I pride myself on my rationality.  Whenever I have an idea, I try my best to check it for unsupported axioms, and I try to make sure it is consistent, both with itself and with other ideas that I know make sense.   Years ago, I concluded that God, as described by Catholicism, could not possibly exist. There was too much suffering in the universe for that to make sense, I thought.  I even believed that arguing for the existence of a God was in some way justifying all the suffering. If God is all powerful, I reasoned, he could simply wipe away all suffering and make it impossible for us to be unhappy. Because there is definitely suffering in the world, then anyone who believes in a just God must also believe that the suffering is somehow just, because a just god would not allow injustice.

I thought a lot about suffering and pain and problems in the world. My understanding of science told me that the universe is made up of lifeless particles interacting according to simple mathematical rules, and that humans are biological robots made from those particles, competing with each other, and with other organisms, for the limited resources that the world has to offer.  As I saw it, we were either going to exhaust all available resources and make our world completely uninhabitable, or we were going to destroy each other through warfare. I saw the world as a horrendous place, and instead of viewing my life as a gift to be treasured, I saw it as a curse inflicted upon me, and often wished I could simply disappear.   When you think that the universe is fundamentally an awful place, it’s hard to be happy, even for a little while.

All of this has changed for me, though, largely thanks to my girlfriend, Megan.   We met almost exactly a year ago, and as I got to know her I soon realized she saw the world in a different way. To her, the world is a beautiful place and life is a gift. At first I figured she was just deluding herself like everyone else, but I soon started thinking she might be right. She saw life not as a curse but as a wonderful blessing, a gift, and this view of life made her happy, gave her peace of mind, and helped her not to worry about stupid things that really don’t matter.

I wanted to share Megan’s optimistic view of the universe, but I felt that science made it very clear that the optimism was completely unwarranted.  I recently realized, though, that perhaps my understanding of science was incorrect.

Or Perhaps Not?

Everything in the universe that has momentum has a wavelength. It’s called the de Broglie wavelength, and it’s a result of quantum mechanics.  Simply put, everything in the universe, from the smallest atom, to very the galaxy we live in, is vibrating at a specific frequency. Not only are there spatial vibrations; light is also a wave characterized by frequency.  Every object that has a temperature emits light; the frequency of this light is determined by the object’s temperature.  This light is called ‘black body radiation‘, and everything that has a temperature emits it. On top of the spatial vibration due to the de Broglie wavelength and the electromagnetic vibration due to black body radiation, scientists also think objects with mass emit gravity waves, although these have yet to be detected.

So everything in the universe is sending off all kinds of different waves.  The waves that are emitted by a given object are not random, though, they have specific frequencies.  A question arises: do you know of anything that could be described as collection of waves with carefully selected frequencies? Sure you do – it’s called music. The universe is not some giant computer simulating biological robots competing for scare resources; it’s a musical instrument. The very laws of physics that govern our universe and make it work are designed so that everything is vibrating and giving off  different waves.

The interesting part hasn’t even come yet. If the universe is playing a song, who’s listening? What does it sound like? We are all part of the universe, which means we are all listening to the song.  Every bit of information you have about the outside world comes to you through your nerves. A nerve is a special type of cell that can fire a chemical pulse. If a nerve is stimulated beyond a certain threshold, such as a nerve responding to the temperature sensing a temperature above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it fires a pulse, and that pulse goes to simulate the other nerves to which the firing nerve is connected.  After a nerve fires, it has to wait a bit before it can fire again. The minimum time a nerve needs to wait before it can fire again determines the frequency at which the nerve fires.  A nerve is like a string on a musical instrument that can be plucked, and when it is plucked, it plays a specific frequency to your brain.

So the universe is playing a song, and your nerves are translating electromagnetic waves entering your eyes, and sound waves entering your ears, and heat entering your body,  the music of the universe, into a music that your brain understands.  Your brain listens to this music, and it responds by sending signals along various nerves, causing your muscles to contract and your vocal chords to move. How does your brain send signals to your body? it causes nerves to fire signals to your muscles.  As I explained before, a nerve is like a string that can be plucked because it can fire at a specific frequency and is either firing or not.  Your brain is singing a song to your body, causing it to move and manipulate the universe, changing the song the universe sings back to you.  If you go to a house with a dial-up connection to the internet, you can pick up the phone while a computer is connected to the internet via a modem, and you can listen to the computer singing to the internet service provider.  Your brain sings to your body in the same way.

So each of us is engaged in a duet with the entire universe.  Everything you see and feel and touch, every sensation you experience, is a note in the song the universe is playing for you.  Everything you do, every action to take, every muscle you contract and each word you speak is a note in the song that you are playing for the entire universe to hear.  What does this all mean?

