Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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June 9. Anne comments on GMO's:

By the way, the two holy grails of GMO crop research - higher yield and drought resistance - are still unreached. Or, I should say, the results from GMO methods are still no better than the results from genetically-informed-but-conventional breeding and hybridization. We have some seriously high-yield and drought resistant food crops compared to eighty years ago, but GMO approaches haven't pushed the curve any.

And a few more links on frontier technology: Is It Possible to Create an Anti-Love Drug? The justification is to get people out of abusive relationships. The article is pretty weak. I'd like to see more speculation about crazy unintended consequences.

Can we design machines to automate ethics? The article starts with self-driving cars, and then gets into ethical dilemmas about when to sacrifice lives to save lives. Great sentence:

If our destiny is a new kind of existential insulation - a world in which machine gatekeepers render certain harms impossible and certain goods automatic - this won't be because we will have triumphed over history and time, but because we will have delegated engagement to something beyond ourselves.

Why are people so comfortable with small drones? Specifically, one study shows that people think small flying drones are cute rather than scary. The researcher speculates that it's because our evolutionary predators walked on the ground. I think it's because flying drones, so far, just hover and don't flit around like birds and insects. Last night Leigh Ann got me up at 3AM when she was frightened out of the living room by a large moth that she thought was a bat.


June 6. Some links about the future. First, a reddit comment arguing for crowdfunded focus fusion. I like the political bit:

Focus fusion reactors are small and not very complex. You could have one in your garage. That means they're more democratic than the huge-scale plants that can power a whole city. Much of our current political situation rests on control of economies based on control of energy sources. What would international relations look like if every city had access to unlimited clean (carbon free, radioactivity-free) power?

Here's the Indiegogo Focus Fusion page. And here's an Indiegogo page for something different, Deep City 2030, a steampunk trans-apocalypse city design strategy game.

Loosely related: GooBing Detroit uses street view images from Google and Bing maps to show particular locations changing, typically by houses being abandoned. Notice how many places look uglier in the early stages of decay, but eventually, when wild plants come back, they look more beautiful.

You're worrying about GMOs for the wrong reasons. It's about the threats to ecology and biodiversity, but I would go farther and talk about the politics, which are similar to the fusion issue above. As long as genetic modification is being done primarily by big agribusiness, plants will be altered to make them more compatible with central control of the food supply.

Finally, a collection of fictional signs from the future. They're mostly silly but a few are ominous.


June 4. Last week Anne sent me a bunch of stuff she learned about famine during a research project. Here are my favorite bits:

Famine is a demographic event. The definition of famine is significant excess mortality associated with a decline in the availability of food, regardless of cause of death. If you and your family starve to death, it's not famine because there aren't that many of you. If everyone in your town runs out of food, breaks into Costco, and are mowed down by machine-gun wielding rent-a-cops, that is actually famine.

Infectious disease (often related to diarrhea and respiratory illness) kills more people than actual starvation.

The indicators of famine are weird. Colonial India developed a set of famine codes that watched for, among other things, sudden increases in prices of food, or sudden increases in petty crime, or sudden decreases in the cost of commercial sex.

Stockpiles and famine foods aren't as helpful as you think. I always assumed that if you had a year's food in your basement, or knew which weeds and bugs were edible, you'd make it through a famine. Turns out, everybody figures this stuff out at about the same time, and the dying doesn't start until the stockpiles and rabbit warrens are exhausted.

The best survival technique is to leave the area. Usually the first to go are the middle class professionals whose assets are their credentials and experience. The poor may lack the means to relocate, and the wealthy tend to have significant investments in non-mobile assets (land, businesses, factories).

Famines in industrial market economies are political or conflict-related. In general, the world has a robust and finely-tuned famine relief industry. The notorious famines of the 20th century (Leningrad, Ethiopia, Sudan) have all been war famines. You are unlikely to ever experience a famine unless you are trapped behind armed fighters.

Opportunistic cannibalism (eating dead people) is common. Predatory cannibalism (killing people to eat them) is really, really rare.


