Today, the prince visited the youth centre where I volunteer. I wasn’t there; he visited a few hours before I arrived. I felt like it was a little exciting – it certainly helped to validate the sense I have that we’re being useful as volunteers. That’s a bit of a non-sequitir, but it did.

On the way home, a fellow volunteer found a notice which had been left on the subway. It raged against the visit of a monarch, the concept of a monarch, the unjust nature of our society, and the foolishness of honouring our ‘imperialist heritage’, or even seeing it through rose-coloured glasses. Everything that I read on the page made sense, and it wasn’t really very sensationalistic. It was just stating the absurdity of the situation. Yet I could not move past apathy about it.

I commented on my feelings to my friend, and a nearby stranger contributed their insight: I don’t have to picket, but I do have to vote. It seemed like a rather courageous thing to do at the time, but they were on their way out of the train, so now I wonder if they’d have been so bold having to continue to sit beside me for a few more minutes. I hope so. Anyway, their words got me on the topic of voting, which I have a similar mixed set of emotions about.

See, I’m pretty stupid and uninformed. Incoming list: I don’t know much about economics, about history, about the culture of the french, the eastern-canadians, the northern-canadians, the prairie-canadians, the western-canadians, or even many of the southern canadians (of whom I take membership) — or those who don’t fit in the categories I’ve foolishly devised. I don’t know very much science, very much about theft, or strategy, or budgeting, or military culture or needs, or policy, or our identity, or education, or anything about ‘what’s best for everyone’.

I don’t even know very much of what I don’t know.

Yet, in our society, I seem expected to feel entitled to a loud, strong opinion about all of those things. I am entitled to participate in deciding who will decide about them, and occasionally, I’m entitled to directly participate in deciding about them. Why should I feel that I have the right to choose a person who will run a city, who will choose a person who will run a police force? Or to choose a person that will decide health-care policy?

Usually, there are attempts to inform us, the stupid public, by telling us ‘what they plan to do’ in the form of “campaign promises”. The people running often seem more interested in winning than in doing the best job or the best things for the most people. They are selling the cheapest, best-looking thing they could come up with that roughly aligns with their ideals, and they’re doing their damndest to package it up so we’ll be convinced.

I don’t want that. It’s feels cheap and sleazy, and it’s not about anything that matters. It’s just a giant, stupid game where we feel entitled and empowered but don’t make many decisions that have real impacts on lives. Well, at least I don’t think we should even have that power! I absolutely don’t believe that there is any real way to make more people “care” about voting, or to make us “well informed”. We’re going to continue to be idiots, and we’re going to continue to be apathetic, unless someone stupidly tries to take power via an obvious show of force.

What else

Meritocracy sounds pretty great. Let qualified people run the show. Standardized tests likely aren’t the way to figure out merit, and I won’t claim to know what is, but I strongly think that the people who run countries should be elected for their ability to do their jobs rather than their ideologies. If they are clearly failing us, we as the public should still have the ability to oust them, but there appears to be very little other control we need.

We shouldn’t need to fire everyone every 2-5 years and retrain them on new jobs in new fields. We shouldn’t need to divide along falsely drawn lines of opinion. We shouldn’t be electing people who we pay attention to for less time than the average person pays to coffee. We should be free from restraint and tyranny. We should be free from oppression. We should have the ability to speak our mind and travel where we like, and as I said above, we should have the freedom to reject a government that clearly does not serve our needs.

All other aspects of military, fiscal, health, education, maintenance, and other policies are not things we need to worry about. Perhaps, if we demanded control, we could hold a referendum every X years to vote on some goals. Maybe we’d like to focus on improving health care. Maybe we’d like to focus on improving our collective wealth. Those kinds of decisions may not be beyond you and I, but percentage points and graphs and numbers of billions of dollars provisioned for X are meaningless to us. We could still have people whose job is to oppose the prevailing opinion — dissent and sober second thought are useful to us. But disagreements shouldn’t be motivated by politics.

Also, as a note, I’m not suggesting that a closed meritocracy is the answer — decisions should be transparently part of public record, but they should come as a product of discussion between experts, not politicians. I’d love to see qualified experts run our world as true civil servants, without the asinine circus of politics.

Is that really a ridiculous thought?

