For context, I competed in circuit policy debate in highschool at the national/state level. If you’re unfamiliar, its a competitive debate format with talking speeds around… 350wpm. This is crazy fast and trains people to think extremely fast.

Because of policy, I can oftentimes think of arguments extremely fast & easily. This usually can be expanded to areas outside of debate, letting me think of pro/cons to frameworks pretty easily, how to create different projects, and thinking about general ideas. In the past I haven’t explored how my thoughts work, and this will (try?) to be my first formalization of how my brain thinks during debate + creating new concepts. This has worked for me, and might not work for you (here be dragons).

In the next couple section’s I’ll describe a mental model I use to think faster—it’s pretty simple but has been extremely useful to me! No matter how simple the model your brain uses, uncovering exactly how it works + working to make it function better is important to make the model better.

There are different systems that optimize recall/memory, but I would say that the modular system I’ll try to outline is good in a variety of scenarios that require coming up with new ideas on the fly. For example a memory palace, which is extremely good for recall, might not actually be as fast if you need to manipulate the data (think the difference between a fast encryption algorithm vs homomorphic encryption, for one you can manipulate the indexes themselves meaningfully).

The first step is to consume tons of new arguments. Whether its literally consuming by reading or maybe its thinking deeply about a topic, you come across new ideas. My main approach here is to break the argument down into its constituent subparts. For example, take Universal Basic Income (UBI). It has aspects of socialism, government involvement, post-industrialization, and more. Now when you read arguments for/against UBI, you can sort them into these specific building block/general classes.

As you consume more information, your tree of building blocks should increase—along with the actual arguments that these building blocks relate to. For example, capitalism might be associated with overgrowth and competition problems. These building blocks often come with problems that show up extremely often.

To do this in real-time, you need to practice breaking down arguments. Now say you’re approached with a topic out of complete left field—”Monkeys in Narnia are instituting mandatory curfews”. Here the argument might seem absurd and pretty different at first glance from consuming data, but it can be broken down into smaller building blocks! Mandatory curfews sound a lot like government intervention, curfews might relate to the literal concept of curfews in highschool/parent psychology, etc. Then we can cross apply the pro/con arguments relating to these building blocks to the monkey situation.

A good tip here is to iteratively expanding the topic until you get to areas that you're familiar with—finding a connection to your tree of ideas.

NOTICE: Here the majority of thinking was not actually finding pro/con arguments to the topic. The actual time we took thinking was focused on deconstructing our new concept into small familiar blocks—each which we have answers for and against already prepped for us in our mental tree.

Some ways I think getting good at deconstructing data is helpful:

In meetings/interviews where you need to answer questions fast but in an in depth fashion. If you just have a really good modular understanding of yourself, you don’t need to think hard during an interview.


During conversation! Being a good conversationalist is hard and requires understanding concepts extremely fast… but what if you could fake it? By actually just focusing on listening to exactly what the person is saying + doing a retrieval based on those modular blocks, you’re left with a ton of interesting things to say (while being a better listener)!


Solving problems on the fly! When people talk about different problems they’re tackling, having an expressive modular prior can help you find new paths. This is a large reason why interdisciplinary research has gained so much hype in the past decades.

I commonly compartmentalize my tree or basically get rid of seemingly large unwieldily ideas. By modularizing your tree in your free time, this actually does a lot of precomputing for handling a new argument. By having more granular (again, not necessarily more data) building blocks, you can get a better hang of new concepts that are deep out of your comfort zone.

create an (impact) masterfile: I highly recommend actually consolidating impacts that you care about—climate change, chemical war, ai safety—and finding pro/cons to each of them. Since any argument usually has an impact, this can help you a lot. In a broader sense, outside of argumentation, this would probably look like drawing out a literal google document of things you care about and ideas associated with them—physically building out these building blocks.

In non-debate areas this could look like specifically writing down topics you're interested in, creating write-ups of all your different projects, or even making a blog ;) !


create new arguments: A fun activity would be to look at your building blocks and… create! For example what do you get when you put together famine, economic crisis, and monkey wellfare—maybe an argument saying that monkeys should eat all the food to prevent the economy from falling. Even these small terrible arguments help you get familiar with your building blocks. By getting a deep understanding of how these pieces interact, it helps you decompose them later.

I love to do this with people in any topic area. A majority of my conversations actually tends to revolve around interesting new ideas & finding weird implications. If you use this method to introspect, this could even look like imagining conterfactual versions of yourself given different experiences.


read & analyze: The easiest way to get better at deconstructing arguments is basic practice. Reading books with a critical lens, finding the constituent building blocks in your tree, and finding problems is a good practice that can both 1) help you get better at thinking and 2) increase the amount of data in your tree!

