The Secret Master Plan

I'm building a platform where to sell my online courses on. I call it "Software Engineering Boss - where you learn software engineering like a boss"

I don't like to take myself too seriously 😂

You can follow progress with the platform here and daily progress here.

This leads us to a few irrationalities in our recent past. A hundred years ago, only people with physical injuries or disabilities did any kind of purposeful physical exercise, and if you were seen purposefully running for the sake of running you were thought of a being insane or at least weird. Sixty years ago there were ads claiming doctors preferred Camels (https://youtu.be/YAB04wkCxqw) and doctors used to smoke in their offices. My grandpa used to smoke right before bedtime inside his room. This is nothing more than an indication of a cultural blind spot.

But not all cultural blind spots are the same. Some threaten to eliminate all of humanity if not corrected. At this moment in human history, we face existential threats like global warming, pandemics, nuclear war, meteorites, artificial general intelligence, and supervolcanoes. If we decide to not invest in space exploration, it is just a matter of time before life on Earth is wiped out. Something like a meteorite or a supervolcano is not a matter of if - it's a matter of when.

If we don't want to become a one-planet grave, we need to become a multi-planetary species and invest in space exploration.

The other cultural blind spot is around the same topic, death, at the individual level. Imagine a world where people lived for as long as they wanted and where you would grow wiser and stronger over time. Then an alien lands on that planet and brings along with him a brilliant idea: old age and consequently forced death. Do you think people would welcome that idea? Of course not. However, if being hit in the head with a club once a day for the rest of your life was inevitable too, we would rationalize away the awfulness of that predicament with justifications for why it's great to be hit in the head with clubs.

A good illustration from Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, chapter 39: Pretending to be Wise part 1.
"Tell me, Harry," said the Headmaster, "why do Dark Wizards fear death so greatly?"
"Er," said Harry, "sorry, I've got to back the Dark Wizards on that one."
"What?" said Dumbledore.
"Death is bad," said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. "Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem."
The Headmaster was staring at him as though he'd just turned into a cat.
"Okay," said Harry, "let me put it this way. Do you want to die? Because if so, there's this Muggle thing called a suicide prevention hotline -"
"When it is time," the old wizard said quietly. "Not before. I would never seek to hasten the day, nor seek to refuse it when it comes."
Harry was frowning sternly. "That doesn't sound like you have a very strong will to live, Headmaster!"
"Harry..." The old wizard's voice was starting to sound a little helpless; and he had paced to a spot where his silver beard, unnoticed, had drifted into a crystalline glass goldfish bowl and was slowly taking on a greenish tinge that crept up the hairs. "I think I may have not made myself clear. Dark Wizards are not eager to live. They fear death. They do not reach up toward the sun's light, but flee the coming of night into infinitely darker caverns of their own making, without moon or stars. It is not life they desire, but immortality; and they are so driven to grasp at it that they will sacrifice their very souls! Do you want to live forever, Harry?"
"Yes, and so do you," said Harry. "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don't want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don't want to live forever, it means you want to die. You've got to do one or the other... I'm not getting through here, am I."
The two cultures stared at each other across a vast gap of incommensurability.

And this finally, brings me to The Master Plan:

1. Create useful products that are highly profitable
2. Use that money to build a premium brain backup system
3. Use that money to build an affordable brain backup system
4. Use that money to build an even more affordable brain backup system
   While doing the above, develop a system to restore the backups.

Don't tell anyone.

Let's define a fact as being a theory in which we hold 100% confidence that it's true. Defined like this, there are no facts because we cannot prove that any theory is 100% correct - that would require complete knowledge about everything. We cannot prove that Newton's Laws of Motion are 100% correct for we have no rational basis for saying with absolute certainty that the next time we apply a force to an object it will move according to the equation Force = Mass * Acceleration. The best we can hope for is running the experiment again and the failure to disprove it increases our confidence that it is correct in each particular circumstance we run the experiment on. Every time we run Newton's Laws of Motion experiments, in many different circumstances, and each time the experiment fails to disprove the theory, our confidence that this theory is correct and the context in which it applies increases. If we run an experiment that repeatedly fails to disprove a theory, our confidence can increase to 99,999...%, but never to 100%.

