Navigating the Unknown: A Rational Approach for a Complex World

The challenge of dealing with the unknown is not limited to politics. It applies to science, personal matters, and art. Different nations and individuals have different methods of approaching the unknown. The image of Lady Justice represents a rational approach, where bias is limited and both sides of an issue are weighed. This approach is not exclusive to Western ideals but can be traced back to ancient Egypt and the concept of yin and yang in the East. In modern America, there is a question of whether we are able to objectively evaluate both sides of an issue or if we succumb to partisanship and propaganda. It is important to have institutions that promote objectivity and impartiality. Using a scale, like Lady Justice, we can evaluate arguments based on evidence and strength without claiming absolute truth. It is about making informed decisions based on the best available information. We should focus on practical details and use a scientific and philosophical approach to analyze argu The challenge of grappling with the unknown transcends politics. It's a constant in science, personal matters, and artistic endeavors. Nations and individuals have different styles or methods of confronting the unknown, making decisions, and setting policy. One method of acting or resolving the unknown, making decisions, can be symbolized with an image, the image of a lady justice. And no, just the image of a woman doesn't symbolize a concept. What she wears and uses is the key. She wears a blindfold to limit bias, and she uses a scale to weigh both sides of an issue. This encapsulates what we would call a rational approach to the unknown. Instead of following her emotions, or just picking whatever she wants, or her side, or her team, she blinds her bias with a blindfold, and uses scales to come up with a non-subjective, non-objective way to measure reality, to use something that she can measure to make her decision for her. You may be aware of her use as an ideal, as an image, for the Enlightenment, or for Western ideals, but you may not know that it's not just a Western idea. It traces back to ancient Egypt, where Matt, M-A-A-T, the goddess of wisdom, also used scales for objective measurement, emphasizing the need for impartiality or measurement over gut feeling and groupthink. Similarly, the Eastern concept of yin and yang advocates for balance between each side, like a scale, rather than defeating of one side by the other. The question for modern America is where do we fit in history? Does our society represent one that has a style of dealing with uncertainty by trying to limit our bias and look at both sides of an issue, or do we form teams and then oversimplify the other side, demonize them, succumb to partisanship, disseminate one-sided information, also known as propaganda, and try to drown out or suppress opposing views? Let's digress real quickly for those who remember what happened in Iraq, when America thought that all we needed to do is give the Iraqi people the vote, but then they fell into the two tribes. And so it was not reason, it was just our tribe against this other tribe. Who are you going to trust? Let's form a group and demonize and hate the other group. And so we learned through trial and error that it's not just the vote. It's institutions that form, that ensure that we're looking at both sides of an issue, that we're trying to be objective. Those are what is required for a society to work. But it's like we don't even know the rules. We were handed a government, but we don't know how to operate it effectively, because we don't even understand the rules of proper operation. For a scale to work, it must be used to determine which side has more substance or mass or weight than the other side, or it can be calibrated against known quantities. Scales aren't used to identify absolute or fundamental truths, but can provide accurate relativistic weight measurements at a given time. Similarly, we can critically evaluate arguments based on their strength of the evidence without claiming to possess absolute eternal truth. A key phrase would be to say, given our current understanding. Like the stock market that gives the current value of a company, these numbers don't have to mean anything concrete forever. For the current best measurement of the available performance of the pro and con data arguments and evidence, specifically what I'm advocating is that we have conclusions or beliefs or plans, and we outline all of the pro arguments and all of the con arguments. And we outline all of the pro and con sub-arguments for all of those arguments. And we run all of the arguments through a conflict resolution cost-benefit analysis where we identify if arguments are free from logical fallacy, if they have been verified to what level they have been verified, and we identify if the argument is true, relevant, or important. And we, for every decision, weigh the relative strength of the supporting and weakening arguments, just like Lady Justice does, just like the goddess of wisdom from ancient Egypt did, with a scale that pits the pro versus the con arguments, and seeking objective criteria for judgment in trying to remove our bias. Does this sound too boring, too spot on? Well, let's just measure the pro and con scores. Let's take a look back. Hannah Ardent, a Jewish-German philosopher student during the rise of Hitler, questioned whether philosophy had lost its way a long time ago. She observed that Socrates drank the poison his government told him to, without engaging in politics and fighting back for what he believed, or even for his own life. He looked down on politics as boring. She also didn't like that after his death, his student Plato failed even to try to address the sickness in a society that would kill Socrates. Instead, he ran away. He went on a journey to meditate and study the unknowable. And you say, oh, that's not true. He had said a lot of brilliant things. Well, a lot of those brilliant things are still debated to this day. And what good did any of them do us? Sure, they're great. Plato and Socrates were great people. But look at it from Hannah Ardent's standpoint. From her standpoint, those things that were never settled didn't have to happen. They turned away from politics or practical matters of what we should do. Ardent also saw her fellow students get excellent grades in philosophy for writing stupid stuff and not even seeing the problems with Hitler. She said philosophy should be concerned with the practical details of what we should do and why. She didn't like the wasted thousands of years making hardly any progress while humanity committed atrocity after atrocity with hardly any comment from philosophers who didn't think getting involved was part of their philosophy. We must be concerned with more than what decisions our society makes. It's not enough to make the right decision or to support politicians that parrot their right answers. We need them to show their math like any elementary grad student. I'm sorry, elementary student. We must be concerned with the style used to make our decisions. We must be concerned with the details of what arguments and evidence were accepted, rejected, and why. We must be concerned with what we should do and why, but we should also, we should go about these practical questions with a scientific, methodical, and philosophical style. We must use our wisdom to weigh the pros and cons of each argument and decide that we should, what we should do based on systematic, quantitative reviews of the pro and con arguments and their sub-arguments and other arguments and claims and ensure that, you know, all of these are, and other arguments and claims that the conclusions are free from