The stair climbing strategy of want, get, be satisfied, want different, get, be satisfied over and over is the most effective that exists. You’re not supposed to be in any one of those three states too long, you’re supposed to cycle through them. As a living person it’s not normal or desirable to be totally still, neither in emotion or location. To be human is to experience not just the storms and calms of Mother Nature, but of our own passions.

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the phenomenon where something you recently learned suddenly appears everywhere. Also called Frequency Bias (or Illusion), the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the seeming appearance of a newly learned (or paid attention to) concept in unexpected places.

Get rid of all the reminders and distractions.

Be your own faithful servant.

Stack the odds in your favor.

Find every edge and use every trick to make the path of least resistance the one that brings long term fulfillment. Make decisions now that your future self will be likely to follow. It’s a cascade. The better you stack the deck now, the better hand you future self will get to play.

For normally powered individuals, overconfidence is way better than under confidence. Daniel Kahneman’s advice is dangerous. You may have seen an article in New York magazine regarding his thinking fast and slow. He says that the most likely emotion to cause you make an incorrect decision is overconfidence. Some think it’s the dumbest advice ever written, because overconfidence is what allows people to do things outside the social norms, and reap the rewards of having no competition in a market, or being the first to do something or making a breakthrough. Your chances of being overconfident or under educated are the least today that they have ever been because of the advent of 500 people on Facebook telling you what a dumbass you might be, and how good Google information is. Those 500 people could be a good test of your idea. If you were ever going to be “overconfident”, this is the time to do it. Obviously more risk weighs upon your decisions, if you’re a government or otherwise have the energy of many people at your disposal, and you should be more cautious if your sphere of influence is large. There may be more at stake than you initially realize.

Further in regard to Kahneman’s thing is that he is giving you non-actionable advice. You can’t tell whether you are overconfident or not, so you can’t take his advice to not be overconfident. You can be full of doubt and with today’s progress you could do a thing four times wrong and have enough to do the fifth, right while the other guy is still doubting himself. Doubting doesn’t produce anything; Overconfidence may produce many incorrect iterations, but also produces the possibility of getting it right eventually.

Testosterone is a great deal when you’ve got much to gain and little to lose. Yet the longer you’ve been around, the more the inverse becomes true. You end up with more to lose and less to gain. The same effective reduction in risk taking that is wise in a weakening body is wise economically as well. Look at great musicians or great filmmakers. You will notice that as their testosterone dies down, the type of films they want to make become less aggressive. They become bigger pussies, instead of rage or conquest-driven, competitive people. Directors and storytellers mellow with age.

Pathing quotes:

Benjamin Franklin said to write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

“If you wou’d not be forgotten

As soon as you are dead and rotten,

Either write things worth reading,

Or do things worth the writing.”

“Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.”

Notice that “wou’d” is spelled exactly as that in the source document

Poor Richard, 1738

What you should do is your potential impact, multiplied by the number of people it will impact. There’s another question to ask in relation, which is, would someone else have achieved that instead of you anyway? Thus there is value in doing the thing that wasn’t going to happen anyway. Do what wasn’t inevitable.

If you’re writing your thesis, do not do what is interesting! Instead, do what is interesting and useful, because it’s easy to do. Interest is very easy to pique and therefore what is of interest to you should also be helpful to the world. The good news is, if it’s helpful to the world, you can actually make money on it.

Imagine a sick child. The child is dying in the deathbed because of a progressing cancer, and in trying to save the child your solution is a smart phone app. You pull up Uber, and you hand over the iPad. Now you keep looking at the child whining in pain, and you ask, “Why aren’t these things working?” The answer is that they’re not supposed to. Apps don’t cure people.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and in order to create some positive benefit to the world, you need to know how to do the thing and then actually do the thing. Well then, which of these two is the weaker link? Is the world more lacking in the ability, or knowledge of, how to do things or is it more lacking in the desire to do things? Scivive will tell you that what the world is missing is desire. Otherwise, everyone would have a six-pack, be fit, and would spend time with their families and do all of the things that they know they should do. They don’t have a lack of knowledge on how, they have a lack of desire and motivation to do so.

If you want to play with the big boys and want to have the biggest impact on the world and be able to brag that you work on the hardest stuff that exists in the known universe, the human being is the answer.

Fear not the man who knows a thousand different techniques, but fear the man who knows one technique very well.

Well, why would the education system be any different? Shouldn’t you just learn to do one thing really well and then move on to the next thing?

A much higher, better use of your intellectual abilities, business talents, talents of any form are to not solve what other people think are problems, but to solve what you think are problems. This is assuming that you’re smarter than they are and have better beliefs.

People wonder whether sometimes it’s better to go into physics or biology. Well, you’re made of meat and you could say you’re made of physics, but let’s take a look at that. Our understanding in application of physics has taken a great deal of money and very well educated people and executed it over a couple of hundred years. That’s part of particle physics, but before they knew particles really existed, you can call it maybe 1,000 or 2,000 years with the Greek discovery of the Theory of Parts, where everything is actually made of smaller things, great! That was the first instance of this atomization of the world.

Now, let’s take a look at the biological world. How much energy has the biological world put into figuring it out? Billions of years with the energy of the sun behind it. It literally invented sex. It invented DNA. It invented mutation. Amazing feats! This is good stuff. Now, they’ve been at it for billions of years, they’ve had more time to do it. They didn’t require experts to do it, every species got to participate in the process and they didn’t require a small fortune to do it.

You have to compare, what do you think is going to create more progress in the world? Learning from the organisms that have had billions of years and the power of the sun where every component got to participate, or a couple hundred guys with lots of money over the last couple hundred years? Learning from biology is going to help the world more than trying to recreate a singularity in a particle accelerator.

In things that aren’t subjective, there isn’t a natural human preprogrammed emotional response limit to the progress that can be made. How fast can computers get? Well, pretty close to the speed of light as you move on up. There’s a bunch of computer science theory guys that will argue with that, but many would agree that it’s a lot easier to build faster computers than it is to make better tasting food because of the human limiting factor. Might you be able to take advantage of this? Yes.

If you have studied for a year in being good at something that is touchy, feely, subjective, limited, like art, you may never become great in that area. The world may not need you to become great in that area and the chance that you waste a huge chunk of your life doing something no one is willing to pay for and not even becoming good at it is much higher than if you did something that the world is willing to pay for and is easier to excel at and isn’t limited by subjective experience.

Now, what might those things be? Can you build a house? People like living in houses. We all like living in houses. Nobody likes getting rained on, snowed on, and struck by lightning. Houses are great. Now, how smart must you be to build a house? Not too smart. We put a foundation down, concrete sounds good. We stack some bricks up on the outside to make walls that look good. Does it need to be pretty on the inside? Sure. Do you like electricity? Sure. You run some pipe, you run some wire, you cover it with dry wall, you mud the dry wall, you sand and you paint it. These are things that children could do in playgrounds building sandcastles. You just have more expensive sand. Literally, that’s what concrete is. It’s expensive sand that’s glued together.

Scivive would rather see you put your time into something that’s guaranteed to pay off and be amazing for you and get that base framework in where you’re useful. You’re effective and you bought your own free time to choose what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. Now, try and put the artful thing first that’s unlikely to pay off and put you in a world of servitude where you must always spend all of your time helping other people achieve their dream so that you can get the money to try and fund yours.

What’s the summary of all this? You need to know the difference between what can be taught and what can’t be taught, between what is more instinctual and harder to teach. Why? Because in this free world if you were lucky enough to choose what you what to spend your time on and what you get good at, you’re going to reap a lot of profit. By getting good at that which you are pre-inclined to get good at, or is of highest and best use to the world and teachable more so than you are perhaps becoming an artist, competing against the machines, competing against all of the past, competing against tools that aren’t improving. Paint and paintbrushes have not improved, canvas has not improved, what are you going to do? How are technology and the progress of time helping you achieve your goals? You just chose the hardest path that pays the least, while being the hardest to teach. How long do you bash your head against that wall before you realize you should have built a base, been useful, been productive for the world and yourself rather than messed around however you wanted?

Common habits of focus and common useful questions can help you choose your path. Can I do this 10 times faster or larger? Who can help me with this? Who already has had this problem? Are there other people who work in fields close to this problem? How can this help the most people? Is this the best thing I can be focused on?

The more things you’re good at, the more lost potential you have.

Let’s say that you’re really good at more than one thing. You do one of those things well. You’re not doing other ones. Thus, the ratio of things that you’re good at, the more things you’re good at, increases the ratio of things you’re not doing. Let’s assume you can only do one thing at a time. You’re good at ten things. Now nine things that you’re good at, you’re not doing, because you’re doing the one thing. Now let’s say that you’re good at a hundred things. Now there’s 99 things are good at you’re not doing. Look at all the unhappiness you can have then.

If you focus being great on a single thing, then when you do that thing, you’re not missing out on your potential in all the other things you could have been good at.

For example, you want to see whether you have perfect pitch, which is the ability to hear a note that is played musically and know exactly what that note is with perfect accuracy. It’s insanely rare and uncommon. If you have that ability, then you could and very likely will have a much better chance of being able to perform, produce, create or analyze all different types of music. Just the same way that if you look at the percentage of people over 7’6” who play basketball, you will find that some majority of those people play in the NBA. If you’ve got perfect pitch, definitely focus on music. If you’ve got a fourth cone in your eye, definitely look at art and things with color. Similarly, if you’re 7’6”, give basketball a try. These are some of the few instances where obvious, measurable genetic differences can affect your inclination to be good at a specific thing. These are things you can test. You can measure yourself. You can go on audiocheck.net and take the perfect pitch test. It’s nice to be able to benchmark yourself. You can go on humanbenchmark.com and check your ration, time, ability, memory, and all kinds of other cool stuff.

The Pareto principle says that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. This means, don’t waste 80% of your effort to get only 20% of the results. Use it in your personal endeavors so that you address your weak points. Scivive likes to call it “Pareto efficiency.”

Somewhere along the way, adults lose the smarts that kids come up with. They just assume that whatever you want isn’t really on the table, so they aim for the floor. If you could dream the biggest dream, and whatever you wanted would become instantly reality, what would you dream for? Now harness the power of jealousy. Many normal humans with fewer resources than you currently have, have achieved likely more than what you’re asking for. So they can’t both be true. What you want can’t be impossible at the same time that others are already living that reality. Thus which belief is more powerful for you to hold? The one that gives you the chance at greatness, or the one that has you failing by default, and not learning what the real challenges are? The virtual challenges are enough to keep your weak ass down. Go out there in the world and discover what the real challenges are.

Tony Robbins’ six human needs—certainty, connection, significance, variety, contribution, growth—are a bad way to organize human motivations. Nah, that’s stupid—where is greed on there? Where is fear? This is an inadequate system for organizing life.

Every emotion has a reason for its existence. All these simple belief systems leave out critical emotions, like greed, or rage, or envy. They just choose a couple, and say those are the ones that matter, like safety. The map isn’t the territory, and these models of human emotion are rather over-simplified.

You have to choose what you don’t care about. Just as you have to choose what you buy and don’t buy with your money, you have to choose which things you’ll use your limited caring currency on.

Comedians and musicians make their living causing people to experience good feelings. You too can make yourself feel good in the same ways. When you’re living in tune with your expectations, you’ll find a lasting inner glow and smile that just doesn’t seem to go away. When it first appears, you’ll be curious as to why it is that you’re happy for no reason. This is the hidden and lasting joy that comes with living up to one’s expectations.

It’s normal when one side wants to quit the behavior, but on the other side wants to engage in the behavior. Adversarial internal logic is a breakthrough in machine learning. It’s an effective system that works in courts as well.

Feeling terrible? Try thinking about how terrible you feel, wondering if you hit an all-time record. It might shift your perspective into the joy of whether you’ve achieved a new status in life, gone somewhere you’ve never gone before. You might also just feel worse. Some have practiced by just thinking, how amazing is it that one can feel so bad right now from things only in one’s head, and instantly the feeling subsided.

Temperature affects behavior. Diet affects behavior. Religion affects behavior. Gender affects behavior. Race affects behavior. Time of day affects behavior. Recent social interactions affect behavior. Weather affects behavior. People doing the same bad things commonly and a single judge, being tired of seeing it over and over, deals out harsher penalties to see if it can make a difference also happens. Everything matters. Yes, literally everything matters. If you find yourself arguing that something doesn’t matter, you are wrong. Everything matters.

Judges are more lenient in after they’ve had a snack and feel satiated.

If you find yourself arguing that something doesn’t matter, you are wrong. Everything matters.

You know you’re a nerd when you realize the seasons are changing, and you know this solely because the ads you see on the internet start including bicycles and outdoor stuff.

Needing to feel significant is the power you give the world over yourself.

Consider the future, don’t fall for the local maximum.

You’ve optimized for a local maximum of good without regard to the distant future. Had Socrates remained alive and discovered/shared more, the far future of mankind would have benefited far more than whatever the local people of his time may have. Thus for the majority of humans that will ever exist, it was surely not “good.”

Include quality in your value delta multiplied by market share.

Elon musk has said that the best way to choose what direction you take with a business or a career is that you estimate how much better what you think you can achieve is over what people are currently doing, and multiply that by how many people you will affect. So you can do a lot for a few people or a little for many people. It’s an ok way to look at things, but sadly it relies entirely on what people will pay for, and as we’ve seen forever, fools and their money are easily parted, so people will pay dearly for all the wrong things. Qualitatively it’s not the best way to look at what you should be doing. Who gives a damn what most idiots want? Let’s make attempts at wanting something better.

The Fermi paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high estimates for their probability. 

