Postmodern thought is dismissive of high-minded notions of true beauty and ultimate meaning and such, but it pretty much embraces the trickster, free play, the willingness to survive and outmaneuver the terrible monolithic forces hedging our lives, to be a gadfly and a libertine and a force of and for pleasure.

Modernist absolute truth often came with a demand for heroism or sacrifice, while the postmodern absence of absolute truth comes with an injunction to make your own contingent but consistent meanings. Both are related models for existential validation in an uncaring universe, but one seeks to correct the other by minimizing the coersive and authoritarian elements implicit in its modeling of "truth".

Finally, an email from Chanita who hosted me in NYC on my last tour:

There is this guy in Kentucky who is trying to establish a free permaculture teaching space, Earth Tribe Trust. He says it's like trying to run a hospital where all these patients are pouring in and he's supposed to be helping them, but he's just like this crazy janitor. I think he's being a bit humble and has a lot of hard work and some better than decent permie building skills and experience. But anyway, he's looking to have more people come down and teach whatever they feel like teaching, pretty much.

He's a rainbow -- it seems like the space is quite inclusive and chugging along. They have built themselves a very pretty outdoor kitchen, rocket stoves, earthship in progress, etc. Very open, tendency toward dictatorship negligible. Appreciation of anarchism and cooperation high. Accepting of trans persons without discussion or pause. Anyway, I know he needs some other folks to be there to teach, especially because he will be working on a project abroad for a while in the fall and I thought you might know folks into his model.

Outside the US, "preventative care" means a nice sit-down with a dietitian and a daily stroll. In the US, this $2500 test can make a disease cost $6000 to treat instead of $150,000! Great deal! So let's get fifteen million people to get this test every year to prevent two thousand cases for a net savings of negative thirty-seven billion dollars.

When someone like Elon Musk comes along, someone who is clearly is working very hard toward Pareto optimal outcomes (watch or red about his personal history), we simply cannot fathom that his actions can't be explained outside a traditional Nash-equilibrium, dog-eat-dog model of capitalism.

Closely related: 17 images showing The Decline of Trust in the United States.

It's not hard to imagine a world in which adults have lost the ability to daydream. Children will grow up immersed in computer-mediated reality and be bombarded every waking moment with 'optimal' stimulation. In such a saturated world, a normal human brain may become incapable of pulling up anchor from reality and drifting off into aimless fantasies.

So what would this future society think of the few remaining people who are prone to daydreams? It will be easy and tempting to classify such people as mentally ill -- to diagnose them with Aimless Imagination Disorder, perhaps.

And what will this future society make of us, here in 2013? I suspect they would reject the idea that we were all daydreamers. Judged by our artifacts, we'll come across as perfectly 'normal' to future archaeologists. They'll find occasional puzzling references to daydreaming, but will be tempted to discount those in favor of their belief that we weren't, as an entire society, mentally ill.

This tendency -- to marginalize a conscious experience, label it as deviant, and then deny its historical prevalence -- isn't merely hypothetical. It's happening right now.

Nine days ago I linked to an article about how people are strangely unafraid of flying drones. James sends this related article: Life Detector: Animal Brains Hard-wired To Recognize Predator's Foot Movements. "One impetus for starting this research several years ago was a question by his young daughter, who asked him why she could get so much closer to wild rabbits in their neighborhood while riding on her bicycle rather than on foot." In the same way, drones might seem harmless because we have no ancestral memory of dangerous hovering things.

And on a new subject, I've been waiting for some clear thinking on the latest stuff in Iraq. The American media writes about ISIS like they're mouth-foaming cartoon villains, but I know that most human actions make perfect sense if you understand the context. So here's a new article by War Nerd Gary Brecher on ISIS. It's long but concise, with lots of back history on Islamic militias, and the basic argument is that ISIS is just filling a power vacuum, and Iraq is inevitably separating into Sunni and Shia regions.

Update: there's a great reddit comment thread about this subject, including a link to an article about why Arabs lose wars. It seems, because of their cultural history, that Arabs are very good at working together in small tribal groups, but totally dysfunctional in big systems because of inflexibility and rampant mistrust.

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all... Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.

This reminds me of my favorite argument against objective truth: give me a non-circular definition. So if you try to connect the map to the territory by starting with the idea of the territory, you can never really get out of it. Eventually you have to say something like "I experience objective truth as a style of thinking in which I imagine a source of potential experience that is indifferent to observation and consistent from all perspectives."

By the way, I found Friday's shaman link on the occult subreddit, which has a lot of silly stuff but I like the way they think. And while I'm recommending subreddits, here's one for the basic income community.

Those who develop so-called mental disorders are those who are sensitive, which is viewed in Western culture as oversensitivity. Indigenous cultures don't see it that way and, as a result, sensitive people don't experience themselves as overly sensitive. In the West, "it is the overload of the culture they're in that is just wrecking them," observes Dr. Some. The frenetic pace, the bombardment of the senses, and the violent energy that characterize Western culture can overwhelm sensitive people.

On a whole other subject (thanks Gabriel) SSC Gives A Graduation Speech. Slate Star Codex is a blog by a guy named Scott Alexander who writes more than anyone can realistically read. This is a great (but long) post about how education is mostly worthless, and how it would be better to take all the money currently spent on the education system, and just give it to people.

...if you'd stayed out of public school and stayed home and played games and maybe asked your parents some questions, then by the time your friends were graduating twelfth grade, you would have the equivalent of an eleventh-grade education.... Why is it so easy for the unschooled to keep up with their better educated brethren? My guess is that it's because very little learning goes on at school at all.

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.

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.

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.