Ran Prieur

June 22.

2015-06-22T12:45:07Z

June 22. Saturday night I was listening to music and had a thought. One song, which I had originally classified as pretentious and boring, and later as interesting, this time sounded radical and brilliant. So how does that mental model change, or not change? What do I do inside my head so that tomorrow I think of this song as great and not average?

Earlier I was watching baseball and having a similar thought about how batters see pitches. As an amateur I would just see a ball coming at me, but a professional batter sees the pitch within a classification system of different kinds of pitches, and if they're familiar with the pitcher, they see it in the context of what they expect from that pitcher. This is more than a mental model -- it's burned into their instinctive body motions by practice, so they hardly have to think at the moment of the swing. Pitchers do the same thing to learn how to pitch to different batters. And they're both aware the other one is doing it, which is how the mental game develops: if you know the other player's mental landcape, you can take advantage of it, or even hack it. Greg Maddux once intentionally gave up a home run to a batter in a regular season game, so in the playoffs the batter would be looking for that same pitch and never get it.

So here's my theory. Our landscapes of mind and habit are mostly shaped by emotion. The more intense my feelings when I'm listening to that song, the easier it is to start thinking of it as a great song. This might be obvious to anyone who's not an intellectual, and if it's true it explains a lot. In conflicts between companies or empires or sports teams, why do young upstarts defeat established powers? They're living more on the edge, so in every little success or failure, their emotions are more acute, and lead more easily to valuable mental adjustments. Why do people get stupid when they get comfortable? Because they have insulated themselves from the extreme events and strong emotions that would help them stay on top of a changing world.

This also explains why job interviewers look for enthusiasm, and why it's so dangerous to fake it, because it gets you in situations where you're not as adaptable as you need to be.

June 19.

2015-06-19T12:26:41Z

June 19. Fun stuff for the weekend. Speculative Evolution is a subreddit "for images, discussion, and articles about life forms that could have existed in a different world. Speculative organisms may be from the future, an alternate timeline, or alien planets."

And I've discovered another great obscure band, Life Without Buildings. That's a 2014 article and interview about their only album, from 2001, Any Other City. All the songs are great but my initial favorites are Let's Get Out and Daylighting.

The singer, Sue Tompkins, has a style that sounds like a hybrid of two of my favorite singers. She doesn't have Colleen Kinsella's unearthly vocal timbre, but she matches and exceeds the raw, punchy aliveness of great Big Blood songs like Destin Rain. And she has the same half-talking half-singing stuttery repetition as Al Joshua of Orphans & Vandals in songs like Mysterious Skin. Except she predated both of them, and Al Joshua was clearly influenced by her. Two years ago I didn't know about any of the above music, so I wonder what else is out there...

June 17.

2015-06-17T12:29:11Z

June 17. Thanks naringas for giving me something to write about today, posting to the subreddit this article from the New Yorker, A New Theory of Distraction. It's a review of Matthew Crawford's book The World Beyond Your Head, and it has a critique of Crawford similar to the one I wrote a week ago.

Crawford thinks that modern people have too much freedom, which leads to boredom, depression, and being victimized by high-tech distraction, and we need to build a culture of benevolent authority and meaningful constraints. I think we've only begun to learn self-regulation, and unstructured time is not a burden but an exciting opportunity to practice the skill of navigating freedom. The reviewer, Joshua Rothman, uses James Joyce's Ulysses to argue that constant distraction is not a bad thing, and instead of avoiding it, we should own it. (I'm glad he summarized Ulysses for me because I find Joyce unreadable.)

On a tangential subject, Rothman mentions that comedian Louis C.K. and author David Foster Wallace think we seek distraction to avoid facing some unbearable pain at the heart of our being. But I've heard that Louis C.K. is privately a sad man, and of course Wallace hanged himself. Maybe that "emptiness inside" is something that only a small proportion of people feel, but it drives them to success or self-destruction, so they get most of the attention. And the reason I haven't written a bunch of novels is that I enjoy doing nothing.

June 15.

