Kaj Sotala, a self-described pursuer of truth, a few years ago offered some tips for those who want to "know how things are in reality." Excerpts below with my bolded highlights:

* Study things from as many points of view as possible, and try to understand as many models of thought as you can. This way, you can better understand the behavior of other people, and how people can think in ways that seem incomprehensible to you. If an atheist, talk to religious people until you understand them well enough not to consider them silly; if religious, talk to atheists until you understand them in the same way….

* Recognize your fallibility. Realize that in a quest for the truth, your own biases become your worst enemy. To defeat your enemy you must understand it, so set forth on studying it….Find the time to peruse articles like Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases and Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks. In your interdisciplinary studies, especially emphasize the sciences that help you in understanding and combating your bias, and the ones that allow you to think clearly – in his Twelve Virtues of Rationality (which is required reading for you), Eliezer Yudkowsky recommends evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory and decision theory….

* Discuss the same subjects repeatedly, even with the same people. If you are losing a debate but still cannot admit you're wrong, ask for time to ponder upon it. Decide if your hesitation was you being too caught up in the defense of a topic, in which case you only need time to get over it and accept your opponent's arguments, or because there was more relevant information in your mind that you couldn't recall at the moment, in which case you need time for your subconsciousness to bring them to your mind….

* Avoid certainty, and of all people, be the harshest on yourself. 80% of drivers thinks they belong in the top 30% of all drivers, and even people aware of cognitive biases often seem to think those biases don't apply to them. People tend to find in ambiguous texts the points that support their opinions, while discounting the ones that disagree with them. Question yourself, and recognize that if you want your theories to find the truth, you can never be the only one to evaluate them….Meditate on the mantra of "nothing is impossible, only extremely unlikely". Think of the world in terms of probabilities, not certainties.

Here is Kaj's post on his personal values. Here is his "About Me" page on his personal web site where, in addition to basic factual information, he lists his one-paragraph stance on free will, ethics, rationality, love, religion, copyright, distribution of wealth, and medical regulation.

He is 24 years-old. For gender he writes: To paraphrase rm: "If there are men and women, then I'm a man. If there are men, women and transsexuals, then I'm a man. If there are men, women, transsexuals and something else, then I am something else."

Cal Newport’s three step way to become interesting:

1. Do fewer structured activities.
2. Spend more time exploring, thinking, and exposing yourself to potentially interesting things.
3. If something catches your attention, use the abundant free time generated by rule 1 to quickly follow up.

Below are 50 ideas for step 2. They are all direct quotes from Tom Peters. I bolded the numbers of the best.

1. Go to the nearest magazine shop. Now. Spend 20 minutes. Pick up 20 — twenty! — magazines. None should be ones you normally read. Spend the better part of a day perusing them. Tear stuff out. Make notes. Create files. Goal: Stretch! Repeat . . . monthly . . . or at least bi-monthly.

2. Go to the Web. Now. Relax. Follow your bliss! Visit at least 15 sites you haven’t visited before. Follow any chain that is even a little intriguing. Bookmark a few of the best. Repeat . . . at least once a week.

3. Take off this Wednesday afternoon. Wander the closest mall . . . for two hours. Note the stuff you like. (And hate.) Products, merchandising, whatever. Repeat . . . bimonthly.

4. Buy a packet of 3 x 5-inch notecards. Carry them around with you. Always. Record cool stuff. Awful stuff. Daily. Review your card pack every Sunday. (Obsess on this!)

5. Going the same place for vacation next year? Why not someplace new? Why not one of those university-sponsored 12-day trips to explore some weird phenomenon?

6. Project stuck in a rut? Look through your Rolodex. Who’s the oddest duck in there? Call her/him. Invite her/him to lunch. Pick her/his brain for a couple of hours about your project.

7. Create a new habit: Visit your Rolodex. Once a month. Pick a name of someone interesting you’ve lost touch with. Take her/him to lunch . . . next week.

8. New habit: You’re in a meeting. Someone you don’t know makes an interesting contribution. Invite him/her to lunch . . . in the next two weeks.

9. You run across somebody interesting. As a matter of course, ask her (him) what’s the best thing she/he’s read in the last 90 days. Order it from Amazon.com . . . this afternoon.

