Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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October 21. Fascinating ask reddit thread: What moral boundaries will be crossed in the next 100 years? There are all kinds of ideas, mostly in the realm of artificial intelligence and biotech. I just want to rant about Gattaca, a well-meaning movie that gets it exactly wrong. In Gattaca there are two brothers, one genetically engineered to be stronger and smarter and better looking, and but he's lazy, and the other one, not engineered but extremely driven. Think about it: the second brother is the hero of the movie because our culture values people who are driven over people who are talented. Therefore, as soon as it becomes possible, everyone will engineer their kids to be extremely driven, and a generation of hypercompetitive fanatics will nearly destroy the world.


October 18. Today, some weird stuff. First, the Glitch in the Matrix subreddit is the best compilation of unexplained experiences I've ever seen anywhere. They're not all good but the highest-upvoted ones tend to be better. Another subreddit covering similar stuff is The Truth is Here.

Also from reddit, What's the craziest or weirdest thing in your field that you suspect is true but is not yet supported fully by data? Too many answers are non-weird miraculous technologies, but if you skim through the thread there's some good stuff, like echolocating whales, cortisol as the cause of depression, hormonal birth control making children with weak immune systems, and humans in North America more than 30,000 years ago.

Some fringe astronomy: Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe.

And some farther out fringe astronomy: Are We Observing Extraterrestrial Intelligence Without Realizing It?

Clement Vidal has pointed out that there are certain binary star systems that astrophysicists have had difficulty explaining with conventional astrophysical models. These binaries are semi-detatched stars that exhibit an energy flow that is irregular, but not out of control. Vidal argues that instead of an astrophysical model, we need an astrobiological model to describe these strange systems.

In essence Vidal is claiming that these systems are not typical binary stars, but rather civilizations that have advanced well past a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale and are now actively feeding on their parent star. He calls these hypothetical civilizations starivores. And if he is right, then there are approximately 2000 known starivores in our galaxy alone.


October 16. Two political links. The more a society coerces its people, the greater the chance of mental illness.

And Tea Party radicalism is misunderstood. The idea is that lefties are wrong to view Tea Partiers as stupid, because they're both wealthier and better educated than the average American, and they know what they're doing:

The Tea Party right is not only disproportionately Southern but also disproportionately upscale. Its social base consists of what, in other countries, are called the "local notables" -- provincial elites whose power and privileges are threatened from above by a stronger central government they do not control and from below by the local poor and the local working class.


October 14. Something I've been putting off for a month, and loosely related to Friday's link, a summary of the book Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita. Thanks John for recommending it! Here's a page with an excerpt containing what I think is the book's most important idea. It's a story of how uncomfortable you would feel if you were stuck in rural Saskatchewan with no distracting technology, and the key line is "Nothing here was designed to affect you."

Elsewhere he argues that our word "real" is outdated because what we used to call real and artificial are now totally blurred together. I think, of the many possible definitions and uses of the word "real", the most valuable is to distinguish between 1) something that is playing to you as an audience, that is arranged or designed for your observation, and 2) something that doesn't know or care whether you are observing it. So obviously a forest is more real than a theme park, but also, the industrial area of a city is more real than a botanic garden.

A few more ideas from the book:


October 11. Some personal news: Leigh Ann moved in with me ten days ago, and I've been busy helping her paint her room and gather furniture. Also she doesn't want to bike to the library every day for internet, so today we got connected with the evil Comcast, because the only other option is much slower and also has bad customer service. Anyway, now I'll be blogging and answering emails at all times of day, but maybe not with any greater volume.

Andy sends this excellent NYT column, Experience as It Once Was:

When you are not told what to do you begin to think what to do. You begin to see without distraction. Urban spaces these days can seem the antithesis of Monderman's vision of freedom. The state's cameras are trained on streets where people's gazes are trained on hand-held screens that map their movements -- offering facsimiles of the experience they might have if they ever looked up.


October 9. I'm sort of on vacation this week. There's lots of good stuff over at No Tech Magazine.