Where are all the aliens? The important question is, whether that terrible event preventing aliens who’ve had billions of years to dick around and be seen doing it, has already occurred, and we passed it, or has yet to occur, and we’re screwed. It’s basically a clue that some things are likely to be coming our way, extinction level events, or at least disassociate with physical space events. Because we’re bounded by the speed of light, appeals to there being infinite stars aren’t useful. Those huge numbers of stars are too far away to matter, they might as well be different universes, or the past.

The reasons we’re not likely to be first to be conscious and alive in the universe, is because there’s only a single “first” slot and nearly infinite “not first” slots. Thus we’re nearly infinitely not likely to be first. First or not doesn’t matter, because everyone else is too far away to ever meet. Damn you, speed of light limit!

Turning inward isn’t as likely as turning outward. Choosing to turn inward instead of travelling the stars is not likely, for turning inward still has an energy cost, and energy is finite per unit of space, thus you must choose between starving other life of energy (think tress competing for height) or you can expand. Expanding has too much profit to be ignored by that which evolved to meet the question.

Let’s just get some diversity in all the other countries too, let’s just open up all the borders, force every country to reflect the makeup of the world, and watch it all fall apart and split up again. Worried about no diversity where you live? Great, go destroy all diversity by equally mixing everyone everywhere.

Ignorance of difference is insulting and demeaning. Get an agreement that calling everyone the same is bad.

Point to a set that has two parts that would be insulted if you call them the same, perhaps Jamaican and African, or Chinese and Japanese. Get agreement that calling two different peoples the same thing is insulting. Replace those parts with male and female gender instead of nationality. Hope they get the analogy that calling men and women the same is as insulting as it was to call the other two parts the same.

You could also use skin color or language or age, or height as the blurred lens you’re looking at people through. Whatever you think the listener will have the easiest time noticing that ignoring differences is wrong. The result should be the realization of trying to destroy differences is harmful, and where it should be done, the benefit should outweigh the cost.

It would be insulting to say that everyone from Africa was the same, as it would be to say that all black people were the same. As it would be to say men and women are all the same. The ignorance of difference is insulting. Destroying differences is worse than insulting and thus perhaps your quota on how many people of a certain type should be in your job or profession is also insulting. Perhaps their choice as to where they want to exist and what they want to do is superior to yours. Stop insulting and doing other larger harms to people by assuming you know better for them what profession or lifestyle they should be leading. You wouldn’t do it with their music, or with their choice of beverage, so how dare you do it in regards to their work or education?

If you think men and women are the same, you either don’t know much about men, or woman, or both.

Women get cancer less than men.

If women have a pay gap—getting lower pay for jobs that should pay the same—then men have an hours gap, doing more work than women. The inverse could show the stupidity of it; trading women pay gap for male hours gap.

What are you actually making profit off doing? What’s really worth it? To help you see, what would you be willing to pay to do everything you do? No more free things, not even your job. It’s unfair to call things wage gaps, as it makes a presupposition that things are supposed to be equal, and we have a natural tendency to dislike gaps.

If you’re smart enough to educate yourself and have the correct opinion about a subject, then why let that benefit die in your mind? You might as well help others benefit from the work you’ve put in.

It’s similar to the idea that if you’re smart enough to buy the right product at a good price, then you’re also smart enough to advertise and let others benefit from that good decision you made. They’re two sides of the same coin. If you’re smart enough to know what to buy, from whom, and why, then you’re smart enough to transmit that same information on to the next person so he can make the same informed decision. If you need to be well educated on a thing to have that good thing in your life, then you can if you choose, let others benefit from that knowledge. As a bonus, sharing that knowledge can even be profitable to you, everyone wins.

Why is your heart not directly in the middle? Why does your stomach work better when you sleep laying one direction instead of another?

Inbreeding is problematic and often illegal. Wouldn’t it have been easier to make having children with your own children impossible, as it’s impossible for humans to generate offspring with a horse? Seems like the system for making kids isn’t well optimized. Perhaps it’s a feature, not a bug though. If you can’t find any other mate at all, maybe inbreeding beats extinction as far as survival goes.

Fudging the crime stats. Make up. Corsets. Lying. These all make you look good, while you remain bad, if not worse.

If you’ve read any of the great books of history, you already stand in honor of them. If only the great thinkers of yore had the learnings and tools that we now have. If you insert into their teachings the things we now know, that they knew not, a new great work would result. What do we have that they did not? Computation, evolution, game theory, hundreds of years working on the things they left for us to build on. This great wealth of knowledge not only adds, but subtracts from some of the silly ideas the greats had. Silly things like Schopenhauer’s believe that life is pain. What an easy to disprove assumption. One need only visit a sunny park with one’s eyes open. Contentment or even boredom is a much more common state than pain. For those uninjured, pain is a much more rare state than most others.

Smashing hundreds of years of discoveries into the great teachings of old destroys the thin veneers of inaccuracy and leaves polished the enduring stone. Only through the application of this hard fought knowledge we’ve worked so hard for over hundreds of years can we see the ancient, lasting knowledge for the gift that it was, free of the clutter of dated ideas.

Don’t cry over spilled milk or milk that will have spoiled by the time you figure out if it spilled or not.

Only what is local and soon matters most. If the universe is one of many, or a simulation, it truly matters not. Those problems or opportunities are the purview of those who are able to pass the hurdle of survival. Biological problems are coming to kill you and all that you love, they must be solved first.

Most people think their mind and body are separate, until you remove little parts of the brain in their body, then you discover that the mind stops existing as you take bites out of the brain. That being said, you’ll spend more time in your head than anywhere else in the world, so you mind as well be great at it.

Scivive wants you to feel good about doing things for the many, so they can do things for you. You will get more out of helping others than you can get out of helping yourself.

This says doing stuff once is weak, and doing stuff for the many is strong, which is a statement about scaling, which could easily go under power. However, it’s only useful if you choose to schedule personal development, and really it’s supposed to change your general belief and value in regards to helping the many over helping the few, of which the single you, is definitely few. The problem with personal development is that there’s only one you. You can’t multiply your benefit by a whole bunch of people. The point here is that, in a world where you can scale, you will always get more by helping others than by helping yourself. If you live in a house, and you didn’t build it by hand, or speak a language that you didn’t invent, clearly your life is massively influenced by many people, who you have likely never met. If you can help the masses, they will help you back, in ways you couldn’t dream. Focus on the many, and know that you are not the many.

What better thing could your brain be doing than preprocessing good actions for you to take if the worst things happen? Would you rather your brain instead prepare for doing all the right things when everything is going great? When everything is great you probably don’t have to worry that much.

What you focus on early in life will color everything else you do afterward.

Elon Musk read space books, loved space, now he does space. Anthony Robbins had somebody who came by to feed his family, now he has a feeding people charity. If something affects you early in life, it is very likely to affect you later on in life. That stuff matters. Bill Gates has almost wiped out Polio. We don’t have to wait 20 years for that. It could happen in the next five years, right? Care most about the things that are exponentially powerful now and happen now, and then we can revisit these other things later.

Anytime you have a gift and you’re not using it, you feel regret even if you know that gift isn’t what you should be doing.

You may be a very social person, you love talking to people. You’re exceedingly good at it. Unfortunately, you may find that you can measure the output and benefit that you’ve had in the real world from the connections and social interactions you’ve had with people, and deduce that they weren’t that profitable. The things you can do at scale that affect thousands of people, far outweigh the one-on-one conversations that you’ve had.

I guess the only people that wouldn’t agree with that measurement are people, that have never had the privilege of doing things at scale. Whether they be speaking in front of an audience, having a business, writing a book or having a blog or vlog or whatever, you choose. What’s here the damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I’m going to come up with a better phrase for it, because that phrase sucks.

Here’s the problem. Anytime you have a gift and you’re not using it, you feel regret even if you know that gift isn’t what you should be doing. How do you win that one?

To punish the bad behavior of those that have wronged you, you will naturally feel like being angry, or hurt, or retaliatory, all of which instantly harm the quality of your life. Meanwhile, the person that harmed you gets to act even nicer, in apology, or may be oblivious to the fact that you’re even transmitting angry looks and words in his or her direction. He may be too far away. You lose, and he doesn’t, all because earlier he gained from your expense.

The best way to understand the value of a dream book, or whatever fancy word for reminding yourself through environment, of a different pattern of focus than you may otherwise engage in, is to know if it influences your behavior. If it influences your behavior and you chose the image, chose the meaning, and you chose accurately, then it’s useful. If it doesn’t influence your behavior, or even worse, if it influences your behavior in a direction that was counterintuitive to your selection of the image, or whatever it is that you’re looking at, or influencing yourself through environment with, then you’re farther away from where you started.

Vision boards and dream boards can be a waste of time, but there’s this specific exclusion to how one should use them. If you paste up sheet music on your refrigerator and sheet music on your bedroom wall, it’s a world different than putting up sheet music in front of an instrument that you actually play. If you cover your house in recipe books, it’s a world different than if you have a recipe book when you’re actually making some food. Some feel that vision boards, dream boards, menus and diagrams and all of those things are infinitely more useful when they’re directing your focus, when you’re working in the space at that very moment. Scivive thinks that they’re less useful when they’re just posted everywhere and they’re not really causing immediate influence.

These are the parts of your brain that usually influence you before you influence them. It’s like a good friend telling you a joke. They’re going to make you laugh, because you respond to their input.

Spirit is “the non-physical part of a person which is the seat of emotions and character; the soul” and “the prevailing or typical quality, mood, or attitude of a person, group, or period of time.”

If you feel loved or connected to the universe, or a part of something larger and more important, or religious, those underlying feelings affect how you feel and perform, and whom and what you spend your time with. It’s important stuff.

Ride the victories. Get a peak and hold it without resampling the happiness. Increase happy time with little amperage.

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” — Epicurus, Greek philosopher (341 BC - 270 BC).

Being happy and complacent gets outperformed and selected against. Happiness is overrated. The happiness is overrated argument works as a counterpoint to the enjoying of life and emotional mastery. It’s overrated for performance and future happiness, however, it’s an instant win in the short term.

A lot of people really care about how they feel. And yes, for your internal environment your average emotional state, your quality of life, the quality of emotions that pop up, and how often and for what duration and intensity they occur in your life, that is your quality of life. There’s something else outside your quality of life. There’s the likelihood that the system you create through behavior enforces those things to be harder or easier to appear. You might be able to force happiness as a homeless person who’s in constant pain, because you can’t afford good medical care, you might be able to do that. However, you might find it’s a lot easier to be happy when you’re not in constant pain and you’re not homeless, because you have slightly more money, because you learned a skill that you’re good at. It might even be enjoyable for you to do something that may not directly give you the same happiness, like controlling your focus and having positive beliefs. It surely works, which is why when you interrogate people in regards to their happiness level at certain salary ranges, and their answers are up to $70,000 a year you just keep getting happier the more money that you make. However, at $70,000 the happiness curve falls off and it goes negative.

Scivive likes the idea of your emotions being your internal environment because just like your environment in the real world, it is going to trigger you more than you’re going to trigger it. The environment has a lot more momentum than you do. It’s not always easier for it to be a non-reactive to you than it is for you to be non-reactive to it.

As far as your emotions go, your internal landscape environment is going to be like the constant operating pressure that you exist under that can cause a movement in direction that’s very nice or a direction that’s very slow. It’s like walking through mud, deep mud, or having the wind at your back. All your beliefs and values, and common meanings that you assign to things are what is going to filter all of the new reality that you experience as you’re traveling down the path; and it won’t always be a path. A lot of times it will be up against the making a path of your own - trail blazing, they call it.

Those filters of beliefs, values and meanings that you assign are going to change the internal environment with the matchup between the new things that you run into that are either inside or coming from the outside, but they’re entering your consciousness; either subconscious or conscious. Once they’ve gone through that filter, they change the wind, they change the weather, and they change the walking.

Unlike many environments, your internal emotional environment can change in a heartbeat. Unlike the environment in the real world, in your emotional environment it is you that has the momentum whereas the environment itself is actually another variable.

Do you want to have better emotions in your life? Great! Sit up in your chair straight now, breathe deeply, and just hold that posture for a minute. I want you to think of a time when you felt really proud about something, really intense feelings of pride. You deserve to feel great right now. Feeling great right now, think about what would happen if you took the same belief, the same habit of feeling great and deserving to feel great, and did a little more often in your life. It’s only a couple of sentences of work, and it could pay a lifetime of benefits if you feel like it’s a good thing to throw in there. If you read a book and it just tells you to do a little mind trick that makes you sit up and feel good, and then you actually follow along which most people have to. Don’t think about a giant pink elephant right now, Scivive commands you, no giant pink elephant thinking! The human brain can’t understand that, it has to frame it in the positive, and imagine it.

There is this wonderful practice called Sciviving; it’s a way to be happier more often and nearly free. If you are concerned with the quality of life that you have, the quality of life that you have is to a large degree the quality of emotions that you have in your life. We don’t have that many words to describe them and we don’t even really feel that many core emotions.

Let’s talk about food for example. Beef, chicken, steak, fish. There aren’t that many core types of meat. Yes, there’s different kinds of birds. Yes, there’s different types of four-legged creatures that are larger and smaller that are tasty. The point is, if you’re willing to categorize emotions reasonably and ask people to write down the emotions they feel in an average day, you’re not going to get more than 12 answers. If it’s true that it’s only basically 12 types of feeling you can feel in a day, that’s quite wide a range. Most people’s range is much lower than that. Then, the quality of life that you have is based on the rules you have for that quality, and your ability to associated them with descriptive words. If in order for you to be happy you have to have a six- pack, 10% body fat, make a million dollars a year, have a model girlfriend or boyfriend, and win a hard contest that is competitive in any arena once a year, you’re screwed. If every single one of those things is an “and” statement - this and that and that have to be true for me to be happy, and if all of those things don’t happen, I can’t be happy. Then you’re in trouble because you set up the rules of the game where you can’t win.

