Ran Prieur

October 30.

2013-10-30T12:08:35Z

October 30. Moving on, lots of stray links. First, the Hacker News comment thread about the latest NSA spying revelation. My favorite comment is in response to someone wondering when the American public will be outraged: "You know what would outrage the public? ESPN being shut down. Most people do not actually care about their privacy." I would say the only two things that would outrage the public would be lack of entertainment and lack of food, and the latter is more likely.

US Healthcare System Explained in Six Succinct Points. Basically, doctors and hospitals have huge incentives to profit from unnecessary treatments, insurance companies respond by not wanting to pay for anything, and it's hard for honest doctors to get treatment for patients who need it. The article doesn't quite say this, but it seems like the bigger a medical organization is, the more corrupt it is, and also the better it is at getting money from insurance companies, so there is a negative correlation between a treatment being necessary and being covered.

Another medical article, Observations: Saturated fat is not the major issue: "The assumption has been made that increased fat in the bloodstream is caused by increased saturated fat in the diet, whereas modern scientific evidence is proving that refined carbohydrates and sugar in particular are actually the culprits."

Mental Illness, the Video Game. A woman who learned to deal with depression and anxiety designed a game about how she did it, a game that directs your attention outside of the game and back into your own mind and body. If humans avoid extinction, it will be through exactly this kind of use of technology, and this game will be historically important.

Top 10 Policies for a Steady-State Economy. These are great ideas, but I wonder how many are politically possible, and how much more likely it is that we will just keep alternating growth and collapse. On the same subject, here's a long reddit comment by Erinaceous, with many links, answering the question Are there any well-established economic theories that advocate for non-growth?

October 28.

2013-10-28T12:31:33Z

October 28. Last winter one of my favorite blogs was The View from Hell. The author, Sister Y, did not post anything for more than seven months, and then in September made twelve dense posts in 20 days. If you want a lot of readers for your blog, do not do this. Anyway, it's great stuff and if you're smarter than me you should read every word. I'm struggling to barely understand it. Most of the posts are about Experience Machines, a broad philosophical category that includes everything from the Holodeck, to religion, to you putting on a performance to get what you want from someone.

There seems to be an important distinction between an Experience Machine that generates experience, and one that merely filters it, but when I think about it more they're almost the same, since both machines are selecting and arranging stuff out of the larger body of stuff that makes sense to a particular audience. So computer animation in a movie, which in theory could show anything, in practice shows a world almost like the world you already live in. This reminds me of the Ribbonfarm post Welcome to the Future Nauseous, which argues that technology can change society no faster than we can change our cultural sense of what's normal.

Also, this whole subject is related to my post two weeks ago about the book Mediated and the distinction between something that's putting on a show for you, and something that's indifferent to your observation. Consider a TV nature show: this is taking something that's indifferent to your observation, and then picking out bits and splicing them together into something that's putting on a show for you. Isn't this also what we do with religion, and culture? Maybe human consciousness itself is just something that filters a chaotic and indifferent universe into a compelling story.

Here's an especially good paragraph from this post:

Experience Machines vary along the dimensions of being effective (producing desirable, meaningful experiences and preventing or at least domesticating negative experiences), honest (not hiding the fact that they are cultural artifacts designed to produce experiences), and voluntary (rather than forced upon adherents). These traits are not necessarily independent; I suspect the most effective Experience Machines that have evolved in human societies are probably some of the least honest and least voluntary, and I'd expect honesty and voluntariness to generally correlate negatively with effectiveness.

In other words, an experience feels more meaningful if you think it's real and not an illusion, and it also feels more meaningful if you think it's necessary and not optional.

October 25, 7pm PDT.

2013-10-25T12:16:45Z

October 25, 7pm PDT. Quick update on today's subject: a new reddit thread, Long time high school teachers of reddit, how have students changed over the years? Lots of interesting stuff, and the clear suspect in the decline of problem solving is No Child Left Behind.

October 25.

2013-10-25T12:29:37Z

October 25. Today, some obvious links about human potential and its enemies. Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime:

Americans and their brains are preoccupied with work much of the time. Throughout history people have intuited that such puritanical devotion to perpetual busyness does not in fact translate to greater productivity and is not particularly healthy... In making an argument for the necessity of mental downtime, we can now add an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence to intuition and anecdote.

Growing Up Poor Is Bad for Your Brain:

"Our findings suggest that the stress-burden of growing up poor may be an underlying mechanism that accounts for the relationship between poverty as a child and how well your brain works as an adult." ... Coming of age in poverty may lead to permanent dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala -- which, according to the researchers, "has been associated with mood disorders including depression, anxiety, impulsive aggression and substance abuse."

