On Hope

There are two components to hope, namely, pro-hope cognitive bias and positive reinforcement.

While one could claim that positive bias would only develop alongside positive reinforcement during the developmental stages thus making it a subset of having positive experiences, I think it bears knowing that there is bias, conditional or otherwise.

Hence when we speak of hope and that "people should have hope", I could not agree more, provided we understand that we mean that everyone should have the opportunity to have lots of positive experiences and reinforcement. Sadly, one cannot help but notice that this post facto wish is of no help where people already are in a position of not having hope - advising them otherwise boils down to being a condescending remark that they should have had a more auspicious life thus far.

On a related note, lets not let hope go rampant. We know that a pessimistic outlook is more in line with reality than an optimistic one, so it stands to reason that we should want our economists, risk analysts, engineers, design specialists and policy makers to be on the pessimistic side so their reasoning includes not only the very real and mild possibility of success, but also the inevitable occurrences of disaster.

Obsolete Notions #1: Respect to Skepticism

All notions are produced by evolution. Everything we find important, interesting, necessary, desirable, preferable etc. etc. comes from our evolutionary past, recent or ancient. Admittedly, more recent notions are more complex, undergone more evolution - selected under a greater variety of scrutiny, withstood greater selective pressure, which generally indicates being better adapted.

Naturally, we can expect some notions to become poorly adapted and obsolete - useful sometime in the distant past, under different circumstances, in a different context, but detrimental in the here and now.

It is clearly important for every human endeavor to be able to follow the best notions and to avoid maladaptations. How to best figure out what is useful now and what to abandon? The best tool we have for figuring things out is science. Science recommends examining bottleneck notions to ascertain potential maladaptations. Potential characteristics of obsolete notions include:

• Age - entrenched, faulty notions that perpetuate themselves by drawing credibility from age. 
• Complexity - convoluted notions that do not follow the principle of Occam's Razor, but cover themselves in layers of mystery drawing credibility from being difficult to grasp. 
• Scale - notions that promote thinking in terms of a single, special, usually human, perspective drawing credibility from being commonsense and lending themselves to easy metaphor. 

After a notion is picked for examination, it is useful to consider the following: 

1. What is the evolutionary history of the notion? 
2. Is the notion active/pro-something or is it reactive/guarding from something (values or taboo generator)? 
3. Does the present environment differ from the notions evolutionary environment? How? 
4. What better alternative notions can we use? 

Let's examine our first case. The notion of respect.

Respect is probably an ancient notion, selected in our sexually-social ancestors. Who do we find respectable? Usually people of age and social position. What does having respect for someone infer about the person? Usually a set of characteristics that would get one in a position of power, such as intelligence, ambition, ferocity. It is not difficult to infer that the notion of respect, same as with beauty, is a shorthand adaptation to allow subconscious recognition of usefulness. In a group of sexually-social primates genes that allowed carriers to distinguish between respectable and dis-respectable individuals by feeling respect for ones and not for others spread better, because the carriers formed more favorable social ties and strove for more advantageous matings. 

Respect generates both taboos and value. Trivially, we are told that we have to have respect for our elders, and this works well in a hostile world where an old person has definitely had good enough sense to stay alive and is worth listening to. So it is taboo for young people to go against their elders, because older people know better and those individuals who do respect their elders are perceived as better. 

Respect also plays a significant role in the social structuring. We are told to respect people of higher rank, people who hold a higher position in a company, are more senior in a field etc. This is commonsense too - in our evolutionary past adherence to social structure is what allowed civilization to flourish. People who rock the boat are notoriously ill-favored, even those who do so legitimately, but especially those who just make trouble. 

It is clear that respect has come at odds with more recent adaptations to human interaction. 

No longer do we live in a life-threatening environment in which only a parent's guiding hand can avert catastrophe; quite the contrary, nowadays parent's controlling and bargaining behavior is more detrimental than most activities a child could engage in. With widespread access to internet and easy learning a parent's limited worldview can do nothing but stifle a new mind's capacity for growth. Food is cheap and relatively healthy (it will not kill instantaneously if consumed); violent crime lower than ever in the history of mankind. We may be scared by images of child molesters, kidnappings, sexual and drug abuse, but the facts remain that drug abuse amongst young children, same as alcohol abuse, has never been a problem and the vast majority of cases of abuse are perpetrated not by unknown evildoers, but by members of the family, usually foster or step-parents. Respect for ones elder's is obsolete.

Respect in social and work environment has turned into a similar novel conundrum. Jobs no longer are held by a person for decades, but change fluidly. Business models become more changing, new services and products emerge at an ever increasing rate and professionals evolve alongside them, on the fly. Seniority becomes obsolete as everyone is pushed back into a permanent state of student-ship. No wonder most great thinkers recognize themselves as fools and merely students in select fields, in a boat with everyone else, just getting by and figuring things out as they go. Respect cannot be given nor can it be demanded in a society that profoundly wishes to be rid of status and to allocate everyone with a nominal amount of dignity as human beings, not as participants in a great Ponzi scheme of life.

Once we recognize that respect has always been an evolutionary shorthand for detecting worth and expressing compliance in a volatile environment, we can abandon it and use notions better adapted to our present day situation. We would also do well if we notice the intricate connection between respect and authority; we tend to explicitly trust people we respect, even when rational consideration tells us otherwise. This is where two notions - respect and skepticism are at odds, and you don't need me telling you which should prevail.

Rather than looking at seniority or status as a measure of worth, we must examine evidence of skills and success - work produced, changes initiated, lives affected. Work performance can be reliably analyzed by checking figures such as income, turnover etc.

When it comes to interpersonal relationships being skeptical can be difficult, since we must avoid asking people's opinions about somebody since those are not evidence of anything other than respect, but this just means we should spend more time getting to know others first-hand and rely less on second-hand stories from sources which are by definition unreliable.