Sometimes, using an “Or” rule is better than an “And” rule. As a result, you’ve got two options. You can either change your rules through effort, dedication and programming in new rules, or be super human and just hit those metrics all the time. Good luck with that.

You can also change your sampling frequency. You can change the rate at which you measure how you’re matching up on those goals. This is Scivive’s invention. If you’re happy because you’re hearing some great music or something cool is happening, you lock that thought in and you make no effort to measure anytime soon to see whether you shouldn’t be happy anymore. You prolong the next sample, the frequency, the rate, the time between this sample and the next one. As soon as you’ve got a good one, you slow down your sampling. Ride the dream. Why not ride that high for longer? If the mission of doing the thing is to feel important and you already feel important, why risk that feeling of success you just had?

If the goal is to maintain happiness, then you can greatly increase the chance that you will remain happy by achieving a high and riding it. If you catch a wave as a surfer, you stay on it until it’s over. You don’t try to catch another wave while you’re still riding the first awesome wave that you caught, because you would crash and you would burn. More accurately for surfers, you would wipe out.

If you don’t want to wipe out emotionally, do a good thing, have reasonable goals - hopefully goals within a reasonable range of what you can do so you can get a taste of success and find the easier way to your next goal. You can just set smaller goals and do it more frequently instead of setting a goal you can never reach, which just causes you pain. Having goals that are too large and sampled slowly is not smart. Having goals that are small and sampled quickly is smart. You get faster rewards. That’s why video games are so addictive. You don’t have to wait a year to see whether you beat the boss or not. You fight the boss, you win right now within five or ten minutes, maybe an hour or two max.

Maybe you’ve never heard of this system before. You have heard of changing your rules, your beliefs, your habits, your skills, but you may have never heard of purposefully manipulating the frequency of which you measure whether you’ve met your goals or not. Measure faster when life is difficult, so you can swallow some wins quicker. Measure slower when you’ve already caught an amazing wave, if you’re trying to optimize for your emotional happiness. If you’re not trying to optimize for that, if you’re trying to optimize for just crushing and being the most effective person in the world, and you’re the kind of person who can crush and be effective while sad or otherwise emotionally distracted, you might find more performance by not being extra happy, through changing the way you measure whether you should be or not. You might be the kind of person that can torture themselves into progress and success, as some people are.

I would say most people, when they crush their souls and crush their dreams and make everything impossible to win, would respond rather reasonably with giving up. Many would rather go do something else—nearly anything else, whether it be drink, smoke, blow one’s ears out with loud music, or otherwise distract from the frustration. Forget all that pressure. The funniest part is there isn’t any pressure. You invent it. There is no actual pressure. You’re at one atmosphere of pressure just like everybody else.

If you want to ride the waves and have a slightly more enjoyable life, ride the highs. Don’t ride them forever. When the wave is over, it’s over, but don’t jump off of a good wave to jump back into the horror if you’re trying to actually enjoy life. Take the time to be proud of yourself as well. Sampling frequency is a totally awesome way to refer to it. Anyone that’s ever had a CD player has been exposed to that word for a long time. Probably few actually know what it means, though.

If you ever want a nice excuse to get rid of feeling bad or some negative emotion, just think about how non-productive you are and think if you’re non-productive anyway, might as well be happy, regardless.

Paul Ekman is an American psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He’s a pioneer in the study of emotions and how they manifest in facial expressions. He has created an “atlas of emotions” with more than ten thousand facial expressions, and has gained a reputation as the world’s foremost “human lie detector.”

For more than 40 years, Ekman has supported the view that emotions are discrete, measurable, and physiologically distinct. His most influential work revolved around the finding that certain emotions appeared to be universally recognized, even in cultures that were preliterate and could not have learned associations for facial expressions through media.

Another classic study found that when participants contorted their facial muscles into distinct facial expressions, such as disgust, they reported subjective and physiological experiences that matched the distinct facial expressions. Ekman’s research findings led him to classify six emotions as basic: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

Robert Plutchik, who was a professor emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, agreed with Ekman’s biologically driven perspective but developed the “wheel of emotions,” suggesting eight primary emotions grouped on a positive or negative basis: joy versus sadness; anger versus fear; trust versus disgust; and surprise versus anticipation. Some basic emotions can be modified to form complex emotions. The complex emotions could arise from cultural conditioning or association combined with the basic emotions. Alternatively, similar to the way primary colors combine, primary emotions could blend to form the full spectrum of human emotional experience. For example, interpersonal anger and disgust could blend to form contempt. Relationships exist between basic emotions, resulting in positive or negative influences.

Through the use of multidimensional scaling, psychologists can map out similar emotional experiences, allowing a visual depiction of the “emotional distance” between experiences. A further step can be taken by looking at the map’s dimensions of the emotional experiences. The emotional experiences are divided into two dimensions known as valence (how negative or positive the experience feels) and arousal (how energized or enervated the experience feels). These two dimensions can be depicted on a 2D coordinate map. This two-dimensional map was theorized to capture one important component of emotion called core affect. Core affect is not the only component to emotion, but gives the emotion its hedonic and felt energy.

The idea that core effect is but one component of the emotion led to a theory called “psychological construction.” According to this theory, an emotional episode consists of a set of components, each of which is an ongoing process and none of which is necessary or sufficient for the emotion to be instantiated. The set of components is not fixed, either by human evolutionary history or by social norms and roles. Instead, the emotional episode is assembled at the moment of its occurrence to suit its specific circumstances. One implication is that all cases of, for example, fear are not identical but instead bear a family resemblance to one another.

If you built living things from scratch, how would you program them?

Think about a world where people harm themselves, and don’t care to eat or take care of their kin because of bad emotional programming or adherence to emotional programming. Those people would all be selected against. The question becomes, if it’s true that everything that’s here is here because it was chosen and it worked, then in what ways do some of the behaviors that are not commonly understood to work actually cause effectiveness? For instance, violence, pair bonding, jealousy, rage, frustration (it’s a search function), boredom, laziness. You can basically model what the world might look like if you change the existence or strength of any one of those emotional variables. You take something that’s universally effective, like delayed gratification, and you wonder how that emotion came into being. For instance like farming, if you don’t farm at the right time, then you don’t have food when you need it. Then there’s people that couldn’t work where it wasn’t obviously necessary, and would lose productivity to those people that could do work when only it was necessary in a more hidden and tacit sense.

Emotions are the programming that allowed the unbroken chain of thousands of “lovers” to become your ancestors. If one single pair of people in that chain didn’t raise their children to the point where they could find a partner of their own and raise children to do the same, you wouldn’t exist to read this book of Scivival right now. This is also the reason that you feel so strongly about the opposite sex. It’s the pull of your ancestors, and the same effective programming that served them for those many thousands of years.

Make babies, or make sure you’re ok with being the last of a hundred-thousand-year chain of successful parents. Life’s main purpose is to survive and produce more life, and we owe this debt to the universe in return for allowing us this experience.

If you don’t feel that pull, then you might be executing the variety strategy, which means that we must be different than our ancestors, for the robust species wins in the long run over the super specialized species. Being an omnivore is hugely advantageous.

If your programming for variety has led you to not have sex with the opposite gender, then you might be the end of your chain. Maybe you can cheat by being a sperm donor, or artificial insemination, but the odds are that you’ll just be the last of your lineage.

It’s a funny way to look at the paths we find ourselves on. Either you’re doing difference from your ancestors for robustness, or you’re doing the same stuff, because it’s known to work. You can’t really escape the paradigm. If you look at spiders, they often make exactly the same pattern of webs that their parents made, even though they’ve never met them. Some creatures are born with less desire to be novel, or break the model so to speak. We as humans are probably the most likely to try different things of any living thing we’re aware of. Have you ever seen reports of men who just can’t stop having sex with the tailpipes of cars, a very strange auto-erotica, so to speak? How often have you seen other animals trying to have sex with a car? We surely are pushing the limits of having kids with whatever we can. If there’s ever a fertility treatment for steel and aluminum, the world might experience a car population explosion.

Thus, your spirit, your feelings, the programming which has served the tens of thousands of men and women who ate, made love, and made sure your ancestors ate and made love and were safe until you were old enough to have sex and perpetuate the process. That programming, that giant long unbroken chain that results in you here reading these words, that is the real decider of what you will become, what your actual soul is.

Programming exists without software and hardware! Take a look at any Rube Goldberg machine or windmill; that’s also programming.

The programming that governs our behaviors: mood and emotion.

The programming that governs our behavior isn’t needs, it’s mood and emotion. Needs are just a weird combination of certain selected emotions that is not accurate.

We come programmed with some pretty great software. For the well and normally programmed of us, lying feels really bad, keeping secrets is hard, we want people to like us, we get bored, we want to travel.

Some may not particularly like when the truth leads to ethical or moral places that they’re not too happy with. For instance, let’s say you’re on the edge, 50/50, between being gay and being straight. If you flop towards the straight side, you have kids and your genes go on. If you flop to the gay side, you get off that gene pool.

There’s a very strong evolutionary advantage to flipping on the side of disliking.

Homosexuality, because at least in some rare cases, it’ll flip you to the side of preferring women to men, or at least get you to try that behavior a couple more times, which might lead to a pregnancy.

Should people be able to love whomever they want? Between consenting, unrelated adults, yes.

Should people get hated on for the choices they make? No.

Should everyone understand why disliking gay stuff has been selected for by reality? Not by us, not by evil, just by what must happen to create more of us. Since we’re what’s left, the only stuff that’s worked in the 99.9 percent of permanent extinction. You kind of have to be sympathetic/empathetic for both sides.

The stupid people that may not have too many tools to help manage who and what they are, and what they do, they are executing an effective strategy that, if for some reason they were born on the fence, they might flop to the side of having kids, and you have to honor that intention. Then you also have gay people, because you can’t program humans perfectly and we have to have variation for evolution, they’re just doing the best they can, too. They just happen to sometimes be girls in guys’ bodies, or guys or girls’ bodies or choose a certain aesthetic over another.

Thus, you’ve got two different systems, both trying to create people, and more effective people. In this case, they have conflict, and it creates basically an eternal conflict. 50/50 will always happen. Choosing straight over gay works, disliking gay helps that happen. Disliking gay gets selected for, in terms of evolution. Yet, having variation leads to excellence and durability, so they get selected for, and part of variation is liking different stuff. I guess there’s always going to be conflict in this area. It results in two conflicting behaviors that are both getting selected for.

By the way, if you have more execution of gay stuff in your crew or tribe of humans, that may appear as a sign of weakness to other tribes of humans, and they may decide to attack you first to take your resources. Sometimes it’s not just selected for at the individual level.

It is important to note under the evolutionary selection stuff, that robustness and the ability to adapt vastly outperforms specialization and niche filling over time.

Squinting is a natural response to things being unclear, as is head bobbing and head movement. This is the reason the birds bob their heads around and those things being related to the emotional programming for perceptual excellence.

Animals are great at lots of stuff we’re not. You wouldn’t want to get into an arm wrestling match with a similarly sized ape, because its muscles attach at different spots to its bones, and therefore it will easily destroy your arm, and maybe eat your face to teach you a lesson about inter-primate respect. Cats can hear up to 60k Hz, we can only hear up to 20k. We can see about 10 million colors with our eyes, while lizards, frogs, birds and bugs can see about 100 million.

Either get some love in your life, make that constant distraction dissipate, or see it as a distraction and focus on it later. If it’s a goal, it’s a great goal. If it’s in the way, it’s in the way big time. Or, maybe you aren’t so passionate or hormonal, and thus less controlled by your baser impulses.

Since gratitude is a key to happiness, it’s good to honor those that we owe so much. Rarely have you ever heard anyone genuinely exclaim how lucky they felt that the road was paved, or that they had such a great language available to them that they didn’t even need to invent. Thank god for the toilet. Best invention ever, yet do you know the inventor’s name?

The answer: The first modern flushable toilet was described in 1596 by Sir John Harington, an English courtier and the godson of Queen Elizabeth I. Harington’s designed a two-foot-deep oval bowl waterproofed with pitch, resin, and wax, and fed by water from an upstairs cistern. 

More improvements followed. Then in the late 19th century, a London plumbing impresario named Thomas Crapper manufactured one of the first widely successful lines of flush toilets. Crapper did not invent the flush toilet, but he did develop the ballcock, an improved tank-filling mechanism still used in toilets today. 

To these men and many others we owe a debt of gratitude.

Scivive would call it courage. It takes courage to jump out into the unknown and say, “You know what, I’m going to quit my job, going to eat through my life savings and I might only improve the outcome 5% by finding the right doctor. Or I could only improve the outcome by 5% by learning about one of these guys who has limited availability getting you a time slot before someone else that didn’t try as hard.”

That willingness to sacrifice the $200,000 you may have made in whatever job you have in order to get that 5% chance in your life takes courage. It takes creativity to know that it’s an option, and it takes courage to do whatever no one else has ever shown you what to do. If it were common that as soon as you get cancer everyone that loves you quits their jobs and only focuses on your wellness, then it would be a lot easier to do because you’d have a role model for it. Many people have that role model experience because they don’t have the financial freedom to do it.

Enduring pain in order to stash up enough energy to make a breakthrough to then have overwhelming success is like holding your breath before a dive, it is difficult while you’re doing it but it’s the only way you can get low enough and get back with enough oxygen. Take whatever you want at the bottom of your dive up to the top and enjoy it. During the hardship of getting no rewards or people telling you what you’re doing is stupid is kind of what’s required to make the breakthrough, to get to the place that they would never have the courage to reach.

