Ran Prieur

December 18.

2015-12-18T12:00:52Z

December 18. This week has been like a vacation: I'm not going anywhere because of the snow, my sleep schedule is all over the place, and while everyone else is watching the new Star Wars, I've been playing the newest version of Starsector.

Thanks Doug for sending this great interview about a new book, Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT. I have yet to use any psychedelic in a big enough dose to trip, but I poked around Erowid and looked at some DMT trip reports, and here's an excerpt from a report called The Elven Antics Annex:

They are elves/not-elves. They don't appear, they kind of ooze out of the woodwork seductively and before you know it they're there... They make Faberge egg concoctions with ingredient lists like: 1) space, 2) lust, 3) politics, 4) circus sideshows, 5) time, 6) gall bladders, 7) existential notions of polyfidelity, 8) cucumbers, 9) Beethoven's 5th symphony, 10) the smell of petunias, and so on. This is somewhat of an arbitrary list, but the point is, all my categories of mind fell away because they were being ceaselessly synthesized and re-synthesized... What you do with these elves is some sort of a game of catch, only the physics of the game has been replaced by the physics of synesthesia... Being there I came to understand the Heraclitus fragment: 'The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls'. It is this. As well I understand, 'Still the first day, All Fool's Day, here at the center.'

December 16.

2015-12-16T12:45:50Z

December 16. City of Darkness Revisited is a great long article about Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, which survived for several decades in a fascinating grey area between slum and anarchist utopia. It makes me think that any anarchist utopia would be a little bit slum-like, because if it gets too clean and orderly it becomes a socialist dystopia.

Another nice thing about the Kowloon Walled City is that it disproves John Calhoun's rodent overpopulation experiments as a model for human society. Calhoun gave rats and mice unlimited food in a limited space and they did all kinds of crazy shit. But the walled city did okay socially, and if you project its peak density over the earth's entire land area, I calculate 190 trillion people, which is orders of magnitude more than the earth can feed. So the global human population will always be limited by food before it's limited by how well we can get along in a tight space. And it's a crazy coincidence that Kowloon sounds so much like Calhoun.

I see overpopulation as a 20th century issue: it required a perfect conjunction of two factors that may never happen again. The first is a value system that develops in an agricultural peasant economy, where having more kids gives an economic advantage to both families and nations, which is why agricultural religions are against birth control. The second is rapid industrialization that increases food production so fast that people can get away with an obsolete cultural behavior, having lots of kids for no good reason, without them starving. I don't know how much the population will fall through food shortage before it has a chance to fall through birth control, but I think in a hundred years birth rates will be too low.

December 14.

2015-12-14T12:18:37Z

December 14. After Friday's post I got a long email from a reader who has had an interesting life on the fringes of society since being inspired by my writing years ago. He took off hitchhiking with a few hundred dollars and "everything I ever imagined the world could be like was there."

My initial response was that he must have been really lucky because I spent my late 20's and early 30's repeatedly trying and failing to find a good land-buying group or existing dropout community. But now I'm thinking it was skill. I'm a good writer, but if nobody knows who I am, I'm socially invisible. When I hitchhiked around the country in the 90's it usually took me hours to get a ride, nobody offered me a place to stay, and I ended up getting really sick and having to fly home. Without existing friends and family and money I might have died. So that's why I don't want to inspire people to quit their jobs and take off without any backup plan.

I told the reader, "If you've actually found the kind of dropout lifestyle that people dream of, you should write a book about it." And he explained why a book wouldn't be interesting because he has used a complex and ever-shifting variety of mostly unexciting tactics.

This whole situation is oddly similar to what I'm reading about in the book Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock. The best forecasters remain unknown, while the famous forecasters are worse than random guessers, because what makes a person famous is myth, a.k.a. bullshit: they start with a beautiful ideology or story, and they look at the world for confirmation, for details that make their story seem more and more certain. Meanwhile the accurate forecasters are looking for doubt, anomalies, details that undermine stories and lead to more baffling complexity.

