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
November 18. Unrelated links... no, wait, they are related! Just Asking is a short 2007 piece by David Foster Wallace. He suggests that instead of giving up our freedoms to try to eliminate all risk of political violence against civilians, we could hold onto our freedoms and think of the inevitable victims as heroic martyrs. He points out that we already make the same trade-off with traffic laws, accepting a terrible death toll just so we can drive faster. I think the difference is, people take a bombing as a personal insult, a threat to their identity and status, while a car crash just feels like bad luck.
Game Theory Based Contrarian Football is about a high school coach who has done the math, and figured out that it's better to never punt and always onside kick. His team is now dominating their conference. It's inspiring to see someone boldly doing something a better way, but depressing that no one else is following. Even in a ruthless meritocracy like sports, winning games is a weaker motivator than saving face.
Alcohol, Obesity and Smoking Do Not Cost Health Care Systems Money, because healthy people live longer, consuming more health care, and ultimately die of other things that still cost money to treat. I would add: the real reason that alcohol and cigarettes are heavily taxed is that people who use them are seen as morally inferior and deserving of punishment. The purpose of sin taxes is to make obedient people feel righteous.
And a great reddit thread, What are stories about picture perfect families who do fucked up stuff behind closed doors? Sample post:
When I was in school, there was one girl who epitomized all-American girl-next-door cheerleader. She was gorgeous with blue eyes, long blonde hair, perfect body, and always had this 100 watt smile. She was on Homecoming court, and so was her little sister. Her family was prominent locally: the stay-at-home mom ran the PTA, the dad had a prestigious job.
This girl was on a parent-imposed diet since at least 3rd grade, despite never being fat. If she or her sister sassed her parents or got less than a B+ on an assignment, they were told they were "dogs" and they were forced to crawl around the house and eat their food from dog bowls under the kitchen table.
November 15. I overposted this week, so today I'm just going to ramble about personal stuff. Leigh Ann and I are still getting along great after six weeks of living together. The main conflict is that our preferred daily schedules are almost completely different, but we're both flexible. She has a Netflix account and I have a good TV and a Wii, so we've been watching stuff every night. Right now we're going through the TV show Fringe. At first I thought, "FBI agents investigate the paranormal? Hasn't that been done?" But the plots are more complex than the X-Files, and more challenging to stay on top of. Another difference is that all the strange phenomena are man-made. This creates room for my favorite difference, that skeptics don't even get a voice. Olivia comes to her boss with some crazy shit and instead of saying it's absurd, he says now that you've found that out, I can show you something even weirder. And Walter Bishop is probably my favorite character ever.
Two and a half years after buying this house, I finally have curtians on more than half the windows, and today I put on bubble wrap for winter insulation. My bees are also set for winter, with the back half of the hive packed with honey. And I haven't read about this, but I'm sure they're bigger now than they were in summer. With foundationless comb, they have a variety of cell sizes, and I'm guessing that when the weather cooled, the queen started laying worker eggs in the old drone cells, because bigger workers are more fit to survive winter.
In music news, Nik Turner played sax and woodwind for Hawkwind from 1971-1975, and wrote and sang a few songs, like Brainstorm and D-Rider. He should have been washed up decades ago, but he has just come out with a really impressive space rock album, Space Gypsy. That link goes to a review, and here's a YouTube page with Space Gypsy videos.
November 13. The Mysterious Case of Elisa Lam is about a young woman who drowned in a hotel water tank, with no easy way to get in and no plausible motive. Also there's a creepy surveillance video, a dark history of the hotel, a movie that foreshadowed the incident, and other coincidences:
Shortly after the discovery of Elisa Lam's body, a deadly outbreak of tuberculosis occurred in Skid Row, near Cecil Hotel. You probably won't believe the name of the test kit used in these kinds of situations: LAM-ELISA. That is hardcore synchronicity.
The article is on Vigilant Citizen, a smart conspiracy site, but I still think they're too literal-minded. The really weird stuff is not being planned by human elites -- it's the visible surface of a level of reality that we can't even understand with Cartesian/Newtonian thinking. And I think the most powerful people in the world understand less than the people on the front lines. As John Keel once joked: UFO researchers are not telling the government what they know.
And some links related to travel. From No Tech Magazine, Africa Teaches the West How to Build a Car:
In Suame Magazine, first the cars are stripped to the bone. Secondly, all computerized devices are thrown out. A sustainable African car has to be mechanical. When the car is stripped the construction process can begin. The result is a strong and simple car ready to carry heavy loads, with extra cargo space, a mechanical motor, a stronger chassis, stronger rims and iron springs. African roads demand very strong cars.