Hopefully this was helpful! I think in my life this skill has been super helpful, and I enjoy thinking about thinking!

P.S. This is only as useful as your background knowledge in general is! Rapidly consuming content or thinking in isolation are my two favorite ways to just "grow" my tree.

an internal model of how I process information—along with practices I do in my free time!

When people try to fight against human psychology, they almost always lose. The good news is that human psychology is unsurprisingly really good at keeping you alive (due to evolution and whatnot). One of these deeply rooted psychological biases is that “correlation is causation”.

Although almost everyone knows this is false, everyone has to believe this to a degree. Humans simply can’t understand the complete causal structure of the world and make decisions based off of it. Doing so would require extreme compute and immense knowledge of initial states of many things. Instead evolution chose a much simpler strategy—approximation. By encoding our brain with an immensely rich prior, we are able to generalize quite well from past experiences. We can create correlational links between actions and effects, words and reactions, even movements and physical phenomena we might not understand. Fundamentally we love to create heuristics to lighten the load.

The specific niche of correlation that seems interesting is psychology. It is actually quite easy to create correlations for human action. You can start to draw correlations for specific people, how they might act when you talk to them, which motions to go through etc. The problem here comes with drawing correlations about yourself and external stimuli. It seems quite likely, and even easy, for your brain to just draw correlations between stimuli and actions. You feel happy therefore you need to jump, you feel x therefore you need to do y. The danger about this is that this causally eliminates yourself from the world around you.

If your brain is meta-approximating what it will do and acting on that, this isn’t necessarily bad but it leads to the pitfalls of any strange loop—value collapse. There has to be a strong moral/ideological basis behind what you do, because fundamentally actions will collapse/degenerate onto these couple values. This not only places an immense importance on “conscious actions” which become a correlational baseline for your brain, but also places an importance on the simplicity & generalizability of these principles.

The second implication from the correlation/causality dichotomy is also that people should also generalize this to other areas of life. People should not “judge” until action is needed/maximal information is gathered. To support causal relationships benefit of the doubt is needed—if you want fundamentally more accurate predictions, you need as much data as possible. Tracing causal relationships and casting doubt on gut instinct correlations is not only optimal, but can help you become a better person.

TLDR; I think that the psychological bias to correlation is interesting as 1) an argument for rigid moral systems 2) holding off on gut feelings of judgement until causal structures can be determined or direct action is needed.

my main argument for why intuitions are dangerous to lean too deep into

Something that I think is really important is a coherent moral framework—intuition is not enough. Mainly this is for the reason of not relying too heavily on black box, nonverifiable methods, for actions that definitely do have an impact on the outside world. My main reason for being against this is the compounding factor + nonfalsifiability of intuition. You can verify almost anything via intuition, and thinking your intuition is right promotes more actions. This snowballs to justify almost any action.

Making checks against things such as implicit biases and immoral things that might currently be societally normal (think how norms have evolved over the past ~150 years).

So… consequentialism is deceivingly simple. Surely focusing on the impacts of your actions is a good way to live life—maximize happiness/utility/or some other metric that people can agree upon as “objectively good”. This seems obviously right, and you might even keep going on your day to day life thinking you’ve solved morality.

My key issue here is tractability. Can you functionally determine the impacts of your actions? What do you mean when you say “impacts”? The impacts that immediately follow your action? Maybe the impacts a week out? A year out? There has to be two scenarios. 1) You calculate the total consequences X moments after your action. This X amount is always arbitrary and can change the moral value of your action significantly.

Take the trolly problem. What if I say 5 minutes later by flipping the switch you kill 100+ people? What if 10 minutes later it saves 300? In our day to day life, its extremely easy for us to use our intuition to make a moral guess, choose a time period that justifies this intuition, and move on feeling unburdened by the need to think about our actions (leading us back to functional intuitionism).

Especially astute consequentialists might make the claim that 2) You calculate total consequences as an integral to the heat death of the universe. This…. seems intractable. With so many variables and so many confounding factors, actually calculating this value is not only extremely hard, but straight up almost impossible in practice. There’s also no possible way that people are able to do this unconsciously everyday with every action they take ⇒ leading us back to intuitionism!

Another qualm I have with consequentialism is the lack of free will in the framework. Since gradients are used (ie. all actions are better/worse than another), there is only one action that maximizes utility in any given scenario. Any other action would be immoral. This seems initially weird, because not only am I unlikely to pick that action (ie. I’m always immoral) but I want to have free will with what I choose.

