My last two posts were related to the turning of the calendar. I have one final new year's idea before I say goodbye to 2006 forever. My suggestion is simple: Imagine that you have only one year to live, starting now. (If there happens to be a small subset of my audience that actually has only one year or less left to live, I certainly don't intend any disrespect to them.) The best time to do this is new year's day, since it'll be trivially easy to keep track of how much time you have left. I'm not suggesting that you stop wearing your seatbelt or take other risks that someone who truly only had a year to live might logically take. I'm suggesting that you be more aware of the passage of time and your own mortality, and that you take steps right away to achieve anything you really want to achieve, rather than letting such goals recede on the horizon as each day gets frittered away with urgent but unimportant minutiae. For a variety of reasons people tend to live less urgently than they should, and imagining that you have only one year left to live is a good way to awaken from the slumber.

Here's an end-of-the year exercise you might find useful. Look back at your appointment book or calendar for the last year (and the prior year, if you still have it). You'll probably notice a clear trend: temporal proximity, like physical proximity, tends to temporarily lead to a perceived exaggeration of importance. Obviously there are logical reasons to view the world this way, but it's possible to pay too much attention to today and not enough to yesterday and tomorrow. Indeed, basing one's mental state solely on what's happening at any given instant, and evaluating that situation relative to the immediately preceding situation or to your expectations, is a recipe for being happy half the time and unhappy half the time. Try to structure your activities and mental states in the coming year in such a way that as things happen you don't temporarily overestimate their importance.

In an earlier posts I've commented on the difference between first-order and second-order desires and on the usefulness of thinking of oneself as a sequence of "I"s over time. Both concepts come into play with new year's resolutions, and the two together illuminate why such resolutions are usually unsuccessful. A resolution is something the current you wants, but doesn't expect, future yous to do, and so the current you tries to coerce future yous to act a certain way. In other words, the current you has a second-order desire that it wants to impose upon future yous by changing their first-order desires. For a variety of reasons (most coiled up in our DNA), second-order desires are rarely capable of changing first-order desires, and for most people, the future yous will do whatever they want. If you genuinely want your new year's resolutions to be successful, the most effective technique is to change the reward/punishment matrix of future yous so that the option the current you prefers becomes the best one for future yous. For example, consider signing a binding agreement requiring you to give a friend a certain amount of money if you violate your new year's resolution. Make it enough so that sticking with the resolution becomes the best option for future yous, but not so much that if you simply can't keep the resolution you get angry with me for having suggesting this idea.

I find it interesting that jealousy is almost universally directed at what others have, not what others want. In other words, people are not jealous of others' first-order desires. For example, I've never heard anyone say, "My friend wants a new car. I wish I wanted a new car." Is this simply because people (mistakenly) believe that they can control their first-order desires, such that if they wanted those desires to be different from what they are that they could make the desired changes? Or is it the case that evolution had no use for such higher-order jealousy (or indeed, found it counterproductive to survival and reproduction)? I do find myself often wishing I could change my first-order desires; that is, I have many second-order desires (e.g. "I wish I cared more about strangers", "I wish my attraction to a woman was based more on her personality and less on her physical appearance", etc.), but such thoughts did not come to me naturally; this tendency developed in me only in recent years, after much contemplation.
By the way, I'll be taking part of next week off, but plan to resume posting late in the week. Enjoy the holidays!

There is a very strong (and justified) correlation between being depressed and feeling that life is without purpose or meaning. But which is the cause and which is the effect? Or are both effects of another cause? Or do they magnify each other in a positive feedback loop? My guess would be that heredity and environment contribute to depression, which in turn leads to a perceived lack of purpose or meaning, but I can imagine causal arrows pointing in both directions. Can anyone enlighten me on this, either with objective knowledge of studies or subjective knowledge of your own experiences with depression and purposelessness?