Probably they get worse fuel economy. But I suspect, as we get deeper into fossil fuel decline, that it will be more efficient to let the roads decay and build cars stronger, than to keep maintaining the roads.
It's cheaper to live in Barcelona and commute to London by air four days a week, than rent in London. You might expect this to change with energy decline, but I think there's still a lot of room to make air travel cheaper, including hybrid airships, and tearing out the seats so twice as many passengers can ride standing up. When you factor in the cost of maintaining roads, long-distance travel in the future might be done almost entirely by air.
And travel across oceans could be done by ship, except I think human extinction is more likely than human culture changing so that we're not in such a hurry. Anyway, water travel is super-cheap. Here's an inspiring blog post, Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location:
On a cruise ship, everything is taken care of for you. No time at all has to be allocated to cooking, choosing your meal, or to cleaning. You show up at the restaurant, in which all of the food is free, order whatever you want from the rotating menu, eat, and then immediately get up and get back to work.
And the cost, for a transatlantic cruise, is only $30-50 per day. How many of us are living that cheaply now?
November 11. Today, some smart links. Thanks Gabriel for telling me about this blog, Novel opinions by Katja Grace. Instead of a table of contents or a chronological list of posts, the front page is a big summary of all her thinking, where phrases and words serve as links to posts. A few samples:
I like to think that thinking is better than reading as a first step to understanding a topic, but I haven't read a lot about this. ... Calling your mother on Mothers' Day tells her less about your affection than calling her any other day of the year. ... It is best to celebrate unimportant things, so that everyone else doesn't also love them and remove the information from your signal. ... There is no correlation between the verdicts of different wine competitions because if there were, there would be space for fewer wine competitions. ... The process of science could be taught better in the realm of unanswered questions that students care about, rather than answered questions that they don't care about. ... Loyalty is the only commonly approved form of extremism.
Thanks James for this long 1988 essay on teaching computing science by E.W. Dijkstra. The main idea is that computers are a radical novelty, meaning that they are so different that "our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating." He makes a similar point to Katja Grace about education: Textbooks "constantly try to present everything that could be an exciting novelty as something as familiar as possible... The educational dogma seems to be that everything is fine as long as the student does not notice that he is learning something really new."
My favorite idea is about halfway down the page: we imagine that artificial intelligence will grow powerful by mimicking human intelligence, but the real power of AI is being smart in ways that computers are smart, and that are alien to human intelligence. Applying this to forecasting the future, long before AI is able to make a replica of your brain, it will have transformed the world so radically that we will no longer be interested in replicating our brains.
Finally, reddit user The Old Gentleman is one of the smartest anarchists on the internet. His posts are loaded with good information and careful thinking. Here's an example, a critique of anarcho-capitalism for failing to understand how our freedom has been destroyed by a radical concept of "property" that we all take for granted.
November 8. Loose ends from the previous post. First I want to say more about state repression. Any control system, including the U.S. government, will crush anyone who is effectively working against it. At the same time, if someone in North Korea holds up a sign that says "Kim Jong-un is a liar and life is better in South Korea," they'll be killed. If you do the same kind of thing in America, maybe someone will glare at you.
I've often wondered, when there's a street protest in the Arab world: Why don't the rulers just ignore it like they do here? One possibility is that Arab rulers are being vain and stupid, and ignoring it really is their best move. The more likely explanation is that in those cultures, for reasons I don't understand, purely symbolic dissent is tactically effective. I would love to know what would happen, step by step, if North Korea or Saudi Arabia suddenly and permanently removed all restrictions on political speech. I have no idea! But I do know that if they stuck it out, eventually the power of political speech would run its course, and there would still be a control system that would now be immunized against language.
This is mostly a good thing. It means that instead of an artificially high level of repression held by intimidation and open secrets, there is a moderate level of repression defined by the inability of the citizens to understand the subtle ways that they're being repressed.
In another loose end, a reader comments:
In too many circumstances, you don't even have to be actively pointing out flaws or advocating changes. If you seem too content, too confident yet not stressed over "advancement", if you seem like you shrug the usual poop off too easily, you will get targeted, and not always by bosses, in fact more often by people on your own level. In today's workplace, if you aren't constantly, visibly stressed, the assumption is that you are slacking off or cheating.