10. Take tomorrow afternoon off. Rain or shine. Wander a corner of the city you’ve never explored before.

11. Go to the local Rite Aid. Buy a $2 notebook. Title it Observations I. Start recording. Now. Anything and everything. (Now = Now.)

12. Going out this Saturday night? Go some place new.

13. Having a dinner party next Sunday? Invite somebody — interesting — you’ve never invited before. (Odds are, he/she won’t accept. So what? Go for it. It’s just like selling encyclopedias. No ring doorbell = No sale.)

14. Go past a kiosk advertising local Community College courses for this fall. (Or one of the Learning Annex catalogues.) Grab a copy. Look it over this evening. Pick a couple of interesting courses and topics you’ve always wanted to know more about. Call the professor (with a little detective work, you can find her). If you’re intrigued, sign up and . . . at least . . . go to the orientation session.

15. Read a provocative article in a business journal. Triggers a thought? E-mail the author. So what if you never hear back? (The odds are actually pretty high that you will. Trust me.)

16. At church this Sunday, the pastor announces a new fund drive. Sure you’re busy. (Who isn’t?) Go to the organizing meeting after services. Sign up!

17. You’re working with your 13-year-old on his science project. You find you’re having fun. Go to school with him tomorrow . . . and volunteer to talk to the class about the topic.

18. A crummy little assignment comes along. But it would give you a chance to work with a group of people you’ve never worked with before. Take the assignment.

19. You’re really pissed off at what’s going on in your kid’s school. So run for the school board.

20. You aren’t really interested in changing jobs. But there’s a neat job fair in the next town this weekend. Go.

21. An old college pal of yours invites you to go on a long weekend by the lake. You never do things like that. Go.

22. A really cool job opening overseas comes up. It fits your skill set. You couldn’t possibly consider it. You’ve got a nine-year-old and your husband is content with his job. At least call someone . . . and find out more about it.

23. You’re on the fast track. But a fascinating job opens up . . . far away. It looks like a detour. But you could learn something really new. Really cool. Go talk to the guy/gal about it. (Now.)

24. The eighth grade teacher is looking for chaperones for the trip to the natural history museum. You’re a law firm partner, for God’s sake, making $350,000 a year. Volunteer.

25. You love taking pictures. You pick up a brochure advertising a four-day photography workshop in Maine next summer. Go to the workshop.

26. A friend of yours, a small-business owner, is go-ing to Thailand on a sourcing trip. She invites you to join her. Go.

27. There’s a great ball game on ESPN in an hour. Forget it. Go on that walk you love . . . that you haven’t taken for a year.

28. I’m not much on planning. But how about sitting down with your spouse/significant other and making a list of three or four things you’ve “been meaning to do” that are novel . . . then coming up with a scheme for doing at least one of them in the next nine months?

29. You’ve a-l-w-a-y-s wanted to go to the Yucatan. So at least call a travel agent . . . this week. (How about right now?)

30. You know “the action is at the front line.” Spend a month (two days a week) on a self-styled training program that rotates you through all the front-line jobs in the hotel/distribution center/whatever.

31. Ask a first-line supervisor who the most motivated clerk in the store is. Take him/her to lunch . . . in the next three weeks.

32. You spot a Cool Article in the division newsletter. Call the person involved. Take her/him to lunch. Tomorrow. Learn more. (Repeat.) (Regularly.)

33. You and your spouse go to a great play this Saturday. On Monday, call the director and ask him/her if you can come by and chat some time in the next two weeks. (If the chat goes well, ask her/him to come in to address your 18 colleagues in the Accounting Dept. at a Brown Bag Lunch Session later this month.)

34. Institute a monthly Brown Bag Lunch Session. Encourage all your colleagues to nominate interesting people to be invited. Criterion: “I wouldn’t have expected us to invite — — .”

35. Volunteer to take charge of recruiting for the next year/six months. Seek out input/applications from places the unit has never approached before.

36. Consider a . . . four-month sabbatical.

37. Get up from your desk. Now. Take a two-hour walk on the beach. In the hills. Whatever. Repeat . . . once every couple of weeks. (Weekly?)

38. Seriously consider approaching your boss about working a day a week at home.

39. Take the door off your office.

40. You’ve got a couple of pals who are readers. Start a Reading Group that gets together every third Thursday. Include stuff that’s pretty far out. (Invite a noteworthy local author to talk to your group now and again.)

