and “the dog is a Samoyed”:

• The former “the” likely refers to all eggplants

• The latter “the” likely refers to some particular dog

This understanding can be inferred from our understanding of these topics - which is not contained within the sentence. Meanings depend on its constituent parts, but not only on them.

This problem is pervasive, almost any sentence can be read with multiple meanings. Rationalism’s diagnosis is that natural languages are hopelessly broken. They are incapable of adequately expressing truths. So, what if we replaced natural language with math and logical formulae?

The Invention of Modern Formal Logic

Gottlob Frege’s invention of modern formal logic fixed several outstanding defects in Aristotelian logic.

• The meaning of formulas definitely exist and can be derived unambiguously from its parts.

• Rigorously separated deduction and intuition, which previously were nebulous in distinction.

• Introduced the logical device of “nested quantifiers” which solved many technical problems of Aristotelian logic

The previous two statements can now be expressed as such:

∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruit(x)

• ∀ is the universal quantifier, it states a universal truth.

• For all x, if x is an eggplant, then x is a fruit

∃x dog(x) ∧ Samoyed(x)

• ∃ is the existential quantifier, it states that something exists

• ∧ is the “and” relation.

• There exists an x, that is both a dog and a Samoyed.

• This isn’t quite what we wanted though

If we want to be more specific and rigorous about making a claim of one particular dog

dog(x_{dog_id}) ∧ Samoyed(x_{dog_id})

But what if we see a dog and have to way to identify it? You still see a dog, and it’s obviously a Samoyed, but how can you make a logical claim about it?

This seemingly trivial question holds a key to meta-rationality - there is no way to fixate the belief “the dog is a Samoyed” to eliminate the context dependency of the statement. You could assign it an ID, but there is no “Cosmic Object Registry”, and even if there was, there is no way to objectively add objects to it. Even if you could, there is no ambiguity when I’m looking right at the dog, there is no need for this registry when you have context and reasonableness.

You don’t always need rationality’s power, precision, and accuracy in the real world.

Facing Indefiniteness

There are also questions without definite answers, not that we are uncertain about them; it is not that there are objective answers we haven’t determined, but they face matters of indefiniteness. This is awkward for rationalist epistemologies, how can you say an eggplant is a fruit if you cannot say what either one is?

Let’s consider a world where ratinoalism is true, one made of ontologically definite objects, objects which something can be true or false about without any nebulosity, possessing definite properties and definite relationships (or lack of) with others. 

If we try formal logic again, we’ve dealt with syntactic ambiguity, but haven’t addressed semantic ambiguity hidden inside predicates (such as eggplant). We can attempt the following explicit definition of a fruit.

• ∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruitbotanical(x) is True

• ∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruitculinary(x) is False

• ∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ ¬ fruitculinary(x) is True

(the ¬  symbol means “not”.)

The next step is to give necessary and sufficient conditions in order to define our terms, such as

• fruitbotanical(x) ≝ seed_bearing(x) ∧ structure(x) ∧ (∃y angiosperm(y) ∧ part_of(x, y))

“A thing is a fruit of the botanical type if and only if it is a seed-bearing structure and there is some angiosperm y that thing x is part of.”

This has not gone well, you discover a never-ending assortment of exceptions and borderline cases, and taxonomizing an unbounded proliferation of senses and properties becomes increasingly contrived and convoluted.

Trying to make a nebulous category precise in terms of several others also turns out to be nebulous. Eventually you might think this would terminate, as we reach the quantum realm, but in practice this never happens. The set of terms proliferates exponentially and seemingly endlessly. It is not just unbounded, but also pragmatically uninterpretable and unusable.

This is not to say it is definitely impossible to ever make perfectly accurate definitions (although this seems to be true). It is that we do not currently have perfect definitions, and yet it rarely poses a problem in the practice of science and engineering. We would need perfect definitions if we needed absolute truth, but we don’t.

The Problem is in the Territory, Not the Map.

Even if we had a perfect mapping of definitions to things in the real world, mathematical formalism doesn’t solve the problem that there are fundamentally no sharp lines that divide the world in a meaningful way.

This issue is an ontological, not representational one. We want to carve nature at its joints, but practically it doesn’t have any. There is no natural, intrinsic, absolute distinction between eggplants and non-eggplants, and no subdivision, however technical, can fully fix this.

A New Truth Value

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s version of Idealism dominated British philosophy for most of the 1800s:

“Time and space are unreal, matter is an illusion, and the world consists of nothing but mind.”

Logical positivism began in the 1900s with the revelation that Hegel’s writing was incoherent made no sense. We acknowledged that the sun and stars would exist even if no one was aware of them.

Aristotelian logic said all statements were either true or false with no alternatives. With the realization that nonsense could not be assigned an existing truth value, logical positivism cut the Gordian knot and claimed that it was neither - it was meaningless.

The problem wasn’t that we didn’t know (epistemic), but that the world doesn’t work in a way that could answer that problem (ontological). 

This opened the door for more truth values - another was unknown. The belief status of sentences whose truth you were uncertain about. Now logic can express epistemic uncertainty?

We can also add sort of, and both (true and false), and a bunch of others.

Multi-valued, or non-Aristotelian logic solved some important problems. Yet, it was still inadequate in practice and eventually abandoned. It was too coarse; it’s rarely useful to merely label something as unknown, you want to know how confident to be and why, you want specifics. 

Also, hardly anything is absolutely true or false, at best they are “good enough” or “pretty much true”. So almost everything and anything would have a truth value of “meaningless”, or “sort of”.

Multi-valued logic was then replaced in part by probability theory, giving a finer-grained account of the epistemological problem of uncertainty, offering a continuous range representing degrees of confidence. However, probability doesn’t deal with “meaningless” and “sort of true”, and has other fatal flaws of its own.

True Statements That Aren’t Absolutely True

Real world truths are all sort-of truths, this causes trouble for most rationalisms, since the formal methods underlying logicism and probabilism depend on absolute truth. 

The fundamental principle of logical deduction is that it is absolute-truth-preserving. If all inputs to a deduction are absolutely true, then so will the outputs. Unfortunately, sort-of truths are not preserved; they don’t follow the standard rules of logical inference.

Sort-of truths are not sufficiently specific enough for standard logic, could we define inference rules for them though? No one has succeeded in creating anything usable, as correct answers depend on unstated knowledge outside the context of the question.

Probabilism doesn’t require an absolute belief about the truth of the statement. However, it does require that a statement actually is either absolutely true or absolutely false - we just don’t know. This doesn’t work for sort-of truths either. Almost no meaningful statements are absolutely true or false - universally, objectively, independent of circumstances, purposes, or judgments.

Quixotic Quests for Absolute Truths

When encountering a sort-of truth, there rationalist strategies for converting sort-of truths into absolute ones. They each work in some cases, and are all meta-rational: they are methods of ontological remodeling, ways of making rationality work better. Unfortunately, they do not provide general solutions, and none of them generate absolute truths that are usable in practice.

Treating Linguistic Vagueness

This strategy involves tackling linguistic vagueness, defining all terms in a statement with absolute precision so that it becomes absolutely true or false.

1. You move all the nebulosity inside the statement. This by itself doesn’t help with deduction, and it doesn’t necessary always work.

   • Before: It’s more or less true that cottage cheese is white

   • After: It’s absolutely true that cottage cheese is more or less white

2. Split the meaning of each term into technical special cases that are each defined separately. For example, the range of reflective properties that count as a particular kind of whiteness under certain lighting conditions; the range of substances that count as cottage cheese; etc.

Treating Epistemic Uncertainty

This strategy involves reinterpreting a mostly true statement as an absolutely true statement with built-in uncertainty.

• Before: (mostly true) all ravens are black

• After: (absolutely true) the probability that a raven is black is high

This sometimes works well, when variations are random and patterns are usually uniform, so a general statement is adequate.

But, when variations occur we usually want to know why and exclude them from the statement. Exceptions can be meaningfully unique and it doesn’t always make sense to lump them in and interpreted them as “true with a given probability”.

Oftentimes, this probability isn’t available.

Reducing Rationality to Reduction

Reduction is a powerful tool of rationality, it is responsible for the kinetic theory of gasses, set theory, the entirety of computer science, etc.

Naturally, rationalists tried to deliver absolute truths about the practical world through reduction., starting with quantum field theory.

The argument is that things on this level are not nebulous, there is absolute truth. From this unshakeable foundation, we can find absolute truths about atoms, molecules, cells, and finally, life.

Empirically, this is a metaphysical fantasy - it does not conform to facts.

In practice, we are unable to reduce many of these domains into each other. Psychology is mostly not reducible to neuroscience, neuroscience is mostly not reducible to molecular biology, molecular biology is mostly not reducible to chemistry, etc.

Not to say that it’s not feasible, but we don’t have sufficiently detailed or accurate models of neurons, we don’t understand in details what each neuron does, we don’t know how neurons form functional structures, etc.

To explain one domain fully in terms is non-existent, and partial reductions do not enable absolute truth to accumulate from lower to higher levels. Nebulosity blurs reduction so things cannot be cleanly split into well-defined levels, and it cannot propagate absolute truth upwards.

What if we’re not “Sciencing” Properly?

An example of nebulosity permeating science is within biology - we don’t have a well-defined conception of what a cell is or isn’t; if we start removing each of the several trillions of molecules of a cell one by one, at some point it must cease to become a cell. We simply don’t have a criteria for this, it’s nebulous.

Some rationalists argue that if biologists an’t define a cell, they are not doing science correctly. If the cell isn’t reducible to quantum theory, then nothing that biologists say about cells can be absolutely true or false, and therefore meaningless.

Biology should be fixed by people who know what they’re doing

The only meaningful questions that scientists can ask are those that can be answered in unambiguous physical terms.

But, this is impossible (currently). So then does it follow that we do not (currently) have any genuine knowledge of biology? If we take this seriously, we eventually reach post-rationalist nihilism, the despairing realization that rationality cannot deliver on rationalism’s promises. Knowledge is mostly impossible.

Alternatively, you can acknowledge that our current biological knowledge is rational, and that a different and better understanding of rationality is possible. Meta-rationalism is that.

Objective Objects

A powerful argument often used in support of rationalism that claims ontological nebulosity is impossible is as follows:

An object is just atoms, and atoms have precisely fixed, objective behaviours. So we know from physics that an object doesn’t depend on your subjective ideas about it. There’s only one real world. Different people may have different beliefs or concepts about it, but that doesn’t affect what’s true. We don’t each get our own reality; only our own subjective opinions. Your supposed “nebulosity” just boils down to people having different theories, some of which are true, and some of which are false. It’s just epistemological fuzziness. There’s no fuzziness in objective reality.

Quantum field theory is the closest thing we have to an absolute truth about physical reality. The physicist Richard Feynman was one of its major architects. He wrote:

What is an object? Philosophers are always saying, “Well, just take a chair for example.” The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about anymore. The atoms are evaporating it from time to time - not many atoms, but a few - dirt falls on it and gets dissolved in the paint; so to define a chair precisely, to say exactly which atoms are chair, and which atoms are air, or which atoms are dirt, or which atoms are paint that belongs to the chair is impossible. So the mass of a chair can be defined only approximately.

There are not any single, left-alone objects in the world. There are no absolute truths about everyday objects because there is no absolute truth about which atoms make it up. The physical boundaries of a physical object are always nebulous, to varying degrees.

• The mass of a set of atoms is objectively well-defined, but an object is not a specific set of atoms. It will invariably have some atoms that are loosely associated but not definitely either part of it or part of its surroundings.

• Mass is a fundamental physical property, yet, the mass of objects is nebulous. Imagine how much more so is its shape, compressibility, pathogenicity, or other endless set of properties. 

The point is, the absolute truths of quantum field theory don’t apply precisely if you can’t say precisely where to apply them.

“If we are not too precise we may idealize the chair as a definite thing”

Feynman to the rescue again. In rational practice, we use ontologies that assume the existence of definite objects with definite properties. This idealization cannot precisely reflect the real world. “One may prefer a mathematical definition; but a mathematical definition can never work in the real world.”

Yet, it works. We can choose ontologies that work despite not being absolutely true. How does a good ontology relate effectively to reality?

In reasonable everyday activity, it’s usually not a problem that the world cannot be divided into well-defined objects. Your ability to work effectively with the non-objectness of these objects depends on non-rational skills of perception and manipulation, which can impose boundaries on their nebulosity.

Meta-rationalism explains the relationship between rationality and reality as mediated by reasonable activity, and as enabled by definiteness-enhancing technologies.

Science generally aims for universal, objective truths (which is good). However, when you apply rational conclusions to the real world, separation of objects is generally context-dependent and purpose-dependent to varying extends. This is because reasonableness critically depends on them, it carves out chunks that are useful, meaningful, or explanatory.

The Role of Perception in Rationalism

There are two important roles that perception plays in rationalism:

1. The correspondence theory of truth (the philosophical position that a statement is true if it corresponds to reality) does not include a causal explanation of how the correspondence between beliefs and reality is evaluated. Perception does part of this work.

2. Rational processes of deduction and induction produce new beliefs from old ones. But what if we have no relevant beliefs? To get this process started, some beliefs must come from a “primary source”, which does not depend on inference or interpretation. Perception is one such source.

Rationalist theories typically make several assumptions, implicitly or explicitly:

• Perception and rationality are separate modules, with clearly distinct and defined spheres of responsibility, and with a coherent information transfer interface at the boundary.

• Information flows unidirectionally from sense organs, through perceptual processing, and finally to rationality.

• Perceptual information is inherently factual and objective, although it might be only approximately correct

The underlying issues with these views were always the same: unavoidable nebulosity. 

Rationalist Theories of Perception

Each of the below is unworkable for different reasons. They are all simplified versions of theories that were major research programs for decades. The aim here is not to prove that no rationalist theory can be adequate, but to explain some specific obstacles that suggest alternative approaches.

1. It would be ideal for rationalism if perception delivered a set of statements about what the objects in your environment are, with their types and relationships. That’s what rationality wants to use as a foundation to build upon.

   • Obstacle: assigning objective types and relationships often requires reasoning that goes far beyond what could be expected of perception.

2. Perception might deliver statements involving only a fixed set of objective, sensory properties of the world, such as shapes and colors. Then, rationality proceeds to make sense of those. 

   • Obstacle: There doesn’t seem to be any fixed perceptual vocabulary that is sufficient to support reasoning. Many conclusions require a set of arbitarily fine-grained discriminations to be formed.

3. Reasoning occasionally has to go all the way “down to the pixels,” in which case it is not clear what work is left for a stand-alone perception module. 

   • Obstacle: It does not seem feasible that rationality can do the whole job.

4. There is strong scientific evidence that biological perception is biased, unreliable, and not objective. Perhaps rationality should be based on measurements taken with objective instruments? 

   • Obstacle: Unfortunately, there are no objective instruments. They can be more objective than perception, but they still fall short of delivering absolute truths.

1. Perception to Formulae

Higher cognition, notably rationality, is usually taken as something running on an engine like to language or logic. So, perception ought to deliver a set of statements about the world.

The question is, what sorts of predicates can appear in the statements that perception produces? What ontology do perception and rationality use to communicate at their interface? 

Perception encounters the same issues rationality, such as nebulosity and context dependence.

Suppose I teach you a new word for an object - describing it vividly enough that you could recognize it immediately - before showing it to you. Then the first time you see it, it seems that some deliberate and rational reasoning would be involved. If not, then definitions would need to be placed into the perception module, which doesn’t seem right.

Perhaps then, every sort of reasoning might be required for accurate judgment in some cases, and nothing is left solely for rationality to handle.

2a. Reasoning from a Neutral Observation Vocabulary

The approach above drew the boundary at too high of a level. What if we move the interface between perception and rationality down, so perception does less work and rationality more?

Considering this lower boundary, perception might output statements involving a fixed set of sensory properties of the world. Perception is responsible for describing objective physical features, and leaving for rationality to handle.

Logical positivists called this “neutral observation vocabulary”, which should be free from ontological bias. This set of vocabulary is supposed to deliver a set of starting beliefs that don’t depend on any theoretical assumptions. The opposite of this would be a “theory-laden” vocabulary, whose terms implicitly include substantive assumptions about the world. 