2015-06-15T12:23:29Z

June 15. There's a subreddit called Shower Thoughts, and that might be the direction I go to keep this blog going, just random small ideas. A couple weeks ago I had this one: what I despise about hypocrites is not that they lack the self-discipline to practice what they preach, but that they lack the courage and empathy to preach what they practice. I'm thinking of anti-gay politicians who have secret gay sex, or women who have had abortions and still think they should be illegal for other women. You might say, what about behaviors that are clearly wrong? Well, if Ted Bundy had stood up and said it's okay to rape and kill women, he wouldn't have got away with it for so long.

June 12.

2015-06-12T12:28:10Z

June 12. As usual, personal and fun stuff for the weekend. Leigh Ann has got me watching the women's World Cup, and in some ways I like it better than the men's game. The men are smoother and more explosive, but the women are more scrappy. Yesterday's highlight: you will never see a better free kick than this one by Norway's Maren Mjelde.

And some music. Has anyone else noticed that Sarah by Ray LaMontagne totally rips off Bob Dylan's Fourth Time Around? Of course Dylan was ripping off The Beatles' Norwegian Wood, but at least he made the song better.

I think popular music has been in decline for decades, but only because creativity is shifting to unpopular music. I've recently become obsessed with this 2014 garage rock gem, Doctopus - Wobbegong.

June 10.

2015-06-10T12:51:46Z

June 10. I want to go back one more time to Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head. My favorite parts of the book are where he argues that technology is being designed to take skill away from us and make us powerless consumers of entertainment. The parts I like the least are where he argues that individual freedom has gone too far and we need to be more constrained by authority, custom, and tradition. That's true in some contexts, but I think those contexts are outliers -- his example of a tradition-bound utopia is a business that restores old pipe organs.

I wonder what experiences led Crawford to take that position and seek the unusual examples that support it, because I'm the same age and my encounters with authority and structure have been tedious and painful. Meanwhile, my most interesting challenges have been about navigating life with very little external regulation. I've complained a thousand times about obligations and never complained about boredom -- that would be like a rich person complaining that they don't know how to spend their money.

But apparently I'm also an outlier. Gabriel sends this article, In Europe, Fake Jobs Can Have Real Benefits. There are thousands of dummy companies where people do office work to support the manufacture and sale of imaginary products -- without even being paid! It makes the workers feel useful, and supposedly they're learning skills that will make them employable, but the trend is toward fewer office jobs as they get replaced by better computers. So if the businesses are not grounded in physical reality, and the workers are not learning useful skills, they might as well be playing video games. Or they could be making real pottery or furniture or planting real trees. They could be learning stonemasonry and building castles and cathedrals. At least they're not making bombs... yet.

I like Crawford's vision of a return to skilled trades, and I like my own vision of universal self-regulation, but I don't expect either one to happen in this century. Instead I expect a global struggle to tap the growing resource of people who want someone to tell them what to do all day.

June 8.

2015-06-08T12:28:03Z

June 8. Sarah Perry has a new essay on Ribbonfarm, Puzzle Theory. It's long and covers many subjects, some of them over my head, but she starts with the idea of fan theories about popular fiction. Here are two reddit threads loaded with examples: What is a fan theory that is too good not to be true? and What fan theory will always be canon to you?

We can also make fan theories about society and reality. This is what most intellectuals are doing, and most religions. Even science, which is supposed to be tested against reality, can veer off into untested beliefs that sound good. I was going to write a post about how dangerous this is: we love to believe beautiful stories, and if these stories claim to be about the real world, they can lead us into terrible decisions. But how often does this really happen?

I wrote a lot of stuff back in the aughts that I now regret, because I was writing nonfiction like fiction, emphasizing some facts and ignoring others to tell compelling stories. But none of my readers tried to blow up an office building or live in an underground bunker. Almost everyone saw it the same way I did: these are fun words, and now I'm getting on with my life.

When I was in college an evangelical Christian student tried to cut off his hand or pluck out his eye, I forget which, because of the line in the Bible. But it's not really the Bible's fault -- that guy was nuts! The actions of sane people come from cultural standards that we pick up socially and follow intuitively, and people only take reality fan fiction too seriously under extreme isolation -- or in sick cultures. I'm thinking of Alice Miller's argument, in For Your Own Good, that the generation that ruled Nazi Germany was raised at the peak of a child-rearing fad where parents thought they had to break the child's will.

