14 Billion Cupcakes, Or: Why You Don’t Know What To Do With Your Life

So here’s an alternative two-step method for understanding the universe.

Step 1: Remember: Six thousand years ago, God created the Heavens and the Earth.
Step 2: Repeat as necessary.

Isn’t that a whole lot easier than analyzing electromagnetic background for evidence of some “Big Bang” fourteen billion years ago? Fourteen billion is a pretty big number, and God didn’t create us so we could waste time trying to picture fourteen billion cupcakes. (DON’T TRY THIS!)

One, Two, aaargh!

-Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!)

You have a stronger mind than Stephen Colbert. If I ask you to picture 14 billion cupcakes, you’ll say, “No problem. Doing it right now.” Little do you realize that the ability to deal with 14 billion cupcakes is the heart of not knowing what to do with life.

So you claim to be picturing 14 billion cupcakes? That’s not what you’re really doing. Instead, you are (perhaps) imagining two cupcakes for every person on Earth. So I ask you to picture every person on Earth. “Okay,” you say, “sure.”

But you’re not. You’re picturing a map of the world, or maybe you see a crowd of faces with different ethnicities. The details vary, but in general your mind constructs a much simpler, more concrete idea that takes the place of “every person on Earth” – you create an icon.

For me, the interesting thing is that I know I can’t picture a billion cupcakes but it still feels as if I can. Our minds can build very high-level abstractions, and we’re so good at it that the process is transparent. That’s where the problem comes in.

What do I want to do with my life?

It takes me only a second to read this question and ten or a hundred seconds to ponder it before my mind wanders. Perhaps I can go a thousand seconds if I’m particularly melancholy or my pet chinchilla just died. But the expanse of time I am considering is a few billion seconds. I cannot imagine them all. The icon I construct for “the rest of my life” inevitably becomes distorted: idealized, homogenized, and definitized beyond reason, and this happens without my conscious recognition.

This isn’t just my personal affliction. The people we overestimate most are our future selves. In 2006, Netflix offered a million-dollar prize to anyone who could improve their algorithm for predicting users’ film ratings. Their goal was to make better recommendations for what to watch next. The prize was won in 2009, but it turns out the Netflix didn’t use the improved algorithm.

Over the years the contest ran, Netflix’s business model shifted. In 2006, users were mostly getting new movies by mail, meaning they were placing orders for movies they wanted to watch several days from now. Why, me? I’m a connoisseur! A few days from now, I will be very interested in watching an intellectually- challenging cinematic landmark.

By 2009, Netflix users had shifted most of their watching to streaming over the internet. Suddenly, well, it’s certainly true that I’m a connoisseur, but I didn’t get too much done at work and I feel bad about not calling my mom enough. It’s a bit too late to turn a new leaf today, so I guess I’ll see what Steve Carell is up to in his latest movie, but tomorrow it’s Ingmar Bergman all the way. The difference was so striking that the algorithm based on the 2006 challenge was out of date by 2009.

And this goes on. Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes tomorrow, Rush Hour 3 tonight. Vegetables and whole grains tomorrow, pizza and beer tonight. Ulysses tomorrow,Grand Theft Auto tonight. See the world in a grain of sand tomorrow, masturbate to fetish porn and fall asleep with your shoes on tonight.

When I’m thinking about the future, I occasionally write a To-Do list. It will start off with a mix of errands and the important stuff: go to seminar, visit to the bank, read the latest chapter, grade these assignments, get some exercise, check out this paper, etc. But when my list is long enough to fill up the day, I always have a few extra things in mind, so I write those down too. That brings more stuff to mind, and before long my list has items like “learn quantum field theory” and “overthrow the evil empire”. Even though the time scale would be the same, somehow my list never has “buy groceries two thousand times.” My future apparently consists of nothing but pure ideals and great achievements. Every mundane detail is excised, leaving only deep, meaningful stuff. It’s like I expect to start living in an Ayn Rand novel.