Unfortunately, even though this makes it easier for perception, it makes things harder for rationality. Too hard. Also still too hard for perception.

The world requires an arbitrary and indefinite list of “sense data” observations in order to make conclusions. Finding rational conditions to believe something is a member of a macroscopically meaningful category faces the same problem we’ve always faced - nebulosity. 

2b. Perception into a Neutral Observation Vocabulary

So a neutral observation vocabulary does not provide enough information to apply rationality and arrive at absolute truths. What about something more fine-grained?

This still doesn’t work - if perception applies any sort of processing and summarization of the retinal image, the limits of that computation will show up at the interface between perception and rationality, and will shape what kind of starting beliefs rationality can work with.

So if we really need an indefinitely fine-grained output from the perception module, it needs access to the retinal image.

3. Pushing Rationality Down to the Pixels

What if we give rationality true inputs? It guarantees true outputs. It’s reliable, universal, and you can reason using formal logic.

When photons hit the retina, perception performs some sort of computation, so we should be able to model it formally; it should be another rational process, just an unconscious one.

Conceptually, just declaring rationality does the rest of the job doesn’t address the question of how. Rationality still needs to overcome all the problems stated earlier, as they need to be overcome to reach a plausible explanation on how pixels can be reasoned into statements, and none have been found.

Still, this approach remains popular, and deep learning systems that start from pixels do surprisingly well. However, computations like convolutions have long been known to be a special purpose method in the early stages of visual processing. Further, image classification is not general perception - it does poorly on spatial relationships and even worse when made to reason with nested logical quantifiers.

Probabilistic (“Bayesian”) approaches are also popular, and depend on the implicit belief that probabilistic inference encompasses the whole of rationality. This is unambiguously mistaken, and also does not yet include any practical theory of how to begin statistical inference from pixels.

4. Objective Instruments

Logical positivists suggested relying on scientific instruments for objective measurements, given the subjectivity of biological perception. However, instruments are also imperfect and theory-laden, reliant on pre-existing theories and assumptions. They're useful but not infallible or ontologically neutral. No scientific measurement can ascertain an object's identity with absolute certainty, similar to perceptual observations.

Since biological perception is subjective, unreliable, and biased, maybe it’s not the right starting point. Logical positivists suggested that reliable knowledge must be based on scientific instruments, which measure objective physical properties and have unambiguous numerical outputs.

Unfortunately, our tools aren’t that good, and scientists know this. It would be convenient if a spectrophotometer always gave you a reliable and objective measure of an object’s color, but they don’t for the same reason eyes can’t. Color is not an objective properly.

Laboratory apparatus can be inaccurate and go out of calibration while still being approximately, probabilistically, or “good enough” right. Yet, this does not exclude the possibility (or eventuality) that they may be wildly off in hard-to-define circumstances.

Scientific instruments are also not ontologically neutral; their outputs are “theory-laden”, someone had to decide what kind of output an instrument should give. A measurement is only meaningful if you already accept particular concepts, assumptions, and theories about the output. Whether and how to trust an instrument is a matter of subjective interpretation.

These instruments are still useful, they do let you make observations that the unaided senses can’t. But they are not infallible or ontologically neutral. No scientific measurement can ascertain an object’s identity with asbolute certainty.

Rational Inference in the Real World

There are hardly any universal absolute truths that apply to the practical world. Nearly every piece of knowledge has exceptions. Nearly anything might be relevant to nearly anything else, though nearly everything turns out to be pretty irrelevant in any case.

You might be able to reason probabilistically about “known unknowns” - obstacles that you could realistically anticipate and assign probabilities to. 

You cannot realistically anticipate “unknown unknowns”, this defeats probabilism. Unknown unknowns are innumerable, and this problem is fatal fore rationalism’s hope for inference and optimality in the real world.

Obviously though, we do use rational inference all the time, often successfully, through three ways.

• We can make a small/closed-world idealization by pretending we know what all the relevant factors are

• We can re-engineer the world to more nearly fit the idealization by manufacturing less-nebulous objects and shielding them from unexpected influences

• We can reality-check the necessarily unreliable results of rational inference

There are all meta-rational operations that can be performed poorly or well. 

Probabilism

Probabilism is any rationalism that takes probabilistic rationality as central to rationality overall, including probability theory, decision theory, and statistical methods.

Probabilism addresses several fatal probabilism, recognizing that absolute certainty is not possible in the practical world and providing an intuitive accounting of confidence in beliefs. 

It managed to largely replace logicism as the dominant form of rationalism in the mid-twentieth century, however:

• Probability theory lacks the power of formal logic

• Probabilism does not address most of the issues logicism failed at

• Probabilism’s defects are not just theoretical; they regularly produce large practical catastrophies

Weaker and Stronger Probabilisms

Here are some claims about the power of probabilistic rationality, in order from weak to strong.

1. Probabilistic rationality is extremely valuable in some circumstances

2. Probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of induction

3. Probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of uncertainty

4. Probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of epistemology

5. Probabilistic rationality is a complete and correct theory of rationality

6. Probabilistic rationality applies in all circumstances

Claim 1 is true, the rest are false

Claim 5 and 6 can be disposed of quickly - probabilistic rationality does not include most of mathematics. Many tools in computer science, theoretical physics, and calculus are not available to us in probabilistic rationality, so it is not complete. That is not to say it can’t be combined with them.

Claim 4 is false for many of the same reasons as logicism

• It supposes that all beliefs are either absolutely true or false, whether or not we know it (otherwise the math wouldn’t work).

• It also does not address any problems faced with representations of reality, such as ambiguity, vagueness, definitions, and references).

• It doesn’t address any of the ontological problems, like the nebulosity of objects, categories, properties, and relationships.

What it does do is address the uncertainty about known unknowns. What it doesn’t have is the expressive power (what it allows you to say) and inferential power (what you can conclude) as logic - it is a weaker system.

Claim 3 fails when faced with unknown unknowns, and even some known unknowns. Probabilistic certainty only addresses certain types of known unknowns.

Claim 2 is compelling because statistics paired with evidence can give you an idea of how confident you can be. However, statistics is not enough to answer the question outright, and can be powerfully misleading. Also, much of science isn’t based on probability and statistics at all, it is not always necessary for induction.

No Alternative?

So logicism doesn’t work, and it seems neither does probabilism - yet probabilists claim there is no credible alternative, and so probabilism has to be right, or else rationality would be impossible.

The assumption at play here is that rationality requires rationalism. That is, rationality requires proofs from first principles that being rational is correct. Yet, we do do rationality, often successfully, without proofs.

The issue is we are looking for a universally applicable procedure with uniform justification, such as logic or probability. Yet we don’t have first-principles proofs that induction works for either. So how do we derive general knowledge from specific data?

An alternate answer is that, investigating this empirically rather than philosophically, we find there is no uniform principle deduction. This is why we’ve devised different ways of finding different sort of truths, all of which are reasonably *but not absolutely) reliable when used well. Some use logic and probability, some don’t.

Small World Idealizations

The mathematics of probability starts from a specified set of possible outcomes. The probabilities must add to 1, or else the math doesn’t work.

So, you start assigning probabilities. Until you realize that there are innumerable unknowns. In the real world, you can’t make a full list of possible outcomes. There are always more things that might happen. If you add up all these estimated probabilities, you’ll eventually exceed 1 (or asymptotically approach 1 which does not provide justifiable priors). If you quit before you run out of ideas, you’ll have underestimated the probability of failure.

And this is just known unknowns. Even after you’ve written down every possibility you can think of, there are still possibilities that nobody would ever think of, because we don’t know how everything about the world works.

You could adopt the strategy of lumping all outcomes into the bucket of “something else happens” and estimate the probability of that. In statistics, this is called a “small world idealization”.

In the practical world, we always require a small world idealization. Using probabilistic rationality always requires lumping these unknown factors into an “other” category. But by excluding an unknown set of unaccounted-for factors, we always risk making the analysis so wrong that it is useless. The “other” category contains a probabilistic model for the entire rest of the universe.

Statistics and the Replication Crisis

If probabilism were just another mistaken philosophical theory, it wouldn’t matter. Philosophy has lots of silly theories; most of these are harmless, because nobody takes them seriously.

Probabilism being wrong is not harmless for obvious reasons, because its widely used in

• Science

• Engineering

• Finance

• Medicine

• etc.

When misplaced faith in probabilistic methods leads you to ignore nebulosity, catastrophes can soon follow.

The crises around credibility and replication in several fields are rooted in bad incentives that reward activities that lead to false conclusions, and punish those that can correct them. However, the substance of the crisis is rooted by statistics being done incorrectly.

Statistics can be “done wrong” at three levels

1. making errors in calculations within a formal system

2. misunderstanding what could be concluded within the system if your small-world idealization is held

3. not realizing you have made a small-world idealization, and taking it as truth

The Problem isn’t Technical Errors

Stats is a collection of complex and difficult calculation methods, which leaves scientists prone to miscalculations. These level-one errors are not uncommon. 

However, if this were the whole problem, it would be straightforward to fix. Unfortunately, the second and third levels are necessary, and more nuanced fixes.

No Solution to the Problem of Induction

Second level mistakes are misunderstandings of what stats can do. What we often want is a mathematically guaranteed general solution to the problem of induction, allowing you to gain knowledge through a routine mechanical procedure without necessarily understanding the domain. You could feed a hypothesis and some data into a black box, and it would spit out a percentage about the degree to which you should believe the hypothesis.

Unfortunately, no magic box can relieve you of the necessity of figuring out for yourself what the data is telling you. For half a century, many scientists assumed there was one, which is a main reason so much science is wrong.

P < 0.05

One such attempt is the famous example of null hypothesis significance testing.

What we would like P to represent is the chance your hypothesis is false, so given a high P value, you can have a high confidence the null hypothesis is correct. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean that, and the P value does not tell you anything about how confident you should be.

Few scientists understand P values, because what the value tells you is both difficult to understand and something you almost certainly don’t care about. This is in part due to education: explanations of the concepts are often subtly wrong, and the fact that it is taught leads you to assume it must tell you something useful, or else why would it have been taught?

One might think these misconceptions can and should be fixed with better education, but a correct understanding leaves a void, begging the question of what scientists should do when P values aren’t applicable? Maybe they’ve just chosen the wrong black box.

Some reformers have advocated for alternatives - confidence intervals or Bayes factors, for example. Unfortunately, each of these has its own problems. All of them can be valuable in certain cases, and none of them by themselves can tell you what to believe.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Why isn’t there a method to tell you how confident you should be in a belief? Because an accurate numerical estimate of how likely you are to be wrong requires a numerical estimate of how extraordinary the claim is, which is often not meaningfully quantifiable. Science is supposed to explore uncharted areas where nobody already knows what’s going on.

Good scientists have good hunches, and can reasonably disagree about what’s likely.

Statistics Cannot Do Your Thinking for You.

Avoiding the first and second level errors does not mean you will get correct answers about the real world. It only guarantees that your answers are correct about your formal small-world idealization.

Good statisticians understand the third level error - confusing formal inference with real-world truth. There cannot be a general theory of induction, uncertainty, or epistemology.

Meta-rational Statistical Practice

In poorly understood domains, science requires a meta-rational approach to induction. In a particular situation, what method will give me a meaningful answer? Why or why not? What needs to be done to assure that it does?

The real world applicability of a statistical approach is necessarily nebulous, because the real world is nebulous. There is no correct statistical method that you can choose, it is a meta-rational judgement based on a preliminary understanding of how the idealization relates to reality. Choices can only be more or less predictive, productive, or meaningful.

Acting on the Truth

Rationalist theories generally take action as deriving straightforwardly from your beliefs about the current state of the world and how your actions will affect it. If your beliefs are true, then the optimal action can be derived. Four influential theories of this sort:

1. Game Theory - you and an opponent alternate in choosing from a small number of possible actions whose effects are fully known in order to achieve a win condition

2. Decision Theory - you choose a single action out of a small set  which will result in one of a small number of possible outcomes, but you may only have probabilistic knowledge of the world state or outcomes.

3. Control Theory - the world is taken to be a differential equation, where your beliefs are values of some real-valued variables in the equation, your actions set some variables, and you aim to maximize the function.

4. Means-ends Planning - you derive a program that will result in a well-defined goal state by taking a series of discrete actions, each of which affects the world in a well-defined way.

In each theory, the math is conceptually trivial. This is why epistemology is central to rationalism: if your beliefs are true, then optimal action is guaranteed.

Determining Effects is Hard

Although the math for computing optimal action is conceptually trivial, it is computationally hard. The number of computational steps required scales super-exponentially as the number of possible actions and outcomes increases. In practice, the correct computation in infeasible.

Instead, heuristics are used, where we consider only a small subset of possibilities. Generally, these are not even approximately correct. Sometimes they work well, but often there’s no available analysis for how well, or for when they do and don’t work.

The effects of any real-world action are subject to innumerable unknown and potentially relevant considerations. To apply one of the theories on rational action, you must enforce a closed world idealization where rational action frameworks can behave reliably. Rational correctness can only be guaranteed relative to the idealization, and any time an unexpected factor intrudes, the guarantee is broken.

Knowing That and Knowing How

Effectively action often occurs without being able to predict or even understanding its effects. Take riding a bike for example.

Almost nobody can correctly explain how riding a bike works; the physics is counterintuitive, shockingly complex, and still a subject of research, not yet fully understood by anyone. Some facts are proven, for instance, to turn left you must first momentarily turn the wheel right. All cyclists do this, few know they do, and many would actively deny it if asked.

Still, we can steer the bicycle effectively while having actively false beliefs about what you are doing, and why it works. Conversely, if you intensively studied bicycle physics and then got on a bike for the first time, you would likely fall over numerous times before getting it right. Your true beliefs would be nearly useless.

Cognitive scientist make a useful distinction between knowing that and knowing how.

• Knowing that, or propositional knowledge, consists of true beliefs

• Knowing how, or procedural knowledge, consists of effective action

Rationalists have argued that procedural knowledge can be reduced to propositional knowledge, and that riding a bicycle does consist of having true beliefs regarding a set of propositions about physics, it’s just that we don’t have concious access to them. 

This can’t be definitively disproven, but there is strong evidence against it. 

• There is a problem with computational complexity. Neurons compute surprisingly slowly, and cycling requires rapid reaction sometimes.

  • There doesn’t seem to be enough time for your brain to perform the logical deductions necessary to derive new conclusions.

• Second, there is extensive neuroscientific evidence that propositional and procedural knowledge are stored differently in the brain. 

Unhelpfully, we know little about how brains store know-how.  Useful intuition may come from the field of AI, where reinforcement learning programs have learned to play complex games using artificial neural networks, in which, if there is any propositional knowledge embedded within them, no one has found. They seem to be fully procedural.

Rationalist theories of action are powerfully useful in certain highly-restricted situations, but are overall inadequate as descriptive theories of what we do, and normative theories of what we should do.

Procedural knowledge typically cannot be formally analyzed, yet prove reliably effective in practice.

Ontologies of Action

Rationalist theories mainly consider the cognitive process of deciding what action to take, with little to say about what it means to take action. Once you decide on an action, you should take it; but the theory doesn’t explain what “taking” entails. Implicitly, “taking” is atomic, you can just do it, then you are done.

In the rationalist ontology, actions exist outside of space and time. It does not consider that you are taking action here and now. This is the power of rationality: its ability to abstract and generalize. It provides universal solutions that are equally correct anywhere and at any time. This is also it’s limitation: rationality is oblivious to the innumerable specifics.

Real-world activity is not separable into discrete units of well-defined types. Actions are not objective features of reality. What an action is or isn’t depends on purpose and circumstance.

Overcoming Post-Rationalist Nihilism

Realizing that rationalism is wrong can be devastating, particularly if you have build an identity around it.

Learning to master rationality is an engrossing way of being. During the educational phase of your life, it can absorb most of your attention and energy. It is natural to construct your identity, your understanding of self and the world, around rationality. It is also natural to take rationalism for granted as your understanding of what rationality is and how it works; and therefore where you are, and how you work.

Post-rationalist rage, anxiety, and depression can be destructive and awful. It is too common among smart, open-minded, scientifically and technically educated people. Fortunately, it is not necessary.

