novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"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
April 16. Big new post on the landblog/houseblog about installing the bees.
April 15. Unrelated links. A great reddit comment on why anarchists fail or succeed. The author's summary is "Anarchists should try to do one thing of value to the community and do it well. They should do so in a strategic way and be open to alliances. Subcultures, drugs, alcohol, and rage suck." My summary would be that successful movements contain many cultures and one goal, and failed movements contain one culture and many goals.
News is bad for you -- and giving up reading it will make you happier. I haven't read the comments, but clearly this has a lot to do with your attitude, and what you are looking for when you read news.
A good Raptitude post, Mindfulness lives in the sink:
"Life is composed of primarily mundane moments," she says. "If we don't learn to love these moments, we live a life of frustration and avoidance, always seeking ways to escape the mundane. Washing the dishes with patience and attention is a perfect opportunity to develop a love affair with simply existing. You might say it is the perfect mindfulness practice. To me, the dishwasher is the embodiment of our insatiable need, as a culture, to keep on running, running, running, trying to find something that was inside of us all along."
April 12. A Practical Utopian's Guide to the Coming Collapse is an excerpt from David Graeber's new book. His most interesting idea is that popular uprisings that seem to fail can ultimately succeed. So the revolutions of 1848 all failed to take power, but the reforms they wanted were mostly put into place out of fear of future revolutions. And the protests of the 1960's failed to end the Vietnam War any sooner, but every American war since has been conducted to mimimize protests, more than to actually win the war. From here, he argues that the main objective of the ruling system is to create a feeling of hopelessness:
It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.
Graeber goes on to suggest some future reforms, for which the mechanisms have yet to be worked out: canceling debts, producing less stuff, and redefining labor in terms of helping other people instead of growing the economy.
And two more political links. In How Noam Chomsky is discussed, Glenn Greenwald argues that "the more one dissents from political orthodoxies, the more personalized, style-focused and substance-free the attacks become."
And from 2009, The other side of Rick Steves, in which the travel guru cautiously talks politics.
April 10. Two good articles on Margaret Thatcher. The woman who wrecked Great Britain focuses more on politics and economics, while Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher focuses more on psychology:
What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neo-liberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
Loosely related: Salvador Dali, Fascist.
April 9. A reader sends two interviews with Douglas Rushkoff about his new book: Why Living in the Present Is a Disorder, and Present Shock. I don't see any jump-out-of-your-seat ideas here, but some good thoughts about some of the ways that technology is changing human consciousness.
Related: a reddit comment about the future guaranteed basic income. While I support it, and expect it, I'm not quite this optimistic:
People, I think, are afraid of this change because of the free time it will bring along with a shift in self identification. A majority of people self identify via a job, "I'm a bank teller, I'm a fundraiser etc." That will be gone. As most people have not had extensive free time they haven't thought about what they really want to do or create, many assume others (or themselves) will just drink and play video games 24 hours a day. But won't that get old after 2 years, 5 years, 10? Won't you want to strive for more, to make something, to write something to invent something? The difference is the choice will be yours, your job will no longer dictate your schedule or what you can do, your chains, will quite literally, be broken.
April 8. I'm in Seattle this week. Leigh Ann (sitting next to me on the couch) mentioned that there was a post on the subreddit that oddly vanished, but still appears on the user page of the submitter. This is probably a bug in reddit, but here it is: Is External Structure Bad? I would say that it's important to distinguish between cooperative external structure and authoritarian external structure.
Update: that post and one other got caught in the spam filter and a heroic moderator has now freed them. Here's the other: On helping people, and "just giving money". I would say that some individuals, like some charities, are black holes that will just suck up anything you give them without creating any benefit. The better you know them, the better you can tell the difference.
Also, thanks to another benefactor for a $100 plus donation. I spent it on crack. Seriously, Sean let me use his table saw, so maybe I'll spend it on a kindle or some LED lights.
Finally, Margaret Thatcher has died. Here's the relevant Elvis Costello song: Tramp The Dirt Down.
