novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
crashwatch (retired)
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"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
crashwatch (retired)
search this site
November 21. I've just been updating some of the recipes on my misc page, which some of you might find useful for Thanksgiving. I'm making gravy and stuffing as usual, plus a "pumpkin" pie with sweet potatoes that I pre-cooked in a pressure cooker, which is vastly more energy efficient than an oven. I remember back in the 1970's Thanksgiving was more commercialized, until the commercial interests figured out how little money they were making since people have to eat anyway, and started pushing Christmas earlier. I wish we had a lot more feast holidays.
November 20. The cutting edge in medium-term future forecasting, 2512 by Charlie Stross. If I'm making a cautious bet, I agree with pretty much all of it. The tech system will keep going, and there will be lots of crazy biotech, but no AI singularity and not much happening off-planet. The oceans will have risen and the more delicate species will be extinct, but there will still be plenty of biological life. The human population will be lower, the nation-state will be obsolete, and industrial-age capitalism will be dead. There's also a loooong comment section with many more ideas.
Taking a different angle on the nearer future, a Hipcrime Vocab post on Collapse and the Sorites Paradox, arguing that America is well into collapse but it's happening so gradually that people haven't noticed. The examples here are about economics, standard of living, and infrastructure.
I think these two visions are perfectly compatible. The depletion of nonrenewable resources has already begun to cause great hardship, but it will not plunge us back to medieval times. Large complex systems will stumble through a transition from nonrenewable to renewable resources, they will shrink both geographically and in range of functions, some will die, some will transform, and new systems will appear, and we'll be in a world with new wonders and new problems.
Related: the best green ruins image I've seen in a while.
November 18. Writing is hard. By popular demand, I've just wrestled two sloppy posts from November 6 and 8, about "being the change" and puritanical activism, into a form that's adequate for a permalink.
November 17. Between travel and Thanksgiving, I won't be online much for the next ten days, so posting and emailing will be light. Something personal that I've put off mentioning on the blog: as of early September, I'm no longer single. Her name is Leigh Ann, and like the two women I was with (briefly) before her, I met her through OkCupid. Before you give OkCupid too much credit, I had a 99% match with the other two and it didn't work out in person. Leigh Ann and I are only an 86% match. She first checked my profile one or two years ago, and I almost messaged her then, but she lived in New York City, her profile is intimidating, and I had a feeling we'd fight all the time. This summer I saw she was moving to Seattle, so I sent her a message and it's been smooth and easy ever since. We've been taking turns busing across the state, and she introduced me to my new favorite band: Moon Duo.
November 16. Two looks back at events earlier this month. Erik sends this article on The Civilizing Power of Disaster, using Hurricane Sandy to anchor a nice discussion of disaster utopias, and why we are more generous and feel more alive during a crisis.
And US election: What next for the Republican party? The article alternates between the idea, among outside observers, that the Republican party is doomed to decline as long as it represents a shrinking demographic of older white people, and the idea, among Republican insiders, that they can win if they become even more extreme and just do a better job of turning out voters. This is great news for America's center-right party, the Democrats. I'm wondering if I'll ever see a real left of center party in America, and if so, whether the Democrats will shift there, the Republicans will leapfrog there, or another party will rise as the Republicans fade -- just as the Republicans rose in 1860 to replace the Whigs.
November 15. I spent half the day scattering 80 bags of leaves all over my yard, and the other half revising Beyond Civilized and Primitive after an email critique by a reader. Here's his blog, Karl North Eco-Intelligence. I started by fixing a paragraph in which I used the word "evolve" to give the false appearance of biological inevitability to my purely cultural vision of a large complex society that maximizes ecological abundance. I also cut a paragraph near the end about natural selection dividing humans into multiple species, something I now think is only going to happen through biotech. I replaced another paragraph to be more fair to primitivists on the issue of civilization as a continuation of previous human changes. And I made a bunch of other little revisions. The newest version, 1.3, has links to the previous versions, and if anyone has enough free time to examine them in detail, I'm envious.
Coincidentally, also on the subject of recent human evolution, Jane sends this article by anthropologist John Hawks, Selection for smaller brains in Holocene human evolution. Hawks never suggests that smaller brains have made us dumber, but you have to wonder.