You can’t predict anything with this theory;  and because it doesn’t predict anything (that I can think of) we can’t really test it.   Is it true? I’m not sure.  The thing is, it’s completely consistent with a logical, science-based understanding of the world, but it’s also beautiful. When you realize that your life is a song you are playing for the entire universe, how could you not want to make that song as beautiful and inspiring as possible? How could you not want to learn to master your instrument and learn all of its techniques? Just looking at the science, with a strictly rational perspective, you can be incredibly positive about the nature of the universe and about your own life. When you realize that the universe is playing you a song, you can start to listen for it, to understand the chord structure and the melody and to enjoy it in a way that you never would have imagined.

When you hear the song of the universe, you realize that even though life has pain in it, and that bad things can happen to you, focusing on those bad things is completely missing the point.  Living life with a negative focus, complaining about problems in your life and in the world is like being a concert violinist who is playing her most important performance ever, but instead of doing her best to play her instrument with passion, doing her utmost to make the song as romantic and wonderful as possible, to play a song fit to be the song of all existence, she’s fixated on whether the guy two seats over isn’t maybe just a little out of tune.  When you live your life fixated on bad things that might happen and things that hurt in the past and what pain could lay ahead, you’re missing the whole song. You’re not playing it as best as you can, and you’re taking away from the whole.

Because I thought the world was a horrible place, I thought about suicide a lot.  If I killed myself, I knew it would hurt a lot of other people but I also knew that it would prevent me from suffering any more pain.  I realize now how stupid this way of thinking is. Imagine a beautiful concert, the orchestra playing the most wonderful piece ever, and right in the middle of the song, one of the violinists cuts the strings off his violin.  Not only will his part stop abruptly, but the snapping of the strings will make an awful noise which will distract all the other musicians; they may get so upset about what he did that they miss their queues and they forget to play their parts.  Do I really want my last action to be screwing up the song of the universe?

Your death is not the end of your song, because the song you are playing right now is altering the physical structure of the universe, changing the way in which the universe vibrates. The song you play resonates on long after you’ve played your last note. It plays on in the ideas you’ve created, and in the things you’ve built. It plays on in your family and the people who loved you when you were still playing; we hear the songs we play for each other and inspire each other to create beautiful new melodies.  The melodies and phrases that you create are shared and passed on, enriching the song of the universe long after you’ve breathed your last.

Your life is a song that you are playing through your actions, your contribution to the song of all existence.  What reason could you give, what excuse do you have, not to make it the best song you possibly can?

• In the long run, ‘lucky’ players make their own luck

  This lesson is by far the most important lesson I’ve learned, both in Poker and Life in general.   Over the course of a single night a player may get incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky. In the long run, though, players who consistently make intelligent moves create their own luck by increasing the probability that they will be in situations to make money.  The key to understanding this lesson is to repeat the phrase ‘in the long run’ over and over. Players can go on months-long ‘bad’ streaks, but good players will eventually make more money than bad players.  Life works the same way.  In my experience, I’ve had streaks of terrible luck at some times, and I’ve had runs of awesome luck at other times.  I believe the reason I’ve done well  in life (at least thus far) is largely the fact that I try to shrug off the bad things that happen to me as mere bad luck, and I try to capitalize on the good things that happen.

  Consider this Example:  At the end of College, I planned on getting a Ph.D. in Computer Science.  At a time when I was living on on about a thousand dollars of income each month, I spent over a thousand dollars applying to some of the best schools in the country: Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, and Georgia Tech. I chose two safety schools: UC San Diego, and Univeristy of North Carolina. I was rejected outright from every program except UCSD (who put me on a wait list and then rejected me) and UNC.   It  definitely hurt to be rejected from so many places, but I realized that coming from a practically unheard of liberal arts college in Cincinnati, and lacking any real research experience, it would be a crapshoot for any school to admit me.  You could definitely say that I was ‘unlucky’ because I only got into my safety school.  I could have taken the job offer I had in Cincinnati, but I knew my career opportunities would be better if I went to grad school, even if it wasn’t MIT.  I took what I saw as one of the worst possible outcomes of the grad school application process and turned it into an opportunity to improve my career.  Blue Capital Group, my current employer, just happened to be located in Chapel Hill, and they just happened to email my algorithms professor looking for new recruits at a time when I was looking for a job.  I took what I saw as a chance for some good luck, and capitalized on it. I now work at a  job I absolutely love, at a time when many people are struggling to find any job at all.  I could go on and on, because my life has been full of both good luck and bad, and the main lesson I’ve learned can be summed up as follows:

  • Recognize and accept that sometimes you’ll have good luck, and sometimes you’ll have bad luck.
    Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve had way more good luck than bad because you have access to the internet, the ability to read,  and knowledge of someone as awesome as myself :-p
  • When you’re unlucky, try to way to turn your bad luck into an opportunity. If that fails, shrug it off as bad luck.
  • When you’re lucky, realize that you’ve been granted an opportunity and do everything you can to take advantage of it.
    

