2021.10.24 - Bright people, Minecraft, and Self Interest

Gratitude

I'm extremely grateful for the many bright, interesting, and engaged people that I've had the opportunity to meet and interact with.  This alone makes life worth living.

Geek

I fired up a Minecraft server several months ago.  Mostly to have something to do with my grandkids.  They connect once in awhile, but not regularly.  I was telling some friends about it the other day and at least one of them is getting into it.  Minecraft is fun, but being able to share a world is MUCH more fun.

The downside was discovering that my implementation had some serious performance problems. I had been running a vanilla Minecraft server on a moderately powered box with 8Gb of memory.  It was chronically several thousand ticks behind.  This created some really unfortunate behaviors.

Last night I bit the bullet and replaced the vanilla Minecraft server with Paper.  It appears to be running much better, but we'll see over time.

Ponder

For quite awhile I've been pondering the tension between interest in the individual and interest in the community.  I'm aware of the System 1 and System 2 framework in psychology, famously explored in Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman that has so much impact on our decision making.  I wonder if the individual/community tension has similar consequences at a higher level of abstraction.

It seems clear that everyone does exactly what they want (this is fun because it's where people start to argue with me).  What this means is that when a decision is made, then you choose between the variety of options that you are aware of.  Sometimes your available options are really crappy but you still choose.  Most people mistake this by saying, "I didn't have a choice" when, in fact, more accurately, they should have said, "I didn't have a good or desirable choice."  It's an extremely rare, probably impossible, circumstance for anyone to act in the true absence of choice.  

You will always choose the option that maximizes your self interest.  If someone chooses to give their life so that the life of their child might be saved they had the option of not doing that.  They did so because saving their child's life by sacrificing their own was the best option for THEM.  While this is a significant choice, they had a choice and weren't acting selflessly.  I believe that as humans we are unable to. They chose the option that best met their interests.   If you hate your job but continue to work there so that you can pay your bills and feed your family it's not because you don't have a choice, it's because the alternatives that you're aware of are worse than staying in that job.

This puts a slightly different spin on calling someone selfish.  First, you're asserting that the choice they made from their understanding of their available options is different than the choice that you would have made with your understanding of your available options.  Second, the choice that they made is not in YOUR self interest.  In the end, we're all selfish because we're made that way.  The key point is not that everyone asserts their own self interest, it is how everyone is made aware of their options and the implications of those options.  Those implications, of course, feed directly back into satisfying our self interest.

This is fodder for several more ponders...

• How are we made aware of our options?
• Why are we ignorant of some options?
• How are we made aware of the implications of various options?
• Why are we ignorant of the implications of various options?

The Structure of the Universe

When I was a teenager we used to like to sleep outside.  Generally it involved spreading a piece of plastic out in the backyard and rolling our sleeping bags out on it.  It was a good way to connect with the outdoors and to get away when you couldn't get away.  It was an adventure.

An opportunity that sleeping outside provided was time to lay there comfortably and stare at the stars.  During one of these adventures my good friend Brian and I wrestled with the question, "What would be here if nothing was here?"  In our teenage way we wrestled with the semantic quandary of, "Well if nothing was there then something would be here and that something would be nothing."  I don't remember coming up with any conclusions about nothing (though ironically that may be exactly what we did) but we did create this nice model of time.  The time when there was nothing we called 'less' and the time when there was something we called 'more'.  This, I'm sure, led to all sort of interesting subsequent discussions but eventually we went to sleep.

The nature of nothing remains an interesting question.  Entropy might be defined as the cosmic pursuit of nothingness.  Maximum entropy, the universe of 'less', would mean no matter, no energy, and since it seems to depend on the existence of matter and energy, no information.  This raises questions about the boundary between 'less' and 'more'.  Why should the universe of 'more' even exist? What information caused the transition from 'less'?  I suspect that this may have to do with wrapping your head around the notion of infinities in which case the answer is "because...".  

In any case, 'more' happened and it seems to have happened in a universe that likes 'less' thus entropy is happening.  Ironically, without 'more' entropy couldn't exist.  If it did then the universe of 'less' would have a property, i.e. information, and wouldn't be 'less'.  

...

Sadly, I'm out of time for this thread.  It does have a purpose.  Perhaps I'll get to it later.

The Greatest Curse

 Humans may be the victims of the greatest, most cosmic, curse.  

We will become extinct and we'll know why.

Life

 Life is a journey, but a journey is a series of destinations.