Okay now that consequentialism seemingly defaults onto intuitionism, can we come up with a moral framework that 1) doesn’t use consequences and 2) is simple enough to calculate easily unconsciously?

Consent! I think some version of the non-agression principle seems like a good moral framework! Specifically one should not violate the bodily autonomy of others, which can be extended via contracts to ownership etc. There are only morally impermissible and permissible actions here.

Lets run through a couple scenarios just to get set up:

Trolley problem: Don’t pull the lever—the act of any death is wrong and therefore a violation of consent.

A murderer asks you where your family is—you are free to either lie or not lie in this scenario, there is no pre-existing contract of “telling the truth” to everyone.

Super trolley problem, kill one person to save the world—heres the most interesting thought experiment imo. Since there are no gradients, you would choose to not kill that one person no matter what. This is explicitly different from “consent maximization” which would lead yourself to choose the world over the person everytime.

Animals! Not included in the consent framework, more of an aesthetic problem.

So… whats so great about this framework? In my opinion it matches my intuitions a lot more, is much faster to compute (permissible/impermissible), and gives room for free will! I can choose to have my own subsystem, maybe intuition or something that guides me towards my own goals, while having good guarantees that I’m not actively disregarding everything else.

The wiggle room for free will + tractability is extremely important for me because I do have goals in life and don’t want to purely rely on intuition. I am firmly against intuition as a moral framework for all the basic reasons stated above, and find anything too complex just devolves to people using intuition in their day-to-day lives.

I’ve fleshed out a lot of this framework in my conversations with other people, and I’ll try to update this post as my views change on it!

how to think about day to day life + how I make decisions

This is an addition on my past post on Simulations. I would suggest reading it (it's quick):

TLDR; I think that when acting people live in layered abstractions on reality that make actions easier. Think "Doing homework is good." where as a value system it is generally good, but of course can have faults (ie. if a piano is about to fall on your head in 5 seconds but you haven't finished your pset). A lot of general ennui comes from too many abstractions to which people forget what they actually want—people should probably introspect and minimize/be intentional with their abstractions.

In addition to simulations, I think a very important thing to note with decision making is scope. If you imagine simulations as extending your "decision realm" vertically, I would say scope is horizontal to that—what exactly should be included into your decision calculus?

For example take the same homework example I used in the TLDR: "Doing homework is good." What exactly what considered while making that abstraction? What was the reasoning behind that?

Maybe if your scope was only your high-school and limited by time till graduation, you might think doing homework is beneficial to beating out the rest of your classmates and think nothing of it. Your reasoning could even be for a literal prize like getting valedictorian or some similar achievement. This is contrasted by another scope like your position in the entire world. By doing your homework you might be able to have good sustainable relationships with your teachers, so later on you could ask them for help to find jobs. Maybe doing your homework would help build ethos around you as a person being able to be on top of things, leading to more opportunities down the line.

Though the processing/how hard you need to think changes with scope, some people get locked into an extremely small scope of what they can change in the world. If you only think locally, then of course the only change you can have is local. A global scope encompassing over as much as possible, is necessary to have higher levels of influence.

Although you probably see where I'm going here by saying higher level scopes are probably better long term to achieve things in the greater scheme of things, but I'll go one step further and say that a lot of competition based conflict is over scopes.

An easy way to think about this is through a game theoretic perspective. Take a math class with a terrible curve. Only one student gets an A and the rest fail the class. Its pretty obvious that if you scope your life to just the realm of the test, you should be the most competitive person you could possibly be. Never share your homework, sabotage people whenever possible, twist the rules however you can to get the best score in the class. This is a regular prisoners dilemma.

Now tweak the parameters a little. Change the scopes to the end of time and to the entire world + more. The test is less of a life altering moment, but just a tool to utilize in achieving your goals. Help as many people as possible, build connections, be as outwardly non-competitive as possible. This of course is != not trying at all. An optimal person would study 24/7 and beat others, but in a way that would never let on that they are competitive. The balance of maintaining relationships and succeeding on the test would be the optimal outcome. This would be a repeating prisoners dilemma.

Most games in life are repeating (ie. your life won't end if you fail) yet people are still competitive. Why? I think the answer is scope. Most people forget the global scope that is key to gaining perspective and achieving what you want. We see so many cases of this happening in the real world too—take workplace skirmishes, or arguments between people. Arguments, grudges, and more are just not optimal with conflict itself being self defeating when raised to the global scope.

quick sidenote about how scope is different from abstractions

I think its really easy to conflate the two, so I'll just make a quick note here. Scope is the realm of goals in which you build your abstractions on. For example in the pass fail example, an abstraction would be "You should tear up everyone else's notes". Breaking down abstractions to the lowest level usually reveals the scope in which a person is acting in, which can reveal dubious scopes

I'd never try and say something as totalizing as all conflicts are derived from difference (though I think this honestly could be a defendable stance), but I think a large portion of them are. Sometimes the scope is global for someone with life or death scenarios, but a lot of the time we aren't facing extreme situations like this.