Boredom exists to make us do something new.

Associations exist so that you could not stay at home and lay in bed all day long.

It just stopped working, and people are tired.

A lot of researchers believe that such behaviors evolve because they provide you with great benefits. They haven’t appeared at the same pace as the world did. For example, now we’ve got an obesity epidemic because calories are more readily available than ever before.

Ever notice you get bored of things, no matter what the thing is—video games, people, etc—hell, even violence gets boring. Why is that? It’s a really interesting optimization to prevent processing loops where you can’t ever get free. Boredom should seriously be looked at in programming and machine learning the same way that it has paid off for us. Some would guess that boredom is a simple way to maintain search space width instead of depth. Boredom works great when there are lots of smaller problems and places to search with good payoff, and when the payoffs happen early, or not at all. When the things you need to beat require tons and tons of deliberate effort, then boredom is your enemy.

Frustration emotionally is like a programming function where you have to decide how far down a path to go before you realize it’s a failure. In the real world, if you actually walk down a path to see what’s at the end of it, whatever time you spend going down that path, assuming you aren’t tired or the environment hasn’t changed, is going to take the same amount of time to get back to where you started. Every minute you walk in a direction is going to take you a minute to get back. This assumes that you have to reach the same starting point in order to start to have a new path, which surely isn’t always the case, but is pretty common (in a wooded area where you need trails). Frustration is an emotion which is basically a halting, it makes you stop what you are doing, and try something else.

If you change the level, speed or intensity to which a person feels frustration, what you are actually doing is putting a limit on the depth of their search function. Or, if you don’t want to call it a search function, you could call it an experiment function whereby which they are attempting to do something, which didn’t previously exist or they didn’t have the knowledge of, or they weren’t good at. Then at some point you decide that we’ve got the diminishing returns out of this thing; we are as good as we are reasonably going to be in this time frame, let’s switch to something else, how do we affect that change? You could really hate the first thing or you could really like the next thing. The problem is that the next thing is like this infinite set of all things possible, whereas the first thing is just one thing. It’s much easier to cause the switch by causing a distaste for the first thing than it is to try and look into the vastness of everything else, and hope that it draws you away from the thing that has consumed your consciousness in the last five or ten minutes.

You will find that the amount of minutes and strength to which human beings feel frustration is probably due to the level of difficulty in tasks in the years past, when our emotions really evolved with our desire for fats and sugars, etc. It wouldn’t be surprising if the vast majority of tasks existed during that formative period. That’s actually a misleading term; we are still being formed just as much now, if not more. For the purposes of this argument, we’ll just say formative period. If you looked from an outside perspective at those people having the problems that they did at that time, you would find that the frustration timing and intensity matched pretty closely with the difficulty of achieving whatever task might have been at hand, whether it was to plant a seed, get a monkey to stop stealing your food or keep the other cave guys away from your cave chick. We may never have the opportunity to look at that, because progress is happening ever so quickly that based on our own technological innovation, the natural biological kind is going to be outpaced.

Everyone is cheating, so don’t be too jealous!

If you’re ever curious why the people of the world are so beautiful, so skinny and so fit, and so energetic Then guess what? Just like you discover all the athletes of the world are doping and cheating, everyone else in the world is cheating, too. Look at all of the drugs that are getting sold. All the diet pills, all the Botox, all of the surgeries, all of the steroids, you name it. Those multi-billion dollar industries, they have customers, and the customers, they are all those people that you look at, and wonder, “How did they do that?”

If you believe that physical traits evolved, like monkeys having longer arms, to be better at maneuvering in trees and reaching branches farther away, how could you not believe that the monkey’s emotions had to evolve as well to coerce towards even look up at the tree and decide that was a place where any monkey would want to climb the trunk to get to the limbs anyway? The motivation and desire to use the physical tools of one’s body is equally important. Imagine what use those long arms would be if monkeys’ emotions instead evolved to go swimming. They would be destroyed by crocodiles and sharks. All of our emotions are as, if not more, evolved than our bodies.

Behaviors that aren’t self-fulfilling enough are self-extinguishing. It is the reason that you see the same social behaviors in humans that you see in animals. If you want to take advantage of collectivism as an animal, you need to be part of the group, and you need to perform in social bonding experiences. If you become socially defective you will be kicked out of the group. For this reason, you see animals mostly working only with other animals they can have synergy with.

If an animal decided that it would do without food or mating, so that some other animal could, that behavior would self-extinguish itself out of the next generation, because over time, even small optimizations that are helpful are selected for. Neglecting your own needs to benefit someone else that is either useless to you, or even worse, wants to harm you, is self-extinguishing behavior, and is the reason that pacifists are by far the minority in behavior strategy both among humans and most other creatures. Any creature that has a territory by definition will fight to keep it. Any creature that values pair bonding will by definition fight to keep its partner from getting bonded with by others. Any behavior that allows you to lose, but doesn’t have an equal or greater side benefit somewhere else to you, will be selected against and disappear over time.

Any time that you want to feel better about the rain, just remember the trees and flowers need to drink.

Frustration is a halt command. Anger is a follow command.

Frustration makes you stop interacting with whatever you’re doing. It’s the opposite of anger. Anger laser focuses you in on a single thing and gives you tunnel vision. If you see people maniacally laughing with a master plan and you wonder what it is that drives them and how they’re able to achieve so much more than anyone else, it’s through rage. An all-consuming anger, and rage for vengeance.

Happiness is not the best target. Let’s be serious, if you only want happiness out of this life, you’re not asking for much.

Some argue that it is impossible to do the calculation that utilitarianism requires because consequences are inherently unknowable. Daniel Dennett describes this as the “Three Mile Island effect.” Dennett points out that not only is it impossible to assign a precise utility value to the incident, it is impossible to know whether, ultimately, the near-meltdown that occurred was a good or bad thing. He suggests that it would have been a good thing if plant operators learned lessons that prevented future serious incidents that could have been even more disastrous.

The question is poorly formed, as there is no such thing as good or bad, unless you include when and for whom. As most things that are good or bad are sometimes one way in the short term, and another in the long term, and always different based on the party to whom they’re occurring. To leave out those obvious variables is negligent. They’re obvious, unavoidable and super important, nearly impossible to not measure things. Wrong for whom? With what objective? At what time? It isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better. Why are all these utilitarians trying to optimize for people they don’t care about? There’s no universal good in resource allocation with infinite human desire and limited real resources.

When bad things happen, they might be good in the long run, so do you focus on the short term and feel bad, or on the long term and feel good? Or do you hurt yourself the most and focus on the loss now? Then in the future, when the payoff has kicked in, just refocus back to the past. You can still feel the negative impacts.

With more complex systems, you have to be creative and wise to guess what the future will look like. As a matter of fact, it’s so hard that we will pay you thousands of millions of dollars. That is, if you can accurately predict the future values of things. Go take out a call or put option on margin in any market, at perhaps forty to one leverage. Now if you’re right, you make forty times your money. If you’re wrong though, you lose the same amount.

Since certainty is expensive to find, even where it can be found at all, you might take the easy payoff of having a positive outlook. The more comfortable you are with uncertainty, the more joy you will have in your life. When you aren’t comfortable with uncertainty, your body and your mind will put you in an unattractive state of stress. You will tunnel vision on that which you fear, and it will destroy your quality of life. Focus on what you want. Let your life be filled with adventure you travel through appreciatively. Reject the commonly taken path of stress and worry. If stress and worry paid better dividends, they could be considered. They take you farther from where you want to be, and lock you in a state of inaction. The coward dies a thousand deaths.

Why are all these philosophers trying to optimize happiness? If we were meant to be happy more often, we simply would be. Being more happy leads to less effectiveness in the ways that we’re used to doing it. The tortured soul must create to relieve pain. The man or woman raised without love must lash out at the world in revenge or find a way to get the love that was so deprived. Much of the greatness that we have in this world is the result of need, not want. Happy people have not need. Happy people’s cups are overflowing. It is that removal of need to destroy the common man’s need to pursue happiness.

If you are already happy, why bust your ass in pursuit? Save the calories. A happy person probably executes morality on others less often, and allows the void to creep into the world, that individual doesn’t want to lose a happy buzz by having to hack at evil with a hatchet. Better to assume that evil person over there doing evil things is really just like you inside, and they’ll see a better way, somehow, hopefully. Hope into one hand, shit into the other, and see which fills faster.

Happy and effective can be done, however, as long as effective is a competition among men, and as long as happy removes the need to compete. Pre-happy people will be outperformed by post-happy people, for they MUST perform, whereas the pre-happy, might, or might not, he can only lose by playing, for he’s already emotionally won. The unhappy person has nothing to lose in the hunt, only gain, for he’s already in the hole, and sees light at the end of the tunnel.

Now these kind of analogies aren’t the kind Scivive likes to make, for as many colors as there are in the rainbow, there’s many, many more ways to be human, and feel about things and operate. However, one can be pretty certain that if you looked at those humans who gave the most to the world they left before death, you’ll find they were described as happier than anything else much more rarely than other emotions such as driven, or focused, etc. Thus, one can feel quite comfortable putting the fate of mankind in the hands of those who must win, and not those for whom winning is only an option. One day happy effective might be common, that would be great. As it stands, happily effective is an end put after effective. If you really want happiness first, just keep lowering your standards and your salvation can be found in a day.

Be reasonable with your happiness, it’s a tool, like all the other tools you’ve been born with. Emotions work, and they work well, for what they’ve evolved to do. When you start altering them, without honoring their original intentions and reasons for being, you’re likely to find out the other people with the old programming are going to outcast you, punish you, and take advantage of your pretty new system of happiness no matter what. During a childhood quarrel, if you were struck in the face, and turned the other cheek and smiled, your ass could be beat until they could figure out what exactly was wrong with you, for what could be more interesting than a person you could pummel, and they actually enjoy it? Well, now you’re getting your ass kicked constantly, and to the casual observer, you’ve found a way to love it so that’s great. Now some other poor kid doesn’t have to get bullied when he or she wouldn’t have enjoyed it; you’re here to be the new whipping boy of the neighborhood.

You could honor the world in the way that it’s been most responsive to, and do tit-for-tat strategy where you give as well as you receive, or perhaps better. The world becomes a better place. Tit-for-tat is the most effective thing we’ve found, and it’s literally how we hand out and authorize use of force by the government. If you commit a harsher wrong, you receive a harsher punishment, that’s tit for tat. Perhaps your fighting back is getting someone in the state to retaliate for you through the use of law, that’s fine too. The point is, when you try to cheat the nice social system that we live in, by taking more happiness than is reasonable, you will be punished for it. Your fellow man will make sure that you don’t get the happiness he’s felt deprived of so easily if he can find a reasonable way to make that happen. There’s a reason vandalism and mischief is so common among men, and it’s because it’s effective. If you break everyone else’s stuff, the things you have are more valuable. Every experimental non tit for tat way of interacting with others has been shown to get abused by others that notice that they can get free profit out of the deal.

Now, if you just kept that happiness inside, and didn’t leak it out of your face harming all the jealous fools who gazed upon you, you could keep much of the upside of an inner peace and joy without getting the beat downs, you could even advertise tit for tat, but in reality not follow through, similar to how many animals mimic venomous animals, when they actually aren’t themselves. They get the benefits the venomous creatures do, without the effort it takes to actually produce toxins. It has worked for animals for millions of years, and it might work for you too.

Hell, that’s how the speeding tickets work, right? The sign says that if you go over the limit, you’ll probably get a ticket, but you know you most of the time really won’t, and thus the highway itself is a mimicking poisonous animal; sometimes you will get bit, sometimes you won’t, is it worth the risk? Many tend to follow the speed limit, because to know the difference between the day you will get caught for speeding and the day that you won’t is too hard to tell and too expensive to risk, just like toying with the snake if you can’t tell whether it’s a real venomous coral snake or a harmless “red milk snake” that looks similar.

Sun Tzu said that all war is deception, and The Art of War has been a best seller for 2,500 years. Kind of makes deception in animals even more interesting. Think of all the instances we use in our own armed services the same tactics that animals have been using for millions of years. If you are weak, attempt to look strong, if you are strong, attempt to look weak (angler fish). If you are near, try to seem far. If you are far, try to seem near. This is what camouflage does—it lets you grab your prey from an angle they’re vulnerable from, like an octopus grabbing a crab from behind.

Remember here, some of these things only work during times of war. During times of peace you’re always better off looking stronger instead of weaker. Looking weaker invites war. A good tool used at the wrong time is the wrong tool. Learn from the animals, learn from Sun Tzu.

You’re supposed to cycle into and out of happiness, just like sleep, just like eating, just like breathing, in and out. The sooner you worry a little bit less about how happy you are, the sooner you get a little free happiness. Maybe it’s ok to be grumpy, maybe you like being grumpy. It could be a good deal for you, or you could be doing grumpy wrong, personality is an art.

I haven’t produced anything for the world in 12 years since I left the company that I ran, with 150 employees. I beat myself up about it rather regularly because I’m not doing what I should do. I’m not doing what I should do and that I should be benefiting the world. I’m talking about the very specific: I need to organize my book. I need to write one chapter and then the next chapter. All the things I know I need to do that are very specific and that’s just book related stuff. I’ve got similar things with different business ideas. I’ve got similar things with my personal health. I am a bundle of disappointment when I measure what I am doing compared to what I could be doing. 