So any time I have tried to think about the future, I’ve never been close. Worse, I don’t realize how delusional I am. I can’t see the tricks my mind is playing on me. I become obsessed with the wonderful, abstract existence I’m about to create for myself.

How many times have you thought, “once I find a new job, everything will get better?” And if not that, we fantasize the turning point will be moving to a new place, graduating, falling in love, breaking an addiction, finishing a project, having a successful IPO, etc. Once I get over this hump, it will all get better.

That’s not true. “Happily ever after” isn’t how it works. I don’t mean we can’t be happy. I mean it’s an insufficient description of “ever after”. Our brains can’t hold an entire, rich future in view at once, so we compress it down to something like “let’s grow old together”. That’s a bad icon, but brains basically work like a man stumbling around a dark garage and grabbing things off the shelf at random. It’s the first available solution, not the best one, that gets thrown at the problem. The result? Three months after the Disney movie ends, the princess is homesick and Prince Charming is eyeing the chambermaid. The grass is always greener…

At long last, we find what we sought, only to realize it is not quite how we imagined.

Cruelly, the more optimistic you are, the harder you’re hit by this. Don’t trust your retirement portfolio to a happy person.

We tend to handle the big questions with small answers: aphorisms, epitaphs, haiku, koans, parables, quotations. The briefer the wiser. This seems backwards of how it ought to be. Beware of any medium in which the message seems to say more the shorter it is. It’s a sign you’re not getting advice so much as having your far-view blindness hacked by a platitude. It’s the journey, not the destination, man.

You can’t act on a wise saying, but I don’t have any more-specific advice for you either. Once I start claiming that such-and-such thing will solve this problem, it’s a lot easier for me to be wrong. The best you can hope for in this business is to get people to pay thousands of dollars before you tell them what to do. That way they’ll be sure to convince themselves it worked; it’s the only way they can keep from having wasted their money.

Even writing this essay has not released me from my poor grip on the future. Somehow, I still have that same feeling. Once I find what to do with my life, it will all get better. But I wouldn’t bet 14 billion cupcakes on it.

Further Reading:
Cobbled together from stuff in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Dan Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, and Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias.

My apologies to anyone reading this the night before their wedding.

taken from my answer on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Life/How-can-I-figure-out-what-I-really-want-to-do-with-my-life

Three Things Every Man Should Have and Know

I turn around and all the sudden my Facebook friends are getting excited about becoming 30-year old women. So in response to 30 Things Every Woman Should blah blah blah, here are some things a man should have and know before he turns 30.

Have

Something he’s good at (preferably marketable).
Some self-confidence.
Training in at least five ways to exterminate a zombie.

Know

How to eat well, exercise, and manage money.
Who his friends are.
Where the clit is.

I think that should pretty much cover it.

Do The Math

In a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I want to point out a blog by astrophysicist Tom Murphy at UC San Diego (I don’t know him).

Do the Math looks at back-of-the-envelope calculations related to energy, environmentalism, and related issues. Tom produces more high-quality material than I’ve been able to absorb, but what I’ve read has consistently been insightful and, thankfully, sane. Check out his post index for some food for thought.

Earth to Humans: You’re Doing It Wrong.

adapted from http://www.superstock.com/stock-photos-images/4136R-221

Here’s my Earth Day article. You may notice it’s late. That’s because I didn’t realize it was Earth Day until a few hours after midnight when somebody said something dumb. Here it is:

The founder of a popular British festival has even said that he would consider powering the event on beer piss, should science find a way. Don’t laugh — human beings collectively produce around 6.4 trillion liters of urine a day, so an effective way of harvesting energy from this golden wonder-fuel might end our fossil fuel dependency overnight, as well as mitigating the effects of one more way we go about polluting the environment.

We do not produce 6.4 trillion liters of urine a day, even on a steady diet of coffee, alcohol, and the vague first-world boredom that leads to a bathroom break every half hour or ten games of Draw Something, whichever comes first. The 6.4 trillion figure is around 250 gallons of urine per person per day. If that were so, your urine would fill two midsize cars every week. At an average flow rate of 20 mL/sec, you’d have to pee for fourteen hours every day to get it all out.

