http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707 <-- radical honesty (link from papertygre's bookmark feed)

As I read that I thought -- when complete honesty is so rare that it has to be a cult, that's pretty bad.

I disagree with a lot of the things the article says though. For instance it claims that to be honest all the time would make you seem like a jerk to everyone. I don't really find that to be true except occasionally. I think that if you're radically honest in the way the article describes eventually what you think about others tends to be more fair to those others and more objective than it would be if you kept it secret from them. If you think bad things about others in secret and don't tell them they tend to get worse and worse without exposure to light.

Another thing is that I don't think digging your nose and burping and farting in front of others is "honest" -- or "dishonest" for that matter -- I don't think that even applies. It's kind of like standing in someone's way, something that annoys others and is unnecessary.

I also disagree that if men were honest they'd be talking about sex every three minutes and be constantly hitting on everyone. I think that, too, is something that happens more often when it's secret than when it's open.

In other words I think the main thing the author of that article doesn't get is that radical honesty eventually changes a person in such a way that it eliminates most of the harmful side-effects you'd expect from it.

I like this quote from it especially:

It reminds me of an issue I raised with Blanton: Why make waves? "Ninety percent of the time I love my wife," I told him. "And 10 percent of the time I hate her. Why should I hurt her feelings that 10 percent of the time? Why not just wait until that phase passes and I return to the true feeling, which is that I love her?"

Blanton's response: "Because you're a manipulative, lying son of a bitch."

Anyway, I had no idea there was a movement for this, and am pleased, and hope it spreads, but it really shouldn't have to be.

Am I as honest as the founder? It's hard to tell from this article.

The only things I think I'm dishonest about are indirect: sometimes I promise others I'll keep their secrets. I don't like doing that, and I don't like people asking me to do that, but I do it out of friendship, even though it feels dishonest for me to do that.

I really should stop promising to do that. But sometimes they trick me into it. They tell me something interesting and then say 'you can't tell anyone this, it's a secret'. Huh? Saying that *after* they tell me is pretty rude.

And I know most people don't consider keeping someone else's secret dishonest, but it is. Thinking one thing and saying something else is dishonest, but thinking something and not saying it is also dishonest.

I wanted to save a theory I expressed to konami recently but haven't written about here.

The idea is that humans are not adapted to grow up and live in safe environments, we were adapted to have to struggle for survival: to be constantly on the lookout for things to hunt or things hunting us, including other tribes, to have to work hard all day and make life and death decisions fairly regularly.

Today, especially in industrialized countries, but even to a good degree in third world countries, that's all gone. In the past you had to work extremely hard to live to 10, now you can pretty much do whatever you want, even just laze around all day and expend no effort whatsoever, and live to be 80. The difference is tangible and unimaginable.

I'm not saying we should go back to the old ways, only that we should recognize that this change has brought along problems and maladaptions. I'll go through a few.

Take habits for a big example. Habits were originally intended to get us to repeat things which help us survive and not repeat things which do not. But today, no matter what you do, you will probably survive. You don't need habits anymore. Really, habits are completely useless today, even though they were life-saving and indispensable 50,000 years ago.

I'd even go so far as to say that our propensity to habit is a very big liability today, particularly because they work by detecting what helps you survive and repeating it over and over; this leads to addictions, but more importantly this leads to repeating arbitrary actions over and over simply because those actions don't kill you; your brain reasonably believes that if you're doing something and you're still alive, it must be a good thing to repeat.

A second thing is free time. Our brains weren't built for idle thought; thinking without action is the cause of most psychological problems. Knowledge exists as a supplement for action, the only reason we're as good as we are at thinking is because it helps us choose better actions. But collectively humanity has become so good at choosing actions that we've pretty much eliminated the need to choose actions.

In other words, humanity is so good at thinking that there is no longer any reason for any person to think. You can think like Einstein or you can think like Forrest Gump and chances are you'll live the same amount of time either way. Maybe you'll gain another three years on average if you're a better thinker, by avoiding unhealthy foods or whatever, but big deal.

