Profundity

"We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation."

"I am a part of all that I have met."

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."

So, I've been idly wondering about why the most profound-sounding statements often have no real meaning. Here's why:

Learning things is fun. Specifically, that moment when you realize that you understand something is fun - or it would be if you could pin it down. In my experience, it usually takes quite a while to get from almost understanding something to fully understanding it, and a lot of that process isn't all that entertaining.

But somewhere at the beginning, when you still only almost understand it, is the moment when you realize that you are about to understand whatever it is. At that point, well, you know what's coming next, and it's pretty exciting. That's the best place to be, and that's where meaningless quotations can take you. Meaningless quotations are great because they seem like they are describing something that is fundamentally true yet was hidden from your understanding. They make you feel like you nearly understand those secret truths.

In reality, what they are expressing is either some obvious idea that you already know, or some utter nonsense. But they work because the obscurity of their messages makes them seem like new ideas. They take you to the point of near-comprehension not by leading you to the edge of new knowledge, but by dressing up an old edge as something different.

Let's take the above quotes, which I picked pretty much at random from Google, as examples:

"We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation."

So, this is using a subtle redefinition of "treachery" from its usual implication of intent, to make the statement that "people make a lot of mistakes" seem like a new idea.

"I am a part of all that I have met."

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, this must be some meaning of the word "am" that I was not previously aware of. It's the same deal as the last one - the meaning of words is warped a bit to make this ("people interact with stuff") seem like a new idea. By the way, I'm not blaming whoever originally said or wrote these things. It's the people who repeat those words because they seem profound who are at fault.

"Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it."

Let me just say that I find it amusing that this is my randomly-picked last quote. (By the way, this one is tricking your mind by making you agree with the obvious first statement, thus making the second statement seem new to you because it sounds kind of like it opposes the first one. (Not you specifically, but whoever thought it was a good idea to post this on the internet. (I don't think I will ever get tired of nested parentheses. :))))

How To Exchange Money With Your Alternate Selves

Do you have more money than you need? Perhaps you've been the victim of some particularly good luck. Perhaps you spend all your time working, and don't have time to spend the money. Or maybe you're dead and don't really need any of it anymore.

You might think you should give this money to friends, family, or charity... but perhaps you should consider giving it to a less fortunate version of yourself instead. How is this possible, you ask? Well, it is slightly complicated but definitely within the capabilities of current technology. Let's walk through an example. Say you've just inherited a great deal of money from your rich uncle, who flipped a coin to decide whether you or your cousin would get it. As you may know, the marginal value of wealth decreases the more you have. Do you really need $6 million? Isn't $3 million enough? It is, and this is why you may be inclined to give some of that money to the alternate you - the one who lives in the universe where your cousin won the money.

Sending money between universes is tricky. Since they are closed systems, they are subject to rules about conservation of energy and all that. So for the transfer to work, you need to find someone in the other universe who wants to send an equal amount of money in the other direction. This is often difficult, but luckily not too hard in this case: your alternate cousin has the same problem as you (too much money)! Now you just need to negotiate a deal with your alternate cousin, who is unfortunately currently in an alternate universe. Well, that's inconvenient.

The trick here is bring in an intermediary, a third party to communicate with both of you. A good choice is your past self - specifically your past self from before the coin flip. Your past self has the ability to send messages to both your present and the alternate present. Additionally, your cousin may wish to have his or her own past self represent them. All that's left at this point is to negotiate the exact terms. (Since you both know it's a 50/50 shot, this should be pretty simple, I hope.)

However, there are a couple more complicated cases worth investigating. First, what if you don't know the likelihood of various presents? Maybe you are living in a world where a certain party won some parliamentary elections, and you just know they're going to cause massive devaluation of your currency. So you want to send the money to your alternate self who is living under a different government, because it will literally be worth more to that you. Well, you immediately run into a problem, because you don't know the ratio of presents with the crappy government to presents with the good government. And to extrapolate, your negotiations with your business partner in the alternate situation are going to be based on guesses. If the pair of you end up overestimating the prevalence of the bad government, then you will end up sending out less money than you predicted, and receiving more. Meanwhile your counterpart will be losing money! So naturally, all parties involved have incentives to exaggerate their own situation's ubiquity. Often, if you (well, your past self) is the one proposing the deal, your counterpart will be suspicious that you have some inside knowledge of the ratio. There's not much you can do about this. You'll basically have to pay a premium proportional to your potential ability to have that knowledge. Think of it as an interuniversal tariff.

There's one other situation worth discussing, and that is death. Wouldn't it be useful to be able to will your money to your alternate selves? Well, there is one problem with this, and it is also related to the universe ratios. But instead of being an issue of uncertainty, it's an issue of being able to influence the outcome. Making a deal like this, where you send your money from presents where you are dead to presents where you're alive, requires someone else to be receieving money in the presents in which you're dead. This makes them want to increase the prevalence of universes which kind of suck from your perspective, due to your deceased status. Let's just say this is not a good incentive to give somebody.

I hope this quick guide gives you a basic idea of how you can organize your finances across multiple presents. And I also hope that you can think of some other interesting events you could transfer money over. The sky is really the limit here. You could even base it one something silly like the outcome of a horse race. (Yeah, I know. Good luck finding someone will take the other end of that deal!)

Have fun.