At the heart of human behavior is a paradox: the way in which we envision our perfect selves and the performance of our perfect self are rarely the same.

Much of our life is dedicated towards acting in the way in which we rationally believe we should (our guided long term interests) and how we actually behave (the short term or impulsive acts of a human in their day to day).

If we listen to most modern rationalists, they’d have us believe that rationality and psychological studies will yield insight into the way people behave. Ideally these studies would help us understand and resolve the contradiction of reason versus instinct. But how we analyze our ethics via experimentation and inquiry is lacking, especially since we limit ourselves in what sort of metrics we collect 1 and experiments we run 2

What we are trying to measure, after all, is the power of our mind over our actions (and over our desires). And most people will not admit what our desires really are, nor that we act without thinking for the majority of our day 3 4

Notes

  1. Happiness is a feeling that can be created and manipulated with no greater purpose for society, why try to maximize and reason about happiness instead of minimize suffering?

  2. Getting experiments through the ethics review board that explore the dark side of humanity is less likely than experiments that generically feel good and add nothing

  3. And how truly boring our most shameful secrets and wishes are. Perhaps we hide them because they remind us that we are mere animals

  4. Should we finally admit that we are more than half animal, how would society improve? Is it not better to believe that we have control over our actions than to allow everyone the excuse of instinct?