We all have a way to do something we know we shouldn’t be doing. For some people it’s drinking. Then you come back and you’re in a state of stagnation. There’s a time for partying, and there’s a time for doing the things that you enjoy. Scivivors will tell you that those times are only after you have got something working for you while you’re sleeping, it’s just too powerful. It’s too powerful to skip.

Theoretically, you could be happy and productive. True Scivivors could strategize a way to do that. All it would require is a little bit of social reward, and you could be good to go, but without that social award, you may find yourself living in a vacuum beating yourself up all the time. The more opportunity you have in the future, the more pain you’ll endure, because you will make more mistakes because you are pushing harder. This analogy has been made before: if you’re a car and you’re not moving, you’re not going to see any bugs in your window, but if you’re going a million miles an hour, flying through life, you’re going to have a windshield full of squished bugs. You need to choose. You want to be a shooting star or do you want to be a dormant stone?

Some people want to optimize for happiness. Optimizing for happiness, at least short-term happiness, could breed laziness and prevent longer term happiness. If you asked Tony Robbins if he’s happy, he’s the best personal development life coach on the planet, a very wealthy and successful person, he may answer, “absolutely.” If you’re in the business of search engine optimization and you don’t rank number one for search engine optimization, that’s a problem. If you’re in the business of self-help and you aren’t the most helped by your own self, you’re a false prophet. It’s self-referential, it’s Meta, and it is recursive. If you’re lucky enough to find happiness before, or during, productivity, fabulous. But you shouldn’t be optimizing for happy, it’s too short-sighted.  

Consciousness is like color; it’s a human construct, and it’s a human way of understanding things, so it’s profitable. It turns out that in the real world, color doesn’t exist, in the real world there’s no blue, there’s no red, there’s no green, you only think there’s blue, red, and green because your brain decided it was a useful way to organize the perception of different wavelengths of light. Different wavelengths of light do exist, and different materials refract the light from the sun and other sources into our photoreceptors in our eyes, in varying degrees depending on the wavelength of the light, and that’s all great. But that’s just a human construct, right? The same way your brain is deleting you seeing your blinking, you don’t notice every time you blink the same way that you don’t notice you can always actually see your nose, is the same way that you think that there’s this consciousness thing and it’s important. But in reality, it’s just a phenomenon of belief that’s profitable and useful. However, just like color, it doesn’t really exist. Consciousness doesn’t actually exist, you just think it does, the same way that color doesn’t actually exist, and you just think it does. Can you still make great discoveries and useful things in life by thinking colors exist? Certainly, sure you can. It’s very useful, but when it stops becoming useful, feel free to stop using it.

Sales and marketing people have power over your consciousness.

If it’s true that the most rare and valuable thing in the world is human consciousness, and sales people affect human consciousness, then sales people are pretty powerful. Furthermore, sales people and comedians are constantly refining their craft, mastering better timing and better wording to maximize the amount of response that they get and their target audience.

Advertising for people to do the wrong thing

If you’re advertising for people to do the wrong thing, you’re killing the mother earth that birthed you. You’re killing the system you live in. You’re making the world that you live in a worse place. To some degree that bad karma will come back to you, but sadly, probably nowhere near as close to the profit you make on causing it. That’s the tragedy of the commons. If somebody gets to externalize the cost of destroying the environment and make extra profit, that’s a great idea for them.  

Self-consciousness just means that instead of operating at your meta level, you can now see above you that there’s another meta level with people walking around on it, and a glass floor, and you can then hop up there and then back down into the minds of other players, you could call that empathy. The issue is that the whole empathy thing is more important for team effectiveness than it is important for calling to some sense of fairness, team beats fair. Fair is kind of the weak flour that makes the team cake. Flour can be ok, but given the choice, you take the cake.

Thus, stop being ignorant in regards to other animals having emotions; they do, and even if they didn’t, you would get the profit from the rest of the people in your society of them not thinking you were a psycho and might kill them, by treating those non “next level” seeing things as things to be treated nice. It’s less important the concept of fairness, and more important the team effect.

Consciousness—you think it exists, but it doesn’t actually exist. It’s useful to think it does though.

It’s like fuchsia.

Fuchsia is not a combination of pink and purple. It is the color your brain comes up with when it sees contradictory color signals (such as very high and very low wavelengths without the appropriate middle stimulation). It’s the only color not in the rainbow. Pink and purple create a lavender color. Whereas fuchsia is what happens when you combine colors in an unusual way

To be yet more pedantic, it’s the only fully-saturated color that’s not present in the rainbow.

Colors are perceptual phenomena; the interpretation of a spectrum of light impinging on a patch of retina that almost invariably contains more than one frequency at a time. Colors include white, black, gray, pink, tan, beige, baby blue, none of which are in the rainbow. 

It’s funny, why try to understand the ancient world when you don’t understand the present? Would you rather beat up the guy beating you, or some other person in the past, while your ass is getting kicked in the now?

In your life, you don’t remember everything; you really only remember moments. Your memory is like any other muscle—it gets better with use. The more you journal the truly beautiful things that have happened in your life, the quicker you will be able to recall them, and the more of a positive effect they will have on your existence.

For instance, if you win a very competitive game of something, it feels really wonderful for a moment, perhaps hours, but the feeling wears off, not because it has to, but because you call it less and less into your memory (and human beings have a saturation point for everything). I think the reason winners look and act like winners is because they’ve won so many times, that they are very ready to fall right into their “I have won” mode, even if they haven’t yet, because their focus is on what they are used to (winning) and you see and feel it in their presence. The inverse is true about losers. Thus, you must keep a daily journal of your magic moments (and set out to create new magic moments) because they are what life and your memory is made of. Open up your book sometime and take a good whiff of all the beautiful things that have happened in your life. Don’t let them disappear just so you can let your memory get rusty. Create a reverse journal highlighting all the beautiful things you can remember about your life before this date, because if you don’t, one day you will not be able to remember them, and they will truly be lost forever (unless you are lucky enough for someone else to have done this work for you).

Complaining is describing an event in a negative tone with no indication of next steps to fix or improve the situation.

Now we live in mega cities, and you have the option of living in a house someone else built, eating delicious food someone else prepared, and watching a mirror as someone else cuts your hair with expert precision. How is this possible? Specialization. People get good at a couple things instead of being bad or average at lots of things. The end result is that all the goods and services we enjoy today are better than they could ever be if you had to do it all yourself. We stand on the backs of giants. The masses and masses of our ancestors who fought, lived and died so that we could have the life and lifestyles we have today. Honor the past and honor the memory of all those that died and fought so hard to allow you the privilege of living this fine life.

Emotions are faster than thought. Literally, emotions are closer to the stem of your brain than all the fancy thinking things, and so it takes longer to react and transmit commands than it does to simply “feel.” And it should.

If you’re not willing to cut off your arm to feed other people, then by golly perhaps you’re not willing to just give away other things you own to them either. Perhaps executing that obvious fact is why nearly all the good stuff on this planet is the result of men organized in businesses with ownership and property enforced. As long as everything good in the world is made in that way, then you should find a way to do more of what works faster than doing what doesn’t work, and hasn’t worked for the most part, throwing money into places where it isn’t used properly.

It’s no accident that businesses beat out selfless endeavors for making the world a better place. There’s no comparison at all. Remember the “One laptop per child” program? Ever see one? Ever touch one? Ever use one? And that was one of the better ideas! The free market is the most powerful way we’ve found to fulfill the desires of the masses. Not the needs, but the desires. Getting them to desire what they should desire is currently their own problem, and the intelligent marketers in the world are usually working against the consumers’ best interests. These days the marketers are winning big time over the wholesome individuals’ ideal behaviors.

Call what the world of marketing out there what you like, many can tell you that if you designed the system from the ground up yourself, you’d probably not have everyone spending large percentages of their conscious life putting on a false face, hair, smell, etc., to trick their fellow man. It’s kind of like the Cold War; if everyone would chill out with the arms race of personal appearance, everyone could relax a bit, and our desires would renormalize, to back when everyone had pubic hair but were still quite horny.

For those of you that haven’t gotten out and about in the world these days, there’s so little pubic hair in Western culture that the crab louse is going extinct.

Now, Wikipedia says that there’s no data for it, but noticing the recent hairless trend, the crab louse would have to be going homeless at an alarming rate, if they need hair to live in. Now Wiki says they can’t tell because governments don’t track it, and some would argue they’re likely not trying hard enough. Sales figures for common treatments, or surveying primary care physicians and students regarding the status of that ailment should be little different from the queries they execute for other ailments, STDs and drug use? If you’re curious, just ask.

Scivive won’t bother searching for a compelling reason that the destruction of this creature’s habitat would have effects any dissimilar than the many other creatures who’ve had their habitats destroyed, except of course that these things are blood sucking parasites, so good riddance.

Extinction level events would be a cool way to invest, (better than hedonism from the perspective of an individual) but it is a slippery slope to care about the people so very far in the future. Let’s say, however, that you did care about raw numbers and masses of people coming after you, shouldn’t you be breeding with everything that moves and maximizing your child output? The Quiverfull Christian sect does exactly that, pumps out the maximum number of kids possible. If you really care about the largest biomass of humans in the future, you should probably outlaw contraception as well. Might make procreating required by law and abstinence punishable by death. Perhaps that should help expand the population too. How stupid…

Every sperm isn’t sacred, boys, and much of the effort you put into the future fiction fantasy world will kill progress that could be made now, or in the next 20-40 years. Focus on the problems you actually have. Focus on getting to the gym and lifting the weights and eating right. Don’t worry about how you’ll fit through doorways when you’re bigger and stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger was—you won’t be. You’re solving a problem you’re never going to have. Solve the problems in order. Solve the damn problems you must solve to earn your next problem even existing. Solve today’s problems today.

They say the coward dies a thousand deaths, because one feels fear and imagines terrible fates often, thus destroying what could be a good life if one had some courage. The courageous person dies only once. Stop being a pussy in regards today’s problems by time-shifting your focus to the fantasy problems of the future. You’ll find that a lot of those problems may solve themselves in ways that you couldn’t have predicted.

Imagine if you were spending big money on punch cards and vacuum tubes, you’d have wasted time perhaps optimizing for technology that paradigm shifts made useless. Find the best method to get people to care more about themselves and their families and the here and now, and not people thousands of years from now. It’s like people choosing the imaginary people of Narnia or some other fiction novel over the real living people of this world. Don’t worry about the fictional characters, we’ll deal with them when they’re closer to existing.

Equality is a widely believed myth. Equality doesn’t exist, not even two foot-long rulers are the same size. If they appear the same size or weight to you, it’s only because you are bad at measuring things.

Since two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time, by definition everything is not equal, because everything is closer to some things and farther from other things. There are other situations where humans try to force equality where it would actually do harm. If you take the concept of pair bonding for social mating and rearing of children, when you remove specialization and attempt to make both members of the party good at the same things, you sacrifice the breadth of ability that comes from specializing in different areas. Men are supposed to do the heavy lifting, quite literally, which is why their muscles are bigger. Women are supposed to do the breastfeeding which is why their breasts make milk. The hunt for equality where there should be specialization does harm, not good.

The art is to avoid thinking that specialization is subjugation. Different doesn’t imply hierarchy. In some places hierarchy is surely implied, however. Who should do the fighting? Men or women? Hand to hand combat? Who looks more able? Who wins in these matches in the real world?

Usually, equality exists in theory. If I push this direction, there’s an equal and opposite force. Equality is useful for physics, equality is useful for finding things that are similar. You must be a believer in equality to execute reciprocity. If the other teammates that you’re interacting with realize that you don’t believe in reciprocity, and try to excel far beyond the equal, they will punish you. You will become hated for trying to gain the system. When you cut in line, everyone hates you because they knew you cut in line and your experience was unequal to (not as difficult as) theirs. Scivive will tell you that in the search for equality, trying to make all lifestyle paths the same is pretty stupid, all lifestyles paths are not the same. If you indulge in heroin, the lifestyle path that you have chosen is pretty stupid, and you are going to bring a lot of pain to yourself and to anyone else around you, and your life is likely to be very short because you chose the wrong path. If you chose ultraviolent dictator, you’re going to die pretty early. If you chose to be the President of the United States, you’re 100 times more likely to die than the average person. Those people get assassinated all the time. A lot of the decisions you make that you want to think are equal because of some desire to be fair to the world is a disservice to those around you and yourself.

All choices are not the same, all paths are not the same. It is worth dedicating a great deal of time on “better and worse exists”; that different exists, because the whole world is so trapped in finding equality where it doesn’t belong that people are filled with delusion.

If equality exists, why is there a Michelin star rating? Why do people use brands? Why do they Choose cheerios instead of tasteless oats? Why do they listen to different genres of music? Equality doesn’t exist, competition exists. Competition is where items or aspects of life that need refurbishing get demolished by the thing that’s good. Natural, and unnatural selection at its finest.

If you think equality exists, it’s because you are bad at measuring. Two rulers are not the same size, you just think they are because your measuring tools suck. If you are able to create equality at such a high degree, at such a high level you positively impact everyone else, because now people know that’s possible.

If everyone’s life is worth the same value, then what is a nation-state, and what is a family? It’s quite obvious we hold different standards for those people which you exclude out of your circle, not only personal living quarters, but even anyone regionally near you.

It seems slightly absurd that people are so cowardly and so fearful of finding better in their life that they’re willing to brainwash and convince themselves that better doesn’t even exist, can’t be measured and therefore whatever they’re doing is already awesome because there’s no such things as better, just different. Computers are better calculators than abacuses, OLED screen is better than the LCD screen, and if you want documents to last a long time, the pen is better than the pencil; and if you want to hear loud music, some speakers are better than others. Better and worse exists.

