Avoiding Thomas Sowell's Maxim
Pondering the nature of life through physics, economics, and religion.
I am currently reading David Griffith’s, Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. It’s a wonderful break from “softer” things I normally read. Physics is a hard science, where things are more concrete than in soft sciences like archeology, economics, and psychology.
Of course softer science doesn’t necessarily mean easier, and hard science doesn’t necessarily mean difficult. Depending on one’s math skills, the opposite is usually true because as we all know, humans are complicated. Answers in the soft sciences are often more elusive.
But there is beauty in the hard sciences; beauty in simplicity and truth. Physical laws offer us peace of mind. We gain a concrete satisfaction knowing that we understand the facts of a given phenomenon.
Indeed, this is why I strayed away from the humanities when selecting my major in college. I knew from high school English that there were few concrete answers in that subject. I wanted to major in something that had solutions, answers, and facts.
It turns out that if we go far enough into physics, we end up at the edge of human knowledge. Things become soft and difficult. In subjecting ourselves to this limit of human knowledge we become humble in not knowing. Concrete answers elude us, just as they do in the soft sciences.
Reaching this point in the hard sciences requires that we challenge ourselves. If we accept Newtonian physics as truth, we will not see, that in fact, it is only an approximation of truth.
The laws that Isaac Newton discovered can be thought as a “rules of thumb.” They are applicable and valid in many everyday situations, but not all situations.
Coming to understand that there is a truth beyond the current truth brings us to wonder. It allows us to get in touch with ignorance once again.
Complacency breeds arrogance. Arrogance is a state of mind that prevents us from seeing a better approximation of truth. In arrogance, “We think we know it all” — yet, in fact, we are blind to the facts.
Studying physics allows us to learn about ourselves — to see that we do not and cannot know everything. Studying physics — the right way — puts us in touch with our ignorance.
When we say, “I don’t know,” we are expressing ignorance. When we have pushed ourselves to the limit of human understanding, we find ourselves in a state of mind that much of humanity once stood — in ignorance of our world.
Certainly we don’t want to go back to a place where we are sacrificing virgins because we believe doing so will prevent poor weather. I’m suggesting that we find ignorance once again by going the other direction, towards deeper understanding of our world. It is through learning that we can find that feeling of ignorance once again.
We desperately need to feel ignorance. Right now many of us are stuck thinking “we know it all.” “It’s those dumb shits over there that are causing us problems.” This might be true. The ignorance of others does cause us problems, but what do we do about it?
How do we persuade others that they are mistaken?
Some people will not listen. They are arrogant. They are dogmatic. They are blind.
This can be extremely frustrating. How do we come to terms with this situation?
It can bring us to tears knowing that others are harming us, and nothing that we do seems to change them.
So we walk away. We move to another location where those people can do less harm to us.
Moving to a better place is one of the most important lessons that I’ve learned in my life. Packing up and moving to another place can be transformative. It can make all the difference in your outlook, your safety, and your well-being.
The most difficult aspect of this process might be accepting the fact that we cannot change people. Giving up on them is not easy. We have invested in this place and these people. Giving up means starting over again, and perhaps regressing to a more primitive place.
Another difficult aspect of this process is knowing where to go. How can you improve your situation on net? If you improve one aspect of your life by moving to another place you might worsen another aspect of your life.
This reminds us of Thomas Sowell’s maxim, “There are no solutions; only trade-offs.” But the truth is that we can (sometimes) find better solutions. We can better optimize our lives.
This is not easy to do however. It can involve a great deal of dialogue with our family members. Again, each of us is ignorant with respect to certain things. Each of us has weaknesses. Through dialogue we can come to understand our weaknesses and improve our thinking. Perhaps the reason we are in this place (that we no longer want to be) is because we didn’t understand something, either about the world or about ourselves.
Optimizing your life can be a difficult process especially when you’re married with children. It requires coordination with others. It requires optimizing for the family.
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How do we avoid the pitfall of Sowell’s Maxim, thinking there are no better solutions? Doing so involves faith and pursuing trade-offs that improve our lives overall. This is what we mean by solution. A solution leads us to a net benefit — an overall better place.
In order to find this solution it helps to understand the optimization process.
What is optimization? And why is life-optimization so difficult?
Let’s take a detour into physics for a moment.