Because this is so, thinking, like habits, has become counter-productive. In most people, it causes more problems than it solves. I'm not saying we should abandon thinking, because we can't; we can't abandon it any more than we can abandon habit. But we should recognize that most of the time thinking causes more problems than it solves, just as having habits causes more problems than it solves.

I don't mean normal thinking like figuring out how to best get from point A to point B on a map or figuring out how to tie your shoes. I mean abstract thinking, such as whether mankind is inherently noble or ignoble, or whether or not this movie is Kurosawa's best movie, or who killed JFK. That type of thinking doesn't actually help you do anything, it makes no tangible difference in your actions, it's for all intents and purposes waste heat, which exists because that type of thinking was once useful in your evolutionary past but no longer is. Most habits are bad, and most thoughts are bad. Even when the thought is factually correct, it can still be morally bad to dwell on it, to have it consume you.

The cause of most political and social problems is at root psychological, that humans are not yet adapted to always being safe and never having to fight for survival. And we probably never will be adapted for that, for biological reasons (particularly because, genetically, extremely large populations evolve extremely slowly, and there's 6 billion of us -- there's a reason the cockroach hasn't changed much in so long: there are so many of them).

But what can't be changed genetically can be changed through culture, and I think a culture in which we foster things adapted to civilization has been developing for some time. There are pretty major ways that culture tries to adapt you to civilization, things which are completely alien to tooth-and-nail life: various moral ideas are just the start, entire emotions (or more specifically emotional interpretations) have been fabricated and brought into being which didn't previously exist, yet feel just as real as can be.

There are deep manipulations of someone's psychology going on as they grow up that aren't noticeable, even when we look for them. They mainly take the form of expectations about ourselves, such that we usually falsely believe such things are part of human nature when they are not which only becomes obvious when you read ethnographies of peoples still living in prehistorical ways and notice, say, that 90% of them aren't monogamous or that most of them don't see murder as a serious crime if it's done to someone outside your tribe or that most of them don't have a concept of falling in love (and neither did even Western civilization until recently).

But back to my point: we are built for tough lives, not soft lives, and the more comfortable your life is the worse you feel. Happiness comes from the achievement of goals, but if you're handed those goals before you're even born (supermarkets to provide easy food, sinecures to provide easy funds to buy that food, and the rest is entertainment) there can be no happiness in the sense that someone who struggles to survive knows happiness.

There are no real answers to this problem. You can't just become a hermit in aboriginal Australia (well you can, but not practically), nor can you accept the full comforts of modern society and expect to be happy (not even content), and any attempt to mix the two will also fail because they can't be mixed, either life is constantly dangerous or it isn't, either you're living on the edge of death or you're not.

The best answer I know of is Karma Yoga: to do good work and to focus all your energy on doing good work. It doesn't matter if that work is making games or baking cakes or building watches, as long as it can't be done automatically (a living death) and especially as long as there is a constant struggle to do it better and better and some type of prideful record of one's work, like a stack of novels you're written that's getting ever taller. If done correctly this maintains the safety of modern society while avoiding most of its problems (it avoids habit because it provides an constant, if artificial, challenge, and it avoids thinking too much because there's no time to be idle).

Preferably the work should do good for others and be useful, but that isn't even mandatory, building houses out of cards and trying to get ever better at that, or juggling 7 balls and then 8 balls and then 9 balls and trying to become a master juggler -- both of those sound pretty useless but they're still Karma Yoga. My personal preference is that the work be useful, but even someone pursuing mastery of juggling is better off than someone who just entertains themselves by watching X-Files or going to concerts or all the other millions of things that people become stuck in habits around, and certainly better off than people who think all the time and never do anything and create psychological problems which eventually end in suicide.

EDIT: And yes I know this entry is doing exactly what I say we shouldn't do (thinking too much), but in my defense I'm so overactive at thinking that I can come up with theories like this over the course of the few minutes it takes to drink a cup of coffee, and I type at 100 wpm and this entry only took a few minutes to write, so it doesn't really take up much of my time, most of which is spent on making and playing games (or, more recently, on getting Ron Paul elected).

