Ran Prieur

October 5.

2012-10-05T12:09:50Z

October 5. On yesterday's sex work subject, a reader sends a forum thread, Ask me about being a sex worker in Australia.

Another reader argues that sex work allows more autonomy because it's easier for the workers to be independent. In food service, health care, academia, and many other fields, it's much harder for workers to quit and provide the same service on their own, so management can afford to treat them worse. This raises an important issue for lefties who like government regulation: there's a trade-off between regulation that protects the consumer, and regulation (or lack of regulation) that protects the freedom of workers to be independent.

October 4.

2012-10-04T12:07:56Z

October 4. Bashing Ayn Rand is too easy, but this article, Ayn Rand vs the Pygmies, makes me look deeper. In a study of 150 hunter-gatherer societies, every one had some selfish behavior, and every one had a moral system in which sharing and cooperation were "the most cited moral values". If Ayn Rand had stood up in any of those societies and said that selfishness is morally virtuous and leads to a better world, she would have been laughed at. This tells me that our own society, which made her a best-selling author, was already damned. We can only accept the idea that individual selfishness is good, if our systems of collective behavior have lost all legitimacy, if the ways we're asked to help others feel meaningless and painful.

Related: a reddit comment about sex work vs food service:

I get so frustrated at how I'm treated at work. I find myself involuntarily crying once I get into my car to drive home. I hate how dehumanizing it is. People don't acknowledge me as a person. They think I'm less than them because of my job. Oh, by the way, I'm talking about the food service job.

When I'm doing sex work I can refuse a customer. I can be rude to them if they are being rude to me. I don't have to apologize for their mistakes. I don't have to be sweet when they are being inappropriate. I negotiate my limits, and I only do what I feel comfortable doing.

Cynically, I think this is because Americans already feel like sex is immoral, so if you add any coercion, it feels totally unacceptable; in the enlightened future when buying sex feels as normal as buying food, sex workers will be as dehumanized as food service workers are now. This reminds me of a line from Gary Numan's song Down In The Park: "We are not lovers, we are not romantics, we are here to serve you."

October 2.

2012-10-02T12:34:24Z

October 2. I've got reader comments questioning the studies I linked yesterday, and questioning the very concept of selfishness. But I'm moving on. Tonight, two doom links: NASA animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, and We've already passed the tipping point for orbital debris.

October 1.

2012-10-01T12:55:14Z

October 1. A set of ten studies suggests that intuition promotes cooperation, but rational thought turns us selfish. This reminds me of a strange speculative piece from a few years back: In a fast society slow emotions become extinct. A thinking mind cannot feel.

I'm in Seattle this week and will not have much time for internet. Here's another reminder about two northwest permaculture events: the Northwest Permaculture Convergence October 5-7 near Port Townsend, and the Inland Northwest Permaculture Conference November 9-11 in Missoula.

September 29.

2012-09-29T12:40:31Z

September 29. Does economic growth make you happy? You already know the answer, but the article has some good stuff related to this week's subject:

The richer societies are, the more status goods people want, but because status is relative there is never enough of it to go round. The same is true of positional goods. "If the supply of pleasant homes is restricted then you have to seek to win in the relative income competition." But there are only a few winners.
...
Turner argues that a large fraction of GDP, especially in finance, law and branding, measures distributive rather than creative transactions; that is, it measures transfers between groups and individuals rather than net additions to income.
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At an earlier stage of economic development, financial liberalization stimulates growth and widens the range of choice available; but later in the development process, the last additional unit of financial liberalization is "less likely to deliver increments in growth and more likely to produce the proliferation of rent-extracting opportunities".

"Rent-extracting opportunities" reminds me of this piece, Four Futures, which was linked from the article I posted on Monday. The most interesting of the four is rentism, where there is both abundance and hierarchy. If everything we need is abundant, how do the economic dominators maintain control? By using "intellectual property" to restrict our access to abundance, so that the people who support the domination system get more stuff than the people who don't. I think property is theft, and intellectual property is theft on stilts.

September 27.