Dear mom,

Thanks for walks on the beach and along hiking trails,
Thanks for driving down dead-end roads to see broken bridges,
Thank you for teaching me so much.
Thanks for food, for a home, for money, for love,
Thanks for being a great listener and talker,
Thanks for always making me feel welcome.
Thanks for letting me sleep in.
Thank you for being proud and supportive, and for letting me keep my old crap around.
Thanks for reading my blog posts, and encouraging me to write.
Thank you for letting me go my own way and learn my boundaries, along with your protective, motherly advice.
Thank you for occasionally letting me bring home a big stick to keep around the house.
Thank you for always being respectful of me as a person.
Thanks for big warm hugs. 🙂
Thanks for letting me watch The Simpsons, and Malcolm in the Middle, and King of the Hill.
Thanks for your awesome songs and poems.
Thanks for encouraging me to keep on learning and growing.

Thank you for everything, mom. I owe you so much, and I love you even more.

Not only could you die at any moment, but the entire world could abruptly end. So why aren’t we all terrified all the time?

First, let’s illustrate that the world is in fact perched on doom’s windowsill; here are some possible world-ending (life-ending for a significant population of earth) events:

• the yellowstone supercaldera (or other supervolcanoes)
• an asteroid
• the canary islands tsunami
• a pandemic disease outbreak
• a nuclear war
• a local supernova
• a profound coronal mass ejection
• an alien attack
• the magnetic pole-flip
• an extreme shortage of fuel

The events with the greatest possible period of warning on those are likely the supernova, followed by pandemic disease and an extreme shortage of fuel — likely on the order of days or months before the effects are felt. It’s possible that we could have warning before an asteroid strike, but far from guaranteed. Any of these events could happen with just hours or even minutes of warning.

Here’s where the weird part comes in though: it is pretty much guaranteed that one of these events will occur, or something else equally terrible. The world as we know it will one day face a significant existential challenge, but we seem totally unconcerned! It’s typically a subject of some ridicule.

It’s a certainty from a very long point of view, outside a regular person’s sphere of perception. From that very long point of view, it’s a certainty that one of these sort of events will occur, but your typical person doesn’t have any reason to look at things that way. In our lives, we see tens of thousands of new days where nothing bizarre or particularly out of the ordinary occurs. On the timescale of a life, the statistics flip: instead of a long guarantee that something will happen, we have a pretty-much guarantee that nothing will happen on a given day.

We have a paradox! Each new day is likelier than ever before to be humanity’s last. It’s also far likelier than that to be the exact same as yesterday.

This is why it makes no sense to freak out and stop whatever we’re doing. It’s extremely likely that we’ll live out our entire lives without significant changes — if we all just stopped, we’d cause the change we fear. It doesn’t help that we are so susceptible to sensationalism: there is always a segment of society that wants to believe the end is imminent, and will stretch reason and sensibility to believe it. Those people have made a bad name for anyone wishing to keep in mind that the world is not to be taken for granted.

If there’s any advice to be taken here, I think it would just be to enjoy life. Steve Jobs’ advice to ensure that whatever it is you do each day is something you’d be happy to spend your final day doing seems relevant. I’m doubtful that we have much of a chance to prevent or even to significantly increase the warning time on all of the risks I listed above, but surely we can make progress for some of them. It’s good to know that there are people out there studying existential risks and how best to respond to them.

I’m also of the persuasion that it’s fun to think about these things, and exciting (while very scary) to consider that the world could change in the blink of an eye. Fortunately, it’s not very likely to happen in my lifetime.

Let this be a reminder that common sense may not get us very far.

Two hundred years ago, the common sense approach to getting from point A to a distant point B would be to walk, ride a horse, or take a carriage. A person today would think to take a car. That doesn’t seem like a wild distinction, but think about how someone two hundred years ago would have reacted to the notion of a carriage without horses. You’d probably come off a little crazy just trying to explain it.

Consider that in 50 years, the notion of physically controlling a vehicle from your point of origin to the point of destination will seem bizarre. By then, it’ll just be common sense that you tell the car where you want to go, and you end up there. That’s much simpler than being trained for years just to be a highly fallible controller of a multi-ton steel bubble that gets packed into a tight space with hundreds of other steel bubbles, hurtles along faster than birds typically fly, and relies on hundreds of strangers to maintain constant attention and vigilance for hours at a time. Why does doing that make sense to us? It’s insane!