Post-rationalist nihilism can be addressed through the recognition that:

1. Rationality doesn’t always work, but it often works. It doesn’t work at all in some domains, but remains immensely valuable in many. Being capable of rationality is good.

2. Rationalism is a mistaken theory of rationality, but a better understanding is available. Meta-rationalism explains how and why rationality works when it does.

3. Applying the more accurate understanding can level up your skillfulness is applying rationality.

Taking Reasonableness Seriously

Systematic rationality often works, but not in the way that rationalism mistakenly supposed. So, how?

The answer depends on an understanding of how effective thought and action works in practice.

Reasonableness works directly with reality, whereas rationality works with formalisms. Rationalism assumes that a formalism reflects reality without effectively addressing how it works. TO understand how rationality depends on reasonableness to connect with reality, we need to understand reasonableness.

Cross the River When You Come to it

The rationalist framework overlooks contextual resources, which makes rationality artificially difficult.

Every problem faced by rationalism can be reduced to nebulosity, which gives rise to innumerable potentially relevant factors which cannot be accounted for in a bounded formal framework. However, it is usually true that almost none of the potential complexities arise in any specific situation. The ones that do arise also often turn out to be irrelevant at that given time. Generally, you are able to observe how these relevant factors play out, and they are adequate in resolving the difficulties that a generalized rational theory could not.

Of course, reasonableness is error-prone. When it goes wrong, you may need to backtrack and clean up your mess. Often it helps to plan head. Other times, reasonableness is inadequate and it is better to apply rationality.

Though, most of everyday activity can be handled reasonably.

Not About the Inside of Your Head

Behaviorism views events in the world as eliciting a response from an organism.

Cognitivism is an inversion on this, it is the view that activity is best understood in terms of mental representations and mechanisms that manipulate them, which causes us to take action.

Interactionism holds that causality rapidly crosses back and forth between perception and action. Understanding activity requires taking into account both the environment and the people within it.

To the extent that rationality is a matter of action as well as thought, a good understanding must take circumstance and context into account. Most rationalisms are cognitivist, and therefore most ignore circumstances in favor of mental mechanisms. This is one reason they fail to accurately model real-world rational practice.

Cognitive science aims to determine what sort of machinery is in the brain which underlies rationality. No doubt there are such mechanisms, but we don’t know enough about them to improve rationality much. Fortunately, we don’t need to know what’s happening in the brain in order to improve the ways we think and act.

Not a Dual-process Theory

People are rational sometimes, but certainly not all the time. Maybe there’s a part of us that is rational, and part of us that isn’t?

This is an attractive theory because it suggests we can be consistently rational, or at least rational more often, if we can strengthen our rational part in relation to the non-rational part.

What is this other part? Rationality has been contrasted with qualities such as irrationality, emotionality, intuition, creativity, superstition, religion, fantasy, imagination, self-deception, unconscious thought, and subjectiveness.

Rationalists tend to collapse all these non-rational phenomena into a homogenous, inferior category. Psychologists call this a dual-process theory: there are just two primary mental faculties or modes of thought - the rational and the other.

Thinking Fast and Slow

A version of a dual-process theory is popularized in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. He describes two systems:

1. System 1 - fast, intuitive, and emotional

2. System 2 - slow, deliberative, and logical

According to this theory, “cognitive biases” explain irrationality, allowing system 1 to act.

Ideas like this are pervasive in our folk understanding of thinking. It makes it easy to misunderstand “reasonableness” as system 1, or non-rational. This is wrong because:

•  Reasonableness does not show most characteristics typically ascribed to the non-rational cluster.

•  The distinction between reasonableness and rationality is about what people do, not about what is happening inside brains. It does not depend on any theories about cognitive processes, and does not offer one.

• Reasonableness and rationality are both cultural practices, not mental or neural processing modules.

• Reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality are not exhaustive and do not overlap with irrationality or emotions.

We are forced to do calculus by re-using mechanisms evolved for finding berries.

For hundreds of millions of years, brains evolved for routine practical activities such as collecting food and avoiding predators. Systematic rationality is a modern product and is presumably mainly the result of cultural evolution rather than biological evolution. There hasn’t been enough time for the brain to evolve to develop a separate system for rationality.

It is no wonder that we are bad at rationality.

We don’t have a good understanding of what neurons do. We do know they are extremely slow relative to their silicon counterparts in computers. It takes tens of milliseconds for a neuron to do anything, and hundreds to do basic mental operations. This rules out models of sequential processing, including those necessary for logical inference.

We also know we have lots of neurons, each of which is connected to lots of others. Estimates are in the magnitude of a hundred billion neurons with a quadrillion connections between them. 

What we are good at, extraordinarily good at, is making sense of situations using our contextual understanding of meaning. This sort of understanding was useful in our evolutionary history, while calculus would not have been.

So, it seems to follow that much of what the brain does must involve a shallow consideration of an extremely large amount of possibilities to meanings. Almost all of these possible interpretations are wrong, and your brain manages to find the relevant ones based on your experience and uses them to make sense of your situation.

The Ethnomethodological Flip

Rationalism understands everyday reasonableness as a defective approximate of formal rationality. We will understand formal rationality as a specialized application of everyday reasonableness.

This flip is best developed in the field of ethnomethodology, which is the empirical study of reasoning and activity, in both an everyday and technical sense.

Flipping the relationship between reasonableness and rationality may be disorienting. Rationalists might respond that human reason capability depends on biological hardware that is ill-suited for rationality. But from a meta-rationalist perspective, everyday reasonableness provides resources that technical rationality necessarily depends on.

This flip implies a change in explanatory priority.

Rationalism supposes that formal rationality could in principle serve as a complete mechanism for thinking and acting. However, formal reasoning is unable to bridge the gap between formalism and reality on its own. Only reasonableness can.

Reasonableness makes direct contact with nebulous reality in a way that rationality can’t. Abstracting from real life into the formal realm depends on reasonable perception, judgement, and interpretation.

Explanatory priority is not a value judgement. The meta-rationalist agenda is not to say that rationality is inferior to reasonableness. Rather, it uses rationality and reasonableness for different purpose, and to show their mutual dependence in technical practice. Neither is uniformly superior, both are useful tools sometimes.

Reasonableness is Meaningful Activity

Reasonableness is a quality of activity. Making an omelet for breakfast has the quality of being reasonable; making a sandcastle for breakfast doesn’t.

Activity is a flow involved in a specific situation

Activity is a seamless flow that continues throughout life. At any moment, activity is involved in a unique, meaningful situation: at a meaningful time, in a meaningful place, with meaningful social or material accompaniments; from all of which it is inseparable. You are always already doing something.

Reasonable activity is in unstopping, intimate contact with the world. You continually perceive relevant aspects of your situation and adjust your activity to account for contextual features.

For reasonable activity, the context is both the problem and the resource for solving it.

Reasonable Activity is Immediately Meaningful

To count as reasonable, activity must be meaningful in at least two ways:

• Concretely purposeful - you are doing something for a reason that is present in the local specifics of your situation.

• Makes sense - it is explainable and orderly. It is not chaotic, random, arbitrary, or irrational.

Rationality is Mostly Not About Activity

The criteria of rationality typically apply to abstract solutions to formal problems. A deduction is rational if it is in accord with the rules of logic.

Rationality is powerful because it is not about specific activities and situations. If a rational analysis is correct, context doesn’t matter, everything is abstracted and detached. Anyone can verify the solution, and the activity that led to it is irrelevant.

The power of rationality comes at the cost of disconnection from reality, formal rationality can never be in direct contact with the world. In rationalist usage, an action is an output of a mathematical computation, a member in a well-defined set of actions. Once this optimal formal action is computed, rationality is finished.

Meaninglessness is a Key to Rationality

Rational knowledge and methods are not purpose specific, and often make no sense. This is the source of their power, but also their limitations.

Rationality mostly produces or applies theoretical knowledge independent of specific purposes. They can have practical applications, but the theories themselves are general-purpose. Rationality is disinterested, as it should be.

Rational work is not pointless. You do it for reasons, but they are typically remote in space, time, or abstraction level.

Rationality is not meaningless, but meaninglessness plays a central role in it. This is key to formality because a formal solution must remain valid under arbitrary changes in meaning.

Rational inference often makes no sense, and that senselessness is in part what gives it its extraordinary power. Demanding a reasonable account from rationality relinquishes its value.

You are Accountable for Reasonableness

Reasonableness has a normative force - you should be reasonable. By and large, everyone will hold you accountable for being reasonable.

Rationality also has a normative force - if you do professional work, you should apply professional rationality.

However, the nature of reasonable and rational normative forces are quite different. This difference lies at the theoretical level.

Rational norms are absolute, abstract, and universal. They derive from ultimate principles. They do not consider the idiosyncratic meanings of specific situations. They are non-negotiable and do not permit interpretation.

Reasonable norms are contextual, purpose-dependent, and situation-specific. Reasonableness is realistic in recognizing that there are always innumerable potentially relevant considerations. Which considerations are meaningful is always subject to interpretation, and often, negotiation.

Reasonableness is Recursive

What counts as reasonable? Something is reasonable if you can give a reasonable account of its being reasonable. But what makes that account reasonable?

A term is recursive if it is defined in terms of itself. Reasonable is recursive, and its recursive structure can be observed in negotiations about whether something is reasonable.

Reasonableness has no Ultimate Ground

How can reasonableness be determined? Does this recursion ground out? In reality, relevant factors are innumerable and absolute truths are scarce, so there can be no ultimate grounding. The negotiation of reasonableness may be non-terminating. 

Yet, we generally tend to reach consensus quickly rather than regress infinitely, because we don’t pursue anything infinitely. We can have persistent disagreement, in which the matter will have to be dealt with reasonably through another means: by dropping the question, agreeing to disagree, taking a vote, or someone claiming authority to make a final judgement. These are standard methods of dispute resolution, whose reasonableness is also always negotiable.

Reasonableness depends on assumed good faith and moral truth; there is no guarantee for those. There is also no guarantee for eventual correctness, because there can’t be any. The hope for such a guarantee is the fallacy of rationalist epistemology.

Fortunately, reasonableness usually more-or-less coincides with what is moral and pragmatically effective (with exceptions, of course). 

Reasonableness provides generalizations, guidelines that are subject to usualness conditions. This non-systemacitiy is what gives reasonableness both its power and limits.

Rationality faces the problem of not being able to treat everything systematically due to nebulosity. Reasonableness provides methods for working effectively with nebulosity that aren’t systematic, that come with no guarantees, and are prone to failure.

There is No Method - Only Methods

The holy grail of rationalism is a single method, the guaranteed correct way of conducting rational thought and action. There isn’t one.

This also doesn’t exist for reasonableness. But, reasonableness isn’t interested in finding this. Reasonableness is about recognizing such a method doesn’t exist, and doing whatever it takes anyway. You are likely to face similar problems a little bit differently each time, but you don’t have to do much innovating. Most of the time, you can just see what to do. Reasonable methods are innumerable and nebulous, without well-defined distinct procedures. You just look and see and do the next thing.

This open-ended improvisational quality is also ultimately true of rationality. Scientific breakthroughs often depend on duct tape.

Improvisation Provides Efficient Generalization

In routine activity, it is usually reasonable to assume you can work out details as they come up. If you get something wrong, you’ll be able to compensate for it.

• Relying on improvisation provides tacit generalization. Your intention covers an innumerable space of unanticipated eventualities efficiently, without having to think of them in advance.

• The rationalist approach to generalization involves explicit universal quantification. You model all the actions and events you consider possible, with all of their possible outcomes, and choose the best ones. This is computationally expensive, but sometimes justified. In the face of uncertainty, rational analysis also depends on a closed-world idealization, implicitly ignoring possibilities that were not considered.

Repairing Breakdown

The basic approach of reasonable activity is continue in the obvious way until you run into obvious trouble. It is normal for obvious troubles to be reasonably and trivially repaired. 

Occasionally, we face troubles that constitute breakdowns, troubles that we can’t repair with routine methods. Occasional breakdown is inevitable due to nebulosity, and also due to the open-ended improvisational approach.

It is only when we encounter routine’s atypical defects, not its typical smooth flow, that it becomes memorable or noteworthy. This can reinforce the misimpression that reasonable is a defective approximation of rationality.

Because of the perceived insignificance of normally successful operation of routine reasonableness, rationalist theories of action are mainly theories of problem solving. They deal with the atypical but significant condition of breakdowns.

Faced with the breakdown in routine reasonableness, you have to come up with a non-obvious fix, which will involve some new thinking. Breakdowns can force explicit reflection that draws on theoretical knowledge. Rationality can be good for that.

However, rationality can also be routine, when you apply familiar systematic methods in familiar ways and they yield the expected sorts of results.

Just as how breakdown in routine reasonableness can trigger rationality, the breakdown in routine rationality can also trigger the groundless open-ended curiosity of meta-rationality.

Meaningful Perception

The usual rationalist assumption is that perception delivers an objective description of your environment that is independent of any bias that cannot be sensed in the moment. 

From previous reasoning this seems impossible. Fortunately, this isn’t what we need from perception.

In practical life, we want perception to tell us what the meaningful aspects of our situation are, and what ongoing action they suggest. The answers to this will depend on what we know, what we can do, what we ongoing activity we’re partaking, and what else is happening.

Unsurprisingly then, scientific study of perception shows that it does not attempt to deliver objective descriptions, and that perception operates on a task-dependent, contextual, meaning-saturated, and knowledge-saturated basis.

So, what is the division of labor between perception and rationality?

We’ve now reasoned that perception is an aspect of activity, not a separated, encapsulated function. This implies what we perceive is inevitably affected by what we are doing.

Rationality depends on perception (among other things), and therefore perception is used to build objective and rational theories. However, this is mediated through reasonableness, which limits how objective theories can be.

Seeing with a Purpose

Vision is not an input device like a digital camera. In that setup, causality flows in one direction, with photons arriving at the sensor, through various processing, and finally through a cable to a computer. It delivers objective information in the sense that it’s the same regardless of what program the computer is running. This is called bottom-up information flow.

Human vision also involves top-down information flow. Conscious reasoning and processes can causally affect which visual information gets processed at lower, pre-conscious stages. Most obviously, we can move our eyes to choose what to look at.

There are many other ways we can direct our visual processing, such as visual attention.

What we’ve learned from visual psychology suggests that seeing involves learned, task-specific skills, and is contextual and purposive. This makes it a good fit for everyday activity, not so much for objective rationality.

Seeing with an Ontology

Much of what we see, we see as something. Bottom-up vision has done the work in identifying things for you.

What you see something as depends on your knowledge, context, and purpose. You can only see things as something already part of your ontology. Although bottom-up processes can do much of the work for you, your top-down direction also plays a critical role.

Because perception evolved to enable purposeful activities, it is able to reveal meaningful functions and potentials. Those are a matter of ontology: not just categories, but also how you separate the world into objects, what properties you see them having, and how they relate to each other. It’s not just about the objects, but also intentions, actions, events, environments, and possibilities.

Routine activity is easy because most of the time we can see what to do. We see affordances - cues to what actions are possible and what their effects will be. We can, in effect, see into the future.

Seeing Nebulosity

Perception is inherently nebulous. Perception is nebulous because reality is nebulous. This is an ontological issue, not an epistemological one.

Fortunately, you only need to perceive precisely enough to accomplish your task.

It seems that we have perceptual processing at many different abstraction levels, and there exists no objective and well-defined “neutral observation vocabulary” as the logical positivists hoped. There are few, if any, objective and non-nebulous macroscopic properties to be perceived.

The Purpose of Meaning

…is to get stuff done.

The typical rationalist view is that the purpose of language is to state facts and theories. But that is mostly not what language is for.

Stating truths is only occasionally useful, and usually only as a means for accomplishing something else. Language is not a defective approximation to an ideal formal language.

Language is the right tool for dealing with the world we live in. One that is nebulous, localized, and meaning-laden.

It is not that everyday language is “good enough” - a properly precise language would be better; it is precisely adapted to its proper function, which is to get reasonable work done.

Logical positivists hoped to start from a theory of meaning developed for math, extend it to science, then to other academic subjects, and finally to rectify everyday language and thought.