David Griffith provides us with a helpful analogy for understanding optimization in his chapter “Elementary particles.” In describing the atom and their nuclei he says, “If a nucleus has too few neutrons, or too many, it will be radioactive, and spontaneously disintegrate.” He then describes the different types of radioactive decay. Skipping to the end his section on nuclei we find the following analogy:
Just as water, left to its own devices, flows downhill to the lowest accessible point, neutrons and protons would "like" to be in the most tightly bound state. But, like water caught in an isolated mountain lake, most of them are (at present) stuck in other nuclei. If something comes along to shake things up, they will tend to head in the direction of iron and nickel. Heavier nuclei break apart, in a process called fission, and lighter nuclei join together in fusion.
…Fission is the mechanism at work in nuclear power plants and the atomic bomb.
Fusion occurs when two light nuclei merge, making a heavier nucleus.
…Because nuclei are positively charged, they repel one another, and it is hard to squeeze them together close enough to fuse. One solution is to heat the sample up to fantastic temperatures, and let random collisions do the job. This is what happens in the Sun; it is also the process at work in hydrogen bombs. Fusion would be a great source of energy, if it weren’t so difficult to contain and control something that hot.
In nature, what provides the energy to heat matter to these fantastic temperatures? Matter and its gravity. The force of gravity causes matter to fall inward (toward the center of gravity). Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, the gravitational potential energy of a system is converted to thermal1 energy, causing the matter to warm up. When the material reaches around 10 million Kelvin, fusion begins, and “a star is born.”
Remember that energy and matter are related to each other by the square of the speed of light:
Note that energy and matter are not the same thing.
Griffith writes:
…when practitioners of Chinese medicine speak of “fields of energy,” or physicists (who ought to know better) tell you that “mass is energy,” they are misusing language. Mass doesn’t even have the same units as energy, and I don’t know what the good doctors are talking about, but it certainly isn’t energy, in the technical sense.
If you ask ChatGPT, “How is matter converted into energy?” — she will tell you about fission and fusion. In both cases, the resulting mass is slightly less than the beginning mass. The difference in mass, called the mass defect, is converted to energy according to Einstein’s equation.
In order to convert matter into energy using solar fusion we need enough matter floating around in space. All matter is attracted to itself according to Isaac Newton’s law of universal law of gravitation formulated in 1687:
It states that “any two objects attract one another with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance (r) between them.”
There are some questions here that we don’t have good answers for.
Where did the energy come from that created the matter around us?
Where did the matter come from that created the energy around us?
Some will point to the theory of the Big Bang, but that doesn’t answer the question. What came before the Big Bang?
We don’t know. We don’t know where the energy or matter came from, or how long it has existed? We have evidence that points to a Big Bang, but this doesn’t tell me where the energy in the Big Bang came from. Or maybe you know more than me?
That should bring us all to a place of ignorance, and hence intellectual humility. We are brought closer to our primitive, ancestral state of mind, and the questions that our ancestors once pondered. For example, “What is the nature of the world we live in?”
Our answers to this question relied on religious narratives; what we might call guesswork. But these guesses were the best science of the time.
And, at least we could formulate questions and guesses.
Prior to this state of mind, we had an even more primitive mind. One that could not even formulate questions, let alone guesses. We had sensory patterns of the various forms of energy and matter: light, heat, sound, gravity, food, and combustible matter; water, air, fire, rocks, plants, and other animals.
But putting all of these patterns together, to make sense out of them took a long time: millions, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of years.
All of that time we were ignorant of what we now know. All of that time we wondered, “How can we improve our lives?”
We first had to understand what these patterns were. We now know. We live on a planet, in a solar system, in a galaxy, and in a universe. We are one of many other living creatures on earth, and maybe, probably one of many planets containing life.
But we are still ignorant as to the full truth of the universe, and we will probably never know its true nature — certainly not in my lifetime.
Now back to the problem of optimization.
Imagine that you are a human that lives in water. You can only travel from one body of water to another. If you leave the water, you will die.
Currently you are living in a high mountain lake, and you seek to improve your life through optimization. The lower you go in elevation the better off you are.
The optimal state for you is the lowest elevation. So you swim around this lake looking for its lowest point and eventually you find it, but you realize that you can go no deeper. The ground is blocking you.
