Why Are We Here?

The two problems I care most about are sustainability (being a steward of the Earth is not just of practical, but of moral gravity) and conversation. I know that sounds very kombucha of me, but getting specific:

Sustainability

This means understanding how our actions, technologies, impact our resources, neighbors, and future. Myopia is the human’s most tragic flaw, and we should not be myopic. I (as a benevolent dictator, not as a senate candidate) would be willing to sacrifice a lot of growth to play on the safe side of warming the planet, exhausting finite resources, decimating flora and fauna, etc. most concretely. But we are unable, either at the moment, or fundamentally, to relate to each other rationally to maximize welfare for us and the future. I think that this is less because we are in a zero-sum competition between the future and ourselves or between those who will suffer and those who won’t (the consequences of climate change are here and costing every citizen of a nation-state a great deal, even if indirectly) and more because we cannot fathom not fighting.

Conversation

Conversation, then, is broken, as I believe humans don’t need to fight, and would be better off if they learned to fight their own weaknesses instead of each other. It’s not that I believe people are homogenous in the limit. I bet they aren’t. But nobody wants to pay trillions of dollars that we didn’t need to pay so that we could die earlier from air pollution. If we could figure out a way to be open-minded, generous, humble, in our conversation, we could do much better to avoid catastrophic environmental events that are in no one’s interest, even if not arrive at the same answers about whether abortion is ethical or whether we should wage wars abroad.

Conversation is also something that fascinates me instrumentally and intrinsically, that I both love and leverage, and I don’t get what it is. It is crazy that it works! How does someone get persuaded of something they didn’t believe before? How do words come to mean something that are useful for us with nearly everyone we meet, when everyone’s definitions of those words are learned by experience, which is vastly different, and depend on other words that are themselves dependent on that vastly different experience. If every part of our vehicles and tools are different, how can we interchange their parts?

Given how well it works and that it works as it does… how doesn’t it work better? Why is it so hard to figure out what someone knows and teach to their level of understanding and their values, if our goal is to persuade each other? Why is it so hard to communicate understanding, and given that it’s so hard, and can’t necessarily be done only through words, how does it work at all?

Conversation is a miraculous thing at the heart of all of our lives, from what we experience in relation to the people we love and the ideas we absorb and channel, to how we make our decisions as a civilization, as nations, as families, as organizations, as partners. And somehow it does all this being an untoppleable house of cards.

There are many different kinds of conversation: one-legged, two-legged, …, n-legged. Commercial and spiritual. Antagonistic and sympathetic. English, Swahili, and Japanese. Pedagogical and exploratory. Policy-driven and reflective.

N-legged conversations are fun to take part in, but I suppose we observe a power law distribution over conversation frequency where the higher \(n\) is, the rarer that type of conversation is. Since self-conversation is accessible to all, and two-legged conversation is required for dispute, I focus on these local conversations.

I care about pedagogical and exploratory conversations, but I think it’s harder to define “good” with exploratory conversations than with conversations over disagreements, and I think that reconciling battling factions of society to each other is more ethically defensible than figuring out how to best educate our youth as if the answers were already known and all we had to do was impart the knowledge; an important part of my mission is figuring out how to hold different, and probably contradictory, truths and interests in balance and tension with eachother in such conflicted conversation.

I care about spiritual topics, but subjective experience and internal life is so important to these conversations that I think they’re way harder to solve than other kinds of conversation, like whether climate change will cost us trillions of dollars or not. Generally, then, I focus on practical conversation.

Antagonism and sympathy are both important to good conversation, and so I focus on both.

I don’t speak other languages besides Spanish, and NLP technology is best in English, and this is the language of the academy, the United Nations, and largely of business, and so for the time being I focus on English.

I hope that what we find in local, practical, conflicted English conversation will translate to other kinds of conversation.

This is why I’m here. Why are you?