After Peterson’s book, many people wrote their list of 12 rules for life. Since I disliked most of the guru-like virtue ethics provided by Peterson, here is my list:

Metarule 0. Reflect upon and work to improve epistemic and practical judgment in order to improve this meta-goal itself, this list below and better achieve anything.

Rule 1. Beware and question rules and guides.

Most of the time rules are useful tools that make it easier to navigate the complex world you live in, however since rules almost always oversimplify reality, by blindly following them chances are you will be misguided.

Also if taken too seriously and followed single-mindedly rules might turn out to be indirectly self-defeating – if someone tries to achieve some aims, these aims will be, on the whole, worse achieved by following the rule. In other words, some aims can be achieved only indirectly, as a by-product of other activities.

Furthermore, rules provide a framework, they put you in a box that constrains your imagination, after a while when they become a second nature to you, it is difficult to notice that you are in the box or to see out of it.

Rule 1a. Beware oversimplified representations of the world.

When it comes to big complex topics the devil is almost always in the details which are most of the time overwhelming and unknown. Our cognitive representation of the situation is almost always oversimplified model of how things are, so chances are it will lead us astray.

Rule 2: Do not fool yourself. Accept how things are, the faster you sync your mind with how things are the better you will handle the given situation.

What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.

And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.

-Eugene Gendlin

Rule 2a. Do a complete search. Do not seek to argue for one side or another, for if you knew your destination, you would already be there.

Before you accept your or someone’s argument, do a complete search if you are not limited by time: check how much the premises are backed by evidence, check if the conclusion follows from them, try to deliberately search for relevant evidence that is omitted, check for unjustified presumptions, try to produce possible alternative explanations. Also find the folks who disagree with this argument understand their position fully, do the same process with their arguments.

Rule 3. Know thy self – set up an evidence-based identity that will serve as default reference point of view while making important evaluations and decisions.



Our evaluation of things depends on our reference point of view, which often is arbitrary and not relevant to the given context, this reference point of view depends on our current mental model of ourselves, the current social situation, our current status in life, our career, how others view us, what we care about, what others care about, what was recently going through our mind, our physiological state, our emotive state, and many other things that might be irrelevant for the things that we are evaluating at the moment.

So first identify yourself as what you really are on the appropriate level of explanation that is most relevant to the function of this identity reference point. Example instead of identifying with some political group, nationality, class, job title identify as homo sapiens, molded by natural and sexual selection with given psychological, mechanisms, a human being, with limited cognitive capacities, prone to vices such as selfishness, weakness of will and biases such as motivated reasoning, groupthink and overconfidence. When you will have a more accurate self-model use it as a default reference point of view when evaluating or deciding anything. This will probably outperform all the other arbitrary reference points of view.

Rule 4. Beware myopic narrow perspective.

When we humans reflect about how we should live, what we should do and what matters most to us, we are answering these questions from the perspective of our current point of view. We are trapped in the present time, unable to see the bigger lifetime perspective.

This horizontal line represents your lifetime, most often your perspective is inside the vertical bars:

_______|_|_________

In most mundane cases this is a proper perspective, however when it comes to questions as those above this is too narrow point of view, which might hurt your lifetime prospects. In other words you might sell your lifetime cheaply. The obsession with personal goals such as, successful career, seeking profit, status and pleasure might not be the most effective ways to spend your limited lifetime.

For questions of this importance it is necessary to approach them from a lifetime point of view.

Visualization of taking a lifetime perspective:

|________________|

Our mind’s reasoning apparatus does not limit us, we can go further and adapt even a larger time perspective.

Larger time perspective:

The horizontal line is your lifetime

The distance between the vertical bars represents the time perspective:

| ___ |

With this perspective in mind you can put more weight on what really matters, and avoid shortsighted cheap or even meaningless goals. Here is an excerpt that illustrates this perspective from Marcus Aurelius:

He who has a vehement desire for posthumous fame does not consider that every one of those who remember him will himself also die very soon; then again also they who have succeeded them, until the whole remembrance shall have been extinguished as it is transmitted through men who foolishly admire and perish. But suppose that those who will remember are even immortal, and that the remembrance will be immortal, what then is this to thee? And I say not what is it to the dead, but what is it to the living? What is praise except indeed so far as it has a certain utility? For thou now rejectest unseasonably the gift of nature, clinging to something else…

Rule 5. Give proper weight to epistemic superiors – Use elite commonsense as a prior.

When it comes to a certain topic believe what you think a broad coalition of cognitive elite/trustworthy people/experts would believe if they were trying to have accurate views and they had access to your evidence.



Rule 6. Accept and give appropriate weight to the values of your parochial nature, but strive toward the normative utilitarian value function – impartial welfare maximization.

Since our parochial nature is undeniable, we must take account of it into our moral equation, if we want to have a useful mental instrument that will guide us during our moral decision making and not just unreachable ideal of obscure moral philosophers.

