Blog – Page 5 – Luke Lindsley

The Art of Mediocrity

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“You will achieve your dreams. You are unique and special. You can change the world.” As much as celebrities and our parents love to tell us these things, reality tends to be a bit more honest: We’re all pretty average at most things.

This is rather self-evident when you think about it. If you gathered everyone in the world to play a game of golf, you’d have Tiger Woods at the top 1% of the spectrum and a guy who couldn’t hit the ball off the tee somewhere near the bottom. Most of us would fall somewhere in the middle.

This is true for everything in life. Some of us are born with a high capacity to learn. Others are born with great physical skills. And some of us even have superhuman genes. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. Some of us are born with mental and physical disabilities that limit the facets of daily living. Others are just naturally unskilled at certain things. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.

For me, my strengths include having the artistic ability to write interesting songs and a deep understanding of philosophical issues. I excel at these things because I’ve dedicated a lot of time and energy into them. Through countless repetitions and exercises I’ve been able to learn and expand my knowledge in these areas.

Nevertheless, it’s important to remember we are all limited in the time and energy we have in this world. If you’re like most people, you spend your attention on a few important things: Your social life, school, work, a significant other and maybe a couple of hobbies. However, this comes at a price. The truth is that the more things you value in life, the less time you will have to improve the quality of what’s most significant. Quality and quantity are always a trade off. Attention is zero sum.

So what about those exceptional people? The people that are the very best at what they do? The Michael Jordans, Tom Bradys, and Paul McCartneys of the world? These people are 1) incredibly lucky and 2) focus almost purely on quality. #1 is obvious. For #2, all of their energy must be focused on their specific discipline so that they can maintain being the very best at what they do.

This means they must neglect the quantity of many other areas in their life. This is true for all successful elites regardless of the distorted perceptions you may have about them. If you want to be the best in any specific discipline, you must sacrifice the opportunity cost of nearly everything else to achieve it. And even then, it’ll require the luck of environmental circumstance.

So to the average person out there(which is most of you), here’s a few words of advice:

Accept that you must make sacrifices in order to excel in the things you care about the most. Accept that other people must do the same. Accept that even then, this doesn’t guarantee success. Accept the luck of being born with your specific genes, environment and opportunities which have led to this very moment. Accept the art of mediocrity- a part of being human.

Blog

Ethics and Economic Justice

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“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have been reading David Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons the past couple of months and I must say, it’s been a wild ride. I recommend it to anyone that subscribes to utilitarian ethics and having their world views pushed to the limit. It may seem farfetched to some, but I suspect Parfit will go down as one of the greats in the history of philosophy.

The book covers a variety of loosely related topics, but I want to focus on the type of utilitarianism he concludes from his arguments: Prioritarianism. Prioritarianism holds that the goodness of an outcome is a function of overall well being (Utilitarianism) with extra weight given to worse off individuals. Let’s look at an example to sharpen the distinction between the two.

Imagine a two-person society: its only members are Jim and Pam. Jim has an extremely high level of well-being, is rich, and lives a blissful life. Pam, by contrast, has an extremely low level of well-being, is in extreme poverty, and lives a hellish life.

Now imagine that we have some free resources ($10,000 for example) that we may distribute to the members of this society as we see fit. Under normal utilitarian circumstances, the $10,000 will generate more well-being for Pam than it will for Jim. Thus giving the money to Pam would be the morally correct choice. However, let’s imagine slightly different circumstances.

Jim, for whatever reason, even though he is already filthy rich and very well-off, would gain just as much well-being by receiving the $10,000 as Pam would. Suddenly utilitarians don’t have a preference on who gets the money because both Jim and Pam’s well-being would increase the same. Prioritarianism on the other hand would give the money to Pam, because she is worse off than Jim.

Furthermore, prioritarianism doesn’t act just as a tie breaker for well-being, sometimes it favors priority over a small amount of well-being in order to emphasize compassion. So if Jim were to somehow gain more well-being from the money than Pam, Prioritarianism still wouldn’t necessarily favor him. It is important to note that the amount of well-being traded for priority is arbitrary, but in most cases we can rely on common sense. But why is that?