• Know when to hold and when to fold

  That pair of red aces you were dealt just doesn’t look so good when there are four spades showing on the board, even if one of them is the Ace. Sometimes you have something really good going in life, but you have to let it go because it’s starting to fail. If you hold on to things that were good and have gone bad, you’ll be doing yourself a huge disservice.

  This lesson is especially true in romantic relationships – the longer you hold on to a doomed relationship, the more pain you’re going to cause the both of you, and the harder the breakup will be. Once you realize a relationship isn’t going to work, you need to inform your partner and leave that relationship – it’s the best thing for both parties involved.  On the flip side, when you have the nuts (poker lingo for the best possible hand), you have to do whatever you can to increase the pot size, without scaring other players out by revealing what you’ve got.  When you meet someone that you connect with on every level, someone you love to spend time with, someone who understands you better than you understand yourself, you have to realize what you’ve got and hang on to it.

• Have confidence in yourself, but not too much

  Having too little confidence in your hand will hurt you because you’ll get pushed around by bigger stacks. Having too much confidence will hurt you becuase you’ll call bets you shouldn’t. There’s a fine line you have to walk with confidence, and the ability to determine when you’re being confident enough is an important skill to hone.

  If you think you’re the smartest man whoever lived (as I once did), that confidence will help you out at times because it’ll allow you to tackle problems that might scare away mere mortals.  It can cost you, though, if you overextend yourself or try something that is beyond your level.  My confidence was shattered when I reached grad school and realized there were people who could think circles around me; people who have thought up and then forgotten things I’ll never begin to understand.  I went from having too much confidence in myself to having too little. I thought I couldn’t accomplish anything and that I’d never amount to much more than an unhappy burnt-out developer.  As I suffered through grad school and started to figure out what was going on, my confidence grew a little bit. I got the nerve to apply for an internship at Microsoft, and being hired for that internship gave me a huge boost in confidence. I started doing better in everything I did.

• It’s all about discipline

  I know I’m bad at poker, at least compared to my friends. My main problem is that when I’m not getting cards, I don’t find the game very fun, so I do things that I know I shouldn’t.  I know not to play trash hands like Ace-Seven off suit, but I get bored and put money into the pot when I shouldn’t because I’d rather have fun than make money. I don’t have a problem doing this in low limit games, because the amount of money involved in doing so is usually very minimal, i.e. 30 cents.  In higher stakes games, this sort of behavior can cost you a lot of money. I stay away from high stakes games because I know that I don’t have enough discipline to play real solid poker. All the theory in the world won’t help you if you don’t follow sound logic and fold when there’s four to a straight on the board, you’ve got two pair, and your opponent has pushed you all in.

  Life in general works on the same principle. You can read all the diet books you want, and you can understand body chemistry all day long, but if you don’t go to the gym and lift regularly, you’re never going to be able to reach your fitness goals.  You can dream of being a millionaire all day long, but if you don’t work hard, save your money, invest wisely and avoid splurging on things you don’t need, you’ll never make it.  Going to the gym, working hard and saving money all require discipline.

I’ll end this already too-long post with a caveat: Not every lesson learned at the poker table applies to real life. Probably the most important exception is the fact that  poker is a Zero-Sum game. That means every player who succeeds does so to another player’s detriment. Real life is most certainly not zero sum – there are plenty of ways that two people can interact with each other such that both people benefit. This sort of mutually beneficial interaction is the cornerstone of civilization and, I would argue, the basis for all just governments.  But that’s a post for another day.

Think about a really good memory. Maybe it’s a memory of your family gathered for thanksgiving dinner, or maybe its of a fun date you went on. Maybe it’s a memory of the time you found five dollars on the sidewalk. Who knows.  Doesn’t thinking about good memories make you feel good inside? I would say that in my experience, remembering a good time that I had is almost as enjoyable as having the good time itself.

This year, I threw a birthday party for myself, and invited a bunch of friends from out of town. I rented a house on a lake for a weekend, and even sprung for a Jet Ski for the day on saturday.  Five of my 8 siblings were able to make it out, as were a substantial number of my friends, from grad school, college, and high school.  I saw some people I literally thought I’d never see again, and we had a great time.  I will probably remember that weekend on the lake for the rest of my life.  When I think of it, I can’t help but smile and feel good inside. It’s not just a fleeting happiness, like the feeling you get from eating a good filet mignon, It’s a feeling of contentment and metaphysical satisfaction with life.