2012-09-27T12:43:34Z

September 27. I've had a few comments about status, and now I see that it's one of those words with two opposite meanings, or maybe a spectrum of meanings where one end is opposite the other. At one extreme is respect based on people's personal experience and ability to know quality. At the other extreme, experience and skilled judgment have been replaced by symbolic shortcuts. So it's one thing to follow the advice of your personal doctor, who has often given you good advice and never prescribed expensive meds that didn't work; and it's another thing to follow the advice of someone you don't know just because they have an MD after their name. If I have status as a writer, I hope that it's among people who have read a lot of my stuff and found it helpful, and not among people who want to impress their friends who think I'm cool. And God forbid I ever win any awards.

I'll call these things regard and prestige. In the past you could lose regard by moving to another city where nobody knows you. This would also work with negative regard, if you have to move because you cheated a bunch of people and nobody trusts you. Today, with so many connections over the internet, it's more difficult to lose regard. But you can easily lose prestige just by losing your symbolic display.

Notice that there's a wide grey area. Gold stars on Amazon are symbols compiled from second hand personal experience of reviews from people you don't know. Or if you're hiring someone for a job, and you can't find someone you know personally, you don't want to go just on certifications, so you'll use references and and interviews. (And if you're really confident in your judgment, you won't even care about certifications.)

Now, in the context of rich people who are afraid of losing status when they lose their money, their fear is directly proportional to how much of their status is based on lies. If you have friendships, connections, social capital, based on honest observation of what's inside you, those people won't think any less of you, even if you have to sell your Lexus and take the bus. But all the suckers will no longer be fooled. If you live by illusion, you die by illusion.

By the way, I know a lot of people are afraid that if they showed their true self, nobody would like them. My fear is exactly the opposite: that there's something wrong with me that everyone else can see and I can't!

Related, a great article just posted to the subreddit: The 3-ladder system of social class in the U.S.

September 26.

2012-09-26T12:49:07Z

September 26. Loose ends from the previous post. On the subreddit, polyparadigm links to David Graeber's book online, and to this Ribbonfarm post, Money as Pain Relief. I love this idea! If it's true that we mostly use money for pain relief, does it follow that economic growth requires increasing pain? Or that a society without pain doesn't need money?

Another reader has a crazy idea: a program for rich people where they will spend time living like poor people, working at a minimum wage job and having whatever standard of living they can afford. "The challenge is to see how quickly you can adjust mentally to the point where you are able to live and be happy under these conditions, day to day... Can you out-poor the actual poor?" If so, you'll no longer fear losing your money!

Another reader, more realistic and much more depressing, thinks rich people are afraid of losing status. It's hard for me to even understand status. If you use status to get your way with people, it's different from paying them, different from physically threatening them, and different from being actually qualified to tell them what to do. As far as I can figure, status is a mental shortcut, the appearance of being qualified to tell people what to do, for observers who are too lazy to discern the reality. The word "prestige" comes from French and Latin words for deceit and illusion.

September 24.

2012-09-24T12:41:07Z

September 24. Chris sent this a few weeks ago and it's taken me that long to halfway understand it: Trade-offs between inequality, productivity, and employment. The core idea is that rich people can only spend so much money on goods and services before it becomes pointless. Like that line from Wall Street: "How many yachts can you water-ski behind?" But they can spend unlimited money, and never be satisfied, competing with other rich people, and trying to avoid losing money and power. This is why they oppose any changes that would equalize wealth.

I don't think the author appreciates how irrational this is. He uses the metaphor of a sinking ship with a few lifeboats auctioned to the highest bidder. But in most economic collapses and famines, you're fine if you're just not poor. The top ten percent are never in danger -- unless it's a violent revolution, in which case they're in more danger.

If the rich want insurance against actual catastrophe, in my opinion, they would do what I'm doing: buy a house with a yard with good sun exposure, build topsoil and grow food, make friends with people who are doing the same thing, and work politically to make sure the lower classes never get desperate.