The ethnomethodological flip involves starting from the ordinary usage of language, and develop an ontology that broadly covers reasonable activity, and then an understanding of science and mathematics.

This may seem backwards, but as human beings, we don’t start with science. Our ability to do science relies on our ability to eat and sleep, so that’s where our understanding of science has to start too.

Reasonable Believings

Categories are a matter of ontology (how things are).

Beliefs are a matter of epistemology (how we know truths).

The ontology of belief itself is prior to epistemology. We ought to understand what beliefs are before making theories about whether or not they are true.

Rationalist ontology supposes beliefs are definite things that live in your head, and the set of proposition and truth value pairs form a single well-defined category.  The rationalist ontology of belief is simple, but wrong.

Understanding Believing Empirically

A better alternative to the rationalist ontology of belief must understand believing empirically as a diversity of complex, contingent, and natural phenomena. Such an understanding is nebulous and complicated, but with adequate empirical grounding, can be roughly right.

Whether or not we believe something, what that belief is, and what it means to believe it, are all nebulous. 

The collection of beliefs progresses from concrete and specific ones, to abstract and general ones.

Believing is a Reasonable Activity

The ethnomethodological flip redirects attention from hypothetical things residing in our head to observable activities.

Believing shares the characteristics of other routine, reasonable activities.

• You are accountable for believing

• What you believe in depends on context and purpose

• What you believe and what it means to believe are nebulous and variable

• Reasonable believings are often adequate to get concrete and practical work done

• Believing is a public and social activity

• Believing is routine, often goes wrong, and then almost always gets repaired

• Believing is often improvised to suit unique circumstances

Believing has a feeling component, both in the sense of an emotion and bodily sensation. Philosophers analyze beliefs as a propositional attitude, a stance toward something a statement about something. This “attitude” is not a mere assignment of a truth value; it is a complex of contextual and circumstantial emotions, associations, and actions.

Believing often means having feelings about an idea. Feelings are notoriously complex, vague, contextual, purpose-relevant, and changeable. Beliefs, considered as feelings about ideas, share these properties.

Reasonable Ontology

An ontology is a tool, a way of relating to the world that enables us to do the things we care about.

Rationality depends on a perfectly sharp ontology, because that makes absolute truths possible. Truths can enable activities that we care about.

In a formal ontology, things definitely belong to a category or don’t, p or not p.

Properties have precise values, and reality is divided into objectively separable entities that are in unambiguous relationships with each other. All of this is held independent of context and purposes; a thing belonging to a category will continue to be part of that category wherever you take it and whatever you do with it.

Rationalism assumes that the world works this way. In the everyday world, it doesn’t.

Sure, the world described by quantum physics is independent of context and purpose, but this ontology is useful only in rare circumstances, and even in those circumstances is contextual and purpose-laden from our perspective. Our everyday understanding of the world is nebulous - there is no uniform, accurate, context-free, purpose-free, and objective ontology in our everyday world. 

Reasonableness works with nebulous, tacit, interactive, accountable, and purposeful ontologies and truths, those that enable everyday activity.

• Nebulous means something can be pretty much something without there being an ultimate truth on the matter

• Tacit means that the use of an ontology generally goes unnoticed and unexpressed

• Interactive means that ontology is an aspect of activity

• Accountable means that if you treat something as a particular thing, you may be expected to explain why it is that particular thing.

• Purposeful means that ontologies are tools for getting work done, and you may use different ones on different occasions depending on context and purpose.

Taking Rationality Seriously

Caring enough about wanting to improve rationality’s operation requires an empirically accurate and practical understanding of when and why it works.

What Understanding Rationality Should Do

Most rationalisms involve impossible metaphysical representations, and encounter difficulties in practice. A better explanation should address how rationality, as a real-world practice, addresses and handles each issue.

An understanding of rationality should explain how, when, and why it works.

• It should account for observed facts about how rationality works in practice

• It should be useful, and enable us to do rationality better

• It should eschew from metaphysics in favor of naturalistic explanations where possible

The standard narrative of how rationality guides practical work is as follows:

• Abstraction - you make a formal model of the problem

• Problem Solving - you apply rational inference to formal model to solve the problem

• Application - you apply the formal solution to the real-world problem

This is not exactly wrong, but an issue lies with bridging meta-physical abstractions and physical reality.

The J-Curve of Development

Understanding how individuals develop into rationality, then into meta-rationality, helps us understand what rationality and meta-rationality are. 

Although the process is continuous, it is helpful to divide it into stages.

• Pre-rationality - you can be reasonable, but have little to no capacity for formal reasoning

• Developing Formality - you can conform to formal norms over reasonable ones

• Basic Rationality - you can model the real world using formal systems with conventional patterns of correspondence

• Advanced Rationality - you can model the real world using formal systems where standard conventional patterns don’t apply

• Meta-rationality - you can dynamically revise rational, circumrational, and meta-rational processes

The development from reasonable through rationality and then meta-rationality follows a J-curve, with time on the horizontal axis and the role of meaningfulness (context, purpose, nebulous specifics) on the vertical. Picture reasonableness starting at some point on the y-axis.

Eliminating meaning is essential to formality

Rationality gains its power from transcending context, purpose, and nebulous specifics to create universal, abstract, meta-physical systems. You must become comfortable with meaninglessness.

This meaninglessness is why formalism works. To become rational, you must wield the power of meaninglessness, the power to strip the world of context and purpose and treating it as a collection of abstractions.

As you develop advanced and meta-rationality, context and purpose come back into the picture. Meta-rationality takes an enormously broader view than mere reasonableness. It considers contexts and purposes with potentially vast scope across space, time, and complexity.

This step is also emotionally difficult. The vastness and groundlessness of the meta-rational way of being provoke agoraphobia and vertigo until the transition has been made.

What Makes Rationality Work?

We do.

There is no answer to rationalism’s central question that is elegant, abstract, or universal and explains why it must work. Rationality only works when we do work to make it work, and our work doesn’t always work. There are several sorts of work we do:

Circumrationality

• Formal reality cannot make contact with nebulous reality, and this disconnection is how rationality gains its power.

• This leaves a gap between reality and formalism that needs to be bridged by a dynamic interface.

• Circumrationality is the non-rational work we do at the margins of rationalisms to actualize correspondences between the two worlds.

• Circumrationality can work more or less well, and a major meta-rational task involves revising the rationality/circumrationality relationship when it breaks or improvements can be made.

Procedural Systems

• Procedural systems mandate rules for action that cover all likely eventualities within their domain.

• You can execute a protocol and it is generally unambiguous whether or not you have done so correctly.

• Meta-rationality reflects on a procedural system’s adequacy.

Sanity Checking

• Sanity checks can be used to reject nonsensical results from feeding “sort-of” truths into rational inference.

  • These kind of truths are usually all that is available, but the correctness guarantee of rational inference depends on absolute truths, so we have to accept that rationality often comes to wrong conclusions.

• Meta-rationality reasons about how specific systems of formal reasoning behave in the face of nebulosity.

Standardization

• Standardization is the work that reworks the physical world to make it more closely fit a rational ontology. It involves getting real-world things to conform to rational criteria as closely as possible to enable rational inference.

• Designing standards involves meta-rational reasoning about the consequences of the inevitable nebulosity that remains.

Shielding

• Shielding isolated a situation from factors a rational framework ignores, so its closed-world idealization is more likely to hold. It involves making many of the innumerable potentially relevant factors as irrelevant as possible.

• Meta-rationality can help figure out what sorts of shielding a system needs.

Why Does Rationality Work?

It works for different reasons in different situations. We do lots of work to make rationality work, and in each case it can be obvious why it works, but there is no general explanation.

However, leaning on abstract metaphysics, rationality works when it does because the world is patterned as well as nebulous. Often rationality doesn’t work because we can’t force reality to conform to arbitrary rationalisms, but when it does, it’s because we’ve found patterns that make rationality work well enough.

Advanced Rationality

There are types of work that remain within a rational system but go beyond the basic rationality that can be taught explicitly.

Advanced rationality shades into meta-rationality. It relaxes formalism’s shielding of inferences, and allows room for context and purpose.

Non-procedural Rationality

Some problems can be solved more than one way, and may have many methods which are relevant at different points in the solution. A solution may involve using several methods in a novel arrangement, or inventing new methods altogether.

An example would be mathematical proofs. A proof can often be reached with different tools, but there is no single procedural way to devise all proofs. Sometimes a proof does not exist.

Context and rationality are both required to decide which approaches may work best, and when to reasonably give up trying.

Ascending the J-curve

As a technical professional it is possible to ignore context, purpose, and nebulosity throughout your career. However, this means the usefulness of your work depends on others abstracting reality into formal problems for you, then figuring out how to turn your formal solutions into practical work.

Typically, becoming more senior brings you closer to the volatile, ambiguous, and unknowable complexities of reality. Increasingly, you are required to make decisions about purposes and context.

Advanced rationality requires the recognition that solving difficult real world problems requires multiple models, exploiting ad hoc constraints, inference-limiting, and solution-monitoring. Understanding when and why formal procedures work becomes more important.

Shading into Meta-Rationality

The boundary between advanced rationality and meta-rationality is nebulous, but meaningful distinctions can be made.

Advanced rationality mainly works within rational systems, and adopts the ontology the system assumes. You typically do not use an ontology from one system and methods from an entirely different system.

Ontological Remodeling

Ontological remodeling involves the reconfiguration of individuation criteria, categories, properties, and relationships. Meta-rationality is itself an ontological remodeling of rationality.

We must recognize:

1. At the meta level, moving from rationalism to meta-rationality requires a remodeling of the ontological categories of rationality, such as truth, beliefs, deductions, etc.

2. At the object level, ontological remodeling is a major aspect of the subject matter of meta-rationality.

So the shift from the rationalist to the meta-rationalist view is an instance of meta-rationality. This implies that meta-rationality is required to understand meta-rationality; it is a pre-requisite for itself, which makes such a shift difficult.

What you must do then, is proceed in a spiral. Gaining an approximate understanding of a subset of a subject makes it possible to grasp more of it. Repeated passes are required to increase breadth and depth, and eventually reach mastery.

The Extinction and Survival of Categories

During ontological remodeling, categories may:

1. Disappear completely

   • There is nothing in it - the entities in the group don’t exist or have nothing meaningful in common.

2. Convert from informal to informal status

   • It is too nebulous for any formal account of it to work, but may still be heuristically useful.

3. Get a new formal meaning

   • It gains a new formal meaning as we discover new knowledge that allows for better categories.

These outcomes are also continuous. It is possible for categories to be dropped by experts but retained in popular language, or for the understanding of categories to diverge.

To approximate where some rationalist categories lie on this continuum during meta-rational remodeling of rationality:

• “Truth” - somewhere around 2.2

  • Best thought of as many different vaguely-similar nebulous ideas

• “Belief” - somewhere around 1.6

  • A mostly useless and misleading category, thought necessary for every-day communication

• “Rationality” - somewhere around 2.7

  • A grouping of usefully similar and reasonably well-defined methods that we should think about differently during meta-rational remodeling.

The book is unfinished and this is unfortunately where it ends, but I will pick this back up if and when it is completed.

Nudge

Influencing without Infringement

Author: Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Recommended by my startup co-founder who I recently met for the first time 5 years after we gave up Mohnish Shah while chatting in a Target parking lot at 11pm.

Choice Architecture

Small changes in context can greatly influence the decisions of people, the people who have the power to make these changes are called choice architects.

Choice architects have the responsibility for organizing the context in which people make decisions, and yet, most choice architects don’t realize they are one.

Parallels can be drawn between regular architects and choice architects:

• There is no such thing as a neutral design choice

• Every choice will be interpreted by a multitude of subjectivities - each person will interpret the context you provided in their own way

• Arbitrary decisions will inevitably influence downstream interactions

Given that even the smallest details can have a major impact on people’s behavior, you should assume that everything matters. The power of these small details comes from the focusing of attention in a particular direction - this insight can be both paralyzing and empowering.

Good architects realize that they can’t build a perfect building; it doesn’t exist; but they can make choices that have beneficial effects.

This concept strikes me as oddly tantric. The idea of directed attention without infringements or constraints captures the essence of spacious passion as outlined in Vividness. The idea that there is no eternal truth or inherent flaw in the universe, but that pragmatic improvements can be made is also one that many find both paralyzing and empowering - the world is our playground and there are no right answers, where do we even begin?

Perhaps we can start by nudging people in directions we think will serve them well.

Libertarian Paternalism

This is a key mindset that pervades the book, and perhaps not a combination many would find particularly endearing on first impression.

To make things worse, they’re somewhat contradictory. However, when properly understood, they show a lot of attractive qualities - even more so when combined.

The first hurdle we must overcome is the baggage that the words now carry beyond their original definitions due to dogmatists.

Libertarianism - as long as people are not harming others, they should be free to do what they like.

Libertarianism posits that we should strive to design policies that maintain or increase freedom of choice. It simply means liberty-preserving, not burdening those who want to exercise their freedom.

This may be caveated by two points:

• When people are inflicting harm on others, freedom of choice is not the best idea

• When people are inflicting harm on their future selves, nudges might not be enough

Paternalism - it is legitimate to influence people’s behavior to make their lives longer, healthier, and better.

Paternalism posits self-conscious efforts should be made by institutions to steer people’s choices in beneficial directions, with “good” being defined by the chooser. We should make it easier for people to make the choices they would have made given complete attention, complete self-control, and complete information.

Those who reject paternalism are typically implicitly committed to the idea of Homo economicus, the “economic man” - the notion that every person thinks and chooses well, and fits the typical economist’s depiction of a rational, self-serving human being. Counterexamples of the idea of the “economic man” are obvious and abundant: diet, smoking, drugs, drinking, etc.

The reason for the nonexistence of Homo economicus is not that people make incorrect decisions, this is bound to happen because the future is unknown - they are however, expected to make unbiased forecasts, predictions cannot repeatedly err in predictably, and people tend to be predictable.

Libertarian Paternalism Weakens Paternalism in Exchange for Liberty

Libertarian Paternalism is a soft, non-intrusive type of paternalism - choices are not blocked or forced. Choice architects simply try to nudge people in directions that will make their lives better.

By accepting paternalism and rejecting the idea of Homo economicus, we accept that humans err predictably. This alone doesn’t allow us to do much, but when paired with libertarianism, allows choice architects to act on the predictability of humans to nudge them towards better choices.

Avoiding Reactance - one of the major benefits of the soft approach to paternalism. When people feel ordered around, they might experience negative feelings that lead them to do the opposite of what was asked.

What is a Nudge?

A Nudge is an aspect of the choice architecture that predictably alters people’s behavior without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.

Nudges are not:

• Taxes

• Fines

• Subsidies

• Bans

• Mandates

Sources of Systematic Heuristics & Biases

Anchoring - people tend to be biased towards numbers close to ones they already know.

• When asked to guess the population of a mid-sized city, residents from a larger city will overestimate the population, and residents from a smaller city will underestimate it.

Availability - people tend to be biased towards things where examples come to mind more readily.

• People will perceive crimes reported on the news to have a higher likelihood of occurring.

Representativeness - people tend to be biased towards things that fit the stereotypes in their heads.

• People will perceive a gender studies major to be more likely to be a “feminist banker” than a “banker”.

Unrealistic Optimism / Overconfidence - People tend to be overconfident about their own abilities.

• Most people think they are above average.

Gains and Losses - people are loss-averse, they react to losses twice as strongly as gains.

• People value things more once they own them. People don’t want to lose money.

Status Quo - people have a tendency to stick with the current situation - this is pretty exploitable.

• People will tend not to cancel subscriptions that were initially free.

Framing - people will react differently to the same thing said in different ways.

• A 90% chance of survival sounds better than a 10% chance of death.

Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, who authored the book which this sub-section is named after, introduced the idea of the brain consisting of two components or systems.

• System 1 - Automatic system that is fast and intuitive

• System 2 - Reflective system that is slow and reflective

The latter typically leads to better or more accurate thoughts at the expense of taking longer to rethink the original answer given by System 1. If everyone always used System 2, we could more reliably rely on humans to make rational choices. However, we cannot rely upon everyone to do this - policies have to be designed for system 1 thinking.

