Ran Prieur

January 24.

2014-01-24T12:13:24Z

January 24. Some happy stuff for the weekend. India's forest man is about a guy who spent decades singlehandedly planting a 550 hectare forest. That's more than two square miles.

Legal Pot: The Gateway Drug to State-Run Banking? Basically state-run banking is better for everyone because the money gets recycled inside the state instead of being sucked into the giant global pool of money that seeks only to grow itself at the expense of almost every actual person. And an unintended consequence of cannabis legalization is that states will be forced to set up their own banks because federal laws prohibit the big banks from handling pot money.

Finally, some music! My latest favorite band is a Connecticut duo called Have A Nice Life. (Thanks Leigh Ann for finding them on the postpunk subreddit.) Their sound includes elements of shoegaze, ambient, post-rock, and drone. Here's a link where you can listen to their upcoming album The Unnatural World. (Go to the upper left and hit "toggle track list".) The first song, "Guggenheim Wax", sounds exactly like Built To Spill put through a doom filter. And here's their entire first album, Deathconsciousness on YouTube.

January 22.

2014-01-22T12:28:30Z

January 22. Today, some criticisms of modern life that you probably already know. First, George Monbiot rants about freedom and consumerism. He never says exactly what freedoms he supports, but this bit is great:

Had our ancestors been asked to predict what would happen in an age of widespread prosperity in which most religious and cultural proscriptions had lost their power, how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves, but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves? ... Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

Hunter Gatherers vs 21st Century Desk-sitters. Basically we spend too many hours under stress and sitting down.

Reddit comment on automation and unemployment. Automation is making more jobs unnecessary, the economic benefits are being sucked to the top of the pyramid, and our obsolete agricultural-age work ethic is preventing us from seeing the obvious solution: pay people to do nothing.

For the Love of Money is a confession by a former seven-figure-income hedge-fund trader. It's no surprise that all those people are addicted to making money. More generally, I would say that any human, in any position of power, will be tempted to narrow their consciousness to compulsively chase rewards that are harmful to society as a whole. I see only two ways out: everyone is enlightened enough to resist that temptation, or no one is in a position of power.

January 20.

2014-01-20T12:11:24Z

January 20. By popular demand I'll mention David Holmgren's new article, "Crash On Demand." Here's a pdf link, and here's a long summary and analysis by Nicole Foss, and a more concise analysis by Dmitry Orlov.

Orlov's post includes a chart by Albert Bates that puts doomer writers on a grid, and here's a subreddit post wondering where I would be. I posted a comment explaining why I disagree with the whole framework of the chart. If I made my own chart, I would have one axis for tech crash vs no tech crash, another axis for pessimist vs optimist, and two different charts for what the writers want and what they predict if everyone doesn't do what they say.

So Derrick Jensen would be a low-tech optimist on the first chart and a low-tech pessimist on the second, because he believes in an inevitable and permanent hard crash that will be worse if the earth is dead. Al Gore would be a high-tech optimist on the first chart and a low-tech pessimist on the second, because he thinks climate change will crash our wonderful world but we can stop it. Ray Kurzweil would be a high tech optimist on both charts, because he believes techno-utopia is unstoppable. John Michael Greer would be low-tech, balanced between optimist and pessimist, and the same on both charts because he knows we can only change our local environment and not the world.

Ten years ago I was a low-tech optimist. Now I would be high-tech and balanced between optimist and pessimist. Energy decline and climate change will cause decades of global poverty, there will be violent political upheaval in the weakest systems, but technology will keep grinding on, especially information technology. The good news is, hardly anyone in the first world will starve to death, and entertainment will be better than ever.

January 17.

2014-01-17T12:45:07Z

January 17. The new Edge.org question is out. Every year they ask a bunch of supposedly smart people one question, and this year it's "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?" I've just spent hours skimming them, and I've never seen an Edge question with so many lame answers. Maybe it's because it asks people what they're against and not what they're for. I like the answer by Ian McEwan, "Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing!"