Indeed quantum experiments disprove Newton's Laws of Motion for quantum-sized particles, effectively drawing a boundary around the context of applicability for this theory. We have near 100% (but not 100%) confidence that this theory is correct for larger than quantum objects, but not for quantum objects.

Confidence in a theory will never be 100%, but the distance between 99,999...% and 100% can be so infinitesimally small that, in practical terms we should call this theory a fact. This is a point many people do not understand. However given "facts" defined as "a theory in which we have 100% confidence" do not exist, we might as well redefine "fact" as "a theory in which we hold an extremely high, practically 100%, degree of confidence".

This leads us to an important question: if we can never know anything with absolute certainty, how does knowledge, both societal and personal, grows?

Since the scientific revolution, societies that adopted the scientific method have been growing their knowledge and, therefore, the quality of life of each individual in them. The poorest members of western society have a quality of life many times higher than a king used to have a thousand years ago. The way knowledge grows is through hard-to-vary explanations and consequent testing of those explanations. A hard-to-vary explanation is an explanation in which if you vary a part of the explanation, the prediction it makes would be different and not adapted to the phenomena it seeks to explain anymore. For example, for any given phenomenon, you could conjecture a very detailed and precise explanation that "the God of Thunder did it because he was happy" including a whole precise backstory, but this is a bad explanation because it is easily variable. You could just as easily say "the God of Wine did it because he was melancholic" (with the same or a completely different backstory) and it would still apply to whatever phenomena you are trying to explain. So precision and variability are not the same things. Precise explanations can still be bad easily variable explanations. A good explanation is one in which the details of the explanation if varied, no longer explain the phenomena.

For example, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that the change in internal energy of a system equals the heat received by the system minus the net work done by the system in the form of a state change. In equation form, the first law of thermodynamics is ΔU = Q − W. A consequence of this theory is that if you keep the pressure constant, increasing the temperature of a material will change its state from solid to liquid to gas. Conversely, a decrease in temperature will bring it from gas to liquid to solid. This theory explains why it rains when it rains, explains why it snows when it snows, and why the clouds have the shape that they have. On a cloudy day, if you look at the clouds you will notice that they seem pretty flat like they are sitting on a glass surface. This is the zone in the atmosphere where relative humidity reaches 100%. Above this zone, the air can sustain water droplets. Below this zone is cannot. Any small change in the ΔU = Q − W theory and it would no longer explain what we observe.

An important characteristic of how knowledge grows is that it grows iteratively. Before the scientific revolution we could look at an easily variable theory and say that it was completely wrong. This is not true for scientific theories. Scientific theories are never completely wrong and they grow less wrong over time. Most people in Nicolaus Copernicus's time (1473-1543) believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the Sun and planets revolved around it. Nicolau Copernicus came up with the heliocentric theory and Galileo Galilei's (1564-1642) observations strengthened the belief that Earth and all other planets revolve around the Sun in a circular motion. This explained planetary trajectories but not their speeds. Later, Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion (published between 1609 and 1619) modified the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus, replacing its circular orbits with elliptical trajectories, and explaining how planetary velocities vary. But if Kepler's laws define the motion of planets, Newton's laws define motion. Kepler's law was not completely wrong, but neither was it completely right (that would require complete knowledge about everything). Newton's laws were less wrong or, conversely, a little more right. Newton concluded that objects fall because they are pulled by Earth's gravity. Later Einstein further made this theory less wrong by hypothesizing that these objects and Earth just freely move in curved spacetime and this curvature is induced by the mass and energy of these objects.

The point here is that scientific theories grow less wrong over time because they are hard to vary - that's what makes them good explanations.