Silicon Valley's amorality problem arises from the blind faith many place in progress. The narrative of progress provides moral cover to the tech industry and lulls people into thinking they no longer need to exercise moral judgment.

How we created a generation of unsophisticated, picky eaters. This high-bandwidth article argues that human appreciation of food is being degraded by busy parents giving their kids bland processed food designed to appeal to kids, instead of making them eat adult food.

Wasp Without a Sting is not about genetically engineered insects. It's about the total lameness of Bob Hope.

How "Clean" Was Sold to America with Fake Science. Our idea of personal hygiene is historically absurd and was invented by ad agencies in the 20th century to sell us products. Personally I don't use deodorant, mouthwash, or shampoo, but I do floss every day.

Former masters, accustomed to ruling through sheer terror, defeated on the battlefield, resorting to what they do best: ultra-violence and exemplary torture-murder, to reassert control of a newly uppity population they're used to ordering around.

His third idea is about the motivations of foreign fighters: that the reason Muslims in Belgium and France and England are hundreds of times more likely to go fight for ISIS, is that they're acting out those nations' colonialist cultures. But a reader from Belgium says they do not have the colonialist culture that Brecher claims, and even if they did, Muslim communities in Europe are much less assimilated than in America and they wouldn't pick up their host nations' cultures anyway. Maybe the simpler explanation is that Muslims in rich countries can afford plane tickets.

New subject, subtly related: How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco's Life. It's about people posting silly, mildly offensive stuff on social media and becoming objects of high-tech witch hunts. I think all of us have done something more offensive than these people got in trouble for, but here and there, almost at random, the wrath of millions will suddenly descend on one person. I think the participants in these shaming frenzies have the same deep motivation as European jihadis: their lives have no meaning and they want to make a difference in the world. They're craving a scarce commodity in the human zoo: to feel powerful.

Are there any better moves when society gives you no participation in power? I can think of two, and they're not mutually exclusive. One is to make small differences in the lives of people around you. The other is to let go of the desire to make a difference and just enjoy the moment, and Japan is ahead of the curve: In violent times, young Japanese just shrug:

Japan's youngest men and women were born into a stalled economy. They grew up in it, are used to it and are now entering it as workers. In 2010, a journalist named Taku Yamaoka wrote a book titled "Young People Who Don't Want Anything". Status, prosperity, success, victory, love, sex, truth, justice - the key motivators of our species since it became recognizably human - mean little to them. A half-ironic description took hold - the "satori generation". Satori is a religious term suggesting the enlightenment that raises an adept above worldly desire.

The impediment of a body is gone, as is one's identity, yet, paradoxically, a perceiving and recording "I" still exists. Several volunteers used the metaphor of a camera being pulled back on the scene of their lives, to a point where matters that had once seemed daunting now appeared manageable... Roland Griffiths likens the therapeutic experience of psilocybin to a kind of "inverse PTSD."

An untrained eye can't tell the difference between a male and female chick; their bodies are just too similar. Trained masters could sort the birds effectively, even though they could not describe what details they used for their decisions.

This isn't some kind of magical talent. It's a skill that anyone can develop just by repeatedly guessing and being told whether they're right. A similar technique was used in WWII to tell whether approaching airplanes were British or German, starting with people who "couldn't articulate how they did what they did. In fact, when they tried to explain, they had even less success."

The article puts this in terms of the conscious vs the unconscious mind, but I would say that chicken sexers are totally conscious of knowing the difference between males and females -- they just can't put that consciousness into words. So we're really talking about the part of the mind that is constrained by language, vs the part that is not constrained by language.

In western culture we have something I would call the Word Ego: the part of our mind that uses language wants to feel like it's totally in charge, so it builds a wall with a narrow gate where it stands like a sentinel, not letting anything pass from understanding into action unless it can take the form of words. (Or you could say the wall is to keep consciousness from passing out of the realm of words!)

As a writer, I'm like a lawyer who represents people before the Word Gate. Everyone tells me, "You put into words what I knew but couldn't put into words, and now I know I'm not crazy." But my job is only necessary because you have a Word Gate in the first place. It would better if we could all just develop our sub-language consciousness enough that we could trust it to directly drive our actions.

If you're going to be two-faced, you have to know who you should be nice to and who you can get away with being nasty to. In the startup world, things change so rapidly that you can't tell. The random college kid you talk to today might in a couple years be the CEO of the hottest startup in the Valley. If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who are genuinely good.

This has big implications for utopian thinking. Some imaginary ideal societies are extremely predictable, and predictability is one of the things we mean when we talk about stability and security. But if you want your society to generate good human behavior, unpredictability has to be somehow built into the system.

Case in point: When my wife and I were sleeplessly losing our wits, we read through advice books on infant sleep, none of which mentioned that sleeping for eight uninterrupted hours in a bed in separate rooms is a distinct cultural anomaly... Around the world, people sleep in groups; with animals; in briefer chunks of time; without coverings.