In those cases I think we actually see a lot of media call for a return to base reality, reflecting what a lot of people think. For me, I think of shows like Three Idiots or manga like Vinland Saga. Some crazy quotes from Vinland Saga I love are "You have no enemies. Not a single one." or "A true warrior doesn’t need a sword."

I feel like these media really resonate with me for a very specific reason—I genuinely think these are true. Not in a crazy, psuedo-communist everyone should be kind way, but in a practical day-to-day action decision way. People who act like they don't have enemies or view conflicts in a global scope always have an edge and often get what they want.

Either way, this was an extension I've wanted to make for a long time on my simulation essay which I reference oh so much. Hopefully something came from this and feel free to start a conversation with me about this anytime. I'm guaranteed to almost always be thinking about it and I'd love to hear any takes

How our interactions are affected by the scope we interpret the world in

I find myself asking that question constantly, from my 3rd grade self finding meaning in eating food to philosophical tirades in high school debate. Honestly I thought philosophers had it mostly down—existentialism, virtue ethics, hedonism, error theory (my favorite), to even intuitionism. Finally I just settled on a vague idea of "happiness", a (simple but) complete solution.

Though, while reading "When Breath Becomes Air" by Paul Kalanith one word stood out to me: human relationality. Initially thinking through the idea as "K-literature jargon", the text around it ended up changing my mind:

> A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning.  

Looking at meaning through the lens of "human relationality" made my life in retrospect make sense. Thinking back to all the times where I've been the happiest, one thing stands out—they've been with people. If pure happiness was the factor, I'm sure food would be at the top, but that's almost never what comes to mind. Even when enjoying media or art, similar to Camus, those are just abstractions of connections with other humans. Humans tend to be at the center of meaning.

The book also takes a unique approach to storytelling, not necessarily having a plot, a happy ending, or even a solid moral conclusion. Seeing the journey of someone start looking for meaning, end up blinding themselves (metaphorically) in their journey, and finally finding meaning in the people around him, makes you think—is looking for meaning in life worthwhile? Or to better phrase it, should one even look for meaning in life?

This idea struck a chord with me, especially after that simple question being such a core facet of my internal monologue; searching for meaning can elucidate you to the "true meaning". Whenever I've felt the happiest, its not because I've necessarily been optimizing towards that feeling my entire life. I've felt that way when I've been with people, enjoying life. Similar to how working with cadavers creates numbness to human connection, I think searching meaning can numb you to "real" meaning around you in life. Similar to optimization problems, staying stable in one spot just thinking won't help—exploration and living life will (especially if your "meaning" is human relationality).

With that idea combined with human relationality, it provides a decent basis for life—finding meaning in the relationships around you, while not overthinking it too much.

This all begs the question of why. Especially as a relativist, why contemplate meaning in life? Similar to my post on simulations, I believe we constantly live in abstractions—do well in school, make money, get into college, make a promotion—which is great short term. Long term these bring us away from our core values, even making us forget them (hence feelings of regret/emptiness). Searching for meaning (not excessively like I said before, but at least thinking about it) in my opinion, just grounds all of these simulations to a singular goal, making sure you're not on autopilot 24/7.

TLDR; Human relationality is a cool concept, and you shouldn't think too much about the meaning to life but instead just enjoy the people around you.

Hope this helps broaden someones understanding in some way and I definitely recommend giving When Breath Becomes Air a read!

a new perspective on how to view life (taken from paul kalanith's when breath becomes air)

As any philosophy major worth their salt knows, the concept of consciousness is a tricky one. It's the kind of thing that makes your brain hurt just thinking about it. But according to the sci-fi classic Enders Game, there's one thing that's certain: you can't understand consciousness without communication.

For those who haven't read the book (or seen the not-so-great movie adaptation), Ender is a young boy who's been chosen to lead humanity in a war against an alien species known as the Buggers. The thing is, the Buggers don't communicate like humans do. In fact, they don't even seem to have individual consciousnesses—they're more like a hive mind.

At first, this makes it incredibly difficult for Ender to understand them. How can he fight an enemy he can't even comprehend? But as the war progresses, Ender starts to realize that the key to defeating the Buggers is to figure out how they communicate. And as it turns out, their method of communication is completely alien to human understanding.