June 2. Right now (11am PDT) there's a reddit question and answer thread going on that some of you will enjoy: IamA Woman living like fantasy fiction. I used to work full time as a corporate graphic designer but felt dead. I am an archer, hunter, equestrian, falconer, and homesteader. I spend my days farming, hawking, writing, and living like a background character in GoT. AMA!

Also a loose end from Friday. Dermot has revealed some spoilers from Battlestar Galactica and convinced us to give it another try. I'll just say that loyalty is less of a theme after the first season, an unlikeable character becomes likeable, and the whole series is surprisingly anti-technology.


May 30. For the weekend I want to review some TV shows. A few months ago Leigh Ann and I tried watching Battlestar Galactica. I was a big fan of the original when I was 12, and I hoped the remake would have lots of exciting space battles. Instead, it's mostly annoying conflicts between the characters, none of whom are likeable except Starbuck; and the main theme seems to be loyalty (identifying the Cylon agents) which totally bores me, and is probably a reflection of America feeling insecure as a declining empire.

Then we tried Caprica, the Galactica prequel/spinoff. The characters are better, and the set design is beautiful, but I didn't like the story arc. The problem with all prequels is that there is no room for creativity in the big-picture story. A lot of good ideas have to be snuffed to make sure the ending lines up with the beginning of the original.

Galactica could have had two likeable characters if they had made Gaius Baltar like Ethan Rayne in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Back in the 90's, when I first heard there was a show with that name, I thought it would be stupid and immature. Watching it, I decided it was high art. Now I'm somewhere in the middle. There are some great episodes in seasons 1-4, and 6. But rewatching season five (the one with Dawn and Glory), it is so painfully bad that it casts doubt on Joss Whedon's entire career. Maybe what I noticed in season five I'll start to notice everywhere: lazy writers making characters implausibly emotionally stupid to contrive embarrassing melodrama, from which uninspired action scenes are a welcome reprieve.

Joss Whedon is not a real feminist because all his female characters are emotionally fragile. Can you imagine Captain Picard, or Malcolm Reynolds, getting so upset by some personal setback or romantic crisis, that he makes terrible decisions or mopes around until finally pulling out of it through spittle-flying righteous anger or a smarmy speech by the buddy character?

We've also started watching Grimm, which is awesome! It takes a few episodes to get into gear, but the whole second half of the first season is one "wow" episode after another. I knew I was in the hands of great storytellers in episode 17 when Sgt Wu ate the cookie.


May 28. Today, three links that are sort of about self-improvement. Always Hungry? Here's Why. Obesity might be part of a feedback loop in which more body fat causes you to crave more calories. The mechanism is complicated but basically the enemy is sugar and other refined carbohydrates. So if you go on a low carb diet, your hunger will eventually get back in balance, and you can lose weight with much less self-control. (If you've used up your monthly NY Times articles, you can get around the paywall in many browsers by using a private window. In Firefox, I can right click on any link to get an "open link in new private window" option.)

According to a new study, The best way to win an argument is not to explain your position, but to ask your opponent to explain their position in great detail. Often they will realize that they understand the issue less than they thought, and they will be more open to other perspectives.

And a reader, Göran Backlund, has a nice philosophy blog, Uncovering Life. It's mostly about how to frame your experience without thinking in terms of subject-object or objective reality.


May 26. The last Monday of every month is Finger Pointing Day, where I cluster all the best complainy links. But first, like everyone else, I want to politicize the Elliot Rodger spectacle in California. That emotion-dripping rabble-rousing speech by the victim's father frightens me more than the actual killings. I would rather live in a world with an occasional mass murder, than a world with all the limitations on freedom and privacy necessary to prevent it from ever happening again. More generally, I would rather live with the risk of acute pain, than the certainty of chronic pain.

Now, on to bashing America. Here's a reddit comment about the close relationship between American Evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party:

Grover Norquist and others put together a strategy wherein business would back social conservative candidates, while single-issue groups (pro-life groups, NRA) would support low taxes and deregulation. The idea was that business would supply the money to win elections, while the single-issue folks would supply the energy needed to get people out to the polls. This is how the GOP is able to stay viable in elections even as the percentage of rank-and-file Republicans decreases.