But it doesn’t seem that way to most of us yet. For now, that’s uncommon sense.

Think about electricity, or airplanes, or hot air balloons. The principles behind hot air balloons had been figured out by the Romans, yet no one made one until the 18th century. People had worked very hard to build flying machines, and somehow putting a big container around a fire never occurred to them as a sensible idea. It’s just common sense: hot air rises. But it wasn’t at the time. Imagine how differently the world might have looked if we’d have had hot air balloons from 50 AD. I think it would make for some pretty wicked steampunk.

On a daily basis, we probably make hundreds of decisions based on our common sense. Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any heuristic for detecting when common sense should be replaced by uncommon sense. It’s strongly tied to what the uncommon sense replacement will be, and if someone could easily figure that, well, they’d be a genius super-inventor.

While we can’t easily identify those times, we can probably identify some times when we’re just using common sense. It might be useful to try to be aware of when you’re making a small logical leap about ‘what the best choice is’, and whenever you catch yourself doing it, examine: what are the assumptions that underly that? For example, with cars in 1812, someone might think ‘well I’d take a carriage’. If they were to stop and determine what assumptions underly that, they could easily say things like “assuming I can’t fly or magically just be there” — but with some thought, they might arrive at “assuming I need horses to make the carriage move”.

So next time you’re out enjoying your day: think about the assumptions that underly simple decisions. Like putting on your shoes, locking your house, wearing a helmet on your bike, stopping at a red light, heading in the correct direction for work, or not forgetting to bring your key-card. Just taking a mental tour of my journey to work, those things came up. I wouldn’t have to put shoes on if they were always on. Or if the ground were cleaner. Or if a barrier somehow magically existed between my feet and the ground. I wouldn’t have to lock my house if my doors only ever opened for me anyway. I wouldn’t have to wear a helmet if it became impossible to crash bikes the way we can today. Maybe those are stupid analyses: maybe not. The point is just to recognize things that would make the situation different.

If you consider the assumptions you make about the default decisions in your life, you might strike on a vein of uncommon sense. Good luck.

Today, I spent two hours on a train listening to a conversation. Two tradesmen decided to travel home by train instead of heading with their crew on the highway. Throughout the conversation, the younger of the two men repeatedly expressed his frustration over the fact that they had lost time by spending money on the train (their crew was already home shortly after we left), while the older man told him again and again to relax, and to enjoy himself for once.

They had a few beers along the way, and their conversation was at times heated, deeply personal, nostalgic, and humorous. They were each a little rough around the edges, in slightly different ways. The younger man had lost his driver’s license for one reason or another, the older had been heavily involved in gang activity when he was younger. They discussed women, drugs, getting and staying clean, their plans for the weekend, the past, really the gamut of life. They rejoiced in their friendship, they talked about how they hated each other (and each threatened violence to the other, at times jovially, at times seriously).

The younger one was intent on saving money and hurrying, even if it meant taking extreme personal risks. The older kept telling him not to bother — a particular sticking point was around their transportation when they arrived. The older man wanted to just split a cab, while the younger man insisted they only take a cab as far as his house, and then he’d drive the older man home. But he wanted the older man to cover the cab. The older man insisted that neither of them should drive; they’d been drinking. The younger man repeatedly brushed him off.

It was really interesting. Near the end of it, during a reprise of their earlier argument over timing and the cost of the train and why they took the train in the first place, I suddenly started listening as if they were characters in a play. Things slipped into an uncanny valley very quickly, and I felt like someone outside of the world, or that these men might just be actors who screw with travellers, performing a brilliant two-man show. Suddenly, their lines didn’t seem to be delivered as convincingly. It sounded like they were just saying what they thought they were supposed to say.

It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever noticed.

As we got into town, the elder man, frustrated with how sour the younger had been throughout the trip, stood up and headed for the exit early. The younger one sat silently for a bit, and then followed. I had a few minutes to mull the experience over. I considered the subjects they’d talked about, their differing perceptions of time, and their attitudes toward life, each other, and the people they knew. I haven’t had an opportunity to observe people so different from me in such a candid fashion before, and it was really stunning.

My final thoughts, as I put my laptop away and got off the train, were that I, like a fish in water, pay very little attention on a daily basis to the geekiness of the people in my universe. I had actually forgotten that most people aren’t like the ones I interact with every day, and it’s weird to recall that generally, I am the weird one.