October 3. Curses, Fooled Again! The host of Candid Camera writes about how people have changed, or not changed, from when the show started decades ago. The most interesting idea is that people are easier to fool because technology is so powerful, and changing so fast, that it's hard to keep track of where the line is between possible and impossible, or normal and absurd.
October 13. The other day I got an email from a reader asking for advice, and while thinking about it, I came up with a theory of why young people are so unhappy. I mean obviously the main reason is economic: they have huge unpayable debts and it's really hard to make money. But on top of that, I think first world middle class Millennials carry a psychological burden that is not shared with other struggling people around the world: they have inherited the Baby Boomer culture of global responsibility, without inheriting the political power to do anything about it.
This fits with an idea from this podcast, In The Dust Of This Planet, which Anne wrote about in this post. The idea is, in the 80's we were all worried about global nuclear war, and we stopped it. Or really, the people who run the world made a show of reducing nuclear tensions while we all watched (because politics has become a non-participatory spectacle like sports but much more scripted) and the danger of nuclear war remains. But the point is, now we're all worried about climate change, and they can't even pretend to stop it. And yet they still ask us to care about it, and they still frame the issue as if power and responsibility are shared by all. What a head trip!
My favorite idea in the podcast is that there is strength on the other side of nihilism. A rapper in a video is wearing a jacket that says "in the dust of this planet" and the message is that he understands that everything falls to ruin and life has no greater meaning, and he doesn't care. My favorite book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, has the same message: everything you do will come to nothing, but it's wonderful to be alive, so take pleasure in whatever you're doing right now.
I'm also wondering, when did "saving the world" become a popular myth? Did anyone think that way in the 13th century, or even the early 20th century? Did it become popular because of superhero comic books? Because of pictures of Earth from space? I wonder if "saving the world" is a fad, a beginner's way of thinking globally. In a hundred years, when we have a better sense of how "the world" (depending on your definition) is permanent, we'll have more complex ways of thinking globally.
Jed comments:
I'm not even sure young people are that unhappy, but to the extent they are, I think it is because of a mismatch between time scales. Young people have only been around a little while, they are immersed in a world where things happen quickly (online, media) and they feel like they can't affect things. They can, they do, but the way water wears away rock. Real social change is multi-generational. The changes that stick are the ones that people live and pass on to their children in a new form.
October 27-29. Google Is Not What It Seems. Julian Assange writes about being interviewed by some people from Google who appeared to be politically neutral, but they turned out to be representing the American foreign policy establishment, and he argues that Google has been allied with these people and their world view for a long time:
By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the "benevolent superpower"... This is the impenetrable banality of "don't be evil." They believe that they are doing good.
If you think about this, it puts a twist on the popular idea that the elite simply rule the world. On a deeper level, the world is ruled by the stories the elite have to tell themselves to feel like they're the good guys. These stories include: that global-scale decisions must be made from the top (or center); that political stability is more valuable than political participation; that "economic development" (the definition is too big to get into here) is a good thing; and the story I find most interesting, that you raise the quality of life of ordinary humans by taking away their pain and giving them stuff, not by giving them interesting choices.
I've been thinking a lot about interesting choices, partly inspired by Sid Meier's famous description of a good game as a series of interesting choices, and partly by an email I got more than a year ago from Owen. Here's some of it:
In game design, they talk about choices that matter. If a choice is presented but people feel obligated to take only one of the branches, that's not really a choice. You must take this option, taking that other option is stupid. Or if taking a branch doesn't result in any perceived consequence. Then take any branch, the choice doesn't matter. They put those kinds of choices in front of you all the time. How do you like your steak cooked? Should I use the gelpacks or the powder for the dishwasher?
This is important so I'll say it again in my own words. If the choice doesn't effect your path, like Coke or Pepsi, then it's not interesting; and if one choice is obviously stupid, like keep your car on the road or run it off, then it's not interesting. But deprive people of interesting choices for too long, and they start making the obviously stupid choice just to feel alive. Another way to say it: we would rather do the wrong thing that we choose ourselves, than the right thing that is chosen for us. I think this explains a lot of behavior that otherwise doesn't make any sense, and it's why even the most benevolent central control can never make a good society, or a good family.
November 3. Scientists of Reddit: What's the craziest or weirdest thing in your field that you suspect is true but is not yet supported fully by data?
The comment featured in the subreddit post is this one arguing that big data will cause a catastrophe by looking at correlation without causation. My example of this would be Google search. If you remember the crappy search engines before Google, they tried to make the computer actually understand what you were looking for. Google worked much better by not trying to understand, but just looking for correlations between search terms and links. So the doom argument is that rare events can change systems in ways that you can understand if you're looking at causation, but not if you're looking at correlation; so a "black swan" event could lead to a chain reaction of computers doing stupid things. "Could even be on the level of seeing planes fall out the sky."