November 14. Yesterday I got a great email about how Chinese students seem to be smarter than Americans because they do better on tests, but this is because their education system is completely teaching for the test, and they can't even imagine coming up with their own opinion and defending it. This reminds me of a story from a friend who was teaching English in some Asian country, and tried to get the kids to play hangman. Not one student would guess one letter, because their culture is about never being wrong. If American culture shifts too far in this direction, we're doomed, no matter how much oil we have.
Also, Anne comments on yesterday's humans getting dumber link:
What possible method could he propose for testing people dead 2000 years? The problem with people who propose non-falsifiable hypotheses is that they aren't talking science, and when "scientists" start talking non-science, you have to look for social and cultural narratives in their ideas.
November 13. And two more links about intelligence. Crippling Intellects is the new Do The Math post, and it rambles a bit, but there's a good story about an exercise in a game theory class, where some players were so "smart" that they could not imagine other players thinking differently. The larger point is that the most extreme visions of the future are based on the same kind of mistake.
Is pampered humanity getting steadily less intelligent? The idea is pure speculation, and it doesn't take a scientist to think of it: that humans are getting dumber (or genetically weaker in other ways) because the genetically unfit are no longer dying.
This reminds me of something I've been meaning to write about for two months: Sarah Hrdy's book Mothers and Others. Here's a decent summary: Is Babysitting the Ultimate Source of Our Ability to Understand Each Other?
Hrdy starts with the observation that humans are nicer to each other than any other large primate, even bonobos. She looks at a bunch of explanations, and eventually argues that at some point in our history (for complicated reasons I won't get into) mothers started sharing the duties of raising children with other family members, especially maternal grandmothers. This led to a higher survival rate for children who learned to read the emotions of many potential caregivers, which led to a higher genetic potential for empathy.
Hrdy's book is mostly a lot of scaffolding to support several rockets that blast off in the final chapter. One shocker goes like this: for hundreds of thousands of years, it was easier for humans to get emotional support than food. So any child that did not have a rich and healthy emotional environment, also would not have had enough food, and would have died. But in civilization, it's normal for kids to be emotionally neglected and still survive to adulthood. This could explain increasing mental illness, depression, emotional detachment, and many other problems of modernity.
November 12. Three links about intelligence. From four years ago, a Russian immigrant takes an American IQ test and argues that IQ tests actually measure how standard and narrow your mind is. In two kinds of questions, crossing out the odd object in a list, and completing a sequence of numbers, many answers could be correct, but you only get points for the most obvious answer.
And a review of James R. Flynn's "Are We Getting Smarter?"
The pattern of rising IQ scores does not mean that we are comparing "a worse mind with a better one," but rather that we are comparing minds that "were adapted to one cognitive environment with those whose minds are adapted to another cognitive environment." Seen in this light, the Flynn effect does not reflect gains in general intelligence, it reflects a shift to more abstract thinking brought about by a changing social environment. We aren't getting smarter; we are getting more modern.
This raises the question: where are we going on this path? The primitivist answer is that modern abstract thinking is a dead end, it disconnects human culture from the rest of the world, and it will lead to collapse and a return to old-fashioned thinking. The "humanist" answer is that modern thinking is better, and when everyone catches up to American college professors, the world will stabilize into a new age of enlightenment. The transhumanist answer is that abstract thinking enables us to build technological life that will make humanity obsolete.
On this subject, Gabriel sends an article, Why I am Skeptical About Risks from AI. The author is both smarter than me and not a native English speaker, so there's a lot I don't understand, but it seems to be a great set of arguments for why an explosion in artificial general intelligence (AGI) is more difficult and unlikely than we think.
November 9. Stray links. In case you missed it, the big news today is that a campaign connected to Occupy Wall Street is buying debt and canceling it. I had no idea you could buy debt at such a high discount, in this case almost 30:1. Of course you can't buy your own debt that cheaply, but if an intermediate organization can, it opens up all kinds of possibilities, including selling debt cancellation at a profit, while still giving debtors a discount.
World's fastest number game wows spectators and scientists. Japanese kids learn to use an abacus, and then switch to a mental image of an abacus, leading to miraculous computing speed. I wonder what else this would work with.