Another reddit comment in which a German argues that American culture is compassionless, impulsive, and authoritarian:

If I say "you're authoritarian", what I mean is that you strongly remind me of Germany in the past. No, not the Nazis. Of Germany leading up to World War One. A society that held its military in high regard, where someone in a uniform was seen as intrinsically better than a civilian, no matter if it was a military or a police uniform. A time when orders were to be followed, not questioned.

Why America's essentials are getting more expensive while its toys are getting cheap. The reason is that manufacturing is being off-shored or automated, while local services are losing public subsidies. The result is that "prices are rising on the very things that are essential for climbing out of poverty." The deeper story is that we're in a feedback loop in which more power gets concentrated in the center, leading to political changes that make it easier for more power to be concentrated in the center. If we continue on this path, most people will be locked in poverty and desperately competing to sell personalized services to the rich.

And a possible solution, from an article where the finger-pointing tone is not at center stage, but is called up to support an argument for a precise set of policies: Radical Centrism: Uniting the Radical Left and the Radical Right.

The essence of a radical centrist approach is government provision of essential goods and services and a minimal-intervention, free enterprise environment for everything else... The principle of radical centrism aims to build a firewall that protects the common man from the worst impact of economic disturbances while simultaneously increasing the threat of failure at firm level. The presence of the public option and a robust safety net is precisely what empowers us to allow incumbent firms to fail.


May 23. Some happy stuff for the weekend. First, some readers disagree with Monday's pessimistic drone article, because they think independent engineers will make better drones than engineers working for big systems. I'm not sure about that, but it does look like we're headed for a world drone war, and society will eventually stabilize around whatever faction can build the best drones.

Fare Dodging Is an Organized Rebellion in Stockholm, and It's Winning. There's an organization called Planka that's basically an anarchist insurance company: members pay a monthly fee, agree to evade public transit fares, and Planka pays the fines if they get caught. Could this strategy subvert other systems?

Also from the NY Times, My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment. A company called AOBiome is testing a bacterial skin tonic that might make you clean and nice-smelling without soap, and will probably make you healthier, but the catch is that you can't use soap or you'll kill the friendly bacteria. I would love to try this! I quit using shampoo back in the 90's, and my hair was oily for only a few weeks before it adjusted.

Related: an inspiring article about Wim Hof, a Polish body-hacking guru who can hold his breath for five minutes, swim in icy water, and consciously control his immune system. There's also some good science about brown fat, which can be turned quickly into heat, but most of us don't have it because it only develops when you expose yourself to the cold. I wonder what other parts of the human potential we can unlock if we are just willing to be uncomfortable.


May 21. Loose ends from Monday. Sometimes I think if we could just use language with perfect accuracy and precision, there would be no more disagreements. When I said that living with your parents is a way of gaming the system, I did not mean to imply that kids and their parents are adversaries. Ideally they are allies, and parents are helping their kids game the system by giving them a way to avoid rent.

On the subreddit, there's a thoughtful post about finding meaning, and how most people are going to want something better to live for than just gaming the system. I agree. At this point in my life I've basically won the game. I could get a cheap apartment and just make food and get stoned and listen to music all day every day for the next thirty years. But I've taken on the responsibility of owning a house because it feels meaningful to turn my yard into a forest garden, and I continue to do this blog because I enjoy seeking and spreading ideas.

Related: yesterday I did a major rewrite of the "Can you summarize your thinking?" section of my about me page.


May 19. Two depressing links. From three days ago, a massive reddit comment thread about how young people feel they have nothing to live for. I can't advise anyone on how to make money, but I would like to advise young people on how to find meaning in life. When the system is designed to crush you, one thing you can live for is to game the system. If you're on public assistance, or living with your parents, or in any way getting benefits from the system without putting work into it, that's not something to feel guilty about -- that's a small victory! A larger victory, which you can organize and fight for, would be more benefits with fewer conditions, ultimately an unconditional basic income that's high enough for everyone to have a modest apartment and not have to look at prices when buying groceries.