~ defining goals and intermediate and short-term objectives,
~ identifying primary and secondary targets,
~ carrying out a SWOT analysis [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats],
~ identifying allies,
~ identifying opponents,
~ imagining and playing scenarios,
~ devising tactics, and
~ deciding what resources are required,
~ drawing up an action timetable.

http://vcn.bc.ca/citizens-handbook/strategicthinking.html

That separates out the elements of long-term thinking. Though I'm not sure it's a good idea to separate it like that -- true strategic thinking is a whole. It feels kind of like separating writing into "plot, character, setting, climax, theme" -- when you cut something up and dissect it like a frog or a pig, it's an interesting exercise, but misrepresentative. A pig's liver doesn't tell you much about the pig. Still, good as an exercise, not totally useless.

I guess compared to this study of lying in women in the UK, the level of lying in Harry Potter isn't so bad (not that I think this is any more common in women).

"What is the point of work? Is it to increase production and consumption? Or is it to promote the development and growth of human beings?" - Erich Fromm

I learned a nice term today: ikigai; apparently it means sense of purpose in Japanese; those who get up each day to do something. It shouldn't be confused with ambition, which is those who get up each day to get things done. Seems to be more in the Karma Yoga tradition than the Protestant work ethic tradition.

Remember that old talk about type A and type B personalities? I don't really like either. Type A is someone who is a workaholic and doesn't take time to enjoy everyday pleasurable things, and type B is a person who cares less about their work than about other things like friends and social connections and having a good time.

But why not a type that enjoys work as a way to have a good time, and works hard but not for monetary gain or fame, but for self-development and the feeling of bringing things into existence which didn't exist before? Like in Ikiru.

(9:57:34 PM) Paul Eres: gumption and hustle are the two greatest virtues

1. Privacy promotes secrecy, deception, and dishonesty. Why wouldn't you want everyone else to know everything about you? Why should anyone have secrets at all? I personally have no secrets, and am very reluctant (though I've done it on occasion) to promise others to keep their secrets. I view secrecy and privacy as a personal immorality, and believe that people should be proud publically of [EDIT: or at least "own up to"] every aspect of their lives.

2. There is no constitutional right to privacy, that was written into the constitution by activist Supreme Court judges only recently. The founders of the US didn't believe in a right to privacy, it would have been alien to them to believe that people have a right to use the government as a tool keep things hidden from other people. The government has no obligation to help people keep some aspects of their lives secret from other people, and it has no obligation to avoid thinking about or using information which would be valuable to it just because some people don't want that information made public, and it's an incorrect use of government to ask it to do so.

3. Similarly, I don't believe the government has a right to privacy either: I don't believe that things should be kept top secret in the sense that people could be imprisoned for knowing or revealing such information. I don't like the idea of state secrets because I think it's an infringement of natural rights to punish people simply for figuring out, discovering, knowing, or spreading information, even when that information would be harmful strategically to spread.

(EDIT: Note that in 3. I'm not referring to copyright. I don't believe people have the right to *reproduce in exactitude* something someone else created without their permission. But I do believe that they have the write to talk about it. I.e. you can't tell someone what Harry Potter 7 was like word-for-word, but you can tell them about it in your own words even if the book hasn't been published yet and you were privy to an advance copy.)

Been reading Epicureanism a bit. I like the basic idea:

"The fundamental obstacle to happiness, says Epicurus, is anxiety. No matter how rich or famous you are, you won't be happy if you're anxious to be richer or more famous. No matter how good your health is, you won't be happy if you're anxious about getting sick. You can't be happy in this life if you're worried about the next life. You can't be happy as a human being if you're worried about being punished or victimized by powerful divine beings. But you can be happy if you believe in the four basic truths of Epicureanism: there are no divine beings which threaten us; there is no next life; what we actually need is easy to get; what makes us suffer is easy to put up with. This is the so-called 'four-part cure', the Epicurean remedy for the epidemic sickness of human anxiety; as a later Epicurean puts it, "Don't fear god, don't worry about death; what's good is easy to get, and what's terrible is easy to endure." "[1]

The rest of that article is worth reading too.

There's a quote by Swami Vivekananda. "Ritual is concretized philosophy."

