novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
July 9. My favorite blog, The View from Hell, typically has a burst of posts a few times a year. Sunday there was a new post, Why People Used to Have Children, and yesterday a follow-up, Children, Education, and Status. As always, the writing is impeccable, and both posts are full of great stuff about the changing role of children and why it has led to lower birth rates. Basically, education has turned children from slaves who produce resources, into people who consume resources. You should read it all, but here's the conclusion of the second post:
Education, specifically Western education promoting democratic values, interferes with children's work and their parents' expectations for their work. It makes them more dependent on their parents, and makes them less likely to be servile and submissive to parents. And education itself provides an alternate means of achieving adult status other than having children. In the presence of these conditions, the demand for children is apparently low.
Also, the end of the first post has a great bit about the transition from the study, the room in the house that used to be the patriarch's seat of power, to "the lowly and shameful man cave", where the man takes refuge from the woman's otherwise total control. If you're curious about my house, Leigh Ann and I have separate bedrooms where we each do what we want, and in the common areas I have the final say, but I usually defer to her superior aesthetic judgment.
Continuing Monday's subject, there's a thread on the subreddit, titled "Ran's next adventure", in which several readers are talking like I'm a teenager and they're my dad. [July 10 update: there's some good stuff there now.] And big thanks to moderator puck2 for styling the subreddit to match the blog.
July 7. I've been waiting for a slow week to announce this. Ten years ago (and twenty) my goal in life was to have meaningful responsibility: have some land, have a house, build stuff, grow food, learn practical skills. I was lucky that I've been able to do all that. Now, looking forward, my goal is to have zero responsibility.
My dream is to live like Paul Erdos, the mathematician who just traveled around staying with other mathematicians, and in exchange for helping them think about math, they took care of almost all his practical needs. A more realistic goal is to sell almost everything, get a modest apartment in a city with good public transportation, and mostly hang out there but be free to do lots of traveling.
I cannot yet afford that. Right now I'm living in a house that's paid for, and still slowly depleting my savings. And even if I had more income, I'd like to stay here long enough to get some big fruit tree harvests and finish fixing the house up, maybe five more years.
But there's no reason to hold onto my land. I'm not in a hurry to sell it, but I would sell it immediately if I had a good offer or found a good buyer. So I'm mentioning it here first in case one of you is interested. The perfect buyer would be a mature permaculturist or a conservation trust. More likely would be a group of enthusiastic 20-somethings who would learn that homesteading means tedious labor, social isolation, and lots of driving, and then sell it to developers. Except it's too remote to be worth anything to developers, and I wouldn't deny anyone that opportunity for learning. Anything "back to nature" is likely to be a good transitional goal: you're not going to do it your whole life, but by doing it, you get a better sense of what you really want.
Anyway, it's ten acres with a year-round spring, an hour drive from Spokane, 2700 feet elevation, and you can read all about it in the landblog archives from 2004-2011. If you're interested, you can find my email address on the about me page.
July 4. Loose ends and stray links. The other day when I picked on Bangladesh, it was because it's the place most vulnerable to climate change, and it's also poor and densely populated. But a reader who lives there reports that the culture and politics are relatively healthy, and it's becoming steadily more prosperous. If Bangladesh doesn't get a dieoff, maybe no one will.
Cool article on Low Tech Magazine, Well-Tended Fires Outperform Modern Cooking Stoves, including lots of data on different kinds of stoves.
On reddit, kinderdemon defends postmodernism:
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.
July 2. On the subreddit, two responses to Monday's theme of civilization as human zoo. First, HTG464 describes how modern humans are better off than zoo animals, and suggests that adaptation could make large complex society the new normal. I tend to agree, but I think human extinction through superstimuli is also a strong possibility. And I think we still have a long way to go to fully adapt, and to build a society worth adapting to. So the zoo metaphor is not perfect but useful.
In the newer post, itsyaboyaccountt1234 attempts to argue that we will return to forager-hunter tribes, but only provides evidence that civilization as we know it is causing many catastrophes. The rest of the argument is not explicitly stated, but it would have to include a premise like "There are only two possible ways for humans to live, as forager-hunter tribes or as industrial civilization." Which is unlikely and unimaginative. I think we have both the ability and the desire to adapt large complex societies to muddle through the ongoing economic and ecological collapses. There might be a 90% dieoff in Bangladesh, but you will still have to pay taxes.
If we do return to forager-hunter tribes, I think the most likely path is through something like the subject of this 1998 article, The Last American Man. It's about Eustace Conway, who has lived in the woods for most of his life, and is generally awesome. He says everyone can live like him, but he's wrong. He can live that way and you can't, because from the moment he could walk, his parents let him wander the woods unsupervised, and your parents didn't. But if that ever becomes fashionable, even in one region, it could spread globally as we see how well it works. And early wilderness immersion doesn't even force you to live primitively -- it just gives you the option.
June 30. The last Monday of every month is Finger Pointing Day. (If more people were into Enneagram, I would call it 6w5 day.) Good stuff this month. First, on reddit, AlexFromOmaha explains why American health care is so expensive. 1) The battle between hospitals and insurers creates a vast medical billing industry that adds nothing to the value of health care. 2) Executives are way overpaid. 3) There is rampant price gouging, especially in prescription drugs and high tech equipment. 4) Insurance insulates consumers from costs, so there is no incentive to compete on prices. And in the final paragraph, a great rant:
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.
