NOTE: THIS IS AN UNFINISHED DRAFT NOT WRITTEN FOR EXTERNAL READERS.

 Few days back I wrote something.

A main point was something like:

You should have extreme opinions about things that matter, but not about things that do not matter.

When I mentioned things that matter, I obviously meant things that had a chance to matter, not necessarily we are sure that they will matter. However, I had defined things that matter rather poorly. In example, I described how principles of practical guidance are what you should have extreme takes about.

This time, I try to figure out what’s the right way to formulate this, as my previous formulation was quite wrong.

[To add: many things that didn’t seem to matter at first but people continued being interested in them later turned out to matter very much e.g. discoveries in maths and physics]

So, last night, I was thinking about this on my bed, and I figured something out and I jolted them down on my phone:

You have to have hard opinions about principles of practical guidance, but not hard beliefs about how the world works, or about the underlying nature/mechanism of reality.

The latter is more susceptible to bias. People either gravitate totally towards their point of initial standing [belief they started out with], or an extreme opposite to their point of initial standing because it does not work out all things fully, and the opposite extreme explains/ copes those things right that your initial standpoint got wrong, but not because this new extreme is right, but because you were on the verge on falling right side of the bridge and it told you to lean left, but if you start holding it in similar extreme position, you are at risk at falling on the left side of bridge

Why there is a bridge you may ask? Why there is no extreme correct take?

Yes, there might be some extreme or near extreme correct takes, such as you should not harm other people, or try to make the world a better place.

But as I mentioned, these are about principles of practical or functional value that tell you how you ought to live your life.

But if you have extreme takes about how the world works, then I would say you have closed doors on yourself for any new discovery, and you are very very likely to miss the bigger picture

 

 I pondered again about the matter today, and something still doesn’t seem quite right. I think I was correct about the latter part, that we should not have any extreme takes about what precisely the nature of reality is. The reason is that our discovery or understanding of our universe is quite in its infancy. We surely have progressed forth a quite and uncovered great many mysteries of the universe, but the proportion of that to the mysteries we haven’t uncovered is extremely minute. To settle on our old frameworks is stagnancy and death of further inquiry. And I think this also makes it clear that I am only against hard settling of beliefs about things that we haven’t properly uncovered yet. I do not mean that we should still doubt matters that have been proven through extensive evidence over time, such as that we should clean our hands before meals. As human, we have an innate tendency to speculate and theorize and that has set forth us to uncover many a things, and thus we should take actual actions that enable us to test them. Needless doubt will only incapacitate us from actually testing out. So, my point is that we must not treat these theories as settled or hard truths.

But, what I didn’t get quite right was when I said we should have hard opinions about principles of practical guidance. I think this formulation can be misleading for someone who does not understand the matter I present henceforth.

There are in reality very few hard principles, that remain as hard truths one should cling to no matter what. Few I could count were integrity, honesty, justice, truth. There might be a handful of others I can’t seem to remember now. Although I think these should stand at the root of our actions, I don’t think these are the actual drivers of our rightful actions. What I think can be an actual driver of rightful action is the following statement/principle/whatever:

One should use his natural abilities to do the thing that is most appropriate in a given situation.

This principle is important to understand because what is right in a given situation is not right in some other situation. If we cling to rules like, do not harm others, be persistent, etc., we very soon will have to start introducing exceptions and edge cases. Actually edge cases isn’t that right word because these exceptions will be much more common than edge cases. Take the point about not harming others, for example. When a surgeon cuts through a patient’s body, he is actually inflicting a great deal of harm, but it is still appropriate because the harm is less than the expected alleviation of some other harm to the same person. Similarly, if society punishes a criminal, the harm inflicted upon the criminal is justified on the basis of harm alleviated from other members of society.

