Tandarin

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.

I wonder if freedom can really be quantified.

Everyone wants more freedom. But sometimes we want a bit less for other people.

I want the freedom to watch a movie in peace and someone else wants the freedom to talk at the same time. There’s a general agreement in that case that the movie watcher wins. But wouldn’t it be nice if freedom could be somehow scored?

That way we’d know how to distribute freedom for the greater good.

Freedom comes in lots of forms. Good health gives you more freedom than poor health. Money gives you more freedom than poverty. Education gives you more freedom than ignorance.

You might say I’m talking about options, or opportunities, not freedom in some legal or moral sense. But it all feels the same. Happiness is the ability to do what you want when you want to do it. Everyone wants more of it for himself. Am I right?

The tricky part is that we’re all interconnected. If I pay for your education, I have less money, and less freedom, because I can now afford fewer things for myself. On the other hand, if I’m a billionaire, paying for your education is a huge increase in your freedom but probably doesn’t have any real impact on my own.

What would happen if we designed tax policy based on the concept of freedom?

If we did, I assume it would look like socialism, where the rich are taxed until their freedom reaches some sort of average with everyone else. Personally, I don’t favor that because I’m too selfish. And it would destroy individual incentives because our system depends on selfishness, doesn’t it?

Or perhaps you could design policies based on the idea that no one can have his freedom reduced for the benefit of another. That doesn’t work because all criminals would be set free, there would be no traffic rules, and police would do whatever they felt like doing.

There’s no practical and honest way to organize society around the notion of freedom. The majority has to use other sorts of language to bring the outliers toward the average.

Criminals are “punished” or “incarcerated.” The rich are taxed at higher rates under the absurd notion of “giving back” something they didn’t actually “take” in the first place, assuming their activities stimulated the economy and created wealth where there had been none.

It seems to me that envy, not freedom, or even selfishness, is the organizing principle of society.

And maybe that’s the only way it can work. That’s why we love best the leaders who seem to be suffering or sacrificing the most. Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffett are all geniuses at appearing to not enjoy all the freedom their wealth could deliver.

They know that controlling envy is essential to their very survival.

Suppose a company offered you a billion dollars in exchange for a portion of your privacy.

To make this arrangement palatable, imagine that the company promises that your data will only be used anonymously. You don't totally trust them, but it's not as if you rob banks in your spare time. You don't have much to hide.

Now imagine that you can selectively leave out of this deal any future plans that are deeply personal. And you can leave out anything that might get you fired, embarrassed, or injured in any way. Those exclusions would be allowed by contract. And you could leave out any mention of your past, where most of your misdeeds happened anyway.

Now do you accept this deal?

Most of you probably said yes, although you might have more questions about this arrangement just to be sure you're not dealing with Satan.

Now suppose instead of a billion dollars, the company only offered a million. Some of you would walk away at that price. How about $100,000?

My point is that your privacy has an economic value. Or it could, if such a market was created. Today you give away your privacy for nothing, in dribs and drabs. Your credit card company knows some things about you, your phone company knows others, and FaceBook knows a lot.

One thing that all of those companies have in common is that the private information they possess involves mostly your past, and not so much your future. When you post pictures on Facebook, it is a record of where you were, not a prediction of where you will be.

Likewise, your credit card company and the phone company have records of what you did, as opposed to what you plan to do next.

Privacy about your past is so cheap that you literally give it away. Privacy about your future plans is another matter. That has real value.

Obviously the past has some utility for predicting the future. If you enjoy a certain activity today, you'll probably like it tomorrow. But predictions based on the past do not have the same economic value as, for example, knowing that you plan to buy a multi purpose vehicle in the next month.

Or perhaps you are planning a trip to Europe, or planning to find a new job. Private knowledge of your future would be worth a lot to advertisers. You wouldn't give away that sort of privacy for nothing.

Here's the Facebook killer part of my post. As I mentioned, Facebook is primarily a record of your past. Imagine a competing service that I will name Futureme for convenience. It's an online system in which you post only your plans, both immediate and future.

As with FaceBook, you decide who can see your plans. You might, for example, allow only specific family members to see your medical plans, but all of your friends can see your vacation plans, or your plans to buy a new couch.

The interface for Futureme is essentially a calendar, much like Outlook. But it would include extra layers for hopes and goals that don't have specific dates attached.

For every entry to your Futureme calendar, you specify who can see it, including advertisers. If you allow advertisers a glimpse of a specific plan, it would be strictly anonymous. Advertisers could then feed you ads specific to your plan, while not knowing who they sent it to. The Futureme service would be the intermediary.

Now imagine that you never have to see any of the incoming ads except by choice. If you plan to buy the multi purpose vehicle in a month, you would need to click on that entry to see which local advertisements have been matched to your plans. This model turns advertising from a nuisance into a tool.

You‘d never see an ad on Furureme that wasn't relevant to your specific plans.