Resisting Temptation

When facing problems around self-control, we can borrow the framework outlined above that posits the individual containing two semiautonomous selves - Systems 1 and 2.

• System 1 adopts the personality of a myopic “Doer”, who has a strong will and impulsive thoughts.

• System 2 adopts the personality of a farsighted “Planner”, who tries to promote your long-term welfare while resisting the temptations presented by System 1.

While strategies of various scales can be employed by the Planner to reign in the Doer, sometimes third-party intervention is required. In some cases, this is implemented from a pure paternalistic approach (eg. government intervention) but often we prefer something less intrusive.

A libertarian paternalistic approach often involves the provision of voluntary self-control services that the Planner can enroll in to remove the potential for the Doer to opt for unwanted behaviors from the action space.

Herd Mentality

Understanding how social influences work is important to choice architects for two reasons:

1. Most people learn from others, this is generally a good thing and is how individuals and societies develop. Misconceptions also come from others, and social influences can cause people to have false or biased beliefs.

2. This is one of the most effective ways to nudge (for good or for evil) as we are easily nudged by other humans; we like to conform.

Social influences fall into two main categories:

1. Information - if many people do or think something, their actions and their thoughts convey information about what is best for you to do or think.

2. Peer pressure - if you care about what other people think about you (particularly those you relate to or hold in high regard), you might just go along with the crowd to avoid potential (often imagined) social consequences.

Collective Conservatism is the tendency of groups to stick to established patterns and perpetuate arbitrary traditions even as new needs arise, and a common outcome of the herd mentality. Of course, the more problems a practice causes the more likely the group is to shift; but when uncertainty is still part of the question, people may prefer sticking to what they know.

Informational Cascades are a phenomenon that occurs when an initial opinion nudges subsequent decision-makers who do not feel strongly about the given topic to conform to prior consensus.

Pluralistic Ignorance occurs when we follow a practice on the belief that other people like it. This can cause widely despised social practices to persist for the simple reason that people don’t know that other people also dislike a practice.

This can often be resolved by nudging people towards speaking and acting in accordance with their actual views, or simply informing people about what others are thinking and doing.

The Tools of the Choice Architect

Before answering the “how” of nudging, we should establish the “when”.

The golden rule of libertarian paternalism is to offer nudges that are most likely to help and least likely to inflict harm.

Opportunities for effective nudging typically arise when people face decisions that demand attention, introduce high complexity, lack immediate feedback, or are obscure and not easily parsed into simple terms.

A few key considerations when designing choice environments:

Reminders and Prompting

People have finite self-control, attention, and memory; this is why we make lists and set reminders - in case we forget. Reminders have become ubiquitous and can be a terrific form of nudging. For instance:

• Checklists - Pretty straightforward. Works especially well when all relevant individuals are authorized to issue reminders.

• Implementation Intentions - Elicit questions that prompt the user to state specifics about their intention to do something.

Advance Benefits, Defer Costs

Most people need encouragement for longer-term “investment-type” activities that are beneficial in the long term but provide little or no immediate gratification gratification.

Nudges can be designed to mitigate issues around self-control by providing immediate benefits and deferring costs for certain actions.

Easing Difficulty

People are less likely to need help with easier problems. We can even cope with harder problems if solutions are readily available to them. However, when solutions are scarce or not easily accessible, we can assist by lowering the difficulty through helpful nudges.

Frequency

Hard problems become easier through practice, and finding solutions becomes automatic. However, most important decisions do not come with many (if any) opportunities to practice. Difficult and rare choices are good candidates for nudges.

Feedback

In an unstructured environment without effective learning opportunities, practice can only help so much. Further, we may only get feedback on the choices we opt for, not the ones we forego. When feedback is ineffective or alternatives have not been explored, a nudge might be beneficial.

Guiding Through Uncertainty

When people are unable to predict how a choice will affect them, or do not understand the available alternatives, a nudge towards narrowing their options or even suggesting one may be welcomed.

Implementing Choice Architecture

If you want to encourage people to do something, make it easy - here are a few ways to do so:

Defaults

Defaults tap into people’s inclination to opt for the path of least effort or resistance - until the default becomes obviously bad enough for the user to pick otherwise. Defaults are ubiquitous, powerful, and to some extent, unavoidable; something has to happen if the user does nothing.

• Required Choice - users must actively make a decision, this is a good strategy if the decision is important and easily overlooked, or requires the person’s explicit consent.

• Prompted Choice - users are presented an option where a selection is not mandated, but acts as a strong recommendation by the choice architect.

Expect Error

A well-designed system expects its users to err and is as forgiving as possible. The idea is to identify sources of error and build “nudges” that prompt users to make their originally intended action into the system.

Give Feedback

Well-designed systems tell people when they are doing well and they are making mistakes. An even better system will preemptively tell you when things are about to go wrong.

If an overwhelming amount of feedback is given and the automatic system within the brain takes over, the feedback is rendered useless.

Mappings

An accurate mapping between a choice and an outcome improves the ability of people to predict the consequences of their choices with considerable accuracy.

A well-designed system should help people improve their ability to form good mappings and select the option(s) that will leave them better off.

Choice Complexity

People use different strategies to make choices depending on the action space and complexity of each option.

When faced with a small number of well-understood alternatives, we tend to closely consider all options and make trade-offs when necessary.

As the set of choices gets large, we may use alternative strategies that can lead us to sub-optimal outcomes. We may have to use simplifying strategies like “filtering” to eliminate options by their attributes, without considering trade-offs that may lead to more welfare.

A good choice architecture should provide structure in such situations, where choices are made more structured and simplified to the user; nudges can be immensely helpful to choice-making through well-designed sorting or personalized recommendations.

An important consideration is to remember that surprise and serendipity can be pleasant too - it may also be good to nudge people in directions they might not have originally considered choosing.

Incentives

Aligning incentives is standard economics, but we can enrich them by remembering the agents are humans who may err or act irrationally. One of the biggest factors to account for is salience - are all major and relevant incentives noticed by the decision maker?

Salience can be manipulated and good choice architects should direct people’s attention to incentives.

Taking Breaks

An often neglected yet important tool available to choice architects is scheduling intermissions. A properly timed intermission should be added without ruining the experience while allowing the users to stretch their legs (either literally or figuratively).

Curation

A tool available to choice architects to massively improve user experience is curation - the ability to provide surprises, serendipity, and delight to a customer; the ability to provide only the best of the best.

Curation can massively reduce the amount of navigation that needs to be done to find something you want given a sea of choices.

Fun

The first mantra of nudging is to make it easy to make the desired decision - choosing fun is easy. Fun piques our curiosity builds excitement and anticipation, and increases the willingness and even perceived value of performing a given activity.

Good and Evil

The corollary to the basic principle of good choice architecture is “if you want to discourage a behavior, make it harder”. This means employing punishments, obstacles, barriers, and disincentives.

Nudges and behavioral science have a dark side too, they can be used for both good and evil. People can be defaulted into decisions that will hurt them, harmful actions can be incentivized and made easier. Friction can be added to manipulate people and make it harder to obtain an outcome to make them better off.

Save More Tomorrow

Saving for retirement is a relatively new challenge for our species, arising from a mix of rising life expectancy and geographical dispersion of families. It’s also one of the situations where directional nudges are highly warranted - we are pretty confident that people will be better off by improving their retirement savings.

How much to save is something we won’t dive into, but in general, the cost of saving too little is much greater than that of saving too much. Yet in actuality, people’s retirement accounts reflect the opposite.

Many people know they should be saving more, but few change their behavior. We know people are favorably disposed towards being nudged on this issue, this is an opportunity to be helpful.

There are five important psychological principles relevant in this context to be aware of:

• Most people want to and plan to save, but never actually do it.

• Self-control restrictions are easier to adopt if they take place sometime in the future, not now.

• Loss aversion - people hate seeing their paychecks go down

• Money illusion - losses are felt in nominal dollars, not adjusted for inflation

• Inertia plays a powerful role - people typically stick to their initial decisions.

Borrow More Today

Humans suffer from self-control problems rooted in being present-biased, putting undue weight on things they can have right now. To be able to retire, you have to figure out how to keep your spending less than your income - you need to save. Unfortunately, before this is greater problem: people borrow money to spend more today.

In particular, credit cards exacerbate this problem by providing instant liquidity in the form of borrowed money, allowing you to easily spend more than you have.

In a vicious cycle, the record of responsibility of using a credit card determines one’s credit score, which determines one’s interest rates. Using a credit card responsibly (paying it off in full every month and avoiding interest payments) requires significant self-control, and those who spend irresponsibly are plenty - Americans have racked up over $1 trillion in credit card debt. This is not unique to the US, China has surpassed this figure already.

Some stats to show their misuse in the US:

• 43% of balances are not fully paid off each month, only 31% are entirely paid off (the remaining have no balance or are inactive)

• $1.1 trillion was the total credit card debt as of February 2020

• The average credit card debt of a household was $6000 across 3.1 credit cards as of 2019.

• Total interest payments were $121 billion with an average interest rate of 14-18%

• Fees accounted for ~5.5% of cycle-ending balances in 2018, with just under half of that being late fees.

Objections to Nudging

Slippery Slope

“If we do some X, then there is a serious chance it will lead to Y, then Z. Even if X is a good idea, Z is scary. So, we shouldn’t do X unless we are willing to accept Z.”

The problem is this does not provide any evidence of an actual slope, and the track record of slippery slope forecasts is rather low.

Applied to the context of nudging, the common criticism is “First it’s nudge, then it’s shove, then it’s shoot.” - even though the whole point of nudging is to avoid shoving. Nudge creep is not a concern as nudges maintain freedom of choice by definition.

Freedom and Active Choice

Some people believe we should always provide people with all the information necessary to make an informed choice, and then let people choose for themselves.

Required active choosing is suitable when choices are simple, and doing so with complex decisions can be quite paternalistic - you’re forcing more responsibility onto someone, and you may not be respecting their preference to not make a choice. In certain situations, it can be intrusive, and in many situations, it is simply impractical to apply required active choosing.

Active choosing is a good idea, but in many domains, curation and well-designed defaults are a blessing.

Don’t Nudge, Boost

Some emphasize that in a free society, people have the right to be wrong.

This criticism does not directly conflict with libertarian paternalism, as it generally favors opt-out rights, as long as harm is not being caused to others.

The difference and criticism lie in that education should be emphasized over nudges. We should be boosting the capacity of people to make good choices rather than enlisting a choice architecture.

These are not conflicting ideas, nudging is simply an offering of well-curated options or suggestions that we can reject if we wish, but are often appreciated. Also, it is unrealistic to think that we can increase individual competence to the level where they are able to handle all complex choices in life on their own.

Nudging is Sneaky

Mandates, bans, and taxes are clear and direct - people know why they are there, and nobody is fooled or deceived. Some criticize nudges for being covert and manipulative - they affect people without their knowledge.

For most nudges, this does not apply; intentions are usually clear and transparent. However, if a nudge is not transparent and is devious in its implementation, it does fall into the “evil” category - these are not the kind of nudges we want.

Some nudges indeed work even if those who are affected by them do not notice they are there. In these situations, the design of the choice architecture is not hidden, but the reason may be. Studies have even found that telling people they have been nudged and the reason behind it increases the nudge’s effectiveness and impact.

So, are nudges manipulative? The philosophical consensus depends on whether or not it adequately respects people’s capacity for rational deliberation.

Beyond Nudging: Mandates and Bans

Libertarians are worried that we may start with nudges and move to shoving. Some critics of a more progressive persuasion have the opposite worry, that we will stop at nudging when stronger measures are required.

Firstly, it is clear that not all problems can be fully addressed with the light-touch intervention of nudging. They might help, but nudges are often not enough to control externalities for more serious matters.

Nudges are also unlikely to discourage many policy and decision-makers from taking stronger measures - they are often used in conjunction with stronger economic instruments or even mandates and bans.

The line when a nudge should become a mandate or ban is certainly blurry. The more general dilemma lies in enthusiastic paternalists who are worried about the risk of poor choices being made by individuals.

In truth, there isn’t a clear definition of when something should be. Both extremes are justified in certain contexts.

As long as people are making informed decisions about how to live their own lives, we should favor an attitude of humility and respect - and hence a presumption in favor of freedom of choice.

Vividness

The Electricity of Liberated Perception

Author: David Chapman

Recommended by my under 9s mini-rugby rival Max Langenkamp during a fb messenger call that prompted me to go for a walk in a park.

An Invitation to a Brighter, Freer Way of Seeing, Feeling, and Acting

This is what Vajrayana offers: a new world is opened up as we relax the compulsion to fit objects, experiences, people, and ourselves into fixed categories.

Vajrayana is a form of Buddhism that is largely inaccessible despite its great potential, primarily due to its presentation not being updated for modern conditions. It is also said to be the most advanced and difficult of all Buddhist approaches.

Before diving deeper, a key concept of Buddhism should be introduced - “yanas”. Lacking an equivalent in Biblical religions, yanas are different approaches within a religion, distinct methods that are applicable depending on where you are and where you want to go. Yanas are defined in terms of a base, a path, and a result: the starting point, the method of movement, and the goal.

Truth and Methods in Buddhism

The attractive proposition of many Western religions is that they contain an eternal truth (”The Truth”). Believing in the religion and its Truth is the primary form of practice, and as long as you believe, God will save you.

Buddhism is non-theistic, there is no-one to save you. You must save yourself.

Buddhism is also not big on Truth. In fact, it only posits one Truth - the non-duality between form and emptiness.

Aside from this one Truth, any other Buddhist statement is useful only if it helps on the path. These statements are methods, pragmatic approximations of reality that are useful to act on in particular circumstances.

Buddhism is pragmatic; it is a religion of methods, not of Truth. Methods are ways of approaching enlightenment.

Buddhism encompasses a multitude of methods. All of which are valuable in particular situation, none of which are right or wrong, which one works better or worse depending on where you are and what you are trying to accomplish. Often it is best to use a combination of methods.

Methods may differ, and it is often only possible to apply one at a time, because they each have contradictory requirements. They may be incompatible, but they do not conflict - neither is right or wrong. What is important is to know when to apply each method.

Methods may have contradictory requirements, but they cannot contradict. Methods are not to be understood as potential Truths, because then their seeming contradictions become a problem.

Absolute and Relative Truth

There is a tendency is to equate absolute truth with the abstract and incomprehensible that is accessible only to the enlightened (eg. Buddhas), and relative truth with the common sense consensus view of the world. This leaves our everyday view of the world intact and allows us to proceed with our daily lives as usual.

Dzogchen (a Buddhist approach, Tibetan for “utter completeness”) explains that there is not one relative truth that is the common-sense consensus view of the world, but many, which superficially conflict. Adopting this explanation no longer leaves our worldview completely intact, and we must learn to see the world in many different ways. That disrupts our ordinary way of operating.

Principles and Functions

Functions can be understood in terms of base, path, and result.

• Base - the kind of situation in which a practice will be useful

• Path - the practice itself, what we do in the situation

• Result - the outcome of the path

Only when we want the particular result of a function does it make sense to apply a practice.

Each practice, within its function, is derived from a broad principle. Principles are simple, core themes, or the fundamental logic of Buddhism. They explain how and why Buddhism works.

Various principles of Buddhism are frequently incompatible. Generally, one can combine practices that share a principle. Simultaneously applying practices derived from different principles are liable to unsatisfactory results, because they are pointing in fundamentally different directions

For example, the fundamental principle of Sutra is renunciation, of which one may practice abstaining from sensual enjoyments. However, enjoyment is a fundamental principle of Tantra, and one may practice reveling in the delight of consumption.

One does not have to swear exclusive allegiance to a particular principles, yanas, or practices. They are all valid and valuable and one may frequently switch between them, choosing which to apply when, but you may only use one at any given moment.

The Futile Quest for Certainty

The mundane world is chaotic, risky, arbitrary, confusing. The good can suffer and the bad can prosper. Life is unfair, it doesn’t make sense.

We want assurance that this is an illusion. That the real world that extends beyond the mundane world (afterlife, Nirvana, etc.) is orderly and consistently meaningful. We want answers - sometimes desperately.

There are hundreds of religions and ideologies that claim to have answers. But, they do not agree.