October 7. Here's a link from a reader, Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark. Basically the tricks that work in America don't work in Denmark, partly because of laws that guarantee women financial security without men, and partly because of the culture: "...the entire point of game is showing you're better than the next guy, something that Jante Law specifically forbids..."

Also here's an analysis of the ongoing government shutdown: Game theory and America's budget battle. The idea is that the Republicans will back down and Obama won't because he doesn't need to be reelected. We'll see...


October 3. Over on the subreddit, there's a long and thoughtful comment by jackthornglas about dropping out. The only thing I would add is that the phrase "dropping out" has picked up so much baggage that you may be better off not using it. Instead you could say you're living life with the goal of maximizing free time and minimizing stress.


October 2. Today's big news is that the FBI raided Silk Road. That link goes to a news article and here's the Hacker News comment thread. If it's true that the guy made a lot of mistakes, then it should be possible for someone more careful to start something similar and not get caught.

Related: the other day Glenn Greenwald did a reddit AMA, answering questions about the NSA discosures and the surveillance state. That's an article with ten excerpts and here's the whole thread. One of the best answers is this one about how the ruling system makes personal attacks on people who challenge it, instead of looking at the substance of the challenge, how they decided to paint Snowden as a fame-seeking narcissist, and how he's exactly the opposite, turning down hundreds of requests for TV interviews.


September 30. Bunch o' links. First, some reddit stuff. I discovered there's a page that shows comments that have been awarded reddit gold, which is a way for people to donate money to reddit to show appreciation of someone's comment, and the commenter gets trivial perks.

Anyway, most of the comments are still lame but every day there are a few good ones. I discovered my new favorite redditor, Drooperdoo, who knows a lot about fringe history and the philosophy of the unexplained. Here's his (or her?) latest comment bashing James Randi as an unscientific authoritarian conventionalist.

And here's a comment from a few days ago by a woman who uses gaming metaphors to explain the pickup scene:

In her game, guys like you are the low-level monsters that pop up every time she walks through tall grass. Nobody expects long-term cooperative play from a guy they meet at a bar, but you're treating sex like a boss battle. This isn't a situation where you have to lower her stats until you win. You're adding her to your party for a mission.

And Video games: the addiction is a well-written piece by a guy who spent years addicted to Grand Theft Auto and cocaine. The header says he has no regrets, but if you read it, he regrets the cocaine and not the gaming. The difference between him and me is that the game I would enjoy as much as he enjoys GTA does not yet exist.

Mass shootings are up; gun murders down. You could reduce common gun crime with conventional gun control measures, but reducing mass shootings would require much deeper changes.

And a good critique of the copyright system: The question was never "How do we make sure artists are paid?" It was always "How do we ensure art is made and available?" I think the near-elimination of copyright is inevitable, simply because our culture is running out of ideas, and it's getting harder and harder to make something creative that isn't like something that's been done before.


September 25. I'm driving to Seattle on Friday, so if I don't post tomorrow, I won't post again until Monday. Here's a good blog post about Louis C.K.'s explanation of why he hates smartphones. The main idea is that we are using technology to distract us from feeling alone and sad, and it's good to feel sad. I have more thoughts on technology, especially on the difference between something that is designed with an audience in mind, and something that is indifferent to whether it's being observed. But my brain is not working at all today.

And thanks AP for a $50 donation!


September 23. Two links about how we're raising kids wrong. First the one I completely agree with: The Play Deficit argues that kids are being both too protected and too controlled, possibly leading to rising anxiety, depression, narcissism, and suicide.

And this cleverly illustrated blog post, Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy, makes some good points in the context of two framing errors. It's the usual argument that Millennials have a sense of entitlement because they're all told they're special. I like the observation that Facebook image padding makes everyone feel like everyone else is happier, and there was some fun stuff in the original post that has now been removed, including a bit about how people think they're too good to live in an uncool city.

Anyway, one error is the failure to imagine zero-sum human value. You can argue about whether we should use the word "special" for this, but it's not that hard to tell every child that they have a unique combination of good qualities, that they are valuable just for being who they are, and that they have the power to live a happy life -- without telling them that their value crowds out or diminishes the value of other people. And the really big error is the failure to imagine happiness or success in any other terms than making money in a wage labor career.

