The (yet) Unsolved Problem - Part 2

 In my previous post, I have provided a much more broader but related context for what I will be discussing here.

In some conversations I had with some friends, the conversation naturally gravitated from the thinking-problem in the masses to the academia to the children and then to parenting. We observe the children in our surroundings, and the way they are being brought up, and we consider it to be very much problematic. There is this one extreme where children's brains are being lobotomized by them being given unsupervised access to mobile phones at a very young age. The parents of such children had not had these technologies when they were young, and so they do not have any mental framework or policy to be able to supervise their children. But then there's an even bigger problem that is only going to be exacerbated in the near future. The generation of people that are having their first newborns at this time, or will have their first newborns in next 5-10 years is the generation of people who themselves have an extremely unhealthy relationship with technology. Children are excellent learners, and the behaviors they are going to learn from their parents will be extremely problematic. This situation is extremely depressing.

My roommate has a very troubled relationship with teachers at his academic institute, and in one such a rant, he commented that if only the Principal would take one suggestion from him, it would make his life easier. He would suggest that, they should check teachers' social media profiles for signs of mental maturity before hiring them. I asked him how on earth will then this normie institute find teachers that pass the criteria?

This is the social environment in which our children will be born, where parents and teachers (to whom parents have started entrusting their children at a younger and younger age) are not mentally well capacitated to provide children an environment that allows them to develop a thinking capability. 

All of this might sound dull and gloomy, but the situation does not warrant pessimism. I believe children have extraordinary capabilities beyond our imagination. Have you ever tried learning a new language? You probably haven't, but if you know about the process, it's not an easy one. But look at children, they learn a completely new language without any guided or structured process within span of a few years, and that too effortlessly. This is crazy if you think about it. You just have to put them in the relevant environment and they learn insane things. (These children then grow up and become human beings who solve complicated problems and build unimaginable stuff.)

But as I mentioned, creating such an environment for our children is not going to happen by itself. It will require a conscious and sustained effort on our part. That is why I have read and thought (and argued with my mother) a great deal about homeschooling and parenting.

However, there's one point where all my previous frameworks of thinking break down. And I had to accept this when my friends asked me about the same point, that I haven't been able to figure out a solution for that part (yet). The problem is this. You can think and conjecture all day about what kind of environment children should have, but there is a crucial detail you are omitting from the scene, and that is that a child has two parents. If your partner does not have a shared understanding of this whole problem, and is not aligned with you in these principles guiding your child's upbringing, this is simply not going to work. Period.

So, the sub-problem that is unsolved yet is this: How do you find a life partner who aligns with your goals and is similarly committed in achieving those goals together?

The fact that my framework of thinking breaks down at this sub-problem means that it needs serious thinking. And when I think about this, then I do think a part of problem is that we (or at-least I) shy away from thinking or discussing this problem. So, the purpose of writing all this, is to stop sweeping certain crucial details of this problem under the rug, and confront them.

For a person to be the right life partner for you, they must align with you in the broader principles of how you are going to live your life. These broader principles are linked with the context I discussed in first post. One aspect of it is about what kind of things would we be spending most of our lives doing, and second is what kind of environment will we be giving to our children in which they will spend the transformative years of their lives. If two persons, do not align in both of these aspects, then I don't see any point in the marriage or relationship of such persons.

So, how do you find a person who aligns with you in these aspects?

I don't know. So, let me look at how it's being done in my environment.

In my environment, I see two different cultures which have a separate mechanism for how people choose their life partners. One is the culture to which I belong. This culture's mechanism is more traditionally rooted where matches are made or suggested by the greater kin and relies on the kin's perception of the two individuals but even more than that, their perception of the two individuals' parents, because a fruit inherits the characteristics of the same tree. If the two families find themselves compatible or aligned in their values and socio-cultural aspects, the match is made.

The second culture's mechanism is relatively a new one, where an individual's kin or even parents have effectively no role in such a decision. While the first culture discourages pre-marital relationship between two opposite gendered persons, the second culture freely allows it. In fact, since there is effectively no role of the kin, the pre-marital relationship is exactly the mechanism through which people are supposed to find the person they are willing to spend the rest of their lives with. Marriage is a commitment between two individuals for spending the rest of their lives together. In this mechanism, there is a pre-marital process called dating. During dating, the two individuals live together and kind of simulate the post-commitment life, to try to see if that will end up well, before actually making that life-long commitment.

This is a very rough sketch of the mate-matching mechanisms I see in the two cultures.

I have described these two mechanisms, because they are distinct in their methodology and the people I get to observe and know about, follow either of these mechanism, and it would not be logical that while observing the situation of their relationships, we do not keep in consideration that mechanism.

