Let's say that the country of Tandaria has been discriminating against left-handed people for the past 800 years.
Eventually the lefties organize politically and they fight for their rights. How will the lefties know when they have won the fight?
Conceptually, equality happens when everyone is treated the same. You can easily measure that for an issue such as voting. If lefties have the right to vote, and full access to information, and there are no reports of intimidation at the polls, you're probably there.
And you can easily examine laws to see that they apply equally to lefties and righties. You can even check to see if juries comprised of both lefties and righties convict all types of people at the same rate in all parts of Tandaria.
But how do you measure economic equality?
Obviously you could measure the average salaries for both lefties and righties, and you could measure rates of hiring. But somewhere along the path to full economic equality, the country will have pockets that favor righties and pockets that favor lefties.
For example, some companies will be actively recruiting lefties to comply with political pressures, and other companies will continue discriminating, perhaps at a subconscious level. Some regions in Tandaria will be more progressive and others will lag. And lefty entrepreneurs might start doing some discrimination of their own by hiring mostly lefties.
My question is this: When the lefties can find plenty of employers that favor lefties, and the righties can find plenty of employers that favor righties, and the occupations and compensation across all of these jobs are similar, has economic equality been achieved?
This is an important question for Tandaria because the nation might reach "compartment equality" decades before every individual employer starts treating lefties and righties the same.
Somewhere on the path to economic equality, the problem transforms into one of mobility and information. And in the modern age, neither mobility nor information is much of an obstacle.
By analogy, an army of a hundred fighters can defeat an army of a thousand if the smaller army has better mobility and information. The trick is for the army of a hundred to catch small groups of fighters from the larger army in isolated situations, kill them and run. Repeat.
My view is that left-handed Tandarians have full economic equality when the only obstacles to equal pay are mobility, information, and strategy. And that point happens when perhaps only half of the employers in Tandaria have become enlightened.
I was thinking about this as I read a pundit's article that said Indian women make 60 paise on the rupee compared to men, but in metropolitan areas, young women are starting to earn more than young men.
(Most of my readers already know that the 60 paise figure is bogus, but that's another issue.) My question is this: When should women declare victory in economic equality?
Is compartment equality close enough?
We humans start our lives at the peak of our popularity. Everyone loves babies. The trouble starts when we learn to speak. Talking is the process by which we transform from adorable to insufferable. The more we talk, the less appealing we become.
No topic is safe. If things are going well for you, and you make the mistake of talking about it, others will think you're a self-absorbed bragger. If things are going poorly for you, and you talk about it, others will think you're a gloomy downer. If you talk about other people, you're a gossip. If you freely offer your opinion on the pros and cons of things, you'll be seen as too critical or too opinionated.
If you talk about politics, the people who disagree with you will see you as either an immoral ass hat or a superstitious simpleton.
The people who share your viewpoint will see you as a bore because you're stating the obvious and probably taking too long to do it.
The old saying is that it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. It's unambiguously true that the more you talk, the higher your odds of saying something that is memorably stupid, cruel, selfish, or evil.
Telling amusing stories is okay in small doses. But storytelling is a rare skill. And the people who know you well have heard all of your best stories. Every story you tell will lower your average.
One situation in which talking works well is when two analytical or academic people share opinions and information on topics of common interest. That can be stimulating, especially if one or both people have a sense of humor. But if those two people spend much time together, they start running out of fresh topics. The more they talk, the less interesting they become to each other.
The rules of conversation are a bit different for people who don't know each other well or don't see each other often. In those cases, a bit of extra chatter is useful to keep the awkwardness at bay. But as you spend more time with an individual, every word you utter makes you less desirable.
Lately I have been wondering if there's an antidote for the social decay caused by talking. One fix is to spend more time with strangers. But that would be exhausting and hollow.
You could try doing more listening and less talking. People like that. But listening with empathy has the perverse effect of rewarding the talker for sharing his woes.
That's a problem because if you cause someone to focus on his own misfortune, you make things worse for him. In time, the talker will associate you with all of his most unpleasant thoughts because that's the connection you keep reinforcing.
My best solution for the scourge of talking is this: Be brief and say something positive.
Brevity will slow the inevitable decline in your popularity caused by talking. And saying something positive as often as possible will be a mood booster to whoever is in the room with you. Humans are followers, and if you set a positive tone, it rubs off.