There are some answers that are unsurprising but at least I agree with them. Alex Pentland in "The Rational Individual" and Margaret Levi in "Homo Economicus" argue against viewing the world in terms of rational individuals.

Hans Ulrich Obrist in "Unlimited and Eternal Growth" and Cesar Hidalgo in "Economic Growth" argue that these cultural myths are now obsolete. I like Hidalgo's idea that the age of growth is neither eternal nor a dead end, but a phase transition.

Luca De Biase in "The Tragedy Of The Commons" explains how Elinor Ostrom (unlike Garret Hardin) looked at actual commons (commonses?) and found many systems throughout history that have managed a commons for the good of all without depleting it.

Sherry Turkle in "Robot Companions" and Roger Schank in "Artificial Intelligence" argue that we should stop expecting robots and computers to replace humans or think like humans. Shank writes, "the name AI made outsiders to AI imagine goals for AI that AI never had."

Back to science, Max Tegmark argues that we should stop using the concept of infinity, and Martin Rees hesitantly suggests the obvious: "maybe some aspects of reality are intrinsically beyond us, in that their comprehension would require some post-human intellect -- just as Euclidean geometry is beyond non-human primates."

If I got to answer this question, I would write about objective truth, the idea that "there is" one reality "out there" on which all observers must eventually agree. This is a useful shortcut for everyday life, but careful scientists and philosophers should never talk about truth, only experience. I think we should expect different perspectives to have inconsistent experience, and consistency is something that emerges (imperfectly) when multiple experiencing perspectives 1) want to share the same universe, and 2) compare notes.

One answer is close to this, Amanda Gefter on "*The* Universe". First she mentions "horizon complementarity", where physicists resolve a black hole paradox by imagining the inside and outside of a black hole as different universes. Then she takes it farther, "to restrict our descriptions not merely to spacetime regions separated by horizons, but to the reference frames of individual observers, wherever they are. As if each observer has his or her own universe."

January 15.

2014-01-15T12:32:52Z

January 15. Today, some smart links about technology. A reader sends this page of 2013 links by Bret Victor. It's all over the map and I'm not going to try to summarize it, but here are the final two paragraphs:

Think about modeling phenomena, modeling situations, simulating models, gaining a common-sense intuition for nonlinear dynamic processes. Then think about a society in which every educated person does these things, in the computational medium, as easily and naturally as we today read and write complex logical arguments in the written medium.

Reading used to be reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses. Today, it's just what everyone does. Think about a society in which science is not reserved for the clergy, to hand down unquestionable Revealed Truths to the masses, but is just what everyone does.

Next, from a post on the Dark Futurology subreddit I learned about philosopher Nick Land, whose writing is almost incomprehensible. From Meltdown:

Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated sucessively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process.

If I read his stuff carefully, I think he's actually saying something, but he's deliberately making it hard to read, and if he made it easy to read it would be easier to see where he's wrong.

And a techno-design movie review, Why Her Will Dominate UI Design Even More Than Minority Report. The idea is, instead of technology being all in your face, it will "fade into the background" and the world will look superfically low-tech.

January 13, 2014.

2014-01-13T12:00:19Z

January 13, 2014. Some future predictions while the new year is fresh. The other day I got an email from a reader who recently graduated from high school, asking for advice in these difficult times. Ten years ago I would have said to get some land and learn low-tech skills like foraging and metalworking. Now I'd say the best skills are meta-skills like mindfulness and quickly noticing opportunities, and you should only go low-tech if you love it so much that you don't care if it's impractical.

I'm embarrassed that I ever predicted a technological crash, because the arguments are so hand-wavy. Instead, I expect artificial intelligence and biotech to spice up a decades-long economic depression as the global system muddles through climate change and the end of nonrenewable resources. Low quality manufactured items and industrial food will remain affordable, but good food, transportation, and services from actual humans will be more expensive. I think the best place to live is in a small house with a big yard in a city with a seaport or railroad hub. You want to be close to the supply lines, but have enough land to grow luxury foods like blueberries and really good tomatoes. As you move farther into the country, the money you save by growing more of your own food will be dwarfed by the money you spend on transportation and shipping. Total self-sufficiency would be a good thing to write a novel about.

