Psychedelics should be viewed like climbing a mountain. The mountain peak has its appeal with the sublime feeling of standing atop it if one is daring enough to get there. And while some may find the experience meaningful a lot of people will only find themselves way too fucking high on a big rock. But most important is how the mountain does not move, it does not feel or love, and so it does not care if you live or die on it. The only feelings it will give you are the ones you reflect off of its steep faces.
KF2 explains depression with a role-playing game metaphor, in which a magic cloak gives you immunity to everything bad and also everything good, so you feel nothing and stop caring, you can't take the cloak off, and your original injuries can't be healed.
Depanneur defines fascism, using a narrow definition that confines it to the early 20th century. Basically fascism tapped into the alienation of industrial society, the longing of WWI veterans for the strict order and community of military life, and the desire of the middle class to participate in a revolution without losing their perks. Of course the alienation of modern life remains unsolved, so we could do something similarly scary in the future, but fascism would not be the right word for it.
James-Venn imagines a technological singularity that is similar to the Great Oxygenation Event more than two billion years ago:
Through us, the process of life itself is escaping the biological limitations of 'life'. What may be around the corner isn't artificial life. It is life, just in a new form. Life is a mathematical process currently operating on biological material. It is a process which could operate far more effectively on digital and mechanical life forms.
I like the general idea, but his weakness is being unable to imagine the existence of something for which he can't imagine the particulars. I think mechanics would be a step back from biology, and digital logic processors are unalive no matter how big they get. But our computers might serve as tools to create a new kind of physical medium through which some deeper principle of aliveness could manifest. Or computers could help us create a new technology that would enable our "selves", our continuity of perspective and memory, to transcend the world as we know it.
For a lot of deep thinking on this sort of idea, check out this Ribbonfarm post from last month, Immortality in the Ocean of Infinite Memories.
]]>I'm trying not to order from them, since hearing the radiolab essay on their fulfillment centers. Which, of course, are independent companies on contract, so Amazon proper isn't liable for abuses that occur there.
One thing Amazon has in common with Google, which may end up playing a larger role in evil than their mail-order business, is their effective joint monopoly on cloud computing. Its not just local newspapers and small businesses that run on EC2 servers -- a majority of bioinformatics computation worldwide is clouded to Amazon as well, and probably heavy-lifting computation in a number of other fields. Even companies that could (and for privacy or espionage reasons probably should) run their own data centers don't, meaning that Google and Amazon set the costs for high-end data analysis.
I literally pushed them out the door. Five minutes went by, them sitting on the front stairs moping. Then they tied to get back inside. "This is boring. There is nothing to do outside." I closed the door in their cute little disappointed faces. This process repeated and went on for some time. Eventually they got so bored they started playing. Just like that. And here I realized and remembered something from my own childhood. The best times I ever had was when I was really bored, with a bunch of friends with nothing to do.
Related: What Is Post-Internet Art? As an alternative to art that only exists inside computers, some artists are now using technology to create art with an enduring physical presence.
And a bunch more high-tech: 20 Crucial Terms Every 21st Century Futurist Should Know. There's way too much here for me to try to comment, but I will say that most of these things would not be stopped by energy decline, economic collapse, or climate catastrophe. They would develop in parallel with all that -- unless they're stopped by being half-baked ideas in the first place.
]]>What I remember from ecological modeling is that models almost always crash, even when modeling systems that are robust in the real world. Mathematically, you could say that a model progresses to a stable attractor and, for obvious reasons, most attractors in synthetic systems are boundary conditions - the point at which there are no rabbits, or all the biomass is trees. These never happen in real life because correction factors exist that are negligible except in extreme circumstances (and consequently impossible to model accurately). Saying that this model predicts a crash just means it doesn't account for everything that happens when some other factor goes to eleven.
Customer service is a dying skill. It is all about people, face to face ideally, trying to give them what they need even if that isn't what they start out asking you for, and making it a pleasant experience. Some of the best interns in my library came from tending shitty bars.
And you can't standardize it, although that seems to be the corporate goal. It has to be about *that* specific moment and the people who are sharing it. Maybe you just have to give half a shit about the guy on the opposite side of that desk or counter? If you actually care, people will pick up on that and express appreciation, and that makes a much nicer day for everyone.
I worry lately that with so much tech in the way of kids as they grow up and get out into the world, they have trouble with that kind of thing. They end up being rude or careless without meaning to be, they can't read the signals, so no one knows what's going on or how anyone feels about it.
In the coffee house in the linked essay, the patron wants to be validated in their hipness, but that isn't even a real thing, so what is it that they *really* need? Maybe they are asking the barista to reassure them that they're doing something valuable with their lives?
Loosely related: Why being too busy makes us feel so good. The article explains how we're too busy and why it's bad, but it never actually tells us why being busy makes people feel good, except with an unsupported speculation that it distracts us from facing death. I'm not qualified to answer -- I love free time and hate busyness so much that I sometimes fantasize about being in solitary confinement. But I'm going to be busy tomorrow and Wednesday, which is why I'm posting today and probably Tuesday.
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