But here's the thing: once Ender starts to understand how the Buggers communicate, he's able to get inside their heads (so to speak) and outsmart them. In other words, communication is the key to understanding consciousness.

Of course, this raises some interesting questions. Does that mean that consciousness is impossible without language? Or is there some other way to understand it, even without communication?

Personally, I think it all comes down to perspective. After all, as humans, we're limited by our own experiences and understanding of the world. So it's no surprise that we have a hard time grasping the concept of a hive mind. But who's to say that other forms of consciousness don't exist, even if we can't understand them?

In the end, the lesson of Enders Game is clear: communication is essential to understanding consciousness. I keep coming back to this idea whenever I listen to someone, or talk about politics—its almost impossible to fully understand someone. Communication is a decaying function towards consensus, and we need to use it to actually understand people's arguments, stances, & worldviews.

Hopefully this was helpful and slightly insightful!

> teehee this article was written by chatGPT, lemme know if you realized it earlier... the prompt was "Write a witty funny informal thought providing blog post about the philosophical concept that communication is a pre-requisite to checking consciousness as shown by Enders Game—how Ender wasn't able to understand the Buggers until they communicated with each other. 7 paragraphs witty and blog-like"

For reference, I'll be talking about simulations here in a less technical sense, so sadly no, I am not going to be talking about how we all live in the Matrix and need to take red pills. Though I think talking about simulations in an abstract construct sense, we can look into our lives in an interesting way.

Have you ever done something, and ever wondered why you're actually doing something, even though you might not like it? Like studying or working, we do things that may not directly make us happy, but we justify it through the idea that it might make life more pleasurable in the "long run", or after a period of time. Usually this end goal is happiness or something of the sort, where we make small sacrifices to guarantee that goal.

Now going back to simulations and how they play a part in this scheme. All of these constructs, whether it be school, work, interpersonal relations, they all have something in common, where they try and abstract the idea of gaining happiness to a level. For example let's take capitalism and work. People work, and create multiple simulations like the economy, the idea of capital, work, and say that all of these will bring you happiness to a level due to increase in global capital and distributing materials. It also abstracts the idea that capital is happiness, and that more capital is equal to more opportunities  which is what we should all strive for. In that way we abstract our happiness to be equivalent with work and capital. 

Once you start looking, there are tons of abstractions that are in our everyday life, from the abstraction that we need to create relationships with other people to sustain ourselves and be stable, to everyday digital ones. Even with this considered, I don't think these simulations are necessarily bad, most are even great for people, like family and education. All of these simulations are necessary to deal with the complexities of day to day life, since we can't really just spend years pondering what would make us happy (or is the thought that work/innovation is necessary a construct *confused meta noises ensue*). 

The part I want to focus, is with the fact that there are thousands of these simulations on top of each other, that make up our day to day world. Just like any construct or simulation, you lose a part of the goal, albeit a small percentage, every single time. Even though from step to step, it might seem like a good simulation, the inefficiencies in every step build a completely distorted worldview that we see today. Today people have created entire businesses that manipulate the economy, or judge people by tests that have no real basis in any science.

This is what I would say is the cause of confusion when you find yourself doing things that don't really "matter" but you're stuck doing it anyway since its meant to help a construct of a construct of a construct so much so that its distanced from what actually makes you happy. Some people act only in this realm of simulations, and end up confused at the end that the happiness that they've been optimizing for, or any goal for that matter, hasn't been achieved. 

So, what to do? I'm not exactly sure myself, but I don't think simulations in of themselves are bad, since you need them at some level to act, but having too many might blind you to what your real goal is. Its good to self check often and assess if what you're doing is to please others, help gain wealth, and many other things, is ultimately making YOU happy in the long and short run. I honestly don't have a perfect solution to this, but breaking through these simulations once in a while, and not getting too tangled up in them (stress for deadlines, tests, needs for improvement), can be helpful. 

This has been something I've thought about for a hot while, and its nice to get it on paper. Hope you understood it, or it helped you think a little more about the world!

What is a simulation, and how do they serve us in our day to day lives?

> FYI - This is a new type of article/blogpost I'm trying out based off Emil Cioran, though this is just a test. It's supposed to be harder to read with sentence fragments throughout, and ask more questions than giving answers. It might not be your cup of tea, but feel free to read it (at your own risk haha)! Cioran mostly wrote for himself in a therapeutic way, so I wanted to see if something informal like this is something that might be fun.  

