What are we optimizing for? What should we be?
So, this is another stream of consciousness post that may or may not go anywhere useful. Nonetheless, here it is.
One of the problems I see with society on Earth is that we are failing to do a number of basic things that would lead to a much better experience for everyone.
1) Triage – we need to figure out which problems are causing the most non-optimal experience for the most people, and address the issues we’re facing in level-of-fuckedness order
2) Finding the root cause – raising the minimum wage, for example, is a very temporary band-aid because the landlords and banks will just raise the fees and the rent. You need some way to control the ratio between pay and cost of living. But even this probably isn’t looking at the real root cause. You will often find a whole list of symptoms, and while you can treat them as individual problems, it’s usually better to figure out what the root cause is and address that.
3) Figuring out what we’re optimizing for – Yah, no kidding. We’ve got the Christians over here trying to optimize for hitting God’s Will. We’ve got me over here trying to optimize for having the experiences I want to have. We’ve got judges trying to optimize for a just society, which is probably about the dumbest thing you could do. And so on.
So, I’m optimizing for the experiences I want to have. I think we should be optimizing for, first, giving everyone what they need, then, giving everyone what they want. As a big picture thing, this is going to need for a lot of us to change, because a lot of us have managed to really build up some stupid ideas this particular time ’round. More on this later.