From last week, in one of the greatest reddit comments ever, AnalogDan comments on how baseball would change if it were only played once a week, and then veers off into impressively honest rambling about his personal life.
And some fun doom news: Global warming may make reptiles smarter.
November 8. (edited permalink) Unexpectedly I have some time to write a follow-up on Tuesday's post. Personally I take "be the change you want to see in the world" at face value; so if you want to see gay marriage, you should be gay and get married. Sean comments that he interprets it more broadly, so straight people can support gay marriage "by loving and supporting gay people, by being outspoken and encouraging." I wouldn't stretch the quote that far, but it's an important point that you can change people's thinking with your behavior, even if you're not personally doing the thing that people will be doing in the world you're aiming for.
This gets more interesting when you apply it to other issues. For example, if you want people to eat less meat, you don't have to be vegetarian. I'm not joking! If you think I'm joking, it's because political action has fallen so deeply under the shadow of puritanism. You can communicate the horror of factory farms and the inefficiency of grain-fed animals, while still eating meat yourself. You can fly around the world on jet planes giving lectures about climate change. I'm still not joking! You can be a primitivist on the internet. You can kick out a Niketown window with a Nike shoe! And you're not doing anything wrong, you're not a hypocrite, unless you tell other people they're immoral for doing what you're doing.
Any movement that allows itself to be framed in terms of moral purity is doomed. If ending the exploitation of animals is about personally avoiding guilt, then anyone who speaks for animals can be dismissed as a fraud if they wear leather, or eat honey, or step on a bug. If reversing climate change is about reducing personal consumption, then the end of that path is to kill yourself. So here's another rule to modify "be the change you want to see": Do things that an alive person can do better than a dead person. (I first saw this idea on Ribbonfarm referencing Bruce Sterling.)
November 7. A few quick comments on the election. Note that Nate Silver's State-by-State Probabilities map (scroll down and look on the right) was correct in 50 out of 50 states.
The Democrats kicked ass in Senate races, winning every close race and picking up three seats. This is because tea-partiers have been purging the Republican party of moderates, and generally because Republicans have become a party of white men born before 1980, a shrinking demographic. But this is not a political victory for the left, because America has no political left. By European standards, the Democrats are a center-right party. This is a victory for the cultural left. I'm not sure how that can lead to better politics.
California, a liberal state, has soundly defeated labeling of genetically modified foods. My position is tricky. Like Michael Pollan, I support open-source genetic modification, and I would love to see thousands of garage biotech labs. But genetic modification at the moment is terrible, not because it's especially unsafe, and not so much because food is being controlled through intellectual property. It's because almost all the modifications currently being done are to make plants more compatible with large-scale energy-intensive monoculture farming. The lie is that science is making plants more productive, when really it's making plants more compatible with farming practices that are anti-ecological and economically authoritarian.
November 6. (edited permalink) Related to yesterday's topic, I think some people misunderstand Gandhi's famous statement, "Be the change you want to see in the world." For all I know Gandhi himself misunderstood it. It is not true that being the change you want to see in the world is a good way to change the world. Consider the only major issue on which American progressives have been winning over the last 35 years, gay marriage. First, how are straight people who support gay marriage supposed to be the change we want to see? And even gay couples, following that advice, would have emigrated to countries where they could get married. Instead they got organized and fought to change public opinion and change laws.
Or consider a minor victory. Seattle has a law now that stores have to charge you for bags. This is a lot more effective at getting people to bring their own bags, than doing it voluntarily and hoping other people imitate you.
It's only when you can't change the world, or can change it only very slowly, that "be the change" becomes good advice. I want everyone to convert their lawns to food forests, but it would be a waste of my energy to try to require that by law, or to get upset that other people aren't doing it. Instead I can be satisfied that I'm doing it myself.
November 5. Summary of my thoughts on American politics: 1) Obama is one of the few presidents in history with progressive values, exceptional political skills, and good character. 2) Nevertheless, the most visible policies of the American government over the last four years have been almost identical to the policies of the previous eight years, or really, any time since the 1970's.