April 6. Update on yesterday. It took me a couple hours with a chisel to separate one layer from an 18x48" piece of plywood. A reader has donated $100 for me to buy a table saw, but I might be able to borrow one, or just spend a long time sawing by hand.
Also, I'm traveling to Seattle tomorrow and might have a group dinner on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. And off the usual subjects, here's a link about the awesomeness of dragonflies.
April 5. Some bad news on the beekeeping front. Last summer I bought sixty top bars from beethinking.com, and designed all my hives to fit them. I just bought another sixty... and they've changed the dimensions! My original decision was between spending way too much money on pre-made top bars, or way too much time making them myself, and now I'll have to do both! Mainly the new ones are much thinner, but they've also slightly reduced the width, so that ten no longer fit in my ten-bar mini-hives without a gap. It's absolutely necessary that all my bars be interchangeable, so I think my best move is to convert the new ones to the old dimensions by taking some 3/4 inch plywood, carefully removing one layer to make it 9/16 (9/16 inch wood or plywood is rare to nonexistent), hand-sawing a bunch of pieces 17 1/2 by exactly 1 3/8, and gluing them on top of the new bars. I might decide to spend yet another $100 on a used table saw, which in hindsight I should have done in the first place.
April 5. Part of my semi-retirement is that I avoid posting reader comments on this page, because I don't want people to get in the habit of talking to each other through my inbox. But I'll make an exception with two perspectives on my April 3 post. On the dropout mindset, Ben writes: "The irony is that it appeals to unmotivated people; when, in reality, you need a super human level of discipline and sense of purpose to pull it off, or any intentional life."
And Gene writes: "How the hell are humans as a species going to learn to be free if they're stuck at a job in which they're constantly being told what to do? Better that these people be cast adrift. They'll learn!"
Well, some of them will learn and some of them will destroy themselves. My dream for the human species is universal self-regulation, but I think we have to do it in baby steps.
April 3. Today, some links about emotional problems that I forget other people have. First, from Aeon magazine, While one person dabbles in drugs with few ill-effects, another will become a chronic addict. What's the difference? The author rejects the idea that addicts are morally depraved, and also that they're helpless and have no control. Instead, they're choosing to stay on their drug because the alternative seems even worse:
They are usually people who suffer not only from addiction, but also from additional psychiatric disorders; in particular, anxiety, mood and personality disorders. These disorders all involve living with intense, enduring negative emotions and moods, alongside other forms of extreme psychological distress... They are unlikely -- even if they were to overcome their addiction -- to live a happy, flourishing life, where they can feel at peace with themselves and with others.
From the confession subreddit, I'm a skydiver with over 500 jumps... What I don't tell them is that I would be relieved if I threw out my pilot chute and nothing happened.
And
Procrastination Is Not Laziness, in which the author discovers that he procrastinates because he's afraid of failure.
I can't relate to any of this. I procrastinate because retiling my shower is a painful chore and playing video games is so much more fun. The closest I come to depression is when everything I do feels like walking uphill and I just want to sleep all day. When that happens, I bite the bullet, force myself to do stuff I hate in the service of my future self, and in a few days I feel good again.
But I'm wondering if some of my writing is harmful to people who are not like me. Some people have a much harder time forcing themselves to do stuff, and they dream of a magical world in which they can just do what they feel like all day and everything works out. These people need more external structure, not less. They should not try to drop out of society -- they should get a job where they are surrounded by other people to motivate them.
This is related to Monday's final link, about giving money directly to the poor. There is a movement to give everyone a guaranteed basic income, and a reader sends a new article about it: Helicopter money: Federal Reserve should print money and give it directly to households. I support this, and I expect it to happen as soon as corporations realize that they no longer need people as workers (because of automation) but still need them as consumers. Economically it's perfect, but psychologically it could be a terrible ordeal for ordinary people who are not yet able to create their own structure and meaning.