I expressed agreement with this notion in a rinkufriend entry, which I'll quote part of here:

"So little time in life, why would anyone want to waste it on doing something they've already done before? I've been thinking now that habits are inherently evil. All of them. There's no such thing as a good habit. Aristotle was wrong. Excellence isn't a habit in the usual sense of the word "habit". Excellence is not being bound by habit. Not doing anything automatically. Never learn anything by heart, never do anything by rote, and yet, preserve ritual. Ritual is concretized philosophy. The important thing about ritual is that it is *not* habit, it's taking the *form* of habit but applying 100% awareness to it, thus taking something which from all outward appearances looks habitual but is actually an adventure. Adventure is much more a state of your mind than a state of your environment. Take a ritual of excerising for example. If it's done ritualistically, that means it's not done by habit, your full awareness is on every move you make, on how far you can go before collapsing. Ritual is an important way to destroy habit. Excellence, is a ritual. Adventure, is a ritual."

But here's some further elaboration on what ritual as concretized philosophy means. The purpose of ideas is their ultimate expression in action: if an idea doesn't somehow, somewhere down the line, affect the movement of your muscles, it's not an idea. The purpose of philosophy is action, the worth of an idea is correlated with how much of an improvement it has on a person's physical bodily actions. Sometimes the connection to action is fairly elaborate and subtle (such as a belief in the beauty of Sumerian writing), sometimes the connection to action is fairly direct (such as a belief that exercise is good for you), but it's always there, all ideas affect your behavior.

Because philosophical ideas have the longest road to travel before they turn into action (although they are also the most all-embracing and affect more of your actions than any other idea), there's a shortcut that can be taken: ritual. Every-day rituals, which virtually everyone has, are there because they help you remember and contain certain philosophic ideas. They symbolize those ideas and allow the reinforcement of those ideas. In line with my action-oriented principle, action reinforces belief. Rituals are symbolic of particular broadly philosophic ideas. A good example of this is in Hinduism: in Hinduism, waking up, brushing your teeth, bathing, etc., are all done explicitly ritually, and each has a different symbolic meaning.

Rituals are broader than that, though. From wikipedia's entry on ritual:

"Rituals of various kinds are a feature of almost all known human societies, past or present. They include not only the various worship rites and sacraments of organized cults and religions, but also the rites of passage of certain societies, oaths of allegiance, coronations, and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals, school "rush" traditions and graduations, club meetings, sports events, halloween parties and veteran parades, Christmas shopping, and more. Many activities that are ostensibly performed for concrete purposes, such as jury trials, execution of criminals, and scientific symposia, are loaded with purely symbolic actions prescribed by regulations or tradition, and thus partly ritual in nature. Even trivial actions like hand-shaking and saying hello are rituals."

Most of those mentioned there are rituals in the sense I mean: a symbolic concretization of a philosophic idea. There are also more personal, non-group, rituals which are unique to each person. Most of these you might not even think of as a ritual until someone else notices it and tells you about it. For instance, I have coffee every morning. This isn't just an addiction, it's a ritual: a dedication to that day's productivity, or even more, a dedication to my life and existence in that day. But rituals need not be daily. There are some rituals I do only rarely, only a few of my rituals do I do every day.

Of course the tendency to ritual varies. Some people are very ritualistic people (particularly those with Asperger's Syndrome, Autism, or Obsessive-Compusive disorder), some people have fairly few, if any, rituals (children especially tend to have few rituals). I believe this correlates with how philosophical a person is: people who think very abstractly and have philosophical ideas tend to be more ritualistic than those who do not. The reason is that in order to maintain those ideas they need those rituals.

I don't want to give the impression that every philosophic idea has a corresponding ritual. I wouldn't take it that far, there are plenty of ideas I hold which I do not have rituals for. But the ideas I believe in the most strongly tend to be those I do have rituals for -- and there may be a two-way causation involved there. Which way is more important is an interesting question; it could be that those beliefs a person practises rituals for are those beliefs a person comes to believe in the most strongly.

This correlation is easy to see when you examine any religion. Many religious beliefs have rituals corresponding to them. Praying is a very common ritual.

Any action can be performed ritually, rituals aren't restricted to useless or bizarre actions. Brushing your hair can be a ritual, as long as you endow it with a particular symbolic meaning.