3) This is not because Obama, or members of congress, are bad people. The awful truth is that they're mostly good people, but the system has so much inertia (on certain issues) that it is immune to good people in the offices that supposedly run it. There is nothing anyone can do to change broad-scale American foreign policy or economic policy, any more than you can stop an explosion halfway through.
4) At the same time, there are many small issues where good people can make a difference, even at the highest levels. Every day executives and legislators make thousands of subtle, invisible, and difficult decisions. They can't stop drone attacks in Pakistan, or the unprecedented imbalance of wealth and power, or the ossification and slow collapse of the American empire. But good decisions will make life better for a lot of people, which is why I think swing state citizens should vote for Obama, and everyone should generally vote for Democrats, but do your research, because sometimes the Republican is better. Also there are initiatives (my state might legalize cannabis and gay marriage this year) and state, county, and city offices.
5) Some people think voting is bad because you're giving moral support to everything the government does. This implies the following ridiculous scenario: "Mr. President, I'm receiving word that ____ has voted." "Excellent! Release another wave of drones!" I wonder if this style of thinking comes from bad families where the abusive parent twists any sign of support into justification for any action. Good families don't work that way because you can communicate what you agree with and don't agree with, and big systems don't work that way because nobody is listening.
6) More generally, this is the biggest mistake on the political fringes, and the most common misinterpretation of my own values: that A) we are engaged in a moral struggle, which B) we fight through personal morality, and C) the key to personal morality is avoiding guilt, D) through nonparticipation. No, No, No, No. I don't even believe in morality. The only moral rule is expansion of consciousness. Beyond that it's all tactics, and morality is tactics for dummies. Morality is a set of shortcuts for people who can't be bothered to figure shit out. The ultimate test of an action is what happens as a result of that action.
So, in terms of politics, a boycott is worthless unless you can organize enough people to use the boycott as a weapon to force a business to change its policies. Similarly, nonvoting is worthless unless you can organize millions of people to publicly pledge not to vote until a candidate supports your chosen reform -- but if you have that much organizational discipline, you have better moves than nonvoting.
And in terms of your personal life, riding a bicycle instead of driving a car will not prevent one billionth of a degree of climate change, but you'll get more exercise and save a bunch of money which you can then use to improve your life in other ways. It's okay to do things for your own benefit -- just don't think you're helping other people unless you actually are.
November 4. Sunday update on the election. I've been following Nate Silver, who is such a clear thinker and writer that it is a pleasure to read him on any subject. While the dominant media have been calling the presidential race a tossup, Silver has been projecting an increasing chance of an Obama win. From Thursday: The Simple Case for Saying Obama Is the Favorite. And from yesterday: For Romney to Win, State Polls Must Be Statistically Biased.
Getting deeper, here's an important analysis, Why political journalists can't stand Nate Silver. Basically journalism is elitist. Journalists say, "We have access to sources that you don't, so you have to listen to us to get the Truth." Meanwhile Nate Silver takes information that's out in the open, reaches conclusions through a transparent process, and yet does not claim certainty, only probability. This undermines information authoritarianism in two ways, by making elite channels irrelevant, and by changing the way we think, so that we no longer go looking for certainty. And in this particular case, Silver's dissent makes the official story seem like propaganda: they must be saying the race is a tossup because that makes a more exciting story. Do they think their job is to fucking entertain us? (That's the President's job.)
Back to the original point, the difference between journalism by authority, and journalism by skilled processing of common experience, reminds me of religion and a hundred other subjects where elites try to set themselves up as the sole conduits of effective knowledge and action. The problem is, if anyone is allowed to do journalism, or diagnose illness, or talk to God, some idiots will do it badly, which justifies the elite saying that only they should be allowed to do it. Meanwhile, if the elite do it badly, it strengthens the case for letting idiots do it. The only way to pull out of this tailspin is for more ordinary people to get really good at stuff.
November 3. This morning I went to see Cloud Atlas. I enjoyed the novel and had high hopes for the film because of the director, Tom Tykwer. Everyone knows Run Lola Run, but I liked his following film, The Princess and The Warrior, even better. I can't complain about the directing of Cloud Atlas, and of course the acting is the most interesting thing, with so many actors playing multiple roles. Tom Hanks fulfills my long-time wish by finally, in one role, playing a pure villain. I believe Hugh Grant plays all villains, and Jim Broadbent is brilliant.
