How to Live .org

howtolive.org — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:09:00 +0000

More on my recent trip to California... The primary reason for my visit was to sell a patent I was awarded a few years ago. In my earlier post I mentioned that I visited Google. Google wasn't the buyer of the patent... or to be precise, I don't know who the buyer was, as it was kept confidential. I am moderately happy with the sale, for several reasons. The sale price was more than twice the highest previous offer. I had had the patent for several years and hadn't had much serious licensing interest (although admittedly I had spent little time actively looking for licensees). It is a business model patent, which the courts have not been very keen on recently. And it probably would've cost a couple million to defend against any infringers (although I'm not aware of any infringers). The claims are extremely broad, which is great, but as with any patent there's no guarantee that they'd hold up in court.
The patent is for what I think is a truly revolutionary idea for streamlining online transactions. It's not obvious that the idea will work; on the surface it seems like it probably wouldn't work, but after a little thought most people I've talked to agree that it has some chance of working. The key point is that if it does work, it could be truly huge. Critically, for the idea to be successful it would require massive scale, on the order of millions of transactions a month. The potential buyer might be able to reach this level, but I was pretty sure that I couldn't. I do hope that the buyer makes the idea work. If they use it to build the next ebay or amazon, I would be very satisfied both that my idea was implemented on a large scale and that it resulted in increased efficiencies for the world's transactions, and only slightly jealous and regretful that I wasn't the one who made it happen.
I'm glad I went through the process of patenting my invention. The patent didn't take very long for me to put together, so on a per hour basis it netted me more per hour than I get in my day job. Although the process was an interesting one to go through once, I don't have any plans to patent any of the other ideas bouncing around in my head. The fun part was coming up with the idea and then trying to figure out the details of how it might work. The writing of the claims required a part of my brain I had never used before, and reminded me why I'm glad I'm not a lawyer. Working with (against?) the patent office to get the paperwork completed and to persuade the examiner that the claims should be approved was pretty unpleasant and could've only partially been outsourced to a patent lawyer. Like my experiences with the isolation tank, skydiving, and drugs, it belongs on my list of things worth doing once or twice but not making a habit of.

howtolive.org — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:31:00 +0000

Random videos of no particular importance:
Stairway to Heaven by the Beatles
Amazing soccer skills demonstration
My favorite pianist
This guy has way too much free time.
Magic tricks explained

howtolive.org — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:35:00 +0000

Here's a little game I just made to test your knowledge of medicine. Your task is to guess which of the following are possible side effects of the ten top-selling drugs and which are possible side effects of drugs from Prescott Pharmaceuticals, the drug company endorsed by Dr. Stephen Colbert. Click on the Comments link to see the answers.
goiter
tremors
difficulty speaking
dyspepsia
cardiac arrest
fungal infection of the mouth
breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue
taste perversion
gastrointestinal hemorrhage
enlarged abdomen
Arthralgia
Scruffula
mild heart explosions
hairy uvula
restless torso syndrome
mild Hulkism
Phantom Hand Syndrome
Spontaneous Pregnancy
vivid dreams of self-cannibalization
Late Onset Albinoism
monkey lung
spontaneous and uncontrollable gum growth
clown-foot
increased risk of vampire attack
wandering genitals syndrome

howtolive.org — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:22:00 +0000

During my trip last week I had an opportunity to visit Google's campus. I had never been there before, but as a customer (Adwords), vendor (Adsense) and shareholder I thought I should visit, especially since I was going to be in the area anyway. Like most internet companies, mine is very dependent upon Google. Until recently I thought of my business as serving three constituencies: its users, its advertisers, and its employees. Now it's users, advertisers, employees, and Google. Google impacts us even more than our direct competitors do. Such a business model is dangerous, but Google has consistently smiled on us (mostly because we play by the rules) and so it's worked well for us so far.
Not surprisingly, I was very impressed by the visit. It felt like a college campus, but with much better food in the cafeteria. Not all of their employees are brilliant, but a lot of them are, and the average employee there is probably smarter than at any other large company in the world. If I was just now graduating from college, this is the company I'd want to work at (although with the skills I had straight out of school I don't think I would've made the cut). They offer the types of perks I wish I could offer my employees, but unfortunately my company's annual revenues aren't a million dollars per employee the way Google's are.
Overall, I really like how they run their business. They're innovators not only in their products but also in their approach to running the business. Internal processes are continually improved and become pretty close to optimized. I like how they ignore Wall Street and think long term, not being in any particular hurry to monetize new tools. They do sometimes seem to be moving in a hundred different directions and a lot of their products never catch on, but they've been very careful not to kill their golden goose, search, and indeed they continue to improve it and distance themselves from Yahoo, Microsoft and the other also-rans. The growth will obviously slow in the coming years, and there will certainly be challenges ahead for them, but it's a big world and there's still plenty of room for them to grow. I would be surprised if they weren't much much bigger and more profitable in the future, and if I had to take one guess at what company would have the largest market cap in twenty years, my guess would be Google. (But I'd still put the chances at only about 15%. More likely it will be some company that doesn't exist yet.)
When I first started my company I gravitated toward technology, but in recent years I've come to appreciate why Warren Buffett generally avoids technology when investing. As with everything else, he turned out to be right, and I'd be better off today if I had blindly trusted him rather than having to learn the lessons myself. If I were just starting a company now and my goal was to build an entity with enduring value (as opposed to, for example, wanting to work on cool projects) I probably wouldn't do anything in technology, because it's very hard to build a lasting moat in tech. This is also the reason I don't have much technology in my portfolio, but I've made an exception for Google. With most companies, the closer I look, the less impressed I am. The reverse is true for Google.