My generation was the first in American history to be poorer than our parents. Now the Millennials are poorer than us, and this trend will continue until the global infrastructure adapts to feed from a growing base of renewable resources, maybe around 2060. Meanwhile, if you can stay out of debt and find a low-stress job to build up savings, you'll be relatively well off. "Debt" is exactly as real as we believe it is. Mostly it's a trick to make people feel ashamed that they have no political power. Not that it would work any better if we felt angry. The system is totally locked down, and the most revolutionary political change of the 21st century, the unconditional basic income, will be necessary to keep the system stable, to turn the unemployed majority from hungry militants back into consumers.

Technology will promise revolution, but in practice ninety percent of the new powers will be used to keep the remaining ten percent from doing anything dangerous. By the year 2200 there will be no poverty, no disease, and no opportunity for anyone to make a difference, except by more quickly closing off the opportunity for anyone to make a difference. Reasonable people will know that they're better off than us, but still fantasize about living in our time. Suicide will be the leading cause of death, and by 2300, any death not from suicide will be global news. By 3000 we will either be extinct or moved to another level of reality through some technology of consciousness that would seem completely loony if you described it today. Related: a clever image of reddit in the early 3000's.

January 10.

2014-01-10T12:20:00Z

January 10. For the weekend, some dark humor from the Onion: It's Not Too Late To Reverse The Alarming Trend Of Climate Change, Scientists Who Know It's Too Late Announce.

And a pretty song, Galaxie 500 - Blue Thunder.

January 8.

2014-01-08T12:30:41Z

January 8. Bunch o' links. On reddit, Erinaceous comments on spirituality and permaculture. Basically, reductionist science is great for simple systems, but as systems get more complex and include conscious actors, we might get better results with a style of thinking that is more intuitive and "magical".

Another good reddit comment on why capitalism is not voluntary: "People only sell their labor power at a profit for capitalists because they are divorced from their own means of production (a situation that required a lot of violence and state monopoly to create)."

Neurologist says ADHD does not exist. This does not surprise me. The idea is that ADHD describes a cluster of symptoms that can have all kinds of different causes, and prescribing stimulants just covers up the deeper problems.

Nice article-length biography of Edward Snowden, but I still don't see what made him different from hundreds of other computer spooks with similar cultural backgrounds, who have not risked their lives to expose the secrets of the powerful.

And this article could be fluff, but it sounds like a great idea: Zappos gets rid of managers.

January 6.

2014-01-06T12:24:18Z

January 6. Today, the future. Just discovered this great subreddit, Dark Futurology. "Automation, natural limits, and new inequalities will be the gamechangers of the 21st century."

An Artist Imagines the Techno-Evolved Creatures of the Future, "based loosely on current research on synthetic biology and genetic engineering." Whether this is utopian or dystopian depends on unintended consequences. Has someone invented a word, "something-topian", for when technology makes the world so crazy that it doesn't even make sense to ask if it's good or bad?

Emoya Estate: The Luxury Shanty Town In South Africa Offering 'Poverty Porn' For The Rich. For now this is about the rich, but suppose we recover from the ecological and economic catastrophes of the 21st century, and in one or two hundred years, everyone in the world is as safe and comfortable as the rich are now (but much less powerful). It might be normal to live in an "exotic hybrid of opulent luxury and extreme deprivation." Everyone wants to feel that their life is meaningful without taking real risks, but I'm not sure this is possible.

January 3, 2014.

2014-01-03T12:39:38Z

January 3, 2014. For the new year, some personal stuff. I'm always trying to move away from blogging so I can work on other projects, but it's very difficult for me to not blog, so I'll probably continue to do three posts a week and mostly avoid writing personal opinions that incite disagreements over email.

Leigh Ann has got me into college football, and I love it! No other sport has so much potential for shocking plays, and this has been the craziest bowl season ever. But I quit playing video games when I learned that Macaulay Culkin is 33 years old, because that means, in subjective time, that I'm going to die of old age in around seven minutes, and I can't afford to do anything that makes time seem to pass more quickly. If they ever event video games that seem to stretch out time, I'm back!

