
The fundamental philosophy behind EffectiveLI is simple:
Science is the best way to understand anything.
Automation is the best way to achieve anything, often with technology.
EffectiveLI is best way to live, by using the best science and technology to fully understand and automate life's well-being.
That's it.
While the first two are already pretty well established, I'll take a little time to explain our approach to each.
1. Science: The Best Way to Understand
Humanity isn't the only species that struggles to understand itself and its environment. From single celled organisms to complex social species, all living things can sense, understand, and react to the conditions of their environments.
However, humanity is the only species to invent an entire methodology and industry for discovering, categorizing, and improving our knowledge of reality; processes and methods that have grown and matured over thousands of years.
This search for and verification of knowledge has a long history, and science to date has no rival in this endeavor.
However, science continues to have 3 problems:
Communication
Application
Direction
Science Communication is an old problem with two sides. First, actual scientific publications are often both expensive to access and unnecessarily complicated. The second form distributes 'scientific information' through unscientific and informal media, like TV News, social media, and word of mouth. These tend to overcome the accessibility problem, but reduce the information to a format that often loses both the value of the information and the trust of the audience.
The second Application problem arises from science's struggle to take specialized discoveries, and find relevant applications. This is a problem within the field of discovery, and in generalizing the application to other fields.
Regarding Direction, science is a ship without a rudder. Beyond the discovering and improvement of knowledge, science does not, as part of its fundamental process, prioritize anything in particular. As a result, it is a 'blind tool', who's value or moral compass resides with its user.
Solving these problems of scientific communication, application, and direction are foundational to finding an approach that works better to improve lives.
Luckily, individual organization have found successful ways to address them. We borrow these successes, and combine them into our overall methodology, in part 3.
2. Automation: The Best Way to Achieve
"Technology" and "Automation" are words we will use with very specific meanings, so they are worth spending a moment to explain.
Humanity's idea of technology has changed much over time. "Technology" is usually used to identify "the latest technology", which today would be digital electronics, like smart phones, smart devices, drones, and VR.
However, if you wait 5 years, what was "the latest tech" is now "old tech". Equally, the new, innovative technology from our childhood is ancient.
Now, to broaden this perspective and see how this will apply on a larger timescale:
If you could jump in a time machine, and travel back in time, depending on when you stopped "the latest technology" would include things like:
Rockets
Airplanes
Cars
Air conditioning
Plastic
Electricity
Books
Iron
Cities
The wheel
Grass huts
Clay pots
Fire
Clothes, and
Sharp rocks
If we defined "technology" more consistently over time, it would be:
"non-living physical items, that have been modified to serve a function"
Using this definition, while a sharp rock sitting on the ground for 100 million years is just a rock, once it's picked up to use to crack open nuts, it becomes "technology", even if simple (or picked up by an otter).
"Automation" is a familiar word and idea, that usually means: "a task or function can be completed independently of intervention by someone, either fully or in part."
This isn't a definition we disagree or deviate from theoretically. However "automation" is usually only applied and used when associated with modern technology. If we apply it more consistently across all types of "automated" events, it would look more like:
Familiar Automation:
Ordering machines at McDonalds that automate the ordering process, and remove the need for Front Register staff.
Farm equipment programmed with GPS and self driving that plant, maintain, and harvest crops without machine operators.
A smart thermostat that automatically adjusts the temperature settings based on a variety of changing variables.
Unfamiliar Automation:
"Autonomic" bodily functions, like breathing, heart beating, and digestion. While not automated through "technology", these (and many other) bodily functions are in fact automated, and require no deliberate input to function.
Physics is fully automated. The movement of electrons, the fabric of space-time, the pull of gravity, and movement of objects in space are all automated.
From a consumers perspective, production of most items purchased is a fully automated, magical black box. All the consumer needs is enough desire and money.
Defining technology and automation this way are more consistent, and have broader implications, for our lives individually, as well as for our species.
3. EffectiveLI: The Best Way to Live
Understanding life is not a prerequisite to living.
We are just born one day, and spend many years learning basic tasks and knowledge before achieving basic competence (learning to speak, walk, eat, bathe, cook, add, read, think, etc).
As a result, humanity has invented a lot of ideas and approaches for how to live well. They always involve the following parts:
A model defining a "good life"
A method to achieve it
A way to scale to the entire intended group
Unfortunately, most of these ideas and approaches are hundreds or thousands of years old. And so:
Are not based on the latest science
Don't apply recent technological advances, and
Rarely account for a global scale, let alone a multi-planet concept of the inhabited universe.
To find a better option, we've accounted for all these, and created a new model and method for achieving a good life, that does scale without adjustment or accuracy loss, and constantly updates with the best science and technology as they become available.
To date, if we desire this approach, our best option is to be socio-economically lucky, find a good job, and stay academically current across several very different specialties, like philosophy, history, ethics, business, medicine, literature, science, art, entertainment, and technology.
But it doesn't need to be so complex, costly, and inaccessible.
We don't need to be experts, or guess when making important life decisions.
Living a good life can be understood, measured, and managed with a high degree of precision and accuracy, regardless of factors.
This would allow us to then:
Apply it across industries consistently and accurately
Improve our precision and confidence in management
Realize huge resource and cost savings from inaccuracy and redundancy
Actually improve our achievement of helping people and the world
Begin fully automating it's management
So, how does it actually work?
Definitions and Models of Life
The first step is to update our definitions, model, and calculation to be scientific, measureable, predictably precise, and accurate across the full scope of our target audience.
Since our target audience is, at least for applicability, everyone, we need our definitions and models to be equally valid and accurate across space, time, and subject.
Meaning, if I got in a time machine and randomly arrived at a time and place, the same definitions and models would apply accurately to everyone I came across.
We have a few scientific and theoretical models that already do this, that allow us to borrow from them: 'numbers' and the periodic table of 'elements',
"Numbers' and 'elements' are practical theories that are both universal, and cover a wide range of variable changes.
That means:
Numbers are universal - meaning that 2 + 2 = 4, no matter the language, location in space-time, or any other attributes
Elements are universal - meaning that an atom with 1 proton and 1 electron will generally behave the same way, under the same conditions, regardless of what we call it, or where it's located in space-time
Numbers account for change through variables - meaning, we can build perfectly valid numerical equations that include constantly shifting variables, while maintaining a high degree of accuracy. The "temperature outside" is a good example. While this is constantly changing moment to moment, and is unique from place to place, we can put a thermometer anywhere and accurately read the temperature for that moment and time.
Elements account for change through variables - While the periodic table and certain conditions of atomic states don't vary from element to element, we can also combine elements into a wide variety of arrangements, making molecules, consumer products, and astronomic structures. The variability doesn't negate the underlying rules of the elements themselves, despite the high degree of variability in structure and size.
So, the hard sciences (math, physics, and biology) become practical guides for how to proceed.
What make these hard sciences is their 'discrete and measurable' variables and formulas. So for us to do the same for 'living a good life', we need models and variables to define and summarize our lives.
We already have idea and words for these. Examples:
"How's it going?" ... "Good"
"The world is going to hell"
"We need to end poverty, and suffering"
"According to the Happiness Index, this is the 3rd happiest place on earth"
However, while we can all commonly assess and grade our lives without much effort, and there are several attempts to model the goodness of life more accurately, we don't yet have a model to accurately understand, model, and predict this.
Hence, the development of the EffectiveLI method.
As the earlier statement alluded to "EffectiveLI is best way to live, by using the best science and technology to fully understand and automate life's well-being".
Well-Being is the term we use to summarize the state of a person's life over a period of time.
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