How might we learn to think and act in a positive way, and build a future worth considering? We can make frameworks for our thought. But complex frameworks are often not worth the extra effort, and poorly-created frameworks are worse than having no frameworks at all. So what might be a simple, elegant, and timeless framework for thought? How can we get people to do things that benefit everyone without explicitly prescribing what 'good' is and 'how to achieve good'. I believe this has implications for law, education, and AI alignment — which I will discuss in a later post.
When I feel negatively towards something, I often think, I wonder “Why do I feel this way?” and, quite often, I realise the anger is baseless, and dissipates. Or if it has some quasi-base, then I work down from that, I wonder about the psychological cause and effect, and quite often, go through a lot of regret about having been angry in the first place, and get sort of a compensatory buzz of positive feelings for being able to interpret myself in this manner. It feels nice to be able to calm myself down.
The positive feeling usually quickly subsides if the target of anger is a larger body: a system, a corporation, a governing body, and the feeling gets swept away by a tide of nervousness. This comes from the fact that a lot of people do not take themselves away from their own feelings in this way, and if they do, it’s in a psychopathic way that lets them disconnect themselves from the anger they feel, and the subsequent angry actions they undertake. Or in a blissful-detachment sort of sense, where you just pretend everything is fine. It is useful to disconnect yourself from your feelings — but only to the point of observation. So not a total disconnect. If you disconnect yourself from your feelings by ignoring them, you are not acting rationally, as your feelings (however misguided) are telling you something.
A mildly-related anecdote: Some time ago, I lived near a rural pub which had an inadequately-sized car park, which meant that cars used to spill out onto the neighbouring roads, parking over driveways. One man who lived particularly close to the pub had this happen to him so often that he put up a big, bright, sternly lettered “NO PARKING” sign on his garage door. He presumably did not use his garage often or call a traffic officer, since it seemed that every time I walked past, someone was parked over his big “NO PARKING” sign. It was deeply ineffective. Some months after, the sign was replaced by a much less glaring sign that just said: “Think”. Very few people parked there again. The change was overnight and noticeable.
It is not easy to say exactly why this sign was effective. Part of the reason, I believe, is that if you disobey a sign that says, “NO PARKING”, then the guilt you may or may not feel is directed at an external thing; you don’t necessarily feel bad if you don’t have the capability to see what you’re doing is against some small rule somewhere. The psychological combatants are Yourself vs. The Rules. Whereas, with the “Think” sign, it reminds of the fact that you have to consider what you are doing. Disobeying a “Think” sign outwardly reflects poorly on a person. It says: ‘this parker didn’t even stop to think about how this poor guy might retrieve his car from his garage’. It induces thoughts and self-reflections in the could-be illegal parker. It doesn’t say, ‘There is a person with mobility issues inside whose garage-stationed wheelchair might be their only way of getting to the shops,’ it just says to think about that possibility. It even allows for emergencies, if someone needs to park there immediately in order to get out and call for help, then so be it. But the requirement is that you must think, of your past, your actions, the examples you have been set and set yourself, of others and yourself, and to do what is right in a fundamental manner, paring back all of the externalities you have faced. It becomes Yourself vs. Yourself — all it can ever really be. It reminds you that everything that you are is what you have done, what you have seen and thought, the circumstances of your birth and your subsequent actions.
One could say that this is the fundamentals of virtually every tenet of belief, from religion to rationality[1] — the idea that these meta-thoughts are responsible for the vast majority of human development. Thoughts alone are strange things — they make no sense in a vacuum. Thoughts about thoughts, taking the process of processing the world and considering it from a distant (but not disconnected) perspective — that is where the most important discoveries lie.
The wonderful thing about this “Think” sign is that it can replace any other sign. For example, a “NO SMOKING” sign banishes and betrays even its loyal followers, making them feel unwanted, and perhaps, more stressed, maybe even more likely to keep smoking. Replacing that with a “Think” sign could get them to consider the original motive behind smoking and the reasons why they presently continue to smoke. Think about why you want, whether it's worth it, and what you get out of it. A "Think" sign prompts you to understand your limits. A speed limit sign could be replaced with a “Think” sign, consider the car you’re driving, the conditions you’re in, other drivers around you, your experience level, your blood alcohol content, insurance premiums, fuel economy, whatever you need to consider to make a rational decision about how fast to drive, knowing that everyone else on the road is going through the same processes as you are, working synergistically with each other, rather than rigidly sticking to an external medium.
Of course, signs and rules help people work together in this way, but they also make people lazy and rely on external processes to mitigate their thinking. Do you know anyone who's actually read up on car-crash-speed vs. lethality statistics, or tested the stopping time of their own car, or their reaction times in dangerous circumstances?
We might be able to go further: Replace a self-help book with the word “Think”. Replace relationship advice, the label on a lightswitch, the signs to the toilets, the warnings on the stairs and on slippery surfaces, consumer advice, energy ratings, stop signs, WARNING DEEP WATER, the lights on traffic lights, 'Electric Shock Risk', exit signs, whatever you want, if it is designed well enough, if the object itself has had thought put into it, then there should be no need for a sign. Think about what you would do, how you would design things, and then think about how others might design their things, and reconcile your thoughts in order to understand the things around you.
Signs are usually made when there is ambiguity, either through the object or other people interacting. Traffic lights are necessary because people are generally not capable of organising on that scale. But we can design roundabouts, which require no traffic lights. The rules are embedded in the 'flow' of the road. Admittedly, the road and the rules of the roundabout are things we have to learn the 'sign' of. But they are better signs in that they prescribe less and allow for more. There is also the possibility of genuinely new information being revealed to us through a sign, like a new scientific paper. These are edge cases, the limits of current knowledge — but again, only reachable by applying this meta-thought processes to current knowledge.
We also get better results out of LLMs through this process. Making them consider their tokens as they generate them could be considered a form of metacognition. Of course, we run into the same problem as humans do, and that is, when to stop thinking about thinking and when to apply the thinking. Other strategies include chain-of-reasoning, and coding programs to solve harder tasks.
Everything is a sign that says something to some degree. A wall can be considered as a sign to not walk through it, a word is a sign that points to your use of the word, language divides up the world like lanes on a motorway, real, practical, but thin, easy-to-cross, and ultimately: arbitrary. A receptacle for rubbish says, “consider the relation between what you value and what you do not”; a bench says, “consider your own tiredness and the tiredness of others”; a piece of art bounces off of you and induces thought inside. I can see the same thing as you and feel something entirely different, but our capability for thought is there, our subjectivities vary.
Our lives (politically, legally) are governed by entities like the “NO PARKING” sign, dogmatic, external, blunt, able to be blindly shunned or obeyed with no real psychological damage done either way. Many people appear to have lost the ability to look inwards, to wonder why these external things are supposed to have such an effect on us. Even fewer have the capability to then rise above that effect, to laugh and shake hands rather than blindly taking offence or cowering back. It is for this reason, that, on an indisputably personal level, each and every one of us needs to find something that induces thought in ourselves. The current formulation of our legal and educational systems place far too much emphasis on these signs at the expense of precisely what they aim to uphold. So we must look past these signs when we consider how we might create things in the future, and how we might act in that future.
Religion having its origins in the anthropological dawn of self-awareness, and storytelling, modern rationality having its origins in the desire to have that self-awareness be consistent with the physical world.
Interesting to note is that often, so called religious “fundamentalists” only rewind religion back to their chosen application (often through a reactionary modern lens) rather than the actual real fundamentals of religion, which is essentially the idea of deliberately conscious introspection — more on that elsewhere. For now, check out Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity and Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.