howtolive.org — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:15:00 +0000

I'm back from my trip. Did you miss me? I spent last week reconnecting with a dear friend, sipping bottled poetry and communing with John Muir's ghost. In case you haven't already guessed, I was in (and around) San Francisco, the city with the lowest ratio of (time I spend there / time I want to spend there). The trip's original purpose was pseudo-business-related (more on that in upcoming posts) but I decided to take off the full week and turn it into mostly a vacation. Like the best vacations, I got three discrete doses of happiness from it: the anticipation beforehand, the being and doing during, and the memory afterwards. Unlike prior vacations, I found that I was able to almost completely avoid thinking about work. I only checked email and voicemail once on the entire trip. The fact that my job existed probably only passed through my head once or twice a day, and only for a few minutes. I don't know if I've gotten better at controlling what I think about, or if I care less about work now than I used to, or if I care just as much but simply worry less, or if my subconscious brain has found that I don't have as many good business-related ideas these days and so intruding upon my consciousness with random business-related thoughts isn't as likely to be productive anymore. I'm still getting caught up at work so I don't have time for a longer post, but I'll post a couple more notes about my trip in the next few weeks.

howtolive.org — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:00:00 +0000

Stuff worth checking out:
PBS Special: Bush's War
Podcasts from top universities
Examine your concept of morality, with Steven Pinker's help
How to slow down aging
What constitutes a meaningful life?
As a quick programming note, I will be off the grid next week (hopefully doing blogworthy things) and won't be able to post again until the following week.

howtolive.org — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:21:00 +0000

Over the weekend I had my first experience in an isolation tank. I like exploring my own consciousness and I'm willing to try just about anything once, so it seemed like a logical thing to do. I had heard that experts recommend no more than one hour for first-timers, but I wanted to make sure I felt the full impact (whatever it might be) and so I opted for two hours. It wasn't total sensory deprivation, but it was very close. The water was the same temperature as my skin and had epsom salt to make floating effortless, the tank was almost pitch black, and I wore earplugs to block out any sound. I was intermittently aware of my breathing and could occasionally sense my heart beating, but other than that there were really no external sensations reaching my brain.

I didn't know quite what to expect. Not being under the influence of psychedelic drugs and not planning to spend 20 or 30 hours in the tank, I wasn't expecting a visit from the Earth Coincidence Control Office. But I was optimistic that I would learn something about the relationship between sensory information and consciousness. I thought it would probably help me to cleanse the doors of perception, and figured I had an outside chance of feeling the sensation of an out-of-body experience.

Overall, the time in the tank was somewhat disappointing. I thought that in the absence of any external stimuli my mind might start manufacturing auditory or visual hallucinations, but it didn't. For the most part, it was as dark in my mind as it was in the room. I was self-aware for most of the two hours but my mind still felt localized in the place where my head was. After the first ten or fifteen minutes of thinking random thoughts as I do in everyday life, my mind became very quiet and I was able to avoid thinking of anything in particular. Thoughts did periodically enter my mind unbidden, but I was able to observe them passively and non-judgmentally, as Vipassana meditation recommends, and they quickly faded away, as if they knew their attempts to command my attention would be futile.

Time did get a little distorted. When the two hours were over I felt like it had been about an hour and a quarter. I'm very confident that I didn't fall asleep at all, but in such a state it's difficult to claim anything with certainty. I'm fairly good at judging the passage of time in ordinary life, so my incorrect guess about the passage of time was somewhat surprising, but the discrepancy wasn't so great as to be startling, and it seems reasonable that in the absence of anything occurring, the mind wouldn't be very good at judging how quickly time was passing.

As I said, my experience in the tank was somewhat disappointing. But once I emerged, I discovered that my mind had indeed been altered from the experience. I was initially tempted to describe the change as merely a recalibration: after two hours of not getting any sensory input, I figured my brain had simply turned the knobs up. But there was more to it than that. The differences weren't just quantitative, but also qualitative. It wasn't just that I perceived the light as brighter and the sounds as louder. Colors were more colorful, and sounds were, for lack of a better word, soundier. On the way home, the breeze on my skin felt breezier. Space felt as if it had more depth... not that it was more than three-dimensional, but rather that I was realizing that in ordinary everyday life it was a little less than three-dimensional.

I especially noticed a change in music. The songs on the radio seemed more... songy. When I got home I played my guitar, and felt a desire to play slowly, at about half speed, in order to give each note a chance to exist in the fullness of time, knowing that the purpose of playing the song was to play it and not to have played it. ("It's the journey, not the destination"... "Be Here Now"... etc). Then I played some of my favorite songs on my ipod. My ipod is filled with two (partially overlapping) types of songs: songs I like because they demonstrate artistry, and songs I like because they move me emotionally. I felt a desire to listen to songs only in the latter category. And they sounded even better than usual.

My other senses were heightened as well. I washed a bowl of blueberries in cold water and the water felt... I'm not sure what word to use here... waterrific? I put a little splenda on them and ate them one by one, which at the time seemed to be the only proper way to eat them. Not surprisingly, they tasted great.

