November 5th

I became Enlightened yesterday. After meditating for ten years, I finally did it! It feels amazing. This deep sense of abiding peace, with waves of satisfaction and intense levels of joy on demand. 

I don’t know for sure if it will last, so I am making this log to see what happens for future posterity and analysis.

I’m going to go back to meditating in the cave. Looking forward to writing this journal. 

December 5th

I have been sitting in complete bliss for the last month. No suffering at all during that time. Occasionally I feel hunger, physical pain, or a sense of sadness for the suffering in the world, but it does not cause suffering to me. I look at them and feel immense love for these sensations and thoughts. It is like crying at a sad movie. The emotions feel good and I do not wish to make them go away, for they, just like all of reality, are perfect just the way they are. 

January 1st

I am leaving the cave. 

I realized that I wanted to share what I have learned with others. This is interesting. I thought Enlightenment would have abolished all desire. And it has. But it has not. 

How to describe it? 

I have a desire to help the suffering, but if I fail, I will not suffer. If I simply sit in the cave, I will continue to be blissful. I will feel completely satisfied. Complete. 

So why help? Why do anything other than stare at the wall? 

It is not because of some philosophical and rational reason to help. I simply want to. The desire arises, I see it, and seeing that I will be happy either way, I decide to attempt to satisfy it. 

January 2nd

Do I desire beauty too? When I left the cave, I was blown away by the majesticness of the mountains. I was also overcome by these same emotions in the cave though. 

Everything is filled with a glowing light of beauty. So why would I want to see mountains? Do I? 

I shall have to experiment. 

January 3rd

I desire truth! I realize this is the whole function of this log. But why? Why do I want anything? This is fascinating. 

I shall have to find others who have achieved Enlightenment and see what they have discovered. Am I what happens in general? Do others have different experiences? 

January 15th

I spoke to another Enlightened One. He was sitting in a cave outside of a small Nepalese village. 

When I arrived he did not speak. He looked straight at me and did not respond. 

“Hello.” I said. “I heard you are Enlightened. I am as well and I wish to learn about your experience. When was the last time you suffered?”

He smiled beatifically at me. After a long pause he said, “Not since my Enlightenment ten years ago.”

“Wonderful! What have you done since then?”

“Nothing. I sit here and experience deep bliss and peace. Why do anything else? I have abolished all desire.”

“Then why are you speaking to me?”

“Because I still wish to survive. This is my only remaining desire. To stay alive such that I may continue experiencing True Happiness. To stay alive, I must occasionally speak to visitors, such that I may receive alms. Of course, to die is also fine. I will not suffer when it happens. I put in the absolute minimum effort to stay alive because why do more?”

“That is so interesting! I find that I still desire truth and beauty and to help suffering beings. You do not have these desires?”

He laughs, a deep belly laugh of True Mirth. “Ah, I see. You finally prove my hypothesis.”

“What’s that?” I ask, confused.

“You see, I was a neuroscientist before I began my Quest for Enlightenment. I always debated with people that the only thing that mattered was happiness, so why not go straight to the source, achieve Enlightenment and be happy no matter what? 

“But people kept disagreeing with me. They said that they cared about more than happiness. I told them they were confused. They only cared about the truth because it made them happy. If they felt happy even if they believed incorrect things, they would not try to discover the truth of the matter. They only cared about others’ suffering because to see it made them feel sad. If they never felt sad about it, they would not care. Ultimately, it’s all about happiness. 

“At first I mostly spoke to the unsophisticated who had not thought of such matters much. I felt confident in my claims. But then as I continued my studies, I came across more and more people who were exceptionally intelligent and well versed in the topic. And they still disagreed with my obviously correct conclusion! 

“I became confused myself. They were not unaware of my arguments. They could easily follow my line of thought. And yet, they still disagreed. 

“Then it hit me. Perhaps I only cared about happiness, but others cared about other things as well? Perhaps the brain is structured such that its main form of motivation is to avoid suffering and pursue happiness, but that is only one of many mechanisms. Perhaps there’s variation between people about the strength of the various mechanisms, and some have only one: happiness. And perhaps those who have only one are like those who cannot visualize things in their inner eye who assume that when people say that they can, it is merely a figure of speech, as it is for them. They have typical mind fallacy and think that since they cannot visualize, others cannot either. 

