Read Paul Graham’s essay: Is It Worth Being Wise? this morning. It occurs to me that I value wisdom more than intelligence. I love living in a time where genius has more opportunities to express itself, but I also recognize that I’m not a genius. In the end, while we, as a community of beings, are finding all these new things or creating them, there is value in choosing between them that won’t take genius, but wisdom. It will come from subscribing to a set of values of determining how these new technologies fit into it. But, those values cannot come from a time where these possibilities did not exist. New ideas will reshape values, and it is up to the wise to determine how to optimize that, once the possible becomes actual.
Tag: values
The Eulogy Method is Bunk
“It might sound morbid, but it’s worth beginning with the end in mind. Specifically, your funeral. Simply ask yourself: “What would I feel good about someone saying in my eulogy?” Think about what you’d like a family member, a close friend, a distant relative, or a co-worker, to say at your funeral.
This method helps us understand the question of “What do I value?” from other people’s perspective. At your funeral, even your co-workers would be unlikely to say, “He helped us close lots of million-dollar deals.” They’d talk about how you were as a person—your relationships, your character, your hobbies. And they’d talk about the positive impact you had on the world, not how much money you made for your employer.
Now apply what you’ve learned to your life today. What does the life you want people to remember in a few decades mean for the life you should build now? So having started in this cheerful place, let’s bring things a little closer to home.”
-Nir Eyal, “The Ultimate Guide to Unstoppable Motivation.” nirandfar.com. December 26, 2023
The problem with the eulogy method is that it starts with the assumption that the perceptions of others are what motivate you. Perhaps I am unusual in this way of thinking, but funerals are for the living. It is to help the living come to terms with a hole that has been cut into their lives by the sudden absence that a death brings. It’s not for the dead.
In most instances, funerals are a lie told to comfort the living. It focuses on the good qualities of the deceased. It ignores the bad qualities. It is based on other people’s perceptions, which are shaped by their own narratives. It has no bearing on the truth.
Let’s reframe this suggestion. Let’s imagine that you are the last in line. When you die, there will be no one to bury you. No one that remembers anything you did. There is no external source that is going to validate your choices. What will you do then, when you have no legacy, no long term significance?
That’s a lesson worth learning. Each of us is nobody, going nowhere. Even Shakespeare, and his writings, will eventually be lost in time. But, we can experience Shakespeare now. The fact that Shakespeare will be gone, in the future, does not detract from the fact that we can read what he wrote now.
I think this is true of everyone. It’s all theory of visitors. We have this moment. We have this shared time together. Can we not value the moment, without having some idea about producing something, turning an encounter into a statement about our beliefs and values? The whole eulogy frame is broken, a railroad track guiding you not to real values but to a predetermined number of ways of living that ultimately depend on projecting a persona, a false self.
Is it not better to think there isn’t a self, or at least if there is one, one without any consequence?
What’s the Profit (কি লাভ)?
Why do it? I keep thinking about the differences in how people account for value. One dichotomy that comes up is people that want to talk and think about other people, and people that want to talk and think about ideas, without reference to people.
I remember once, on a trip to Italy, I was with a group that had hired a local guide. While the group was taking pictures of themselves and other people in the group, I was mostly taking pictures of the architecture, the sculpture, the paintings and so forth. Generally, I was not taking pictures of people. The guide stopped me and said something like, “If you were to come back, years from now, many of these things will still be here, but the people won’t be.”
He was right. I’ll probably never have that opportunity to take a trip like that with my dad again. This is true of everything, the moment will never return. It’s a variation on the theory of visitors.
It goes deeper than that, though. There’s the phrase: there are people that know the price of everything and the value of nothing. There’s a certain kind of cook who thinks it is a greater virtue to get the best price on ingredients or use all of something rather than have waste than to make food that tastes good and that people will enjoy. We do not live with such scarcity that we need to maximize calories per dollar. Yet, some people insist on it.
Culturally, you can see these kinds of values as well. For example, I make certain recipes, such as spiced maple caramels, caramel-filled butter pecan cake, idli, bread cooked in the kubaneh-style, home-made chili pickles, etc. The maple syrup in the spiced maple caramels alone would make it difficult to sell the caramels at a profit, particularly if much cheaper substitutes will be had. But, most people have never eaten anything like them.
The caramel cake takes about 6 hours to make. Idli requires at least two days of fermentation to develop interesting flavors. Bread cooked in the kubaneh style is slow cooked over 8-12 hours. Chilies can take months, even years, to fully pickle.
Some products that take a long time can make a profit. There are +20 year old ports, cheeses decades old, and so forth. But, I wonder how much is lost in a world that cannot afford to wait, that is more concerned about turning over the product and selling it than the quality, or uniqueness of the product itself.
When you start looking, you can see this everywhere. in cryptocurrency circles, people ask why the price isn’t going up, as if a cryptocurrency developed on a time line of a few years is going to generate value that quickly.
But, it seems the environment has us looking for profit. We know the price of everything and know the value of nothing. And, there is much that has value that is discarded, out of hand. Beauty, value and everything else being in the eye of the beholder.