More generally, I've been thinking about the human need for life to feel "meaningful": for the individual self to engage with a context in which its minute-to-minute actions make sense. This drive for meaning has caused almost all the tragedies of history, but this happens when consciousness is compulsively narrowly focused, like in addiction or extreme ideology. Fanaticism is a psychological event and the ideas are tacked on later. And the antidote is a broadly receptive consciousness that can build meaning from whatever is in front of it. I think if you get good enough at this, you don't even need stories.

June 5.

2015-06-05T12:33:23Z

June 5. I'll eventually go back to writing about abstractions but this week I took a break to practice a skill: video editing. It all started a few weeks ago when I wanted to make a video of one song by that band I'm obsessed with. It's a weird cover of a Sumatran folk song called Indang Pariaman, and I wanted to set it to moving images that look as trippy as it sounds, without breaking copyright laws. So I did a YouTube search for "fractal, creative commons" and discovered the Electric Sheep project:

Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC, Mac, Android, or iPad. When these computers "sleep", the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep".

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

On this page I found a torrent to download this two hour Electric Sheep in HD video. It has 256 "sheep", each one 7.2 seconds long, looping three times, then a 7.2 second transition to the next one. It played on my computer but not on my TV, so I learned about the program Handbrake which converts almost any video format to one that plays on newer HDTV's.

The conversion took all night, and two weeks ago I ate some cannabutter and watched the whole thing. I became obsessed with naming the sheep, and the next day I wrote a list of all 256, the starting times, and names for about 90% of them. Some of my names were obvious and literal, like Fire Taffy, and others were subtle and intuitive, like Audrey Hepburn. I would eventually make the Indang Pariman video from one I called April Shrine (which is not that trippy but really fits the song). And when I happened to be watching one I called Mayan Calendar while listening to Don't Trust The Ruin II, its sharp ghostly appearance fit the song perfectly and I realized that I could use the sheep to make a lot more videos.

It's hard to find good advice on video editing software because people use it in so many different ways. The main thing I needed was very precise copying and pasting so I could seamlessly multiply the loops. The problem is that video files do not store a screenshot of every frame. They store a small proportion of frames, called I-frames, plus data for calculating the other frames forward from the I-frames. So cutting at I-frames is easy and cutting at other frames is really hard. I tried a free video editor called Avidemux, and couldn't get it to work, but I found forum threads where people recommended an older version of Avidemux, 2.5.6.

Even that didn't work perfectly. I frequently had to use the tool "rebuild I and B frames". I learned that you can scan forward frame by frame, but scanning backward more than a few frames will freeze the program, so you have to go back to the next I-frame and then forward. When I tried to add audio, Avidemux failed to recognize most mp3's, so I used the Audacity audio editor to convert them to wav files.

Anyway, I started with the giant two hour file, used I-frames to copy blocks containing my favorite sheep into much smaller files without reprocessing, cleaned up the edges of those files and saved them at a smaller size (1280x720), went into those files and bracketed and duplicated the 180-frame loops to just over the song length, trimmed the transitions to fit the song length, and finally added the audio.

This week I made four Big Blood Electric Sheep videos. For each of the two above, and Sick With Information, I used only one sheep. But for one of their greatest songs, Adversaries and Enemies, I decided to use four sheep and sync the transitions with song changes. It took a bunch of drafts, and working around loops of fixed length I couldn't get the first transition perfect, but I'm happy with the other two and the end.

June 1.

2015-06-01T12:17:31Z

June 1. I'm getting burned out on the internet, and I wonder if this is part of a trend. I mean, the internet is still miraculously useful to support offline activities. Which product should I buy? What's wrong with my car? How do I make this food? Will I like this album? You go on, you get the answer, you get off. (Heh heh, porn.) But as a channel for action, or as an end in itself, the internet is unsatisfying. I don't think an online petition has ever accomplished anything. You have basically zero chance of changing someone's mind in an argument. The communities are shallow because the connections are thin.

