Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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November 2. I plan to just post links this week. Locked doors, headaches, and intellectual need is related to the motivation subject from a month ago. The idea is that we learn something better if we learn it as a solution to a problem that we already have, and the author uses examples from game design, math education, and programming.

The Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a fun reddit-like page where people submit crazy science and fiction questions and other people answer them. (Thanks Tim.)

Zeno effect verified: Atoms won't move while you watch. The article doesn't even touch the philosophical implications. We've learned to accept this kind of thing in the quantum world, but suppose it's happening in the human-scale world all the time. You could say there's no objective scientific evidence of that, but science and objective truth are methods for defining what happens when everyone is watching. And if macroscopic phenomena know who's watching, then they can reveal that they know who's watching when only a few people are watching, and increasingly hide the fact that they know who's watching as more people watch.


October 30. It turns out this week's big ideas were in a book called Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga, published in 1944 and written in 1938. A reader linked to a pdf in this subreddit post. I haven't read much yet, but I noticed that Huizinga uses children as an example of what real playing looks like. That doesn't work in the 21st century because even children's activities are too structured now. I had to use a cat. And maybe that's why so many Millennials have social anxiety.

Another reader mentions an ancient sport in Myanmar (Burma) called Chinlone. That link goes to a five minute video, and there's also a documentary, Mystic Ball. It's basically hacky sack with a larger bouncier ball and dance moves.

New subject: Greater than the sum of its parts is about an awesome new coyote-wolf-dog hybrid that is spreading through eastern North America. Like a wolf, it can hunt in the woods and is big enough to take down a small deer. Like a coyote, it's highly adaptable and can live around humans, even in large cities. It's not just the animal itself that's interesting, but that something genetically stable, and more fit than its ancestors, can appear so quickly.


October 28. Continuing on Monday's subject, Anne points out that there non-authoritarian uniforms: "What about hockey, or punk kids, or clowns?" Also we're coming up on a holiday where people wear costumes. I've always liked the occult aspect of Halloween and not the costume aspect. When I think about it, this is because the occult is about transforming physical reality, while costumes are about transforming social reality. To me, physical reality is boring and needs shaking up, while social reality is already too challenging without getting even more shifty.

Last week, right after reading the Graeber essay, I went with Leigh Ann to a catsit where her job was to play with a cat for an hour. (Before you say that's the best job in the world, she also had to clean the litter box.) And watching the cat chase a toy on a string, I thought, how often do modern adult humans get to play like this? This must be a big reason we have pets. And it might be why some people like alcohol so much, and why alcohol has different psychological effects in different cultures: in anti-playful cultures, alcohol is like a costume that makes playfulness socially acceptable.

Even when we're "playing" sports or games, we rarely feel like a cat playing with a laser pointer. Only sports where the rules themselves are improvised, like Calvinball, can reach that level of play, and as sports get more elite, they get more serious (but here's a fun moment from last weekend's Clemson Miami game).

Video games can focus and expand our minds in valuable ways, but I can't think of a single one that's truly playful. Is this a failure by human game designers, or is it built into the hardware? Would we have better artificial intelligence if we judged and improved it by looking at playfulness, instead of using the Turing test which is based on symbolic language? Or do we need to start over and build AI from a foundation that cannot be reduced to numbers and logic?

Even board games and card games are more about competitive focus than strict-definition play. One partial exception is Cards Against Humanity -- and that's an interesting name given the idea that modern humans might be the least playful thing in the universe. Another exception would be a pencil-and-dice role playing game with a really good game master. How hard would it be to build an AI that could design and improvise a virtual world more creatively than the best human, and what would happen to society if we could do it cheaply?

What can we do to make ordinary life more playful? Today I rode my bike to the store, and it occurred to me that there's a lot more room to playfully ride a bicycle than drive a car. Play is about sudden unpredictable movements, and if you try that in a car you're going to crash. So the most playful society is the one that can tolerate and use the most surprising behavior.

By the way, a famous book on same kind of thing is Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. Here's a pdf link.