That weekend cost me money; around $1,000 after all was said and done.  A slightly younger me would have argued that spending $1,000 on a birthday party for yourself is a waste of money and irresponsible. An older (and I’d argue wiser) me would respond that the weekend was not just a way of having fun in the present, but an investment in the future because of the value of the memories it creates.

Let’s suppose that I remember my birthday party 4 times a year for the rest of my life.  They say you can’t put a price on memories, but they say a lot of things that aren’t true, so I’m going to put a price on the memory and say that the good feelings I get from remembering that weekend are comparable to the good feelings I’d get if I found $20 on the sidewalk. That means my $1000 investment pays me $80 a year for the rest of my life.  If I live another 50 years (which seems like a reasonable bet), the memory will pay me $4,000 over the course of my lifetime. Not bad. Is it possible to do better?  If I had put that $1,000 into the stock market, it would not be unreasonable to assume that my return would average close to 8% annually.  That works out to … $80 a year.  It’s true that if I invested that $80 back into the market, my annual return would increase beyond $80, but I’d be giving up the momentary satisfaction of having that $80 now.

I’m not arguing against savings – I think it’s important to prepare for large future expenses like retirement and your childrens’ education – but I think there are diminishing returns to having large amounts of money, and that spending even non-trivial amounts of money now in order to create great memories that will last your entire life is also a great idea.

Let’s use a simple model of reality: events happen, and they’re either good or bad, to varying degrees.

In this model, one of three things is true:

1. Reality is fundamentally a good place:  the sum of the good experiences is greater than the sum of the bad experiences
2. Reality is fundamentally a neutral place: the sum of the bad experiences is roughly equal to the sum of the good experiences
3. Reality is fundamentally a bad place:  the sum of the bad experiences is greater than the sum of the good experiences

   You might object to my model of reality and claim that it’s too simple to be useful.  Just for you, I’ll add another possibility:

4. Reality is too complex to be characterized by simple good/ bad models.

As you experience life, you’ll try to build a model of the universe, and part of this model is how or bad the universe is.  Ideally your model is perfect, but invariably you’re going to get things wrong.  If you’re going to model how good or bad the universe is, is it better to err on the side of  good or bad? We’ll say that optimism means believing the universe is better than it really is, while pessimism means believing the universe is worse than it really is. I claim that, regardless of the true nature of the universe, an optimistic strategy is the best strategy to pursue.

To prove my claim, I have constructed a ‘truth table’ which describes the outcomes of optimistic and pessimistic strategies in the four cases listed above. In each case, the Optimistic strategy pays off more than the pessimistic strategy.

If you find yourself worrying about the future or fretting about the past, just remember – Optimism is always an intelligence choice that will make you happier in the long run.

The day starts off well, and reaches a peak when I eat my breakfast of eggs and turkey bacon. Yum. I get into my car, and there’s a wreck on 15-501, so I’m late getting to work. My mood goes down, but it’s still positive. Upon arriving at work, I realize that I’ve fallen seriously behind in a big important project, so my mood falls. As I work harder and harder, I keep realizing how much more work I have to do. My mood plummets, until lunch time. A dozen buffalo wings provide a brief respite and put me in a better mood, but I’m still frustrated about work. I have time to think at lunch, though, and I realize  I can save myself some time if I take a new approach that I hadn’t though of.  My mood improves, and by the end of the work day I’m happy again.   After I get home from work, I relax by playing a game of Left 4 Dead with some friends, and my mood improves back to where it was.

The above graph was generated using a type of randomized noise function called Perlin noise. In other words, I modeled happiness as simply the summation of random waves. What better models can we use to describe and predict how people can become more happy? If happiness is a function of time, the simplest model says that we just choose to be happy all of the time. I would argue that the ‘choose to be happy’ model is too simple to be very useful.  Happiness isn’t a simple binary choice: It’s hard to choose to be happy when it’s cold and dark outside, and you feel tired, lonely, and hopeless about the future. Conversely, It’s easy to choose to be happy when it’s sunny outside, you’ve just enjoyed a nice meal with friends, and now you’re playing a sweet designer German board game, like Dominion.  These  examples are taken from points in my life. Your mileage may vary. The examples demonstrate that, very often, external factors in your life play a huge role in how happy you are. I believe it is possible to influence those external factors, but influencing them Isn’t as simple as just saying “I choose the happy path.”

