Utah is a nice place to live mostly. We've got central location, independent water supplies and power. Big mountains, low population density but high urbanization, republican gun laws.... hmm, paranoid thinking.

***reboot***
....


So, what a summer it's been. My limbic system is still roiling from losing a girlfriend of two years, so the last two weeks have been a little sub-optimal. But work continues in saving the world. More and more, I'm discovering what a complicated place we live in. Longtime readers may remember a Threats file I wrote. Unfortunately due to some negative reader experience and other factors, it's not available online despite my usual views that more information is better. But the act of researching the document has lead to me spending most of this year expanding Threats-ish information about our local environment.

People ask me, if I'm not an altruist, why I care or spend time on improving the lot of others. So, let's suppose you're a member of a fairly specific population, say, legally blind people who live independently in the US. Now, individually, these people may not be very similar to each other, but their situation makes them a specific and known population. You're one of these people, and you note that legislation is about to go through that will legally restrict the activities legally blind people can embark on unaided. You obviously grab your stuff and try and stop this legislation. Why? The primary beneficiaries, in and ultimate sense, will not be you, but other people. But the attack is against a set of people whom you are a part of, and any threat against this group of poeple is a threat against you. It's only common sense.

That's the logical justification, in a crude sense, of my efforts to help people out. Improvements to the group that I belong to(humanity) are improvements to my situation. My fate is for better or for worse inextricably entangled with the present and future of humanity. We're interdependent, and very very fragile. So to survive, I must view myself as a part of a larger situation. And every little bit helps.

Now, this is all very good, but it's obviously not the initial reason I help people. I am not a rational person yet, and I dont' plan all my actions to my full predictive horizon. I am not an altruist, in an ultimate sense, because I don't feel I need to help people. But sometimes I want to. Becuase I was born into a horrific situation. Lots of people die every day, lots of people are involuntarily subjected to things every day, craploads of complexity is lost every day, wonderful novels go unwritted every day because their possible author is starving or working for food, or being beaten or shot at. This is a situation that demands rectification, even from relatively uninterested bystanders, much less orphans born in the middle of the war zone. It is entirely likely that after a successful uplift of humanity, I won't spend much time helping people out or crusading for good causes. Well, maybe, but habits die hard. And child abuse is known to instill certain repetitive behaviors in human-like minds.

So, I may not be a philosophical altruist, but I help people anyway. You can take your simple characterizations and shove them. Pragmatism may not be a pretty philosophy, but sometimes it leads to nice morally uplifting results, particularly when pragmatism is at best a weak characterization of tiny differences from human standard, rather than some big ivory formal system that outputs actions. But you already knew that. I am a pragmatist because it works. Much like I'm a rationalist because I get better results from it. They also seem to conform to a pattern of relationships I've come to associate with 'truth'. A pattern, I hasten to add, that I'm not very good at recognizing yet, but I try.

Anyway, that question aside, My work this year has been very private, which bothers me. Privacy concentrates productivity into a single point of failure, much as I hate to view myself as a risk. So little outlets like this blog, or my chatting on IRC, or emails to other people help me keep my privacy to a managable level. But of course, it's not enough. What I would really like is to be in a position where privacy was not an option. Unfortunately, given my position, so far it's the only option. So that's probably what I'll be doing the end of this year. Working on ways for my side-projects to be less private. That means, hopefully, some of my CAD designs will be going online permenantly, rather than just emailed to people. As well as some theses and other wonderful stuff. Stay tuned.