People often seek certainty within religion. This adds another layer of confusion - the religious domain, that which is supposed to provide answers, seems to also be chaotic and uncertain. Unless, we can find the one true path that really has the answers.

Serious spiritual practice requires commitment to a single tradition, yet the question of how to pick the right one seems difficult (or impossible). If religion claims to hold the Truth, it may very well be the most important thing in life.

Buddhism insists that the answers we’re looking for cannot be found, it is “The Way of Disappointment”

Emptiness is at the heart of Buddhism, repeatedly crushing our hope that we will find a satisfactory end to our search for answers. If we take this seriously, it follows that we cannot use Buddhism to confirm ourselves. There is no way to be absolutely certain of anything other than the non-duality of form and emptiness.

The quandary of uncertainty is at the heart of Dzogchen. It teaches us how to live joyfully and effectively in a world that is both horrifying and perfect, chaotic and crystalline, alienating and supremely meaningful.

Approaching Religion

There are several different ways of relating to religious or spiritual systems.

• Path

• Social group

• Faith

• Worldview

• Toolbox

• Tradition

Path

The path approach, though uncommon for other systems, seems to work best for Buddhism.

The path approach to religion has many parallels to a garden path you may walk on.

• It is something you can follow

• You can see where you’re going, and where it will take you

• At junctions, you have to choose where to go

• If you don’t like the direction of the path, you can go back and try a different route, or leave the path entirely

• Paths may or may not have destinations; sometimes, you walk on a path just to enjoy the scenery.

Paths often have a signpost at the start saying where it will take you. Sometimes the sign is wrong - rare in the real world, but much more likely in the spiritual realm. However, it is impossible to be certain without following them all the way to the end. And until you get to the end, you can’t really know what it is like.

Even if a path has no destination, or a mislabelled one, it still allows movement. If you are unable to make any more steps, or if steps don’t take you anywhere, there is no longer a path.

Paths do not appear spontaneously; they are forged by others who have gone before. Some may have documented the route or offer guidance along the way.

Social Group

When people deliberately look for a religious organization, it often seems their real goal is to find a comfortable social group, overlapping in values, social class, interests, and lifestyle. This can serve purposes such as emotional support, intellectual entertainment, and affirmation of life choices.

This is a valid reason to join religions, but not a Buddhist one. Although it is probably the most common reason, it is also a waste of time and emotional energy, and diverts every individual within the group from its proper purpose.

For Buddhism to be effective, it needs to undercut your basic assumptions about life. An excessively comfortable group, constantly validates your reference points, and serves as an obstacle.

A sangha (Buddhist community) should be comprised of people whose experiences and understanding of life is different from yours, being in a sangha can be irritating and tiresome.

Faith

For some religions, the important part is that you believe in them full heartedly. This condition is sufficient for membership. This is true in many Christian sects.

To approach Buddhism this way is not wrong, but it misses the key aspect of Buddhism that is important to Buddhists - applying methods, not believing truths.

Worldview

A worldview (or philosophy) is a system for understanding meaning - life, the universe, and the part one plays in it. This is not necessarily a faith; it can be a method for searching, as opposed to a set of claims to subscribe to. Some religions do also provide a worldview, such as those that are spiritual but not religious.

A worldview in isolation is not a path, as it does not show you where to place your foot next. It may give you an overall sense of direction, but it does not provide the pragmatism of a path.

Toolbox

The near opposite of faith. Faith is belief without method; Toolbox is method without belief. It provides you various methods that take you in different directions.

This is the common modern approach to spirituality - you take methods from different systems and apply them as you see fit. The toolbox approach provides pragmatism, but it does not give you an overall sense of direction.

A toolbox is smaller than you, it becomes a part of you. Religion is bigger than you, you become a port of a religion. A toolbox is much smaller than a religion.

Tradition

Most religion is inherited from family or a close community. The legacy may be a reason to stick with a religion, or provide enough inertia to see no reason to switch. This is usual for Buddhists in Asia, and less common in the West.

Buddhism provides a toolbox for pragmatism, a worldview for direction, social structures for guidance, and a tradition that instills confidence. Together, these form a path.

Redefining “Right”

Within most major religions there are hundreds of lineages or sects to choose among.

• Western religion - framed around Truth, the right sect is the one where one believes true answers lie.

• Buddhism - the right sect is a matter of individual fit rather than ultimate correctness. It provides pragmatic methods in place of Truth.

This means finding a Buddhist sect involves considering what you need as a unique individual, in order to move in the direction you want to go, to reach the place your goal lies. Questions can include:

• What do I find inspiring?

• What motivates me?

• Where am I, spiritually?

• What am I currently capable of?

• What are my strengths and weaknesses?

• What directions can I go from here?

• Which directions do I want to go?

• What tools are available to take me from where I am to where I want to go?

• What do I like?

On the Path

A garden path was used to metaphorically introduce Buddhist paths, in reality, a more apt comparison might be a remote hiking trail over rough terrain in the distant mountains. It may be difficult, uncertain, and at times dangerous. Luckily, someone has been on the path before, and teachers and communities are available.

Walking on the Shoulders of Giants

Followings a path allows you to leverage the insights and hard work of many people, it gets you somewhere faster and more predictably.

A spiritual path has way-points gives you the direction that previous path-makers have worked out. Part of the definition of a path as a religious system is the existence of defined stages, and a way of knowing if you have accomplished each stage.

A path always takes you somewhere, in a direction that someone thought was useful, giving at least some sort of guarantee. As long as there is a path ahead of you, further progress is possible. This should be caveated by reminding you a path may not take you where you want to go - remember to constantly check whether or not it is still heading in the direction you want to go. If not, consider an alternate route or continuing off-path.

Choosing a Path

There are three crucial questions to ask when picking a path:

• Does the path take you somewhere you want to go?

• Can it actually get you there?

• Do you have the strength and skills to follow it?

Selecting a path is also a matter of taste

• Do you want to get close to God? Or as far away as possible?

• Do you want to be holy and serene? Or sweaty and ecstatic?

Off the Path

The claim “I am following my own path” is absurd as it implies a unique, new path, which by definition you cannot follow. If you want to go further, you must extend the path yourself.

There are three things this can mean:

• Wandering off into the wilderness, off of any path

• Blazing a trail, building a new path for others

• Aimlessly jumping from one path to another, taking a few steps on each one, doing what seems attractive at the moment

The third is what most people mean, and it’s not actually going off a path. It just doesn’t take you far enough along any single path to be useful, at the same time also not taking you into new territory. You are unlikely to get far from your starting point - years later you may be dealing with the same emotional problems that plagued you at the start.

Of course, it can be helpful to investigate several paths, but at some point you need to go far enough down a single path to bring real change, to progress from your starting point.

Mixed Feelings

Everyone, when approaching a spiritual tradition, will feel a mixture of attraction and repulsion.

Every religious system seems to have delightful aspects and irritating ones. It is important to accept this ambiguity, however uncomfortable. Any quick judgement you have will likely be wrong, and it can take months or years of investigation to find a good fit. It is important to embrace both attraction and repulsion to find the right fit in the long run.

In Buddhism, this is a deeper point: ambiguity is an essential aspect of experience. Learning to accept ambiguity is a key Buddhist practice.

Approach Gradually

Every religious group has a series of stages that allow increasing involvement as your interest and understanding deepens. It is important to move through the stages as you become ready to. Mixed feelings will always be present, but each stage requires a greater level of confidence and lower level of repulsion.

It may be tempting to ignore our feelings of repulsion for several reasons

• We like the feeling of attraction and dislike the feeling of repulsion. We try to get rid of the bad feeling by pretending it isn’t there.

• We want to be accepted by the religious community, expressing our repulsion will make us less accepted

• We want to believe we’ve succeeded in finding the right fit, to avoid additional time consuming hard work to keep searching.

It is important to discuss these mixed feelings as they are inevitable and not inherently problematic. However, one must learn to start the conversation in an open and respectful way:

• “I like some things about your system, but practice X is obviously wrong.”

• “I like some things about your system, but I am bothered about X, because it conflicts with Y. Am I missing something?”

The act of discuss the nature of ambiguous feelings itself is a central theme in Buddhism, and can be a springboard for profound teachings.

Opinions and Curiosity

Not knowing is uncomfortable because it represents a void where truth should be. We often try to fill this void by jumping to conclusions. Once we form an opinion, we no longer need to wonder.

Many people feel entitled (or even obligated) to take sides and express strong opinions about things they are ignorant of. The fear of not knowing leads to cynicism and blind faith. They use rigidity as a defense against uncertainty, which helps them avoid ambiguous situations.

Forming a meaningful and well-informed opinion can require a lot of effort, and it is not always necessary unless a decision needs to be made based on it. What truly matters is curiosity, or the absence of it.

Non-dual vision (rigpa) represents the essence of ambiguity and is the goal of the Buddhist path. To cultivate this vision, we gradually let go of fixed ideas about ourselves, others, and the connections between.

Curiosity involves allowing ourselves to be open to ambiguity and embracing the mixture of form and emptiness: knowing and not knowing. It means actively seeking uncertainty and embracing things as they are, dancing with them. By softening our boundaries, we can experience wonderment.

Yanas

Buddhism is enormously complex and diverse. Yanas are vehicles within Buddhism designed to guide you spiritually from one place to another, helping you determine which aspects are important to you.

Different vehicles are useful depending on your current location and desired destination. If a Yana does not take you where you want to go, you can disregard it. If you are not in a position to board a Yana, you can either ignore it or find a way to get there.

The choice of Yana depends on your current location and desired destination. A submarine is a suitable means of transportation from the shore to the bottom of the ocean, but it is not ideal for traveling from Denver to Chicago. An airplane would be a better option for that. While it might be possible to use an airplane to reach the bottom of the ocean, it is not recommended.

In this sense, Yanas are incompatible. They’re all valid, but you can only utilize one at a time. Each Yana stems from a set of distinct principles.

When consuming Buddhist knowledge, it is crucial to identify which Yana serves as the framework for the discussion. A statement that aligns with the principles of one Yana may appear false or nonsensical when interpreted using the principles of another Yana. This can even result in "Yana shock".

To comprehend Vajrayana (Tantra and Dzogchen), one must first grasp the relationship between truth and methods in Buddhism. From a Buddhist perspective, contradictory statements from different Yanas are not problematic as they are considered methods rather than absolute Truths.

Yanas are not Buddhist sects

Sects can be compared to automotive brands, while yanas can be compared to vehicle categories.

The usefulness of different vehicles depends on what you want to do. Each vehicle category has its own sub-categories, and vehicles can be classified in various ways. Different categorizations serve different purposes.

These categorizations and classifications are only useful in context, as ways of pointing out similarities and differences. They are not absolute truths and rarely lead to controversies.

Buddhist sects can be likened to name brands with institutional ownership. Most sects offer multiple yanas, but the number can vary, sometimes even consisting of just one.

Yana Shock is like a culture shock

the fear, disorientation, and anger that comes from being thrown suddenly into an alien value system. It can happen when Buddhists familiar with one yana first encounter another.

Some differences are slight and easy to adjust to. Others are profound and non-arbitrary, expressing deep differences in cultural values that seem severely wrong.

The different yanas contradict each other profoundly, as they are built on different fundamental principles, and have different concepts of truth (especially Truth).

• For Mahayana, emptiness is the ultimate truth and ultimate goal

• For Vajrayana, emptiness is the starting point

Sutrayana vs Tantrayana

Sutrayana defines itself as everything that is not Tantrayana (so Hinayana plus Mahayana). The scriptures of Sutrayana are called Sutras. The scriptures of Tantrayana are called Tantas.

Sutrayana asserts that life is suffering, so you should escape it through Nirvana - but that is effectively impossible.

• Sutrayana starts with a deep revulsion for samsara. It is about rejecting and transcending the world. Without this revulsion, you can’t even start this path. If you think the world can be fixed, you do not have revulsion for samara.

• The Sutric path entails self-denial.

• Sutrayana’s absolute domains - Nirvana or emptiness as alternate planes or dimensions of existence - are not credible. The modern world has already largely rejected Christian Heaven, and a Buddhist equivalent is not too different from a metaphysical standpoint.

• The result is liberation from suffering. You abandon all desire and anything that provokes desire. This is not an attractive proposition unless you are desperately unhappy.

Tantrayana posits that life, marked by both splendid and dreadful moments, should be enjoyed and celebrated; enlightenment in this world is realistically feasible.

• Vajrayana is largely synonymous with Tantrayana

• Tantrayana begins with the recognition of emptiness, which is considered realistically obtainable by ordinary individuals. It offers methods for developing a sufficient recognition of emptiness.

• The Tantric path entails transformation and liberation.

• Tantra emphasizes the actual, physical and social, experienced world. This is the world that secular humanism affirms.

• The result is liberation into mastery, power, play, and nobility. It promises freedom from pointless constrictions.

In actuality, Sutrayana is a somewhat theoretical construct. Actual non-Tantric Buddhisms are diverse, and do not universally adopt all the features of Sutra. Nevertheless, Sutra acts as a useful starting point in understanding how other Buddhisms differ from Tantra.

Non-Tantric Buddhism retain vestiges of Sutra's anti-world, anti-body, anti-self, anti-pleasure, anti-mention, and anti-life orientation.

Tantra is more comparable with modern sensibilities and the secular humanism worldview, affirming the value of everyday life (which Sutra denies). In spite of this, it is still widely considered medieval, and has failed to become a major thread in contemporary Western Buddhism.

The Tantric Base: Spacious Passion

The Power of Attitude

Attitudes transcends the boundaries of internal and external, subjective and objective. It encompasses emotional and mental states, as well as physical bodily postures. You might suggest it is a tendency towards a particular action or response - a disposition to act.

Tantra is about the world and its inhabitants, acting on the basis of their “attitudes toward”, with accurate action requiring a blurring of the subjective/objective boundary.

Maintaining an attitude implies a reliable disposition to act in perceptive, compassionate, and effective ways in response to problems and opportunities. It simplifies life while remaining intricately technical, yet only serve as guidelines for nurturing a helpful, cheerful, and creative attitude.

Many Religions Begin with Existential Problems

The foundational premise of religion often centers on the existence of a fundamental problem. Religion tries to convince you that:

• Everyone’s got a problem, and it’s really bad

• This problem is pervasive, it affects everything in the whole universe, and nothing can escape it

• There is no practical way of solving it (EXCEPT through our religion)

Some examples of these problems

• Eternal suffering after death (Christianity)

• All of existence is pervaded by impermanence, suffering, and non-self (mainstream Buddhism)

• Inherent meaningless of life, rendering action impossible (existentialism/nihilism)

According to Tantra, there are no such problems.

Nothing Is Fundamentally Wrong with the World

Tantra challenges mainstream wisdom, the tantric claim about the nature of reality is that there is nothing wrong with it.

It is also obviously wrong - there are problems, and not everything is ok. To make sense of this contradiction, we distinguish between practical and “fundamental” problems.

Consider one of the mainstream Buddhist “Three Marks of Existence” mentioned earlier - suffering:

• If the universe is about us, and we don’t like suffering, the world would be wrong.

• If there was a God who allowed suffering, the world would be wrong.

• If the world was supposed to be some way that it is not, the world would be wrong.

However, there is no God, the world was not designed, it was not supposed to be any way, there is no eternal Truth to compare it against. Therefore, there can be no fundamental problem with it.

In Tantra, the “Three Marks of Existence” are reframed as the “Three Doors of Liberation”

• Impermanence provides delightful entertainment

• Suffering gives the energy to act

• Non-self is simply how you are

Spacious Passion Relishes Real Difficulties

Spaciousness entails openness to everything in the world, free from the entanglements of moral judgements. It involves allowing everything in the world to be as it is, and accepting all outcomes as they are. Spaciousness is the tolerance of chaos, unpredictability, discontinuity, and nebulosity.

Passion drives the desire to actively connect with everything. You are interested in everything, eager to learn, and eager to intervene. It is the desire to create and enjoy, it is what drives projects - tinkering with reality to see what happens.

Problems are Not a Problem

So, there are no spiritual problems, but there are real problems.

Spaciousness and passion each lead you to regard all situations as workable. Nothing is cosmically awful; practical problems do not probe the world is wrong. Instead, problems are a sub-category of opportunity: a chance to act to make things better than they would be otherwise.

