"When
I was a little boy, my father told me to always listen to my heart.
When
I was a big boy, my father told me that only money counts.
The
wind blows and breaks the weak trees, the wind blows and pets the strong trees.
The most important thing is to be strong."
This
is a free translation of the "Kiedy byłem małym chłopcem" ("When
I was a little boy") song by the famous polish blues band Breakout. This
great piece really puzzles my children: which advice is the right one, why did
the father lie at some point? Let's take a closer look at all three advices
with a little help of physical and cognitive sciences, but we'll start in the
reverse order.
3. The most important thing is to be
strong
The
weak are meat the strong do eat. Being strong is a basic principle of life, we
were shaped by the evolution to maximize our chances of survival and
reproduction, otherwise we wouldn't be here. So that's it, the end of the song
presents the ultimate wisdom, which can also be applied to the companies or the
nations and help us mentally endure during the bad times.
Well,
not so fast, there are some catches. First of all being strong can lead to an
arms race, stifling the cooperation and possibly leading to a risky
confrontation, it also consumes an energy, which we'll examine later on.
Secondly it doesn't change our fate, which is death, so maybe the resistance is
futile. Even if we come up with a recipe for immortality, the stars will burn
out and the whole Universe will become cold and inhabitable, we can't win with an
entropy.
2. Only money counts
Money
makes the world go round. This saying depicts the role of the money in our
society, which is an equivalent of the energy in physics, nothing happens
without it. Connection between the money and the energy is more than symbolic,
because for example we need the money to buy a fuel or an electricity, and
without them all the present social structures would die, just like a living
creature without a food. So focusing on the money (or the energy in general)
seems like a very good advice.
Life
needs the energy to fight with the entropy, but the energy comes from the
outside world, making life a predator. Becoming stronger in order to grab more
energy creates an addiction to the higher energy needs, which can backfire when
the environment changes and the energy supply becomes short. That’s why the
nature doesn’t blindly seek for more, but rather reach some equilibrium and
minimize the energy consumption where possible.
1. Always listen to your heart
There
seems to be a more precious resource than the energy, which is our limited
time. We can spend the time to get more energy, but we can’t buy the time back.
Think about it for a while, you can even measure with a stopwatch what really
matters in your life. Here we reach our first advice, listen to your heart to
know what really matters. It may seem a bit cheesy or sentimental, but it has
another strong justification. Every second you process a huge amount of data
from your senses. Most of this information is discarded and the emotions filter
what gets attention, what gets analyzed and remembered, which is very efficient
and saves a lot of energy. We can even think of ourselves as the patterns of
neurons getting excited by the certain inputs.
Listening
to the emotions which provide the optimal default hints for our specie to
survive and reproduce in the Stone Age may not always be the best in the modern
times. Evolution never optimized us for a precise reception of the reality, we
get it as a side effect to a degree in which it helps us to survive and
reproduce at the minimal energy costs, keep this in mind and don’t treat your
world image too literally. Our genes didn’t have enough time to adapt to the
abundance of food, to the lack of most dangers, to the longer lifespan and to
the complexity of the modern world, instead our cognition is full of biases,
which make us vulnerable and are ruthlessly abused by the marketing folks. Of
course we can rely on the science for the better hints and practice Buddhist
like discipline to retain a better control of our emotional life, but it’s very
difficult as those things are so deeply wired in our brains.
Reading between the lines
After
analyzing all three advices we can see that none of them is perfect, they all
have the strong bases, but can fail us in the certain situations, they can also
produce either similar or contradictory hints. Father didn’t lie, things are
just more complicated. There are no golden rules and there can’t be, because it
all depends on both our abilities and the external conditions. What used to
work for some great person, probably won’t work for us, because we are
different and the world has already changed since then, otherwise everybody
would simply do it. Luck is an important ingredient of all great successes,
because the right abilities must meet the right conditions at the right moment,
the world may not be technologically or socially ready for your great start-up
or it can be already too late, because the competition is too fierce.
Fortunately we don’t have to depend on the luck, but should rather help it by
adapting to the changing environment conditions, which happens to be a
definition of an intelligence.
Intelligence
Even
a behavior of a simple creature fleeing from a danger and seeking the
opportunities is considered intelligent and our capacities are much bigger. We
can adjust our patterns of behavior, we can predict the changes instead of
being surprised by them, we can even change the environment to better suit us.
It may all sound so simple, but is actually the most difficult thing in the
world, life is the art of making choices. First difficulty comes from the fact
that we can even choose what we want to optimize. If you don’t believe in some
divine powers, then there are no objective values and the whole meaning is just
local and subjectively created by the individuals or the society. It’s even
worse, different people represent different values, which you have to take into
account when optimizing for your own values, and each person including you can
have a conflict among their values. Now let’s add the complexity of the
external world and we can imagine the scale of the problem. I really admire how
our simplified thinking often leads to the surprisingly good results, but
sometimes it fails miserably, in such cases we can only adapt again and again. There
is an interesting alternative definition of the intelligence, which is
maximizing your choice options. This may come at some cost, but in the long run
should allow for a better choice and avoid reaching a dead-end, where you’ll no
longer be able to adapt. This sounds familiar to the notion of freedom, but they
are not always the same.
Cooperation
Our
specie excels in a cooperation. We have defeated the Neanderthals by
outnumbering them, even though they were stronger and smarter, but the bigger
brain and more muscles required more energy and the same area of land could
feed a smaller group. Cooperation of similar yet diverse individuals have many
benefits: common problems get better solutions as more people work on them or
some specialize in them, resources are used more efficiently when they can be
shared, risk is minimized when people help each other. Contrary to the animals,
which only trust their own herd, we also trust the strangers and can form the
groups as big as the society, which can be compared to a meta-organism or a
human hive. So maybe the final advice should be to join or create the best
groups?
Being
a group member comes at the cost of freedom, but can actually increase your
choice options as the whole group has more possibilities. On the other hand
being an outcast requires you to be more self-sufficient rather than specialized
or managing, which can be beneficial when the whole group is in trouble.
Conclusion
My
advice for the children is to adapt using the available information and other advices
as the good hints. Don’t regret your choices, because they were the best what
you could come up with at the given moment, failure is simply a part of a trial
and error process, and if you don’t like the outcomes adapt again…