A more predictive model of happiness must therefore take into account external factors as well as personal choices.   After giving this idea a lot of  thought, I came up with a model, based upon the concept of ‘Experience-Space.’  Experience-Space is the set of all possible experiences that an individual could have. Points in Experience-Space are points in both time-space and sensation-space.  In other words, a single point in experience space describes the exact feelings you feel at a given time.   To make things as easy to understand as possible, we will say that the only sensation one can experience is happiness, and that, at any given instant in life, one can make one of three choices. Why three? When there is only one sensation, Experience-Space becomes two dimensional: time is one dimension, and the experience you have is the other dimension. We can represent life with an image. Your experience of life is a path traced by a pixel through that that image from left to right.  At each step in time, the pixel can either go straight forward, diagonally up, or diagonally down.  We will label these choices straight, up, and down.

Look at this example:

In this example, the person is currently happy. They have a choice to make: in the next time tick, they will be happy if they choose straight or down, unhappy if they choose up.  This is a very simple model, but it proves surprisingly powerful in generating useful predictions about how we can make ourselves happier.

Suppose you know everything about the universe, and your goal is to be as happy as you possibly can.  You start out at some initial point in experience-space, and your goal is to maximize the sum of the happiness of the experiences you have over the course of your entire life.  (Is that a reasonable goal? A question for another blog post!). Suppose that experience space looks like this:

If this is your universe, wherever you start out, your most logical move is to always choose to go down (when possible) and then go straight along the bottom edge of the graph, when (if) you ever reach it.  That’s easy enough. Let’s consider a more complicated model of the world:

In this model, most experiences are either slightly positive or slightly neutral. There are quite a few “great” experiences, and a small number of “terrible” experiences. These big experiences are so big that they affect you for some time after you experience them.   How would you navigate this graph, in order to maximize your happiness? The problem begins to look like an artificial intelligence.  I’m not going to go into artificial intelligence algorithms such as A* search (as much as I’d like to.) Instead, I’m going to draw to draw some conclusions from this model.

In the real world, we don’t know the entire universe ahead of time: we only know the choices that we have made, and their ramifications. In other words, our graphs look like this:

That’s not a lot to go on. It would be hard to take that information and build a model of the world and use it to predict where to go next.  While walking like this, you’d probably notice that some areas were nicer than others, and that the really nice areas and really bad areas tended to clump together, but you’d still have a hard time determining which areas to go towards. Suppose there are 50 people in the universe, and you all share information about the choices you have made and the results those choices have brought you. Then, your picture of the universe looks like this:

This picture is much more complete than the picture you were able to generate by yourself.  By using information you glean from asking others about the choices they make, you can make yourself happier.

Conclusion: Talk to as many people as you can, and learn about their experiences.  Doing this talking will allow you to gain a much more accurate model of the world as a whole, in order to determine what will make you happy. Ask people about their history, and specifically about choices they have made that made them happy or unhappy.

I hope to write more on this subject in the future. Stay tuned!

]]> http://www.markpneyer.com/wp/2009/08/13/a-mathematical-model-of-happiness/feed/ 2 http://www.markpneyer.com/wp/2009/06/26/on-genetics-programming-languages-and-god/ http://www.markpneyer.com/wp/2009/06/26/on-genetics-programming-languages-and-god/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:34:36 +0000 MarkPNeyer http://www.markpneyer.com/wp/?p=406 The genetic code is the programming language used to make living organisms.  Right now, biologists are attempting to ‘reverse engineer’ this genetic code, in order to determine how it works and to make changes to it. I (in my infinite wisdom) think they’re going about this the wrong way.

To understand why, we must first delve into the languages of computers. When humans program computers, they usually write in “high level languages”, which look like a series of mathematical formulas and instructions.  Here is an example of a simple function to compute the nth Fibonacci Number, written in a high level language called C:

//computes the nth fibonacci number
unsigned int fibonacci(unsigned int n)
{
	unsigned int term1 = 1;
	unsigned int term2 = 1;
        unsigned int result = term2;
 
	unsigned int i = 1;
	while (i < n)
	{
		result = term1 + term2;
		term1 = term2;
		term2 = result;
		i = i + 1;
	}
 
	return result;
}

The Computer cannot understand this program as it is written. It must be translated into instructions that make sense to the computer. This  translation process is called compiling. The compiled program will look different depending upon what computer it is compiled on, but all computers basically operate the same way: they can read from and write to memory locations, and they can add, multiply, divide, and subtract numbers.  Here is an English-language translation of what the compiled Fibonacci function might look like. Provided to make things more clear is a mapping of variable names to their memory locations:

# set the value in location 1 to 1
# set the value in location 2 to 1
# set the value in location 3 to the value stored in location 1
# set the value in location 4 to the 1
# if the value in location 4 is not less than the value in location 0, go to instruction 11
# set the value in location 3 to the result of the value in 1 plus the value in 2
# set the value in location 1 to the value in location 2
# set the value in location 2 to the value in location 3
# set the value in location 4 to the value in location 4 plus the value 1
# jump to instruction 5
# return the value in location 3

Each of the above instructions would be represented with a single word, which on a top-of-the-line modern computer is 64 bits of information. The human genetic code is also a sequence of simple instructions, interpreted not by a central processing unit, but by intracellular organisms.  Instead of dealing with changing values in memory locations, the genetic code’s instructions are for amino acids used to build proteins.  There are approximately 6 billion instructions in the human genome, making it roughly 10 million times as complex as our simple Fibonacci function.

