Minicon Talks!
I just got back from the Atlanta Objectivist Society‘s Mini-Con (which was an awesome time, the subject of a later post), where I gave two talks: one about practical benefits of epistemology and one about regulation in the medical device industry. I recorded both and am posting them here, but I have two disclaimers first: 1. These were informal talks and I make no guarantees about any accuracy. Particularly with the medical devices talk, the particulars I discuss may not be perfect reflections of what actually is in the real world and are more reflections of my memory. 2. I have not edited these, nor listened to them all the way through. Some questions in the Q/A sessions may be difficult to hear; if you want me to try and clarify what was asked at that point give me the time in the lecture and I’ll see if I can remember.
CPL: A Clarification
One of the most important practical ideas of Objectivism’s ethical theory, and sadly one that seems to be misunderstood by many Objectivists, is the notion of a central purpose in life (a CPL). The purpose of this post is to discuss the misunderstanding as I see it, but before I do so a general review of the idea is in order.
A CPL is the central, guiding purpose around which one’s entire value hierarchy is shaped. Acting in accordance with that purpose is the primary goal of one’s days, the value to which all other values are subordinated. While many proper values (such as the joy of relaxing on the beach or watching a clever television show) are not productive in nature, the CPL must be a productive pursuit and such non-productive values must only be pursued if they are in harmony with the central purpose. As Ayn Rand explained in her 1964 Playboy interview, having a CPL enables man to live a happy, integrated life whereas its lack ensures conflict:
A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life. It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him, and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some value which he will never find . . . .
Now you hopefully have an idea of what a CPL is, and probably why it’s so important. So now, something that a CPL is not: A CPL is not synonymous with a career. This is really important, so I repeat: a CPL need not be a career! This is something I’ve seen quite a few Objectivists get wrong, and it has led to misled advice given by some and frustrated negative self-images by others.
Don’t get me wrong, a CPL can be, and often is, a career. Your central purpose can be working as a database programmer peopleguy, or a lawyer, or a novelist, or many other such pursuits. Moreover, I think for most of your life your CPL should be a career, so long as your society is the kind willing to pay for your work. But there are two important points missed by those who think a CPL must be a career: first, your CPL can change over your lifetime, and second, everyone at every stage in life needs a CPL (at least implicitly). To see the first point, consider the fact that Ayn Rand herself probably had two major CPLs in her adult life: first, to portray man as he could and ought to be (which work culminated in Atlas Shrugged), and second, to flesh out and spread her philosophy of Objectivism (which work consisted of several anthologies, speeches, lectures, newsletters, and at least one significant book). Or, for another example, consider Leonard Peikoff, who has announced plans to switch from philosophy after the culmination of his work on the DIM hypothesis into the field of science fiction writing. Before I address the second point, I want to clarify something about the scope of a CPL.
A CPL exists to guide your actions in the present. A CPL will certainly imply taking actions with long-range effects, and in most cases will even involve long range planning, but qua CPL its purpose is to guide your choices here and now, today. Should I pick up that physics text or reread ItOE? Should I apply to grad school or start looking for jobs after college? Should I sign this 99 year contract as a representative of my company? These are the types of questions that a CPL helps answer. A CPL is not something you just refer to when thinking about your future, it should be there (implicit or explicit) in every choice and judgment you make.
So now, back to the second point missed by equating a CPL with a career: Everyone at every stage of life can, and should, have a CPL. A child who integrates acts with the ultimate goal of learning how the world works has a central (implicit) principle “serv[ing] to integrate all the other concerns of [his] life.” A teenager working to form his character and determine which ideas he wants to guide his life can’t be said to be “drift[ing] helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any whim of the moment.” A young adult taking various jobs and exploring his passions in order to determine a career to which he wants to dedicate his life is surely able to “enjoy life on a wide scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind.” Indeed, all of these (learning how the world works, forming ones character, figuring out ones career) ARE valid central purposes.