A final note: control your rituals, and you control your philosophy. Allow your rituals to be controlled by someone else, and your philosophy could really be under their control.

Oh man, today I solved a philosophical problem I hadn't been able to solve since I first came up with it at age 12, a full 15 years ago, and which has been on my mind for a lot of that time. I haven't completely solved it but this is a major insight into the problem which I believe will lead to the total resolution of it.

The problem is one of identity through time, and, relatedly, why long-term interests matter as much as short-term interests. Think of this: are you the same person that you were 1, 10, or 20 years ago? Are you the same person that you were yesterday? To what extent? Will you be the same person in 10, 20, 50, or 100 years (if you live that long)? In many ways your identity is very distinct from your future selves and your past selves. You might think you used to be stupid, but are not anymore; may aspects of your identity will change.

Further, your physical body will change, in scientific terms, the atoms that you used to be made of will be completely replaced over the next few years, until eventually not a single atom of your former self remains. This happens quicker than you think -- every six months to three years your atoms are completely replaced.

This has ethical repercussions: if you are a different person than your future and past selves, why should you bother to plan for the future or act in your long-term interest? It won't be *you* enjoying the fruits of your labor, it'll be someone else, someone who may look and act a bit like you but not someone who actually is you, it'll be a different you who experiences the happiness and experiences the accomplishment of the goals that you are working for now.

So for a long time I've had two semi-contradictory beliefs: that we are not really the same person that we used to be or that we will one day be, *and* that it's a good idea to work in your long-term interest. I knew both were true, but I wasn't sure how to resolve the two.

The resolution, in part, is this: that there is no such thing as identity through time, there is only causality through time. In other words, identity is a faculty that works only in the present, causality is the faculty that works through time. To ask whether we are the same person as our future or past selves is a nonsensical question: the answer is that we are neither the same nor different in identity from our future and past selves, because identity cannot be applied through time. Causality is applied through time: it's much more accurate to say we cause our future selves and were caused by our past selves. Or in other words, that our future selves are the results of our actions and that we are the result of the actions of our past selves.

Another way to express this is that identity only applies to existing entities, you can't posit identity between an existing and a nonexisting entity, and our past and future selves are (as of now) nonexisting entities.

In answer to the question: why should we work in our long term interests if it's not "we" who will enjoy it? The answer is: it doesn't have to be. The point of working in our long-term intersts is *not* to enjoy the fruits of our labor, but to produce something: greater future selves. In other words, when I didn't spend a year saving up money to buy a SNES (Super Nintendo) by babysitting in order to have fun playing the SNES for the person who babysat. I did it so that I could *create* a me who has fun playing the SNES. Working for the future is the creation of better future selves.

Some quotes I wanted to save from the book "Beyond Success and Failure" by Willard and Marguerite Beecher (it's a self-help book but an unusual one, told through aphorisms, which suits the genre actually).

( There's lots of them. )

I just found a quote which is a better understanding of Greek/Aristolian morality than the often-misunderstood "moderation in all things":

"Moderation even in excess." -Benjamin Disraeli

Moderation of course in the first quote is meant in the sense of a message board moderator, not in the sense of a middle ground between two extremes. I.e. what's essential is intentionality and control and choice, not safety and averageness and mundanity.

Copied from a comment to Newedition.

"
Evil is not the opposition and desire to destroy good, rather evil is the opposition and desire to destroy *the self*. Destroying good in others is a small side effect of thanatos (the death wish). In other words, murder is usually really a form of suicide, hatred is usually really a form of self-hatred, dishonesty to others is usually really a form of dishonesty to oneself, and so on. I don't believe that people who 'actively seek to destroy the good' exist except as a side effect of someone actively seeking to destroy himself.

When I say that evil is the absense of good, what I mean is this. Life is self-perpetuating action, and death is a natural result when a living entity ceases to maintain itself, when it lets go, gives up, goes to sleep, or just sits there: in other words, lethargy is thanatos, in a very real sense, they are identical. Inertia is identical to self-destruction.