Another NY Times article about cultural habits and sleep, A 12-Hour Window for a Healthy Weight. Research on mice, if it applies to humans, shows that it's good for you to go 12 hours between your last food of the night and your first food of the morning.

New subject? Pray for Calamity is an anti-civilization blog that some of you will like. I've been off that bus for about seven years now. Anti-civ ideology is a powerful tool for cutting through the religion of progress, but I think it's a fallacy to take the word "civilization", define it according to the worst mistakes of our first attempts at large complex society, and project that definition onto all possible large complex societies of the future. More generally, I think we've barely scratched the surface of all the possible ways we could live.

We seem to place a special value on children because of their blankness, the fact that they have not thought or done anything interesting or important yet and that their identity is still unformed. As children grow up and become more like people, with a life of their own, they seem to become less valuable.

We have it back to front. People's lives get more valuable as they 'grow up' because part of growing up is having more life to live. The greatest part of the value of a human life, as opposed to that of a merely sentient animal like a mouse, relates to the development of personhood. The death of an adult person is a tragedy because a sophisticated unique consciousness has been lost; a life in progress, of plans and ideals and relationships with other persons, has been broken off.

What follows from such an analysis? Not, I suggest, that we should care any less for children but that we should care more for adults. On the principle that a good idea realised is better than a good idea merely, we should acknowledge that oak trees are more valuable than acorns.

I see one thing he's missing: children seem more alive than adults because they are more alive, because we have an education system that punishes creative spontaneous behavior in order to polish us down into interchangeable parts for a machine-like society. In practice, personhood is often a destructive process. Maybe we get so upset about the rare things that kill children physically, to take our minds off the normal things that kill children spiritually.

Loosely related: after a long break from video games, this week I've been playing Lords of the Realm II. It's an intimate medieval strategy game in which you can see down to the level of individual peasants and cattle. My dream game would be the framework of LOTR2, with Dwarf Fortress complexity in town management, and Mount & Blade complexity in combat. Anyway, the game conveniently ignores the time it would take between peasant births and soldiers in armies, and when I noticed that, I suddenly understood why there are child armies in Africa.

He's been away for two months, spent most of it dancing on the beach addled on diet pills and Sangsom sets -- perhaps punctuated by a week of hungover volunteering building a retaining wall that is destined to collapse within a year. His destination's merits can all be surmised with the brain-dead epithet "amazing"; the natives were "so friendly". But this facsimile, off-the-peg experience has invested him with unprecedented insight into Thailand's society -- indeed, into the very essence of the human condition. Suddenly, he is Marco Polo returning from the court of Kublai Khan. He must write a blog, post endless photos on social media. Everyone must benefit from his remarkable new wisdom!

The key to this whole subject, which the author misses, is that these are people from rich countries traveling in poor countries. That's why the natives are friendly: they're kissing your ass because they want your money. And that's why the travelers fail to gain any wisdom, because their money blocks them from the valuable experience of engaging the natives as equals. Even if you have no money, if you just look like the people with money, your interactions with others will not be real.

I didn't understand this myself until I had a long talk with a guy who spent a year in Asia, who admitted that he loved being treated like a rock star just because of his race. Personally I hate it. I'm not even good at reading people, and even traveling in Mexico, the friendliness is so obviously fake that it just makes me feel dirty. I don't want to be the center of attention -- I want to see a changing landscape while being invisible, which is why I only really enjoy traveling inside the USA.

...we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else. So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

This doesn't fit my experience. What I find most addictive are computer strategy games, but I prefer single player to multiplayer, so I'm seeking something other than human connection. As an introvert, I don't feel like modern society cuts me off like a rat in a cage. I feel like I'm in a Kafka nightmare, overwhelmed with insane and meaningless obligations. The problem is not a lack of connections but an excess of bad connections. Hari claims that Portugal has cured addiction by giving addicts "subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life." Jobs must be better in Portugal, because in every job I ever had, the only purpose was to make it to quitting time with enough energy to have an hour or two of fun before collapsing into bed. The appeal of computer games, compared to society, is that the tasks in front of me are part of a good story and my choices make a difference. We can't fix society just by adding human connection -- we need to take the power out of the center and distribute it to all of us, and that's going to take hundreds of years.

Meanwhile, sometimes drugs are great. This article is also by Johann Hari from his new book: Why animals eat psychoactive plants. There's good stuff about that subject, and also about the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece. And the main point is that "the overwhelming majority of people who use prohibited drugs do it because they get something good out of it." And we should embrace our desire for altered mental states, instead of seeing it as something dirty.

Loosely related: How to disappear completely is a post on the Raptitude blog about sensory deprivation float tanks. I just want to say that I tried this and it was completely lame. I was hoping for any kind of trippy experience but it was no different, mentally, from spending the same amount of time lying on my bed with my eyes closed. But you should try it because your results might be better.