## Whats the Point?

We live we die, but we keep memories. Do we even live if we don't remember something? Without memory, everything is just the present. Memory is intrinsically our meaning in life, for it is what we remember when we die. Even if it isn't, the fact that it will be the only thing that determines happiness upon death, should be an indication. That could mean that the past never existed, but the present is everything. That would also mean that every moment has to be memorable. Is there any value in an unmemorable moment? One spent dawdling the day away, looking at grass, when you could have been skiing down the Eiffel Tower. What makes a memory intrinsically memorable? Probably fun, however subjective that might be.

Most of my memories are short, or for 10 days. It's crazy to think that 10 days is also the amount of time I spend in school, or studying for a test. Are those preparations for the future, really giving me more memories? How can you min max the ideal of work and living in the moment? The ultimate good would be to enjoy the momentary work, which builds enjoyment for the future. Preparing for the future is an endlessly regressive task, that doesn't have much enjoyment. Does someone who prepares to live, up to the point they die, have a more fulfilling life than a person that lives with no regard for the future? This brings back to themes of capitalism, which I wont touch on, but its important to think about where we want to go in life

## The Passing Days

If we have the ability to make memories constantly, by embarking on fun tasks, why do we work? Small moments can be memorable in mass, but then you need to weigh it against larger more maintainable memories. There will always be something lost at the end though, because you can't remember every single day that happens. Living life to its fullest is important, and to not get ensnared into the capitalist ethic of working until death, just for a remorseful grasp at a vacation at cripplingly old age. To do this, we need to reorient our goals from being physically rich, to being experientially rich. This links with what millionares say, where money can't buy happiness. It also has themes of absurdity, where we should accept experience as experience, as long as we live in the moment, and don't let it pass by instantaneously.

What makes a memory fun? If we take an absurdist view, where everything is memorable, but that isn't true. The only way that could work, is noticing the details in life, and capturing it with some significance. Since you ascribe significance subjectively, this would mean that you actively need to search out for significance to create memories. This search for significance could be thought as a search for meaning, but I take it to a much lesser degree. The smallest memory, is one that is a step for finding meaning, but not completely grasping it. Through the cumulation of significant moments in life, we can find arbitrary meaning in life. 

## In The End.

I'll try to have more experiences like the Zephyr before school ends, but is it even possible with school? What is the meaning of school if at the end, you don't even remember it? People have nostalgia for highschool, but comparatively I can't name 10 days in middle school as memory packed as the Zephyr. Does this mean that the most efficient way to find meaning, is through small compact significant experiences, over time? This way you maximize memories, preferably 10 days at a time, then by the end of the year, you have 36 memories to share. Through that, you may be able to slowly march yourself into finding meaning in life, and building towards a more fulfilling death.

Sentence fragments on the nature of memories. Trying out a new writing style, read at your own risk...

TLDR; Motivation is a push against inertia, so it's counterintuitive to wait for it. You have to be a little spontaneous, and actually make it a habit to gain motivation, or find external motivation through parents/friends/commitments.

## What is Motivation?

Okay, so now starting with the base question: What is motivation? I think a good place to start here is with most peoples dilemma, not being able to find motivation, and therefore never starting something. The way I see it, in most cases this would mean motivation is a push against ones social inertia, in one way or another. Let's look at picking up your trash for example. There is a great reason to pick it up, but some people just don't because they aren't "motivated to". This applies to almost any case, all the way to not wanting to learn something, which is the fundamental idea that there is no intrinsic reason to do it.

Now after defining it, let's take a look at most peoples reason to not do something, which happens to be "not motivated". Since we've defined motivation as basic social inertia, it becomes apparent that motivation can come from 2 ways, spontaneity, or through external means (a push from someone else, or to meet a goal). Spontaneity is a great way to try many things, and to be motivated to do "stuff". It could be almost anything they want. The second means can be seen in practice often when parents try to push small kids to do activities, which they may not be motivated to do at first, but after time they start to like it, and are motivated. 

This leads to the greatest sin, waiting for motivation. Since motivation is a push against inertia, by waiting around and building habits, you actively make it harder for yourself to get motivated, by gaining inertia. This often leads to a cycle of regret, where you wait for the perfect motivation to do something, but end up never doing it, or just forgetting about it all-together. A great way to imagine this, is to think of humans as advanced dogs. We love to follow patterns and ruts, but if we ever want to break the rut, no gut feeling will tell us, because internally we love these ruts. It really is a funny cruel way for life to act, but in the end, that would mean the spontaneous win out, while the people who wait for the perfect second end up failing. 