Other than that, here are my ten favorites in the thread: 1) There are contagious diseases that spread through ideas combined with the power of the mind over the body. A current example is gluten intolerance. 2) The Big Bang theory violates the principle that there should be no special time in the universe, but you could resolve this with an eternal universe in which regions are expanding or contracting. 3) Some voters do not try to figure out which candidate they like the best, but vote for the candidate who seems most likely to win so they can feel like winners. 4) The chemical key to depression treatment is not serotonin but a protein called "brain derived neurotropic factor", which makes the brain more flexible, but you still have to do the work of adjusting your thinking. 5) Epigenetics could explain how a population can evolve together instead of waiting for an individual to have a lucky mutation. 6) Lead in Washington DC drinking water severely affected hundreds of infants and children and it was all covered up. 7) "Cumulative or simultaneous nonhazardous odors (often called nuisance smells) have a multiplying hazardous effect." 8) Small birds can hear tornado storms hundreds of miles away. 9) People with autoimmune disorders rarely get sick from other things. 10) Nerves send signals through pressure waves.
November 17-19. Leigh Ann and I were watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and I started wondering: why does Voldemort act that way? I'm talking about the cartoon Hollywood villain personality. You've all seen it a hundred times, but where does it come from? It can't be based on an actual person, because nobody really behaves like Voldemort. Even Hitler, while tactically very much like Voldemort, didn't have anything like the same persona.
My guess is that the villain personality is a meaningless accident, like the shape of men's suits or the Nike logo. Maybe it developed out of a few 19th century authors and silent movie actors, but we could just as easily live in an alternate universe where fictional villains behave completely differently. What's important is 1) there must be a uniform standard so that uncreative writers and actors can communicate to unperceptive audiences that this character is evil; and 2) it must be nothing like the behavior of actual powerful and harmful people, because that would be too emotionally troubling and politically dangerous.
Anne comments:
How can you make the ministry of magic, which is more or less MI5/GCHQ for wizards, look sympathetic? You need an opponent who, unlike real criminals - who tend to be motivated by rage, addiction, poverty, and mental illness - acts on motives and methods so devious and dense that they make a regulatory apparatus look benign in comparison. Snape is a tragic antihero. Voldemort? Evil (tm). He has to be, otherwise the Death Eaters start to look pathetic, the way neo-Nazis or the National Front look in real life, the kind of broken losers whose childhood dreams of being awesome were damaged by bullying and irrelevance, stolen opportunities, bad decisions, and depression.
November 19. Awesome new speech by Steve Albini on technology and the music industry. Like a good song, his argument starts slow and keeps building. He explains the old system and how all but the most popular artists were screwed, and then the excitement of the independent music scene, and then the emerging system in which cheap recording technology and internet file-sharing have created a musical utopia for listeners and most artists. But the middlemen and owning interests are being cut out of the action, and Albini spends more than 1600 words dissecting their plea, "We need to figure out how to make this digital distribution work for everyone." His conclusion:
I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word "release", as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don't believe the public good is served by trying to.
Related: Iggy Pop's incredible John Peel lecture, with good stuff about how art is made for reasons other than money, but if it's too successful, money kills it.
December 2. Saturday night I went out for dinner with some smart people, and one subject that came up was a company called Uber. Through a smartphone app, they "arrange rides between riders and drivers", but unlike Craigslist, Uber controls all the information and all the money. They also aggressively externalize costs: they profit from everything that goes right, while only passengers and drivers suffer from anything that goes wrong.
The promise of the internet is a rhizomatic world where anyone can connect with anyone. The reality is, if someone can route these connections through a central hub that they control, they can leverage this advantage into rapidly growing wealth and power. Google, Amazon, eBay, Paypal, and Facebook have all done this, and now Uber is taking it into the new frontier of local services. I expect them to expand from taxi rides into stuff like dog walking, yard work, haircuts, massage, tutoring, and so on, the same way Amazon expanded from books into every product.
A dystopian sci-fi story about the possible future of Uber: One Day, I Will Die on Mars.
December 4. The Sci-Fi Future of Personalized Advertising. I went a long time not watching much TV, and now I'm watching more and the commercials are just terrible. I mean if you listen to their tone of voice, and their whole framing of reality, the bullshit is laid on so thick that it's like they're not even selling products -- they're training the public to accept that level of bullshit as normal.
But now I'm thinking, what if instant viewer feedback enables commercials to learn, the way performers learn from a live audience, until every commercial is genuinely interesting? Will it lead to better mind control, or will commercials become authentic and subversive because that's what people need?
December 6. Three comments by my favorite reddit commenter, Erinaceous. First, an easy but not 100% reliable method for home-grown oyster mushrooms.
In the context of how to feed yourself in a hard crash, how grain agriculture goes hand in hand with empire, because grains are easier than other food to collect as tribute. It follows that horticultural societies need to be converted to agricultural societies for the empire to expand.
And how economic inequality drives collapse: normally if something becomes scarce, people consume it less. But if there are very rich people, they want to consume scarce stuff for social status, and poor people want to harvest scarce stuff to get high prices from the rich.