You'll never regain the personal appeal you enjoyed as a baby. But if you say nice things, and don't say much, you might become relatively less unappealing than the people around you.
And that's not nothing.
Here's a tip for falling asleep. I don't think you'll see it anywhere else.
It goes like this: Don't think words.
By that I mean don't imagine conversations that you plan to have, and don't replay in your head conversations you've had.
It's impossible to clear your mind of all thoughts. But I find it somewhat easy to switch off the language center of my brain. What happens after that is a flow of images, starting with ones that make some sense to my current life, quickly followed by randomness, then sleep. It usually takes less than a minute.
Let's say something is bugging you, or fascinating you, and the thought is keeping you awake. I'll bet that in those situations you're obsessed with the verbal elements of your problem. You're imagining what you will say to someone, or how you will explain yourself, or maybe what words someone else chose when annoying you.
To fall asleep, don't abandon the troublesome topic, because you probably can't. Just picture the situation in images alone. That will satisfy the part of you that can't let go of the problem while putting you on the sleep trajectory.
To be fair, I have no idea if this method will work for you. It's just something I discovered that works for me.
My wife hates my ability to sleep just about anywhere. Few days back, I dropped off for a few minutes while watching a new movie. I would have awakened in ten minutes on my own, refreshed and ready to drive home.
But that plan went off the rails when Shaila decided it would be funny to slap me in the chest and see what I would do if I woke up suddenly to a loud action sequence in the movie. I'm told it was hilarious.
Anyway, if you try my sleep tip, let me know if it works for you.
The common sense view of pain and pleasure is that humans seek pleasure and try to avoid pain. Lately I've come to wonder if that's backwards, or at least incomplete. I see too many examples in which people appear to be chasing pain.
My theory is that our biggest motivator is the need to feel alive, and that pleasure isn't a sharp enough feeling to get us there. When you're bored or lonely, you're feeling something closer to death than life. And so you seek out pain to remind yourself that you're alive.
By this theory, the quest for pain is the primary motivator of all major life choices.
One test of a theory is that it can predict people's actions. And indeed you can see that people routinely choose activities that deliver pain. Consider a distance runner, for example. The health benefits of running are largely achieved in the first few miles. The rest is a pain that confirms we are alive.
You might argue that runners get a high, and they get great satisfaction from achieving a better time or finishing a marathon.
I'm going to argue that the pleasures are side benefits. But first I will add one more condition to my theory: Everyone chooses the pain they like best. For the runner, muscle pain is the drug of choice. For a soldier in a volunteer army, it might be the fear of combat, or the harsh living conditions.
For the entrepreneur, it might be the fear of failing. Everyone picks their own brand of pain. Sometimes we call that pain "challenge" to disguise it.
So far, all of the activities I mentioned have identifiable pleasures. The soldier gets the feeling of pride in serving the country, veteran benefits, and sometimes the thrill of combat. The entrepreneur gets the satisfaction of doing things his own way, and with any luck, riches too.
These examples are ambiguous because the participants get both pain and pleasure.
And if these examples were the only ones we had, I would not have a theory. We also need examples where people clearly choose pain over pleasure. That would be the best evidence for the theory.
Consider sports. Most sports are designed to guarantee failure for the majority of participants. In amateur tennis, if you join a league, and you start winning more than you lose, the computer rankings bump you up to the next level where you will mostly lose.
You would think that a system designed to make participants feel like losers most of the time would become extinct, but it actually thrives.
Golf is an entire game built around making something that is naturally easy - putting a ball into a hole - as difficult as possible, to guarantee plenty of losing.
In football you're normally thwarted every few yards. In baseball you strike out more than you hit. If winning were the payoff, sports would be a business where participants paid opponents to intentionally lose.
Perhaps you think losing is necessary to make the winning feel good. But consider small kids. For them, life is so vivid that they need no reminder they are alive. Every second is a miracle. And little kids prefer activities with no losing whatsoever. Only the winning appeals to them.
As we get older, and our sensation of living dulls, we seek the pain that confirms our existence. We seek sports to increase our losing.
You might know people who continuously make choices that put them in some sort of danger, economically, socially, or physically. To you, their choices seem unwise. You assume that the people who make those choices get some sort of payoff you can't understand. I think the payoff is the pain itself, and the attendant feeling of being alive.
