Accountability

I’ve recently started thinking about retiring this blog. I’m not entirely sure how worth this blog is, especially given that I’m not posting “productive thinking” sections as much as I used to. The main reason is that I don’t know what the purpose of this blog is anymore–without spending lots of time (which I no longer have) polishing my writing, this blog isn’t for deepening my thinking/keeping my writing skills in shape anymore. However, if I end this blog, I doubt I’d be proactive enough to return to this when I actually have time, so for the time being, I’ll continue it.

Going along with that, I should also consider the fact that this blog can be utilized to help kick some of my procrastination habits. Specifically, one of the blog’s original two purposes was to improve my productivity–I feel as though my boost in productivity has been more due to the utilization of productivity apps/quitting League and less so due to this blog. I’ll try to use this blog more seriously in that regard.

Finally, in regards for my weekly habits consideration update, I’ve added some new habits. Namely, seeing if it’s possible to only watch one YouTube video at a time, and the latter is to respect my phone’s social media limit. The latter has been going pretty well, but a lot of the time I keep forgetting about my YouTube limit. I’ll try to improve upon that for this coming week.

In terms of life updates, I did try to go fishing again today in NYC, but it didn’t go so well. Hopefully, when I try something new next time I go back, it’ll be better because today was pretty awful.

Productive Thinking

The concept of altruism is almost one we take for granted–we accept that parts of it are logically dubious on the individual level, but respect the fact that it’s good for others. It’s a feelsgood philosophy that we rarely question because questioning it would somehow be wrong.

Yet, when we or game theorists take a step back and analyze altruism, it becomes a whole lot less black and white. For example, consider the meerkat. Meerkats display considerable altruism, most notably by warning their colony if a lookout spots a predatory bird–however, warning the colony instead of running normally singles out this individual for the predator, putting its own survival at considerable risk. From a purely evolutionary biological perspective, this helps because even if the individual itself dies, kin who share similar genes will live on to pass it on–the group as a whole still benefits.

With humans, altruism is markedly much stronger–people will sacrifice their own lives for complete stranges. This pops up, albeit rarely, in the news from time to time, and the arguments for such altruism is even more tenuable.

Now, to clarify, I’m not saying that altruism is bad–quite the contrary, my goal is to explore just how extraodinary the fact that humans would sacrifice their own lives “for the greater good” is.

There is a very common game theory thought experiment dubbed “the prisoner’s dilemma.” In this thought experiement, two individuals are locked up in separate rooms without any means of communication. They each have a choice: turn the other person in or stay silent. If they both stay silent, they will get 3 years in jail. If they both turn the other person in, then they will get 5 years in jail. However, if one person turns the other in while the latter stays silent, then the one who remained silent will get 10 years in jail while the traitor will get away with simply 1 year. Game theorists argue that the only logical move here is to turn in your counterpart.

Note how if both simply stayed silent (altruism in a sense), both of them are in a better situation than when both turn each other in (which is what game theorists argue would happen in an ideal situation).

However, in the real world, this sort of effect trends towards altruism rather than game theory. By not doing the most logical situation (where every person is perfectly smart and makes the correct decision), society actually ends up in a better spot! This is miraculous–human stupidity actually benefits everyone for once!

Obviously, the term stupidity is rather harsh–people seem to have some sort of altruistic instinct ingrained in them. People have conducted similar experiments in real world situations with legitimate stakes–a professor polls his class, asking each student to decide whether or not they will accept 3 point of extra credit or 20 points of extra credit. However, if more than 1% of the class asks for 20 points, then nobody gets any extra credit. If this was a class full of game theorists, what would happen is everyone walks out with no free points–however, experiments of this nature find that most people still opt to take their smaller amount of extra credit.

So long story short, good thing society isn’t composed of a bunch of game theorists–we’d probably all be long dead.