• Find sources you trust (the most) and consciously account for their biases – a glaringly obvious example: don’t read Krugman in the New York Times and think he doesn’t have a worldview to sell. Differentiate between reporting mostly facts (e.g. Bloomberg) vs. ‘news’ as (political) entertainment (e.g. Krugman, also nearly every daily paper). Place emphasis on sources that often openly declare their views if relevant (e.g. The Economist).
• Don’t buy into explanations of why things happened; reporters have mostly no clue either, it’s often just conjecture - just try to absorb the facts and try to make up your own mind (have you ever read ‘explanations’ of why flash crashs happened? It’s hilarious).
• Read a huge variety of sources, so that biases tend to cancel each other out – especially on politically charged topics, you need to get different viewpoints (e.g. read The New Yorker and The Weekly Standard).
• Make use of modern media – there is excellent reporting out there, you just have to find it (e.g. Felix Salmon for financial markets and business reporting), also use aggregators (e.g. Hacker News, Abnormal Returns; Long Form; Metafilter etc.), also read out-of-mainstream sources (the little crazy ones, e.g. Zero Hedge).
• Try an information diet as recommended by Rolf Dobelli or Nicholas Nassim Taleb, find out why it doesn’t work for you, but still improve your reading habits.

Why do I feel the need to point all that out? Because I endorse those organizations anyway, for what they stand for and for what they try to accomplish. I couldn’t care less about what others may think about donating to those institutions. I think they deserve more attention and I hope to help them get to that – with all of the ten readers a month I have..

So whom did I give to (in ascending order)?

Wikileaks

They may not care about journalists in jail. They may not help journalists who are under observation by secret police forces. But they ‘produce’ scoops. They have freed more documents who were kept secret and are often – supposedly – relevant to national security than any other publication. And they have been a game-changer for freeing (mostly governmental) information from confidentiality in general; though their fundraising methods have been controversial.

There is a ridiculous notion inherent in classifying documents produced by the government (and paid for by the people) from view by the public, which Wikileaks helps expose. After the Obama administration decided not to declassify millions of documents previously scheduled for that and after censorship laws gaining governmental (and sometimes even public) support in ever more countries, here is to hoping that Wikileaks grows stronger by the day.

Please donate to Wikileaks!

TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is – to my limited knowledge – the best encryption program available to a regular user which works like a charm. With an ever-growing support of censorship approaches and laws worldwide, I believe it to be of utmost importance that anyone is able to secure his own privacy from prying eyes. I am an ardent believer that the debate about security in our current times is framed wrongly. There is a false premise in the prevailing mass belief that there is either ‘security or privacy’. The issue at hand is simple: It’s (a false sense of) security vs liberty. But no state whatsoever, not even a totalitarian one, can guarantee absolute safety for its citizens from all enemies. The more you let the debate be defined by fear, the more liberties you give away. This is why I stand for liberty any day and am ready to accept the trade-off: a more ‘dangerous’ world, but one with great liberties.

Please donate to TrueCrypt!

Zero Hedge

Every time someone gets called a “full-blown cult hero” and a conspiracy theorist, they are either completely nuts or spot on. In the case of the anonymous finance group blog Zero Hedge, my bet is on the latter. Sure, their posts are often controversial and there seems to be some kind of ardent followership. But that’s just perception. Are they controversial because they are perceived as being anti-mainstream or are their arguments controversial on their merits? Who truly looks at them without preconceived notions?

I think contrarian voices deserve to be supported in most cases, especially in an industry exhibiting as much conformity as the finance industry does. Zero Hedge not only exposed malpractice in the finance industry but balances out the financial information one can get by providing a contrarian viewpoint. The finance world would be a worse place without Zero Hedge.

Please donate to Zero Hedge!

The Seasteading Institute

In the words of Peter Thiel, “in our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms – from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy’.” One form of escape from obviously corrupted politics lies in the possibility of settling the oceans. The underlying concept of encouraging competition between governments in order to achieve better forms of government by providing people the means to chose between them, deserves as much support as it can get. Charter Cities are another important means to achieve this.