The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines. The whole article is worth reading, with many examples of how automation robs us of the ability to do things on our own, and increasingly, the ability to understand things. To paraphrase myself from a few years back: Machines that do physical work make us weak. Machines that do mental work make us stupid. What's going to happen with spiritual machines?

Measuring America's Decline, in Three Charts. Among OECD nations, Americans age 16-24 are dead last in problem-solving and math, and second to last in literacy. I blame a combination of the factors above. Middle class Americans are stupid from working too hard; poor Americans, who are stupid from being poor, are increasing in number as more wealth is sucked up by the rich; and the rich are stupid from having everything done for them, and also being insulated from criticism and failure.

Finally, thanks DN for a $20 donation. And here's some beautiful music for the weekend: Peanuts Theme (Linus and Lucy) 600% Slower.

October 23.

2013-10-23T12:01:19Z

October 23. Yesterday's big news is that Amazon has raised the free shipping threshold by 40 percent, from $25 to $35. Notice that they did it without warning. If they had given us a few weeks notice they would have seen a huge spike of sales in the $25-35 range. The fact that they didn't want that spike, shows how much money they're losing in shipping.

This is related to a change they made in 2012. Here's an article about it, Amazon Prime buyers not happy with Add-On Program. Originally Amazon Prime was a way to pay $79 a year to get free shipping on everything. Then they raised the Prime threshold to $25, and low-priced items formerly eligible for free shipping became "add-ons" that you couldn't even buy unless your order was over $25. Here's another article from a year ago that makes the obvious point: "If Amazon will free-ship items totaling $25 without Prime, then why continue to pay $79 a year if the main draw of a Prime membership is free shipping?" The answer is that you get stuff in two days instead of three to five days. Most of us are not in that much of a hurry. And the prophetic conclusion:

[What if customers] begin to reconsider whether Amazon Prime is worth shelling out $79 a year for anyway, and Amazon starts losing money to canceled Prime subscriptions? Why in that case, the company just might decide that it needs to make the advantages of Prime a bit more clear-cut -- for example, by upping the threshold for non-Prime free shipping to $30, $35, $50...

I'm not making a moral judgment here but a strategic observation. The $25 free shipping threshold was too good to last. Amazon was overreaching, and now they're making the biggest retreat in their history, conceding the market for low-priced items to brick-and-mortar stores. It's just more cost-efficient to send a shipping container to Home Depot, than to send it to Amazon and then pay the postal service to deliver all those items to people's houses.

Now, I've heard that it's more energy-efficient to have a few trucks making optimized delivery routes to a thousand houses, than a thousand people driving to the store. But for some reason shipping still costs more. Maybe Amazon could start its own shipping company using automated solar-powered vehicles. And then local stores could respond by installing giant fabricators to make everything on site. For reasons I won't get into here, I do not expect a utopian Maker revolution where everyone has an autonomous home 3D printer.

October 21.

2013-10-21T12:45:37Z

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.

2013-10-18T12:47:07Z

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.

2013-10-16T12:21:55Z

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.

2013-10-14T12:52:01Z

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:

Why do Americans remember where they were when JFK was assassinated but not when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor? Because the media changed, so that with JFK people felt as if the story had happened to them personally.
Man-on-the-street interviewees are much better performers than they used to be.
Even getting in touch with your feelings is now a performance. Also see this Adam Curtis blog post, Learning to Hug.
Deconstruction is like shopping, "perpetually entertaining options among undecidables."
Child-rearing used to be focused purely on behavior. Now the inner life of children is being colonized.
There are no more heroes because we have so much information about people that "there is no space left for our imaginations to occupy."
"To the extent that our thoughts no longer wander along on their own, stocked only with materials drawn from direct experience, to the extent that they follow flows of representation instead -- to just that extent we don't think our own thoughts."
On the urge to take photographs: "Just seeing something counts as missing it."
"The scarcest resource is attention." Political action now means getting attention, but human attention is already so overstretched and paralyzed with options, that every attempt to "raise awareness" only makes us more numb.

October 11.

2013-10-11T12:42:18Z

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.

2013-10-09T12:24:03Z

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

October 7.

2013-10-07T12:09:11Z

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.

2013-10-03T12:47:07Z

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.

2013-10-02T12:21:29Z

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.

2013-09-30T12:34:53Z

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.

2013-09-25T12:49:37Z

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.

2013-09-23T12:03:59Z

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.

2013-09-20T12:53:01Z

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.

2013-09-18T12:14:07Z

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.

2013-09-16T12:30:21Z

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.