Friday, 31 May 2024
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Hello. All is well. God is love. 

Yes, I'm going to start each entry with that. I think it's important. Let me do my little ritual. I swear I'm not starting a cult.

Continuing with chapter seven, we learn about creativity and measuring intelligence.

The book briefly mentions creativity. It helps to have a lot of knowledge. I think gathering knowledge from different fields can be a method for finding unconventional solutions. You know, there are a lot of people specializing in narrow fields. I've accepted that's not in my nature to do, but who knows?

Thinking outside the box is also known as divergent thinking, and the opposite is convergent thinking, which emphasizes staying in a field with a clear direction to a solution. I suppose divergent thinking is high risk and high reward, and convergent thinking is low risk and medium reward. You're usually going to be better off with convergent thinking.

I felt I was forced to think outside the box to survive when it came to school and work. I see all these bright, dedicated, beautiful, sociable people. We're all going to compete for limited enrollment and employment. Yeah... I should think of another path fast. It worked out, but I'd contribute that mainly to delusions and luck. Delusions kept me going, failure after failure, until I got lucky. But it's important to max out your chance of luck, i.e. don't put it all in red. Forget looksmaxxing, it's all about lucksmaxxing. Sorry.

I think I have average intelligence and creativity. My secret sauce was having intention, learning the cheat codes, making many small attempts, and breaking a few rules. The last one is tricky to get right depending on your level of sociopathy, but it's usually the deciding factor of how successful you'll be, unfortunately. In general, I think one should start with convergent thinking and then move to divergent thinking. A good indicator that something is wrong in a society is if the convergent path leads most astray.

Anyway, it's time to measure intelligence. IQ stands for intelligence quotient. It is a standardization of the measurement of intelligence. Without standards of measurement, we can't really use it for anything. I guess you could say standardization is a practical process of creating a context to create absolute knowledge.

The Flynn effect observes that IQ increases with each generation, but this doesn't necessarily mean they're more intelligent by nature.

Standard deviation tells us the dispersion of data values from the mean. It arranges values into fitting percentage chunks for normal distribution. What am I even saying? Normal distribution, or the bell curve, is a type of distribution where data fits into a symmetrical distribution centered around the mean value. I'll look into a statistics book later.

For IQ, a value of 100 is the mean, and one standard deviation is 15, meaning most people will fall between an IQ of 85 and 115.

Stereotypically, we may think people with a high intelligence are outcasts with weak physique like me. This is not true according to studies, notably a longitudinal study by Lewis Terman. They're usually well-adjusted to society with above average physique and attractiveness. If you're in the top 2% (~130 IQ), you can join Mensa. Measuring intelligence is useful for identifying support needs and appropriate duties for a person.

Moving on to my moral protocol. Morals say something about what is wrong and right. What is good and bad. Ethics is the philosophical study of this. I'm not taking the approach of a study if that makes any sense. I'm not making an academic or intellectual investigation.

I am looking for a solution to a practical problem that relates to the academic study of ethics. When I think of academic study, I think of building knowledge using scientific methods. However, I don't find it practical for this purpose, and I find it confusing to use words from ethics like utilitarianism because they contain a bunch of stuff that doesn't help me make sense.

I want an agent-sensical, relative starting point to build upon, like the transport protocol for the internet protocol. I don't want an absolute standard. That's for some superior being to figure out. For me, morality takes place on the interpersonal level. Morals serve to regulate human social systems.

If we look at a human, its internal sensory system, affective feeling guides regulation, serving to maximize the human's agency. The goal is not to feel well. It's a metric or feedback system. In economics, we know of Goodhart's law, which seems to be a valid critique that can be applied to ethical theories, such as hedonism.

I think the purpose of morals should be to maximize a social system's agency. What does this mean in practice? That's a more complicated question and inherently degenerate as a complex social system like DNA. But it's a similar concept to improving a human's agency. In the context of a social system, such as a society, things like the improvement of technology and infrastructure spring to mind. It expands the system's agency in reality, and expansion will intuitively feel right as our basic feelings are based on the same concept, but I'm missing all explanations if it doesn't make sense yet.

With systems thinking in mind, a social system is made up of people. To maximize the social system's agency, we want it to regulate humans competently to competently regulate itself. In practice, it makes sense that this leads to ideas of happiness and well-being since those are usually states we associate with good regulation. But the important part is that agency is our ultimate concern. However, positive feelings and well-being typically go hand in hand with a sense of agency.

Here comes another important part. As humans make up the social system, we have to consider how humans work when thinking of morals. You could think of morals as the immune system of a society, and the people are the cells. This is where I believe theories such as effective altruism fall short if one thinks of maximizing agency and considering the agents, humans, making up the social system. My gut reaction to effective altruism is that they effectively turned humanism into authoritarianism.

How do we guide the cells in our social system to improve its agency? I think interpersonal emotions are a starting point. But for this to make sense, you have to view emotions as constructions. What I mean is they are complex concepts to guide complex social functions. A competent or good emotional concept is one which leads to agency. Again, it's a complex system, so the specifics are inherently degenerate, but it makes sense that the outcome should be improved collective agency.

If a human fails to regulate, there's an increased risk of cancer. A part of the system grows and reproduces to the detriment of the system and itself in the end. You can think of incompetent morals leading to poor regulation in a social system that can lead to cancer of another form. Some practical examples could be the growth of a corporation or central government to the detriment of a society's agency.

I think I will leave it at this for today, but there's lots more I have to say and think through as well. I find it fun to write about, but the primary goal is to help me function. Yes, I have to go through all this to reach the basic conclusion that love is pretty based.