Cannabis seems to stretch out time, I can use it legally now, and later this year I'll be able to legally buy it. But I have to be really heavily stoned to enjoy it more than being sober, and I can't afford to use that much that often. Probably I'll settle into using it once a month. I've poked around online looking for ways to reset tolerance faster. Some people say that nothing works but time, but this page, Activating Cannabinoid Receptors, suggests that green tea can help, and also several essential oils including clove and lemon balm. We need more research on this important subject!

My bees in the backyard are still alive and have barely touched their massive honey stores. I think they're being a little too frugal and I hope they eat enough to survive until spring. Either way I'll have at least a gallon of honey.

I tried to sign up online for the new expanded medicaid, renamed Apple Health in my state, and kept getting an identity validation error, probably because I have no credit rating. Finally I borrowed a land line and spent almost an hour on the phone, and I'm in. As long as I keep my income below around $13k/yr, I can continue not paying into the medical system -- and probably not using it. I still think Obamacare is bad for the country, but it's good for me!

Finally, some music for the weekend, from an Italian electronic jazz duo: Satelliti - Transister.

December 31, late.

2014-12-31T12:25:05Z

December 31, late. For the end of 2013, a massive purge of links that I hadn't got around to posting yet.

A reader sends this page about media for thinking the unthinkable. I didn't watch the videos but I like the idea that the right symbolic tools can greatly enhance our thinking. One example is how tinker-toy 3D models enabled Watson and Crick to imagine DNA as a double helix.

Great reddit comment about learning to see beauty in the mundane world (using the tool of cannabis).

One of my favorite redditors is Drooperdoo. He's fascinated by ancient human ethnicity, and I don't think he's racist but he does give the benefit of the doubt to whatever idea is most interesting. Here's his latest summary of human ancestry and interbreeding, and an argument that the Buddha was white.

Why I like something as dumb and meaningless as professional sports. I would add: politics are even dumber than sports, less transparent, much more rigged, and only slightly more meaningful. Also on the subject of sports, an argument for banning the helmet, because players would adjust by not tackling with their heads.

On my favorite political cause: Why we should give free money to everyone, and Moral Aspects of Basic Income.

Fun science article, A Universe Made of Tiny, Random Chunks. My only comment is: when will academic philosophy enter the 20th century? They're still taking determinism seriously when it's based on a Newtonian clockwork model of reality that has been overturned again and again by newer science.

Dave Eggers argues that NSA surveillance is going to get worse, and that it will mostly be used not to stop violence but to intimidate citizens who threaten the ruling powers.

According to a new study, the brain can't empathize and analyze at the same time. Before you think "empathize good analyze bad," consider that analysis can simulate empathy more easily than empathy can simulate analysis. Related: letter from a recovered psychopath.

Hope for healthcare is about an independent hospital with low and transparent pricing, that threatens to undermine the American medical cartel. Related, an article about independent commuter airlines: I flew on a plane without going through security. It was amazing and no one died.

Finally (coming back to DNA and the Buddha) a new study shows that mindfulness practice can cause molecular and genetic changes.

December 30.

2014-12-30T12:30:29Z

December 30. Friday on the subreddit there was a thoughtful post about dropping out and how it can go wrong on the level of motivation. The main point is that some subcultures (for example primitivism) are ideological and moralistic, and following them can lead to spending years living how you think you should be living but finally you notice that you don't enjoy it. This reminds me of a famous inspirational quote that's worth repeating: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Related: thanks Dena for sending this long blog post on Vaclav Havel and the Power of the Powerless. It starts with an example of a grocer in a totalitarian communist state, who is expected to put a "workers of the world unite" sign in the shop window, but the real message of the sign is: "authorities, I am obedient so don't crush me".

The next point is how surprisingly powerful it is if the grocer refuses to put the sign in the window. Havel's words:

He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

Now the state must either ignore the example of living the truth, or crush it. But crushing it just drives it underground, where eventually it reaches a critical mass and drives sudden changes that seem to come out of nowhere: "The Prague Spring wasn't the birth of something promising that was then cut down, but the above-ground blooming of something that continues to flourish underground."

