You've undoubtedly heard the old adage "money can't buy happiness". As with most adages, it has some truth to it but is an oversimplification. Money may not be able to guarantee happiness, but the two are positively correlated. This is not because happiness results from the purchase of material possessions, but rather because money buys financial independence and financial independence facilitates happiness. Consider the following financial independence ladder:
Level 1: Being forced to work in order to pay off debt.
Level 2: Being forced to work to support yourself right now, i.e. living paycheck to paycheck.
Level 3: Being able to take some time off if you want, but knowing you'll eventually be forced to return to work.
Level 4: Being able to live comfortably without work.
Level 5: Being able to live however you want without having to work, although you may still choose to work.
Each successive level increases the likelihood of happiness (although even Level 5 doesn't guarantee it). Whatever level you currently find yourself on, it's likely that you can increase your happiness (and your overall quality of life) by striving to reach the next level.

Reading Roy Baumeister's description of "the myth of pure evil" in The Meanings of Life has helped me to better understand the "war on terror". The myth of pure evil is a form of naive realism under which the evil doer's sole motive is to commit evil (because most people equate understanding and acceptance, and fear that trying to understand a terrorist's motives might open the door to justifying those motives). One essential feature of the myth of pure evil is that the evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks "our" group, a bias which governments everywhere have become adept at exploiting. The myth persists in part because people love battles between good and evil (for evidence, one need look no further than Hollywood, or their local church). And the myth resists attack because if you question the myth, you are assumed to be in league with evil (e.g. if any readers think I'm defending terrorism then they are simultaneously missing and making my point). People often feel the need to explain violence and cruelty through the myth of pure evil, but such an oversimplification stands in the way of understanding and working toward a solution.

Happy Friday! Here's the latest installment of non-trivia:
- Aristotle (in Virtue of Prosperity) said that in a decent society craftsmen and traders would not be granted citizenship, and Plato (in Laws) calls for citizens who engage in commerce to be punished.
- In 1765, the government of Hapsburg, Vienna published a catalog of forbidden books. In 1777, the catalog itself was added to the catalog because people were using it as a guidebook of interesting reading.
- There are about 10 trillion bacteria in a spoonful of typical high-quality soil.
- The wealthiest 1% of the U.S. owns 38% of its assets.
- The only Roman emperors who didn’t throw Christians to the lions were the Christian emperors, who instead threw pagans to the lions.

Another batch of quotes. Enjoy!
"The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living." - Isaac Bashevis Singer
"The rules that shape our lives defend the interests of the holders of power." - Allen Wheelis
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H.L. Mencken
"The good life is not about looking good, feeling good, or having the goods, it's about being good and doing good." - Rick Warren
"In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." - Theodore Roosevelt

Appreciation is one effective route to happiness, and one great technique for heightened appreciation is temporary deprivation. In an earlier post I mentioned that simply making a list of things you're thankful for can increase your happiness. Once you've compiled your list, consider going without each one, one at a time, for whatever period you think is appropriate. Admittedly this attempt to recalibrate your appreciation is "working within the system" rather than "breaking from free the system" (that is, changing external circumstances rather than internal interpretations of those circumstances), but I've found that such temporary deprivation can be an effective technique for cultivating appreciation when it doesn't come naturally.

From Peter Voss: "What is Optimal Living? It comprises long term physical and emotional health, fulfillment, and happiness; not wasting our lives on irrelevant or unpleasant tasks. How much time do we spend on sub-optimal activities? If our work is not a pleasure, we are off to a bad start: We probably spend at least 50% (55 hrs/week) of our total waking lives preparing, commuting and working, and that’s not even counting time wasted vegetating away because of stress, frustration and exhaustion. Most of us spend at least another 20% (22 hrs/week) of our waking lives on other tasks which we regard as necessary evils rather than pleasures. These may include shopping, cleaning, cooking, laundry, gym, fixing things, doing taxes and other red-tape, and filling ‘social obligations’.
Have you ever done an audit of your actual life? How much of our lives do we waste with people we don’t really like; or in relationships which are far from optimal? What percentage of your time do you spend doing things you want to do, rather than have to? What is our LQ (Living Quotient)? How can we get from 30% to 60% or 40% to 80% (effectively adding maybe 30 years to our lives), or even from 10% to 90% (does 10% even qualify as living)? Fortunately, many of us enjoy our work most of the time, but is it optimal? What would we do if we could wave a magic wand?
There are no magic wands. But, we have something almost as good: intellect, knowledge, freewill. We just need to learn how to weave them in just the right way.
Responsibility for our lives must neither be abdicated to the future nor to others. The priority is to do an audit of our lives: how we spend our time and money, our physical and mental health, our long and short-term goals, our strategies for achieving them, plus a review of technology (including philosophical and psychological) used to help achieve our goals. Are we satisfied with our time utilization? Are we happy with our financial plans? How do we break out of the mental prisons which hold us back? Let’s carefully review our options and overcome the limits within ourselves. Let’s make sure that we squeeze the last drops out of any technology that may promote our goals. Let’s not waste the next 20 or 50 years just fantasizing about the future. Let’s take charge – today. Order from chaos, now."

