Ran Prieur

January 28.

2013-01-28T12:07:54Z

January 28. (permalink) Over the weekend I read Philip K Dick's last finished novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. There's a pivotal scene where three characters go to a medium, intending to talk with the spirit of another character who died. The medium is a fraud, but there's a twist: it's not that she has no psychic powers, but that she has a different power than she claims; rather than speaking with the dead, she can read minds. So she just tells everyone whatever they are already thinking. They think they're looking out a window, when they're looking in a mirror, and this leads to their destruction.

I think this is the key to two of Dick's biggest themes: reality and madness. Reality is looking outward, unreality is looking inward, and madness is when you can't tell the difference.

This reminds me of my favorite critique of technology. In the book In the Absence of the Sacred, Jerry Mander argues that our technological progress is like inbreeding: we have been turning our attention away from the world outside humanity, and deeper into a world created by humans. Look around where you're sitting now. Can you see or hear anything that was not created by humans? How common was this for your ancestors?

I have a challenge for transhumanists. The word can mean a lot of things, but I would ask: where will future transhumans be focusing their attention? With whom will they have relationships? If they're truly transcending humanity, they will be looking outside the world created by humans. I fear that transhumanism is really ultra-humanism, where we not only turn our attention deeper inside the world we created, but change ourselves so that we can't get out.

January 26.

2013-01-26T12:42:31Z

January 26. The other day there was an epic reddit comment on the fall of Rome, compiling links to almost a hundred other comment threads on various questions.

Unrelated, another nice reddit thread, people with a history of depression, what was the most positive thing someone said to you while you were low?

And two loose ends on lard. A reader mentions that the cracklings can be improved by baking them at 350F until they're brown and crispy. And another reader sends this thread about omega 6 in lard, which implies that hard lard is better for you than soft.

January 24.

2013-01-24T12:59:55Z

January 24. New landblog/houseblog post about rendering lard.

January 22.

2013-01-22T12:38:40Z

January 22. My latest thought about collapse is that there are two ways to frame it, or a continuum between two extremes. At one extreme, the threat of collapse is purely external. All systems are assumed to be equally strong, and the question is how many bad things have to happen to a system before it breaks down. This is like a view of infectious disease that assumes all immune systems are equally strong, and seeks to minimize exposure to germs. At the other extreme the threat is purely internal. So a strong system can endure anything, and a weak system will be toppled by anything. I lean in this direction. So if you want to predict if a certain system is going to crash, you don't look at all the threats lined up against it -- you look at how it behaves when things go wrong.

Specifically, I would look at feedback, how things going wrong cause other things to go wrong. Initially there is a continuum between zero feedback, where one thing going wrong does not make anything else go wrong, and maximum feedback, a chain reaction of bigger and bigger things going wrong, so that the slighest bump will bring total collapse. Over the longer term you can ask if a system gets hardened, where for example a hurricane makes it stronger against future hurricanes, or worn down, where every hurricane makes it weaker against future hurricanes.

I've stopped predicting collapse because I'm seeing low disaster feedback, chain reactions of smaller and smaller things going wrong, culminating in almost no change in the daily life of the average person. The technological systems seem especially strong, the economic systems weakest, and political systems somewhere in the middle. So if the European economy collapses, it will reshuffle but not totally overthrow the governments, and it will barely effect the electric grid.

The next question is, what would it take for any of these systems to change and become weaker? I see two ways it could happen. One is in complex systems theory, and Steven Strogatz raised this danger last week in his edge.org piece on too much coupling. Parts of the system are influencing other parts, and this is good up to a point, but if coupling passes some critical threshhold, the basic character of the system changes, and the next small disaster could cause something like a system-wide epileptic seizure.

The other change is in human psychology. I'm thinking of Fredy Perlman's book Against His-story, Against Leviathan, where he goes through the whole history of civilization arguing that empires fell because they were emotionally hollowed-out, because their own citizens no longer believed in them.

January 19.

2013-01-19T12:38:57Z

January 19. Here's a good link about the future of biotech: Interview with George Church: Can Neanderthals Be Brought Back from the Dead? My favorite part is about how "life science will co-opt almost every other field of manufacturing."

Related: The Deepening Paradox by Karl Schroeder, in which he argues that we are failing to recognize extraterrestrial life, because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

January 16.

2013-01-16T12:31:07Z

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 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 is Your Life As Pornography.