October 26. Earlier this month when I wrote about school shooters and other non-state mass-killers, I had a tangential thought: these people are extremely serious. No school shooter would ever be described as playful or fun -- except maybe Eric Harris, which is why other shooters worship him. And it's the same thing with animals. A dog that won't play with you is much scarier than a normal dog.

This explains why we're afraid of people in uniform -- or we should be. A uniform can turn a normal fun person into a machine-like agent of an insane bureaucracy, and if the uniform includes a gun, it can turn them into a killer. The only thing scarier than a person turned into a killer by a uniform, is a person who can do it without a uniform, which is why governments want us to think about criminals and terrorists.

Getting deeper into the subject of play, last week a reader posted this 2014 David Graeber piece to the subreddit, What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun? I think David Graeber is the best public intellectual in the world. I discovered him back in 2006 through his short book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, the first smart thing I ever read about how to look to tribal people to improve our own world. More recently he wrote a radical history of economics, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and he has a new book about bureaucracy, The Utopia of Rules.

Anyway, in the essay about fun, he writes about human attempts to interpret playfulness among wild animals. When industrial age biologists see animals playing, they assume it must have some hidden utilitarian value -- but this assumption is purely cultural, a projection of our selfish and mechanistic modern society onto nature. Graeber looks at some other perspectives that could put play at the heart of reality:

Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely -- if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, "does anything it likes" -- it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake -- which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.

This gets more interesting the more you think about it. If electrons are playing, and bacteria and insects and squirrels are playing, and tribal humans are playing most of the time, and modern humans are hardly playing at all, then what happened? One answer is that this is a dead end and we should all go back to the stone age or go extinct. My answer is more optimistic: we are a work in progress, an attempt by universal play to manifest at higher levels of complexity, or within our particular mode of consciousness.


October 23. Loose end from the previous post: if you're smarter than me and you want to get deeper into causality theory, Andy recommends the book Causality by Judea Pearl.

And for the weekend, music and drugs. Samsara Blues Experiment is a German psych/space rock band that might even be better than Electric Moon except that they sometimes have bad vocals.

I've been thinking how strange it is that so few people use marijuana in moderation -- at least on Reddit. The main stoner subreddit, Trees, has 800,000 subscribers, most of whom seem to get high every day. Leaves is for people who are trying to quit forever and has 27,000 subscribers. And then there's a tiny subreddit, Petioles, for people who are trying to cut back but not quit, with 2100 subscribers and about one post a day. Maybe this is because Reddit is dominated by young people who don't think in terms of moderation, or because moderation is not as interesting to write about as indulgence or purity, or because our culture is still getting used to the drug as it comes out of prohibition. In a hundred years it might be common to use it once a week like it is now for alcohol.


October 21. Today, some technology links I've been saving up. I think I found all of these on Hacker News.

Correlation, Causation, and Confusion is a long article about that subject, and the important idea is that Big Data is based entirely on correlation. My example would be that early search engines tried to make the computer understand what you were searching for, and then Google worked much better by just crunching data about what people searched for and what they clicked on. The danger is that no amount of correlation-based computing can tell us what's going to happen if we intervene in a system. So if our decisions are based increasingly on correlation without understanding causation, we're going to make more bad decisions.

Portugal's speed control traffic signals. They're enforcing speed limits with a radar gun that gives everyone a red light if someone is going too fast. Drivers don't run the lights, and they tend to stay below the limit because they don't want to be the person to blame for delaying the drivers around them. As the technology gets cheaper, this should work better in every way than speed bumps or human cops.

By the way, I support Ivan Illich's politically impossible idea to limit all vehicle traffic everywhere to the speed of a bicycle. This would lead to much safer roads, better cities, massive energy savings, smoooooth traffic, and stronger local economies.

A dense article and comment thread that some of you will understand, How is NSA breaking so much crypto? Whether or not their speculation is right, the political angle is the same: the NSA, or any intelligence agency, would rather get our information than protect us from other intelligence agencies.