This would be my advice for "Lucy": Everyone is special, but only a few people are special in the tiny range of things that this society will give you money for. You can live a wonderful life doing what you love, but whatever it is, most likely you won't make a living from it, and you will enjoy it more if you do not expect any money at all. So let go of the expectation that you will get fulfillment and money from the same activity, and try to find a source of money that is as easy and low-stress as possible.

I also want to comment on the trend of events for kids where everyone gets an award. I actually think this is good! This kind of unconditional validation is what kids need. And in my ideal world, when they become adults, they have a ceremony where they burn all their awards, and adults would never get awards. Everything from the Nobel prize to Walmart employee of the week would be eliminated. Of course adults can still compete for money and scarce activities, and they can still take pleasure in other people appreciating what they do. But awards are in a crazy-making grey area between subjective and objective value, between authentic appreciation and bullshit. They indulge our need for validation which, if we've been raised well, we've outgrown.


September 20. Some happy links for the weekend. I've linked before to a transcript of this David Foster Wallace graduation speech, and this link turns it into a great video. It's mostly about how you can make your life better by changing your perspective on the tedious details.

Article about the growing trend of European families adopting black American children.

Via many sources, A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics, a good explanation of a huge discovery. They compare it to finding a vase that could previously be described only by looking at the broken pieces. "You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before." And it suggests that space-time is not fundamental but emergent.

And Leigh Ann sends this video from the psychology subreddit: Rare footage of 1950's housewife on LSD. Personally I doubt the long-term value of technologies that do stuff for us instead of challenging us to learn to do stuff for ourselves. So that's one reason I don't use psychedelics. Another reason is that Philip Dick had not yet tried LSD when he wrote his trippiest novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Oh, and thanks MK for a $31.76 donation!


September 18. Via No Tech Magazine, two links from earlier this summer that make similar points about money and time. Why so Fast? is a critique of high-speed trains. It's mostly about the lower energy efficiency and higher costs that come with increasing speed, and only touches on the most interesting point: fast travel only benefits people with too much money and not enough time! If you have lots of time and not enough money, there is no reason to spend money to go faster. So if we're headed for a permanent low-employment economy, fast trains are becoming socially obsolete.

And Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed is about the connection between the 40 hour work week and the culture of consumption: when people have a good income and not enough time, they spend a lot on fast easy pleasures. Clearly this could lead to a feedback loop, where rising unemployment means people have less incentive to consume, so the economy shrinks, so there is more unemployment, and so on.

I think this would be great as long as unemployed people could still get decent food and housing. But with the inevitable decline in agricultural yields, ruling systems might find it easier to kill the poor than feed them. Anne has a related comment about hunting:

One of my friends gave me a copy of Field and Stream. Much of this particular issue is taken up with the question of how to hunt on public land, or how to find a farmer or other landowner who will let you hunt without charging a shit-ton of money. Apparently, hunting is being enclosed, in the sense that the very rich are finding ways to lock up resources for themselves.

More optimistic: a long article about The Rise of the New New Left, arguing that the election of Bill de Blasio as NYC mayor is the start of a trend of Millennials saving America.


September 16. A couple weeks ago the Archdruid had one of his best posts in a while, The Next Ten Billion Years. It was a response to this Ugo Bardi post from a year ago, also called The Next Ten Billion Years.

They both try to predict the future by powers of ten, looking 10 years ahead, 100 years, 1000 years, and so on. Bardi has the "bad" scenario, where civilization slowly collapses, and humans linger for a while and go extinct, and the "good" scenario, where this civilization survives to terraform other planets and expand into the galaxy. Greer has only one scenario, in which thousands of global human civilizations rise and fall, and then there are rising and falling civilizations of other species that evolve human-like intelligence, and then the sun dies and the same thing happens around other stars.

I roughly agree with Bardi's bad scenario for 10 years, Bardi's good scenario for 100 years, and Greer for the big numbers. Humans are extremely resourceful but not until we have our backs to the wall, so things will get really bad before they turn around. But I think energy decline and climate change will just be bumps on the road for high tech. The deaths of a billion poor people will not stop luckier people from unlocking new powers with computers and biotech.