The main thing people are doing is seeking the self outside the self. "Does anyone else have this opinion, or this private habit? Wow, lots of people do, and now I feel validated, and strangely empty." I wonder if it makes you stronger to not know whether other people are like you, because it certainly makes you stronger to not care.

I'm not giving up this blog. It's useful for connecting with people who I might meet in person, and there will always be stuff I enjoy chattering about. But I expect my posts to be mostly about surprising ideas and personal stuff, and not about confirming stuff I already believe.

Surprising idea of the day: I only halfway understand this hyperintellectual reddit comment by Erinaceous on ecology. He's saying that humans like to idealize a unified whole, and we project that ideal on nature, but really nature is "a disequilibrium system that requires disturbance and flux at every level to maintain far from equilibrium states." Sounds like Taoism.

May 29.

2015-05-29T12:22:38Z

May 29. For the weekend, some personal updates. Earlier this year I had some serious fatigue, and one of the changes I made was to cut my sugar consumption. Now every time I eat something sweeter than a carrot, even whole fruit, I eat some Ezekiel cereal along with it because fiber enables healthy digestion of sugar. After a few weeks of this, I've noticed that I barely even like sweet foods. Also, maybe coincidentally, I no longer crave bread at all. On a normal day my breakfast is boiled sprouted wheat with whole milk kefir and prunes, my lunch is red meat and cheese, and my supper is whatever. For a while I was eating meat twice a day, but it gave me body odor that I didn't like, so now I'm eating more beans, mostly refried beans made in large batches with sprouted pintos.

Since selling my truck I miss it sentimentally, but not practically. I still ride my bike a few times a week but mostly I ride my scooter, a Buddy 150. It's great to have fast acceleration and still burn hardly any gas.

Yesterday the first strawberry ripened in the back yard. The apricot and peach and apple have all set less fruit than they did last year, maybe because this year we had late frosts. Peaches are iffy in Spokane and the peach tree is struggling while the apricot is thriving. Also I'm going to get my first crop from the Evans/Bali tart cherry.

I've cut my marijuana use to one night every two weeks. I was thinking I might get away with two consecutive nights every two weeks, but last weekend when I tried that, on the second night my body felt sluggish and crummy and the head high was mediocre. I'm just not built to be a full-time stoner. Even once every two weeks it takes me a few days to feel normal again, but it's worth it.

Alcohol for me is the opposite of marijuana (and the opposite of alcohol for most people): I don't like being drunk but I love the taste. On most nights I'll drink half of a craft beer, and I have a new favorite, Ninkasi Dawn of the Red, joining my existing favorites Deschutes Red Chair and New Belgium Trippel.

May 27.

2015-05-27T12:55:51Z

May 27. Adam sends this interesting article, The Caveman's Home Was Not a Cave -- because they only lived in caves in winter, and the rest of the year they lived outdoors and moved around a lot.

Also on the subject of human habitat, here's a good critique of Colonizing Mars. I think robot space probes are cool, but the idea of putting humans on other planets is pure romanticism by people who think they're rational, which makes it funny. If you're going to base your vision of the future on genre fiction, it's more realistic to aim for bioengineered dragons and elves. At the same time, I think the dream of living on Mars, where there is no ecology, will lead to inventions that reduce our ecological footprint on Earth.

May 25.

2015-05-25T12:53:05Z

May 25. I'm still working through Matthew Crawford's book The World Beyond Your Head. Here's an excerpt, The Case for Dangerous Roads and Low-Tech Cars. The idea is that we drive more safely if roads and cars are engineered to fully engage our attention. Crawford's broader idea is that technology is being used to insulate us from the challenges of the physical world, and this not only makes us incompetent -- it makes us depressed, because part of being human is extending our consciousness into physical and social landscapes that set constraints and make demands.

Another way to frame it: the trend in technology is to make practical things boring and idiot proof, so they don't attract our attention but in the absence of attention they still work. Consider the education system, or computer operating systems. Meanwhile, computer games and other forms of entertainment are being skillfully engineered to demand our attention. You can escape the trap by learning to ride a motorcycle, speak a new language, play an instrument, play a sport, make furniture, anything that puts your mind and body out in the world unmediated.