So, when I observe the current situation of relationships in the people from both the cultures, the situation is pretty bad at both places. However, the nature of relationship problems is different in the two cultures.

Let's consider the second culture first. In the second culture, individuals are exposed to this process of dating in their teenage or early-20s, when they are very young, and their worldview isn't properly developed yet. However, their bodies have sexually matured, and hormones have started kicking in. So, when these young individuals will start talking to opposite-gender individuals, they will naturally gravitate towards them due to the purely natural biological attraction toward opposite sex, even if there is no deeper principle aligned between the two of them. So there will be inevitable failures in relationships in early years because their process is not a process for finding a life partner but a process for finding a sexual partner.

This was the general-population problem. But then there are people within this culture who are serious about things they want to do in their lives and serious about finding a life-partner with whom to live their lives. This culture's mechanism causes problems for them in two ways. The major problem with this mechanism is because it has made relationships too much fungible. It is relevant to note that this second culture's mechanism had emerged as a reaction to mechanism of the first culture. In the first culture, relationships were too rigid; incompatible people felt compelled to continue their relationship further than they ought to, and thus suffered. So, this second culture first encouraged divorce and ending of long-term relationships, and then in continuance of making relationships more flexible went as far as discouraging the initial long-term commitment in the first place, by abolishing the tradition of marriage. So, the lines between short term experimentation part called dating and the long-term commitment part got blurred. As I defined earlier, the dating phase is an experimentation phase where you kind of simulate the post-commitment life before making that commitment. So, it is a fake simulation, because due to the idiosyncrasies of each individual, there is a certain minimum level of compromise or tradeoff you will have to do to be able to live together, but you will not be willing to make that tradeoff, if you are not committed about it for the long-term. So what happens is that on every hiccup in the pre-commitment experimentation phase, you either (i) consider moving on to a different relationship, or (ii) when you have done that enough, you become defensive and start doing things to ensure that the other person does not move on to a next relationship, and thus you start compromising a bit too much and that is also a problematic because it might take the relationship to the commitment phase, but then you will stop compromising too much and the other person will have a rightful objection to that, and things will start going downhill. All this happens because without commitment, the simulation is fake. A true simulation pre-commitment is simply not possible. So, this is the problem in this culture. How are you going to be able to build relationships that are based on broader life principles and not natural biological attraction owing to the hormones, and how are you going to find a life-partner when no one is willing to commit to a longer term relationship without a short-term fake simulation phase that does not in fact tell you about your compatibility with another person?

Now, let's discuss the first culture, where although an individual might make the final decision regarding choice of his partner, he himself would not be the one looking out for potential-partners to decide about, rather his extended family or kin would be doing this task for him. The primary problem with this mechanism, specially in this age, is that individuals have become more differentiated but with that many levels of hierarchy involved in finding the potential partners, the actual preferences or values of the two individuals get completely abstracted away. And for individuals who are supposed to make the final decision, there simply is not enough information to be able to judge whether the other person believes in same kind of principles as they do. It's just a blind guess. But since the problem of complete abstracting out of individual values started getting felt, the culture (or some subcultures) allowed flexibility in the mechanism. That is the individuals are now allowed to talk and discuss with each other, before making the final decision. This flexibility is limited, but still I think you can get to know a lot about other person's worldview by having a few conversations with them. But the problem is that this flexibility only solves part of the problem not the entire problem. The flexibility only allows you to filter out incompatible partners, but it still not solves the problem of how the kin is supposed to suggest potential-partners that are actually compatible, given that the kin does not understand the true goals or values of the individual. Maybe, if you are lucky, one of your parents might understand your preferences or values, but the sample of potential partners that your parents will directly know of is too small, and if they take suggestions from kin, then those suggestions would be not guided in any way by your individual preferences or values.

Another problem with the first culture and its mechanism is its traditionally rooted association with patriarchy. Apparently, the strictness and rigidity regarding the lives of females has loosened a lot on surface level. But the actual autonomy females living in this culture have with their lives is still low. The first part of their lives is governed or influenced by their fathers, and the second part by their husbands. Traditionally, females were married at a younger age and thus when they were married, they would be more adaptable to the ways of their husbands. Now, when marriage age is relatively later, the lives of females get well adjusted to their father's way of living which makes re-adjustment to their husbands' way of living much difficult. But either way, females do not have any kind of autonomy in their lives. This is a big problem. Because as I discussed in my previous post, there are already too many of a forces forcing a person to switch off their minds and follow the bureaucracy. Now, those few females who have somehow still developed the ability to think by themselves are very negatively impacted by this lack of autonomy. What lack of autonomy does is that it makes one's mind reach this conclusion logically that there a lot of (fixable) problems that can't be fixed, because the lack of autonomy disables them to even consider a big portion of the solution space. So even in areas of life where they do have some level of autonomy, they do not use it as much as they can, and that is a problem.