Notice that the machine language program is  no where near as easy to understand as the C program. If I gave you a machine language program with 100 million lines of code, you’d have a heck of a time trying to figure out how it worked.  Poking around and changing single instructions, then determining what happens when you change those instructions probably wouldn’t be a good start. Unfortunately, as I understand things, that is exactly how biologists are proceeding.  They are stepping through the genetic code piece by piece,  using experiments to try and figure out what different sequences of instructions do.

There is, I think, a better approach. The key to understanding this approach is a simple fact about computer programming: It’s easier (and more fun) to write your own program than it is to read someone else’s program and figure out what it’s doing. Instead of trying to reverse engineer existing DNA code, which evolved over millions of years and is therefore probably extremely convoluted and hard to follow, we’d be better off trying to ‘write’ our own organisms.  Biologists could start by writing DNA ‘programs’ to code simple proteins.  After getting good at this, they could invent a ‘high level language’  for DNA programming (AKA GeneticC) which could be used to speed up the development progress. The next step would be to write a single cellular organism, and then more complicated organisms.

Interestingly enough, this process of building our own organisms could provide a lot of insight into the question of whether there is some being who designed us.  Once we have a better understanding of genetic programming,  we could look at the quality of the code that builds human beings. If it’s clean, neat, and straightforward,  that would be strong evidence of a creator at work. If it’s messy, garbled, hacked together, redundant and nonsensical in parts, we could conclude that the code evolved over time.  Either that, or god is a perl scripter.

Anyways, back to the task at hand.  Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. MLK Jr. was a great civil rights leader who opened the eyes of his fellow countrymen to the injustices suffered by black Americans, particularly in the south.  Was he a great man? I think, undeniably the answer to this question is ‘yes’. However, there is a more interesting question – was he a good man? The answer to that question, I think, is ‘ probably not’.

Unfortunately, I don’t have sources for a lot of this information, which is why I prefaced my answer with ‘probably.’    Firstly, he is alleged by numerous sources to have cheated on his wife. The only real web sources I could find for this point (that weren’t from hate sites) were about.com, and the straight dope, two sites I believe to be (relatively) bias free, at least when it comes to overt racism. A lot of the allegations come from illegal FBI wiretapping of King, and can’t really be trusted, but some come from King’s lifelong friend Ralph Abernathy.

Secondly, King plagiarized significant portions of his doctoral thesis, academic papers, and speeches.

Why does any of this matter? What’s the point of dragging a revered historical figure through the mud?  My reasoning is that I think there’s an important distinction to be made between good men and great men. Great men are nice and well and all; they do change the world significantly, but great men also tend to suffer from narcissism and selfishness. Consider Albert Einstein – brilliant man who undeniably advanced the state of science, but also a jerk who cheated on his wife.

Why the fixation on adultery? Am I some kind of right-wing christian conservative? No, not hardly. A marriage is not just a simple contract between two people made for financial considerations – it’s a lifelong commitment with profound implications for children.  Cheating on your marriage partner is probably one of the worst things you can do to them. It’s an incredibly self-centered thing to do. Not only does it cause significant emotional harm to your spouse, it causes irreparable harm to any children in the marriage.  It is well documented that children do far better in stable family structures with two parents around.  (Personally I don’t think it matters what gender the parents are, as long as they love and are committed to each other, but that’s an entirely different argument.)   A little over two thirds of all black children born in America today are born to unwed mothers.  Those children do not have the same chance at success as children born into stable, two-parent families centered around a committed relationship between two adults. Any man who would cheat on his wife, betraying that bond of trust and hurting the future of his children, is not a good role model.

Is there institutionalized racism in the world today? Absolutely. Did Martin Luther King Junior do a lot of work to fight this racism?  Of course; That’s why he was a great man. However, there’s a solid difference between great men and good men. Great men do extraordinary things with their lives.  They’re good for the world. What we need, however, more than great men, is good men, men who do ordinary things extraordinarily well. Men who get up every morning to go to work, who pay their taxes and give back to their communities in the small ways that they can, and who set excellent examples for their children. Given the choice between being a great man with a flawed personal life, and a good man who never accomplishes anything ‘of note’ in the world at large, I will choose to be a good man any time. I should hope you feel the same way.