But I didn't like the adaptation. Splicing all the stories together is something anyone would have figured out, and beyond that, most of what they cut from the novel, and added to the film, was not to translate the story from novel to film, but to translate it from smart to stupid. If you see the film first, trust me, the novel has no heavy-handed messages or Hollywood bullshit. If they hadn't thrown so much money at action scenes that were not in the book, maybe they could have lowered the budget enough to not feel the need to dumb it down.
The technological politics are also worth mentioning. Through a plot contortion, they manage to turn the threat of a nuclear power disaster into a message that's pro-nuclear and anti-oil. The ending is also turned 180 degrees toward techno-optimism.
November 2-4. (permalink) In a Reddit thread about reality glitches, I made this post about White Rabbit, and how I'm sure I used to hear "feed your head" three times at the end, but now, in every version I can find, I only hear it twice. I'm not the only one. In the replies, Velinus finds two videos where the printed lyrics have it three times, and a few readers remember the same thing. Robert has no memory either way, but reports:
After you mentioned White Rabbit I decided to look up the lyrics online. All the lyrics I found on the major lyrics sites have the line "feed your head" repeated twice. I lost interest at this point and decided to get back to my work.
Now, there's a UNIX program called fortune. It basically just displays random quotations pulled from a database when it's run. I had set up our development server so that it runs when I log into the system. So, what should appear when I log in? The lyrics to White Rabbit with the "feed your head" line repeated 3 times!
And now, this is the top postcard on this weekend's PostSecret.
November 2. The range of definitions for "spirituality" is even broader than I thought. Daniel writes that it's not incompatible with materialism, and he defines it as "the processes by which human beings construct their own identities, interpret the identities presented to them by other human beings, and weave their perceptions into coherent narratives." And Anne, who belongs to a Reform Judaism synagogue, writes that it's not incompatible with religion, and "most of us at one point or another wonder just what is going on here with this whole existence thing."
November 1. (condensed permalink) Earlier this week my old friend Davis stayed three nights with me at the end of a fifteen month trip around the states. Here's his blog, The Hoop Tour, with a post about it.
At one point he asked me about spirituality, and I gave him a definition, something about rejecting philosophical materialism without following the centrally controlled beliefs of a religion. I asked Davis what "spirituality" means to him, and he struggled to define it without using the word "spiritual".
So now I'm wondering, when people talk about spirituality, what exactly are they talking about? If I had more time, I'd make a survey with hundreds of questions and give it to thousands of hippies. If I wanted to make them look stupid, I would ask questions to trick them into muddling the word up with culture and politics: What's more spiritual, a Prius or a Hummer? But if I wanted to understand them, I would ask for stories about the most spiritual and anti-spiritual parts of their lives. Then I might be able to analyze out some definitions, like "the feeling of engaging with a living universe" or "the yearning to be part of a larger story" or "absence of stress".
Underlying all of this, I think "spirituality" is how people refer to the gap between human nature and modern society. Our ancestors lived in close-knit extended families, imbedded in the spectacular complexity of wild ecosystems, viewing reality itself as full of awareness and intention. Now we grow up in neurotic nuclear families, work in office cubes, our closest engagement with nature is mowing the lawn, and we view consciousness as an accident in a mindless billiard-ball universe.
So how do we bridge the gap? This is such a hard question that almost everyone goes astray. We correctly observe that our society is fucked up, and then we get seduced by incorrect but beautiful stories about why it's fucked up and what we can do about it.
Eddie sends an article about where this can lead: European Yoga Porn Cult Establishes a U.S. Beachhead. The Movement for Spiritual Integration in Absolute (MISA) "recruits young women, often still in their teens, with the promise of a better spiritual life" and then gradually turns them into powerless sex workers. (By the way, "Where is the outrage?" is the most annoying sentence possible in English.)
As industrial civilization continues to decline, I expect all kinds of movements to appear, from exploitative cults, to unrealistic utopian crusades, to patient realignments of human culture, all of them feeding off the energy of people who are economically vulnerable and desperate to feel like they're part of a story. Eventually several of these movements will stabilize into dominant belief systems, and beyond that I'm not sure.