April 1. Unrelated links. The Unintended (and Deadly) Consequences of Living in the Industrialized World. It's all about how exposure to dirt makes us healthier. But there's no practical reason that industrialized kids can't be exposed to dirt -- only cultural stupidity.
Also from Smithsonian magazine, What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution. A photographer has worked out a technique to make modern cities look like all the lights are out and you can see astronomically accurate dense starry skies behind them.
Something Other Than Adaptation Could Be Driving Evolution. "Speciation might not only be an evolutionary consequence of fitness differences and natural selection, but a property intrinsic to evolution, just as all matter has gravity."
Want to Help People? Just Give Them Money.
Investments in common goods such as roads, schools and wells are critical in helping people out of poverty. But GiveDirectly has a new concept: What if cash transfers are used as a standard benchmark against which to measure all development aid? What if every nonprofit that focused on poverty alleviation had to prove they could do more for the poor with a dollar than the poor could do for themselves?
March 29. New post on the landblog/houseblog about building three mini/bait hives. I've also tacked it onto the bottom of the Top Bar Hive page, and taken a prettier photo of the finished hives. I pick up my bees on April 13. I haven't mentioned it in a post yet, but I've planted a patch of strawberries, some more raspberries, and I'm preparing places for lingonberries and more blueberries.
March 27. A week ago on the subreddit, this post suggested that we can think of the corporation as a form of artificial intelligence. Today Leigh Ann sends two links with the same idea: The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations, and a Charlie Stross post from 2010, Invaders from Mars.
March 26. Another good article about de-extinction: Efforts to Resuscitate Extinct Species May Spawn a New Era of the Hybrid.
Loosely related: Becoming the All-Terrain Human, about the world's best endurance runner. How long until biotech is able to give these skills to everyone?
He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe's roof -- over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex'd climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet -- and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete.
March 25. Thanks GB for a $50 donation. In other personal financial news, I've started to research Obamacare rules, and it looks like they've eliminated the asset test for medicaid. This is great news for people like me with high assets and low income, and it's a smart move overall, because the administrative cost of testing for assets exceeds the savings of excluding people. Of course, the American medical system remains the worst in the world in terms of benefit vs cost, and I still don't see any politically possible way to fix it.
March 21. Appropedia is a new green living wiki. And on a similar subject, there's always good stuff on No Tech Magazine.
This reddit comment explains why it sucks to be an opera singer, and how opera companies are becoming more short-sighted in developing talent. And by a former reporter, Why I left news. I would say, as a general rule, the more glamorous a job sounds the more likely it will destroy you, and the more boring a job sounds the more likely you'll be happy. Or, there is an inverse relation between how much you enjoy what you do, and how much you enjoy answering the question "What do you do?"
March 20. Four links about biology. I've seen a lot of articles lately about bringing back extinct species, and this is my favorite: Cloning Woolly Mammoths: It's the Ecology, Stupid:
Is one lonely calf, raised in captivity and without the context of its herd and environment, really a mammoth? ... Perhaps the best course of action is to first demonstrate that we can effectively manage living rhinos and elephants before resurrecting their woolly counterparts.
Swallows may be evolving to dodge traffic. The evidence is that fewer birds are being killed by cars, their wings are getting shorter, and birds that are killed by cars have longer wings than birds caught in nets.
Ten predictions for the future of your microbial health, speculating that coming research will show that having a high diversity of good bacteria -- on your skin, in your gut, etc. -- is better than aiming for total sterility and ending up with an environment that favors bad bacteria.
And an excellent reddit comment about how bees swarm.
March 18. Some personal stuff. Last fall I grew a beard, and this is my new look. I just shaved it off for spring, but after getting used to the bearded look, I like it better than the shaved look and I'm going to grow it back. Notice the beehives in the corner of the photo. I just updated my Top Bar Hive page with a photo of the hives in their final position with the lids painted, and added some new info in the big paragraph about wax and comb.