And a somewhat fluffy article, Psychedelics could trigger a paradigm shift in mental health care. This summer I finally got a source of psilocybe cubensis and tried a normal beginner dose. It felt like somewhere between being drunk and having the flu, not trippy at all, so I must have a high natural tolerance. Apparently some people need more than five grams. But that was also right before I started blogging more heavily, so I wonder if the mushrooms worked on a purely subconscious level and shook loose a bunch of stuff in my head.


October 19. Thanks Jed for sending this blog post, On the Eating of Lotuses, pointing out the psychological similarities between Muslims going to fight for ISIS, and young people in the 1930's who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Both are seeking...

the chance to really matter in the world, to put their lives on the line to shape the future in a situation where it seemed to genuinely hang in the balance. They did so in a context where the everyday world around them offered nothing more than stasis and passivity.

I think they should get over it. The chance to really matter in the world is a narcissistic illusion that used to be the privilege of kings, who in practice usually made the world worse, but since the Enlightenment we all want to do it. The world in which you can really matter is the world of your own friends and family, but it's hard to feel satisfied with that when your culture constantly turns your attention to the Big World.

On a similar subject, thanks Anne for sending this post from the collapse subreddit, Missing the forest for the trees. It reminds me of an insight from Dmitry Orlov: that large-scale collapse, viewed on the scale of ordinary lives, seems like personal failure. But this post goes into more detail, and it adds an even more interesting idea: that collapse can seem like success if our values change so that necessary adaptations are stuff we want to do anyway.

The author seems to think we're fooling ourselves, that if we want to live cheaply and avoid having a job, we're just putting a positive spin on something bad. But if you take a step back, that judgment comes from a value system that is much more clearly a distortion of reality.

In the 1950's, with a college degree, you could easily get a high-paying job doing something that your whole culture told you was making a better world. You build wealth, you buy a house, you raise a family, everything is improving. This was the dominant perspective for only a few decades in all of human history. Even in the 1950's you could see cracks forming, as people sensed that this was not the dawn of utopia but a new level of humans blundering around the planet.

By the end of the 1960's everyone knew it, and when I was in school in the 1980's, our perspective on wage labor was the realistic one people had in the 1920's or the 1850's: your job is just some shit you have to do for money. In Reagan's America, we still expected to make easy money by cynically exploiting the college-job system. Now even that part of the illusion is gone.

First-worlders dream of the zombie apocalypse because it would be so much simpler than the real collapse. We're not going to starve -- but without the deep social connections of preindustrial people, and the ever-increasing numbers of the industrial age, what will keep us going day after day? Drugs and video games are not ideal, but they're better than political extremist movements with a storybook understanding of big systems. Living well in this age is a book-length subject, but it involves rebuilding deep connections, letting go of epic stories, and learning to skillfully navigate your stream of experience, seeking rising quality without rising numbers.


October 17. I've just increased the font size on this entire site from 100% to 108%, because I noticed that I had my browser on permanent one notch zoom (ctrl +) to make it the size I wanted. In newer browsers "ctrl +" also magnifies the images, which I don't like.


October 16. Personal stuff for the weekend. Thanks Anton Mindrup for a $100 donation. I'll probably use it to buy more Ezekiel cereal, which until now I've managed to get for $4/pound but the price of wheat has gone through the roof. (Update: a reader tells me that commodity wheat is low right now, so maybe the prices are only high for organic wheat, or the co-op is gouging us. I remember buying wheat berries for 29 cents a pound in the early 2000's and now they're over two dollars.)

Next weekend we should get our first frost, ending the long summer harvest of raspberries and strawberries. Here's a pic of a typical strawberry harvest from my yard. That was in September when I was getting that much every other day. In July I was getting almost that much every day, from a 50 plant patch the size of a ping pong table. The variety is Tristar and a lot of nurseries sell it. I also have a patch of Shuksan that makes better berries but only in June.