41. Join Toastmasters. (I know it’s a repeat. It’s important!)

42. Pen an article for the division newsletter.

43. In the quarterly alumni magazine, you read about a pal who’s chosen to do something offbeat with her life. Call her. Tomorrow. (Or today.)

44. Buy that surprisingly colorful outfit you saw yesterday. Wear it to work. Tomorrow.

45. Develop a set of probing questions to use at meetings. “Will this really make a difference?” “Will anybody remember what we’re doing here two years from now?” “Can we brag to our spouse/kids about this project?”

46. Assess every project you propose by the “WOW!”/ “Is it Worth Doing?” criteria.

47. Call the Principal Client for your last project. Ask her to lunch. Within the next two weeks. Conduct a no-holds-barred debriefing on how you and your team did . . . and might have done. Now.

48. Call the wisest person you know. (A fabulous professor you had 15 years ago?) Ask her/him to lunch. Ask her/him if he or she would be willing to sit with you for a couple of hours every quarter to talk about what you’ve done/where you’re going. (Try it. It can’t hurt.)

49. Become a Cub Scout/Brownie troop leader. Or direct your kid’s play at school. The idea: spend more time around children . . . they’re fascinating . . . spontaneous . . . and wise.

50. Build a great sandcastle!

“If I were able to live my life anew, in the next I would try to commit more errors. I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more. I would be more foolish than I’ve been, in fact, I would take few things seriously.

I would be less hygienic. I would run more risks, take more vacations, contemplate more sunsets, climb more mountains, swim more rivers. I would go to more places where I’ve never been, I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans, I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.

I was one of those people that lived sensibly and prolifically each minute of his life; Of course I had moments of happiness. If I could go back I would try to have only good moments. Because if you didn’t know, of that is life made: only of moments; Don’t lose the now.

I was one of those that never went anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, an umbrella, and a parachute; If I could leave again, I would travel lighter. If I could live again, I would begin to walk barefoot until autumn ends. I would take more cart rides, contemplate more dawns, and play with more children, If I had another life ahead of me.

But already you see, I am 85, and I know that I am dying.”

– Variously attributed to Jorge Luis Borges and Don Herold (via Josh Kaufman)

The fascinating truth about humans is that many of us do not know ourselves very well. We don't know what we want. We don't know what's best for us. We don't know what we're trying to say.

It follows that we should not automatically trust someone's self-analysis or personal expression. If a woman I do not know well tells me very honestly, "I recently broke up with my boyfriend because he was boring," I will maintain some level of skepticism about her stated reason until I have a handle on the reliability of her introspections (or perhaps her willingness to self-delude).

Even on issues about which a person has unmatched knowledge and connection – the reasons for their parents’ divorce, the dynamics of their romantic relationship – their intuitions and default explanations can be very off. I know mine can be.

In general I think we give too much deference to the main actor's intuitions in cases where there's deep interior drama, like romance.

Some possible loose conclusions:

• Early on in any kind of relationship try to assess the accuracy of the other person's self-knowledge.
• Sometimes I feel like I know a person better than they know themselves.
• Sometimes it's other people, in all their brilliant distance, who can shed the most light on issues most intimate to us.
• Which are areas where self-knowledge is most consistently unreliable?

###

My friend Eliezer Yudkowsky not too long ago wrote a useful paper on cognitive biases. Required reading.

How many people whose lives we admire actually maintain a torturous inner life? How many ideal men and women — and I don't mean perfect, I mean ideal, which is to say perfectly flawed — actually are consumed by insecurity or anxiety or guilt?

In American Pastoral, the character Swede is perceived as an ideal man in every respect. But his outer life is

accompanied by an inner life, a gruesome inner life of tyrannical obsessions, stifled inclinations, superstitious expectations, horrible imaginings, fantasy conversations, unanswerable questions. Sleeplessness and self-castigation night after night. Enormous loneliness. Unflagging remorse… And in the everyday world, nothing to be done but respectably carry on the huge pretense of living as himself, with all the shame of masquerading as the ideal man.

Was this Tiger Woods' inner life the past few years? Could it be the private mind of a close friend who's duping you with his charade? Has a journalist done her job if she does not know what keeps her subject up late at night, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling?

By the way, fiction addresses these type of issues the best. Unrelated: Philip Roth is a fucking genius.

