Ran Prieur

January 16.

2013-01-16T12:02:46Z

January 16. Yesterday's Early Warning post mentions my latest vision of the future. Stuart Staniford writes:

I still think there are non-trivial tail risks of this-century societal collapse running around. One is that climate change turns out to be a runaway process and basically burns all/most of the biosphere in a massive drought. Another is that the process of keeping ever larger numbers of technologically unemployed people from revolting turns out to be too hard. A third is a massive cyberwar.

Also, the Edge.org 2013 question has just come out, and they ask a bunch of prominent thinkers What should be worried about? I just spent a few hours skimming the whole giant page, and picked out a few favorites. At the top Geoffrey Miller writes about Chinese eugenics, and down the page Robert Kurzban writes about the destabilizing effect of the imbalanced sex ratio in China. Also on the subject of human demographics, Kevin Kelly writes about the underpopulation bomb.

In the two that worry me the most, Eric Weinstein writes about excellence and Evgeny Morozov writes about "smart" technologies, and both argue that by seeking improvement and perfection according to a narrow cultural view, we are locking out genius and change. In a related point, Murali Doraiswamy writes that the American view of mental illness is spreading globally, so that more and more mental states that Americans don't appreciate are being declared pathological and overmedicated.

Stuart Kauffman, in the only optimistic piece that I like, says some stuff I don't quite understand about going beyond the Newtonian paradigm and re-enchanting the world. And in the best argument for doom, Steven Strogatz undermines my statement that "the interconnectedness of modern complex systems makes them stronger, not weaker." That has been true so far, but he knows some math that I don't, and he says that interconnectedness (he calls it coupling) can get too dense, leading to a phase shift where a system suddenly becomes brittle and unstable.

January 14.

2013-01-14T12:15:02Z

January 14. My friend Sarah will be traveling around the country this spring with her boyfriend and dog, in a Vardo tiny house on a pickup truck, staying with people and making pies. They're calling it the OccuPIE Pie It Forward Tour, and they're looking for hosts. You can email them at pieitforwardoccupie at gmail.

Also, I've just archived my 2012 landblog/houseblog posts, and made a new post about a DIY HDTV antenna. Not that I'll be watching a lot of TV but it's good to have the option.

January 11.

2013-01-11T12:39:03Z

January 11. Just rewrote the second sentence of the third paragraph below to make it less hostile and more precise. By the way, I'm enjoying not having home internet! Unless the weather is terrible (or it's Sunday) I can get on at the community college, so I have a nice walk, and then when I get home I have the rest of the day to do stuff without the internet to distract me.

January 10.

2013-01-10T12:03:37Z

January 10. (permalink) I've been thinking more about doom blogging. Ten years ago, when I imagined "collapse", it was interesting: industrial collapse means there are no factories and everything new is made by hand. Infrastructure collapse means there are no electric grids and we're riding horses on the ruined freeways. Economic collapse means the banks are just gone, cash is worthless, and economies are gift and barter. Political collapse means you don't have to pay taxes, kids don't have to go to school, and there are no police.

Now it's increasingly clear that none of these things are going to happen, even slowly over 100 years. As someone known for writing about collapse, I have two career options. One is to follow the bait-and-switch: keep writing about "collapse" but redefine it as something much less interesting. The other option is to write about what has now become interesting, given the new forecast. And that is: if the tech system keeps grinding ahead, what kind of crazy stuff is it going to do?

On this subject, there are two popular schools of thought, and I don't like either. One is late 20th century conservative disasterism, where the worst criticism we can make of any technology is that it will destroy a bunch of stuff that we want to preserve. The other is infantile techno-optimism. Look at this page that just got massive upvotes on reddit: "Papertab" paper tablet is your flexible friend. This is not revolutionary. This is a toy, and people who get excited about it are like little kids around the Christmas tree, believing that the shininess and novelty of their toys equals eternal happiness.

Now, there are possible technologies that are truly revolutionary. But my fear is that they will all be stopped, that the increasing power of the tech system will be used to keep the world stable and predictable, and to make us happy in the shallowest and least satisfying way. To avoid this dreadful fate, we need a cultural shift in which we gain a deeper understanding of quality of life, and we need to apply this understanding to technology, and start using it to increase danger and pain. I know, people in Africa would love to have the problem of not enough danger and pain. Don't worry -- in a hundred years, they will, and we'll have it worse than we do now.

