All surfaces must be regularly cleaned; weeds eradicated, car oil spots removed. Clothes in closets are to be organized by color, and contestable items - heavily religious books, personal photos - must be removed or neutralized. Every item has a rule, and everything must be exact: the rotation of pillows, the fold of towels, the positioning of toothbrushes. Even the stacks of novels casually left on the bookshelf are placed and angled with pinpoint detail.
One of my favorite themes is how a skilled person using low tech can outperform an unskilled person using high tech. How to Write 225 Words Per Minute With a Pen is about a 19th century writing system called Gregg shorthand.
A seemingly fair overview of the latest Israel-Palestinian conflict, posted by an Israeli on the Arabs subreddit.
This article, Why It's Worth Paying More for Legal Pot, describes the unprecedented detail in the labeling, including the strain name, the genetic background of the strain, where it was grown, how it was grown, when it was harvested, and the percentage of five different cannabinoids. Personally I'm not going to buy any until the outdoor harvest comes in and the price drops. But I can't think of any other product that gives this much information to consumers. One of my utopian visions is that every time you buy food, you can see a live video feed of the farm.
By the way, after a three week break, Saturday night I took nine vaporizer hits of Jack Herer and spent a few hours thinking about hypotrochoids as models for intersecting parallel worlds, something that did not seem nearly as profound the next day. My most valuable insight was that the Main Title Theme from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is damn near Bob Dylan's best song.
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.
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.
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.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.