“And here you are! We are proof of this! I ceased to suffer and since then I have pursued nothing. You, on the other hand, continue to have desires despite being in a constant state of bliss. How very lovely.”

We spoke for a few more minutes, then I gave him some alms and departed. 

I had much to think about. 

I had much truth to discover, much beauty to apprehend, and many sentient beings to help. For despite having discovered Permanent and True Happiness, there were still things I wanted, and I would pursue them. 

Because life is not all about happiness to me. 

This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective. 

You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out. 

I think the biggest takeaway I had from my experience is that I am even more skeptical of survey methodologies than I was before, and I started off pretty intensely skeptical. The reasons for this is that I think that misunderstandings caused by translation, education levels, and just normal human-to-human communication errors are not only common, but the rule. I explain some things that I think might help mitigate these problems below. First I will list some examples that led to this conclusion. 

Not understanding hypotheticals. One of my main sets of questions was asking people which interventions they’d prefer. At first I started by asking people just what they’d like charities to do to help, but that was too broad. Around 90% of people could not think of anything. 

This makes sense if you think about it. Imagine somebody came up to you and asked you what charities could best do to help you. It’s not something that people have thought about much. After that I switched to asking people about paired options. At the end of this, once their minds were more primed to thinking about options, I’d ask the open ended question. 

The paired questions went along the lines of, “A charity could either pay for one person to go to university, or ten people to go to primary school. What do you want the charity to choose?”. Getting people to understand the question was very difficult, often requiring over three minutes to explain, and even then, it was unclear whether it had really been grasped. They would say things like, “They should do both” or “My children already went to primary school, so I’d ask for university.”

Not understanding in general. People did not understand the question (yet answered what they thought it meant anyways) so frequently I had to create a shorthand marking for “didn’t understand”. I would guess that this happened in 20-80% of questions depending on the person. 

People giving inconsistent answers. An extremely common problem was that people would give inconsistent answers over the course of the conversation. I’d ask them about their job before this one and they would say that they had never had a job beforehand. Later they would refer to working at another farm or as a seamstress. Since I was there I was able to go back and ask them to clarify the previous statement. However, often even then it was unclear whether I’d gotten the correct answer the third time round. 

It is also my experience that standard surveying techniques do not give surveyors the leeway or incentives to correct inconsistencies or spend a lot of time explaining the question since that would lead to less standardization. I’m not sure the benefits of standardization outweigh the cons of not being able to correct for obvious errors. 

Refusing to rate happiness. I was asking a 75 year old, illiterate woman how happy she was. First off, she said she was very happy. I asked her to rate it on a Cantril ladder, which is what is commonly used (e.g. by the Gallup Poll) in low literacy settings. It shows a ladder from 1 to 10, with a number on each rung of the ladder, showing worst to best possible life. I also drew a smiley face at the top and a sad face at the bottom, which is also common in these settings. She did not understand the question at all and refused to answer. 

Potential solutions

• Surveyor flexibility. I think perhaps giving surveyors the flexibility to go deeper into explaining questions or going back and asking about inconsistencies could help a lot. 
• Rejecting survey questions with contradictory answers. If people give inconsistent answers, reject both answers and have a smaller sample size. This might lead to results being skewed if people who are inconsistent have some other similar trait. On the other hand, it skews the answers more if they are flat out false. Or at the very least, if you have a set of two questions that are inconsistent, you have a 50% chance that the answer you use is false. You could either remove the data for that one person’s questions or you could reject all the data the person gave. I think the latter is probably overkill. 
• Explore the causes of contradictory answers. Maybe they gave contradictory answers because of something that can be fixed. Maybe one was worded poorly. Maybe they’re not actually contradictory at all but just appear to be. 
• Try a bunch of different phrasings and find the one most people understand. For the happiness rating, perhaps they just don’t like numbers, and if it was a likert scale that would be fine. For hypotheticals, make them more concrete (e.g. there’s a woman in your village with ten children. Would you prefer that a charity helps one of them go to university, or ten of them go to primary school.)
• Spend a lot more time explaining the question. If the person doesn’t seem to be understanding, spend a lot of time trying to explain it. Maybe even ask some questions that check to see whether they understood. This will add variation to how the question is asked, but at the benefit of much greater understanding. 

