misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
misc.
advice,
links,
books, and more!
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
July 17. I'm heading up to the land today, probably until the middle of next week. But I've been saving up a bunch of psychology links. First, David sends this loooong article on couples therapy, Are You There For Me? I didn't read the whole thing, but there's a great insight near the beginning: people behave terribly toward their partners, undermining the relationship, because they are "in a state of anguish and terror" about the relationship dying. Paradoxically, their fear of an event paralyzes them and makes them behave in a way that draws them toward that event.
I immediately thought of this article on what drowning really looks like. Drowning people don't splash their arms and scream, even if it would attract attention that would save their life. Instead, their nervous system forces them to use their arms and mouth to do nothing but take one more gulp of air. And of course, this reminds me of how complex systems fail to prevent collapse: when they get in a state of crisis, they focus all their energy on keeping the whole thing going just a bit longer, while sabotaging their long term survival. I believe that even if every individual in a system knows what the problem is and how to fix it, the system as a whole can still rush to its doom... especially if it's difficult for individuals to withdraw from the system and the behaviors it commands.
Moving on, two links about raising kids. The most frustrating thing about bad human behavior is that so many people think there's an easy answer: it's all caused by religion, or capitalism, or the psychopathy gene. I think the answer is so complex and difficult that we will solve teleportation before we solve ourselves. Anyway, this article debunks one easy answer, by pointing out that good parents can raise bad kids.
And here's a smart comment on a new book, asking, Are shifts in child-rearing making modern kids mean? Basically, humans are nicer than apes because many adults help raise every child, so the kids have to learn empathy to get care from a variety of different adults. Except we stopped doing that! Now kids are often raised by single adults, by overworked teachers, and by the TV and the computer. This might explain why researchers have "found a 40 percent drop in the empathy of college students over the past 30 years."
Next, a great article with a terrible title: The Perils of Introspection. Because it's really about the perils of rationalization: studies show that if you base your decisions on what you are able to explain to other people in words, you will make bad decisions, but if you don't care whether you can explain your decisions, you will make good ones. I don't know what this has to do with "introspection", since less than five percent of my own introspection is cooking up words to justify what I'm doing. Is it possible that this is the main thing that most people do inside their heads? How profoundly depressing! Imagine, if you can, what it would be like to spend hours and hours doing stuff inside your head, without ever using language. (I also wonder: does video technology train us to think in pictures more, or does it destroy our ability to think in pictures, by creating the pictures for us?)
Finally, if you're interested in "magic", in how to use your mind to influence the world of matter, then this is the most powerful magical technique I've ever seen: The Willpower Paradox. If you say "I will do this", you sabotage yourself, but what really works is to say, "Will I do this?" I suggest saying it as often as possible. The article stumbles around trying to rationally explain how this works, but if you just imagine saying both things, and feel your way through, then it becomes obvious.
July 15, late. Still very busy. Here are a few ecology/economy links: Ivan sends this excellent 1997 article, Places to Intervene in a System. It argues that the leverage point of industrial civilization, where the smallest action will produce the biggest change, is economic growth... but everyone is pushing in the wrong direction! Then there is some general stuff about how to influence systems.
This new Bill McKibben interview goes from growth to some visions of the future after economic collapse and climate change.
And Fritjof Capra explores Qualitative Growth, in which the world gets better without the numbers getting higher.
July 15. One loose end from the other day. Aaron noticed that the Groasis site, which sells the box to grow trees in the desert, has a nice set of animations about how trees grow.
July 12. A few food-related links: Pancakes from perennial grains.
Full fat dairy is good for you.
And the Waterboxx is a new device that can water trees in dry areas by collecting dew. You can order ten of them for $275, but since it's made of plastic, this would be a perfect thing to make with a large RepRap.
Update: a reader sends a similar kind of thing, about bio-conversion units to enable large numbers of black soldier fly larvae to quickly break down food waste. Second update: another reader mentions that black soldier flies "don't leave nice soil behind like worms do."
July 8. This seems to be turning into a psychology blog. After a reader challenged me on dopamine and daydreaming, it occurred to me that dopamine is not the only brain pleasure chemical. Which one is it, for example, that you get while you're dozing in the morning? Maybe serotonin? Going back to the article that started this whole subject, suppose there are two people enjoying the same porn, and their brains are responding differently, with one of them addicted to dopamine, and the other one having a much healthier response. Certainly there is both healthy sex and sex addiction, so there must also be better and worse ways to have imaginary sex, or to play World of Warcraft, or to read books.
I also stumbled on this great blog post, The default brain network and ADD. The post has many other links with more details, but basically the default network is what the brain is doing all the time when it's not doing anything else, the background "stream of consciousness". And now I'm wondering: do some default networks function well, while others function badly? Could this explain why some people use alcohol or other drugs to "stop thinking"? Personally, I'd like a drug that lets me think even more! I'm even wondering about meditation, which attempts to still the default network. Maybe this is only really valuable if your default network is not working right, and you have to shut it down to repair it.
July 7. Back in Spokane. I've just added a little update to the landblog post about installing the faucet, after a reader mentioned that instead of using a cork to seal the pipe, you can use balled-up Wonder Bread, which then breaks down on its own.