So, that is where I find myself currently in. This is the culture I find myself living in. And the one discussed before it is the only other culture I see or know of. And there are problems existing in both of these.

So, the problem at hand that I haven't figured out the answer of is this. Given the context of the graver problems I described in first post, there are certain broader principles I have developed (of course they are coarse and less developed now, and might go through some changes in details, but at a broader level I don't think they are going to change) that are important to me, so how do I find a life partner who aligns with these principles and is willing to put in the conscious effort to live by these principles, specifically given the context of the cultural environment I find myself in. 

The problem is already complicated enough, but there's another element that I think is of crucial importance in this problem, that is one's religious belief system. Most people subscribe to religious belief system they inherit from their parents by default. They not merely inherit the name of the religion/sect or the loosely-defined belief system, but also the degree of its influence, i.e., in which affairs of life does that belief system influence the actual practices or actions of a person (and to what extent) and in which affairs it doesn't. For the values and goals of two individuals to align enough to be good life partners, it is important that both the set of beliefs (or lack thereof) and the degree of their influence must also align. For instance if A is agnostic, and B subscribes to belief-system X only in practices of social traditions like marriage ceremony and funeral and not much else, then in belief-space they are close to each other. But if say, C belongs to belief-system X and is influenced by it to the extent the kind of work he'll do will be influenced by it, while D only follows belief-system X in social traditions, then they are further apart in the belief-space than A and B even though both of them apparently follow they same belief-system.

Currently, I'm in the phase of life where one starts to question and re-define the belief system he inherits by default, and I believe figuring out this part is going to take a while, but whatever the final redefinition is, it might add another level of complication to the already complicated problem. Because, if you plan to have children, it will be cause severe conflicts in their upbringing if both the parents do not lie close in the belief-space.

So, the final form of problem is this:

How do you find a life partner who:

• aligns with you in your broader principles of how you are supposed to live your lives
• aligns with you in your vision of the kind of environment you would like for your children to have and is willing to put the conscious and sustained effort in providing them such
• is autonomous and believes in these principles independently, and not merely because their life-partner believes in them
• thinks for themselves, so that both of you help each other get unstuck in hard problems of life
• lies close to you in belief-space (regarding belief-set and its degree of influence)

This is the unsolved part. I notice I had titled this piece as The (yet) Unsolvable Problem, which is funny because I should have used Unsolved instead of Unsolvable.

So, this is the yet unsolved part.

The (yet) Unsolvable Problem - Part 1

 I have just come from a long conversation with two university friends. On Thursday, I also had a very long conversation with another like-minded person. All of us are males in our 20s. And there was one direction in which both conversations flowed towards naturally.

When we look at our environment, we see things being operated at bureaucracy mode, i.e. keep the thing running, quality of output is not a concern. Our academia is running at bureaucracy mode. Our corporations are running at bureaucracy mode. Our government is running at bureaucracy mode. This mode of keeping the things running as they are, requires that affairs be operated by people who are submissive to the existing processes and resistant to new ideas, i.e. people who switch off their brain. Academia is exactly producing such people, and is very good at this job.

The result of this situation is that we live among people who have long switched off their brain, or at-least the part of brain that thinks new thoughts. The society may apparently continue to function this way, but not for long. Because the most dangerous effect of it is that people who do not think have no principles to stand by. Whenever they'll have a hard decision to make, they will take out their moral compass, look at it, and act upon it, without ever realizing that it's being influenced by the dominant magnetic field of their bureaucracy. The days of such a society are numbered.

The realization of this situation is very depressing. But this is what we see when we look around us. Naturally, a thinking person thinks of academia as the part where the process starts and so he thinks of attacking it first. But he realizes that among this chain of academia, corporation, and governments, academia is the longest surviving institution. Although government bureaucratic structures stays same, at-least the political process on the surface level keeps changing names with the electoral process. Some new corporations do emerge, and some do die out. But, academia, if you think about it, is the longest-held monopoly on a system. How do universities or educational systems die out? They just don't. And it's not because they adapt with the changing world so rapidly and so well that they never die, but it's because by design their simply is no mechanism for them to die. Or at-least we don't have a mechanism to declare them dead and build something new.

So attacking academia seems futile. It can't be changed.