So why does this all matter? Because it is important to know (especially, though not exclusively, for younger Objectivists) that one is NOT stuck with the false alternative of either having a central, fulfilling career goal or being consigned to an aimless, purposeless existence. If you have a career and it is your central purpose, awesome and great for you. If you don’t or it isn’t, though, don’t worry! There are other productive purposes that could never be considered a career (such as “shaping ones own character”) or don’t work as a career in today’s world (such as “writing rational screenplays for big-budget films” may be given the state of Hollywood) that CAN work as valid central purposes. Of course, you need to survive, so if you need to take a job to support yourself you should, but it doesn’t need to become your central purpose. By all means, work as a waitress during the day and audition for plays on the weekends. Or finish your science degree while considering becoming an artist. Or move to Atlanta and make money doing various odd jobs while soul-searching and figuring out what you really want. You can still be happy and purposeful, and your worth is not lessened in the least.
Introspection as a Cognitive Tool
Introspection, like its more fundamental counterpart external observation, is primarily a cognitive process. The main goal in introspecting is to discover things about one’s self. Ultimately, just as with all knowledge, the reason to seek introspective knowledge is to guide action, but the first purpose is to gain knowledge.
Unfortunately, some people seem to use introspection as a primarily evaluative tool. Rather than looking inward to answer questions like: what am I thinking? what am I feeling? what’s causing this subconscious response?, etc. they instead focus on: Am I thinking properly? Is this feeling appropriate? Did I make some (possibly immoral) error to cause this subconscious response?, etc.
Now, don’t get me wrong, those questions ARE important, but they are NOT the only or even primary purpose of introspection. The first step is to figure out what exactly is going on internally, THEN you evaluate it, but you evaluate it while considering your knowledge as somewhat metaphysically given, e.g. “OK, I get mad at clowns, and that’s due to an improperly integrated experience from my childhood, now how can I go about fixing it or living with the anger?” rather than “Jeez, something’s just WRONG with me for having this clearly irrational emotion, I should have known better when I internalized that experience from my childhood, why haven’t I fixed it before now?” Of course, if you really did make a mistake and especially if you should have known better, then you should take that into account, make amends to anyone wronged, and recognize any immorality that played a role, but primarily you should recognize that the only thing in your control NOW is now and the future, and your focus should be on learning what your internal state is like NOW and how to apply that knowledge in making your life better now and in the future.
I have some speculations as to why so many people put the wrong focus on introspection. From day one, we are learning to observe the external world. Our culture puts a (proper) major emphasis on knowledge of the world, even when practical applications of that knowledge are not obvious. Introspection, on the other hand, necessarily starts later in life. Moreover, possibly due to a general acceptance that the internal world is an inherent mystery with no causal explanation, there is much less emphasis on introspection as a valuable tool, especially for children. As a result, if people learn to introspect at all they usually learn it AFTER they already have (at least implicit) moral standards and BECAUSE they have noticed a particular problem in themselves. This could easily resulting in having a mistaken association of introspection as a tool for morally evaluating oneself in order to fix problems, rather than a general tool for knowing one’s self.
EDIT June 29: Since writing this, I thought of a good analogy: think of your own character/psyche like a skyscraper. It was partially made by man (though the base elements are metaphysically given), and thus the making of it must be judged accordingly. However, now that it HAS been made, it is what it is and its nature must be accepted, even if the goal is to change it. Just as one does not modify the structure of a skyscraper by simply recognizing an error and condemning the man who made it, so one does not change his psyche by simply finding a flaw and condemning himself for the choices leading to it. One must act in accordance with the nature of his mind, often with the aid of the findings of psychology, in order to change it.
Integration in Action: Frequency-Based Filters and Driving
I’m not exactly sure what made me think of this, but the other day while on a medium-length drive I realized that driving can be thought of as a low-pass filter on speed: The amount of time it will take you to get to the destination is much more affected by the slow but long-lasting changes in speed and not on the quick but oscillatory changes. Pursuing this line of thought further (the drive was pretty long), I realized that car-sickness can be thought of as a high-pass filter on speed: slow, long-lasting changes don’t matter, but quick oscillatory ones have a big effect. I spent quite some time turning this over in my head, including recognizing the fact that the speed-time relation involved integrating speed and the speed-sickness relation involved differentiating it, and it was honestly a joy to find such a simple little connection. Really, though, it was a good demonstration for me of the power of integration (philosophical, not mathematical!).