Spielen Macht Frei (Play Sets You Free)
“The Prussian model seeks to create a population for whom work, no matter how mind-numbing or back-breaking, is the only hope. That’s why they try to inspire us with the promise of a freedom that will never come. When we keep play alive in our own lives, in the lives of our children, even if it is just in the nooks and crannies, we are creating real hope for freedom. If you are reading this, you are probably one of those people keeping play alive. In this world, play is the one thing that can give us genuine hope. It is the only path to freedom. And that is why play is the greatest threat to the status quo.It’s play, not work, that will set us free.”
Teacher Tom, “Play Is The Greatest Threat To The Status Quo.””. teachertomsblog.blogspot.com. December 22, 2022
This morning, I was reading someone talk about how consistency is the key to great work. Before joining family and friends for Christmas Eve or Christmas, one should get a little work done. When I read it, it sounded convincing.
Shortly after, I read this piece from Teacher Tom. Its an interesting contrast. In our culture, value is a function of work. How do we contribute to society? And, our contribution is, for most, determined materially. In crass terms, it’s the hourly rate where we exchange our time for money. That’s our value.
But, it is useful to be reminded that there are other values. As one section describes it:
Yunkaporta points out that the word “work” does not even exist in many Indigenous languages. Indeed, the “work” his people did do prior to colonization was confined to a couple hours a day and was comprised of things many of us now do as a break from work like gardening, cooking, hunting, hiking, camping, tinkering, and fishing. They spent the rest of their time building relationships, making art, dancing, playing games (almost always cooperative), telling stories, and making music. Indeed, they spent their time doing the very things that our youngest children do when left alone to be whatever they want to be — not when they grow up, but right now. Play, not work, sets us free.”
-ibid.
Indigenous people, or even people not part of our post-capitalist society or that live on its margins, viewed value through the lens of being someone who was enjoyable to spend time around. What would our lives be like if this were the organizing principle of society?
On one level, this seems like it would make our focus on extrovertism even more pronounced. It would amp up the performance aspect of society. But, it also makes me think that extrovertism and introvertism might be a kind of filter failure, where our society and the people who were are acquainted with has grown so large that it passes a certain threshold where people stop trying to participate in that society.
If you lived in a society or 100 people or less, where people knew and cared for one another on some fundamental level. Wouldn’t this change our society, where we knew that there was this base layer of caring and knowing that serves as a kind of bedrock on which play rests? Doesn’t it require a certain level of negotiation to move to the kind of intimacy that play requires with complete strangers, particularly in a world where all but the smallest children have been wounded by others?
What would it take to live in a world where play was of primary value? I’ve suggested smaller group sizes. But, what can we do, right where we are, to make this a more important value?
Intrinsic Values Test
“To develop this test, we investigated what philosophers and psychologists have said about what humans fundamentally value, and then conducted two studies of our own, collecting and statistically analyzing the intrinsic values of 500 people in the U.S. Taking this test will help you:
1. Figure out your most important intrinsic values.
2. Discover what your unique intrinsic values say about you.
3. Understand why intrinsic values are so important.
An intrinsic value is something you value for its own sake.
Put another way, an intrinsic value is something you would still value even if you got absolutely nothing else from it. Sometimes intrinsic values are referred to as ‘terminal values,’ because they reflect the end points in our value system that all our other values are aiming at. Non-intrinsic values are sometimes called ‘instrumental values,’ because we only care about them as a means to achieve other ends.”
–Intrinsic Values Test
My top value: I have agency and can make choices for myself. Surprising no one.
Excavating A.I.
“Datasets aren’t simply raw materials to feed algorithms, but are political interventions. As such, much of the discussion around ‘bias’ in AI systems misses the mark: there is no ‘neutral,’ ‘natural,’ or ‘apolitical’ vantage point that training data can be built upon. There is no easy technical ‘fix’ by shifting demographics, deleting offensive terms, or seeking equal representation by skin tone. The whole endeavor of collecting images, categorizing them, and labeling them is itself a form of politics, filled with questions about who gets to decide what images mean and what kinds of social and political work those representations perform.”
—Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI
The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets.” Excavating.AI. October 2019.
White Nationalism in the United States
“Sometimes, in the face of a totalitarian system of thought, and in the absence of a fully articulated alternative world order, conveying unease is the best a narrator can do. Or is it? …
As we now understand, a significant portion of the US population supports a politics of white nationalism…The phrasing varies, but the arguments share a premise: life is deeply
unfair, and by birthright some people will have material comforts and physical safety and some will suffer, and this inequality should be upheld with state-sanctioned paramilitary force.”—Emily Witt, “Crossing the Border.” London Review of Books. August 15, 2019.
The people who love the idea of the law of the jungle are people that don’t live in one.
Can A.I. Think Ethically?
Source: Cyber Security Degrees
Personal Values Assessment
A survey from the Barrett Values Centre that has you select ten values from a list and then sends you an assessment via email.
cafebedouin.org 