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Wise and poetic advice for the exceptional from the same text:

As with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart and makes you exceptional — and enviable, and hateable — to accept your beauty, to accept its effect on others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you're well-advised to develop a sense of humor.

Otherwise, I'm told people will just hate you. This is not the only reason to try to develop a sense of humor…

There were many fascinating comments to my previous post on drugs, and are evidence for why Cal Newport has called readers of this blog "freakishly smart."

Lindsey of Crooked Lines left this comment:

… because [drugs] are illegal, drug creation and the ensuing multi-level drug distribution scheme usually involve violence, intimidation, and corruption in some form or another — especially in urban communities with fewer resources, which are often the main source of many different drugs that the more affluent people use. Many of the drugs at the University of Michigan, where I went to school, for example — especially the ever popular marijuana — made their way there from Detroit, and while the affluent drug users in Ann Arbor are, for the most part, safely insulated from the effects of the trade, the people who live in and around the earlier links of the supply chain (whether or not they are part of the trade itself) are not so privileged…

… the reality is that as long as drugs are illegal and thus…must be grown/harvested/created in a way that begets violence and corruption — violence and corruption that are often endured by people who are removed from but no less affected by the people you will ultimately buy from – for me personally outweighs any of the other considerations.

Lindsey is elevating the societal impact of her behavior — the funding of narco-violence — above personal preferences in deciding not to buy drugs on ethical grounds. The tricky part is that there is essentially zero societal impact of a single person buying or not buying a drug.

Economists argue that it's irrational to vote in an election because it's essentially impossible that your vote will affect the outcome. As the old joke goes, if an economist sees another economist at the voting booth, they say, "I won't tell if you won't tell." But what if everyone adopted this mentality, people reply, then your vote would matter! Why yes, but everybody does not think this way.

What are the ethics surrounding decisions that, if universalized, would make a big difference, but which, at the margin, make essentially zero difference?

In Kant's Categorical Imperative he includes this moral maxim of universality: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction." In other words, if your action were to be the action everyone was taking, would you still do it? The implications of Kant to non-voters would be, "If everyone chose not to vote, the democracy wouldn't function. So vote!"

That seems like a fine aspirational ethic — a principled stance applied to things like democracy and drug buying — but the more realistic approach would to weigh the probability of universal adoption of the action. If it's insanely low — like in the case of non-voting or drug-buying — then ignore it. If, on the other hand, there were only five total drug buyers in the world, and if you stopped buying drugs that would drastically shrink demand and perhaps result in less drug violence, you would be right to incorporate societal implications more seriously in your decision as they much greater.

Bottom Line: In the case of buying drugs, since the personal impact (positive and negative) so vastly outweighs the societal impact, I believe solely a personal consideration of costs and benefits is an ethical way to think about it. But ethics is simply a basis for making individual decisions, and to each his own.

(thanks to Dave Jilk and Nathan Labenz for brainstorming this post)

The term "loyalty" often carries with it the connotation that it is unconditional. For this reason, loyalty is an overrated and sometimes dangerous virtue.

Loyalty is better viewed as a phenomenon of other traits and virtues: trustworthiness, empathy for fellow humans, investing in a relationship in good times and bad, variations of the golden rule, etc. These are constitutive virtues of loyalty. For example, fidelity is its own virtue. You should be faithful in a relationship. To describe this concept, I say use the word "fidelity" and not "loyalty."

The Bush Administration was criticized for prizing loyalty over competence. You had a place at the table so long as you were strongly loyal to the President. Ron Suskind wrote a book about Paul O'Neill and the Bush administration titled The Price of Loyalty which documented the uncurious and unquestioning habits of a loyal cabinet.

Nor should loyalty trump independent moral judgment. I do not believe in unconditional love or sticking with someone through thick and thin to an indefinite point. If my brother started raping and murdering people, I would call the police.

Bottom Line: Better to employ more precise words to describe the positive virtues in a person than the broad and potentially dangerous "loyal."

(thanks Dave Jilk, Ben Abram, and Cal Newport for their feedback on this idea.)

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I first started thinking about "overrated virtues" when I read Alec Baldwin tell Vanity Fair that the most overrated virtue is patience.

"I always sing, even though I never know the words to the song. I like this as a metaphor for how I live my life, too."

A perfect life metaphor indeed. It's from Melissa Sconyers.