If we want to make utilitarianism more realistic and practical we should make it scalable. This means that as responsibility rises a person should become more utilitarian. By responsibility I mean, the given stakes in the given situation. As the given stakes in the situation rise a person should be more reluctant to act according to his egoistic or commonsense morality. The responsibility can vary from personal situations with low stakes -where a person might act on non-utilitarian selfish grounds (sending your child to a better private school instead of donating to charity) to high responsibility situations where a person must decide on utilitarian impartial grounds, (not imposing tariffs knowing that this will hurt many people even though you might benefit politically by that act).

This scalability might be part of our commonsense morality.

For example, you might categorically oppose the torture of a human being due to relatively small stakes (for example if he needs to inform you what is the location of a hostage).

But I doubt that you will categorically oppose the torture of a human being in a situation with big stakes (for example if he needs to inform you what is the location of the ticking nuclear bomb planted in Manhattan).

In other words, the average Joe does not need to act according to U principles in his everyday life. Even if he tries he probably will not improve anything relative to his status quo commonsense morality. But when it comes to billionaires, policymakers and politicians they should strive toward impartial welfare maximization.

Rule 7. Question your nature and the things you intrinsically value.

We are biological organisms running on specialized programs molded by blind non-random evolutionary forces. Since we are aware of this, we can use reason to break off of our habitual hedonic treadmills and pursue our higher order values instead. Or as Kovac puts it:

The notion of happiness as limitless pleasure runs counter to a fundamental biological fact: biological sensing systems are designed to respond to changes in the incoming stimuli, rather than to the magnitude of a stimulus. In the presence of a maintained stimulus, receptor sensitivity decreases, which is known as sensory accommodation. In humans, sensory accommodation has its counterpart in ‘hedonic accommodation’. Analogous with sensory accommodation, the emotional responses to a pleasant stimulus also weaken or completely cease, if a stimulus remains constant. This phenomenon has been called the hedonic treadmill. Positive emotions serve as a lure to engage in certain behaviours, but they cease once the need or want driving them has been satisfied. However, the memory of the pleasant moment remains and we want to experience it again. In this sense, pain and pleasure are not symmetrical, nor is the absence of both pain and pleasure a normal state. The normal state is to be sensitive to pain and to yearn for pleasure. We have been molded by evolution not to be happy, but to act on the phantasm of happiness. Indeed the debate about the motivating strengths of positive and negative emotions has gone on for as long as humankind has been able to express itself.

– Ladislav Kováč

Rule 8. Apply global consequentialism – Evaluate everything by the expected value of its consequences.

Freedom, equality, rights, moral rules and character virtues have only instrumental value, that depends on how much good they produce relative to other possible alternatives. Always choose the alternative that has the greatest expected good.

Rule 9. Write down insights, ideas, and other important information.

Our memories are far from perfect, important information might never get into your long-term memory or will never get recalled from your long-term memory storage. (Use note taking software to easily organize or search by keyword your notes). In other words, when you can, take precaution of your cognitive limitations.

Rule 10. Grow, contribute to and rely on your network. Also, use WWW collective superintelligence as your network on steroids.

You are few clicks away from a collective superintelligence – billions of people with different kind of experiences and knowledge.

-Do not be afraid or ashamed to ask thoughtful questions to your network or to the WWW, especially askReddit or ask on Quora.

-Visit the subreddits that correspond to the topic that interests you and set up filters.

-Create twitter lists each dedicated to a different topic with the relevant cognitive elite.

Rule 11. Take an impartial temporal perspective of yourself to avoid weakness of will, hyperbolic discounting and temporal preference reversals.

Imagine that you called for a meeting between you and your all possible future selves to negotiate about things that matter to you as a group in general. You all know that each self is morally responsible for all the future selves after it since the actions of the current self will affect the welfare of all the others that come after it. Furthermore, each self is morally responsible to anticipate and prevent possible harmful actions of future selves, since these will hurt the other future selves that will come after them. (all possible future selves are modeled by your all previous data of yourself + possible changes in the future + best hypothesis of how would you probably react in a specific situation under specific emotional and social influences + average data of how human beings react in a specific situation under specific emotional and social influences).

After reflecting upon this meeting try to take possible precautions against your current or future selves. Here are six pre-commitment strategies by Jon Elster:

-eliminating the choice of the early reward from the feasible set

-imposing a penalty on the choice of the early reward

-adding a premium for the choice of the delayed reward

-imposing a delay between the choice and the actual delivery of the reward

-avoiding cues that might trigger preference reversal

-avoiding information that might cause you to choose the immediate reward.

Rule 12. Take care of yourself



This is not some bullshit tree-hugger advice. Taking care of your health is instrumental necessity. Ambitious people often don’t take care of themselves following a rule that they think maximizes the probability of achieving their aims. But, in the long run, this will probably make them burn out and ultimately be less successful. If you notice this last rule as the first rule tries to take the precaution against flawed rules that might undermine your prospects.