That might never happen. This article, Drones will cause an upheaval of society like we haven't seen in 700 years, argues that the invention of the gun took power away from the elite and gave it to the people, and this will be reversed with progress in military drones:

The day that robot armies become more cost-effective than human infantry is the day when People Power becomes obsolete. With robot armies, the few will be able to do whatever they want to the many. And unlike the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced tyranny will be robust to shifts in popular opinion. The rabble may think whatever they please, but the Robot Lords will have the guns... Imagine a world where gated communities have become self-contained cantonments, inside of which live the beautiful, rich, Robot Lords, served by cheap robot employees, guarded by cheap robot armies. Outside the gates, a teeming, ragged mass of lumpen humanity teeters on the edge of starvation.

I don't expect it to be this bad. The elite don't want to be evil. They actually want to help the masses -- but without giving up a shred of political power. There will be war and starvation as we pass through the bottleneck of converting from nonrenewable to renewable resources. But on the other side, we will all be guaranteed comfortable survival, and the elite will manipulate us not by locking up the food, but by shaping a culture in which our lives have more meaning if we do what they say. They're already doing this now, which is why young people in no danger of starvation still feel worthless if they don't have a job.


May 17. Quick note: a couple weeks ago I uploaded a video to YouTube, the first 25 minutes of the Live at Epplehaus version of Doomsday Machine by Electric Moon. I was thinking I'd submit it to the listentous subreddit, which has a 27 minute time limit, but I've given up on that, so I've deleted the short version and uploaded the full 40 minute version at the above link.


May 16. Over on the landblog/houseblog I've made a big post with the latest story about the bees. Basically I left too much honey in the original hive for too long, they turned it all into bees, they threw off a bunch of swarms, I caught two, and now I have three hives.

And some fun stuff for the weekend: a collection of ten bizarre illustrated stereographic gifs. And did you know there was a guy who played jazz on bagpipes? Rufus Harley - Sunny.


May 14. NY Times article on the corporate future of marijuana, The Bud Light-ification of Bud. The main point is that until now the stuff has been wildly inconsistent, and testing and industrial processing will make any given product as reliably similar as two cans of the same beer. The title implies that there will also be a reduction in quality, but the article itself never says that -- but there will be. I'm pretty confident in the following prediction:

1) Big Cannabis will stop using the traditional strain names, like Blue Dream and Sour Diesel, in favor of new names that it can trademark. 2) They will breed new varieties, not for the flavor or the quality of the experience, but for high efficiency and compatibility with large scale industrial production. 3) They will figure out how to extract all the cannabinoids and then put them back in precise amounts, because that's what they do now with nicotine in tobacco. 4) The typical blend of cannabinoids and additives will make people docile and productive. If they find a cheap way to make a product that's extremely psychoactive, they won't do it, or if someone does, it will be made illegal. 5) At the same time, independent enthusiasts and small businesses will continue to breed and sell high-quality minimally processed particular strains, but they will be much more expensive, like single malt whisky is now.


May 12. A week ago I wrote about the dumbest people worried about human extinction. Today, the smartest people. Thanks Adam for pointing me to this reddit thread from just this morning, We are researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, ask us anything! The whole thing is loaded with good ideas, not just about how technology could exterminate us, but also how it could make the world more interesting or more repressive.

Related: one of my favorite redditors, Blisk McQueen, comments on the serious dangers of resource depletion, including a personal story about watching the water dry up in California's central valley.


May 9. For the weekend, some sports and entertainment. First I want to explain the barefoot shoe controversy, after the news that Vibram FiveFingers has settled a lawsuit. The journalism on this issue is terrible, compounding Vibram's original error, which was not shoe design but marketing. It's very simple: when walking or especially running, it's good to come down on the balls of your feet so your ankle allows your calf muscle to absorb the impact, and it's bad to come down on your heels and knock the impact up to your knee and hip joints. Sloppy marketing led people to believe that the shoe would do this for them, when really you have to do it yourself, by deeply changing your habits, and the best thing a shoe can do is not get in the way. This might be a good time to buy used FiveFingers on eBay, and if you don't like the articulated toes, Merrell barefoot shoes are also good.