Before making the (quite unexpected) connection between an abstract concept from signal analysis theory and a concrete daily action, I understood what filters were and how they worked, and I had a strong grasp on how changes in my driving speed would affect my overall trip, but now I can use the knowledge I have from both fields and apply it to both. When considering filters, I can concretize problems by relating them back to my very perceptual experiences with driving. On the flip side, if I ever want to take a more intellectual approach to driving (which I doubt will happen, but it might), I will be able to use my experience with signal theory to solve problems like “What’s the best way to get to the destination quickly without making Alyssa sick?”
In the scheme of things, this integration was quite unimportant. But it really hammered home to me the fact that integration really is a (the?) vital cognitive tool in a really neat, fun way.
Quick Thoughts on Terms and Conditions
(Note: I am not a lawyer, and this post does not necessarily reflect the state of any current legal system. This is a post about the morality, not the current legality, of a particular type of action)
To the savvy internet user, it’s second-nature: You find a new website requiring login information, you create a new account, put in your details, make sure to uncheck all the boxes allowing them to spam you, and check the box agreeing to the terms and conditions, and move on to using the site. But how many people actually read those terms and conditions? They may be obnoxiously long, written in dense legalese, and grant ridiculous powers to the content provider, but checking that box without reading, understanding, and committing to act in accordance with those terms is morally equivalent to fraud (there is a possible border case if you’re willing to accept their terms without reviewing them and the checkbox doesn’t specify that you have read the terms, but that is a dangerous decision). This is an extremely clear-cut case: the owners of the site have the right to set any terms they wish delimiting your use of their property. You may not like it, you may not want to spend the time needed to read through the contract, and you may not like the terms you find if you do, but your only moral choices are to accept the terms, negotiate new terms with the owner, or decline the use of the site. To make any other choice is to force your desires on the site owner.
Putting the Cause Before the Truth
At my old blog, I recently penned a long post explaining in detail why I’m opposed to infantile circumcision. While I was certainly expecting opposition, I never expected the accusations I received in the comments: A few commenters claimed that I was being, to use the words of some Chabad rabbis, tendentious. At first, I was just confused by this: why would I want it to be true that circumcision has no medical benefits? If it turned out to be true that infantile circumcision helped the child, I would be very happy to know that the majority of American children were not [ED: Thanks to Sara Cammeresi for catching the omission of 'not'] mutilated for nothing. In general, why would I advocate an idea if I thought it wasn’t true? It just didn’t make sense to me. After thinking about it some more, though, I think I understand the objection now.
Ideas, properly viewed, are guides to action. Ultimately, the purpose of concepts, principles, and even perceptual knowledge is to guide our action in order to enable us to live a better life. Under this view, it would make no sense to advocate an idea one knows is false, or even to advocate a good idea with false arguments. If your idea is false, advocating or following it has no value and is detrimental to your life. Unfortunately, most people don’t treat ideas this way. In today’s culture, ideas are viewed at best as being irrelevant to everyday life, and at worst as being detrimental. In this mindset, ideas don’t reflect facts of reality, they are either subjective whims or revelations from a supernatural realm. To people with this approach, truth or falsehood is irrelevant and the idea is everything: challenges to the idea can’t possibly have any bearing on the real world, so dedication to your whims or your god becomes more important than any arguments to the contrary. This, more than any potential financial gain or political power, is the motivating force behind those who fudge data, suffer from confirmation bias, cherry-pick evidence, advocate causes without respect for the truth, or, on the other side, claim that anyone with a firm ideology is untrustworthy or that everyone is biased. This is the cause of the view that debates are just about the scoring of points, not about discussing the truth when faced with conflicting ideas. The idea that ideas are more (or less) important than reality, rather than being in harmony with reality, is the idea that must be fought if we want to live free of those who would impose their revealed Truths on us in defiance of the facts as well as those who would claim that ideas are meaningless and that we must be forced to live on the range of the moment.
So why did some commenters think I was being dishonest in my choice of sources? To them, the thought that I might care about the truth is not even on their minds. I have my anti-circumcision ideology, and so of course I will do whatever it takes to try to fight for that ideology. It never occurs to them to ask WHY I have the ideology in the first place, since in their mind all ideas are equally arbitrary. In such a world, the only option left to men is to try to force their ideas down each others’ throats at all costs, even if it means lying to themselves about it. Thankfully, we don’t live in such a world and I advocate my ideas because they are true.