First off, I will note that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are purely subjective terms.  Every person has his own perspective of what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mean.  Every logical person, however, can use analytical models to determine what do to in response to people doing things they personally find bad.  It is my belief that most people reading this blog share similar ideas of what kinds of actions are ‘bad’ – killing people, for example, is generally viewed as a bad thing.

The first model I shall present is the simplest model. I call this the ‘atomic model of bad things.’ It works as follows:

Atomic Model of Bad Things

• Some people are inherently good, and some people are inherently bad
• Good people tend to do good things, and bad people tend to do bad things.

That’s it. Very simple.  What does this model imply? If the atomic model is accurate, it means that in order to stop bad things from happening, we have to prevent bad people from doing them by incapacitating them somehow.

The most effective way to incapacitate someone is to kill them. Therefore, the most effective strategy to be pursued, if the atomic model is accurate, is to identify bad people and kill them.  Does this present a problem? Only if you think killing bad people is a bad thing.  If killing bad people is a bad thing, then you still have other options for incapacitating bad people. You could put them in jail, indefinitely.  That would prevent them from doing most bad things.  What if you think putting people in jail indefinitely is a bad thing to do? I’m not really certain.  Ultimately, if you want to stop bad people from doing bad things, the atomic model says you have to do something to prevent bad people from acting as they are inclined to do.

An objection arises:  what if the bad people think we are bad? This is very likely to happen, but it doesn’t change the most effective strategy for responding to bad events. It simply implies that the people we’re trying to kill also have it in their most logical interest to try to kill us.

This atomic model is quite violent; it advocates a lot of killing. Is there another way from this endless cycle of violence and death?

Yes. I call it the ‘relativistic model.’ It is more complex than the atomic model.

Relativistic Model of Bad Thigns

• People are a product of their environments; no person is inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’
• Someone who does bad things does so as a result of some external stimulus, usually a bad thing that has happened to them

What does this model imply? If we wish to stop people from doing bad things, we have to prevent bad things from happening to people. Note that the optimal strategy under the relativistic model is the exact opposite of the optimal strategy under the atomic model: if the relativistic mode is accurate, than anyone following the atomic model is making the situation in the world worse; they are causing more bad things to happen, and therefore they are influencing more people to do bad things.

Which model do I prefer? Both. I think they both have their applications; which model is more accurate simply depends upon the circumstances.

Example

I once saw a news program about an illegal immigrant on trial for murder.  The immigrant had been apprehend for speeding previously, and was released back into the general population. One host of the show,  (We will call him the atomist for reasons that shall become clear) was outraged, and said that this immigrant should have been deported upon being arrested for speeding. He was arguing in favor of legislation that would deport all illegal immigrants charged with any crime.  The other host of the show, the relativist, was arguing against the legislation.

Let’s look at the situation from both mens’ perspectives.  To the atomist, breaking the law and coming into this country illegally is something that only a bad person would do. By entering the country illegally, the immigrant has shown himself to be a bad person. Upon his being apprehended for speeding, he should have been deported in order to prevent him from doing something bad. The fact that he committed murder was practically to be expected – he is a bad person, after all. Therefore, the fact that he wasn’t sent back across the border represents a glaring problem with our legal system.

To the relativist, anyone in the situation of the immigrant would probably have tried to cross the border illegally. Who doesn’t want to give themselves a better life by migrating to the land of opportunity? How were the police to know he would commit murder after being apprehended for speeding? Any law that would treat all illegal immigrants as potential murderers is draconian, and because it does bad things to many people, would probably create more problems than it would solve.

In this case, I agree with the relativist. I don’t think that breaking into the country illegally makes someone a bad person,  because many people break into the country illegally, and not all of them are murderers.

Back to 9 / 11

The relativistic model for 9/11 is that we were attacked because of our expansive foreign policy, and because we favor Israel over Palestine. If we would change our attitude towards the middle east, be more even-handed in our dealings with Israel and Palestine, and stop interfering with foreign governments, the relativists argue, we would prevent future attacks.  The atomic model says there is a jihad by some of the Islamic people in the world against the west, and that the only way to prevent future attacks is to find and kill jihadists wherever they are.

Note that, once again, the atomic and relativistic models are completely at odds with each other. If we base our strategy on the atomic model, then the relativistic model predicts that we’ll simply inflame tensions in the middle east, creating more terrorists and making our problems worse. If we follow the relativistic model, the atomic model says nothing good will be trying to ‘make nice’ with the very people who are out to kill us, and that our weakness will only embolden them.