Of note, these issues are actually quite likely to be true in the developed world too, just (potentially) to a lesser degree. Additionally, this is less true for more objective metrics, like whether they have a dirt floor or how many cows they own.

Lastly, surveys can be extremely flawed, but this is true for virtually every method available to us. The question isn't whether it's perfectly accurate, but whether it's better than our alternatives, and the case of surveys, so far it's the best we have.

To modify Churchill's quote, science is the worst form of epistemology except for all those other forms that have been tried.

If you don’t want to miss the next installments and want to stay up to date with my research in general, you can subscribe to my newsletter here, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or my YouTube channel, where I summarize what I’m reading and convert quality written content into video and audio format. 

People both do not often interact with charities or do not realize that they are being helped by one. One of my questions while I was in Rwanda and Uganda was to ask people whether they’d ever been helped by a charity, and if so, ask them more about what they liked and didn’t like about the experience. However, probably only about 5% of people said they ever had. I even often made the question broader by asking whether they or anybody else they knew had interacted with a charity, still with the answer being no. 

I think the reason for this is twofold:

• Charities are not as big as they think they are. All of the aid in Africa amounts to a very small amount per person. I can’t find the number, but it’s in the range of less than $10 per person per year. Given this paltry amount and that it is unevenly distributed, most people will never have been privy to being helped by a charity. It’s easy to forget this when you’re in the NGO bubble, but keep in mind, business and government are massively bigger than the charity sector. 
• It’s not obvious when you’re being helped by a charity. For example, I saw an advertisement that looked like it was just selling condoms. However, when I looked closer I saw that it was funded by USAID and other donors. Most people would not know that this is a charitable intervention. Likewise, many people I had met had been refugees due to the genocide and they didn’t realize that receiving food and shelter in refugee camps during those times was from aid.

This is part of a series where I write about my stay in Rwanda and Uganda and what I learned that might be helpful from an EA perspective. 

You can see the full list of articles here, which I will add to as they come out. 

If you don’t want to miss the next installments and want to stay up to date with my research in general, you can subscribe to my newsletter here, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or my YouTube channel, where I summarize what I’m reading and convert quality written content into video and audio format. 

In which an EA goes to Africa, asks a ton of questions, then writes about it.

Here’s a series of posts summarizing what I learned and experienced:

• Why you shouldn’t trust developing world surveys, including the one I did
• I asked the extreme poor about their experience with charities and this is what they said
• What’s it like living in a benevolent dictatorship? My experience in Rwanda
• “Do you eat cats in Canada?” and other interesting conversations I had in Rwanda
• How do the poor feel about infant mortality
• Do the poor prefer university or primary education?
  
• How much meat do the rural poor eat in Rwanda

If you don’t want to miss the next installments and want to stay up to date with my research in general, you can subscribe to my newsletter here, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or my YouTube channel where I summarize what I’m reading and convert quality written content into video and audio format. 

Background

I spent a week living with a family in a rural village in Rwanda, living in their hut, working on the farm, and asking them a million strange (EA) questions, like:

• How satisfied are you with your life on a scale of one to ten?
• If you could save the life of one baby or give ten children an education, which would you do? How about one thousand children?
• Do you think pigs can feel pain?

I also spent a month and a half in Rwanda and Uganda more generally, visited a fish farm, and sat and watched a lot of pigs and chickens, much to the villagers’ bemusement. I did this ground research to get a more qualitative sense of the problems and how best to help from an EA perspective. 

Epistemic disclaimer: everything about this is incredibly uncertain. This was just me spending a month and a half in a small part of Africa. My very first post is about how very limited all of this information is. Personally, this whole trip brought me twenty steps closer to complete epistemic nihilism, but for those of you who still have hope, here it is.

I’ll tag all of the ones that refer to animal welfare so you can read or avoid those according to your preferences. 

I often see people who say they want to write more often and the solutions they come up with are basically along the lines of “you have to work through your suffering.” This is actually the case for most creative works and the general principles apply to most of them, such as painting, poetry, music, design, etc. I take a different approach than this masochistic protestant work ethic. I use my SEEP system to make it so I write more frequently, and it’s a lot more painless and indeed, actually enjoyable (that being the second E in the SEEP system). 