Well there is a good reason: There are diminishing returns on the value of goods and money. Would Jim be able to tell the difference between having 1 billion dollars and 1.00001 billion dollars? No, he wouldn’t have a clue. In fact there have even been studies, including a prominent one by Princeton University Researchers, that money doesn’t buy happiness after one earns $75000 a year.

It is estimated that it is around this point where money is no longer a primary concern in ones life. People can focus on health, relationships and leisure’s without the stress of paying the bills at the end of the month, which is a real fear for millions of Americans.

If you subscribe to prioritarianism ethics, a certain amount of wealth redistribution becomes fundamental to a healthy and moral society. In a society where Walmart’s Walton family (one of many examples) owns more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined, millions of which are living in poverty and struggling to survive, can a rational person really argue that this disparity in wealth is ethical?

Welfare state capitalism may currently be the best economic model, but its inability to redistribute wealth fairly will continue to raise questions on how it can be improved. Economic justice isn’t about equality. It’s about removing the gross excess at the top to help prevent suffering for those at the bottom.

Blog

The Ethics of Torture

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I am a utilitarian and a consequentialist. I believe we should try and maximize the well being of conscious creatures and minimize suffering. We can do this by measuring outcomes, which gives us the ability to distinguish between different moral actions and determine what is right and wrong.

I suspect most people would agree with my views at first glance, but many people grow cautious the second they hear any number of thought experiments. The ticking time bomb is a perfect example. For those that are unfamiliar, here it is:

“Suppose that a person with knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack, that will kill many people, is in the hands of the authorities and that he will disclose the information needed to prevent the attack only if he is tortured. Should he be tortured?”

In 99% of cases torture is wrong and immoral, but within the ticking time bomb scenario torture becomes ethically permissible in a utilitarian and consequentialist worldview.

In this thought experiment we know the outcomes of the scenario: If we torture the man, we will receive information on the bomb and save lives. If we don’t torture the man, the bomb will go off and people will die. The consequences of not torturing the man is worse then torturing the man because it increases suffering for more people.

What many people do not understand, however, is that just because this thought experiment is ethically permissible, doesn’t mean torture is practical in the real world. Why? It’s simple: in the thought experiment we have perfect information and outcomes, but in the real world there is a degree of uncertainty and randomness.

In the real world, the man could lie, not give the information, or give the information too late to be useful. The bomb may not even be real. Because of uncertainty, because we cannot know the outcomes, we don’t have the ability to distinguish whether torturing someone will actually save peoples lives. What we do know, however, is that torture will increase suffering for the individual.

Furthermore, I believe the majority of tortures are employed not as a method of extracting information, but as a method of terrorizing and subjugating a population. This enables state forces to control the establishment of innocence or guilt and the entire legal process altogether. In this context, and in 99% of cases, torture is immoral.

For sake of argument however, let’s say the government is utilitarian and they are considering torturing a man for the sole reason of saving lives and maximizing human well being. This would be just like the ticking time bomb scenario, but within the real world and limited information.

The question then becomes something different: Is the chance of maximizing well being for many people morally superior to increasing suffering for an individual? This is a difficult question because what is right and wrong depends entirely on whether the individual will give up the information in time. Moral luck is at play in this situation.

My intuition tells me the answer is no, but the higher the number of lives that are at risk, the more appealing yes becomes. Where do you draw the line? 10 lives? 100 lives? 1000 lives? An entire city? At some point, not torturing the individual seems to become immoral even if it’s only a chance to save them. And I would argue that it is.

So yes, the chance of maximizing well being for many people (at some arbitrary point) is morally superior to increasing suffering for an individual. This means that torture can be ethical given very specific circumstances. Discussion surrounding torture will continue for a long time, but I don’t think the world is as black and white as it appears.

Songwriting

3 Tips For Writing Stronger Melodies

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Writing a strong melody is arguably the most important aspect in creating a popular song. It also happens to be one of the most difficult. Often times this is one of the key reasons that prevents a good band or musician from reaching the limelight and their full potential.

One of the best ways to improve your own melodies is by looking at and identifying the melodic characteristics of some of the most popular songs over the last century. By dissecting these songs we can begin to understand why those melodies are so damn good and catchy.