Which model is accurate? They are both accurate. Which model’s strategies make the most sense to follow? They both do.  We should stop supporting middle eastern governments that oppress their people, but at the same time we should take take military action against states that support terrorism.  Unfortunately, most people in America subscribe to only one of the models, while completely rejecting the other.    Conservatives in America tend to be atomists, while liberals in America, and pretty much the rest of the world tend to be relativists.  Here’s hoping more people will see the light in the other model, and start advocating a mixed policy, one that is gracious and kind to the majority of people in the world, but merciless towards those who harbor ill will in their hearts.

Let’s say you can flip the coin once every second. That’s a pretty generous estimate, but I’m a generous guy so we’ll go with it. At that rate, it takes around 17 minutes of sitting there flipping a coin to play the game. Flipping a coin for 17 minutes would get pretty boring. Is it worth it, though, for a shot at, say, $10,000? The odds of you winning are 1 divided by the number of people who play the game. This is where it’s important to mention that the fair is really, really big – let’s say around 200 million people big. Suppose only half of those people decide to play the game. Your expected value, then, for this game is $10,000 / 100,000,000 which is $0.00001. Even if the prize were an astronomical $100,000,000, you’d still only expect to earn one dollar, for 17 minutes of boredom flipping that coin. A rational person would conclude that it makes no sense to play the game. The thing is, most people are irrational and a large number will still play the game even after you explain the math to them. If you doubt me, look at the number of people who buy lottery tickets. My game has a positive expected value – lottery tickets have a negative expected value and people still buy them. Unless you really enjoy flipping coins, it just doesn’t make sense to play the coin flipping game.

What does this have to do with voting? We can easily look at voting systems as large, multi-player games. The payout if you win (your vote chooses the guy who gets elected) is very high. However, the probability that your vote will be the deciding vote is vanishingly small. There is no monetary cost to voting, but it does take time. Going to the polling place and voting takes probably 15 minutes, and you could spend hours each week educating yourself on the issues. Unless you really enjoy doing these things, it just doesn’t make any sense to spend your time attempting to influence an event, when the probability of your actually having an effect is so small that it might as well be zero.

A common rebuttal to this argument is ‘what if everybody thought this way?’ If everybody was rational and decided voting didn’t make sense, it would suddenly become rational to vote, because one vote would decide the election. The same logic works for the coin flipping game, however – if everybody realized how stupid it was to play the game, nobody would play it, and then any one guy who decided to play would win. The fact that a decision makes sense in an alternate reality where everybody behaves perfectly rationally doesn’t in any way mean it makes sense in our reality. The ‘what if everybody thought this way argument’ is like arguing ‘well, if we lived on the moon it would make sense to play basketball with 30 foot high hoops. ‘ Yes, but we don’t live on the moon, so it doesn’t make any sense.

Do you owe it to society to educate yourself and vote? Even people who are very educated about world affairs disagree with each other on the best course of action. The Pew Center for People and the Press does a typology survey every few years, breaking the electorate down into different groups based upon common values and shared attributes. In the 2004 survey, the two groups that followed world affairs most closely were the Enterprisers, who were Bush’s staunchest supporters, followed by the Liberals, who aligned themselves with Kerry. More education most likely isn’t going to change your mind – it’s just going to give you more reasons to believe that you’re right and that your political opponents are idiots.

What about convincing other people to vote? By taking a stand and convincing others around you to vote your way, surely you’re making a difference, right? Unfortunately, the answer is still ‘no’ unless you’re very persuasive. A statewide election decided by 10,000 votes is still considered very close. Unless you can convince 10,000 of your friends to change your mind and vote your way, you really aren’t making a difference.

What does all of this mean? It means that our political decisions are made by people who are irrational – they don’t understand the math governing the logic of making decisions in massively multi-player games. This means that pure democracies, where everything is decided by a majority vote, are probably the worst form of democratic government possible. How can we do better? The electoral college is a start, because it increases the probability that you will be able to influence an election. Increased federalism is another huge step in the right direction – instead of choosing a president who is essentially a king in a giant winner-take-all election, choosing a president who has a limited set of powers prescribed by a constitution interpreted strictly literally lessens the blow of having a bunch of irrational people make decisions.

A final improvement could be gleaned from implementing a recursive system of representatives. Suppose every 1000 people chose a single representative among them. Each 1000 of those representatives would choose a meta-representative, who represents 1,000,000 people. We could have each 100 of those meta-representatives choose a single meta-meta-representative, and so on. Due to the exponential nature of the math in this system, the government would only need 3 or 4 layers. Each of the different layers would be charged with different levels of power, with most of the power at the bottom levels of the system, where it makes the most sense for individual voters to participate. When only 1000 people are voting, your vote matters much more and suddenly it becomes much more rational to vote and to try to convince others to vote your way. Will this ever happen? Probably not. Still, a guy can dream, can’t he?