Instead the rich want insurance against the feeling of catastrophe. If your income drops from a hundred million to ten million, it feels worse than a drop from a hundred thousand to ten thousand. I think the deeper problem here is that money is used to buy control. In a perfect world, the richest and poorest person would be identical in political power, in their influence over the shared world, and money would only buy better private experiences. But that would not be "money" as we know it. In the real world, money has always gone hand in hand with central control backed by violence. (For more about this, read David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5000 Years.)

It's because money equals control that people who chase wealth are never satisfied, because they just try to control smaller and smaller things; and it's because money equals control that rich people are terrified of losing wealth, even though they're in no danger of losing physical comfort, because they would be losing psychic comfort: as your control recedes, you have to extend your understanding.

September 23.

2012-09-23T12:05:34Z

September 23. Three reddit comments. First, an excellent comment about UPS vs Fed Ex, and how the different economic models of the two companies lead to different cultures. UPS drivers are mellow and happy because they have job security and good benefits, while FedEx is a war zone where a few drivers make tons of money while most of them are stressed out and angry.

This comment about marketing and emotions is wordy, but makes some good points about how thoroughly our culture has been shaped by consumerist propaganda. My favorite bit is that "encouraging deep personal satisfaction hurts the bottom line."

This comment about simulated universes is rambling and confused, especially about consciousness, but it explains how two aspects of physics are exactly what we would expect from a simulation, and speculates:

We aren't just living in a simulation. We are living in a simulation, of a simulation, of a simulation. There is no top, and there is no bottom. And "we" actually means "me". It's recursive and fractal, and the loop may even close in on itself. A series of bracketed realities that create each other.

Speaking of fractals, here's my favorite fractal video, the Baroque Mandelbrot Zoom.

Finally, on today's PostSecret, a nice image about the Mayan apocalypse.

September 20.

2012-09-20T12:10:12Z

September 20. By now you've heard about the discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that says Jesus had a wife. This is a fun time for atheists, because they get to hear Christians say that just because somebody wrote it, decades after it supposedly happened, doesn't mean it's true. But you could say that about all evidence for Christianity! Here's a reddit comment from last month, which explains how scholars evaluate the evidence, and concludes that Jesus probably existed, despite the lack of contemporary sources.

Unrelated stray links: the Where-to-Go Getaway Map allows you to find cheap flights without knowing where you're going yet!

Can Dogs Predict Earthquakes? The idea is that dogs can hear high-frequency sounds of rocks grinding underground. In one study, there is more correlation of dog behavior to earthquakes among dogs with better hearing, and in earthquakes on shallower faults.

And OPEC Nations Look to Solar Power. The article doesn't explicitly mention using solar power to extract and refine oil, but that has to be part of their motive. So when the EROEI of oil drops below 1, they can still make a profit selling oil, by effectively trading hard-to-store solar energy for the easy energy storage of liquid fuels.

September 18, late.

2012-09-18T12:18:54Z

September 18, late. As expected, I got some emails with more explanations for Islamic decline. I want to repeat that I'm talking about pre-industrial decline. If they had maintained the dominance they had a thousand years ago, they would now have military bases all over America and be taking our oil. If they had even kept up with the west as well as China, they would still be holding their own. I'm sure there is no simple answer, but other factors mentioned by readers include Al-Ghazali, who made Islamic philosophy less open-minded, and the Mongol invasion. I'm done with this subject and taking the day off tomorrow.

Another loose end: in the latest landblog post, I linked to this article about how foam is loaded with carcinogenic fire retardants. But Joel writes that it's mostly only in couches and not mattresses.

September 18.

2012-09-18T12:18:54Z

September 18. Today, a few brainy links. A reddit comment thread from a few days ago, What is the most interesting psychological experiment you know?

A smart blog with only a few public posts, Winnowing Oar (thanks Gabriel).

An ambitious philosophy blog, mostly arguing that consciousness is the fundamental reality, Uncovering Life (thanks Trevor).

Also, I've edited yesterday's post to remove the World Cup thing, which went off on a tangent, and I replaced it with this piece from the Onion, which shows how far out of touch certain Muslims are from the rest of humanity: No One Murdered Because Of This Image (NSFW).