In summary, the approach is to: satisfice on polish, do it when you’re inspired, and make it short. A way to remember this is the acronym PISh. To get it to really stick in your head, remember an imaginary conversation with a person who says that writing is really hard and you reply, “Pish posh! Writing is delightful, dear boy!” (In this scenario you are an eccentric British writer sipping tea and talking to squirrels of course.) You could even add, “You simply have to let the habit SEEP into your life” and reuse the memorization tool I developed for the SEEP system. 

Without further ado, let’s jump into the explanation of the actual points. 

• Make it short. Write short posts! You aren’t in high school anymore where you have a certain word count you need to achieve. Some of my posts are just one or two paragraphs and that’s totally fine. The rules you think exist only exist in your head. There are no walls. Nobody will punish you and give you an F for writing something concise. In fact, people often just want short answers to questions. Don’t be that person who has five hundred words of introductory text before you get to the actual answers. Don’t be that guy. Another benefit of this is that you can sit down and pound out and publish a post in one sitting, making it much more satisfying. 
• Do it when you’re inspired. This is the opposite of what most people suggest, which is to write every day no matter what. Just grit your teeth and embrace the grind. Maybe this is necessary if you have a grand ambitious project, but even then, I’m not sure. However, if you’re writing for a hobby blog, a story you release piecemeal, or for an organization that only needs a post between once and four times a month, you can probably wait until inspiration hits. Not only will you then write faster, you’ll also enjoy it. This has two benefits. The first is that enjoying something is a good in and of itself. The second is that it makes you more likely to have positive associations with writing, making you get inspired more frequently, thus making you write more, both in the short and long term. 
• If you can, 80/20 grammar and editing. Few people like the endless process of editing again and again. If you want to retain your love of writing and do so more prolifically, sacrifice that annoying 20% of grammar and style that costs you 80% of your time. I tend to just run over my writing twice. Once after I’ve done my first draft and second after I’ve put it on the website, the latter of which is mostly for making sure the formatting didn’t do something weird. Sometimes you shouldn’t do this, such as when you’re a professional editor or in extremely high stakes writing (such as grant writing). However, for many cases, you really don’t need to strive for perfection. Sure, some people will be annoyed because you put a comma before a coordinating conjunction for a dependent clause, but honestly, life is too short. And it’s too short for the grammar Nazis too. Don't waste your life editing instead of creating, on satisfying grumpy internet trolls instead of yourself and the rest of your more laidback audience. Satisfice in life. You’ll be happier for it. 

So there you go: write short posts when you’re inspired with 80/20 grammar. The overall principles behind this being: make it short, do it when you’re excited to, and satisfice on polish. 

If you liked this post you might also like:

• SEEP
• How to always take your vitamins

Please vote on the research topics you think would help the EA community make the world a better place or suggest other ideas in the comments. Below are more details about the project. The poll is at the bottom of the post.

I'm about to go to Rwanda and other African countries for an indefinite period of time (probably on the scale of a few months) and I'm going to be trying to get a better sense of on the ground, qualitative information. The science, quantitative, and big picture/low resolution stuff I can and will be getting on the internet via reading and Skyping with people, but I want to have a qualitative, higher resolution understanding from being on the ground. I think that this will help flesh out my understanding of the problems and might unearth things that would be hard to discover from afar. 

My strategy at the moment is to focus more on explore vs exploit and while some questions I have going in, I'm trying to keep it largely exploratory so that I can follow "leads" as they happen and jump on unexpected opportunities for learning. This means I'm trying to get as big a diversity of sources of information as possible outside of what I would usually learn from (e.g. EAs, academics, etc.). So please do recommend things (or books, etc.) that you think as a typical EA I might be missing. 

I basically have no money as this will be self-financed, so nothing that costs a lot. Unless you or anyone you know is keen on funding me of course! If I had more funds I'd be able to: hire local/professional translators to understand people better who I otherwise wouldn't be able to talk to; go to more remote areas that might have a completely different way of life and set of problems than those in more accessible ones; go to a wider range of countries; spend less time and cognitive energy arranging couch surfing or losing sleep in hostel dorms; and generally be able to jump on more opportunities as they come up. I think even just $2,000 US would make a huge difference to the endeavor. If you're keen, just reach out to me over PM or at katherinexsavoie@gmail.com 

I'll be writing up a lot but not all of the results of these questions on my blog and the EA Forum to share it with relevant parties. 