Here's a new article from the Atlantic about this issue: There's More to Life Than Being Happy:

Having negative events happen to you, the study found, decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life. Another study from 2011 confirmed this, finding that people who have meaning in their lives, in the form of a clearly defined purpose, rate their satisfaction with life higher even when they were feeling bad than those who did not have a clearly defined purpose. "If there is meaning in life at all," Frankl wrote, "then there must be meaning in suffering."

January 7.

2013-01-07T12:54:42Z

January 7. Stray links. My friends Wynn and Deb are selling their energy-efficient permaculture-yard house in Portland.

Kevin Drum argues that Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.

And a fascinating reddit post, I once went shizo-level crazy for 2.5ish years and no one really noticed. "...when I wasn't afraid of being assassinated it was actually pretty wonderful. Feeling connected and powerful and part of something greater that's rooted through the universe."

January 4.

2013-01-04T12:16:43Z

January 4. Thanks Erik for sending this reddit page that I missed: Prominent collapse blogger changes his tune. Readers who have been paying attention know that I've been shifting my opinion on collapse for more than eight years now, as one small disaster after another has fizzled out rather than sparking greater disasters. I've only skimmed the comments, but it's interesting that people are disagreeing from both sides, with techno-optimists saying I've ignored space flight and doomers saying I've ignored ecological collapse.

Related: another reader sends Paul Kingsnorth's latest piece in Orion Magazine, Dark Ecology. It's a nice overview of the critique of civilization, but I had to look to make sure it wasn't written ten years ago. It's been 18 years since Ted Kaczynski wrote that "technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster," and there have been regional disasters like Fukushima, but overall technology has been moving the world away from disaster and toward stability and central control. Kingsnorth writes that "our civilization is beginning to break down," but every year it gets harder to squint your eyes so that it looks that way.

Kingsnorth's best stuff is about the human soul, how environmentalism is shifting from feelings to numbers, how technology seduces us with comfort and prosperity while destroying subtler things that make us feel like we're living good lives.

By the way, I'm going back to Spokane tomorrow, and I'm leaning toward not getting home internet until a good ISP like Clear or FreedomPop comes to Spokane. That means I'll only have internet for a few hours a few times a week from the library or community college.

January 2.

2013-01-02T12:14:07Z

January 2. Two more future forecasts, The Real America of 2022 on the Rationalist Conspiracy blog, and 2512 by Charlie Stross. Also, someone has made a subreddit page about yesterday's post.

January 1.

2013-01-01T12:51:50Z

January 1. Changes for 2013. First, a reminder that I am semi-retired from blogging. Mainly that means that I will still post links but only reveal personal opinions once a week or so. When I reveal a personal opinion, you're welcome to email me with a comment, but if you have a comment on something I link to, that's between you and whoever wrote it. The thing I'm retiring from is the feeling that I'm sitting at a table with a thousand people who can talk to each other only by talking to me. Of course you can always post comments on the subreddit.

I've raised font size to 100%, and fully retired the crashwatch page. Where the page used to be, I've written my latest thoughts on the future. I'll also write them here, and here's a permalink:

Ten years ago it really seemed like the whole system was about to come apart. People who saw a crash coming were seeing things that were being ignored by people who expected business as usual. Yet we were still wrong. After seeing how little daily life has changed after the 2008 financial collapse, seven years with global oil production on a plateau, and two catastrophic hurricanes, I think the big mistake of doomers was assuming that failures would have positive feedback like a house of cards. At this point, anyone still using the "house of cards" metaphor is not a serious analyst but an entertainer. It's clear that the interconnectedness of modern complex systems makes them stronger, not weaker.

This is especially true of technological systems. I no longer expect any kind of tech crash, except that resource-intensive benefits like driving and eating meat will become more expensive and less available to poor people. Economies will collapse as they adjust to decades of zero or negative growth, weaker nations and businesses will fail, but computers will continue to get stronger, and automation will adapt to resource decline by becoming more efficient and better able to compete with human workers. At the same time, no government that can possibly avoid it will allow its citizens to starve, so there will be even more subsidies for industrially produced human dog food.