I wholeheartedly believe humanity will be better of if people can choose between governments at free will. It will provide much-needed encouragement to start experimenting. Democracy in its recent form is quite new in an historical context. There has to be something better than that. But the only way to find out is to start providing people the possibility to choose.

Please donate to The Seasteading Institute!

Every time someone experiences a mishap or failure, something astounding happens: People who have no business lecturing and criticising the very people who went out and at least tried do it anyway. Chairmen of political parties, authors or entrepreneurs nearly get slayed by dumbasses every time something doesn’t go according to plan, or, as you might call it, reality happens.

Why is that so? It’s just that much easier to criticise and to condemn than to think for your own and let other people be.

Criticising others makes you feel superior and you gain emotional satisfaction from the fact that others fail. It lets you off the hook for not even trying to make your own dreams come true. It makes you feel good in playing it safe.

Intellectually, it’s also that much easier. Just take a look at Gawker or Techcrunch (or many other often snarky publications). Have you ever seen them consistently reporting on people’s successes or investigating thoroughly? They don’t because you can ridicule and critique in a much shorter time and it sells that much better. Gawker doesn’t sell news or gossip. It sells emotional satisfaction.

It’s intellectually lazy and emotionally dishonest to stick with criticising others. You can do so much better. You learn, you grow, you keep your self-respect. All by just keeping your mouth shut more often and thinking before opinionating on any topic you don’t know enough about to provide real value. As Marcus Aurelis said, “the best response is not to be like that”.

Critical thinking is an oxymoron. What passes for critical thinking these days is often intellectually lazy, snarky witticism in disguise. You need knowledge to warrant thinking.

I think it’s just a totally different argument to make – at least in these spheres, where I think you have to differentiate between concept and adoption. Either you critique the original idea or you argue that its adoption is flawed. But to combine those two arguments just makes your critique seem lazy and to be a foregone conclusion.

Judging ideas on their merit is, of course, much more difficult as you need to be intimately aware of their context and of the creator’s intentions. This requirement for deep understanding not only makes it harder to argue your point, but also exposes your incapability in case you go ahead nonetheless.

Apparently though, it’s much easier to get published by mainstream publications if you just make shallow and sloppy arguments which sound good and go nicely with pre-existing world views.

People lie all the time. Even scientists do it. The Economist recently concluded an article about the (dis-) honesty of scientists with the fitting observation that “scientists are as human as everyone else”. This doesn’t help much with trusting humanity to deal with an ever-growing list of obstacles in our future’s way.

I fell into the trap of the confirmation bias: focus on seeing problems and soon you will feel overwhelmed by it all. But it’s absolutely ridiculous to worry about the future of humanity – it sure as hell doesn’t rest on my shoulders alone.

When you read about the ancient life, you recognize that there may exist a tendency in yourself to take yourself much too seriously.

This is why reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations helps so much – and why I consider it the greatest book I have ever read. It’s puts your life in perspective. You are awed by the recognition that everything is transitory.

Humanity hasn’t changed that much at all. In the words of Aurelius:

The age of Vespasian, for example. People doing the exact same things: marrying, raising children, getting sick, dying, waging war, throwing parties, doing business, farming, flattering, boasting, distrusting, plotting, hoping others will die, complaining about their own lives, falling in love, putting away money, seeking high office and power. And that life they led is nowhere to be found.

There is vanity to be found in constantly worrying. You have to be able to let it go to achieve a peaceful state of mind. It doesn’t ultimately matter whether or not we solve the problems of our times – they will soon be forgotten anyway.

What matters though, is how we go about it. How we live whilst hammering away at the opportunities (disguised as problems). As Aurelius says,

It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character.

Not everyone may have an audience. But at least it ‘s now theoretically possible for ever more people around the world to be heard. Thankfully, this does not depend on whether an intelligentsia, or a ruling class considers an individual’s voice ‘worthy’ or not.