Five important concepts everyone should know:
John Rawls' veil of ignorance
Hugh Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics
Robert Nozick's experience machine
Panspermia
Microcredit

Some thought-provoking quotes about religion...
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - Seneca the Younger (circa 4 B.C.-65 A.D.)
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal
"People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police." - H.L. Mencken
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion." - Steven Weinberg
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." - Thomas Jefferson
"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some random stuff worth checking out...
Is it better for x guilty people to go free or y innocent people to go to jail?
Where your tax dollars go
Why scientific literacy and critical thinking skills are essential
How stores try to control your mind
Beautifully ugly bugs

My friend Alexandra recently emailed me a poem that I thought I'd share with you. It reminds me of Max Ehrmann's Desiderata. Here it is...
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty,
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
- Bessie Stanley (1905)

I like words. Some words I like due to their meanings (awe, beauty, bliss, free, sweet, pure, etc). But other words I like just because of how they sound: I enjoy saying them. Here are some of my favorites in this latter category...
bamboo, boom, brouhaha, darjeeling, defenestration, dodecahedron, esoteric, gubernatorial, hey, iconoclast, kangaroo, lugubrious, mellifluous, melody, meme, metamorphosis, mukluk, onomotopoeia, palindrome, quanta, rococo, serendipity, synesthesia, syzygy, undulate, zeitgeist.

Paul Graham: "Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor. We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners."

Here's an interesting thought experiment, from Richard Dawkins: "Should twelve jurors be locked in twelve isolation chambers and their opinions separately polled so that they constitute genuinely independent data? If it is objected that some would be too stupid or inarticulate to reach a verdict on their own, we are left wondering why such individuals are allowed on a jury at all. Perhaps there is something to be said for the collective wisdom that emerges when a group of twelve people thrash out a topic together, round a table. But this still leaves the principle of independent data unsatisfied.
Should all cases be tried by two separate juries? Or three? Or twelve? Too expensive, at least if each jury has twelve members. Two juries of six members, or three juries of four members, would probably be an improvement over the present system. But isn’t there some way of testing the relative merits of such alternative options, or of comparing the merits of trial by jury versus trial by judge?
Yes, there is. I’ll call it the Two Verdicts Concordance Test. It is based on the principle that, if a decision is valid, two independent shots at making it should yield the same result. Just for purposes of the test, we run to the expense of having two juries, listening to the same case and forbidden to talk to members of the other jury. At the end, we lock the two juries in two separate jury rooms and see if they reach the same verdict. If they don’t, nothing can be proved beyond reasonable doubt, and this would cast reasonable doubt on the jury system itself.
To make the experimental comparison with Trial by Judge, we need two experienced judges to listen to the same case, and require them too to reach their separate verdicts without talking to each other. Whichever system, Trial by Jury or Trial by Judge, yields the higher score of agreements over a number of trials is the better system and might even be accredited for future use with some confidence."
I like this idea a lot, although I think Dawkins would agree that it's only a partial solution, since consistency and accuracy may not be positively correlated. Even if the principle underlying the Two Verdicts Concordance Test is correct (that if a decision is valid, two independent attempts at making it would yield the same result), that does not necessarily imply that if two independent attempts at a decision yield the same result, that the decision is necessarily valid. For example, juries (or judges) might tend to make the same types of errors or be manipulated in the same ways by lawyers' tactics.

"To a considerable degree, our behavior is composed of automatic responses to sensory inputs, but if we knew the genetic determinants, cultural elements, and intracerebral mechanisms involved in various kinds of behavioral performance, we could come closer to understanding the motivations underlying our actions. If we were cognizant of the factors influencing our behavior, we could accept or reject many of them and minimize their effects upon us. The result would be a decrease in automatism and an increase in the deliberate quality of our responses to the environment. Awareness introduces greater individual responsibility in behavioral activities." Jose Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind (1969)

Interesting stuff you might like:
Cosmic Evolution, from Big Bang to Humankind
Caltech course: Philosophy and Neuroscience
Interesting look at religion in the U.S.
American Museum of Natural History's Genomic Revolution
Puzzles that seem impossible but are merely difficult
By the way, I won't be able to post again until Monday.