logical fallacy and looks into their level of verification. Relevance and importance is true. We do not need absolute knowledge to start the process of scoring our arguments and tying our conclusions to the score of the arguments. We just need to start in a world where there's not an equal score for the belief that the world is flat as that the world is round. Those need a score based on the relative performance of the supporting and opposing evidence and arguments. We need to start scoring our beliefs and tying the score of conclusions to the strength of the evidence. We don't have to prove that the world is round, is aglobe. We just have to prove that it is more likely to be one or the other based on the cumulative pro and con evidence. Again, the stock market is a good analogy that we can use simple algorithms that measure the supply and demand and asking price for each stock to measure the relative strength of a company, which is a very complex evaluation that uses very simple algorithms. The stock market is constantly fluctuating and there's no way to predict with certainty which stocks will go up and which ones will go down. However, nothing can outperform the stock markets in a simple algorithm to identify today's best guess of the relative worth of a company. We need to take the same approach to our beliefs. You know, we can track the score over time of each belief just like a stock market price. And as new evidence comes in, it should automatically strengthen or weaken the beliefs that are built on that evidence. Again, this doesn't prove anything. It's just that when we have to act, we should look at the current best score of the supporting and weakening arguments of whichever action we have to take that looks at the relative likelihood of each cost and benefit. So again, we can make educated guesses about the best course of action in any given situation by weighing the pros and cons of each option and considering how these arguments, evidence and data stand up to systematic analysis. We are not like the dogmatic believers of simplistic solutions who say they made the right decision. And by right, they mean conservative or liberal or socialist or free market solution. We do not have to have absolute certainty in simplistic solutions. We just need to use wisdom and judgment in the right process or style. And that's why I propose a process party. Instead of a party that says, oh, I'm the big government party and I have faith that government is always going to provide the solution. Oh, I'm the small government party. I also end up spending just as much money as the big government party, but I talk about how we should be small whenever we're not in charge. But we run up just as big a deficit. Those trite solutions and simplistic recommendations aren't working. We can use data to identify and understand the different options available to us, assess the potential consequences of each option, weigh the pros and cons of each option and make informed decisions based on the information we have, the best available information. Data can help us to make better decisions in a number of ways. It can help us identify patterns and trends, identify potential biases and errors in judgment, compare different options and make informed tradeoffs, monitor and evaluate our decisions over time. It's important to know that this data is not a silver bullet. Data cannot tell us what to do. It can only provide us with information that we can use to make informed decisions. Ultimately, the decision of what we want is up to us. But if we want something, we should use the most effective method of delivering that. We shouldn't use methods that have higher cost and lower benefits to deliver the same thing that has lower cost and higher benefits. That's all I want. We stand at a crossroads. We can let information reach us through filtered channels, be it advertising campaigns, memes, interest groups, politicians that are trying to stir up anger and get reelected, intuitions, media bias or narratives, or we can take control of our destiny by employing a rational style. This involves metaphorically donning a blindfold and using a scale to weigh the relative merits of arguments and evidence. All I'm trying to advocate is a continuation of what American founding fathers started. They envisioned a system where power is accountable to reason. To uphold this vision, they implemented checks and balances, the division of power between judicial, legislative, and executive branch. They enshrined the freedom of speech and the press and representation as a way of filtering beliefs through a system where you had people with ambition on both sides fighting for their side and hopefully promoting the best ideas. Today, however, we have more tools. We have formalized cost-benefit analysis, the science of bias reduction and identification. We've come up with all sorts of identification of biases and we also have a whole field of conflict resolution taught by Harvard on how to systematically resolve conflict. So we can, all of these steps and procedures can be automated through a website that puts our arguments through a systematic detailed evaluation. Let's therefore continue their work, the founding fathers' work with our new tools of conflict resolution and confirmation bias reduction and cost-benefit analysis. So we're going to keep the same political systems. We're just going to have a new political party that supports candidates that promise to show their work. To show which arguments they accept and give scores to the pro-arguments and the con-arguments and show that the strength, that their conclusions line up with what they believe to be the stronger arguments or the arguments decide with the most evidence and the best arguments and the most likely benefits and the least likely cost. As a nation, we must remember our conduct can still reflect our core ideals, even when our future is uncertain. Whether we find ourselves in positions of weakness or power, our focus should remain on upholding democracy, the rule of law, the peaceful transition of power. If we lose, we submit and we also must remember the removal of bias and thoughtful evaluation of the pros and cons for each issue. And instead of waiting for everyone in America to become an angel and to use systematic processes, we can just make a political party that automates this process. We tried for several years to have unorganized conversations that allowed for the creation of echo chambers and my team against the other team bias. These have been well-documented on shows like The Social Dilemma. We behaved like cavemen, demonizing the other side and pretending our side was just virtuous angels. However, this was to be expected. At no point in time has disorganized interaction led to anything other than, you know, lynch mobs. Like the French Revolution, it just is always chaos. If you don't have, if you just have, you know, random groups being formed. Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when creating them. We can't convince Twitter or Facebook to use reasonable web design to ensure beliefs are put through well-organized analysis and the, we can't ensure that they create organized list of reasons to agree and disagree and that supporters of conclusion come into contact with reasons to disagree and vice versa. But we can build better forums and so that's my whole point. This rational approach aligns with the principles of democracy and offers a balanced and thoughtful way to navigate the complexities of the modern world. It calls for a collective community to objectively, reasonably debate and weigh the evidence with scores. Therefore, thereby providing a sustainable path forward in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. I hope you'll join me.