I don't think we're going to return to forager-hunter tribes, because there will be other options that we like better. Soon it will be easier to change human nature to fit society, than change society to fit human nature. But I don't think we can just do anything we want. I believe in a conscious universe, beyond humanity, beyond biology, even beyond physics, into which post-human nature and post-human society must ultimately fit. We're either going to change ourselves to extinction, or change ourselves to fit this universe through a new interface that we cannot yet imagine.
October 31. Two Halloween links from reddit: a thread asking what is the most "paranormal" thing you have ever experienced? And the The Truth is Here subreddit for weird stories that supposedly are not made up.
Before I do an update on the TV, an update on the truck. The symptom was that sometimes the heat gauge would drop to zero and the air out of the vents would be cold. When I replaced the thermostat, the old thermostat looked and worked great. But another symptom, and the key to my final diagnosis, was a sound of rushing water behind the dashboard. Now I think a bunch of air got into the cooling system through a bad radiator cap. This caused the watery sound from the heater core, and it also sometimes fooled the thermostat into opening all the way and overcooling the engine.
Now, two people have mentioned that I could work around the dead TV speakers by connecting external speakers through the headphone jack. Surprisingly the headphone sound almost works, except that it goes silent for around half a second every eight seconds. Also, the primary speakers make a faint click exactly every second. Clearly the TV needs a new digital main board. I looked on eBay and found one for $65, less than the cost of shipping the whole thing back to New Hampshire, but first I called the seller, Tradeport. They were very nice and did not offer to pay return shipping, but told me Samsung would fix it for free. I called Samsung and talked a guy who managed to know less than me about TV diagnosis while still being patronizing, but he finally did his job and gave me a service order at a local shop.
I brought the TV to the shop, and mentioned another issue I had noticed: something large was sliding around behind the screen. I figured they would say "Oh yeah, the LED wire support flange fell off, happens all the time in this model." Instead the guy rolled the thing around and muttered, "That's impossible." Apparently there's nothing that's supposed to be in there that could make that sound, and no way to get something in without breaking some plastic connections (which of course were unbroken) to remove the screen. I expect, when I go back to pick it up, they will either say "I don't know what you're talking about," or it will be a locket with a picture of my grandfather.
October 30. I ordered a TV online so I can watch lots of DVD's this winter, and the audio is DOA. Now I have to do a bunch of stuff to sort that out, including trying to convince the seller to make an exception to their policy that would normally require me to pay $70 to ship it back to them. At least I'm not drowning in a hurricane. In the spirit of bad luck, here are some complainy links: The Plot to Destroy America's Beer, in which an evil capitalist buys beer companies and ruins them to temporarily increase the value of the stock.
There Is No Nobel Prize in Economics. It was tacked on without the consent of the Nobel family and is used to reward advocates for the giant blocks of money.
And Journalism in the Obama age shows the real media bias, always subservient to whoever happens to be in power. I think this is exactly what we should expect. All institutions, most culture, and many individuals, start out on the fringes, slip into serving the domination system, ossify and decay, while new life comes from the fringes and the whole cycle repeats.
October 28. Just permalinked, after extensive rewriting, two posts from a month ago, about control and status.
In hurricane news, there's a new Sandy subreddit. And here's a ten hour loop of the Song of Storms from Zelda.
October 27. In 1997 a hurricane simulation drill took place surrounding a hypothetical Hurricane Sandy which was almost identical to the real one that's coming now.
By the way, that article is on a conspiracy site, and I'm grateful to conspiracy researchers for finding weird anomalies and connections, but their usual interpretation is that shadowy powers are planning everything, and my usual interpretation is that reality itself has the structure of a dream. Of course sometimes there are "hard" conspiracies. The recent assassination of an ExxonMobil executive probably has a completely rational secret explanation.
October 25. Ugly fruits and vegetables returning to UK supermarkets because of bad harvests. This is an example of collapse making life better, because it's good for us to not care if our food is pretty. And it's an example of how waste can serve as a buffer against catastrophe... if we're able to recognize waste and stop it.