Discuss!

Viability of Gullibility

Watch this TED video, pay close attention to 14:00 in it.

Christoph introduces a brilliant idea - the viability threshold of life which is understood as the amount and rate of mutability in the organism and the environment - make it too little and the energy present (or rather vice versa) does not even allow reproduction, make it too much and the amount of random new insertions is too great to bear meaningful sembalce to the parent organism. 

Where am I going with this? To the heated debate between the religious and the skeptical. To why there seems to be a divide that cannot be crossed or breached without sacrificing something thought valuable and to why, perhaps, there should be no divide at all.

The analogy I wish to make here is that skepticism is the mutability and the viability threshold remains a viability threshold for life. In this view we will see that too much skepticism and we get an inert environment - lifelessness and, conversely, with too little skepticism we get a boiling brew of loon - divorcement from reality. This view also tells us that if we are to live, we must remain within the viability threshold's boundaries and that implies that we should combine skepticism with a sort of gullibility, an ability to make assumptions that allow for complex mental function. 

Let's look at what kind of mental environment we can expect to see in the habitable zone below the viability threshold.

The critically skeptical - I must admit I do not know of people of this type, but we might expect individuals that are inherently unable to trust their senses, other people and most forms of inquiry. Perhaps an acute version of these characteristics results in paranoia. So mildly paranoid people that have developed ways to verify their unsubstantiated feelings of mistrust and cope with the state of "overskepticismization". Needless to say, this is a boundary condition and is critically close to being maladaptive. Notice that it could be possible to claim that paranoia is in fact total gullibility - the inability to critically analyze notions of total distrust.

The cynical - considered by some to be the later stage of the life-cycle of idealism and often associated with bitterness. It seems that this type of mental environment is a product of a certain maturation, an experience of life with both highs and lows. A naturally tuned, intuitive, organic skepticism. With quirks and duct-tape patches. This is probably the natural state of all old-school skeptics - they have been through life, been gullible, paid for it and vowed never to go back. This type is moderately adjusted, however, problems might arise from the principled approach to skepticism which is limited only to past experiences.

The methodical - most scientists fit this category, as well as people who are not scientists per se, but who use the scientific method, most importantly the methodological naturalism part. It differs from cynicism in that it is based not on extensive personal experience, but on an established method - a canon of experiences and ways to think about things with the express goal to arrive at reliable results that allow high-precision activities, like designing a nuclear reactor or launching a satellite into a distant planets orbit. It is important to realize that just as cynics can be mistaken due to the personality and limitations of their natural skepticism, methodological skepticism suffers a reverse flaw - it can be misapplied due to the fact that it is burrowed knowledge and people sometimes are clumsy at integrating it into their thinking. We see this when young Earth creationists try to do "science". I would claim that based solely on science's unsurpassed ability to produce quality results it is reasonable to assert that methodical skepticism is the most adapted mode of skepticism out there.

The open minded - probably the most mixed group. It can contain persons that have some methodical training, but who feel dissatisfied with its inability to give precise answers about the supernatural world like it can about the natural world. Or it can contain people who have little methodical skepticism training, but who also have little interest in other forms of inquiry - perhaps a sub-group of "not-so-open-minded" is apt. This group often trades the precision of method to the all-inclusiveness of new-age gibberish and the old line of "there's more to life then evidence" (no, there isn't).

The religious on Sundays - this, I believe, is the most disseminate mental environment on Earth. It is a direct reflection of most societies on Earth - an which only 10% are atheist (and which means that all atheists are gay for the statistically-illiterate). This means that 90% of the world's 7 billion people, that's 6.3 billion people, are exposed to religious dogma to the level to ascribe a particular faith to themselves, at least until adolescence. This type of mental environment is not without skepticism, of course - a great deal of skepticism is encouraged against everything that could threaten said faith which usually is labelled as sin. Consequently Abrahamic religions have knowledge, sex, wealth and morality - things that any sane man should care deeply about - labelled as sins to foster an environment that punishes skepticism. Luckily, a considerable amount of people realize that what they were taught as children strains credulity when they expose themselves to information outside their dogma - usually with friends, social groups, universities and lately, the web. 

The fundamental - this is the critical state of gullibility beyond which all relevant ties to reality disappear. Clearly, it is inconceivable how a person with modest skeptical thinking skills (emphasis on skills) could be fundamental - his training would forever cut off the possibility of taking a single collection of ancient text at face value, much less to be divinely inspired. I would argue that for a person to be fundamental about something, there must be a peculiar union of absolute lack of skepticism towards a text or a set of ideas and an enduring, practically live or die type skepticism towards anything and everything that contradicts said text or set of ideas. Clearly, this results in a critical state because such a person would be forever at odds with reality and the natural world understood to even the most basic level. For the text would no doubt contain a creation myth, value set, social and moral rules and an extended discussion on reality understood as a manifestation of the divine, which would inevitably be incompatible with some if not most facts known to science. This is how the theological method canon differs from the scientific - it is a honed way to to think about things, however, there is no reference point, no experiment, no way to falsify the results. And it is simple to explain why - if religion is constructed by men, it is no surprise the texts show a surprising lack of insight even to as basic an idea as the existence of unseen evildoers that can be dispelled by washing hands - the germs.

We have examined the spectrum of predominant mental environments found in the world as a series of skeptical adaptation of varying degrees. I think a paraboloid graph would be fitting. What we can take away from this is that while we should surely strive to get our skepticism dose just right for high-precision thinking, perhaps we can rest comfortably even removed from the peak of ultimate skeptical fitness while preventing the critical excesses of paranoia and fundamentalism. 

Discuss!