There is a distinct problem, though: Too much writing on the internet is deemed to be ‘great‘ or ‘interesting‘. I am as guilty of this as the next guy.

But not everything is great. Giving everyone the means to publish whatever they want leads to an explosion of superficial thinking. I think people basically tend to mimic the desires of others and they tend to cluster around popular opinions.

And nearly everyone falls prey to overestimating their own knowledge and insight. You see lots of articles and comments on stuff people are obviously not qualified to comment on. Yet they think they are qualified to have an opinion and criticize others. Again, I am as guilty of this as anyone.

I’m trying to get better at stiffling that impulse and only write about things I truly understand.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the internet has achieved wonderful things. We have to advance our current state of technology to help us deal with the ever growing amount of information. We need to filter stuff we, individually, consider to be superfluous, unqualified writing or plain noise. And this hasn’t happened yet and we’re still far from being good enough at it.

Until then, I see us drowning in a sea of information of – at best – mixed quality.

Pick your bias.

Afterwards, we tend to like our past choices better than any other choice available at the time – we overestimate how happy we are going to be with it and frame every thought in a way that makes us support our former assumptions.

Throw things away and remember to think about it in a week. You won’t miss it much.

As it is said in Fight Club, the things you used to own, now they own you – never let that happen. 

In everything you do, discount your biases and aim for rationality above all.

But how to give back? How to enrich the world with value? I do not want to add to the amount of nonsense and superfluous things already out there.

What it ultimately comes down to, is feeling obliged to thank the world for granting me existence in a time of prosperity and providing me with endless opportunities. I have thought about how to give back and how to provide value to the world and its inhabitants for years.

Still, I am no wiser. 

Nonetheless, I consider two steps vital to figuring out how to give back:

Keep training my discipline of perception

The doctrine of the three “disciplines” is central to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

Gregory Hays writes in his introduction to his translation of Meditations:

“The discipline of perception requires that we maintain absolute objectivity of thought: that we see things dispassionately for what they are. (…)

It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.”

For me it’s is all about differentiating between face-value and the deeper meaning of things. I still have a lot to learn here but hope to gain sufficient ability in it which hopefully will enable me to identify possibilities to further mankind’s good.

Start acting on my knowledge

“Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.” Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 6.51

My well-being depends on what I do. If you have been training your whole life to sincerely give back, there will be a time where you are called upon to do so.

I consider that time to start now.

Honestly, I am still not any wiser how to give back. I know, though, that it all comes down to what I do. If I focus on that, I will not get lost.

As Gilbert & Wilson state, our previews (i.e. mental simulations of future events) are only as good as the memories on which they are based.

There are several sources of error in this. We tend to base our previews on the most accessible rather than the most typical of all memories. Ironically, the most available memories are often of the least typical events. Furthermore, recent experiences are especially available in our memory.

These errors can have enormous consequences. Just think of the current financial meltdown. Whenever you talk to finance professionals, they are often quick to express real and honest surprise as to the extent of the crisis now unfolding. No one could have seen that coming, they say. 

Although one should not let them off the hook to easily – for some have truly been blissfully ignorant in chasing bonuses -, a case can be made that they truly did not foresee these consequences of their actions. Let’s not consider how realistic that assessment is.

Instead, let us focus on another issue which I deem to be even more important: what will society as a whole learn from the recent crisis?

Considering human psychology and judgement errors, we apparently will make much too dire predictions of the future in the short term as we overestimate the importance of the crisis. But when things have picked up again, we are also very likely to forget much about the causes for the crisis and the lessons that should be learned from it.

The bottom line is this: We will probably learn a lot in the short time, a bit in the medium term but will remain ignorant to the enormous risks inherent in our current (financial / institutional / political) system in the long term.

In order to learn from our mistakes and to not let all the current hurting be in vain, society has to initiate a mechanism to not let us forget.