July 3. Heading up to the land soon, and when I get back I'll be very busy, so it might be more than ten days before I can post anything but links. Today I have a few more scattered loose ends on the subject that won't die. First, a neuroscience specialist comments:
The theory I hear most about the rewarding aspects of dopamine release says that dopamine encodes for prediction error: if we get a reward that we didn't predict then we get a shot of dopamine proportional to discrepancy in our prediction... if you've just gotten an unexpected reward, then you might benefit from putting your most recent experience to memory.
Anne sends this article about how Alcoholics Anonymous works, which has some stuff about dopamine, and also a speculation that AA replaces the pleasure of alcohol with the pleasure of being part of a group. (I also like the bit about the movement's open source structure.)
One way we self-administer dopamine is through daydreaming. This article, Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, explains how daydreaming is good for us.
I'm trying to put my finger on the difference between healthy and unhealthy dopamine use, and this might be a helpful rule: it's good to get it from something you do yourself (or as part of a group), and bad to get it from something that is done for you. Yes, I know you can think of exceptions. And what's more important: making decisions yourself, as in interactive computer gaming, or creating the pictures in your own head, as in reading a book?
Of course, I'm also wondering how we can feel good all the time. Here's an edited-down bit from Cory Doctorow's review of the book The Upside of Irrationality:
My favorite is the section on adaptation, the way in which both pain and delights fade down to a baseline normal. Ariely points out that if you take a break, the emotional sensation comes back with nearly full force. We have a tendency to indulge our pleasures without respite, and to take frequent breaks from things that make us miserable. This is exactly backwards. If you want to maximize your pleasure, you should trickle it into your life, with frequent breaks for your adaptive response to diminish. If you want to minimize your pain, you should continue straight through without a break, because every time you stop, your adaptive response resets and you experience the discomfort anew.
July 2. For the last few years I've been using Scroogle, a benevolent Google scraper, for the "search this site" box. But Google has changed their system so that Scroogle can no longer use it. Here's Scroogle's explanation page. So, regrettably, I've switched the search box over to Google, and the results will now have a bunch of ads and shit.
July 2. Finally found the time to do another landblog post about various things.
July 1. Some farm links. First, a fascinating permaculture forum thread on dew ponds. The idea is, if the bottom of a pond is both watertight and insulated from the temperature of the ground, it will fill itself from the air, because water will condense faster than it evaporates.
This Is Not A Weed is a smart article about urban weeds. (They won't let me direct-link to the printer-friendly version, but you can click on it.) The big idea is that "native" and "invasive" don't make any sense in the city, since it's a new kind of habitat where nothing is native. (Actually, you could say the same thing about a monoculture field or lawn.) And instead of condemning everything that we didn't put there, we can decide what's useful. Related: a forum post about a good framework for understanding weeds:
...a weed requires attention to restrict its growth or propagation, while needy plants require attention to establish and/or maintain. Within that framework, each plant should be placed so that it lies as close as possible to the center of that spectrum. The gardener does minimum work by locating each plant where it can maintain itself, but is limited by its environment.
Finally, an article on the possibility of perennial grains, which would let you plant a field of wheat only once and then harvest it every year. This would stop the loss of topsoil and save massive amounts of energy. Of course, the seed companies are not going to be funding this research.
June 30. A couple loose ends from last week: Danny sends this follow-up to Ivan Illich's critique of cars: The Social Ideology of the Motorcar. My favorite idea is in the first paragraph: that cars only work if they're a rare luxury. Personally, I wouldn't have any problem with that. That's one way I'm an anarchist and not a liberal. It's fine if some people live in castles while others live in huts; the important thing is that nobody, by lacking wealth, is in a position where they have to obey.
Also, inspired by a comment from Bruce, I have a few more thoughts about dopamine addiction. I played Civilization II -- I know what a dopamine hit feels like. And it occurs to me that I have never got that feeling from anything that this culture considers productive, useful, or admirable. People who get dopamine-addicted to productive activity are called "workaholics", and it is still not considered healthy! So I'm wondering about the evolutionary purpose of dopamine, and I'm thinking it's not supposed to be attached to something you can do all day every day, only to things that you do rarely.
June 26. Some loose ends on dopamine addiction. At the moment, through porn, games, and drugs, anyone in the industrialized world has the option to slide into unproductive pleasure. Without these technologies, some people can still do this, but only if they have very strong imaginations. In civilized culture, these are the "dreamers", and a few become great artists and philosophers. In primitive culture, these must be the people who become shamans.
Some questions: If you use your own imagination to self-administer dopamine, in what ways does this make you stronger than if you were to do the same thing with external tools? In industrial society, is it better to get pleasure through solitary daydreaming, than through engaging with other people in "useful" activities that are mostly harmful? Has the "real" stuff in our society gone so far astray that imaginary worlds are more real? (This leads to a book-length question of what "real" means, but it has something to do with connection to a larger whole.) Is there anything we get pleasure from anymore, that is beneficial on all levels? And now that everyone can get dopamine-addicted, how do you play the advantage of having a strong imagination?
June 24. An article with some sloppy thinking concealing a good point: Was the Cowardly Lion Just Masturbating Too Much? The real issue here is not sexual release, which is healthy no matter how you get it. The issue is that we are using technology to self-administer dopamine, we are getting better and better at it, and it's ruining us. This is what Scott Adams meant when he said that the holodeck will be our last invention. Anne mentions another article in the same magazine with more details on dopamine and addiction.
June 16. A disturbing and important post about how to keep someone with you forever... in a bad way, by keeping them in a constant state of crisis and hope.