Take example of another saying, that we should be loving and caring for people around us. I think this also isn’t a good principle to always adhere to. Why? I see many children do not get most out of their innate capabilities because their parents are too loving and caring of them, and this tendency of parents barrs those children from any kind of struggle including the struggle that comes inherent with doing anything meaningful in life. We as a society have been so much traumatized by purposeless struggle that most of us can’t imagine a purposeful or meaningful kind of struggle.

Anyways, coming back to the point, in most of our everyday actions, we should not be following some hard and fast rules, but rather asking ourselves, what is the most appropriate thing to do here. We should be thoughtful of our actions, which means we should be trying to figure out the consequences of our actions, including higher-order effects. The problem with higher-order effects is that the higher order, you think about, your certainty about it reduces, so you have to discount that higher order effect due to higher uncertainty.

There is a group of people among rationalists who take this even further, and claim that we should not just be vaguely thinking about these higher order effects, but rather we should mathematically estimate these thing to find out what maximizes a certain objective function which they call us welfare. I think they are right about convincing people to contemplate about whether their actions actually achieved the results they intended to or not, and this was a good thing given that even a lot of seemingly well-intentioned [how do you know?] actions are ineffective. However, I think the mathematical framework they have developed for this contemplation is quite useless. One reason for this is that whatever final objective function they aim to maximize through their mathematical excise is something by nature unquantifiable. The attempts to quantify it nonetheless leads to ridiculous results like shrimpmaxxing. This is why we should keep mathematical models for well defined objective functions like no. of runs in a baseball game, and we might get some useful results from it. Second reason, for this is that we greatly underestimate human mind’s capabilities to think about higher-order effects. I don’t know what’s the proper term for it, but I think this is what people mean when they say intuition. People who are observant of various changes in a given system, and think about it, and then tinker with the system to bring about some other changes and then observant of the whole system, and they do this whole thing for a great deal of time, develop this thing called intuition about that system, and their minds are then capable of accurately estimating higher order effects of a new set of changes in the system. When instead we shift towards mathematical models which can’t properly incorporate all changes in a system (probably because some are not properly quantifiable, and as someone who has worked with demographic and survey data, I can assure you that in a complex system, even the quantifiable elements are very hard to get accurate observations of), we are just throwing a lot of useful but either unquantifiable, or not accurately observable information into trash can. I think a great abuse of mathematics in this age is that we have started seeing it as a tool to delegate our thinking to, instead of seeing it as tool to enhance it.

So coming back to the point that we should be thoughtful of our actions, and ask ourselves what is the appropriate thing to do given this situation. But this can also be rephrased to what is the right thing to do given this situation. While the appropriateness covers the part that how the correct course of action is different for different situation, but still given the situation, there is a judgement call, a matter of values. Thoughtfulness tells you about the higher order effects of different courses of action, but then considering the right course of action and actually doing it, requires you to be well-intentioned. [For now, I’m not sure about how to address this part].

These were a few things that remained when I was cutting down principles for things that are appropriate in one situation but not in some other: integrity, honesty, justice, truth, which makes me curious what makes them truly hard-and-fast. I don’t think integrity can be compromised in any situation. One who dies fighting to maintain it dies a very honorable death. Similarly, I can’t think of any reasonable excuse to be not honest. I do think it is appropriate to hide some true facts in some extreme cases, but it is a different thing to lie or be explicitly dishonest about something. Justice is also something very important because it actually guides a lot of appropriateness. A great deal of apparently good actions are nullified because they violate justice. For instance, a person who shows generosity to his relatives and acquaintances, but this depraves him to give essential necessities to his own family commits injustice to his own family. Similarly, if one starts doing charity work during his working hours, he is being unjust to his employer. So, I don’t think there is any situation in which being unjust could be the right thing. About truth, well, I can’t think of why someone would want to deviate from truth for even a single moment of his life. This is something so problematic in my framework of understanding that my mind just can’t comprehend what could lead someone to believe it. If you are such a person, please let me know.

So, these were a few un-compromisable principles that came to my mind, and I think there might be a few more, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of them. In fact, there are great overlapping elements to integrity, honesty, and truth.