So next comes corporations. The way you fight with corporations is by competing with them in business with a different mode of operation, an example of which is startups. This smaller, faster, and innovation-based mode of business operation will be able to outcompete corporations in all areas where free market exists. Now, there are two bottlenecks in spread of this newer business model, I don't know which one is narrower, but eventually one will become a problem when the other is fixed.

Digital space by nature was a new area less governed by governments, and that is why startups have naturally sprung up there and flourished. But in physical space, government bureaucracy is still halting the flourishing of startups. In competing against the governmental friction, startups either burn out and fail, or if they do survive, they do so by eventually picking up the same weapons, and becoming a corporation. For innovation-based businesses to win in physical space, government bureaucracy must be fought and defeated.

The second bottleneck in prevalence of this newer business model is that given this academic system that enables sucking away of smart people by corporations and government bureaucracy, where will the smart people to start start-ups come from?

And maybe this is also linked to the problem of fighting government. How can it be changed if the masses of people and government are aligned in this principle of only keeping things running without doing anything new? We need people who do not believe in this principle and thus don't want to be governed by a government who believes in this principle. Who will be these people?

My answer is: our children.

If thousands of years of evolution and survival of fittest, has given rise to human beings who have conquered the skies, moved mountains, and built thinking-machines, it is not an unsafe bet to claim that people who welcome change have higher odds of surviving than people who don't. The way things survive is by evolving, not remaining static. So if my chain of reasoning is not flawed, we have to remain steadfast on our path, and create small pockets of environments where our children develop the same principles of nature, and the future is in safe hands.

I also believe in human will and autonomy, and I do believe a lot of people raised in the change-resisting institutions will also develop their own thinking and start challenging that mode of operation, but still, that is something we can't fully rely on, unless we also think of producing a progeny that lives by principles of nature i.e. of change.

But, our children won't develop these principles by default in the currently existing environment created by bureaucracies. It will take a conscious and sustained effort on our part to create small pockets of environments that allows our children to develop the strength to withstand the downsliding and to overcome the inertia.

Technology is an amplifying media. All things decay in stasis. Brain rotting through huge consumption of addictive content is simply an amplified or sped up version of natural rotting of a static mind. Similar technology also amplifies the learning process of a young mind by accelerating the process of their natural explorations.

A car can be harmful in two ways. 1) it is standing on a steep hill by default, and it starts moving downhill if you don't take any action. 2) the car is on a level road but if you wildly keep accelerating, it goes out of control and causes an accident.

This is the technology our children will gain access to when they are born, and they would have to be taught how to drive it safely, and then we'll have to let them explore. I'm not just talking about cars. I'm talking about technology.

So, we have established technology is not our enemy. Our enemy is defaults. Our children find themselves in a car which is sliding downhill, and the children have no idea the danger they are in. Academia is not going to solve it. Corporations are not going to solve it. Governments are not going to solve it.

But this is not an unsolvable problem. It just requires conscious sustained effort on our part.

So, summarizing my chain of thought, without people who can think for themselves, we will never have people who can stand by their principles, and a society where people don't stand by their principles will inevitably be led to conflicts and disharmony, and such a society won't survive for long. There are three forms of bureaucracies, that are leading production of people who can't think for themselves : 1) Academia, 2) Corporations, 3) Governments. All these three forms of bureaucracies, by their design, resist change and innovation. The way to fight with them is to 1) create or work in smaller and innovation-friendly modes of businesses such as startups that outcompete corporations, and 2) take learning of our children in our own hands instead of academia, and give them an environment that allows them to develop their own thinking and follow their natural curiosities, so that we produce a progeny that can think for their own, and thus by mechanism of natural selection, allow prevalence of people who will build better systems for learning and keeping societal order than the ones we have now.

[That is where my chain of thought has went to, uptill now. The first part about choosing modes of creating economic value other than corporations is something I hadn't thought of in this framework before I started writing this. So, I have yet to contemplate further on that part. The reason I had started writing this was because in the second part of solution, I had gotten stuck at a point, the explanation of which I will do in a separate piece, as the preface or description of the context has grown larger than I had expected, and this preface is I believe a more important piece, and the problem I had in my mind was only a specific sub-problem within the context, so it should be described separately. I will link the next post here.]

In praise of... [*checks notes*]... emails

 I like email as a medium of communicating with friends. That is because, it has two desirable properties:-

1. Email encourages long form text. Text message is a good medium for fast conversation, but in short form, you can rarely convey a full chunk of thought. So, emails are good for that.
2. Email encourages a more thoughtful reply rather than instant reply, which for me is a very important thing. As a friend used to say:-

Late replies over dry replies anyday.