Since the beginning of time political theorists have debated the relationship of power between the elites and the masses. Plato talked about it. Jefferson and Hamilton argued about it. Adams was wary of an overly democratic democracy; Paine championed the everyman. Contemporary thinkers have weighed in. Bill Buckley famously said he’s rather entrust the U.S. government to the first 400 people in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard. A few months ago an editor from the Wall Street Journal told me he believes an illiterate Afghan has a “horse’s sense” for what’s right and therefore can make the right choice at the voting booth.

I am less instinctually trustful of the common man. There is a worldly wisdom that comes from walking the earth, but it’s hardly sufficient to be an informed voter or ruler. I sooner put my lot with the well-educated elite.

If your car is broken, you want a mechanic who possesses elite knowledge. If you’re going to get surgery, you want an elite surgeon — someone whose knowledge of the matter far surpasses the average Joe.

Shouldn’t you want the same out of the people in government? Yes, with two qualifications.

First, elites should rule but be able to be replaced by the masses. This is why we have a republican form of government.

Second, the ruling elites need to be humble. One reason why elites are more dangerous in politics than in the narrow sphere of car mechanics is that they can widely exercise unbridled ambition. The Obama cabinet is stacked with elites — very smart individuals. And they are probably trying to do too much. They are too ambitious and too confident in their ability to direct and organize events. It’s tricky because ambition and talent tend to go hand-in-hand. In politics we need the rare talent who’ll be very humble once in office.

Elitism, by the way, has come in all sizes. Some of America’s finest leaders did not possess elite educations or ex ante high brow status, but rather were in an elite category in terms of their fundamental decency and perseverance. George Washington and Harry Truman come to mind. It’s unlikely we’ll see this type of elitism in the future.

I’ve read two main concerns about elites in politics.

There’s first the Sarah Palin View. She sees the common man as a better representative of the aesthetic ideals of Americana, and thus more fit to participate in the democracy. She will crack jokes about latte drinking, New York Times reading, sushi eating elites who are “out of touch.” I believe Palin’s dislike of elites is fundamentally stylistic not substantive. She disrespects George Will and Maureen Dowd, even if Will shares some of her policy beliefs.

Then there’s the Arnold Kling View. Arnold’s wariness of elites stems from their substantive failures in the past and policy tendency toward state control. He’s disheartened by elites’ failures: he sees “mostly harm in the way educated elites have exercised power…from Vietnam to the current economic crisis.” He agrees that the common man’s ignorance can be dangerous, yet he also notes the danger that can come from over-confident elites:

The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results.

Bottom Line: I share Arnold’s conclusion: “I think that the best solution to the elitist/populist dilemma is an elite with humility. Don’t let the mob rule, but at the same time don’t let the elite get too sure of itself.”

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The “people” are stupider than you might realize. Here’s Robin Hanson reminding us of this fact. Here’s Bill Maher doing the same. Nick Shulz dubbed the following Summer’s Law, after Larry Summers’ utterance: “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.”

My mom tells me, "When you were a kid, you were so laid back and happy that we were worried you might be retarded."

In my tween years, I grew fiercely competitive. I always wanted to win and lead things. Any type of game I played in, I wanted to win. Every conversation, I wanted to be the smartest and funniest. Every group effort, out in front.

Now, in adulthood, I try to stake out middle ground that goes something like "be intense about things that matter, super laid back about everything else." In other words, be more intense about fewer things.

By shrinking the "stuff I really care about" box to just a few areas — off the top of my head: my relationships (friends and family), my work, and my personal development / learning — it allows me to focus intensely on those things and let go and/or be non-competitive on everything else.

A casual game of ping pong? Enjoy it. Political debates? Don't let it get too intense. It's okay not to win. Better, even, to listen and ponder while sipping green tea and staring pensively up and to the right. Non-core professional endeavors? Just suck less than the next guy, or outsource it altogether.

One reason I am less competitive the older I get is I see more situations as non-zero sum. I am more attuned to shared interests. Others don't need to lose for me to win.

Bottom Line: Maybe one part of growing up — oh, to grow up! — is picking your battles, winning the ones that matter, and seeing the others as much as possible as non-zero sum endeavors

Somewhat Related Posts: Is a Killer Instinct Necessary in Business? and The Components of a Killer Instinct.