In addition to the overall vividness of my senses, I also had a general sense of well-being and connectedness with the world - benevolence, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity (which you might recognize as the four sublime virtues of Buddhism). I know that in some ways the description I've given sounds a lot like a drug high (maybe something like a mescaline trip, only to a far lesser degree). But it didn't feel like a drug high, and my cognitive functioning was enhanced rather than impaired. I don't want to overstate the magnitude of the changes. My natural state is to feel a little like this all the time, and this experience maybe moved me from a 1 to a 2 on the Buddhaometer. It was nowhere near nirvana, or even the feeling one would get from an empathogen like MDMA.

Alas, the change was only temporary. Several hours later I was no longer able to tell if it was having any impact at all, and by the next morning I was pretty sure that I was back to my pre-tank state. The next day, I wondered which mental state was the "correct" one: my ordinary state, in which my mind is bombarded by thousands of external stimuli and is constantly in overdrive, or my post-tank state, which required the equally unnatural condition of total sensory deprivation to achieve. Of course, even if I decided that my post-tank mental state were "correct" and desirable, I may not have the ability to consciously choose to make that my default mental state.

All in all, the experience wasn't life-changing, and I don't think it revealed some previously hidden truth about the nature of reality, but I'm glad I did it once. I am not specifically recommending that you try it, or that you don't try it, although my advocacy of the "try almost anything once" policy does seem to prescribe giving it a shot. Keep in mind, your mileage may vary.

howtolive.org — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:04:00 +0000

And now for something completely different, my favorite recent nominees for the Bookseller/Diagram's Oddest Book Titles prize:
The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, Julian Montague
I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen, Jasper McCutcheon
How to Write a How to Write Book, Brian Piddock
Drawing and Painting the Undead, Keith Thompson
Squid Recruitment Dynamics, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
How Green Were the Nazis?, edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller
Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium, edited by Robert Anderson, Juliet Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan Critchley
Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar
Bombproof Your Horse, Rick Pelicano and Lauren Tjaden

howtolive.org — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:21:00 +0000

Videos worth watching:
Fantastic look at what happens inside a cell
Bono talks about Africa
Profile of radical life extension advocate Aubrey de Grey
Sam Harris talks about religion, atheism, mystical experiences, and happiness
America: Freedom to Fascism

howtolive.org — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:26:00 +0000

On Friday I had the opportunity to hear author Dan Ariely speak. Dan is an MIT professor on tour to promote his new book, Predictably Irrational. He made a strong case that people are, as his book's title implies, not just irrational but irrational in predictable ways. Some interesting tidbits:
- The herd instinct extends even to one's current self being inclined to copy actions one previously made (in this case, you can think of all of the prior "yous" as the herd). People often remember what they did before in similar situations without necessarily remembering the rationale or the outcome, and this can contribute to behavioral inertia.
- People are more likely to cheat when the benefit is abstracted, even if only superficially. The example Dan gave was an experiment in which people had the ability to cheat and claim they deserved more money than they actually did. When the payoff was in cash, people only cheated a little, but when the payoff was in tokens which could be immediately redeemed for cash, people cheated a lot more. (As a side note, I also took this as evidence that the pervasiveness of cash has made people forget that it is just as abstracted as tokens are.)
- In another experiment, people were given arbitrary numbers from 1 to 100 and each was first asked if he/she would want to buy a given item at that number of dollars, and then later was given the opportunity to bid whatever he/she wanted to on the same item. There was about a 0.5 correlation between the initial arbitrary amount and the bid amount, whereas for rational agents there should've been no correlation. Provided that the methodology was sound, such a high correlation implies that people's perceptions of value are extremely easy to manipulate.
- In another experiment, Dan let students specify their own deadlines for a series of projects during the semester, but with substantial penalties for missing their self-imposed deadlines. A strictly rational student seemingly should choose the latest date allowed for all projects, but students who spread their deadlines evenly throughout the semester turned performed better. (There are obviously potential confounding factors here, which I'm assuming Dan dealt with.) This is an interesting example of a person wanting to do what's best for his/her future selves while not trusting those future selves to behave rationally and therefore imposing restrictions on his/her own future behavior.
If you like this kind of thing, you might want to check out Dan's book. You might also like overcomingbias.com, a great site run by ultra-smart guys Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky which covers similar ideas.

howtolive.org — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:16:00 +0000

Here are my favorite quotes from David Seaman's "The Real Meaning of Life":

"If you spend your time on things you feel are meaningless, life will seem meaningless to you, and you will probably be pretty miserable and discontented. If you spend your time on things you feel are meaningful, then your life will be full of meaning, and you will be pretty happy, no matter what happens to you." - Michaela Stephens

"It is true that the unexamined life is not worth living, but it is equally true that the overexamined life is also not worth living."
"There is always a blue sky above the clouds."
"The sunrise and sunsets in life are sublime, and every night we see that it is darkest just before the dawn, but on a deeper level we know that the sun never actually goes down - it's just an illusion caused by the world spinning around. Nature is nudging us, offering fresh evidence for hope and faith, love, and persistence against all appearances." - John P. Avlon