This leads to a deeper question: What happened to the Islamic world? A thousand years ago, they were far ahead of Europe, and maybe even ahead of China, in terms of technology, wealth, and social tolerance. How did they become so poor and backward? Some of it can be blamed on the last hundred years of interference from Europe and America, but they were already in decline long before that. I'm sure there are a bunch of factors, but the most interesting story I've seen is that too many rulers had harems. So when rulers died, there were wars of succession (not to be confused with wars of secession) between all the potential heirs, and over time the political instability and stress wore down their culture.

September 17, late.

2012-09-17T12:23:54Z

September 17, late. Just done my first landblog/houseblog post in months, with some stuff on dandelions and beds.

September 17.

2012-09-17T12:58:37Z

September 17. (permalink) A few thoughts on the Muslim riots. First, if they said, "We are rioting because of the military occupation of our lands and the economic exploitation of our people," more than half the world would be on their side. But when they say, "We are rioting because someone made a movie somewhere that insults our religion," not even half of Muslims are on their side. This is a public relations catastrophe for Islam.

Now, some people are saying, in Islamic culture, politics and religion are one, and they actually are rioting for political reasons even though they say it's for religious reasons. Fair enough. But if they understood our culture, they would frame the riots in political terms, not religious. And because the secular west is in a position of power, for us to understand their culture is merely a matter of politeness; for them to understand our culture is a matter of survival.

I can't help but see this in terms of Darwinian competition. If an organism has a behavior that is no longer adapted to its environment, if this behavior is self-harmful and can be reliably incited by competitors, it will be incited by competitors, until the maladapted organism changes or dies. In this case, the behavior is responding to symbolic expression with physical violence, which is no longer tolerated in the modern world. For an illustration of the gap between radical Islam and other major religions, here's an offensive piece from the Onion, No One Murdered Because Of This Image.

I think there's an even deeper cause of the riots, and also the anti-Japan riots in China, and the coming riots in your city. According to this article, Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence, primates always have the potential to come together in a violent mob against a common enemy -- but this happens much more easily when we're already under stress:

Hundreds of studies with captive primates have shown that impoverished environments result in heightened aggression and antisocial behavior. Such behavior has been shown to significantly increase under conditions of overcrowding, when there's a lack of novelty in food, entertainment, or social opportunities, when the population increases and the number of strangers in a colony grows, or, most crucially, when food is limited and/or fluctuates dramatically.
...
Another classic, if somewhat cruel, study by Charles Southwick in 1967 found that increasing the amount of food in a captive colony of rhesus macaques by 25 percent decreased the amount of aggression by 50 percent. However, when a normal amount of food was restricted (by placing it in a single basket where it could be monopolized by a few high-ranking individuals) the level of overall aggression tripled and the number of violent attacks per hour was five times greater.

September 14.

2012-09-14T12:36:59Z

September 14. Other readers confirm that medical culture is authoritarian, but I have to move on because my "stuff to post" folder is overloaded. First, Mythodrome is back, with several posts over the last two weeks, about internet doomers, alchemical tarot, and now an open thread.

Russia to build biggest nuclear-powered icebreaker, and they've planted a flag on the bottom of the ocean at the north pole! This is related to the fast decline in arctic sea ice. According to this post on Early Warning, "extrapolations show the Arctic ice free for six months out of the year by 2025." The Arctic Ocean is loaded with resources, and I've seen speculative future maps where extreme warming turns it into the center of the world.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are being consumed by anomie, a listless sense that life has little meaning. Welcome to the post-industrial world! This reminds me of Jimmy Carter's crisis of confidence speech. When a society is based on resource extraction and consumption, then as long as the numbers are rising, there is a sense of "progress" that makes life feel meaningful. When the numbers level off and begin to decline, people lose their faith in the system and desperately seek meaning elsewhere.

Two more doom links. From George Monbiot, Alzheimer's could be the most catastrophic impact of junk food. "A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes."