Over the next few decades I see the global system passing through a bottleneck as it shifts from nonrenewable to renewable resources. We fantasize about apocalypse because we want the world to get looser, but I see it getting crappier and tighter. When we emerge from the bottleneck, life will get nicer... but are we coming out of the bottle, or going in? I think the "singularity" will match its meaning in astrophysics: the center of a black hole, with 90% of increasing computing power being used to stop the other 10% from doing anything interesting. I imagine an airtight sci-fi utopia/dystopia, where almost everything will be automated, nobody will have to do any work, everyone will be comfortable and safe, and we will have amazing powers to entertain ourselves. Other than that, we will have less power than any people in history or prehistory. The world will be lifeless and meaningless, a human museum, a suicide machine. Making the world alive again will be our next challenge.

December 30.

2013-12-30T12:39:33Z

December 30. Awesome essay, The Departed Queen by Dana Mackenzie. The author is a chess player who spent two years in an obsessive quest to consistently beat a computer program that would normally be better than any human player, through an early queen sacrifice. After working out the details over 100 games, he tried it in a tournament against a stronger human player. Mackenzie combines this story with thoughts about artificial intelligence and the future role of computers.

I have some new thoughts about artificial intelligence which for now I'm keeping to myself. But they have something to do with a distinction between quantitative and non-quantitative thinking, partly inspired by reading reviews of this book: The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.

December 27.

2013-12-27T12:15:34Z

December 27. Some links about wildness. From Jared Diamond, Best Practices for Raising Kids? Look to Hunter-Gatherers. There are three sections: hold them, share them, and let them run free. This reminds me of this article, How children lost the right to roam in four generations.

Hunting by liberal, urban, locavores is a trend good for the environment.

And a 2011 blog post, How to Solve Homelessness, in which the homeless author argues that society should not try to end homelessness, but make it easier, with good free public toilets, super-cheap capsule hotels, the right to have a job without an address, and the right to sleep in public.

December 26.

2013-12-26T12:24:52Z

December 26. I'm in Seattle with adequate internet through January 4, but still busy. Thanks Charles for an updated link to the story behind the abominable O Holy Night. Also, I probably exaggerated on internet costs, but without giving Comcast my personal info, there's no way to find out how much I'll pay after the 6-12 month bait period.

December 24.

2013-12-24T12:26:06Z

December 24. My long-term plan for internet access is to solicit donations, buy internet from the evil Comcast, which will cost about $1000 a year, or $1001 if it's bundled with a bunch of crap that does more harm than good, and then offer it free to my neighbors through tools that are being developed by the Open Wireless Movement. For now, I'm mostly getting online in a building at Spokane Community College, which is surprisingly open on Christmas eve.

Here's my favorite funny Christmas song, The Abominable O Holy Night. The related page telling the story is gone from the internet, but the singer is highly skilled and intentionally making every possible ridiculous mistake. And here's my favorite serious Christmas song, Alex Chilton's Jesus Christ.

December 18.

2013-12-18T12:54:56Z

December 18. My partial retirement was timed well: my internet access has just been severely limited. Right now I'm on at the library, but it's possible I won't be on again until the 26th when I'm visiting Seattle. So emails will be delayed, and blogging will be even lighter than I thought.

By request, here are some of my own favorite websites: the Food For Thought subreddit has been my biggest single source of links for the last year, and there are other good subreddits if you can find them. The key to using reddit is to register, unsubscribe from all the default subreddits, and then go looking for the ones you like.

Hacker News is similar to reddit but smarter and with more tech links.

Early Warning has carefully selected links and graphs, and sometimes good analysis.

And four deep-thinking bloggers who can be counted on for good stuff once a month or so: The View From Hell, Mythodrome, Raptitude, and Ribbonfarm.

December 12.

2013-12-12T12:08:14Z

December 12. This subreddit post has let the cat out of the bag, so I'd better talk about it here. About two weeks ago I finally started a project that I've been putting off and dreading for years: going through all my essays and doing whatever I had to do to still feel okay about having my name on them.

This project was the main cause of my decision to greatly cut back on putting my thoughts on the internet. For me, writing about ideas for an audience is like getting drunk, and taking responsibility for those ideas later is like the hangover. Sometimes it comes in only a few hours, when people think I'm wrong or missed something important. And sometimes it comes years later, when I can see myself that I was wrong or missed something important.