Something to keep in mind as you begin your holiday shopping...
"One cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants. Were it so that a man on arising each morning was assailed by demons which instilled in him a passion sometimes for silk shirts, sometimes for kitchenware, sometimes for chamber pots, and sometimes for orange squash, there would be every reason to applaud the effort to find the goods, however odd, that quenched this flame. But should it be that his passion was the result of his first having cultivated the demons, and should it also be that his effort to allay it stirred the demons to ever greater and greater effort, there would be question as to how rational was his solution. Unless restrained by conventional attitudes, he might wonder if the solution lay with more goods or fewer demons. So it is that if production creates the wants it seeks to satisfy, or if the wants emerge pari passu with the production, then the urgency of the wants can no longer be used to defend the urgency of the production." - John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958)

From Matt Ridley:
"Government is the problem, not the solution.
In all times and in all places there has been too much government. We now know what prosperity is: it is the gradual extension of the division of labour through the free exchange of goods and ideas, and the consequent introduction of efficiencies by the invention of new technologies. This is the process that has given us health, wealth and wisdom on a scale unimagined by our ancestors. It not only raises material standards of living, it also fuels social integration, fairness and charity. It has never failed yet. No society has grown poorer or more unequal through trade, exchange and invention. Think of pre-Ming as opposed to Ming China, seventeenth century Holland as opposed to imperial Spain, eighteenth century England as opposed to Louis XIV's France, twentieth century America as opposed to Stalin's Russia, or post-war Japan, Hong Kong and Korea as opposed to Ghana, Cuba and Argentina. Think of the Phoenicians as opposed to the Egyptians, Athens as opposed to Sparta, the Hanseatic League as opposed to the Roman Empire. In every case, weak or decentralised government, but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all, whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic decline and usually war.
Take Rome. It prospered because it was a free trade zone. But it repeatedly invested the proceeds of that prosperity in too much government and so wasted it in luxury, war, gladiators and public monuments. The Roman empire's list of innovations is derisory, even compared with that of the 'dark ages' that followed.
In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it. Self-policing standards and rules were developed by free-trading merchants in medieval Europe long before they were taken over and codified as laws (and often corrupted) by monarchs and governments.
Sometimes, they say we need it to protect the weak, the victims of technological change or trade flows. But throughout history such intervention, though well meant, has usually proved misguided — because its progenitors refuse to believe in (or find out about) David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage: even if China is better at making everything than France, there will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say, luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import luxury goods and insurance.
Government is a very dangerous toy. It is used to fight wars, impose ideologies and enrich rulers. True, nowadays, our leaders do not enrich themselves (at least not on the scale of the Sun King), but they enrich their clients: they preside over vast and insatiable parasitic bureaucracies that grow by Parkinson's Law and live off true wealth creators such as traders and inventors.
Sure, it is possible to have too little government. Only, that has not been the world's problem for millennia. After the century of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, can anybody really say that the risk of too little government is greater than the risk of too much? The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be."

From Frans de Waal: "Given that our brains absorb and reflect everything around us, they are barely our own. We all carry society's brains around, and the biggest advance in science will come from disentangling the feedback loop between brain development and the ancient primate tendencies that shape our societies. We have the distinction of going where no species has gone before. Whether we make good use of that distinction depends on human nature and the way we choose to organise our societies. What is the value of medical discoveries if most people cannot afford them? What good does it do to harness power if we only use it to make weapons? Who can say that anti-science forces will not send us backwards in time? This is why we need a deeper understanding of human nature, and this can be achieved only if the social sciences replace their ideology-laden, fragmented approach with objective science grounded in a unitary theory of behaviour. There is only one such theory around, which is why I predict that 50 years from now every psychology and sociology department will have Darwin's portrait on the wall."