That’s the dumb part – a silly gaffe. But there’s a stupid part, too. You can’t get more energy out of beer urine than you can get out of beer. You can’t get more energy out of beer than you can get out of beer plants. You can’t get more energy out of beer plants than you can get from the sunshine they absorbed. Processing your sunlight by way of a barley seeds, the digestive system of yeast, and a human liver is, as a thermodynamic strategy, piss poor.

Humans are not energy producers. Any energy we output came from our food and represents our bodies’ inefficiency. Only a fraction of the energy we eat can be reharvested, and the energy we eat is about one percent of the energy we use on all our gadgets and things. Measured purely by energy consumption, it’s as if every person in the US has 100 personal servants. Recapturing energy from our bodies is like realizing our 100 servants are too expensive, so we make one of them give us a percent or two of their wages back. That means we can only ever get a miniscule fraction of the power we need from any human activity – urination, generators inside exercise equipment, piezoelectric thingymabobbers in the floor, engines run on body heat, etc.

Even if you crush your enemies and drive them before you, the lamentation of their women will not provide much power.

Why bother, then? Why is there a dance club whose floor generates electricity for lighting as revelers hop around on it? Why don’t they just dance during the day?

Human-generated electrical power could make sense in special circumstances – charging your bicycle light with energy from the bicycle, for instance, but as a general plan it’s insane. The floor in that club is not about generating electricity. It’s very unlikely that the energy generated could ever recoup the cost of the installation – if you exercise for an hour, you’ll generate around a penny worth of electricity, and that’s with high efficiency. Instead, the floor is about advertising that it generates electricity.

This is what we’ve done with energy conservation – made it into a luxury item more about social signalling than ecological benefit. How many people, proud of their environmentally-conscious Prius, have any idea how much energy went into the car’s manufacture? How many of them drive it alone? (Though Prius owners may deny it, the car’s popularity is mostly about social signalling. For cars that come in gas-only or hybrid variants, the hybrids don’t sell well. If it’s not a hybrid-only brand, it’s a lot harder for people to recognize how environmentally-conscious you are.)

No one would tie a helium party balloon to a hippopotamus and say, “See? I did my part to help it fly!” Yet they feel just like that when they bring their own bags to the grocery store. On Earth Day, people turn their lights out for an hour. (Did that happen this year? Or is it some other day? Whatever.) If everyone turned all their lights out in their homes all the time, it would reduce power consumption in the US by about two percent.

The lights-out thing is symbolic, of course. It’s there to remind you of the importance of energy conservation, and to show other people you think energy conservation is important. The problem we’re facing is that everything is symbolic – our efforts at conservation are almost random, showing no systematic effort to focus on the big-ticket items, or even knowing what they are. How many cell phone chargers would you have to unplug to make up for the energy spent on one cross-country plane flight? Most people don’t know, and so most effort put into energy conservation is wasted.

Worse, if you’re conserving energy because you want the warm fuzzies associated with it, you get your warm fuzzies based on how much you inconvenience yourself and how much you show off, not on how much energy you actually save. You feel just as good about unplugging cell phone chargers as deciding to stay local on vacation. Our emotions have no sense of scale.

Even worse than that: when we talk about energy conservation and environmentalism, we’re largely bullshitting, and people pick up on that. That’s the thing with signalling to your tribe. It gets the other tribe pissed off. (And as we’ve learned, piss is not very productive.) The worst part about energy conservation and environmentalism is that they’ve been wrapped up into one issue and shipped off to the place where good debates go to die – politics.

If we could separate our conservation efforts from our warm fuzzies, we’d send out fewer of the pheromones that rile up political associations and drive out even the possibility reasonable discourse. Fewer news stories. Fewer buzz words and applause lights. More Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air and The Azimuth Project. That is how you get a hippopotamus to fly.