I mentioned the Netflix TV series Sense8, and how the big ideas are good but the line by line writing is terrible. Last week Leigh Ann and I went to see Trainwreck at the discount theater, and it's exactly the opposite: the big idea is formula romantic comedy, but the writing is brilliant. Even though you know how it's going to end, the individual scenes are original and surprising. I probably laughed ten times as hard as I would at a Ben Stiller movie.

And some music: The Rathburns - It's Been. Blues rock isn't really my thing but this is great stuff and they're probably going to be big in a few years.


October 15. Continuing on the subjects of violence and human psychology: Terrorism is not about Terror is a smart essay by a prolific intellectual who goes only by Gwern. I don't use the word "terrorism" myself because it's a semantic minefield, and there's some discussion of this on the Hacker News comment thread. I would say, when everyone in a culture agrees that a word always points to something bad, then the word becomes weaponized: everyone wants to define "terrorism" so that it morally condemns whatever political entity they happen to hate the most, and this semantic battle gets in the way of clear thinking.

A more precise title for the essay would be: "Non-government organizations that attack civilians for political goals are not really acting for political goals, even if they think they are, because as political strategy their behavior makes no sense." Their real motives are social: to belong to a group that tells a good story about itself and performs actions that feel powerful and meaningful. The author compares them to long term World of Warcraft players whose motivation is "to continue playing with their guild."

This comes back to my favorite recent idea: the human desire for life to feel meaningful is not a strength but a weakness, maybe our greatest weakness. Our ancestors lived in tribes for a million years and became biologically adapted to follow the kind of social approval and motivational stories that happened in tribes. Now we live in large complex societies that are still really clunky. Maybe in the far future we'll have complex systems that serve our innate psychological needs (or we'll use biotech to change our nature) but for now we each have the challenge and opportunity of creating our own meaning and motivation. And even if we succeed, we still have to defend ourselves from people who create meaning and motivation in ways that harm others. This includes everyone from jihadis to rich and powerful people who play the game of increasing their own power at our expense.

In America we're a lot less likely to be killed by jihadis than by cops or school shooters. Malcolm Gladwell has a new essay in the New Yorker, Thresholds of Violence: How school shootings catch on. He thinks the school shooting trend is like a growing riot where it gets easier as more people participate, and he tells the story of one kid with Aspergers who seems to have read cultural messages in a way that made him think a school massacre would be a valuable thing to do.

The best thing I've read on this subject is this obscure piece from around ten years ago, Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere by Johannes Grenzfurthner, who makes Gladwell look like a lightweight pop philosopher (which he is). Among many insights, Grenzfurthner points out that theatrical frenzy killings are not a modern invention, but have been recorded in many tribal cultures, and he writes about the word amok and its roots in the Malay language.


October 12. Last night I made a long comment on this subreddit thread about violence and Steven Pinker. I see now that it was a mistake to cite Pinker, because the only place I agree with him is that the average person's life has become steadily more peaceful over the last few decades. I think this is mostly because of the information age, not because of enlightenment values or because it's magically built into history. In the comment I explain why various critiques of Pinker have not changed my mind on declining violence.

This topic is frustrating because it seems like everyone is trying to force history into a grand moral narrative, and it's hard to convince readers I'm not doing that, especially since I used to do it all the time. I mean, a writer has to simplify or else it's like that Steven Wright joke where he has a map of the USA that's actual size. And it's fun to declare something good or bad. But as you move to more general statements about more complex systems, simple stories become more incorrect and value judgments become more dangerous.

Last month there was a piece in the Economist, Unclouded Vision, about a book that analyzes attempts to forecast the future. The author finds that a few people are surprisingly good at it, and they share a mental attitude:

Mr Tetlock divides people into two categories: hedgehogs, whose understanding of the world depends on one or two big ideas, and foxes, who think the world is too complicated to boil down... superforecasters have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new data, and the ability to synthesise material from sources with very different outlooks on the world.

This is just intellectual maturity. The good news is that anyone can learn it. The bad news is that hardly anyone has.

Related, from Aeon magazine, The dangerous idea that life is a story, and from the LessWrong blog, Tyler Cowen on Stories. These are both more about personal stories than stories about the world, but the basic idea is the same: it's foolish to filter our perception of reality to make it seem more appealing or meaningful.