"Choose the meaning of life from one of the four listed below:
1. Life has no intrinsic meaning beyond what we attribute to it. Our task is to infuse our lives with whatever meaning will ensure we stay with it to the end.
2. The meaning of life is way beyond our grasp. Naturally, we do the best to grasp it, but it essentially ungraspable. Our life is a continual process of seeking that meaning, and living in the heart of that seeking. When we stop seeking we have either given up on it or decided that we have it figured out. In either case we are wrong, and life begins to die from there.
3. Life means love. Our lives are treasure hunts for love. When you find the treasure, you find yourself; you are love, you are life, you live.
4. Life is an experiment. Can we bear to live without meaning? If we can live without meaning, we will be destroyed. If we cannot live without meaning, we will destroy ourselves. If we find meaning, we will fight to live. If enough people find enough meaning, humankind will live. If a critical mass does not find meaning soon enough, the experiment will be complete, and humankind will be gone." - Wend Stewart

"We spend entirely too much time looking outside ourselves for meaning, for happiness, for gratification, for validation, or for anything we seek. The trick is to find all these things within first. Once we do that we find affirmation of all those things in the world around us." - Sjan Evardsson

"No one ever finds the meaning of life - they simply become suitably satisfied by love, children, or career, and these become the outcomes of the quest and human fulfillment of purpose... If you are ever consistently hounded by longings to uncover the meaning of life, it's you telling yourself that something is missing in your existence. Stop reading books about the subject - that's the equivalent of reading romance books when you're lonely. Get out and open yourself up to new experiences. You're being set up for an internal battle with your own desire for security." - Peter Davison

"For me, what it means to live are these things in this order: love, family, friends, fun, health, creativity, achievement, stability, purpose, variety, challenges, excitement." - Autumn Nazarian

"Give more than you take. Do your best to leave every situation better than you found it. Seek beauty in all its forms. Chase dreams. Watch sunsets. Endeavor to use more than 10 percent of your brain. Don't stifle your deep-from-the-gut, cleansing laughter. Take a moment to ponder the enormity of the universe, then admit to yourself that you can't possibly be the center. Breathe deeply. Swim into the dark water. Let yourself cry when your body tells you to. Love more. Delight in silliness. Don't be bitter. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive." - Katy Rhodes

"I have been alive 10,983 days. I can't help but think I've wasted around 10,900 of them.
By wasted, I mean I've spent the days hidden behind a desk at the office or slept until noon or wallowed in a bad mood. I've been ill, watched too much TV, or surfed the Internet for entirely too long. There are 10,900 days I don't remember.
But I could probably recall vividly around eighty-three different days of my life. These are the days I graduated from college, adopted my dog, Lucy, got married, played my first song on the guitar, or published my first poem. They also include the day my grandfather died and the day my first boyfriend broke my heart.
The days I remember aren't all happy or pleasant; they didn't always teach me a lesson or make me a better person. But they always, always made me feel something: excitement, pride, sadness, love, exhilaration. There is an overwhelming emotion tied to each of these days that makes them impossible to disregard.
It is so easy to pass a day without having felt anything. To me, my life has meaning only when I've felt something I can't forget." - Vicki L. Wilson

"Enjoy your life to the fullest, do what you truly love to do, and be with those you love as much as possible." - David Seaman

howtolive.org — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:32:00 +0000

On this date in 1600, scientific martyr Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy. I have a profound respect for him... I love truth, but I'm not prepared to give my life for it. Here's my favorite quote from Bruno, from his De l’Infinito Universo e Mondi: "There are countless suns and countless earths all rotating around their suns in exactly the same way as the seven planets of our system. We see only the suns because they are the largest bodies and are luminous, but their planets remain invisible to us because they are smaller and non-luminous. The countless worlds in the universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our earth... Destroy the theories that the Earth is the center of the Universe!" Read more about him here.

howtolive.org — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:48:00 +0000

I decided to take off work tomorrow to go snowboarding. I prefer to go on a weekday to avoid the lift lines. It does tend to be harder to persuade friends to go with me during the week, but that's understandable. Or is it? When someone says "I can't", is that really true? No, they were physically capable of going. So why would they say they couldn't go? Maybe they didn't want to go. Maybe abdicating decision-making power is their way of short-circuiting any attempt by me to persuade them. Maybe "I can't" is linguistic shorthand for "I have evaluated my options and determined that it's not the best one". (If that's the case, the English language probably needs a new word that lacks the moral implications of "shouldn't"... maybe "optn't"?) But more likely, it was an automatic reflex rather than a carefully deliberated decision.
Why would people choose to avoid making such decisions? Because they think that if they don't make a choice that they can't make a mistake? Because continually rethinking every possible option at every instant would result in mental fatigue? Because it's unpleasant to think about the sacrifices that the current you makes to benefit future yous?
Commitments, obligations, responsibilities... on the surface these all feel like either yes or no, you have it or you don't, and if you have it then it trumps everything else, and is not something to be weighed in the balance with other considerations. Granted, sometimes people really have no choice, and a certain course of action is absolutely necessary. And if you make a promise to do something, you should honor that commitment, even if it limits your decision-making power (which means that you should not make such commitments lightly). But in other circumstances, when you feel that you have only one choice, you should double-check to make sure that you really only have one option, because you might have other options that you automatically assumed weren't viable but which might be.
As a small business owner, it is both easier and harder for me to take a day off. Easier because no one can tell me I can't go. Harder because it's more expensive for me to take a day off. Even if I'm not a wage slave, I'm still a slave to the business model. But above moderate affluence the marginal value of each additional dollar declines in its ability to positively impact one's happiness, and realizing this has given me a degree of freedom I wouldn't have had otherwise. I sometimes take off a day of work just to exercise my autonomy, and to remind myself that it's within my power to do so, even when the temptation is to think that it isn't.
I hope to see you on the slopes, if not tomorrow, then some other weekday.