And where Americans are sabotaging surveillance cameras, there are new cameras to watch cameras that watch you. So what happens when people sabotage the cameras that watch the cameras? They'll have to make cameras watching cameras watching cameras! This is an example of Joseph Tainter's observation that increasing complexity is subject to diminishing returns, but I wonder if this is only because complexity is being added to prop up central control, and if the deeper rule is that increasing control is subject to diminishing returns.

September 13.

2012-09-13T12:28:50Z

September 13. On Tuesday's link about military culture, a West Point graduate comments that it's the same everywhere:

It seems me that the space and time for critical thought is increasingly shrinking in our world... a result of people being increasingly integrated into and identifying with systems and not an issue with particular systems. Having been out of West Point for three years and now in medical school, I can say confidently that the field of medicine is far more hierarchical, self congratulatory, malicious towards "the other", and dogmatic than I find even the American military to be.

Loosely related: a thoughtful article about the Stanford Prison Experiment, with reflections from six participants 40 years later.

September 12.

2012-09-12T12:40:11Z

September 12. Lots of action on the subreddit lately. Yesterday polyparadigm posted a great long comment on Slavoj Zizek and worldview tunneling, explaining why it's easier for us to imagine the apocalypse than smaller changes:

An interesting thing happens when two steep-sided potential wells approach one another very closely: it becomes easier for a particle to vanish from one potential well, and reappear inside the other, than to climb up the potential well... Similarly, there is some steep obstacle to imagining most sorts of incremental-but-substantive change in capitalism, but apparently that steep barrier isn't far enough away from zombies or singularity or rapture to prevent people from tunnelling through, in droves.

Also, Jerah comments about getting into Zizek: "The best thing to do is google videos of him and just watch his mind in action."

September 11.

2012-09-11T12:27:27Z

September 11. Today, some smart stuff. How to Read Zizek is about a Slovenian political philosopher I've never heard of, but he sounds brilliant:

Zizek's political writings often start with a mainstream liberal view and then assert one that sounds much more right-wing. Yet the point is not simply to provoke liberals or to play devil's advocate. Rather, these reversals are part of a strategy to keep the thought in motion. Instead of proposing a solution or finding a resting place, Zizek relentlessly seeks out further conflicts and contradictions... The goal is not to arrive at a settled view, but to achieve greater clarity about what is really at issue.
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Zizek believes that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is "class struggle." The struggle is not between two pre-existing classes -- the working class and the capitalist or owner class -- that happen to enter into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the "fallout" of capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people "worked" before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to extract profits from this "free" labor power.

From Jacobin Magazine, Sarah Lawrence, With Guns is a rambling essay about teaching literature at the U.S. Military Academy. The point seems to be to show the difference between the dumb kind of disobedience that is encouraged in military culture, and the smart kind that is forbidden.

Finally, why have I only now learned about this? The View from Hell is easily the smartest blog I've ever seen.

September 10.

2012-09-10T12:22:58Z

September 10. On the subreddit, johntobey253 has more comments on yesterday's woo-woo subject, Lazy Universe = Boltzmann Brain Dream:

The notion that "our universe" arose from a random quantum fluctuation yields the Boltzmann brain "paradox", which, carried to its logical conclusion, suggests a model where the observer creates the universe in a way analogous to a dreaming human.

I'm not a specialist in physics, but I've come to this idea myself from another direction. If you study the "paranormal", fringe science, or even dominant science, you see the same thing again and again: a few initial observers will see something strange and radical, and then as more people investigate the phenomenon, it disappears into statistical noise, or can otherwise be explained away to the satisfaction of most people. This is exactly what you would expect if we are collectively dreaming reality. A few people on the fringe can dream pretty much whatever they want, but for a dream to be shared by everyone, it must be generally acceptable and not destabilizing. This also fits with the concept of charisma in primitive magic: someone with more charisma can persuade more people to dream things his way. For a modern example, Wilhelm Reich had tremendous charisma and was able to achieve powerful results with orgonomy, but after his death, the results fizzled out.