What I don't like about Crawford's book is it has a town hall vibe, pointing out evil and recommending public policy. There's no way congress will pass a law limiting the addictiveness of slot machines or requiring cars to be less squishy. We're facing an unstoppable force like a fire or a plague, and the value of the book is in helping us understand it well enough to survive it. I see this as a psychological version of the popular myth of the apocalypse. Instead of physically dying, most people are going to fade away into technologically assisted adult infancy, while communities based on challenging skills and deep relationships survive and eventually fill in the dead spaces.

Related: I found that car article among lots of other good stuff on No Tech Magazine.

May 22.

2015-05-22T12:50:16Z

May 22. Loose end from Wednesday: on the subreddit, in Drone Combat and the End of Satellites, polyparadigm argues that even satellites are slow enough to give a disadvantage to human controllers, and the future of drone combat is local control. I wonder if it will eventually be like video games are now: humans give general commands like destroy or engage or defend or pursue, and the AI takes care of the moment-to-moment details. But there's probably some big factor in drone warfare that nobody can even guess in 2015.

For the weekend, something inspiring, I secretly lived in my office for 500 days.

And from the books subreddit a week ago, a thread asking What's the most beautiful paragraph or sentence you've ever read?. The most beautiful paragraph I've ever read is this one from Little, Big by John Crowley:

While the moon smoothly shifted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Dr. Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: 'There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.' This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said 'Years'.

May 20.

2015-05-20T12:22:18Z

May 20. A reader sends a fascinating doom scenario. It starts with the idea that drones are the future of warfare. The plot thickens with the observation that military drones normally require satellites. And the speculation is that experimental high-altitude aircraft like waveriders, which are also being developed by China, are intended to shoot down satellites to neutralize the enemy's drones in a war. Enough blown up satellites and we've got Kessler syndrome, a feedback loop where high-velocity space debris hits satellites and makes more space debris, and "the resulting debris cascade could render low Earth orbit essentially impassable."

This is the same kind of mutually assured destruction that has so far prevented global nuclear war. The difference is, if you push the button to start a nuclear war you're killing billions of people and destroying your own nation. A satellite war is merely a big inconvenience, and you might be preserving your own nation. If someone has the ability to blow up all the satellites, and it feels more like saving the world than ending the world, they're going to do it.

The next strategic move is not hard to figure out. How do you win a war after the satellites are gone? Or how do you get in a position where the satellite war hurts your enemies more than you? By having the best drone force that does not depend on satellites. I'm talking beyond my knowledge here, but I'm thinking that drones use satellites for communication with operators and GPS navigation. You could navigate by triangulating from fixed beacons on the ground, and you could communicate globally through massive drone-to-drone networks, but not fast enough for remote operators to make combat decisions. So the likely goal is drones that are smart enough to make combat decisions on their own.

May 18.

2015-05-18T12:28:23Z

May 18. So I've started reading a book I mentioned a month ago, The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford. Here's a repost of the article. In the book, he starts with the obvious complaint that the world is increasingly saturated with advertisements and other demands on our attention, and then he puts this in an interesting philosophical context. According to Enlightenment metaphysics, your "self" is inside your head, and you make an abstract mental model of the world outside your head and make rational decisions about how to navigate it.

Crawford argues that it's better to think of the self as extending beyond your body into your immediate physical environment. His first example is how short-order cooks lay out the ingredients of the meals they're making in a way that allows them to do the simple motions of cooking without having to think, which frees their limited brainpower to add skill to their work on other levels.

So all these demands on our attention are not neutral opportunities for making choices -- they are more like assaults or invasions, and the more intelligence we have to use filtering our senses to sort out what's useful, the less intelligence we have for complex thought and creativity. Crawford notices that younger people are better than older people at navigating the information shitstorm, and he fears that they have gained this skill by numbing their extended self.

May 15.

2015-05-15T12:42:02Z

May 15. For the weekend I'm ready to unveil a personal project, moving my favorite band from my songs page to their own Big Blood page where I can go into much more detail.