Stuff you might like...
The social contract between you and the government
Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics
How to go to MIT for free
The secret life of machines
Top 10 underreported stories of 2006

Bill Moyers: "As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people."

Over the last several years I have become more confident about my worldview and my beliefs. To clarify my thinking about matters that I'm less sure about, I find it helpful to make explicit statements and then try to quantify the likelihood that the statement is true. (I also find it interesting to ask the same questions a year or two later and watch how my answers change over time.) Here are a few examples:
- Life exists elsewhere in our universe: 92%
- Life of at least human-level intelligence exists elsewhere in our universe: 88%
- Human civilization will survive (that is, remain at or above its current level of technological capability) at least another 100 years: 85%
- ...at least another 1000 years: 25%
- Within 100 years, some form of international federation or global governmental structure will emerge that can exercise sovereign authority over world affairs: 40%
- The world's per capita GDP (currently around $8,000) will increase at least tenfold in inflation-adjusted dollars within 50 years: 50%
- A machine intelligence will have passed the Turing test within the next 25 years: 15%
- ... within the next 100 years: 60%
- My quality of life will improve in the next 10 years: 75%
- My life will have a net positive impact (whether small or large) on the world: 80%
- In old age I'll rate how I lived my life as very well or better: 60%
- I'll live to be more than 100 years old: 35%
- I'll live to be more than 200 years old: 1%
- Someone currently alive will live to be more than 200 years old: 25%
- I (that is, my consciousness) will survive my biological death: 3%
- Our observable universe will eventually stop expanding: 40%
- Our observable universe represents a vanishingly small fraction (let's say less than 1/10^100) of all that exists: 60%
- Everett's Many Worlds Hypothesis is correct and essentially complete: 15%
- Earth life originated via panspermia: 40%
- Earth life originated through directed panspermia: 20%
If you disagree about any of these, I'd like to hear your rationale, so that it might help me improve my estimates.

"You will sometimes see maps of the world in which the places where people speak different languages are shaded. So, you'll say, 'English is spoken here,' 'Russian is spoken there,' 'French is spoken here, etc.' And that's fine; that's exactly what you would expect because people speak the language of their parents.
But imagine how ridiculous it would be if you could construct a similar map for theories of, say, how the dinosaurs went extinct. Over here they all believe in the meteorite theory. Over on that continent they all believe the virus theory, down here they all believe the dinosaurs were driven extinct by the mammals. But if you think about it that's more or less exactly the situation with the world's religions. We are all brought up with the religion of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents and by golly that just happens to be the one true religion. Isn't that remarkable!" - Richard Dawkins

Today's To Do List:
- reconnect with an old friend
- take a shower with your eyes closed
- buy a meal for a homeless person
- look at yourself in the mirror for 5 straight minutes
- do something you've never done before

Some great quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr...
- "An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."
- "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
- "Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated."
- "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction... The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars — must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."
- "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
- "One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."
- "Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world."
- "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
I had difficulty keeping the list this short, because he said so many important things so eloquently. Here are lots more.

More non-trivia...
- The CDC estimates that each year in the U.S. nearly 2 million patients get an infection while at a hospital, and about 90,000 of these patients die as a result.
- The B-2 bomber includes parts made in all 50 states.
- The Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) left his wife and child in search of enlightenment.
- The richest 2% of adults own more than 50% of the world’s assets while the poorest 50% hold only 1%.
- If you started counting the atoms in a sugar cube at the rate of three per second at the time of the Big Bang, you would only be about one-millionth done by now.