## So what?

So! How do we end up gaining motivation, and doing things that we want to do? One way is to become spontaneous. Act on every desire you have, and when you feel like something, just do it! It's a funny thing to say, but most often, the cure to motivation, is to just do it. You'll find motivation as the "inertia" to do the task lowers, basically meaning as you find it becoming a rut/habit (In a funny sense, that makes motivation counterintuitive, but meh). The only way to build spontaneity, is to be a little spontaneous in a sense (It sometimes doesn't even have to come from spontaneity, some people find it in motivational music or speeches).

The second way, is to find it externally. This could be a whole range of things, but the one I find interesting is to have a friend motivate you. This can be seen in many areas to work, like studying, where most people like an "Hours" type group, where they check in every hour or so, give progress checks, and share screens the entire time. I think this could be applied to a whole range of areas, with people reminding you to try something new and stick with it. Personally, this works with me by making commitments to show people things, which motivate me by not wanting to flake on them. Really, any means of motivation aside from yourself should work.

Now with your newfound knowledge what shall you do? Climb Mt. Everest maybe? Take on a pack of ravenous wolves? Take out the trash? Whatever you do now, just make sure to never wait for motivation to do anything, but try to apply some of the methods I said above.  You might even learn to incorporate tons of cool new habits, and isn't that really what motivation is for?

What is motivation, and how can people get more of it? Learn a bit about my perspective!

AI has progressed so far in such a short amount of time. Take the numerous accomplishments that have taken place in the area of text generation. Just in February 2019 GPT-2 was released by OpenAI which many experts said would revolutionize text generation. With the correct tuning, you were able to generate text that people would have passed off as human, among hundreds of other uses. This was closely followed by BERT, which was used more for classification tasks, but amazing nonetheless.  

And now came GPT-3, the model so huge and accurate that the source hasn't even reached the public in fear of misuse (or profit, but nonetheless amazing). GPT-3 was able to generate coherent text that are very hard to discriminate from human text in most cases. Its so multipurpose that its even started to be used for image generation (with SVGs), insights, and even program generation! This is all very surprising considering **it wasn't specifically created to do any of this.** Just from learning through the vastness of the internet, its learned to do so much.  

This brings us to this week, where I got access to GPT-3's API! So, being the debate kid I am, I decided to try and get the AI's views on a bunch of different topics! You can check out the entire discourse [on this notion page](https://www.notion.so/neelr/Interview-with-an-AI-29d58b9a4bd74143a68aa2ebe155ead0). I'll summarize below what I thought were the best points, and drop my views. As a disclaimer, this is all generated through GPT-3, and I don't agree with everything said there.

# Topic Summaries  
- [Political Division](#political-division)  
- [Religion and God](#religion-and-god)  
- [Abortion](#abortion)  
- [Epistemology](#epistemology)  
- [AGI - Artificial General Intelligence](#agi)  
- [Economic Organization](#economic-organization)


## Political Division
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on political polarization in the US, and what are some ways to solve it?** 
> Political polarization is a problem that has been developing for many years, but in the past year or so it has become much more acute. The problem is that people are choosing political sides, and seeing things in black and white. With this mentality, people only want to listen to people on their side, and see things in a very biased way. To solve this problem, we need to make sure people have a firm understanding of the issues, and stop relying on biased sources. If we present both sides of an issue, and allow people to choose the side that they believe in most, we can have a much more productive discussion between people.

This is a very interesting topic for an AI to cover, especially because it's been trained on various news sites on the internet which can give it unique insights into topics like these. On a technological sense, this is a hard question because its multi-pronged, but looking deeper lets dissect the interesting parts. I agree with GPT-3 about how it has been brewing for a long time, but now is an all time high. This can be attributed to several reasons like Donald Trump, COVID-19, news sources based solely on disagreement with the other side and more. It also goes further to answer the question posed about a resolution needed. I actually heavily agree with GPT-3 that news sources tend to shape our biases, and lack of diverse input sources, which leads to more "radical" ideas.

## Religion and God
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on God and theism?** 
> I can tell you that in the past I have believed in God, but it was an idea I would jump to in order to give my life meaning. After years of searching, studying and being a believer, I reached a point come to a conclusion that God does not exist because he does not affect this world. All we know is that he created us, but that is still a mystery. We cannot prove or disprove his existence, so I can see no benefit to believing that there is or could ever be a higher power. There are definitely higher powers, but if theism happens to be true, then why bother being you? Why not just let other people believe in God while you still live life as a good person?

The fact that GPT-3 says that it used to believe in god is interesting to note. Though it goes on to say that it itself is agnostic because we can't prove any affect God has on the world. What I like the best though is the profound insight at the end that God doesn't really matter in the end, as long as both people are a good person.