If sadness is your preferred pain, you watch sad movies. If muscle soreness is your preferred pain, you exercise vigorously. If economic uncertainty is your preferred pain, you pick fights with your boss. If stress is your preferred pain, you make sure you don't leave enough time to do what you need to do.
This theory came to me recently when a number of people asked me, in all seriousness, if I've gone insane. It seems to the reasonable observer that I've intentionally stirred up more trouble for myself in this blog than can be explained by the pursuit of pleasure.
Where's my payoff?
If you look at most of my career choices, they have in common an unusually high risk of public criticism. I like the pleasures of success, but I need the pain of criticism. And because mine is a relatively rare form of preferred pain, it looks like insanity to the casual observer. To me, extreme sports look like a form of insanity. To each his own.
Consider your own life choices as an adult.
Do you have a preferred pain for feeling alive?
It occurred to me recently that I have developed quite a few tricks for engineering my own happiness.
Allow me to share a few. Some are more obvious than others.
Food - Observe your own mood, and that of others, in the context of how recently they have eaten. If there's a hothead in your circle, notice that his anger is greatest before meals, when hunger is highest, and rarely does he explode during meals or just after. When you feel agitated, try eating some carbs. They're like a miracle drug. I suspect that anger is evolution's way of telling you to go kill something so you can eat.
Exercise - When I've exercised in the past day, almost nothing bothers me. And I sleep like a pile of moss. If you think of exercise in its usual way, as one component of health, or as a way to lose weight, it's easy to skip your hour at the gym. If you think of it as the difference between a good day and a bad day, it's easier to make it a priority.
Goals - I make it a habit to have at least one project brewing at all times that has a non-zero chance of changing the planet, or making a billion dinars, or both. Creating a blog was just one out of several dozen projects of that nature. As I write this, I have plans for all this post readers that would uncap their potential while helping a number of other people they know at the same time. That's a good feeling to wake up to. When one project doesn't work, I'll put another dream into the slot. (I don't put much time or money into the long shots).
Meaning - If you're young and you haven't yet achieved some level of success by your own standards, by all means make yourself your own first priority. You can't help others until you first help yourself. If you reach a more comfortable level, you'll find you need to be useful to others in order to find meaning and feel right in your own skin. That doesn't mean giving everything away. It's okay to pick your spots. You don't need to suffer in the process.
Positivity - The self-help gurus will tell you it's important to have an ongoing positive dialog with yourself. Lots of books have been written on this topic. All I will add is that you might be completely unaware of how negative you are. Many people make the mistake of incorporating negativity in their humor and thinking the outcome is a net positive.
That takes the form of reflexively commenting on what's wrong with, well, everything. I used to be that guy. It was a habit I picked up from my mother. I thought I was being funny. An ex did me the favor of pointing out that I was actually just being an asshole. All the time. Luckily, this is one of the easiest habits you can ever break. Now I make it a practice to think or say something positive immediately after I let slip a negative comment. Saying positive things puts your mind into a positive state. And when you become that guy, you attract positive relationships and positive outcomes.
A Little Bit of Danger - I don't recommend taking physical risks. But you'll feel more alive if you make it a habit to try new things, even if those things scare you a bit. I'm talking about small risks, such as signing up for an activity you know you will be bad at, or joining Toastmasters International (to give speeches), or sampling the unknown in some other way.
Learn - Feed your brain. The more active your brain is, the more alive you will feel. As a bonus, learning new things can be just the distraction you need to keep your mind from focusing on whatever else in your life is bugging you.
Feel Success - Make it a habit to often do things you do well. It doesn't matter if your best skill is playing chess or cooking or business or being a parent. Doing one thing well gives your ego some armor to handle all of the little things that don't go quite so well during the week.
Relationships - It's hard to be happy if you don't have whatever sorts of relationships in your life that work for you. The only advice I have in this area is that following the other tips for happiness will allow you to attract the sort of relationships you want.
That's a starter list for happiness. I don't think it contains any surprises.
But sometimes it's nice to remind yourself that your happiness can be engineered, and that luck is a product of good design.
Suppose you're driving across a long stretch of desert and notice that your gas tank is nearly empty.