Workable doesn’t necessarily guarantee a solution. Nothing is wrong doesn’t imply everything can be fixed or made perfect. Catastrophe is always possible; death is always certain.

But, spaciousness and passion together cultivate a deep care towards the world and desire to urgently fix problems as best as you can - and be unruffled when you fail.

This is a realistic attitude that produces a fearlessness - not a stubborn or idiotic one though; it is the fearlessness of knowing that the world is neither good nor bad; that it is not actively working against you; that things can appear to happen randomly; that you will do your best; and so outcomes have no spiritual meaning.

The world is full of problems and opportunities, and it is rich with resources for improvisation, creativity, caring, and connection.

The Joy of Enjoy the Sacred World

According to mainstream buddhism, it is critical to avoid indulging in sense pleasures. They attach you to the world, and the world is wrong. Mundane reality is utterly impure and defiled, the Sacred is found in another realm.

According to Tantra, the world is fantastic, and we should enjoy them as thoroughly and often as possible, as long as it has no negative practical consequences. There is no objective good or bad, judgements are based on personal likes and dislikes - Tantra trains you to suspend such judgement. Everything in the world is sacred, and enjoyment should be inseparable from reverence.

• Mundane reality is a Pure Land

• Samsara is Nirvana

• Reality is uncreated; there is no God

The “Self” Poses No Spiritual Obstacle

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with you.

This is the tantric claim about the self. Ego is not evil, it is not a spiritual problem.

You do not need to fix, improve, transform, transcend yourself. Tantra is about living here and now, you are how you are now, and waiting to get fixed before living is not helpful. There is no higher True Self, cosmic All-Self, or Buddha Within that needs to be awakened.

Emotions, including desire, anger, sloth, worry, doubt, ignorance (Buddhist Kleshas, akin to the seven deadly sins) are not wrong. They can be unpleasant, but also fun. Neither of these are evil.

This doesn’t mean there are no wrong actions, it means that experiencing emotions does not force you to act wrongly. Tantra offers a toolkit of methods to sever the habitual connections between emotions and actions.

The Insignificance of Your Feelings

We often cling to emotions to the extent of defining ourselves through them. However, everyone has the same set of emotions (in different proportions). What you feel in which situations is spiritually meaningless, as in you cannot find any spiritual answers through them.

Personal emotional patterns do not validate one’s existence or establish a unique narrative - you are not special.

This realization grants emotional freedom, this means what has happened need not dictate how you feel; at the same time, it does not afford the excuse of “I wanted to do the right thing, but my emotions got in the way”.

You are Not Perfect

“There is nothing fundamentally wrong with you” does not mean you are perfect.

It means you have no cosmic defects, but are still prone to practical faults, such as bad habits. However, the thing that drives these practical faults also correspond to a specific form of wisdom. Different methods of tantra allow you to flip each Klesha into a corresponding wisdom.

Accepting Your Imperfections as You Are

Tantra allows you to view your counter-productive habits with some affection and humor - even as you try to overcome them.

The point of tantra is to live as considerately, effectively, and enjoyably as possible just as you are.

The Good News and The Bad News

The good news is that there are no spiritual problems.

The bad news is there are no spiritual solutions.

Spirituality claims the mundane world is garbage and should be abandoned, spirituality claims there is a Heaven, Nirvana, or transcendent reality of some sort that is all good.

Tantra is non-spiritual, it is about the everyday, concrete world, just as it appears. It is not interested in escapist fantasies. This world is where we are. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with it. It’s real, it’s workable, it’s enjoyable, and it needs our help.

The Tantric Path: Unclogging Energy

Tantra is not about techniques - although traditional and modern practitioners may describe it as a set of esoteric practices (or as advanced mental technology).

This isn’t exactly wrong, but it might not capture the essence of Tantra

• Conceiving Tantra as techniques can be a roadblock to necessary innovations

• This view also risks aggressive self-aggrandizement, where the more techniques you master, the better you think you are

Tantra is about your relationship with everything in your life. One’s attitude is what matters in Tantra, not simply performing tantric practice. This is more or less also Dzogchen’s take on Tantra, citing it as artificial and conceptually complicated - the best practice is simply to “remain in state”.

When tantric practices take precedence, they become “power tools for transformation” in fulfilling tantra’s promise of power. This leads to an arrogance that gives onlookers the impression that Vajrayana is for dickheads. Remember, the attitude is the union of spacious freedom with passionate connections. These tend to melt away arrogance, aggression, and self-aggrandizement.

Another take on tantric power is as a mental upgrade. If you can master difficult mental techniques, you can eliminate your defects and construct a better you! This may fit within the Sutrayana framework, which is largely about the self (or lack thereof), but becomes misleading when applied to Tantra, as it is not about the self, but relationships, connections, and interactions.

Unleashing Free-Flowing Energy - as in an every day metabolic kind of energy, not a spiritual one.

Energy is potential. In this context, it is the immediate potential for change. It powers passion, action, and connection. The union of passion and spaciousness releases energy, and energy unbound intensifies passion and widens spaciousness. Tantra amplifies all three, with each reinforcing the others.

This intensification can be uncomfortable. You may feel that your emotions are overwhelming, and that the world is excessively complex and confusing. More of both might be the last thing you want.

The choice then lies between Tantra and Sutra:

• Tantra involves facing yourself squarely and experiencing your feelings fully, immersing yourself in a world with all its vivid fascinations, unpredictable agonies and ecstasies.

• Sutra involves suppressing your unruly passions, energy, and spaciousness, seeking tranquility by retreating into a safe space where your impulses are inhibited.

Luckily, this is not a one time choice. It is possible to take both approaches at different times to cope with more or less intense circumstances, but you cannot practice point both at the same time - they point in opposite directions.

Starting Tantra involves practicing in a sandbox, a safe environment where you can intensify your spacious passion and unclog your energy. The aim is to experience emotions unreservedly, as a brilliant, vibrant biological energy with no inherent implications. Feel them without suppression, analysis, judgement, fixation, or need to inflict them on others.

While safe practice is not the centerpiece of Tantra, they can be understood like scales in music - they lay the foundation for a masterful performance that is everyday life. It produces unconditional confidence that does not guarantee good outcomes, but enables you to face difficulties without recoiling.

The Psychology of Optimal Experience

In Western psychology, "flow" refers to a mental state that occurs when you are fully immersed in an activity that demands your complete attention and skill. It’s highly enjoyable, often the best thing in life. It is also very elusive.

Flow shares several commonalities with Tantra:

• A sense of enjoyment

• Focused attention and intense energy

• Skilled perception of details

• Altered perception of time, forcing you into the now

• A loss of self (funnily, psychology sees loss of self as a temporary illusion, whereas Buddhism sees the self as a temporary illusion)

• Requires and facilitates mastery of skills and a sense power.

There are conditions to flow that Tantra does not share. Flow requires a task that:

• Offers a reasonable likelihood of success

• Demands total attention due to its difficulty

• Has clear rules and goals

• Provides immediate feedback

• Has an absence of distractions

Intensification

Most tantric practices involve intensification. Increasing passion motivates extreme action. Increasing spaciousness gives room for weirdness. Increasing energy fuels extreme emotion.

Intensification is not a goal in itself, but is a method within the path. It prepares you for the culmination of effective action by developing spaciousness.

Intensity builds capacity, your ability to effectively act in extreme situations, by developing passion and spaciousness together - Tantra is extreme because reality is extreme, it will take you places most people never go.

You might also go way too far, revealing the underlying structure of experience, in the form of breaking. What is revealed is that Tantra is big and stupid, wildly enthusiastic but perhaps a psychological defense against experience the rawness of reality.

In this case, you might try Dzogchen, which is approximately Tantra minus big and stupid.

Tantric Non-Duality

Charnel Ground - “Nothing is Sacred”

Hope is a compelling concept. People turn towards it as an escape from the horrors of reality.

However, hope is also merely a practical improvement to life - it cannot alter your existential state. What do we do without hope?

Viewing the world as a charnel ground - where human corpses are dumped to rot

Reality contains a raw, intense visualization of the awfulness of this world. It’s a dangerous, horrifying, chaotic realm. Nobody gets out alive.

Many religions manage to convince people that this is not true through hope for salvation; the only problem is religion is a fantasy that serves as a misguided escape, there is nowhere you can go where you won’t find these horrors.

Reality is also not a hell. Curiosity, creativity, and celebration cannot exist (let alone thrive) in hell. You cannot maintain the tantric attitude in hell - you are preoccupied with resentment of suffering. As long as you think the world is unfair and should be different, as long as you have an opinion on how life ought to be, you cannot maintain the tantric attitude.

In reality, there is no hope. But there is opportunity.

Sooner or later you’ll die, but you might as well do something in the meantime.

Pure Land - “Nothing is Ordinary”

The tantric practice of “pure vision”, like “charnel ground”, involves a shift in perspective - a habit of interpreting the world in a particular way.

Pure vision serves as an antidote to misperceiving people and things as ordinary, allowing you to overlook their vivid details and manipulate them solely for boring and practical purposes - you are no longer surprised or delighted by them.

Approaching the world as if it were a Pure Land - and people as if they were Buddhas

In a pure land, everything is enjoyable. If you are able to experience any situation as a pure land, then you will enjoy it. Nothing is unsatisfactory or threatening. Relax.

This might evoke notions of Heaven; except, the pure land does not fixate “good”. Pure vision makes everything interesting, not good. What makes things interesting is dynamic interaction, that is neither subjective nor objective.

This is a good thing. In heaven, everything is so blandly pleasurable that you turn into an indolent idiot. There is no motivation to do anything but experience pleasure, it doesn’t allow for meaningful action.

The pure land is comfortable enough for meditation, but not entirely pleasant. It is varied enough for you to push you to make yourself useful. In the pure land, flowers are thorny, predators can be heard, corpses can be found.

Oops, we’ve wandered into the charnel ground again.

Approaching Non-duality

What we almost mistook for heaven and hell look to be interconnected. The pure land is the charnel ground; the charnel ground is the pure land.

It is not the case that everything good resides in the pure land, and everything bad in the charnel ground. Instead, reality is non-dual; everything is sacred and nightmarish, everything is perfect and horrifying. You too.

The views merely highlight different emotional responses to non-duality:

• Charnel ground is the antidote to eternalism - the delusion that the universe has an ultimate metaphysical meaning

• Pure vision is the antidote to nihilism - the delusion that the universe is full of purposeless life.

The Tantric Aim: What is Vajrayana?

The Western Buddhist consensus answer seems to be “Buddhist ethics make you a better person, and meditation promotes mental health and social functioning.” However, this is pretty much just secular liberal ethics.

Perhaps a better question to ask is what do you want from it?

It’s a hard question, without one right answer. One perspective suggests that it offers a way of living that is enjoyable for you and valuable to others. The aim is elegant, accurate, kind, effective, and expansive action in the real world through mastery, power, play, and nobility. There is no achieving the aim, no endpoint.

You can get better at it though, which is what Tantra is good for.

At Emptiness

Vajrayana Buddhism begins where Sutrayana ends: at emptiness. Vajrayana delves into realms beyond emptiness, about which mainstream Buddhism (Sutrayana) has nothing to say.

Few Buddhist systems go beyond emptiness, but among them are Zen, Tantra, Dzogchen, and Mahamudra (not discussed).

• Zen starts with enlightenment, there is nothing you need to do to become enlightened, except perhaps noticing it. Once you do, there is nothing more to do. There is no beyond emptiness. It is open-ended, you can wander aimlessly.

• Tantra has a well-defined objective and specific routes to reach it. It is deeply action oriented. You should not deviate from the narrow, precisely defined paths. Without proper instruction and practice, it is pointless.

• Dzogchen grows out of Tantra and shares the starting point of enlightenment with Zen. But, at emptiness, there are still useful and enjoyable things you can do. It is both action-oriented and open-ended. You can have plans, but can also act spontaneously to new opportunities as they arise.

Dzogchen

Dzogchen, a subdivision of Vajrayana, has found recent popularity, particularly among Western Buddhists, for its simplicity. However, it is not well understood. In Tibet, Dzogchen was considered an advanced and secret teaching - this is no longer true, yet good introductory resources remain scarce.

The base of Dzogchen is momentary enlightenment, which is elusive. Almost nobody is qualified to practice Dzogchen. This is not necessarily a problem, and there are compelling reasons to study it in spite of this - it has an exceptionally attractive worldview. The ideas presented in meaningness are a rough secular presentation of the Dzogchen view.

Dzogchen is often called the “highest teaching of Buddhism” and “fastest route to enlightenment”. This is the reason for its allure, and it’s also misleading. The best teaching is whatever is most useful to you, now.

Dzogchen is elegant, clear, powerful, practical, and simple. It is also dry and abstract, to make sense of it requires inspired explanation from a Lama, and years of meditation practice or unusual intellectual capacity.

The Dzogchen world view is exceptionally compatible with modern Western culture, to the point that it may be understood as common sense. That would be to miss how extraordinarily radical it is.

There is No Holiness

Almost every culture, religion, ideology, or world-view holds some things as sacred, pure, and holy - as well as profane, unclean, or taboo.

Among the few exceptions are Zen and Dzogchen - where nothing is inherently sacred. If you spend enough time with Zen or Dzogchen teachers, they will contradict things you think are sacrosanct, defy your expectations of holiness, roast your sacred cows, and do things no holy person ever should.

They may violate fundamental assumptions you didn’t even know you had.

There is Only Vastness

Any fixed belief is a reference point. Reference points are bricks to build a prison of identity. Meditation allows this prison to collapse, revealing a boundless sky - the vastness of non-duality, where purity and impurity are equally meaningless.

In every situation, we have the opportunity to experience awe and beauty, referred to as “kadag” in Dzogchen, signifying “primordial purity”. All reality is primordially pure because purification is both unattainable and unnecessary; nothing has ever been impure. We only created the illusion of impurity as a reference point, to avoid the vertigo of vastness.

By experiencing the brilliant energy of emotions without their conceptual content and unnecessary judgements, we need not divide the world into the dualities of pure and impure, sacred and profane.

Experiencing the dissolution of dualist boundaries can be extremely funny, but until you understand this, it is also easy to be offended.

No Cosmic Justice, No Karma

It seems obvious that the world is unjust, much bad is left unpunished and much good is left unrewarded. People turn to religion for answers.

The answer you’ll typically find is that the universe is not inherently flawed, we just fail to see how it falls in the cosmic plan - cosmic justice will rectify it behind the scenes.

Buddhism offers a similar view, the Law of Karma. It posits that the apparent injustice in our lives stem from the balancing of rewards or punishments for our past actions in past lives. The karmic effects from this life will also persist in our future lives.

This cosmic justice requires a certain, eternal, external, constant, and universal notion of itself - a concept fundamentally incongruent with the fundamental Buddhist principle that nothing can be those things. This presents an unresolved contradiction in many Buddhist systems that lacks coherent resolutions.

Dzogchen acknowledges karma, just not a certain, eternal, external, constant, or universal one - there is no cosmic justice. Karma is a matter of habit, and therefore, empty. It happens when we view the world habitually, when certain situations must lead to certain emotions, which must lead to certain actions. If we can break the habitual cycle, karma is not guaranteed.

If There Was Perfect Justice, It Would Negate Itself

Even if there was “Perfect Justice”, ethical action would be impossible, the very belief in it would negate it.

Performing supposedly ethical actions with the knowledge of such, and with the intention of being rewarded (either in this life or a future one) is self-serving and self-righteous - it is no longer just about doing good.

Think Again

Knowing What You Don’t Know

Author: Adam Grant

Recommended by current tennis buddy and future VC Joycelyn Feng after I complained I didn’t want to read any of the books I bought.

This wasn’t a mind-blowing book, but still thought provoking as over the last year I’ve found myself knowing that I don’t know, hopefully that changes soon :)

Below are some of my key takeaways.

Individual Rethinking

The act of revisiting and revising solutions empirically improves outcomes.

This isn’t due to alternate solutions being inherently better; Rather, the act of rethinking increases the probability of finding an alternate solution with stronger evidence or outcomes.