The biggest benefit of the system could come from your network of friends and business associates. Suppose you post on the system that you would like to see a Asha Bhosle concert sometime in the next year. Now your friends - the ones you specify to see this specific plan - can decide if they want in on it.

Maybe someone you know can get free tickets, and someone has a van and is willing to be the designated driver. Maybe someone has a contact that can get you backstage passes. By broadcasting your plan, you make it possible for others to improve your plan.

Conversely, if you plan to do something stupid, your contacts have time to talk you out of it or suggest a superior alternative.

Your plans could be very general at first, such as a desire to go out next Saturday. Click on your Futureme entry on Thursday and perhaps you will see that three of your friends have the same general desire, and one of them has an idea of what to do.

It allows you to move from a general plan to a specific one.

I know what you're thinking. You're worried that this system allows the stalkers and mooches in your network to ruin your future plans. But remember, you are only broadcasting your plans to people you specify.

If you choose to tell a stalker where you'll be, don't blame the application when you get stabbed.

Almost any kind of plan can be improved by your network. If you plan to buy something, it would be handy to automatically receive ideas, opinions, links, and relevant ads.

If you plan a vacation to the mountains, your friends and business associates would tell you the best place to stay and the fun things to do. Your biggest vendor might throw in some freebees to keep you happy. Almost everything you plan to do could be improved by advertisers and friends.

Gift-giving would suddenly be easy. Just check what someone is planning to do, then plan a gift around it. Advertisers could automatically provide gift ideas around every planned activity. It would have the same utility as a bridal registry, albeit less filtered.

If you have kids, you're continuously matching their planned activities with that of their friends so you can arrange car pools, play dates, birthday gift-buying and more. It's a logistical nightmare. It would help a lot if mothers knew what the other mothers were planning.

Facebook succeeds in part because it is addictive. People like to talk about themselves, and people are nosey. But if you think people are nosey about what you did last weekend, imagine how nosey they would be about what vacation you are planning. It's a whole new level of nosey.

Yes, people already discuss their plans on Facebook. But doing so has a small payback because the system isn't optimized to improve your plans. You might discuss only 10% of your plans on Facebook, but 80% on Futureme, because the payoff would be greater.

It would be a pain to enter all of your plans into the system, and keep it updated, but it would save you a huge amount of time in the long run. That would be your payoff for "selling" your privacy.

Imagine how different society would be if most people started sharing their plans.

I think it's a world changer, on par of importance with the invention of the wheel, and the rule of law.

Are conjoined twins one person or two?

That's easy. They have two minds, so they are two people.

A person is defined by his or her brain. Your limbs, hair, lungs, heart, and all the rest of your parts can be transplanted, conjoined, or in some cases deleted, yet you remain the same person. You are your brain.

Now consider regular identical twins. Their brains have the same DNA, yet they are considered two people because their brains operate independently. I think we'd all agree that having the same DNA doesn't make twins one person.

Now what about the individual whose two halves of the brain are separated either by an accident or by surgery? Do you end up with one person or two? The two halves can operate independently, as shown by so-called Alien Hand Syndrome, where half of your brain is telling your hand to do one thing while your other half is wishing it didn't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12225163

In my opinion, that's two people occupying one skull. If you went into a voting booth, I expect that the alien hand could vote for one candidate while the other side could make a different choice.

Now I make the leap from something mildly interesting to something totally ridiculous.
You should leave now if that sort of thing bothers you.

It seems to me, based on observation, that what we think of as one person is always two, even if the two halves of the brain are communicating. You wouldn't label twins as one person just because they communicate before they make decisions.

It's the independent thought that defines a person, not the degree of their communication. If twins made a deal with each other to always make the same decisions, effectively acting as one, we would still know them as two individuals because they can think independently.

Sometimes when I'm alone in the house at night, I am certain the place is haunted while simultaneously certain that ghosts do not exist. Perhaps the right side of my brain is generating the thoughts of imaginary ghosts while the left is being rational.

I realize that the human brain is a bit more fluid and complicated than the left-brain-right-brain model suggests, but I'm guessing that any time we hold two contradictory views at the same time, the two hemispheres of the brain are thinking independently.

Sometimes you might have three or more choices and you can't decide which one you prefer. But I'll bet your brain needs to consider them one at a time, in a serial fashion, if they are all rational choices. That's different from the ghost example, in which the sensation is that you believe the ghosts exist while simultaneously knowing they do not.

It takes two brains to simultaneously have two contradictory beliefs.

I also think the two brain theory explains why people who are smart in general can hold irrational world views. In my experience, people who hold irrational views are almost always aware of their own irrationality. They simply have two brains, and the rational one doesn't always get to make the final decision.

Now suppose you could do a brain scan and determine which side of a person's brain is most active while pondering a particular political question. If the scan shows that the rational hemisphere is clearly in charge, you allow that individual to vote on the issue.

If the irrational side is overly active, you politely explain to that person that he or she has to sit out this vote.

No, it's not a practical idea. But the cool thing is that I know it's a bad idea while simultaneously imagining it could work.