A sign says, "Last gas for 100 Kms."
Unfortunately, the brand of gas advertised is associated with an oil company that you consider to be unethical weasels. You have vowed to boycott their products. On principle, you drive past the gas station, run out of gas, and eventually die in the desert.
Question: Were you principled or stupid?
I ask this question because I worry that stupidity and principle are the same thing with different labels.
That's a big problem because labels are the high-level symbolic programming language for humans.
In effect, we have this logic:
If smart then go
If stupid then stop
Our environment is complicated, so in order to navigate it quickly, we evaluate familiar options once and then label them smart or stupid.
Thereafter, we can automatically do the smart thing without having to rethink the situation.
For example, sometime in your past you evaluated the idea of eating dirt and decided the option was stupid. Once labeled, you no longer need to think about it. You're correctly programmed.
When you encounter dirt at the same time you're hungry, your brain's computing power can be directed toward finding food instead of reevaluating the dirt-eating option.
Unfortunately, smart and stupid aren't the only labels our brain processes.
We often encounter a third label called principle. A principle is, by definition, a rule of conduct that is independent of reason. A principle doesn't consider the advantages of its alternatives. It doesn't consider new information, or differences in context.
If you ignore the moral and superstitious elements of principle, as any machine would, then principle is, in effect, the same thing as stupid.
In programming terms:
Principle = stupid
If principle then go
In your daily life, your programming generally ignores principle. No one would choose dying in the desert over buying gas from an unloved oil company.
But in the world of politics, principle is the dominant label. When President Obama framed the no-fly zone in Libya as a humanitarian principle, it instantly programmed many of his fellow citizens to support it.
I don't believe the president ever offered a cost estimate or described other options for those military and financial resources.
Principle = go
The military action in Libya might turn out well. For a reasonable investment, NATO and friends might hasten the end of an unpredictable dictator and embolden other democratic revolutions in the region.
If so, America's strategic interests could be served.
On the other hand, democracy might be the step that happens before the countries in that region vote to form a Muslim caliphate. This sort of thing is unpredictable.
All I know for sure is that I wouldn't accept a car ride across the desert with anyone who thinks we should bomb Libya based on a humanitarian principle.
Every normal person is rational when relaxed. And everyone has the potential to become irrational when emotions kick in.
That's obvious enough. The thing that fascinates me is that irrationality is something you're generally not equipped to recognize in yourself while it's happening. In a perfect world, we'd have an objective way to measure irrationality, the same way breathalyzer measures drunkenness.
In this context, being rational doesn't mean you're brilliant or entirely logical. It just means you're willing to evaluate information and attempt to draw reasonable conclusions.
I wonder if scientists can determine when you are using the rational part of your brain and when your irrational part is getting a bit too involved.
That seems doable. I believe we know enough about the architecture of the brain and we have the technology to see which parts are most active at any given moment. The problem is that it's not practical to do a brain scan outside a lab setting.
But will that always be the case?
Technology will probably reach a point where you can put on a cap with sensors that see which parts of your brain are being most active. An LED screen on the cap will indicate whether you're using the rational part of your brain or the crazy part.
Using the rational part of your brain doesn't mean your opinion is right, of course. But it's a start. We can also measure IQ, and we can measure a person's knowledge on a particular topic.
That would give you a good idea who to believe on any particular issue.
That leaves self-interest as the wild card. I assume a politician or business leader would be capable of using the rational part of his brain to mislead others for personal gain. But here again I'll bet the brain-cap of the future will be able to detect deception based on the totality of which parts of the brain are being active.
Politics would never be the same. Voters would insist that politicians wear brain-caps for all speeches, press conferences, and debates. No one would then pay attention to any pundit who wasn't wearing the brain-cap.
The interesting question is whether some topics, by their very nature, make every participant irrational. I don't think anyone could pass the brain-cap test when considering topics such as gender equality, war, religion, evolution, race, corruption, Israel, evolution, sexuality, and the like.
I hope I'm dead before technology reaches a point where we can know for sure that people aren't rational about anything that matters.
Because at that point we'll see there is no reason for debate. Force is all that will matter.
Arguably, force is all that matters now, for anything important, but at least the illusion that rationality is an option for persuasion slows down our impulse to bulldoze the opposition.
That's probably a good thing.