So what I mean is that unless someone actively values and seeks good for themselves, thanatos is the state that appears in the absence of that. Unless someone is doing good, they are doing evil; unless someone is gaining value, they are letting it decay, which is the definition of evil. To desire death is the absense of the desire for life, there's no middle ground when a person can neither desire death nor life; to neither desire death nor life is to desire death, because death is the freedom from desire and choice.
"

An earlier one in that thread:

"
[B]ecause evil is simply the absense of good, fighting it through any other means than the creation of good is like trying to fight darkness with means other than a light source.
"

"The Vedanta recognizes no sin, it only recognizes error. And the greatest error, says the Vedanta, is to say that you are weak, that you are a sinner, a miserable creature, and that you have no power and you cannot do this and that. [...] Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin: to say that you are weak, or others are weak."

"A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century."

"Anything that is secret and mysterious in these systems of yoga should be at once rejected. The best guide in life is strength. In religion, as in all other matters, discard everything that weakens you, have nothing to do with it."

"Astrology and all these mystical things are generally signs of a weak mind; therefore as soon as they are becoming prominent in our minds, we should see a physician, take good food, and rest."

"Even the greatest fool can accomplish a task if it were after his or her heart. But the intelligent ones are those who can convert every work into one that suits their taste."

"Great work requires great and persistent effort for a long time. [...] Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles."

"Stand as a rock; you are indestructible. You are the Self (atman), the God of the universe."

"Strength is the sign of vigor, the sign of life, the sign of hope, the sign of health, and the sign of everything that is good. As long as the body lives, there must be strength in the body, strength in the mind, strength in the hand."

"The greatest religion is to be true to your own nature. Have faith in yourselves!"

"The less passion there is, the better we work. The calmer we are, the better for us and the more the amount of work we can do. When we let loose our feelings, we waste so much energy, shatter our nerves, disturb our minds, and accomplish very little work."

"The power of purity—it is a definite power."

"This is no world. It is God Himself. In delusion we call it world."

"We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life."

"When I asked god for courage he gave me difficult situations. When I asked god for intelligence he gave me puzzles to solve."

"If you really want to judge of the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Every fool may become a hero at one time or another. Watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man. Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be."

"With regard to Karma-Yoga, the Gita says that it is doing work with cleverness and as a science [which leads to enlightenment]; by knowing how to work, one can obtain the greatest results."

"There is a sage in India, a great Yogi, one of the most wonderful men I have ever seen in my life. He is a peculiar man, he will not teach any one; if you ask him a question he will not answer. It is too much for him to take up the position of a teacher, he will not do it. If you ask a question, and wait for some days, in the course of conversation he will bring up a subject, and wonderful light will he throw on it. He told me once the secret of work, "Let the end and the means be joined into one." When you are doing any work, do not think of anything beyond. Do it as worship, as the highest worship, and devote your whole life to it for the time being."

"Ritual is in fact concretised philosophy."

"Let us give up all this foolish talk of doing good to the world. It is not waiting for your or my help; yet we must work and constantly do good, because it is a blessing to ourselves. That is the only way we can become perfect."

"The greatest men in the world have passed away unknown. The Buddhas and the Christs that we know are but second-rate heroes in comparison with the greatest men of whom the world knows nothing. Hundreds of these unknown heroes have lived in every country, working silently. Silently they live and silently they pass away; and in their time their thoughts find expression in Buddhas or Christs, and it is these latter that become known to us. [...] They are the pure Sattvikas, who can never make any stir, but only melt down in love."

"This world's wheel within wheel is a terrible mechanism; if we put our hands in it, as soon as we are caught we are gone. We all think that when we have done a certain duty, we shall be at rest; but before we have done a part of that duty, another is already in waiting. We are all being dragged along by this mighty, complex world-machine. There are only two ways out of it; one is to give up all concern with the machine, to let it go and stand aside, to give up our desires. That is very easy to say, but is almost impossible to do. I do not know whether in twenty millions of men one can do that. The other way is to plunge into the world and learn the secret of work, and that is the way of Karma-Yoga. Do not fly away from the wheels of the world-machine, but stand inside it and learn the secret of work. Through proper work done inside, it is also possible to come out. Through this machinery itself is the way out."

-Swami Vivekananda