Yesterday was the first round of the NFL draft, and here's a smart article about How NFL teams ignore basic economics and draft players irrationally. Charts show how teams overestimate the value of a higher pick relative to a lower pick, so trading up is likely to be a bad deal and trading down is likely to be a good deal. What I find most interesting is the final section about the overconfidence effect: "As people are given more information, the accuracy of their analysis often hits a ceiling, but their confidence in it continues to increase." So a GM might fall in love with a certain player and give up too much to get him. I think that's what the Bills did yesterday with Sammy Watkins. By the way, even though the draft is fun, I support ending it and making all players free agents from the beginning.

You might have seen the browser game 2048, where you slide tiles around to add powers of two and try to get to 2048 before you run out of space. I prefer this game based on 2048, Fe[26], because the rules are more complex, but after learning the rules it's easier to win. It's based on the fusion of elements that happens inside a star. Quick strategy guide: 1) Avoid bumping 3Helium into 4Helium, because this makes 7Beryllium which gets in the way until it decays. 2) Try to get three 4Helium's lined up so you can fuse two of them into 8Beryllium, and then quickly add the third one to get Carbon. 3) When you get your first Carbon, do the same thing to get another Carbon, except now you're also trying to avoid fusing a 4Helium with your first Carbon. Once is okay because it turns to Oxygen which you need anyway, but again and you've got Neon, and once more and you've got Magnesium and you're totally screwed. This is the hardest part of the game. 4) When you've got two Carbons, bump 4Heliums into them to get two Oxygens, then fuse them into Silicon. 5) After that it's a slam dunk to just keep adding 4Heliums as your Silicon changes into a string of heavier elements, finally 56Nickel which decays into 56Iron. 6) After winning, you can keep playing to try to get more Irons, or just rack up points.

There was a reddit thread a few weeks ago with some clips of all-time great plays in soccer (world football). My favorite is this Lionel Messi Goal vs Getafe.

Finally, an awesome four minute animated video, How To Cheat, Do Drugs, And Succeed At Baseball, By Dock Ellis, who famously pitched a no-hitter on LSD.


May 7. Loose end from Monday: In the comments section of that Mythodrome post, Dermot has made a long comment about the distortions and fanaticism of the Near Term Extinction people. My favorite line: "Comical or tragic? Depends if you're related to or friends with someone who kills themselves as a result."

Two more doom links: This is what tent cities will look like after peak oil, about a prototype of a tent with photosynthetic algae in the walls. And a new subreddit for people to demonstrate traditional skills.

On a different subject, this morning Erinaceous made this great reddit comment thinking about the public-private debate in terms of networks. Basically, if there's a physical network with lots of infrastructure, like railroads or the electric grid, then there's an inevitable monopoly because it's too hard to build a competing network, so the government should take it over and make sure it's run for the good of all. But at the lower levels of the network, where competition is easy and more information is required to make good decisions, it's better for stuff to be private.


May 5. Recently Paula made what she says is her final post on Mythodrome, about the death of Mike Ruppert, childhood abuse, and the Near Term Extinction movement. She speculates about the dark psychological motivations that would make someone go out of their way to believe that humans are going extinct in this century. Her argument that we are not going extinct is that the future is unknowable. I don't think the NTE folks have even made a case for human extinction, only for catastrophic climate change and the inadequacy of the present system to get most of us through it. There's a general failure of prediction here that I've mentioned before: the inability to imagine the existence of something for which you cannot imagine the particulars. In this case, they cannot imagine precisely how humans might adapt to climate change, so they imagine we will not adapt.

At the other extreme, here's an interview with a techno-optimist, Andrew Hessel, on why synthetic biology and the Netflix model are the future of medicine. I'm sure he's right about the technology, but not the wonderful social revolution. Mark my words: there will be a biotech 9/11, a terrifying spectacle that will not kill that many people, but will serve as an excuse for a few giant corporations and governments to hold a monopoly on powerful biotech, which they will use to tighten their political and economic control over all of us.





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