Also my whole intellectual style is different. Many of my essays, especially the early ones, remind me of a novice swordsman, swinging the sword like a sledgehammer and sadistically battering a practice dummy. As an unknown writer I had a high incentive to attract attention and a low incentive to avoid mistakes. Now it's the other way around.

Anyway, I've been going through the essays from oldest to newest, and I'm still stuck on a few at the top of the list, but the rest are done. I did three different kinds of things. A few examples: How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth was heavily annotated, to keep all the stuff I was wrong about and explain why I was wrong. The Effects of Highly Habitual People was so heavily edited that I saved the original version. Arno-geddon was kept unchanged, but with a general disclaimer at the top. The Slow Crash has some of all three. And the one thing on the page to remain untouched, perfect as originally written, is Your Life As Pornography.

This is a big thing, so you all have permission to email me about it, but I won't respond much.

December 11.

2013-12-11T12:10:38Z

December 11. Via Early Warning, a cutting edge analysis of global warming, Something Wicked This Way Comes, arguing that the coming temperature rise will be similar to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, but much faster.

December 10.

2013-12-10T12:45:55Z

December 10. Could boredom be curable? The article suggests that boredom is an issue of where and how we focus our attention. Back on November 27 I linked to another article about boredom which defined the word more explicitly, and not quite the same as this one seems to define it.

December 7.

2013-12-07T12:20:06Z

December 7. In culture news, Hawkwind guitarist Huw Lloyd-Langton has died. Here's my favorite, The Island, a live combination of solos from two other songs. And one that he wrote and sang, Dragons and Fables.

December 6.

2013-12-06T12:08:59Z

December 6. The rules of my semi-retirement are coming into clearer focus. A friend suggests that I could "follow my bliss" and just keep writing without ever looking at feedback, but I still think that would be bad for me. Immunity from criticism is one of the biggest ways people get corrupted by power. Also it would be difficult to draw the line, because I don't want to cut off all communication; I just want to greatly reduce the amount of attention I spend discussing intellectual shit. But it's not bad for me to post other people's ideas, and even summarize them, without personally accepting comments. So here are some links:

A reddit comment on the bleakness of Japanese life. (The original comment was deleted. Thanks sess and reddit_is_horrible for finding a new link.)

Related: Most lives are lived by default. The original link is down so that link goes to the Hacker News thread with discussion and a link to a cache.

City birds use cigarette butts to smoke out parasites. What do I think about this? Ha ha, you'll never know!

And a brilliant scientific article about Musical beauty and information compression:

I hypothesise that enduring musical masterpieces will possess an interesting objective property: despite apparent complexity, they will also exhibit high compressibility.
...
I contend that a seminal point in human history must have occurred when the act of compressing sensory patterns became intrinsically satisfying in its own right. As brain complexity and consciousness led to greater sophistication in the sensory stream's interpretation and reward system, a multitude of compressible sensory inputs could became increasingly pleasurable.
...
I speculate that when we appreciate music, a major influencing factor is the release of pleasure that comes from performing a surprisingly profound audio data compression. By this logic, one would anticipate the level of pleasure to scale with the mismatch between the apparent complexity initially perceived by our ears and the real simplicity subsequently resolved in our minds.

If you want to discuss this amongst yourselves, I've posted it to the subreddit.

December 4.

2013-12-04T12:16:05Z

December 4. Another note on my motivation for semi-retirement. It's not that I'm getting burned out on posting, or running out of stuff to write about. In that sense I feel like I could keep going forever. What's wearing me down is the accumulating burden of responsibility for everything I've ever written. With thousands of readers, and hundreds of thousands of words, there will always be people who think I'm wrong about something, or think they have an important insight, and sometimes they'll be right. I would love to live in a bubble, and just throw stuff out there without ever seeing a word of feedback, but that would be irresponsible. The right thing to do is to look at every response and honestly consider it, but this takes a tremendous amount of psychic energy. If I can't do it, it's better not to write anything, and I mostly can't do it any more. Maybe a little. I expect future posts to either be about personal stuff, which I still enjoy talking about, or simple links like megastorms drowning California, or if it's about heavy ideas, it will be a link to someone else's blog with its own comment section, like this Ribbonfarm guest post, Patterns of Refactored Agency, for which there is also a post on the subreddit.

December 3.

2013-12-03T12:38:58Z

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.