howtolive.org — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:01:00 +0000

From author, entrepreneur, and all-around cool guy Paul Graham: "People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends. Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good."

howtolive.org — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:18:00 +0000

Happy Birthday, Charles Darwin! His complete works are now freely available online here. My favorite quote from him is his concluding sentence from Origin of Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

howtolive.org — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:37:00 +0000

A reader named Chris recently sent me an email that I'm publishing here (with his permission) because it's too good not to post. I like the way he thinks, because it forces me to question what I believe. Below his email I have included my replies as referenced footnotes. My intent in posting this is to clarify my opinions for him and other readers and to subject these opinions to criticism.
Chris wrote:
In what is apparently your current state of mind, all things are possible and interesting. This is not a virtue of logic or rationality; it is a virtue of imagination. [1] Hold onto it dearly because if you persist in your stated purpose, your imagination is the baby you'll need to salvage from the bathwater. I applaud your efforts and hope that you will have a fruitful journey. Toward that end I offer a few thoughts on the subject.
1. Whether or not there is anything beyond our universe (in the grand sense of our ability to perceive or measure) is utterly irrelevant, and most likely uninteresting except for flights of fancy. Why? Because, by definition, it cannot affect us. [2] The very instant that it affects us or becomes tangent in any way to our universe, it ceases to be THAT and becomes THIS. And THIS is the province of science. Anything that is defined as supernatural or metaphysical cannot be studied or understood by science, but who cares? No theist is interested in God's hobbies. It is the interface BETWEEN the natural and the supernatural (i.e. so-called miracles, etc.) that people are concerned with. In short, if there is a God who exists beyond the physical laws of our universe, it does not matter UNTIL He acts on our universe at which point He or His act is by definition part of our Universe and even if not constrained by our universe's physical laws, He or His act is certainly subject to our scientists' scrutiny. Read more at naturalism.org.
2. Your conscious or subconscious endorsement of the legitimacy of the evolution/ID "debate" if not your tacit endorsement of ID itself, is clear through your repeated use of the term, "design" throughout your site. I would predict that, if you are not being disingenuous, you probably believe that some kind of god or other-worldly force does exist and has either allowed or controlled the process of evolution. If I am correct in that prediction, please re-read #1 above after reading this. [3]
If your position is that "God"(or whatever) must exist because of the overabundance of order and apparent design in the universe generally and in biological systems specifically [4], think about this:
a. this is what is known as the argument from personal incredulity. "I, personally, find (it) difficult to imagine therefore (it) must be false." or conversely, "I find (it) easier to believe than something else so (it) must be true." Obviously, this can have no explanatory value to anyone, including the person making the argument. [5]
b. If your argument is that the universe and the biology found in it are too complex to have occurred via any means other than through the design of some vastly superior being you have explained precisely NOTHING. You are in the grips of an infinite regress. If the universe is so complex as to require a designer, then by the same very argument, THE DESIGNER ITSELF REQUIRES A DESIGNER (presumably the designer is at least AS complex as that which was designed). [6]
3. You may also have bought into the statistical hat trick suggesting that the universe is too statistically unlikely to have occurred via natural means (trick #1 is the use of the code term "by chance"). Ponder this: The odds of something happening that DID HAPPEN, no matter how unlikely, are precisely 1 in 1. [7]
4. Another recurrent theme in your repertoire seems to be a reliance upon the concept of free will (and I like the Rush song, too). I would caution you against overestimating it's value. The most that can be said of free will is that it is very a convenient illusion for our legal system to exploit in order to maintain it's own legitimacy, the status quo and prosecute those who are statistically unpopular. [8]
a. Several hundred years ago the study of philosophy determined that free will was another infinite regress since no one is their own "First Cause."
b. More recently Physics dropped the deterministic universe bomb. Briefly, at any single moment, there exists exactly one possible future. [9]
c. Neurobiology is currently dismantling the heart of the free will myth in ways that defy sound-biting. Suffice it to say, we are the product of two programs, one genetic and one environmental/cultural. Nature AND nurture AND...nothing else. There is no "you" passing judgment on you; no "you" beyond you deciding what to do, no matter how counter-intuitive this seems. [10]
That's right. I am saying there is no supernatural anything. No soul, no god, no consciousness guiding evolution or anything else in any sense that any religion has thus far suggested. This is not to say that we have figured it all out. I'm quite certain that there are forces at work in the universe with which we are not yet familiar (and may never be). I am equally certain that those forces, if they exist, exist in THIS universe, or they simply don't matter.
And now my replies:
[1] I don't think that all things are interesting; I do have broad interests but find many things uninteresting. I do think it is an open question whether all things are possible, and my view is based at least partially on logic and not just imagination. Countless things have been demonstrated to be possible, but I don't think anything has ever been demonstrated to be impossible (perhaps proving that something is impossible is the only thing which is impossible to do?), and many things which had been previously thought to be impossible were eventually accomplished. Our universe does seem to have some limits on what can be known (e.g. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, etc), but these don't necessarily imply that there are states that our universe can't reach. I can't confidently say that everything is possible, but it's hubris to think we're smart enough to confidently say we know what will never be possible.