America's booze laws: Worse than you thought. Basically, large distillers, large wholesalers, and entrenched retailers are shaping the laws so they can keep sucking up all the money instead of allowing newer and smaller businesses to give a better deal to consumers.June 27. If you've been following the World Cup, here's a funny video by John Oliver on FIFA corruption. He correctly compares it to the corruption of large organized religions, and I would be more specific and look at Medieval Europe, where everyone knew the church was corrupt for hundreds of years, but they couldn't do anything about it because the church held a monopoly on religion. One difference is that modern nation states are much stronger than FIFA, so maybe they'll eventually step in.
Here's a long reddit comment on why there can never be a drug that makes you feel good with no bad effects: because feeling good artificially, rather than from doing valuable things in the real world, is a bad effect. Of course I don't agree with his conclusion that no drugs should be legal. I think we should be working toward full legalization, but we have to do it gradually because doing it too fast would be catastrophic. Our goal as a species should not be to protect ourselves from temptation, but to learn to face it.
Personally I don't want to try the harder drugs even once. I'm lucky that I don't get any euphoria from alcohol, and it's a challenge to limit my cannabis use to one night every two weeks. When I crave that mental state, I try to generate it internally. My biggest vice is video games, and my latest dark accomplishment is scoring under 200 in minesweeper.
June 25. Loose end from Monday: I didn't even notice that the decline of trust image page links to the source article, The Decline of Trust in the United States. The conclusion is that there's no easy way to reverse the decline, and my best guess is that the USA (and eventually most of the world) will fragment into different cultures, linked by social technology rather than geography, with trust within cultures but not so much between them.
On a new subject, Music Changes the Way You Think. Basically, one pitch gap between notes, the tritone, makes you see the forest, and another pitch gap, the perfect fifth, makes you see the trees.
And completely off the usual subjects, How to Name a Baby is a smart blog post with lots of fascinating stuff about baby names, including a discussion of fad names that define generations, this surprising list of current fad names and the traditional and older fad names that are now less popular, and a strange discovery that Utah is often ahead of other states on new names.
June 23. This blog post, Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism, laments the cynical reaction to Tesla releasing a bunch of patents, and uses game theory to argue that a society works much better if people trust each other.
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.
June 20. Some happy links for the weekend. Masters of Love is about research into how couples stay together. Failed couples exist in fight-or-flight mode, "prepared to attack and be attacked." Successful couples create "a climate of trust and intimacy." They do this by "scanning the social environment for things they can appreciate," while failed couples are scanning for things to criticize.
I have two more thoughts. First, people who consistently get in bad relationships might enjoy the stimulation of fight-or-flight mode, and seek out partners who make them feel on edge. Second, I think these principles also apply to your relationship with the world, and with yourself. If you're appreciating little things that go your way, or little things that you do right, you are living better than someone who gets worked up over things that go wrong. Of course it's still necessary, when things do go wrong, to see them clearly.
Next, this is not obviously happy, but according to this reddit comment on Nazi SS soldiers who refused to participate in mass-killings, they were usually not punished, and when they were punished, it was almost always a demotion, transfer, or other loss of status. So ask yourself: is there anything you're doing in your life that you hate, and if you refused to do it, the only penalty would be a loss of social status?
Finally, another reddit comment on how Colorado legalization has changed marijuana from a seller's market to a buyer's market. The black market now has to compete with the legal market on customer service, while the legal market has to compete with the black market on pricing. The most interesting thing is that the highly competent dealers are thriving, while the incompetent dealers have been driven out of cannabis and possibly into dealing harder drugs where the customers don't have as much leverage.
Here in Washington we'll have the first legal shops opening in early July, and the after-tax prices are going to be very high. According to this article consumers will pay $15 to $25 per gram, which would be $53 to $88 for an eighth ounce, which on the black market might cost $40. So I look forward to the Colorado prices eventually coming here. By the way, I haven't ever linked to it on the blog, but Spec Bebop by Yo La Tengo might be the best stoner track of all time.
June 18. A week ago I said I was reducing my internet, but I was unable to follow through, and you should probably not believe me when I say that.
Anyway, continuing with philosophy, I love this article, Accepting Deviant Minds: Why 'Hallucinations' Are as Real as the Self. The author wisely concedes that spirit beings are metaphorical, because an argument that they really exist would require a book-length reframing of the idea of "real". Then he goes on to argue that hallucinated voices should be respected instead of marginalized. But the really brilliant stuff is in the middle of the article. Edited excerpt:
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.
June 16. Continuing last week's philosophy subject, Dermot mentions Gregory Bateson's book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, and Bateson's view of the map-territory relationship:
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.
June 13. Related to my last post: What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital. Even if you don't accept the idea of spirit beings, it's possible for a model of mental illness based on spirit beings to be more helpful than one based on objective materialism, if it's about integrating different perspectives rather than repressing them.
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.
June 11. Today, some philosophy. Yesterday I spent a couple hours working out an answer to this subreddit post, Scientific experiments from a non-mechanistic perspective, because it raises multiple issues that show the difficulty of modeling reality by imagining that mind is the root of matter. If you're not interested in woo-woo stuff, or having experiences that make you doubt your sanity, I recommend you just stick with the objective materialist model of reality because it's much simpler.
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.