This could also explain a lot of "conspiracy theory". We're at the 11th anniversary of 9/11, and everyone who has investigated the event deeply with an open mind has found all kinds of weird shit. The "truth" is that the collective consciousness, for some reason, decided to dream a spectacular attack on America, and from that starting point, the details were filled in sloppily by so many different perspectives that they cannot be made consistent. That's why they had to burn the tape of the interviews with the air traffic controllers, because the nature of a tape is that it has to sound the same to everyone, and the event was so metaphysically messy that we could not all agree on what it would say.

I think reality is more fragmented than it seems, not just in big events, but everywhere all the time. It's not just that the world isn't filled in until we look at it, but if two observers look in the same place, it's not filled in the same way unless they compare notes and force it. Last week I picked up a hitchhiker, and old guy who claimed to be an heir to Philip Morris, to have built the art school at UCSD, and to have personally restored a bunch of bank accounts, confiscated by the Nazis, back to Polish Jews. Was he lying, or did he actually experience some of that stuff even though it's inconsistent with the experience of other people? Does it even make sense to ask where he walked, after I dropped him off and drove down the next hill?

September 9.

2012-09-09T12:50:14Z

September 9. Friday night a long-time reader, Mat, came for a visit, and we talked about all kinds of stuff. A few years ago he sent me this link, Life in a Lazy Universe, which argues that observations in physics are not inconsistent with the idea that our universe uses "lazy evaluation", where any given piece of reality is not defined until someone looks at it, and even then, only as deeply as they look at it. A reader comments: whether or not the physical universe works that way, our models of the universe, inside our heads, clearly work that way.

Anyway, we were talking about the meaning of life, and Mat suggested that it might be possible to prove that the meaning of life (or lack of meaning) is unknowable. Now, when we talk about the meaning of life, I think we mean that this world is part of a larger world that contains it, and also contains a bunch of other stuff we can't see, and our world has some function or value in the context of that other stuff. So I said, well, we might be able to guess the meaning of life, if the larger world is similar to this one, for example if Earth people in 500 years are doing computer simulations to learn about their past. Then Mat said something that hadn't occurred to me: to the extent that the larger world is similar, we still have the same problem, because we still don't know the meaning of life in that world.

September 7.

2012-09-07T12:33:11Z

September 7. I think we all saw this coming: Breakthrough study overturns theory of 'junk DNA'. It wasn't junk -- it was just doing stuff that we did not yet understand.

And some great future ruins from the imaginary landscapes subreddit: 'A New Beginning' by Alen Vejzovic.

September 6.

2012-09-06T12:14:38Z

September 6. Loose end from last week. Anne comments on caloric restriction:

The aim of this study wasn't to compare caloric restriction to free eating - the question was whether CR is better than the kind of healthy diet nutritionists are already recommending every day. The control group of monkeys, the ones that weren't on CR, were eating a diet gauged to help them "maintain a healthy adult weight." Since the average American gains somewhere between one and four pounds per year, this would count as caloric restriction in and of itself, if it were fed to humans. What the study found is that if you are eating little enough that you never gain weight, making yourself eat even less won't make any further difference.

September 5.

2012-09-05T12:52:27Z

September 5. Stray links. Actual fascists in actual black shirts are waving swastikas and murdering ethnic minorities in Athens. Is it a coincidence that Greece is also the most distressed European economy?

Do The Math covers air conditioning. Unsurprisingly, AC uses a huge amount of energy, and most Americans use more than they need. I don't use it at all, but Spokane is dry and rarely gets above 100F. Without even using a fan, just by opening the windows at night and putting reflective stuff on the west facing windows, I was able to keep indoor temperatures below 85 even on the hottest days.

I've seen this link about fifty times, but some of you might not have seen it once yet: The Cheapest Generation: Why Millennials aren't buying cars or houses, and what that means for the economy.

And a fun article on Jakob Böhme: "About 400 years ago, a barely literate German cobbler came up with the idea that God was a binary, fractal, self-replicating algorithm and that the universe was a genetic matrix resulting from the existential tension created by His desire for self-knowledge."