In a sense, I use emails as a substitute of letters. Earlier, I used to think it was nostalgia, but I realized it has actually lot of functional value.

The problem is, I am an outlier in using emails in this way. So when people think of emails, all they recall is boring formal corporate/legal/OTP kind of stuff. So, it is understandable why they think of it that way.

But there's a simple solution to this.

Have an email address that you use for nothing else but talking to your friends. Believe me, when you will open that inbox, you will never feel like how you use to feel now.

A blog post in which I info dump my friends on why they should also write a blog

 I will send this blog post to a few friends of mine. I might scare them away from writing a blog, but my challenge here is to not let that happen.

So firstly, instead of pointing you my very badly articulated blog post of mine that explains why my blog is called a weblog, I give you a tldr.

When I tell you to write a blog, I don't want you to tell you to write the kind of blogs people write these days. I want you to write the kind of personal blogs that people used to write a decade or two earlier, and back then it was called weblog (which later got later shortened to blog) meaning a log on the web. Very few people write that kinds of blogs these days, but as they say:

0.01% of people is a lot of people

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) February 12, 2021

I was about to go to a tangent, but let me come back. So... as I note in my badly articulated blog post, this is what a weblog is:-

• Weblog is a personal project.
• It is mostly a log of observations, thoughts, ideas, and/or activities of the person.
• The weblog is primarily intended for a very limited audience [or you should entirely ignore who's going to read it and that would be a very reasonable thing].

          ~ Tamseel in a very condescending tone

This is a very meh definition. So you should probably not delve very much on that.

However, I will point you to read something from some essays by Henrik Karlsson (whom you might have heard a many times from me).

He has this essay/blogpost titled "Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog" which is a simple bullet list of points. Interestingly, the most interesting point is at the end:-

In real life, you can’t go on and on about your obsessions; you have to tame yourself to not ruin the day for others. This is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d be ripping each other's arms off like chimpanzees. But a blog is a tiny internet house where you decide the norms. And since there are already countless places where you can't be yourself, there is no need to build another one of those. The law of the land is that everything you think is funny is funny. Those who find the texture of your mind boring or offensive can close the tab, no need to worry about them. It is good for the soul to have a place where being just the way you are is normal. And it is a service to others, too. You'll be surprised how many people are laughably similar to you and who wish there was a place where they felt normal. You can build that.

In another point:

Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution, write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.

Also:-

Your contradictions are an asset. You’re a lover of classical English architecture and you’re also a dirty little punk—expressing both at the same time is more interesting than sharing just cute pictures of English gardens or just wild trashy stuff. The more you incorporate everything that you love and that comes easily for you, your interests, your sense of humor, your grammatical tics, etc, the more your style emerges.

~ Henrik Karlsson

He also has another interesting and rather longer essay titled "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" which you can read sometime else because reading it now can possibly overwhelm you which is against our purpose [or maybe you can also read now; the point is, follow whatever trails that seem interesting]. But I'll leave an excerpt.

People feeling alone in their interests has always been true to a certain extent, but the internet has made it much worse. The excess of information allows you to travel down your path of interest with mad velocity. On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the further you fall, the less likely it is that anyone you’ve ever met is falling where you are. This will make you immensely sad. You will visit your parents, and when they ask you about your life you will have two choices. You can either be incomprehensible and see them grow concerned about things you are excited about, or you can talk about surface-level things and cry a little when you are alone at night.

The reason I’m spelling out this dynamic is twofold. First, you can get out of this mess if you want to. You do that by writing online (or publishing cool pieces of software, or videos, or whatever makes you tickle—as long as you work in public). Second, if you want to get out of the mess the key lies exactly in understanding that you are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.

This essay resonated with me a lot, and since the time I read that, I think have gotten out of that mess. 

I just now went away started re-reading some of interesting Henrik essays. I want to point out some of them here, but I won't because I might write a separate post where I share some of the most interesting essays of him. And the reason I'm telling you this here is because if I don't write that I'd like you to nudge me to do so. The way you can nudge me is by writing to me, and that is what I'll discuss in my next post.

 Anyways, back to writing a blog. If, by any chance, you have actually decided to give it a go, I'll help you with the undecidedness about where exactly to write. For now, you have only two options:-

• Choose the simpler path, and make a blog using the same platform I use for my blog at the time i.e. Blogger.
• Go be nerdy about all kinds of blogging platforms, and list down all their pros and cons and then eventually reach the same conclusion as mine. Hehe. Bye!

Being able to spin up a room of your own with a few clicks is one of the great advantages we have over previous generations. Make use of it. ~Henrik