]]>"It's not a question of, 'Here's a drug that's going to fix you,'" Mate explains. "It's, 'Here's a substance under the effect of which you'll be able to do a kind of self-exploration that otherwise might not be available to you, or otherwise might take you years to get to.'"
]]>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.
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?
]]>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.
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: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.
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.
]]>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:
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?"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."
[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.