Gabriel sent me that Cowen link in August, and it partly inspired my August 31 post about hedonic technology, but I didn't link to it then because I disagree with Cowen that life is merely a random mess. Through decades of observation I can sense the influence of storytelling forces whose motives and literary standards are far beyond my understanding. Rather than look at reality the way a child would look at clouds, ignoring and emphasizing certain things to see faces or castles, I try to look at reality the way a scientist would look at clouds, to begin to understand an alien order.


October 9. A few readers have disputed my statement that violence is down in the last 50 years, but under normal definitions of violence, this is noncontroversial. Steven Pinker wrote a book about it, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and his interpretations of this trend are speculative and shaky, but his evidence is strong.

You could certainly come up with an alternate definition of violence where it is higher than ever, and that's what I might have done ten years ago when my writing process was to start with an extreme idea and find a way to make it sound true. Now I think it's more interesting to start with surprising facts and see where they lead.

To show that I'm still capable of recognizing doom, here are the two doomiest links I've seen in a while. The sky's gone dark is a Charlie Stross post explaining why we are likely to lose access to space in this century because of a chain reaction in orbiting debris.

And a reddit thread, Older redditors, what do you hate about kids these days? Some of the answers are just the same complaints you can find all through history, but the really troubling ones are new, like "I feel kind of bad for them. I think I was from the last generation that grew up with the freedom to do stupid things without serious repercussion." Or:

Through no fault of their own, kids these days are weak as fuck. They're allergic to every fucking thing, they fall the fuck apart if they think you're criticizing them, damn near zero recess, damn near zero self-advocacy skills... I'm a teacher and I love kids, but God damn...

Also, apparently my generation is only one that's good with computers, because boomers were set in their ways when computers appeared, and millennials have no experience getting under the hood since Steve Jobs took that power for himself.

Anyway, if this trend of treating young people like delicate museum pieces is temporary, then all we have is a lost generation. If it goes far enough, then we have a really pathetic extinction.


October 7. Continuing on the same subject, there's a famous quote by Karen Blixen, "all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story," but this was taken out of context, where she qualified it with "perhaps this is not entirely untrue." If I were making a general statement about humanity, it would be: People will cause any suffering if they see it as part of a story. All of history's religious wars and violent conquests and utopian disasters were driven by the desire to make reality fit a compelling story. To influence the world in a good way, you have to understand it with so much complexity that it doesn't feel like a story.

So I was serious when I said ancient video games would have saved forests. Masanobu Fukuoka wrote, "The increasing desolation of nature, the exhaustion of resources, the uneasiness and disintegration of the human spirit, all have been brought about by humanity's trying to accomplish something." And entertainment, including fiction, sports, and gaming, is a safety valve that takes our drive for accomplishment and channels it to where it does less harm.

You would think, as technology gets more powerful, that humans would get more destructive. But the last 50 years have been the most peaceful time in history. I think this is because technology, which used to be directed completely outward, is increasingly being directed inward. This is good! Even the worst inward-directed technologies, like slot machines engineered for addiction, are less harmful than guns or cars.

Most of my personal experience with motivation comes from video games. Sid Meier's Civilization series combines three things that make me want to keep playing. The first is improvement: you can see your empire getting stronger in thousands of tiny steps that are clearly visible, and directly caused by your own actions, more than anything in reality. The second is abstract puzzle solving, and people who aren't into this prefer RPG's and other action games to strategy games. The third is exploration, which could be subdivided into the novelty of seeing the map open up, and the excitement of opening "goody huts" with random benefits. This last thing is what slot machines are pushing to the extreme.

I'm highly motivated by novelty, which is why I get bored with 4x games in the late stages, and why I was excited to turn my yard into a food forest and now I can barely get myself to water it. The point is, if you understand what motivates you, you can try to set your life up so that you get the right motivational feedback from activities that you have rationally determined are good for you.


September 28 - October 5. My multi-part post on motivation has been archived here.





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