Steven Pinker: "We have an unprecedented wealth of data from social psychology, ethnography, behavioral economics, criminology, behavioral genetics, cognitive neuroscience, and so on, that could inform (though of course, not dictate) policies in law, political decision-making, welfare, and so on. But they are seldom brought to bear on the issues... Since all policy decisions presuppose some hypothesis about human nature, wouldn't it make sense to bring the presuppositions into the open so they can be scrutinized in the light of our best data?"

Here's a shocking quote from Abraham Lincoln. (Thanks to Richard Dawkins for pointing it out.)
"I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
Here's the source, for those readers who can't believe he actually said this.

There's a traditional Zen saying: "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
I disagree strongly. I think enlightenment should be a means, not an end. I would consider it a hollow victory to achieve a form of enlightenment which left me internally better off but had no external impact at all on the world. Beliefs matter primarily because they affect behavior. I advocate becoming more aware of the way you are and could be, and the way the world is and could be, not merely out of a love of knowledge but in order to improve yourself and the world.

Another batch of interesting links:
learn to speed read
how your senators voted on every bill
astrobiology roadmap
a thought-provoking commentary on the war in Iraq
cosmic thinkers on camera

From Martin Rees:
"Some experiments are designed to generate conditions more extreme than ever occur naturally. Nobody then knows exactly what will happen. Indeed, there would be no point in doing any experiments if their outcomes could be fully predicted in advance. Some theorists have conjectured that certain types of experiment could conceivably unleash a runaway process that destroyed not just us but Earth itself.
More ominously, there could be a crucial hurdle at our own present evolutionary stage, the state when intelligent life starts to develop technology. If so, the future development of life depends on whether humans survive this phase.
The ever-present slight risk of a global catastrophe with a 'natural' cause will be greatly augmented by the risks stemming from twenty-first-century technology. Humankind will remain vulnerable so long as it stays confined here on Earth. Is it worth insuring against not just natural disasters but the probably much larger (and certainly growing) risk of human-induced catastrophes? Once self-sustaining communities exist away from Earth — on the Moon, on Mars, or freely floating in space — our species would be invulnerable to even the worst global disasters.
Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life's long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth. Will this happen before our technical civilization disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it forever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth.
What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter."

Some of my favorite Stephen Colbert quotes:
"I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least, and by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."
"I'm disappointed that my own Catholic Church has decided that capital punishment is wrong. Which is pretty hypocritical if you think about it, because they wouldn't even have a religion if it wasn't for capital punishment."
"If a father and a son can be president, why not the holy spirit?"
"Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is the highest grossing PowerPoint presentation in history."
Want more? Check out his hilarious appearance at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner: transcript or video

The person in the world who loves me the most is me, and the person in the world that I love the most is me. (For the purposes of this post I'm not differentiating between amore, agape and other types of love, although I understand that this may be a dangerous simplifying assumption.) I've thought about why this is the case and have come up with several possible theories:
- I have not been sufficiently successful at loving others, due to a lack of ability and/or effort.
- When I was younger I felt that I wasn't loved by others as much as I would've liked, and so as a coping mechanism I relegated it to secondary importance behind self-love.
- Consciously or subconsciously, I determined that loving myself was safer than loving others, and in an overabundance of caution opted for the safe (but not necessarily the best) route.
- I have worked hard to learn to love myself, and succeeded.
- I have worked hard to become the kind of person I could love, and succeeded.
- To know me is to love me, and I know me better than anyone else.
- I have an inflated sense of self-worth.
Some of these are interrelated, and I think the correct explanation is a combination of several of these theories.
Should such a condition be envied or pitied? Certainly, the ideal situation is to love yourself a lot, have others who love you a lot, and love others a lot (ideally with the "others" in the latter two groups being the same people). The three are obviously not mutually exclusive, and in many cases they're positively correlated. But if a person can't optimize for all three, which is most desirable (that is, most likely to lead to a well-lived life)?

Another batch of my favorite quotes...
"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear." – Ayn Rand
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." - Mark Twain
"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
"We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished." – Allen Wheelis