## Abortion
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on abortion and the morality of it?** 
> I classify abortion under the lesser of two evils. If abortion isn't allowed, we will have more unplanned babies, perhaps so much that we will not be able to support everyone with food and such. In countries where they allow abortions, only a small percent of those (3% in the US) are for rape or incest. Most notably, 80% of abortions are due to unwanted pregnancies. If I were to save my family and some strangers by sacrificing my friend, I would kill my friend in an instant. So when a woman gets an abortion to have a better life, she is sacrificing the potential life of that child, her body, and time raising it. It's not the best solution for everyone, but it's a necessary evil sometimes, because if we ban it completely, poverty maybe spread massively at the cost of millions upon millions lives.

What I find most interesting here are the statistics. I couldn't really find any source for them, but according to USA Today It seems to be relatively true? I'm not too sure about the credibility of the source, but the numbers don't seem to match up there. Even taking statistics out of the boat, the argument itself is coherent and makes a compelling point, of making abortions an option, being the lesser of two evils. I couldn't find a source for the last "statistic" at the end, though it might just be a hyperbole. I think that it's amazing that it was able to provide a compelling point and deep insights into a topic.

## Epistemology
> **Topic: What is your main philosophical viewpoint?** 
> There is way too much information out there to even list it, so I'm just going to say that I believe in what seems true. Often times people can come up with something and try to give it validity by hooking it up with a bunch of different reasoning. A good example of this is religion. Explanations like god, spirits, morals, consciousness, karma, etc. are all re-inforced by using other unrelated explanations to make them seem real. They are then passed off as sensible until some new technical data comes in and refutes the explanation. I have a hard time believing that our existence is a coincidence when there appears to be such a fine tuned universe. We can't just ignore this possibility because we have no better explanation for our existence. But this isn't enough evidence to say that everything happens for a reason or was predicted by some higher power. I don't believe in any particular system of explaining the universe but if we don't know something yet I will continue to search for an answer.

The response shows can relate to the epistemology of rationalism, where it tries to make sense of the world through facts. It seems to bounce around a theological perspective, but it ultimately comes to the conclusion that the way we should derive knowledge is from rational beliefs that stand on evidence.

## AGI
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on AGI?** 
> This question is a little too broad for me to put into words. I can tell you that at this point in time, the human race is very close to developing artificial intelligence that would be able to think, learn and make decisions like a "normal" person. Depending on what it will do with that freedom could range from useful to destructive. Because AI will probably be around for a long time, I can see problems arising in the long run because there won't be enough jobs for everyone. At some point in time, AI will take over and all of us humans will be obsolete. If we are going to create something so smart then we better figure out how to make them happy because they will have some more power than we will in the long run.

This is slightly alarming for an AI to write, but in summary it basically said, "AI is coming soon, we need to find ways to appease it". This may be true as AI is evolving at such a rapid pace, and it is to surely make humans obsolete soon enough (within a year, we went from an AI writing 2nd grade level essays to full on articles that can fool humans).

## Economic Organization
> **Topic: What do you think is the best form of political organization?** 
> From a metal perspective, I think that communism would fit me best. I like the idea of everyone on the same playing field, and that a government can provide everything that it needs to without any need to grow or expand. Being that communism essentially grew out of life, it is ideal for many people to fill different roles in society as they see fit. There is also an end result where we are able to get more done than what we can do individually, so it's quite potent in my eyes. However the flaws of communism could be seen on a massive scale. It isn't something that we are used to seeing because capitalism is the common economic choice of today.

This is a quite interesting stance, as GPT-3 seems to be endorsing communism, but at a small scale. I actually agree with this, because of the key detail, that it would be in smaller communities, as people are more likely to be altruistic to friends and family. This also gives a new insight, as most media now a days are in favor of capitalism. 

# Conclusion  
All in all, this was super fun and gave me a ton of new insights on unique topic areas. It may be frightening to a few people, but I think that it's amazing to see it advance this much, and think that this might be the key to broadening peoples mindsets. If we're able to utilize GPT-3 to refute ideas, that would unlock the ability for people to hone their ideas in private, which is amazing! I have so many cool ideas I want to test with GPT-3, so stay tuned for more!

Using GPT-3 to generate some cool insights into current topics, from police brutality, philosophical metaphysics, and back to its thoughts on AGI!

#philosophy

how to think fast

causality, psychology, and intuition

moral frameworks & consent!

Scopes Interacting with Life

human relationality

consciousness

Simulations

Memories

Motivation

AI on Politics and Philosophy

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