After performing surgery on dozens of songs over the years I’ve come across a few consistencies between many of them. Here are 3 tips for writing stronger melodies:

1) Use Wide Interval Leaps

One of the most classic examples of using wide interval leaps is found in the song Somewhere Over The Rainbow. Notice the interval between the first two notes of the word “somewhere.” This interval is actually a perfect octave. This makes the melody stand out right away because it’s unexpected to the listener. Using wide interval leaps tastefully can help compliment the smaller leaps and turn an average melody into an outstanding one. This is a great technique to make the chorus shine, but don’t be afraid to experiment with it in other parts of your songs.

2) Develop a Rhythmic Theme

Paul McCartney is the master of developing rhythmic themes. One of my favorite examples of this is The Beatles song Eleanor Rigby. Listen to the theme of the main phrase of the tune (“Eleanor Rigby picks up the..”). You’ll notice it’s broken up into an unusual length of 5 measures that uses a pattern of “1 + 3 + 1.” This strange combination gives the songs melody a very unique and stylistic feel. You can incorporate this technique into your own song by breaking up your melody into simple pieces and experimenting with various combinations in different orders.

3) Implement Color Tones

Color tones are pitches added to major or minor triads to extend the shades of either the major or minor tonality. In a C triad for example, a color tone might be Cmaj7 or Cmaj9. By adding color tones to your melody, it provides richness to the song. One of the most popular examples of this is Radiohead’s High and Dry. You can hear the color tone note when the singer sings the word “high” during the chorus. The note isn’t within the chord that is being played, but it doesn’t sound like the note is wrong either. By adding color tones to your melodies, you can add a lot of texture which makes the song come to life.

Hopefully these tips were of some use to you. Cheers and happy writing!

Essays

What Does A Utopia Look Like?

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From its inception in ancient literature, to the popular movies and novels of today, humans have tried to imagine what a perfect society would look like. And not surprisingly, it’s been a difficult task. Often times these perfect societies portrayed in works of fiction and movies turn out to be dystopias in disguise. Novels such as Brave New World, 1984 and A Clockwork Orange and movies such as The Matrix, Minority Report and Equilibrium all share this feature.

Another characteristic these stories share is that they all took great advancements in technology for these societies to become a reality. And eerily enough, it’s hard not to see the resemblance these works of art share with what is actually taking place in the real world.

Technology will continue to advance and with it comes a plethora of possibilities. Can we use this technology to create a utopia? Is a utopia even possible? Or will this attempt at a perfect society lead to a dystopia in disguise in which so many works of fiction have imagined?

To me, a utopia would provide happiness to everyone that belongs in it. And ideally, to describe the opposite of Sam Harris’s “worst possible misery for everyone” in his book The Moral Landscape, a utopia would attempt to achieve the best possible happiness for everyone. Let’s call it BPHFE.

It’s incredibly difficult to imagine how BPHFE would be implemented into a society. Brave New World attempts to do this by stupefying the lower castes while they’re young, and providing them with plenty of drugs and recreational sex when they’re older. And while you must admit this would increase pleasure, there is a sense of manipulation in the way it is achieved. Besides, happiness doesn’t have to revolve only around drugs and sex.

I believe curiosity is a vital ingredient towards achieving BPHFE. It is curiosity that allows us to keep advancing as a civilization through our willingness to learn and experience new things in life. In order to achieve a society filled with curious people (and therefore BPHFE), we must do the opposite of the society in Brave New World: educate the masses.

A BPHFE utopia would have individuals involved in occupations that would spark their own unique passion and interests. Perhaps the technology of the future will have some type of test to best determine our natural characteristics. Ideally, this would allow every individual to flourish by increasing their curiosity freely and unrestrained.

Advanced machines and computers would keep society functioning. They would provide humans with everything on the bottom two layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. These technologies could also produce goods to enrich the lives of the people for the highest layers.

This society would embrace minimalism. Money wouldn’t exist. People could focus purely on their passions without fear, anxiety and hatred. Possessions would have little value or meaning. Life would consist of love, curiosity and experiences; and that’s all we would need.

My idea of a utopia surely has its flaws, but perhaps the concept is not entirely unfathomable. The question remains: What does a utopia look like? Stay curious.

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