I did my taxes, and my income last year was $8500. I didn't have to file but filed anyway to document my low income so I can try to get medicaid under ObamaCare. I overspent my income by a couple thousand dollars, so I'm getting more serious about frugality, and one thing I'm doing is eating less meat. Counting my cart the other day at Costco I noticed that a pack of two small organic chickens was over $20, and a giant bag of potatoes was under $5, and I know that potatoes are almost complete nutrition, so I put the chickens back. I've also been making lots of lentil soup after a friend found a local farmer selling dirty chaff-filled lentils for ten cents a pound. The dirt rinses out, the chaff can be picked out in half an hour for a large batch, and the flavor is just as good as the premium lentils I was buying for fifteen times the price.
If anyone likes tart cherries, Costco is also selling Evans (a.k.a. Bali) cherry trees for under $12. Evans will eventually surpass Montmorency as the standard for tart cherries. I don't know what the rootstock is but I bought one anyway and stuck it probably too close to the peach tree.
I'm still going to the library for internet, and still loving it. I get a nice bike ride every day, spend a few hours online, and then the late afternoons and evenings are open to do other things... not all of them "useful". I've been playing Twilight Princess on Wii and last night I beat the mini-boss in the desert dungeon. I've also been reading Charles Stross, and I want to read the first three books of Iain Banks's Culture series, but the library doesn't have them and my Kindle remains broken, so maybe I'll finally sign up for Paperback Swap.
March 15. Ten days ago Paula made a post, On Canceling Collapse, about my developing no-crash position, arguing that I've collapse-proofed my own life to the extent that collapse is invisible to me.
I think the word "collapse" is confusing us by blurring several different issues. One of them is poverty, and my position on that has not changed: for all the usual doomer reasons, there will be a lot more desperately poor people, and we should all try to change our lives to need less money.
The issue on which I've changed my mind is the stability of big systems, and it's strange that everyone thinks I've become more optimistic, when really I've become more pessimistic. Go back and read stuff like The Coming Expansion or How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth. I was a doomer optimist. For my entire life the world has been getting tighter and tighter, and I was hopeful that I would see it crack open into freedom and possibility. I'm too young to remember the 1960's, but I remember as a kid roaming the neighborhood unsupervised, I remember when small airports had no security at all, when surveillance cameras were rare, when there were no seat belt laws, when you could share information without having to overcome DRM, when only young people had to show ID to buy alcohol.
My fear now is that it will never again get looser, that a tech crash is almost impossible, and that technology will make the control systems more airtight while channeling our urge for freedom into artificial worlds. You could even argue that this is part of the "collapse": increasing poverty causes increasing crime causes increasing fear causes increasing popular consent for strong central control.
March 13. Continuing on Monday's subject, a reader sends this page about complexity of value and how difficult it is to encode human values into a system of rules:
Because the human brain very often fails to grasp all these difficulties involving our values, we tend to think building an awesome future is much less problematic than it really is. Fragility of value is relevant for building Friendly AI, because an AGI which does not respect human values is likely to create a world that we would consider devoid of value.
Another angle: The Best Intelligence Is Cyborg Intelligence. I think this is where we'll be for the rest of this century, because no matter how powerful computers get, it will always be easier to combine machine and human intelligence than to duplicate human intelligence with a machine. The more interesting possibility is that someone will build a self-improving AI that is not a computer.March 11. From Aeon Magazine, a smart essay about humanity's deep future and the threat of extinction from stuff we are only now beginning to create. My favorite ideas are not from Nick Bostrom, the guy photographed at the top, but Daniel Dewey, a specialist in artificial intelligence. This is the first time I've seen a plausible analysis of the motivations of a dangerous AI. We imagine that it will be like an evil human, but human motivations come from human nature and human culture, neither of which will motivate a machine. Dewey correctly observes that our AI will have exactly the motivations we give it, and he speculates that it will follow these motivations into consequences that our relatively low intelligence cannot predict.