Eventually you die, but your children live on, and eventually they find an outlet to the lake, and they follow this outlet down a river, to another lake. Life is better in this lake, but they cannot find a way out of this lake, and they die.
But eventually their kids find a way out of that lake, and they follow this new river downstream to an even better lake.
This is similar to the process of optimization that we face in our lives. We want to improve our lives, but we often don’t know which way to swim. In fact, we aren’t even sure there is an outlet to the lake that would take us to a better place.
We don’t even know if there is a better place.
We do know that looking for a better place takes time and energy, which of course, are scarce. We must spend most of our time hunting, gathering and fishing. In our free time, we can look for a better place, but this requires coordination from other humans, and we don’t all agree on where to look, or even, what better is.
In fact, this human-in-water analogy is simplistic in comparison to the problem we face in optimizing our lives. It has one variable that we seek to optimize: down is better. That’s easy in comparison to our true human reality.
We are not like human-fish, just seeking lower elevation. Hope is enough to keep those human-fish searching for a lower elevation. Faith and diligence is surely required for those human-fish, but eventually they will bottom-out.
Those that bottom-out before reaching the ocean’s bottom will never know that there is a better place to be. We might feel sorry for those human-fish that never make it to the lowest level — the optimal state. Some of us will find the ocean and the deep trenches within the oceans. Others will be caught in a landlocked sea.
No, our optimization is much more difficult. Not only can we move to another place, which is difficult enough, but we can improve that place. And there are a multitude of merit variables that we might optimize to produce that best overall situation for ourselves.
We don’t know what combination of these merit variables produces the best overall optimum. Sometimes we just have to try things out and see how the new situation fits.
Along the way there are difficult questions. When should we give up improving one place, knowing that progress is waning? How much time should we spend searching for a new place, hoping that we can find a lower optimum, and not knowing that any such place exists?
This is the problem of local and global optima. We only know of our local optima and we can make those local optima better and worse, but we don’t know if there is a better global optimum. We don’t know if it’s a waste of time to search for a better global optimum. We don’t know how to “shake things up” to reach such global optimum. We are like a human-fish wondering if there is a better place, but never really knowing of our unique global optimum. Everyone, of course has a different global optimum.
In his 1979 book, What Should Economists Do? James Buchanan writes:
Man wants liberty to become the man he wants to become. He does so precisely because he does not know what man he will want to become in time…. Man does not want liberty in order to maximize his utility, or that of the society of which he is a part. He wants liberty to become the man he wants to become.
Without liberty we don’t have the opportunity to pursue the global optimum.
And even if we have liberty, we don’t know what the global minimum is, where it might be if it exists, or how to find it. We are aware of the local optima, and we wonder if there is a better optimum. When we find a better optimum, we wonder: “Is this as good as it gets?”
We don’t know if there are better overall solutions, but we need liberty and faith in order to find out. Are we trapped in a high mountain lake? Have we reached the ocean yet? Have we found the trench at the bottom of the ocean?
Certainly, there are other planets in other solar systems to explore, if we can reach them. What direction might we point our spaceship? How could we preserve our DNA until we get there? And how could we bring our DNA back to life once there?
Would life on another planet be better than life on earth? If so, why? Perhaps we could have more freedom there. Similar to how the English colonists in the New World improved their lives. They had religious freedom, and from this freedom, they found better optima.
We’re living with the progression of those optima today. We’re aware of various local optima in our vicinity. For me, California is currently a worse local optimum than North Carolina, but I wonder, how could I do better for my family? Am I currently at my global optimum in terms of location?
Perhaps Seasteading offers a better optimum?
Unlikely. I’ve explored that space in thought and it doesn’t seem to offer a better optimum.
For now I’m not looking to move. Moving to North Carolina, away from California brought us to a better place. We have a range of better local optima here it seems. Finding these local optima is a process. Life is process of discovery. We don’t know where the best solutions are, and certainly if we did, it would get awfully crowded there. It might even lead to a fusion reaction.
Maybe the purpose of life is to avoid the catastrophic consequences that eventually result from gravitational pull. Do we allow ourselves to get sucked into a black hole, or do we blast off in a spaceship in search of a new galaxy? Maybe love is a form of anti-gravity.
And other forms of energy.