[2] Part of our apparent difference of opinion might be merely semantic, specifically in our usage of the word "universe". I typically use the phrase "our universe" to mean "the stuff that came out of our big bang", as distinct from "all that exists". It's possible that our universe is all that exists, or it's possible that our universe is an unimaginably small part of all that exists. I think the latter is more likely. I do think that what might exist outside our universe, and questions such as what happened "before" the big bang or what (if anything) caused it, are suitable topics for scientific research (once we're sufficiently intelligent to use clues within our universe about what's outside our universe), and therefore not supernatural.
I do have a minor objection to your claim that anything outside of our universe is irrelevant for how we should live. If one thinks a god created our universe for some purpose, and one believes that some clues as to this purpose can be discovered, then this should certainly be factored in to one's decision about how to live. You apparently do not accept these two premises (which is fine), but I think you'd admit that one who did should accept the conclusion.
Having said all that, I do occasionally think that speculating about what might lie beyond our universe is a waste of time, and that I do it not because it's important or because it will change how I live, but because I enjoy thinking about these things. But those feelings are based on the low probability that I'll figure out anything meaningful and not on the fact that such discoveries wouldn't be useful.
[3] My use of the word "design" might be confusing. I mean it in the same sense that some evolutionary theorists use it as a shorthand for "appears to be designed". Some writers include that explanatory caveat every time they use the word, but I find that cumbersome. I know that such confusion can be manipulated by intelligent design proponents for their political ends (just as they tried to claim that disagreements between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould about punctuated equilibrium implied that evolutionary theory wasn't on solid footing), but I care more about discovering the truth than about how such meme wars play out. Just to be clear, I have very little patience for religious fundamentalists who rally behind the intelligent design movement as a way to circumvent the Supreme Court ban on teaching creationism.
I consider myself an agnostic. But the distinction I made above between a creator of all that exists and a creator of our universe is important here. If I had to guess, I'd estimate the likelihood of a creator of all that exists (i.e. a first mover) to be 30%, and a creator of our universe to be 80%. Of course, these are just guesses based on limited and difficult-to-interpret data.
[4] My position is not that apparent design necessarily implies a creator, but that it ought to somewhat increase one's estimation of the likelihood that a creator exists.
[5] When deciding what to believe, I weigh empirical evidence much more heavily than my intuition; e.g. I accept quantum physics and relativity as true even though they seem profoundly absurd to me. But for anything that currently lies outside the empirical realm, what can I possibly factor in to my beliefs other than intuition (after examining ways in which my intuition tends to be flawed and making adjustments to the extent that I can)? And couldn't I argue that atheists are falling into the same trap, believing that there's no god because they can't imagine how there could be one? (e.g. "If there was a god, then what created that god? I can't wrap my head around that, so there must not be a god.")
[6] I do accept that my view (that there is at least a chance that there are "levels" above ours) doesn't remove the mystery. However, that alone doesn't mean it's not true. If we start to find evidence that there are indeed levels above ours, it would be silly to simply ignore that information on the grounds that it doesn't provide a full explanation and merely pushes the mysteries further up.
[7] That is true. However, if I flipped a coin and it came up heads, even afterwards I would still be able to say that the a priori chance of it coming up heads was 50%. Granted, the matter of our existence is different due to the Anthropic Bias. You might be right that existence isn't a mystery in need of explanation, but I just can't get past the firing squad analogy: If you woke up to find that you had just faced a firing squad and all the shooters had somehow missed you, you would not simply say "it's not remarkable that I'm still alive, because if I wasn't then I wouldn't be here to ponder the situation".
[8] I talk a lot about free will not because I understand it and want to educate others, but because I don't understand it and hope others can educate me. I'm not confident that I'll ever understand free will (people much smarter than me have spent years thinking about it without success), so this might fall in the category of things that are fun to think about but are unlikely to really affect how we should live. I do grant that some people believe in free will because they want to believe in it; but obviously this alone doesn't make it false. I also admit that it's possible to overstate the importance of free will, but I think it's also possible to understate its importance. Consider the following list: life, intelligence, consciousness, morality, free will. Several things strike me about this list: They're interrelated; They feel valuable and fundamental; They make a universe interesting; They are among the few things that humans don't understand; They might somehow open the door to an unexpected outcome; etc. I might be biased by the fact that I'm a living, intelligent, conscious, moral, partially free entity. But if I were creating a universe, I'd probably bake stuff like this into the system. I don't know how important free will is. But given that philosophers can't even agree on a definition (e.g. "ability to do otherwise"... ok, so what does that mean?), I don't see how we can confidently say that free will is not important.
[9] Even if I accept the claim that in our universe the causal path we're on cannot be changed, I don't think that implies that the same must be true outside our universe. And in any case, compatibilists argue that there could be some form of free will in a deterministic system. I haven't found compatibilist arguments persuasive, but we shouldn't simply dismiss them as non-existent.
[10] I definitely agree that most people live like robots, doing whatever their genes and memes "want" them to do. But I do think that it's possible (at least in theory, if not by current humans) to break free from our default programming and have some degree of free will. One possible route to such freedom may be found in the concept of higher-order desires and preferences described by Harry Frankfurt and others.

