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
December 3. Something I've been thinking about for a while, and this feels like the right time. As a blogger, I'm going into permanent semi-retirement. I won't be able to stick to full retirement, because there will be things I want to write about too much, and I want to keep traffic coming to this page. So I'll still post at least once a week. But after seven years of heavy blogging, I'm just burned out on discussing ideas, and I'd rather turn my attention to other things.
December 1. This ranty Hipcrime Vocab post, The Neurochemistry of Americans, has a fascinating idea: that a gene related to dopamine reception is correlated with migration, so maybe Americans, being descended from recent migrants, are genetically more prone to all kinds of impulsive behaviors. Note the comment section at the bottom of the page; please direct your comments there and not to my inbox.
Shifting to American politics, a couple weeks ago I saw this article, When the Nerds Go Marching In, about how Obama's campaign crushed Romney's campaign in the realm of information technology. It occurred to me, this is likely to continue as long as skilled programmers heavily favor Democrats. Nate Silver has now covered this issue in detail: Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns.
There is something Republicans could do to attract techies and young people... and they did it! After the election they released a policy brief supporting radical copyright reform -- and then immediately took it back, probably because of financial pressure from Hollywood assholes who are going to give more money to Democrats anyway. Here's an editorial about it: Vanishing 'copywrong' document blasts RIAA, suggests radical reform, and should be taken seriously. If Republicans stood behind this, I would probably switch to their side on the national level, because this difference alone would be bigger than the many little ways I like Democrats better.
November 30. Two good news links from the BBC. New York City celebrates day without violent crime. And US birth rate falls to record low. I expect that the ongoing economic collapse will continue to drive down birthrates, but violence will increase in any population that's short of food.
November 29. One clarification on yesterday's post: I'm not saying that today's upper, middle, and lower classes will become the upper, middle, and lower classes of post-scarcity society. The two systems can overlap in time, with individuals holding one position in one system and a different position in the other, just as the medieval class system based on ancestry has overlapped with the modern system based on money.
I want to push ahead to the other subject I mentioned: How exactly can the tech system pass through the bottleneck of resource exhaustion? This is way too big for one post, but in the context of technology, I think we're going to see more automation, not less. It's true that machines require scarce energy, but they still require less energy than managing and feeding human workers.
Of course, if too many people go hungry, there will be riots. So I expect the poorest nations to fall into chaos, while medium-wealth nations keep their citizens barely subdued with low quality products of industrial agriculture, basically human dog food, which already fills half of the typical supermarket. For a depressing argument that peak oil helps industrial agriculture, see Stuart Staniford's The Fallacy of Reversibility.
At the same time, I expect a golden age of TV shows and music and video games, because high quality entertainment does not consume more resources than low quality entertainment.
November 28. Something big that I've been putting off for a week, and loosely related to yesterday's subject, the latest View from Hell post: Fungibility and the Loss of Demandingness. It's already too clear and concentrated to be summarized, but here are three sample paragraphs:
To sum up, the modern economy is primarily composed of things and services available for money, ratcheting to allow fewer and fewer non-monetary costs. When things are available for money, anyone can acquire them; this dilutes the information about the self that can be contained in the ownership. Similarly, a major trend in the labor market is toward fungible skills that anyone can supply, reducing opportunities for virtuosity and positive information about the self through work. Everything is increasingly available for money, except, I will argue, a major thing we all want to buy that gives us the feeling of meaning: our own value and specialness.
...
The mistake is to view hipsterdom as pure signaling. It invokes signaling, of course, but also the genuine, authentic search for value in genuineness and authenticity. The hipster is a person who is particularly alienated by the world of purely fungible culture. His music and books, his old "vintage" items, are more demanding, harder to find. But at the same time, he is made more interesting and valuable through what they demand from him.
...
The fungibility of work, the reduction of demand for long-developed special skills, the impossibility of virtuosity in one's limited job, has made work less and less a source of reliable, positive information about the increasing value of the self - because it has ceased to truly improve people. But people still desire to work at what they love, and to improve themselves. The market will sell them the feeling of this, but will not commonly supply them with food in exchange for pursuing virtuosity.
Going off on my own tangent, humans have two contradictory desires. We want to feel like we're valuable people living good lives, which itself is a massive and difficult subject. A good place to start is the famous video, The surprising truth about what motivates us. The other thing we want is for life to be easy, but there is a trade-off between a good life and an easy life.
This conflict comes into clearer focus as more work is automated. Do you want a machine where you push a button and food comes out, or do you want the challenge and personal empowerment of growing and preparing food with your own hands? This was not an issue in preindustrial civilization, when work was done by slaves and peasants. The lower classes suffered, but not from existential angst, and the elite felt important because they were ruling actual humans. Now there is a growing class of people who have no political power but are served by machines.
If the tech system can pass through the bottleneck of resource exhaustion (I think it can, but that's another subject) we might emerge into a high-tech utopia/dystopia, in which it's easy to be comfortable but difficult to be happy. Social class will no longer be about power or even standard of living, but valuable activity. The upper class will hold the few important jobs that still require humans. The middle class will be hobbyists, practicing difficult skills that are not necessary for society. And the lower class will be content to consume entertainment.
November 27. There were some comments on Sunday's links but I'm moving on. The History of Boredom has some good stuff. Most important, it has a precise definition:
"a state in which the sufferer wants to be engaged in some meaningful activity but cannot, characterized by both restlessness and lethargy."
Notice how much this overlaps with some definitions of depression. I think that everyone who has gone to school, or otherwise been trained for an externally-driven life, has to pass through the desert of unmotivation while learning to motivate themselves internally. And the article has some stuff at the end about how it's good for you to have nothing to do.
Also, check this out:
A host of studies have found that people who are easily bored may also be at greater risk for depression, anxiety disorders, gambling addictions, eating disorders, aggression and other psychosocial issues. Boredom can also exacerbate existing mental illness. And, according to at least one 2010 study, people who are more easily bored are two-and-a-half times more likely to die of heart disease.
This raises the question, which cannot yet be answered except by guessing: what exactly makes different people more or less easily bored? Personally I'm so resistant to boredom that I sometimes fantasize about being in solitary confinement. My guess is that it's partly genetic, and the key environmental factor is how much free time you had in your first few years of life.
November 27. So a bunch of people have asked me for a recipe for my homemade sweet potato chips. I always say: slice them, throw in some olive oil and salt, bake them on trays in the oven, and I'll eventually make a page with more details. Here it is: sweet potato chips. It's really very simple except that it requires great attention to detail to get them all crunchy but not burnt.
November 25, late. Heading back to Spokane tomorrow. Here are some stray links. How To Live Without Irony is unfair to young people, and grossly simplifies what a "hipster" is, but it does have good advice about why and how to live without irony.
This BBC article about Marijuana legalisation in the US becomes as fascinating and disturbing as a car wreck when it briefly explores the coming world of cannabis brand marketing.
Dmitry Orlov's latest post about anarchy, The Practice of Anarchy, makes the sobering argument that a free system can only exist as a temporary state, cutting through a control system before becoming a control system itself. Related: Hakim Bey's famous essay on the Temporary Autonomous Zone.
And Schools should replace Catcher in the Rye with Black Swan Green.
November 22. Where I'm currently staying in Seattle, the only way I can get internet is by holding my laptop up to a window, so posting and emailing will continue to be light.
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.