And on another subject, more music for the weekend. Over the last week I've been making and uploading videos of my favorite songs that were not yet on YouTube (and that will not be immediately taken down, like "Boots of Spanish Leather" by Bob Dylan and "Wendell Gee" by REM). Here they are:November 6. Another big psychology link. The Girl in the Closet is a giant 8-part article about Lauren Kavanaugh, who at age 20 months was taken from her adoptive parents and given back to her evil birth mother. For the next six years she was locked in a closet, nearly starved to death, and repeatedly beaten and raped. Eventually the stepfather confessed to a neighbor, and he and the mother are in prison until 2031. Lauren, now 20 years old, has made an impressive but incomplete recovery.
The interesting question is, why would parents do this? Especially when they had five other kids who, while badly raised, were not horrifically abused. I think Lauren was singled out because she alone had the experience of living in a healthy family. She would not put up with the abuse and neglect of a bad family, and at 20 months, could not possibly be diplomatic about it. The parents had to either raise the level of how they treated all their kids, or escalate the conflict; and the easiest way, other than killing her, was locking her in a closet. And then they either had to admit their own failure, or imagine that she deserved to be locked in a closet. Then she became the sink for all the family's frustration and hostility.
You can see the same thing in repressive states that kill or imprison people who try to make things better. I think it can happen in any dysfunctional system of any size. You could even use this as a definition of dysfunction: that anyone who draws attention to what's wrong with the system and how it could be improved, is punished.
That's why America is not seriously repressive, because if you do that here you're simply ignored. It's also an advantage of a system built out of subsystems from which people are free to leave. You can quit your job at a bad corporation and let it die out while you find somewhere else to be helpful, but it's much harder to quit a family.
I think this can also happen inside of a person: that someone might lock up and punish an aspect of their personality that threatens to make their life better in a way that a more dominant part of their personality cannot tolerate.
November 4. A few psychology links. First, Vandana Shiva explains How economic growth has become anti-life, and most of the examples are about how the way we live has veered away from the way humans like to live, even when we're getting more material wealth.
Also from the Guardian, The secrets of the world's happiest cities. There's some stuff about social connections, but it's mostly about transportation: driving makes us unhappy, and walking and bicycling make us happy, especially if the city is designed for traveling without cars. I have two ideas not in the article. First, given identical commute times, I think we would rather move at a steady pace than alternately move super-fast and be stuck. Second, we cannot operate a car without depending on a giant system that we cannot understand and in which we have no participation in power. The first time we experience something like that, it feels like a magical miracle. But over the long term, we feel disconnected, weak, and unsatisfied.
The Psychological Power of Satan. When we believe in pure evil, it leads to a political climate in which we want to identify the bad guys and totally destroy them, which makes the world nastier. The article is too cautious to make the obvious point that if two sides each think the other side is pure evil, it leads to a feedback loop of increasing aggression -- and then the eventual winners, since they're still unhappy, go looking for more pure evil.
The Psychology of Cheating. Again, mostly obvious stuff: people cheat more when they have more power, when they're in a competitive culture, when they're not being watched, and when they're tired. Notice that the American elite score four out of four. One of my utopian visions is universal democratic surveillance, where there is no spy agency making sure all surveillance is top-down, but anyone can watch anyone at any time. It follows that the most powerful and famous people would be watched every moment, and nobody would seek power unless they were okay with that.
November 1. For the weekend, some pictures, The 33 Most Beautiful Abandoned Places In The World, and more music...
You've all heard that Lou Reed died. Over the years I've become less impressed with Reed's singing and songwriting, and more impressed with his musical style along with other members of the Velvet Underground. I think their second greatest song is Heroin. In 1967 there had never been a rock and roll song that started out slow and pretty and built up to a wall of noise, and it would not be done better until the 1990's -- with the exception of the greatest song of all time, Space is Deep by Hawkwind.
Hawkwind, like many other influential bands, was influenced by Krautrock, which was influenced by the Velvet Underground. One of the most important Krautrock songs, Hallogallo by Neu!, is the direct musical descendant of the greatest thing the Velvet Underground ever recorded, the six minute jam at the end of the 1969 live version of What Goes On. That's Lou Reed on rhythm guitar.
October 31. Quick note for Halloween. I'll be giving candy to trick-or-treaters tonight, and playing the scariest music I can find: an untitled 1971 German experimental piece, 15:33 by Cluster. You might also like this one from Belgium 40 years later, Kreng - Wrak.
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. 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. 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. 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?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. 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.