howtolive.org — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:59:00 +0000

I recently saw the excellent movie The Shawshank Redemption for the first time since its original release. One scene got me thinking. In it, Morgan Freeman's character is talking about another inmate who has spent almost his whole life in jail, but who is up for parole and is scared of starting a new life in the "real" world. Freeman says: "These prison walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on 'em. That's institutionalized." My question is, is your life institutionalized? Invisible walls are no less real than visible ones, and are harder to break through because they have to be discovered before they can be destroyed. How much of what you think and do in a typical day are influenced, or even determined, by others? Have you gradually become reliant upon things that you would be better off without? Comfort is seductive, but is detrimental to the development of the autonomous spirit. Are you truly free? Or are you sleepwalking through life?

howtolive.org — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:52:00 +0000

TGIF and Happy New Month, dear reader. I'm registering pretty high on the happyometer today, for a lot of reasons: 1. It's friday. 2. Spring is just around the corner. 3. I sold one of my web sites this week. The negotiations took longer than I had expected but I'm glad we were able to work out a deal. With this out of the way I hope to have more time now to post. 4. Yesterday I found out that I wasn't going to have to move out of my townhouse. My aunt owns it and had planned to move back to town this spring, but her plans have been postponed and so I'm not getting evicted yet. 5. I'll be spending most of this weekend with my favorite person (other than myself, of course).

howtolive.org — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:48:00 +0000

More interesting stuff...
See which candidate's platform is closest to yours.
So you say you're not prejudiced? Let's see...
Is it really true that people find faces with average features to be beautiful? This site lets you experiment and see for yourself.
How much time do you have left?
If you don't want to be a vegetarian but you want to want to be a vegetarian, spend some time inside a slaughterhouse.

howtolive.org — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:49:00 +0000

I received a very nice email over the weekend from a reader who explained that he has everything that people typically assume will bring happiness, but that he isn't as happy as he thinks he should be. I hear this a lot. Since my recent posts have drifted away from my stated purpose for the blog, I thought this would be a good time to circle back and summarize what I've learned about happiness, one of this blog's key themes. I don't have all the answers (yet), but here's what I know so far, in no particular order:
1. First decide if happiness is what you really want. Most people live as if happiness is the ultimate goal, but it need not be.
2. Happiness and pleasure are often confused, and this confusion usually results in more pleasure and less happiness.
3. Most people are wrong about what would make them happy. If you systematically examine what makes you happy (for example by keeping a journal for a few weeks), you'll probably be surprised.
4. Money and happiness are positively correlated only up to the level of moderate affluence.
5. Your genes have given you a default happiness set point, but you can break free from it with effort.
6. Examine what makes others happy, for example by studying the burgeoning field of positive psychology.
7. Have a safety net. Develop positive social relationships, and have some activities or hobbies that brighten your mood whenever you need a temporary boost.
8. Understand the relationship between purpose and happiness, and the ways a purposeful life can lead to happiness.
9. Get off the hedonistic treadmill.
10. Cultivate an appreciation for the little things. People who wrote down a few things they were grateful for each day reported a significant rise in happiness.
11. Don't let your happiness be determined by how you're doing relative to others.
12. Happiness is affected by the interplay of expectations, circumstances, and interpretations. You have at least some control over all three.
13. Providing happiness to others is a good way to achieve happiness yourself.

howtolive.org — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:00:00 +0000

Several regular readers have pointed out that I don't talk much on my blog about my personal life. Perhaps it's just my humility that has kept me from talking about myself more. To address this, I thought I should put together a list of some of my favorite things. So here we go...
favorite person: me
favorite family: mine
favorite college: the one I attended
favorite sports team: the one from my hometown
favorite city: the one I live in
favorite country: the United States
favorite planet: the earth
favorite star: the sun
favorite galaxy: the Milky Way
favorite universe: the one I'm in

howtolive.org — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:04:00 +0000

More Notable Quotables...
"Freedom is not one moral value among many, but the necessary condition for all morality. Without the possibility of acting other than one did or does or might act there is no responsibility and without responsibility no morality. Freedom derives from choice, and choice in turn from awareness." - Allen Wheelis
"Why is 'one plus twelve' an anagram of 'two plus eleven'? The truth is that not everything has a reason behind it. We should not assume there is someone or something to be blamed for every pattern that strikes us as significant. But we have evolved to have what the psychologist Bartlett called an 'effort after meaning'. We have always done better to find meaning where there was none than to miss meaning where there was." - Nick Humphrey
"As we have discovered more and more fundamental physical principles they seem to have less and less to do with us." - Steven Weinberg
"Unnervingly, there is literally no form of experience or behavior too horrible to get selected for if it differentially enhances the reproductive fitness of genetic vehicles." - David Pearce
"Americans seem to have a very difficult time recognizing that there is a distinction between understanding and sympathizing. Somehow we believe that an attempt to inform ourselves about what leads to evil is an attempt to explain it away. I believe that just the opposite is true, and that when it comes to coping with evil, ignorance is our own worst enemy." - Kathleen Norris