How can we apply these insights to America, or to global technological civilization in general? This is a hard question and I'm leaving it open. But I will suggest how to frame it. The question is not what the system forces us to do that we hate, but what we feel like we should be doing, and not doing it feels both dangerous and liberating.

December 27.

2014-12-27T12:13:02Z

December 27. Collapse blogger Dmitry Orlov has a new project intended to make it easier to learn English. English is one of the easiest languages if you're only trying to hear and speak it, or read and write it, but not both, because the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is terrible. Project Unspell replaces written English with a new set of phonetic symbols, and then uses software to convert those back and forth between standard written English, so you could learn to speak it without the huge hassle of learning to spell it. I'm not sure how the system will deal with homophones like two/too/to, or heteronyms like lead, wind, or desert. Probably try to figure it out from context. Update: Orlov informs me that the system will simply ask the user which meaning they want.

In other blog news, Stuart Staniford's Early Warning is back after a three month break. Here's the latest post with a brief explanation and then some stuff about oil supply.

Also on the subject of energy, Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth? The author makes a great effort to be fair and consider why mass transit could still be a good thing even though it often burns more energy per passenger mile than cars. Another thing I take from it is that tiny electric vehicles might be the future of transportation -- unless it takes too many resources to manufacture as many as we need.

December 25.

2014-12-25T12:43:23Z

December 25. Because of the holiday I'm doing music links on Wednesday instead of Friday, and posting the same two as last year. The Abominable O Holy Night is the most hilariously bad vocal performance of all time. Basically it's an experienced music producer with good vocal control, packing every mistake that he has ever heard bad singers make into one song. That link goes to a blog post with an interview with the singer and a video of the song being performed by a cartoon zombie.

And my favorite serious Christmas song is Alex Chilton's Jesus Christ.

Also here's another good one, Sister Winter by Sufjan Stevens.

December 23.

2014-12-23T12:43:20Z

December 23. I'm happy to see more action on the subreddit. Last night was a post about "the nicest essay Ran never wrote". Closely related, four days ago was a post about TED-ism and Ran Prieur-ism, and how my early writing was too simple and optimistic. The essay linked in the first post, Take what you need and compost the rest, is exactly the kind of thing I would have written in 2005 and would not write now. For one thing I no longer use the word "civilization" because it's both vague and value-loaded. That's perfect for attracting attention, but once I've defined the word and fought a semantic war about my definition, I realize I still haven't said anything until I use the precise and value-neutral language that I should have used in the first place. Also I've changed my forecast of what's really going to happen, from an inspiring steampunk stone age hybrid, to a painful global depression with some fun stuff happening at the fringes.

Also on the subreddit, a post about learned musical taste. In my post on Friday I mentioned culturally programmed taste and innate biological taste, but the comment points to something I missed: taste that is changed by listening, by developing your brain's potential to hear and appreciate more stuff. For example, I remember the first time I heard Sonic Youth it just sounded like noise, and now it sounds good. Conversely, something that sounds beautiful to a beginner might sound insipid to an experienced listener. This even suggests a way to put off the very difficult question of objective vs subjective quality: we can define "good music" as whatever the people who have listened the most like the most.

Doesn't science work the same way? By limiting observation to experience that can be called up at will, and that is the same for everyone, we are defining "truth" as whatever is experienced with the greatest consensus.

December 20.

2014-12-20T12:15:22Z

December 20. Every year my girlfriend makes a mix of her favorite songs of the year (or sample songs from her favorite albums). Here are her 2013 gems. The host site doesn't allow you to view the list without listening, but the artists are Charlie Boyer and the Voyeurs, Jake Bugg, Woodkid, Anna Meredith, Janelle Monae, Of Montreal, Ahmad Jamal, Islet, Suuns, Melt Yourself Down, Teeth of the Sea, Temples, Jacco Gardner, The Child of Lov, His Clancyness, TV on the Radio, and Sons of Kemet. I've YouTube linked my four favorites.