Expressed simply, it is not:

• Rethink → new idea → change belief → better outcome

Rather:

• Rethink → new idea → better outcome → change belief

Of course, not all reassessments of existing beliefs will be better or “more correct” - further elevating the importance of adopting an actively open-minded mindset in hope that a subset of those will evolve into better beliefs.

In static realms, intelligence is the ability to think and learn; In turbulent realms, intelligence is the ability to rethink and unlearn.

Interestingly, static realm intelligence introduces two main biases that build inertia against turbulent realm intelligence.

• Confirmation bias - seeing what we expect to see

• Desirability bias - seeing what we want to see

The “smarter” you are (rather, think you are), the better your ability to be self-assured in your beliefs and the harder it can be to see your own limitations.

The remedy is humility with an intellectual twist.

Humility is knowing that you don’t know

• I do think this is a natural onramp as it can become obvious by simply observing how brilliant other people are - and if it’s not obvious, perhaps it’s time to hop to a bigger pond.

Intelligent humility is knowing what you don’t know

• Still trying to figure this one out, I’ll get back to this hopefully.

• Obviously there’s levels to this - it’s quite easy to say “I don’t understand Buddhism”, it’s harder to say “I don’t know why despite intellectually understanding the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, I still harbor desires that lead to suffering”.

Short-term Pessimism, Long-term Optimism

Navigating the world with doubts about every belief you hold seems like a nice way to develop a debilitating inferiority complex.

The “Confidence Sweet Spot” is introduced as a secure belief in yourself with an uncertain belief in your tools. I’m not sure I like this phrasing as it introduces a duality between you and your methods where I don’t think there is one.

Capturing a more non-dual, participatory stance between an individual and reality, I think this is better expressed as adopting a short-term pessimism and long-term optimism. Hypothesize how your ideas will affect reality, and in turn see how what happened in reality affected you; reality (or your beliefs about reality) may not have improved for now, but you’ve certainly improved your understanding of your connectedness to the world around you.

Associated with this evolution should be a deepening of the decision process, increasing its expressiveness in explaining reality as you accumulate counter-examples to your prior beliefs.

Interpersonal Rethinking

I don’t dance but here’s an analogy anyways.

In an attempt to consolidate this section succinctly, I’ll lean on the dance analogy that was introduced but don’t think was fleshed out properly. What I like about this analogy is it blurs monism and dualism - the boundary between two individuals still exists, but in a nebulous sense - each parter is free to move as they wish, but both are influenced by and hold the ability to influence their partner.

Acknowledging this freedom is important - if you force your partner to move in certain ways, they will stop dancing and walk away.

Instead, if you use your action not to invoke action, but suggest the possibility of action (affordances) - your partner will be be free to form hypotheses around the affordances of your actions and test them on you, leading to an ever improving intellectual dance of beliefs.

In short - work collaboratively and ask good questions :)

Collective Rethinking

Binary bias is the human tendency to seek clarity by binarizing complex spectrums.

Changing someone’s binary viewpoint is difficult - but by introducing complexity and acknowledge multitude and nebulosity of a topic, you also lower the friction of rethinking; now, instead of flipping one’s entire viewpoint, you afford them the possibility of ever-so-slightly tweaking one dimension of their belief without the added burden of simultaneously tackling all other dimensions at once.

This intuitively translates to the collective level (organizations, communities, etc.) as success are often expressed in terms of a limited set of metrics, but the complexity of how each member contributed to each process is lost if we rely on a binarized (or “dollarized”) outcome.

You can’t make a collective successful by telling it to do better. You make it successful by accounting for and constantly rethinking every process.

Meaningness *

Better ways of Thinking, Feeling, and Acting

Author: David Chapman

Recommended by my kindergarten/primary school buddy Max Langenkamp while reconnecting over a bowl of oyster ramen in Taipei. (二屋牡蠣拉麵 - it was so delicious I went back for lunch the next day).

Landing a job as a data scientist at Tesla seems to have been the canonical ending to my academic journey, and its probably the first time in my life I have no idea when and what I want to do next.

That’s not true, I want to do something meaningful for myself and for others, but I don’t understand meaning.

Perhaps one day I’ll have my own metaphysical thoughts, but as the first step, here’s my notes reading Meaningness.

Eternalism and Nihilism…

The two most powerful and opposing approaches to meaning.

Often and understandably presented as a duality, both are failed (albeit genuine) attempts at resolving the ambiguity of meaning.

They seem to be the only possible alternatives to each other, and each fulfills the repulsive qualities of the other. They’re both half right, but they can’t be added up to form be completely right.

Eternalism is rooted in the denial of ambiguity in meaning - it posits that everything has a definite, true meaning. Humans obviously don’t know everything, so objectivity must come from a transcendent source with an ordering principle. This source can be a theistic God, alternatively described as “fate” or “destiny” in non-religious contexts.

Eternalism requires you to buy into the cosmic plan - to either turn a blind eye to the “bad bits” of reality, or to trust that there is a net positive to all suffering. In either case, it seems much suffering is done and much good is left undone.

Nihilism is rooted in the denial of meaning - it posits that meaning in not objective and nothing has meaning, there is no cosmic plan.

What Nihilism gets right is that there is no objective source of meaning, meaning there is no ultimate basis for accepting or rejecting things. This is the acceptance of nebulosity, the chaos and contingency of the world.

True nihilism involves active hostility towards pretty much everything that makes life worth living, it relies on self-imploded intelligence and willpower to rid the world of meaning.

You deny the vastness and complexity of reality. The only problem is, denial doesn’t change reality, only your perception of it. Its as if you were lost at sea, and you build yourself a nice windowless raft for yourself and lock yourself inside; sure, everything seems simple and confined, only, you’re still lost at sea. And you know this in the back of your head, and eventually you’ll either starve or be forced to face the vastness of reality - what’s for dinner?

They’re both half right, but don’t add up to a whole truth

• Eternalism correctly recognizes that reality is meaningful, and must be accepted as is - all of its variety, pains, and pleasures.

• Nihilism correctly recognizes that there is no ultimate source of meaning, it accepts the nebulosity, chaos, and contingency of the world.

The Spectrum Between - A False Dichotomy

Much adoption of either eternalism or nihilism are rooted in the obvious flaws in the other, and the perception that the two stances form a dichotomy.

However, the flaws on both sides often become unbearable. So it seems we have two choices - swap stances to the other side (repeatedly), or find a compromise between the two.

It’s in this compromise where we find a spectrum of new stances that posit some parts of life are meaningful, and others are not. These stances fall into one of two views:

• Things are either objectively meaningful or effectively meaningless

• If meaning is not objective, it must be subjective.

Although these “confused” stances carry the inconsistencies of both eternalism and nihilism, they are also seem to be more tolerable for daily use.

Mission is the eternalism-flavored reconciliation. Mission overcomes Eternalism’s rejection of nebulosity by admitting nebulosity of the trivial/mundane domain, while reinforcing a fixed higher (but not universal) purpose.

The fixation of a higher purpose, the denial of a universal purpose, and the allowance of mundane nebulosity implies the existence of a unique personal mission that should be discovered accomplished at the expense of mundane concerns.

This sounds nice, unfortunately there isn’t an inherent and permanent higher purpose for you to pursue. With eternalism, you forgo the responsibility of choice to fulfill the cosmic plan. By forgoing the cosmic plan and regaining choice, mission becomes self-righteousness hiding behind a facade of being in accordance with the cosmic plan.

What are the mundane concerns of those who have a higher purpose?

Materialism is the nihilism-flavored reconciliation and the counterpart of Mission. It overcomes Nihilism’s rejection of meaning by admitting to mundane purposes and rejecting higher purposes. The most common and obvious of these mundane purposes is in the pursuit of only self-interested purposes, such as popularity, fame, sex, status, and power.

Materialism seems like common sense - it’s easy to arrive here based on simple observations that getting what you want makes you happy, and not getting what you want doesn’t make you happy; Therefore, to maximize happiness, I should try to get enough of I want.

Materialism → Happiness → Meaning

This stance is mostly not wrong in that mundane purposes are real purposes. However, the flowchart above often breaks down during two primary realizations:

1. Getting what you want doesn’t always make you happy (materialism → happiness is broken)

2. Ignoring unselfish purposes can make life feel meaningless. (happiness → meaning is broken)

Existentialism is another failed attempt at bridging eternalism and nihilism as it shares the same incorrect underlying metaphysical assumption - that meaning is something to be localized.

• In eternalism, meaning is localized to the object - it is objective.

• In nihilism meaning is not inherent to anything, and therefore cannot exist.

• In existentialism, meaning is localized within the subject - it is subjective.

Existentialism posits that meaning is not inherent, but can be created by the subject. This can go one of two ways:

1. An idealized ego in which you maintain the illusion that you have the capacity to make individual judgements about the world. This can be attractive as it tends towards the mission/eternalism end of the spectrum.

2. An intelligent realization that while meaning cannot be objective, it also cannot be created from nothing - true subjective meanings are impossible. If meanings cannot be objective or subjective - they cannot exist. You’ve arrived at nihilism.

The way out of existentialism is the realization that meaning can exist despite being neither objective nor subjective, it is accomplished through dynamic interaction with reality.

Nebulosity

Stemming from the word “nebula”, or mist/cloud in Latin, nebulosity means “cloud-like-ness”.

Clouds have the interesting property of being both real, but impossible to completely pin down. Some properties of clouds:

• From afar, they look like a well defined object with clear boundaries; up close, the boundaries disappear and we may not even be able to know when we’ve entered one

• It is impossible to say where a cloud ends and “non-cloud” begins

• Clouds can change in shape, size, and even slowly disappear - but it is impossible to quantify these exactly.

• It can be impossible to say whether a cloud exists in a particular place or not.

Meanings behave in these ways too.

Whether we’re talking about words, art, or life, meanings cannot be well defined and fully specified, meanings can even change over time, we can even disagree about meanings. Yet, they do mean something.

There are two primary approaches to rejecting nebulosity - eternalism fixates it, nihilism denies it, muddled middles try to do both; all lead to problems down the line.

The difficulty in acknowledging nebulosity is not that we don’t know what true meaning is, but rather in accepting that it is inherently ambiguous. That is, nebulosity doesn’t exist as a product of lack of knowledge - it is a built in feature of reality.

Pattern

Pattern is how we interpret and make sense of the world. It is the regular occurrence of various features in reality that make effective action possible.

Evolution has a tendency to find the patterns most conducive to survival and reproduction, but not all patterns are useful or meaningful. Humans have a tendency of frequently perceiving patterns that aren’t there - we’re particularly good at spotting faces when there are none.

On the other hand, we can also miss patterns that do exist. But in general, we are biased towards pattern recognition as evolutionarily, overreacting to false positive is usually not too serious, while it just takes one under-reaction to a false negative to cease to exist :)

Eternalism is a cognitive form of pattern - everything is meaningful, we just haven’t discovered it yet, but god has!

Nihilism is a dismissal of the significance pattern - nothing is meaningful, and patterns do not convey purpose or value.

Unity and Diversity

Boundaries and connections

• Monism is the idea that boundaries do not exist, the idea of self and the universe are one. As a social ideology, it tends towards the totalitarian denial of individual responsibility.

• Dualism is the idea that reality consists of separate objects within clear boundaries between them. As a social ideology, it tends towards denial of collective responsibility.

Monism is the fixation of total connection and denial of boundaries. The fantasy of monism is the total connection between you and the universe (or god) - all is one substance. The refusal to make distinctions quickly collides with reality when you realize you do not have the ability to affect everything you want.

Dualism is the fixation of boundaries and denial of total connection. The fantasy of dualism is the clear separation between you and the world frees you from responsibility. By blinding you to connections, it allows the evasion of ethical responsibility and produces alienation from the natural world and from other people.

Monism and Dualism Recursion

Much like yin and yang, monism and dualism are as distinct as black and white, yet each contains the other, resulting in a pathological counter-dependency between the two.

Monism within Dualism

Dualism assumes categorical boundaries exist that exaggerates the commonalities of whatever falls on either side - it forces a choice of every item to fall on one side of a boundary or another. This imposes an impression of homogeneity, where everything within a boundary is perfectly connected to everything else within the same boundary. So, given categorical boundaries can be drawn, within each boundary dualism turns into monism.

This dynamic is closely akin to essentialism, a typical strategy for justifying the equivalence of the apparently dissimilar. The “essence” is the property present within each “thing” that makes it that “thing”.

Dualism within Monism

Monism attempts to force universal homogeneity in the face of patterned distinctions. Everything must be included, everything must be totally connected; this is enlightenment, and anything that does not conform is the root of all evil.

When monism encounters a difference it cannot ignore, it transitions into (often a particularly absolutist and pathological) dualism. Any recognition of distinctions are denied, which draws a boundary between the distinction that was recognized and the purported homogeneity.

Boundaries are Nebulous and Patterned

Monism and dualism are mirror-image attempts to separate sameness and difference, an idea that harkens back to the paired nature of confused stances. Each pair shares the same underlying mistaken metaphysical assumption, which is solved by addressing the inaccuracy of the other.

The metaphysical assumption in this case is that boundaries must be objective and definite.

• Monism (correctly) recognizes that these definite boundaries do not exist, but (incorrectly) denies all differences.

• Dualism (correctly) recognizes that distinctions do exist, but (incorrectly) fixates them.

Much like meaning, boundaries are nebulous, yet the patternicity of the world implies meaningful boundaries can be made at varying abstractions. There is never a perfect border that can be drawn, or a definite truth to whether two things are similar or distinct, connected or separated.

Combining Boundaries and Meaning

We’ve covered stances across two dimensions/axes of meaning that can be combined to form complex ideologies.

• Eternalism - Nihilism

• Monism - Dualism

If we take the cartesian product of these, we end up with three combinations that most systems align with and one outlier.

Dualist Eternalism - everything is given an objective meaning by a separate entity. This is how Christianity and Islam operate; God is the one that gives meaning.

• Secondary stances: mission, ethical eternalism, reasonable respectability, religiosity

Monist Eternalism - you are one with God and the universe, which is objectively meaningful. Advaita Hinduism and much of modern spirituality are examples of this.

• Secondary stances: mission, true self, total responsibility, specialness

Dualist Nihilism - we are distinct and isolated individual entities in a meaningless universe. Existentialism, postmodernism (humans as the center of reality and rejection of metaphysics), and scientism (science is the only way to determine truth) tend towards dualist nihilism.

• Secondary stances: materialism, ethical nihilism, romantic rebellion, secularism

Monist Nihilism - all is one, and everything is meaningless. This is conceptually coherent but entirely emotionally unattractive and attracts few if any advocates.

The Complete Stance

The complete stance recognizes that meaning is both nebulous and patterned. Equivalently, it enables the realistic and creative possibilities that emerge when you neither fixate nor deny meaning. This is more or less obvious to many of us, yet it seems unattractive as it does not offer comforting promises such as certainty, understanding, or control.

Without a fixated meaning, we are made to contend with the daunting intricate interrelationships between pattern and nebulosity. Yet, viewed from the perspective of the complete stance, pattern and nebulosity are not divided, they are always present together when considering the quality of being meaningful or meaningless.

Because of the obviousness of the complete stance, the complete stance can appear dull and deflationary in nature - it doesn’t come with the excitement or drama of the confused stances. This exciting and appealing drama, despite also being imposed and confused, can be enticing because we fear actually existing meanings are inadequate. Yet, we are better off without them.

What the complete stance lacks in appeal, it makes up for in its promise: freedom.

Freedom from metaphysical delusions and their propensity to limit the possibility of actions. To stabilize within the complete stance (as opposed to falling into a more unstable but possibly more attractive confused stance) is to gain skill in grappling with fluid, non-fixated meaning.

Aspects of this skill include curiosity, playfulness, and creativity. It affords an actively participatory stance towards boundaries and connections, acknowledging a nebulous self/other boundaries with diverse connections, bringing about an appreciation of the extraordinary variability that the world offers.

By acknowledging that meaning, boundaries, and connections are neither subjective nor objective, neither inherent nor decisions, we realize that they are neither imposed nor arbitrary. Meaning is a collaborative and improvised accomplishment, that is re-made in every moment by the nebulous yet patterned boundaries and connections between the self and other.