We can look at this from another perspective also. One could take the whiny, irritated complaint about the world position, or take a more advanced, position that explains how lucky are you that you get to build free yes momentum and free authority by building off of something simple that these people already actually know to be true. And so, how lucky are you that you can win a seemingly contentious point easily by showing that better and worse obviously exists and then building upon it for your next thing. So, you had to build yes momentum anyway. You had to get an opposing argument to pre-commit to agree with you anyway by finding that first common ground. How lucky are you that the first common ground is so easy to find?

If you want to talk about how unfair the world is, it is designed in such a way that two pieces of matter couldn’t exist at the same space, at the same time. This means there’s literally an enforced uniqueness of one thing per location, how can that possibly be fair? That thing’s location has got to be slightly better or worse than someone else’s. Time and space itself starts out as unfair so stop looking for fairness.

Finnish women live on average six years longer than men. That’s 77.8 to 83.8 years. Where’s the Scandinavian equality everyone is clamoring for?

The silly search for equality and other pattern finding tendencies, often you will see patterns where none exist. It can be useful and it can be harmful. The lion is not the tiger and the antelope is neither still. No one cares about those far off years. Everyone cares about today, so let’s make today kick ass. Let’s work on vanity for fun. If girls can pay thousands a month to plaster over wrinkling skin, they can surely pay to have genuinely wrinkle free skin without the makeup.

“Do onto others as you would have them do on to you.”

We are not all the same, we should not all be treated the same. Some things that you would love, others would hate; roller coasters, gluten, etc.

When you’re looking at economic policies, or policies in general really, it’s a bit conceited to want the same things for everyone else that you want of yourself. Take for instance inflation versus deflation. Most would prefer deflation for their currency, wanting its value to go higher and higher. For everyone else, however, you may prefer that theirs go lower and lower, because it will amplify the amount of trade and creation that those people in that economic situation create. I think that overall inflation is great because it robs from the hoarding people who don’t want to give their money to someone else for goods and services.

Inflation works like the memory of someone else, where you lend them your lawnmower, and then you have to borrow your own lawnmower back from them. That’s what inflation is, the world owes you something, because you have the money that you worked hard for, but as long as you don’t claim the favor back, it erodes over time until you are owed nothing anymore. Hold for too long and you can’t afford to buy anything with the money that you saved because of the inflation.

Ego is the power other people have over you. Significance is the power other people have over you.

How the “-isms” and “-ities” affect real world.

In an endless sea of perspectives, but with limited knowledge and limited time to improve, measure, and compare our models of the world, it is best to choose the perspective which profits you the most. Let me give you an example; one could make two statements that are obviously true, and yet contradictory. Look before you leap, and he who hesitates is lost. Or, money is the root of all evil, and he who has the money makes the rules. Or, the early bird catches the worm and some euphemism about patience. How about don’t put all your eggs in one basket, vs put all your eggs in one basket and watch it very carefully. All of these perspectives could ring true depending on circumstance. Most notably, the circumstances pertaining to your ability to execute one or the other based on your own skill set. Choose your perspectives wisely.

The zodiac and the concept of a horoscope dividing everyone on earth into 12 groups and then giving them some vague crap predictions about their futures is pretty stupid. Do you really think that if such predications were true, that all of mankind could be divided into twelve? And why can’t you ask for better details? Why isn’t anyone named specifically like, “XYZ dude is going to shoot up a school today.”

It’s funny how superstitious we are, with chain letters, post in this thread or you mom will die in her sleep tonight, step on a crack break your momma’s back, and those obviously false little hints surely do inspire action.

Hitchens and Dawkins appear to be impressed by the argument that the odds are so against us existing, that it seems the game is rigged for us to exist.

This is just confirmation bias, just as any horse picker can send out 100 pieces of mail choosing a winner, then another 100, then another 100, and some random person will be the recipient of four picked winners in a row. That’s because the cost of picking a winner at random is about zero. That’s why trustable signaling needs to be costly. Just because the universe tried something one zillion times in a row, and you just happen to have received the letter that was all winners in a row, doesn’t mean it was built for you. Also, how special would you consider the living beings that dominated this planet for thousands of times longer than you? Dinosaurs—and how did that work out for them?

If you believe that you don’t have much control over your life, you become discouraged, because if you don’t have any control, you can’t make anything better. If you can’t ever improve anything, well, your life might not be fulfilling. Now what if you had a different belief? Even a belief that you had to stretch to make fit, a belief that you did control certain things in your life even if you really didn’t, but you could slightly influence them and you called it control, what kind of effect would that have?

As an example, let’s say you didn’t want to get hit by a car, what could you do? You could not be around cars and live on an island without them, or you could travel at night when there’s not so many cars around, or if you’re driving your own car you could paint it bright yellow. There are a hundred options you could try that wouldn’t actually cost that much that would greatly reduce the chance that you ever experience a car accident, and that same type of creativity and responsibility can apply anywhere in your life.

You have a drinking problem? What’s the problem? Alcohol is near your hand, your hand grabs it and puts it in your body, how do we get the hand further from the alcohol? You could chop your hands off, or you could go somewhere where there isn’t alcohol, or you could find an empowering meaning that you felt stronger about through deep soul searching than the reason you are reaching for the drink. More people in the world need to take responsibility for what’s happening to them in their own lives. Responsibility for oneself is absolutely massive, so if you want to live longer, then maybe watching the Discovery channel is not enough, maybe being part of what the Discovery channel is covering would be better, and is that not an option? Can you not invest in one of the stocks, can you not put 5% of your money into one of these companies that could one day save your life? That responsibility is a very strong part of the argument.

Tony Robbins’s limiting beliefs: if you don’t think you have any, you just found your first one.

The risk-to-reward ratio during advancement gets crappier and crappier for any kind of improvements in life. By definition, doing better in life implies that you have already obtained more of the set of the good stuff, which is a finite set, whereas you have had the minimum of the bad stuff in the risk category, and therefore the farther along you go, the easier it gets to find things in the much more under achieve risk set, and the harder it is to make gains in the farther success set. For example, should you try psychedelic drugs to become more creative? If you already have a great mind, perhaps you lose your drive, or have a really bad trip, and you go from a nice productive guy that only wanted to create cooler and better ideas for the world through a creativity assister, a chemical, but you end up like the Unabomber instead, really intelligent yet dangerous and evil. Now is that to say it’s a common outcome for people that have tripped? (“Tripped” meaning that a person has had a psychedelic experience.) Well, how much do you want to risk? If you are already inadequate, and are likely to continue to be, perhaps you have more to gain by risky changes to brain chemistry, or risky experiences that you may enlighten the world about.

For a better analogy, if you’re already dating a super model who loves you, is honest and caring, and can be a great mother, how much do you gain by trying to upgrade, and how much do you risk?

Surely you can come up with a scenario where you would suggest to someone that they not mess up a good thing. You will find that the validity of that advice increases the better the good thing is, and the more likely the inverse is to become the reality, or have more tragic amplitude.

This is why Scivive has no interest in suggesting what is so commonly suggested by many others in regards to sensory deprivation tanks, or gurus, or meditation, or all of the other new age and rarely effective isolation behaviors. If you want trance, and alteration of consciousness, the least risky way to get there is dance/chanting/singing. It occupies the mind and feels good.

Some young folks like to combine those things with some chemicals like MDMA, and claim to have the same near soulful experiences of those on more psychedelic substances. If meditation was so bad ass, why are the Tibetan monks not crushing it on the world stage? Most inventions, the best health, best science, and most advanced philosophy, or fastest rates of progress in economic, culinary, and musical areas are not usually attributed to monk lifestyle. They’re rather stagnant and getting stomped by nearly everyone else that doesn’t meditate. Well why would one want to adopt and or maximize what appears to be an ineffective behavior in one’s own life? So that one may trade real world useful behavior and growth for the illusion of usefulness?

Is it better to trick yourself into thinking that you’re doing great things, when in reality you’re sitting uselessly, leeching the resources and productivity out of the other people in the world that actually keep you safe and develop the music and literature you might enjoy, only to give little to nothing back in return except perhaps the observable warning you leave that life truly can be wasted?

Not realizing your underachieved status is one way to do it, and enhances the likelihood that you continue to underachieve until the day you die. You’ve found a way to be content with sucking, and continue to lie to yourself about your own reality.

If you’re not giving back to the world that brought you into it, and gave you roads to walk on, understandings to learn and benefit from, a nice language to speak, beautiful art and music to immerse yourself in, and a body not riddled with bullet holes or under Nazi government control, you are an ass. Many good men fought and were tortured and died so that you could have the rather awesome quality of life that you get to enjoy today, and meanwhile you disrespect their sacrifice and quite literally throw your life in the garbage and waste it, by giving little to nothing back. To what degree are you doing these people a favor by allowing their enduring pain or achievements to go unnoticed? You don’t help them or anyone else by speaking well of things that are sick.

Improper tolerance or ignorance of the real effects that occur in this world because the decisions people and religions and belief systems cause to be executed is the road to damnation. Perhaps the Tibetan pacifist monks actually did do something to free the world of Nazism and genocide. One would have to say it seems unlikely they were useful. If you’re looking for people who take more than they give, and aren’t doing what they should or could to make this world a better place, you really don’t need to look far, the jails have tons of them behind their bars, and perhaps we are all guilty of this impropriety ourselves from time to time. Let’s call the crap what it is, find it and cut it out where reasonable.

Some experimentation in the areas of uselessness is actually useful; however, it should be kept to a minimum for the likelihood that useless behavior remains useless, is greater than the likelihood that a great discovery is made.

These ideas, these things, these side benefits that come from smoking, you would only discover them if you know how to ask the right questions. Now, one framework that is useful for asking these types of questions is an incorrect framework which, is a good third party framework that has shown to actually analyze a behavior; see what the side benefits that are useful are and try and replace it with another behavior that meets those same benefits at a lower cost or at a higher enjoyment level.

Let’s compare two frameworks for analyzing human needs. By the way, these human needs things, 1: Presuppose that human beings have these needs, which is up for debate. 2: They presuppose that those needs are constant and not ever changing. There’s a whole other set of lines to the human being which is the most conscious, rather the most complicated conscious, living, thinking entity that we’re aware of in the universe, to think that such a thing only has in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, seven or eight however are them are in there. Or, in Tony Robbins’s contrived world, human invented, not really well researched scientifically system of needs.

Let’s put Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in regards to analyzing the side benefits of smoking, or even call them all benefits, there’s no reason to call them “side.” We only call them side because they’re benefits to people that might miss, “Oh, it feels good.” Well, is there anything else it does? You know, scratching your back feels good too but it appears to be less addictive than smoking so there’s obviously something else going on there.

Here’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs versus cigarettes. Okay, are cigarettes food? No. Shelter? Nope. Self-actualization? Maybe you could stretch that one in there. Love? No. So far in this exercise we’re not really getting a lot of useful detail out of applying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to the behavior of smoking. What you’ll find is you won’t get much of a benefit out of applying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to anything, which is a reason when you’re done learning them in school, you never see them again. That stuff is too remedial. If there were huge swarms of people out there who weren’t able to self-actualize, weren’t able to find shelter, and weren’t able to eat, then that framework would be much more useful. However, since you as a person are lucky enough to read this book you probably already have shelter and aren’t using the book to shield yourself from the rain, then you need to use the framework that’s more applicable. Maslow’s is hard to apply in the real world.

So, let’s look at Tony Robbins. Tony believes that there’s certainty and variety, significance and connection, and those things are all paradoxical. So, if you become too significant, people remove connections. If you become too needy, then people don’t think you’re important, you lose significance. And the same goes for certainty and variety. If you do the same thing all the time, then it’s boring because you’re not getting variety. If all you ever have is adventure and craziness, then you may develop a post-traumatic stress because you don’t have enough certainty. Then he would like to believe that growth and contribution are the two needs of spirit, and not the four previous needs of the personality or identity.

Now, it’s interesting enough that Robbins is in the business of selling personal growth, and it would be pretty awesome if people had that as a need—their most fulfilling of needs—and the more time they spent on growth and contribution, the more fulfilled they would be. Consequently, since we have finite time, the less time they spent with certainty, significance, variety and connection. So, Scivive doesn’t agree with Robbins’s system completely though the system is still more applicable than Maslow’s and is still very useful.

Why bother mentioning this to you? You will find frameworks of understanding, categorization and maximization that allow you to build categories of things and look through that lens at something. Some of those frameworks are useful, some of them are not. If you have an infrared camera and you’re in the Arctic, and everything is the same temperature, it’s not that useful. There’s nothing to be really looking at. If you have an infrared camera and you’re in a wooded area and there are animals that are generating heat, then the infrared camera is much more useful, and in that environment infrared is a great lens to look through because the animals will stick out massively.

What you discover is just like animals can hear at different frequencies, they can see at different frequencies. Some can see polarization while human beings can’t. Some animals can see into the infrared, human beings can’t. Actually with surgery in the future you might be able to, but currently you cannot and you probably wouldn’t want to anyway.

If you look out into space infrared is really useful, if you’re looking at whether people have viruses and their immune systems is responding with a fever and you want to quarantine them if there’s a swine flu epidemic, it’s really cool to have an infrared thermometer that you can just point at someone’s mouth without having physical contact with them. If you need to make a new non virus- contracting method that allows you to see in other people’s mouths then infrared is awesome.

However, if you’re a normal human being and not really so concerned with the temperature of everything around you, you just care about friend or foe; edible not edible, things like that, maybe it’s more useful that you don’t see in the limited infrared spectrum. So, what’s the point?