'The basic problem is that the strong realisation of most motivations is incompatible with human existence,' Dewey told me. 'An AI might want to do certain things with matter in order to achieve a goal, things like building giant computers, or other large-scale engineering projects. Those things might involve intermediary steps, like tearing apart the Earth to make huge solar panels. A superintelligence might not take our interests into consideration in those situations, just like we don't take root systems or ant colonies into account when we go to construct a building.'
It is tempting to think that programming empathy into an AI would be easy, but designing a friendly machine is more difficult than it looks. You could give it a benevolent goal -- something cuddly and utilitarian, like maximising human happiness. But an AI might think that human happiness is a biochemical phenomenon. It might think that flooding your bloodstream with non-lethal doses of heroin is the best way to maximise your happiness. It might also predict that shortsighted humans will fail to see the wisdom of its interventions. It might plan out a sequence of cunning chess moves to insulate itself from resistance. Maybe it would surround itself with impenetrable defences, or maybe it would confine humans in prisons of undreamt of efficiency.
March 8. Yesterday on the subreddit a reader linked to this Ribbonfarm guest post that explores the WEIRD subject more deeply: Honesty and the Human Body.
Also, I keep forgetting to mention this. Does anyone have a Kindle 3 (a.k.a. Kindle Keyboard) that they want to donate or sell cheap? It's okay if the logic board or battery is bad because all I need is the screen.
March 7. I've just finished the latest update on my 100 things about me page. The biggest block of new stuff is from 26-30.
March 6. Three positive links. This Happy Homestead is a new blog by a guy in my area.
BookOS is a new ebook site. It's mostly pdfs, which are good for reading on the computer. If you have an e-reader it's better if you can find epub or mobi.
And a great reddit comment about the benefits of meditation, focusing on the skill of noticing and dropping unhelpful thoughts.
March 4. There's a lot of buzz about this video, Wealth Inequality in America. Here's a less slick video that goes inside the top one percent to show the wealth continuing to increase to even more absurd levels: The L-Curve: Income Distribution of the U.S.
Something most people are missing is that, past a few million dollars, money is no longer about buying stuff -- it's about political power. And this power is mostly being wasted. Only a few super-rich people are doing anything interesting -- Bill Gates is trying to eradicate malaria, Elon Musk is trying to colonize Mars, but most of them are ordinary idiots, throwing their wealth/power behind two contradictory goals: to continue to increase their wealth/power, and to keep the system stable.
March 1. Today, people bash American culture and I defend it. Dmitry Orlov's new post, Monkey Trap Nation, points out many ways that Americans are short-sighted, and he's right. But relative to other countries, we are only more short-sighted in the time dimension. We are less short-sighted in the social dimension, and I'm talking about political corruption. I'll define corruption as the use of a position of power to serve a narrower interest than the scope of that position. So instead of serving everyone you have power over, you harm most of them to serve yourself and people close to you. America is corrupt, but most of the world is much more corrupt, and short-sightedness toward other people might be even more harmful than short-sightedness toward the future, because when disaster happens, a socially far-sighted culture can hold together while a short-sighted one breaks into warring tribes.
Why Americans are the weirdest people in the world. This is the best article I've seen on the idea that psychological studies have been skewed by only testing educated westerners, and when you look at all of humanity, we are outliers, and Americans are the most extreme outliers. There's a fascinating argument that a particular optical illusion (see the article) is a cultural artifact of living inside square rooms. Americans are the most fooled by that one, but we're the least fooled by another one, in which a vertical line appears to be tilted by being placed in a tilted rectangle. The idea is that we're more individualistic, and cultures that see the illusion are more holistic, more focused on the context.
But wait -- there's a reason it's called an illusion. When you look at larger context -- the paper the test is written on, your computer screen, gravity -- the line really is vertical, and Americans are seeing this context, this whole, more accurately than anyone else! So in society and politics, we are more likely to act in the interest of all of humanity, or all life everywhere, or biological nature manifesting through our feelings, than to obey family and country. Individualism has its own dangers, but collective insanity is a greater danger, and something like the Cultural Revolution in China could never happen here.