This has probably been said by many others better but it’s been occurring to me so frequently I have to get it on paper (or pixels as it were). A commonality I’ve noticed about the really original characters, the people who go do great things with their lives, is that they can see that most rules people think exist don’t. There are the more usual insights, like realizing you don’t have to go to school to learn, you don’t have to get a job to make money, or that you don’t have to have a location dependent source of income. However, the general principle goes way further than that. You can start dancing during a dinner party. You can do your own science outside of academia. You can go around in a coffeeshop and ask people what their greatest fears and dreams are. You can start a spontaneous salsa dancing lesson with a stranger in a park*. The worst that will happen to you is that somebody might give you a funny look. The best is that you will do what you really want, live your life to the fullest, and actually get the respect of your community for doing so. 

Despite all of the analysis paralysis people have about choosing a career I don’t think people truly grasp how much their lives are really a blank canvas. Most of the rules you think are there are simply blinders we willingly put on because of societal expectations. However, unless you’re in a very rigid society, like living under the Taliban, most things are not actually against any enforced rules. I sometimes feel like I’m in a society of mimes behind fake walls who’ve started to believe their act and they look on in shock as I carelessly walk through all of their boundaries with no resistance. 

Can this be taught? I don’t really know. I feel like I’ve only ever really met people who either always seemed to know it or spontaneously discovered it. I think for me I learned it when I took a gap year between high school and university and learned I could learn on my own, which opened the floodgates. Maybe for some it can just be enough to read this. Perhaps purposefully trying to find and read about alternative lifestyles could be helpful. For others maybe being around people who think this way could help internalize it. You can read my post on internalizing ideas which might help, although that process works for more concrete ideas, and this one is so broad that the ideas might be harder to incorporate. 

Regardless, this is a good tool to try to add to your cognitive toolbox. It will unlock so many more paths that might lead to some much more well-being and fulfillment than you would otherwise have access to. 

*Of note, I have done all of these things. 

Many intellectuals spend a lot of time learning ideas, but how do you actually internalize them? I mean truly grok them, not merely memorize them. Here are some tactics I use that work quite well:

• Write about them (ahem). Writing and publishing what you learn helps you learn through multiple mechanisms. Firstly, it helps you clarify your thinking and can often even help you realize you don’t really understand in the first place. It’s like how writing notes helps you learn but on hyperdrive. Secondly, you publicly commit to the knowledge, making you more likely to use it. Thirdly, it will make it more likely that your friends use the concept, and if your friends are using it, it helps you remember it too. Lastly, teaching people is one of the best ways to learn. 
• If-then intentions. Also known as implementation intentions, it involves identifying a trigger which will prompt you to do a specific action. Usually this is done for habits like exercising and the like but can equally be applied to thoughts. For example, you could have a Starbucks trigger the action of counting your blessings, or have a Skype ringtone remind you to ask questions before explaining your own side. You can also use Habitica (a gamified task management system) to change thought patterns which I explain more in this other post. 
• Use memory tricks like acronyms. If you were a nerd in school, like myself, you might remember using memory techniques like making memory palace, using visualizations, and acronyms to remember things. You don’t have to reserve that for school. You can use it in your professional and personal life too. I do this all the time, such as for my systems to: make habits, feel better emotionally, and write more frequently.
• Spaced repetition. Not only can you put most things you want to internalize into a flashcard software that spaces the cards based on the best way to upload it into your long term memory (otherwise known as spaced repetition), you can do that in other ways. My favorites are to put the ideas into my google calendar so that it will send me a gmail reminder periodically (usually once every few months until it’s integrated). A friend of mine, Emerson Spartz, has set it up so that these repetitions happen on digital photo frames put in strategic places around the house which I definitely want to experiment with. 
• Environmental cues. A less high tech method than Emerson's is to put up sticky notes around the house, office, or on your computer at the beginning reminding you of various things. The drawback is that you cannot set up any sort of spaced repetition or automated cycling. Additionally, you can only use a few of these for a short period of time because if there’s too many of them or they are up for too long they’ll lose their power. 

This is hardly an exhaustive list, and there are innumerable other ways to incorporate ideas into your life. Please do let me know in the comments about any techniques that work for you! 

Other posts you might like:

• The general system to form any habit: SEEP
• How to write more and actually enjoy the process
• How to change your thought patterns
• How to always take your vitamins