Organizing the world and looking through that lens of organization has a massive effect in your ability to act and perceive. The frames and lenses which you use to see the world directly affect the number of actionable behaviors that are presented for you.

If you’re a musician and any new thing that happens to you, you perceive the lens of timing, amplitude and timbre, then you’re going to be accumulating excellence in that area which you might be able to execute in the future. However, if you’re constantly focused on the way things sound and you’re listening as hard as you can with your eyes closed, you’re going to be missing out on much of the visual world. Therefore, you’re likely to be a mediocre artist because you’re less good at color and only focused on audio. Perhaps this is the reason that most musicians aren’t great painters. Perhaps this is the reason that most great book writers aren’t great painters or great musicians.

To be a polymath and amazing at more than one thing is pretty hard to do. It really takes all of your consciousness and all of your focus on a single thing. To become amazing at it? Well. You don’t get to do two things great, you only get to do one thing great. Thus, you must choose very carefully the lenses you use to see the reality, the frameworks, shortcuts, prejudices and pigeon holing of people and categorizing of people. All of those things that you use to understand the world that you live in... And it’s more than understand it. If your eyes see a thing, then you start to assign meanings and beliefs to the thing.

In this world, you actually don’t get to control what your eyes even see. And so, you not only have the filter of belief and the filter of meaning, but you also have the choice as to what even gets put into that filtering system. Thus, choose the most powerful and useful belief systems, hopefully ones that have been proven to be useful for others. Values, meanings, shortcuts of categorization, shortcuts of prejudice, shortcuts of wanting to be good at these things and no other things.

Those calculations will make huge impacts and differences in your life, and since we don’t exist in a vacuum and much of our consciousness is affected by our family, our friends, and who we spend time with, when you hear commonly held beliefs such as the amount of money you make is the average of your four best friends, you may think, why is that? Because those are the people that are going to affect what you focus on, what you do and what you see as actionable behavior based on the inputs that you allow into your mind. Whatever allowed them to achieve success is likely to rub off on you.

And so, not only are your beliefs, your values and what you focus on an influencing factor in your life, but so are the people that are nearest to you because they will trigger you in ways that may be both positive and negative. If you spend time with friends that are rather free flowing with the new things, they want to tell you about all the new things they want to believe. The less specific and less scientific they are about it, their one hour of watching something believable and interesting on television, turns into 12 hours of you disproving it for them. You develop with that person an asymmetrical relationship, which is a little bit okay for an author, but unless you’re harnessing that energy to benefit the world somewhere else, you can end up wasting a lot of time.

You could say Tony Robbins’s “Six Human Needs” psychology is much very useful psychology for needs, but it’s very wishful. For instance, certainty and variety could also be called fear and greed, because variety just means do different from what you’re currently doing, which is caused by greed, and then only doing the same thing that you’ve been doing is caused by fear. Another thing to say is that those two definitions are so vague as to apply to all behaviors, which is basically do the same thing or do a different thing. Now there’s a lot of people that don’t really ever try different things, and so the needs of growth and contribution you could say are very wishful. Now, perhaps he says that growth and contribution are optional, but those other four - certainty, variety, significance, and connection - perhaps he refers to them as the needs of the identity. He also states that one of the most important needs that you have is to remain consistent with what you think your identity is, which is interesting, because perhaps that would also have to be called certainty. However, it really seems like a cop-out because any complex system, particularly a human being, probably has a lot more than four inputs and weightings that it’s using to measure and controlling the actions it takes. To tell you the truth, that’s what feelings and emotions are. If you were going to say that human beings had needs, which could be a misnomer, you must question that we even have needs. Maybe just have behaviors.

Let’s say you want to change your behavior. Behaviors have side benefits. There was a study done on people who claimed they had cancer even though they really didn’t, and they tried to figure out why someone would lie about something that is so important. What they discovered was that part of the reason someone would lie about having cancer when they didn’t have it was because it was the only time that their family called; and it was the only time that they felt important; and it was the only time that they felt part of their family’s lives. So, that problem, the terrible problem, they had to will into seeming to exist in the real world because it paid in real world benefits.

Same with smoking—it pays real world benefits. It gives you a temporary excuse to stop doing something that you dislike. It gives you an excuse to go out with people and talk to them when you may otherwise feel uncomfortable by not having a common activity to perform with them. It gives you the ability to perform a ritual which makes you look cool to other people and allow you to feel cool through having this ritual and good marketing on the behalf of the tobacco companies to make it look cool so that you can be associated with the Marlboro man; a tough and rugged persona who needs nothing, who’s very useful and powerful and confident.

You can’t enforce optimal charitable choices amongst all the citizenry. Humans are built to be robust, and robustness requires that we all have slight differences in desires and efficacy so that we can find optimal paths, or create them where they can be made. If everyone felt the same way about everything, it would leave us open to more risk and less excellence. Living things have mutations to find excellence, we have experimentation, and we all have chance and luck.

If you’re curious, the relationships that you should have with behaviors that make you feel different, whether that’s singing songs you like or reading cool interesting facts and news or being around people that respect you and make you feel good, you should really take a look at how your body and your psychology respond to increasing dosages of those things at increased frequency. You might find that there’s a minimum effective dose. For friendship, there might be a minimum effective dose for singing. Then, as you go over that minimum effective dose, you get diminishing returns and as you go beyond diminishing returns, into the negative. Now your voice doesn’t work anymore because you sang too loud for too long. Now your friends are bored of you because you are around them too long.

What’s the point? In life, your body is a self-correcting, self-regulating, basically conscious actor. Without stretching the use the word conscious too far, it has its own agenda, whether it’s conscious of it or not, and it wants you to do things a certain way.

What would you do if you wanted to create an Elon Musk twenty years before he was born? How would that occur? It would be very useful to have a great school for him to be able to attend. Apparently it would be very useful to have some interesting science fiction for him to read and enjoy. Then, later on in life, the existence of a science related massively profitable IPO and public company exits along with capitalism would allow such a man to execute his dreams without the assistance of the government in some cases. If one were to ask you twenty years before he was born, the best way to create him, would science fiction have made into your answer? And would venture capital have made it into your answer? Is it likely that the next Elon Musk that gets created twenty years from now will be influenced by the same exact set of things, or will something occur between now and twenty years from now when said person is identified through success to be what it is that you wanted to create, and is he of the right framework? Are there other people that have arrived at excellent behavior outcomes through separate inputs? Further still, can great outcomes be had without the hero worship and cult of personality that follows a single individual? Or is it that one human accomplishes so much without a following that actually paves the way of progress in this world?

There are two things that aren’t fair.

One is that you are too cowardly to admit how great any human being’s potential can truly be, and that any one of us with enough dedication and drive could truly impact millions of people’s lives, both today and in the future, through creation of film, book, music, the spreading of a unique idea. There’s so many ways that we can affect those near us and in perpetuity into the future, and it’s unfair to not be aware of that.

It’s also unfair to focus on something that is so hard, nearly unobtainable for much of the world, and to feel bad if you don’t obtain that. There is art and magic to knowing what you are capable of, and what is reasonable or even unreasonable, but worth trying to do, and still feel good while failing, because you are going to fail a lot along the way. In explanation, there is what you can and can’t do, and there is what you think you can and can’t do. It would be a miracle if you were completely correct in knowing what you could or couldn’t do, thus we must all take calculated risks, and reach as far as our arms will allow, to see what we might grasp. We can stand on the shoulders of friends and the great men that came before us, and reach higher than we ever thought possible. Shakespeare had a nice turn of words when he said, “Do not find yourself. Create yourself.”

Silicon Valley is about getting rich by giving people what they want or could be addicted to, instead of what they should want. Sadly, the battle to better the common man is costly, and where should the money come from to do it? Ideally, businesses could find a way to empower people for profit rather than weaken people for profit. The mindless numbing of our future generations is truly a tragedy.

When you listen to music, to some degree that’s what you’re doing. You are executing someone else’s software for you. When you watch a movie, you are executing someone else’s software for you. You hope they have positive intentions for you, you hope that they want you to have positive experiences, because we have good peer review they usually do, which can warn you if a particular piece is garbage. You might listen to a friend’s movie review and reply, “Oh, you watched it and it wasn’t good? Thanks for saving my time.” But in the end, you’re living someone else’s life. You’re living what they gave you, though their advice, their lensing. Maybe it’s a wonderful gift, or maybe at some point, you’ve run out of time now. You may have enjoyed the ride, but no one else will get to enjoy your ride now. You had a chance to build a nice ride for the rest of the world to make the world a better place, to give back to the people that gave to you. You had that chance, and instead you just took and never gave. You ate up the music, you ate up the language you ate up the education, you ate up the recipes, and then you took it with you when you died. You didn’t give anything back. If you don’t show people the detriment of their ways, and there is profit in them executing those ways, they will certainly run those programs. If people see profit in being corrupt, they will do it. It’s one’s duty to show them a better way. Stop living everyone else’s program for you. Build your own program. Stop absorbing everyone else’s content to the exclusion and deletion of yourself. Have balance—give and take. Absorb. Build. Mix. Extend. Expand. Give back to the world.

To be, or not to be, that is the question—

Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer

The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Whatever it is that you are trying to do to make a big impact on the world, you are going to be faced with challenges, you are going to need to have internal drive and self-reliance, or an exceptionally helpful peer group that can help you get to that level.

I used to wish my father had a made a larger impact on the world. I wished he were the descendant of some type of royalty, noble upbringing or lineage. In reality, my father is a hard-working, loving, caring, honest man who has worked hard every day of his entire life. I really mean every single day. I wouldn’t want to rob him of the potential to do something even more amazing with his life, by just not thinking enough of him to even think it possible, nor do I want him to feel even the slightest bit of sadness for choosing to lead an honest hardworking life.

As you grow up, you have so much that you want. You want your freedom, you are tired of so many people having so much power over you. Due to the luck of the draw, some of you will have great parents, some not so great, and some none at all. Some of you will get great advice, some terrible, and some only silence. GREAT NEWS! You are about to get some life changing advice.

There exists a duality of death and how it relates to courage. Some people have the courage to face death and fight for their country, or perform other courageous acts. Other people may lack the courage to face life’s challenges, and instead are cowards and choose death over continued struggle. It’s an odd duality that in one case the courageous person may die anyway, for example in a war, and in one case the courageous person lives. Humanity’s courage to discover the world is eventually inevitable, that is obvious and will happen regardless of whether we want it to or not, in pursuit of places where we may live longer and find new ways of life as we always have. In this case, death due to exploration of the unknown is a courageous action, and in this case, the cowardly action occurs when one chooses death over struggle and expansion. In our needlessly early and perhaps painful death that comes as a result of not putting up a fight and pretending that bad things aren’t going to happen and that nothing can be done about them. That pretending is cowardice.

If you think the lives of yourself and the people like yourself are worth more, consider these things instead: Being a man or a woman is a unique experience, and your life and thoughts are likely to not be exactly like anyone else that has ever existed. Because of that, it would be quite silly to waste time writing a book that everyone was supposed to read the same way. Some people, perhaps you, will benefit from reading some parts of this book more than others. Perhaps the order in which you consume this information improves digestion based on your unique perspective and life experience.

Perhaps the two major themes are feelings vs. reason. Art is feelings and science is reason. There are other giant ones in here, like religious vs. non-religious, rich vs. poor, tit for tat vs. tit for two tats. Political orientation, gender... So many variables! Perhaps this is why books are rarely written from a race, gender perspective? Maybe the authors just weren’t flexible enough. If it is the case that this type of unique specialization in framing similar concepts is possible, then it should be demonstrable on a small scale.

Do you believe that you should have the right to have kids? Do you believe it was a good thing that you were born? Do you believe you have the right to decide who else is allowed to have kids? Do you believe in the right for an individual to have a chance at life, perhaps even a chance at a good life?

You would be surprised at the range of opinions here. Hard questions. Is being overweight dangerous to your health? If your health is impaired by self-abuse, should you have the right to medical care? Is it reasonable then that those whose lives you will impact and time you will consume through being sick, have a right to impose healthy things on you because you will be screwing them over with your risky behavior or unhealthy eating? Should you have the ability to opt out of the social safety net, because you’re comfortable doing unhealthy and risky things and didn’t ask anyone to take care of you? Should the present-day you be able to make that decision for future you? Who gets to be the health czar?

If health is such an important part of life, and it can be influenced with science, why don’t we mandate a science production quota, or labor quota, as we do forcing kids to learn other languages? There is a line that must be drawn between what it is worth to sacrifice for, and for how much sacrifice.

Here is a gigantic one. How many lives is your life worth? Would you die for your kids, your parents? How about three random people, or three schoolmates? What about two guys you barely knew? Two girls? Two kids that weren’t yours? What would you answer to this question in public, versus what you would do if no one ever knew your decision? The answers to these questions are really important, and there are people making exactly these answers every day, whether they realize it or not.

You probably know some of the easier answers for yourself. You believe your life is worth the most, but perhaps that will change when you have kids. For now, you must exist. Then comes your loved ones, your mate, then your kin (parents), then people you like, then people you know, then everyone else. Some people would put animals pretty high on this list as well. One wouldn’t be surprised if many people put animals before people they would never meet.

What research gets funding? Which countries get invaded? Is non-vaccination punishable by law, how punishable? How far should dragnet surveillance actually go? Is there an objective method by which you could know which of these personal beliefs caused the best emergent outcomes for all participants in the system? Could it perhaps be a mixed, evolving belief where people had different ones at different times would be best? It seems as though that is how life is designed, you go from an all-powerful god to a god that the leads and cares and is merciful, but you can’t start there, you have to go through power god first.