If I had to guess, humans will be extinct within 500 years, not from the failure of technology but from its success. Biotech will tempt us to change ourselves into something that is no longer human, and that is better in obvious ways, but in subtle ways much worse; and even when we see extinction coming, we will be psychologically or culturally unable to change ourselves into something that can survive. At the same time, virtual reality will tempt us to turn our attention fatally inward.

There's also a chance, before we go extinct, that we'll use biotech to give human-like intelligence to other species, or make crazy biological-cybernetic hybrids. Most of these will also go extinct, but some of them will settle into ecological niches, so in just a thousand years we could have Greer's crow people and raccoon people at the same time, along with rat people, octopus people, unicorns and snuffleupagi. This is my personal best case scenario, and I sort of wrote about it more than ten years ago in J.R.R. Tolkien: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow.


September 13. You've probably heard about the new Jon Krakauer piece on how Chris McCandless died. Ever since he wrote Into The Wild, Krakauer has been changing his story from one slightly poisonous plant to another slightly poisonous plant, and there is good evidence for this one, but I still think the data fits the theory that McCandless simply starved to death. Here are two articles that make that argument, Into the Wild Debunked and Into the Wild and other Poisonous Plant Fables. We'll probably never know for sure, and I don't want to criticize McCandless for being unprepared. He knew he was taking a big risk and that's okay. But if you are going into the wild, it is better to go with the attitude that it is really, really hard to get enough food, than the attitude that it's easy to find food if you just avoid eating anything poisonous.

A few more links, sort of related. Two days ago there was a great little discussion on the INTP subreddit about dreaming of some sort of apocalypse of civilization: "I would be totally happy (I THINK!) roaming around on my bike, figuring out how to work things, foraging for food, and going to sleep with the sun every night." I feel this way too, except I know that the food part is pretty much impossible, which is why instead of trying to homestead, I now live where I can ride my bike to food stores. And if I had to have a job, I'd find one that left me time and energy to putter around doing my own stuff.

And a thoughtful blog post by a smart guy who became stupid from Lyme disease. The title is a reference to the classic sci-fi story Flowers For Algernon, where a dumb guy keeps a journal as an experimental drug makes him the smartest man alive and then he gradually loses it. What I find most interesting is the description of depression, not as sadness but as lack of motivation. I wonder if I've been mildly depressed for my whole life. And then I wonder how much of modern depression is in the brain, and how much is in society, because I can imagine worlds in which I would be highly motivated all the time. How many depressed people would come alive if they were fighting for survival, or for some concrete and important cause? Instead we're expected to get enthusiastic about an almost meaningless wage labor career and scoring social points with people we barely know.

This is related to a point in a book I just read, Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita. We use technology to give ourselves more options, and it seems like we're making a better world, but what makes us feel alive is necessity.


September 11. From three months ago, a well written reddit comment on the creepiness of the word "homeland". For me it was a Philip K Dick moment. Here was a word that I had never once heard used to describe the USA, and suddenly everyone was using it all the time as if it was completely normal. People in the comments are comparing it to Nazi language, but I would make the comparison like this: The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) was the main division of the Nazi SS, and the parent organization of the Gestapo. The German word "Reich" is too packed with meaning to be translated into English, but homeland is probably the best you could do. "Sicherheit" is always translated as security, and "Hauptamt" literally means "main office", which in the American government, we call a department.

My prediction: The "war on terror" will be defined more and more broadly as a war on anyone who attempts to break the state monopoly on politically effective violence -- which will eventually include a majority of Americans when we can no longer afford to eat because so much wealth has been concentrated at the top. Related: the rich get richer through the recovery.

And something happy: A New Future for Nature is a video of a speech by George Monbiot arguing that we should fully restore large sections of Europe to how they were before civilization, including bringing back elephants! If you don't want to sit through a video of someone talking, here's a similar Monbiot TED talk on rewilding that includes a transcript. And he has a new book on this subject called Feral.





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