howtolive.org — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:04:00 +0000

In anticipation of the upcoming Olympic games, I have recommended to the IOC some events of my own invention. Don't be surprised if you see some of these in the Beijing games later this year.
1. High and Narrow Jump: Similar to the high jump, except that there are also two vertical bars that you have to squeeze between. A jumper's score is the height divided by the width. Having seen the Beijing Acrobats live, I'm expecting a score of about 6 (e.g. 6 feet high / 1 foot wide).
2. Sprintathon: Runners are spread evenly around a track. When the gun fires, you run as fast as you want. If the runner behind you catches you and tags you, you're out. Last one still running wins. It will be interesting to see if sprinters or marathoners have the advantage.
3. Underwater Swimming For Distance: Everyone starts on one side of the pool and goes back and forth underwater, as fast or slow as they want, until they have to come up for air, or until their body floats to the top. Kids, don't try this at home!
4. Ski/Snowboard Jump: This is a tandem event for the Winter Olympics (or if they pass, the X Games). A skier and a snowboarder go off the long jump at the same time, but they must swap equipment in mid-air before landing gracefully.

howtolive.org — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:15:00 +0000

Assorted links...
Invest wisely, end poverty
Top science breakthroughs of 2007
Interesting article about beauty and success
50 lessons learned over 50 years
Women living under muslim laws

howtolive.org — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:36:00 +0000

Over the holiday break I decided to become politically active for the first time in my life. Who do I support? Ron Paul. Let me explain why.
First, he is the only candidate I trust. He has as much integrity as Jed Bartlet. John McCain has called Ron Paul "the most honest man in Congress". Ron says what he believes rather than what people want to hear. He doesn't treat voters like children. He says and does what he thinks is best for the country, not for himself. He supported his children during their undergraduate and medical school years, preventing their participation in federal student loans because the program was taxpayer-subsidized. He rejected a Congressional pension for the same reason, and even proposed a pay cut for Congressmen (i.e. himself). He declined to attend junkets or register for a Congressional pension. His medical practice refused Medicare and Medicaid payments; he worked pro bono, arranged discounted or custom-payment plans for needy patients, or otherwise "just took care of them".
Second, I like most of his platform and voting record. He voted against the Iraq War resolution. He has never voted to approve a deficit budget. He wants to abolish individual income tax. (Absurd, you say? Actually, it would only require scaling back the federal budget to its 2000 spending levels.) He favors allowing workers to opt out of Social Security. He opposes the "Patriot" Act. He understands that the reason the U.S. has more enemies and fewer friends than ever before is not that everyone else is jealous of our freedom.
Third (and most importantly), he is the only candidate who could really change the system. He understands that the federal government is a bloated, ravenous monster that devours everything in its domain, causes problems rather than solving them, and gets bigger, less efficient, and more destructive with every passing decade. Personally I would estimate that the value the government provides me is about 5% of what I involuntarily pay it for those services. (If you haven't done this type of calculation yourself, I encourage you to. Be sure to include everything you pay: income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, property tax, gas tax, the hidden tax of inflation, etc etc.) It's time to starve the beast, and Ron Paul is the only candidate willing to do it. All candidates talk about change, but once they're elected we just get more of the same. As I watched the presidential debates, the other candidates reminded me of a debate in one episode of Futurama:
John Jackson: "It's time someone had the courage to stand up and say: I'm against those things that everybody hates."
Jack Johnson: "Now, I respect my opponent. I think he's a good man. But quite frankly, I agree with everything he just said."
John Jackson: "I say your three cent titanium tax goes too far."
Jack Johnson: "And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough."
A vote for anyone else is a vote for The System. The two parties appear to have very different platforms, but the perceived differences are exaggerated by the fact that they only discuss the 10% they disagree on; the other 90% doesn't get discussed until a candidate like Ron Paul questions the hidden assumptions and puts everything back on the table. This country is going in the wrong direction, and if all we do is hire new people for the same old positions, things will keep getting worse.
Having said all that, I'm not going to pull a Trevor Lyman or Vijay Boyapati and quit my job to join his campaign. Ron Paul is not my ideal candidate. There are certain parts of his platform I don't agree with; for example, I think his strict non-interventionism is overly simplistic in a world with genocide and increasingly loose nukes. More troubling (at least for me), he has said that he doesn't "accept" evolution. (I think his word choice is interesting, essentially implying a desire to not think about something one knows is true rather than genuinely believing that it's false.) He also said he doesn't think that (dis)belief in evolution is an important consideration in one's choice of president, and that it's a "theological debate". Given the extent to which religion affects policy in this country, I disagree. We have seen that a president who is willing to ignore overwhelming evidence because it doesn't match his current belief system can get our country into serious trouble. I am a lover of truth, which is why I like the rest of his platform so much, but also why find this particular (dis)belief so troubling.
I don't think Ron Paul has a realistic chance of winning the Republican nomination, or winning the presidency as a third-party candidate (although I hope I'm wrong). But if enough people support Ron Paul and his movement, we can send a message to future politicians: our lives and our wallets belong to ourselves, not to the government, and if you agree, we'll elect you. My hope is that passion of the hundreds of thousands of fervent Ron Paul supporters will outlive this election and will enable the libertarian party to be a real force in the coming years. Hopefully some of the people carrying "Ron Paul Cured My Apathy" signs at his rallies will decide to seek public office themselves. I'm fairly certain I'll never be a politician (I would find it exceedingly frustrating), but I do intend to contribute to the cause in other ways.
Learn more about Ron Paul:
PBS NewsHour interview
John Stossel interview
monetary policy
quotes
his official site
his writing
videos