If it is the case that one percent of the world owns 90 percent of the stuff, then it’s quite likely that that one percent gets to decide what the other 90 percent do with their time, more or less. As such, if you want to make an impact in the world, then you probably need to start and finish with the one percent. Now here’s an odd fact, if you didn’t know it, if you make over $31,000 per year, you are in the one percent of the world. I find that knowing what percentage of the planet’s wealth is stored in different owners is probably less valuable than knowing which small groups in that large group you can successfully influence. Hell, there are probably some groups in there that will actively try to bring you harm if they discover that what you are doing might cost them their money.

Some think that you and your loved ones and your friends are worth more than people you will never meet. One is not usually willing to accept death, or let one’s own family die, because seamen somewhere else are having a bad time. Lucky for us, the rising tide usually rises all ships. These things we do to help ourselves will almost always help others, not including some exceptions to that rule like property rights. If you have the right to kick other people off a piece of land, then you having that power is nearly exclusive of anyone else having it. In that case, we really do have a battle of powers.

For many successful people, they misattribute, along with many of their peers, the importance they actually have to the company they founded or currently manage. Whether your company is doing good things or not has much more to do with how you appear compared to your peers, in that, if your peers suck, it’s very easy to look like a winner. However, if your peers are ass-kicking machines, then even though ideally you should be happy with your performance, the market may starve you out of existence.

Bill Burr has a pretty funny skit on how he thought Steve Jobs was a douchebag, and now that he’s gone, look how the company has gone to shit. In reality, it was the hard work of many, many other people that allowed those things to be created, and if he truly was integral to the company’s wellbeing, should not the company be in dire straits now?

When you analyze someone, you may want to say a bunch of things to them that make you sound insightful, as though you are able to identify specific traits in that person, because you have a greater understanding. That then would give them credence to believe more of the things that you said. Good liars mix in a lot of truth, the maximum amount of truth and the minimum amount of lies, because if they test you, you pass more of the test because there’s more truth density. Bullshit artists do the same thing when they’re bullshitting you. They tell you as many non-testable good sounding things that they can so that they can get cool points and pass through more of the bullshit, which doesn’t pass tests.

What are some standardized feel good, complementary, sound smart, intellectual mumbo jumbo false truths that you can tell people that they love to hear? Because people have found profit in believing that they are unique, special and deserve great resources, particularly more resources than people who aren’t them, that may not be as great, they believe that consciousness is something that is hard to understand, hard to measure.

Adopt increased behavioral variance and follow through volatility. Mutations that allow for variation and robustness are the result of lacking self-doubt. The more self-doubt that you have, the less decisive you are, the longer you remain in a non-mutated state, and thus the less variation in behavior you will have. Thus, the less likely you are to become an outlier, or have legendary robustness. This is closely related to analysis paralysis and the opposite of ready-fire-aim.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” —  Bertrand Arthur William Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951).

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” .— W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1919). 

“To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.” — Bertrand Arthur William Russell.

It takes a lifetime to build a reputation, and only minutes to ruin it. Most great scammers could have been greater business people instead.

You put yourself at odds with the most powerful tool any wealthy person has, the law.

Pay attention to what other people say about your attitude, it’s easier for them to see what you’re doing than it is for you, you can’t even see your own face.

You’re too busy doing the feeling to notice that you’re doing it. It’s funny to watch people act like they’re happy or fulfilled when you can tell they’re not. It’s like when your girlfriend tells you nothing’s wrong when you ask her what’s wrong. Only after you beg, plead and cry might you find out what was indeed wrong. Most people are bad actors.

The trolley problem is going to actually be executed in cars as decision logic.

Back to the trolley problem, let’s say you wanted to use brute forcing and creativity to create a realistic set of possible factors which you could or should factor into your decisions regarding the value of human life, the difference between persona action and inaction, the response of other parties in the future to the survivors of the event, and getting caught or not caught, etc. You’ll find that when you make it a specific goal to achieve, to expand the number of factors that you consider, and the parties to which those factors could apply. Let’s give it a whirl so to speak. Parties, person to be tested, we’ll call this poor bastard the “testee.”

In this analysis, as in so many other paradoxical questions, it seems as though the truly useful data is left out of the question. Why should you value all human lives at the same value, which we already know you do not? This is the reason you don’t let strangers into your home, because they are worth less than family and worth less than yourself.

You’ll find that you’re much more likely to allow people into your home that you would like to make love to, or are friends with, etc. Thus, it’s quite obvious that you have a process by which you are used to deciding which other people in this world are worthy of sharing what little time, space, or things you have with. Now, this thought experiment of a trolley could be a bad example to start with, because we know much more about trains than trolleys in the western world, as they’re much more common, and faster, and more dangerous, thus a much better educational tool.

The experiment goes, if a runaway trolley was rushing towards four workmen working on that track that would be unable to escape, and you could flip the switch causing the track to switch to a different track where a single worker wouldn’t be able to escape, would you flip the switch? Now what if instead of being at the switch, there was a fat man on a bridge over the tracks, and you were standing near him, and you could push this fat man over the side and somehow magically this would prevent the other four people dying? What a silly idea, fat men nor cows nor cars are known to make much difference in the speed of an oncoming train whatsoever. Anyway, for the sake of this poorly designed thought experiment, let’s grant them their assumptions.

Would you push that fat guy?

Here is what should go into your considerations. If the fat man’s friends and family detect that you have murdered their fat man, they’re going to rightly punish you, and use the state to punish you for manslaughter. You can’t allow the silly people of this world to kill other people because they thought it was useful for someone else to do so. If people believed that their estimate of a greater good allowed people to be murdered, wow, you’d have a whole lot of murdered people. It turns out that no man knows the future well enough to know that those other people couldn’t have escaped the train, the train wouldn’t have been otherwise derailed, the people you thought you saw were actually dummies and this was a test of some part of the train and not real lives in danger, or that the impact, if unavoidable, would be fatal; perhaps they all might just lose a leg.

Therefore, some might see this thought experiment being rather poorly formed for the following reasons: You must not act, for you operate from incomplete knowledge. You must not act, for you will personally be punished much more harshly than you will be rewarded. The four you think you saved won’t pay you enough or protect you enough from the peers of the one that you killed or law enforcement. The fat man wasn’t doing something risky and stupid, he was only crossing a bridge, specifically out of the way of the train, whereas those other men earned their fates by not respecting the train tracks, as is required by law and common sense.

If you choose the one over the four, haven’t you increased the chance that four more people will make a life threatening decision by making someone else pay for their risky behavior? If the reason this is a trolley moving at speed instead of something slower, is to try to limit your time to think, and get you to be more emotional and less logical, which some believe is the point, it’s a great thing that we have books, dreaming and education so that when these pressing, time sensitive issues arise, we have already pre-calculated good action and good outcome beforehand.

Other than learning that this is a poorly formed thought experiment, which is supposed to estimate how you as an individual value the weight of one anonymous person versus four anonymous people, against the idea that you will be guilty by action for saving four, but killing one, and guilty by inaction by allowing four to be killed but not killing one. One can only say that it seems quite stupid to combine someone’s valuing of another’s fitness in regards to fat or fit, pretty much destroys the information you would get regarding the one death through action vs the four deaths through inaction. Couldn’t you just more easily ask, how much less value do you see in fat people? Should they be punished for their lack of fitness? Perhaps if you didn’t believe their answer, you could structure a superior thought exercise to derive their true feelings on the matter.

In the end, Scivive sees very, very little use for this poorly formed thought exercise, it’s far too removed from reality. Really, for any reasonable thinker, the fat man should never be pushed. You will be guilty of manslaughter, and fat men don’t stop trains, or even slow them to any useful degree.

In regards to the one versus four, you don’t have the data you’d need to make a good decision, you don’t know they couldn’t escape, so you will yell and holler, but you won’t perform an action that will once again lead to your personal annihilation by the state for manslaughter. The law and society you live in has a much harsher penalty for causing harm through action personally, than it does through watching as harm occurs, but being too much in shock to act. You’ll do much less time in prison by non-action.

Now, is it fair to care more about your time in prison, perhaps alive but incarcerated, than it is for you to care about those lives? Well yes, one must say that it is,

“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.” — Declaration of Independence.

If you believe the above line to be true, then you should value your own life as at least equal. You aren’t risking your life on the tracks as they are, and you will be harshly punished for acting. Anyway, it is a poorly designed experiment with some interesting discovery that the state has already decided the matter for you, and people must pay personally for the risks they take. Friends and family of deceased will harm you more than friends and family of survivors, for vengeance has larger amplitude than favor. Those that will harm you are exponentially more dangerous than those that will help you are useful. The harm hurts more than the help feels good.

Scivive would say that fixing the question, and looking at the system are two important steps that seem to be left out of all the common teaching of logical thought. It seems like what’s most common is to be more logically effective and tactical about the wrong questions, and not mindful of the system as a whole. Do not trust the question, do not trust the data, know your desired outcome in positive terms, and know the system.

This is how you get superior answers to those that came before you, because logic on its own will not tell you to do these things at all. Logic is like a physical calculator; it only knows what you key into it. Your hammer won’t ask you to use a different kind of nail, nor tell you how hard to swing it.

If you want people to do something that isn’t done often, it’s really helpful to give a name to that action you want them to do, and if you can define the term, then it becomes a memory anchor in their mind, greatly enhancing the presence and identification and spread of the behavior in the wild. Words need to exist to quickly describe the specific pre-work that needs to be done before using the hammer of logic. We could also benefit from inventing a word for the specific action of knowing which tool to use for a thing. Very specifically not requiring you need to know how to use it, but that it exists and this is where it should be used.

Every other important domain of knowledge has a title. The concept that problem solving as a domain or tool use as a domain doesn’t have a title is stupid. Thus, know which tool is right for the job in your domain shall be called tool sense. Even if you don’t know how to use the tool, you know it exists, what it’s good for, why it should it be used here, and therefore can find someone to use it. Scivive should coin a term for the Meta layer of knowing when to use a tool, what is the layer before the tool? What would one search for to discover if such a word may already exist, and even if it does, if it were good, it would already be well known, therefore likely not good and therefore likely needing made anew. What should one call this scope expansion step? System/brute forcing (finding max quantity of) parties and variables in the system/brute forcing (finding max quantity of) states or actions of the parties.

Then creating the table of all possible outcomes combining all the measureable outcomes when all parties have all the states and all the actions they can perform in different orders and combinations and locations, etc., to create a giant hard to understand mass of outcomes from which you may filter those that are most desired. Creating that table is how you beat lots of puzzles and logic questions and don’t miss non-obvious answers because you can’t miss an answer, because you have the largest possible set to choose from.

Imagine you wanted to create a beautiful sculpture from a block of marble. If you start out with a small block, you get only a small sculpture where the detail is hard to see, and you don’t have the space you need to execute your vision. If you choose a larger block of marble, you will end up with the fine details that people will enjoy with their naked eyes in person. If you start with a mountain, you may get Mount Rushmore. The point is, the smaller and less stuff you have to work with to create an idea, the less resistant to the elements and impressive your sculpture will be. Expanding your set of variables and possibilities and externalities accounted for in the work you do to find all the answers and outcomes possible to a situation is your block of marble.

Similarly, while you will have a more lasting and impactful creation, just like a large sculpture, it will take you longer to create. Good, fast, cheap, you can have any two of the three. In statistics they call this the probability space.

Logic is a tool, and knowing when, where, and with what inputs towards what end is outside its ability.

Forget their question. Make a better question.

If your first inclination upon hearing this trolley problem isn’t to attempt to ascertain more relevant data about the parties involved, than you will be more unaware of the factors that you should be including in your analysis. For instance, if you believe that people should take responsibility for their own actions, and those people on the tracks chose to stand in that dangerous place.

So the point is that, you know you do believe in responsibility, and you know this would be a place where that belief should be used, however you never notice that responsibility is part of the equation, because you’re so focused on the restrictions of the problem, and your role in it, that you never arrive at thinking about what these people deserve outside the system of you and the train and your decisions, but what they have earned in the system that isn’t mentioned, which is the system of “deserving” and responsibility.

Thus due to the very wide range of things that can and are push and pull, give and take, earn and not earn, fair and not fair in this world, one may believe it’s entirely required that you take a moment to be mindful of all the surrounding, related, touching things that are tangential to what you’re thinking about, without actually being the thing you’re thinking about. This idea of mindfulness and holistic thought and being at least one extra level higher up and looking down on a wider problem where the original parts become smaller parts of a larger functioning system is how you make breakthroughs and discoveries that everyone else misses. Elon Musk calls this thinking from first principles.

Sherlock Holmes said, “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.” Anyway, the summary is, if you ignore all the other parts that touch and influence and are near a thing, you’ll rarely make the best decision about the thing. That’s the kind of limiting logic that sees you remove one dictator and see two worse ones being imposed, or you stop doing one bad habit, and instead pick up another bad habit, which might have even been worse than the first.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Oddly enough, think about why this specific phrase might exist “power vacuum.” If you see the whole system from one level higher, you learn the superior strategy of fulfilling the needs of the world under pressure, but choosing the thing that will fill the vacuum strategically, before you tacitly create the vacuum and think your job’s complete; only to have to come back to the issue once you’ve admitted your first attempt at fixing it was actually a failure and hopefully this time doing the thing that is strategically correct and choosing the thing you want instead of just excising the thing you know you don’t want.

In all matters where time to think exists, see the system around the thing, choose what you want, be strategic, not merely tactical, and you can solve a problem the first time. So this is very important, when someone doesn’t completely agree with you off the bat and has doubts, you need to know about that because you didn’t do a good enough job, and you need to test that on other people to see their reactions the same. Let’s handle the objections before they occur outside the book!

From <^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory>}