This goes back to the primal divide between settled and nomadic culture. (Morris Berman's Wandering God is a good book on this.) Some thinkers are like cities, sucking in everything around them to feed a fixed idea, while other thinkers are like nomads, following an ever-changing stream of intellectual experience from one idea to another. Our settled culture rewards the most settled thinkers, so my most popular writing is from around 2002-2005 when my thinking was most settled. (Ironically, anti-civilization writers tend to be extremely settled thinkers.) Now I'm trying to be a nomadic thinker, and the best example I can think of is Robert Anton Wilson.

December 11.

2015-12-11T12:40:42Z

December 11. Last week I got an email from a small anarchist publisher who wanted to talk about publishing some of my stuff. My initial feeling was "oh shit". There's no money in publishing (until you get to the bestseller level and then there's too much), I'm already more famous than I'd like to be, and they probably want to publish stuff that I no longer exactly agree with. My only incentive to work with a publisher is if I can add some kind of introduction to prevent my writing from being taken the wrong way by idiots in the future. So that's what I told the guy (in a nicer way) and I haven't heard back from him. But I started thinking: what would I say in that introduction?

The way I think about my old writing is probably the way the band Rush thinks about their old songs: the music is great but the lyrics are mostly terrible. What I mean is, I still like the spirit of my zines and essays, their energy, the flow of words and ideas, the way they can make you feel. But if the reader were a computer or an unimaginative person who took the ideas at strict face value, it would be a disaster. If someone read Harry Potter and jumped out a window with a broom thinking they could fly, it would not be J.K. Rowling's fault because she presented the books as fiction. But I presented fiction as nonfiction. The world I wrote about was so heavily simplified that it's not the world we actually live in. If someone reads my anti-civ essays and thinks that a stable low-tech future is a realistic possibility or a reasonable goal, they could make terrible decisions that ruin lives.

Another thing I did was make black and white thinking fun. Now, this could be helpful if serious black and white thinkers read my stuff and learn to loosen up. But it could just as easily go the other way, where people start reading for fun and are seduced into black and white thinking.

And maybe the worst way my writing is misunderstood is not because of something I said, but something I didn't say clearly enough. Every subject carries an aura of unspoken assumptions, and if you write about that subject, you will be buried by those assumptions unless you put defiance of an assumption at the center of your argument. Specifically, the assumption around counter-culture lifestyles is that your motivation is purity.

A few weeks back I was listening to a podcast where someone mentioned that if you take something pure, and mix it with something impure, the whole thing is impure. Now, there are special cases where you need to think that way, like blood transfusions. But if you're thinking about open-ended complex systems like society or how you live, and you think in terms of pure vs impure, you will slide into a nightmare of ever-increasing sensitivity and cringing paralysis. Pure vs impure is the morality of a dead person. The morality of a living person is alive vs unalive. If you mix the alive with the unalive, the alive consumes the unalive, or animates it, and then it's all alive.

December 9.

2015-12-09T12:10:28Z

December 9. More stray links. How Your Brain Decides Without You. I've been thinking a lot about the subconscious mind lately, and I think it's more useful to imagine many subconscious minds with completely different identities and functions. Anyway, this article is about how we filter our perception to fit what we already believe, which is why you can't influence people merely by giving them information. And the article doesn't mention this, but couldn't we train ourselves to do the opposite, to give more attention to information that contradicts what we already believe?

The mysterious aging of astronauts. Living in space causes physical changes that are indistinguishable from rapid aging, and this blogger argues that it can't be explained by anything we already know about. My own cognitive bias is to assume that what we know is basically zero compared to what we don't know.

This reddit comment has hidden depth: My kids are better about turning off lights and closing doors in Minecraft than in real life. Actually you want to leave lights on in Minecraft, but if we pretend it's the other way around, I can think of four explanations, and two are in the comments: 1) It's much easier to do work by clicking a mouse than moving your whole body. 2) A game can have clear penalties for leaving lights on and doors open. 3) Unlike parental pressure, video games do not allow negotiation, and there is no social dimension of obedience and disobedience. 4) Video games put human consciousness into a different mode than real life. In real life we have to remain broadly perceptive, but in games it is both possible and rewarding to narrowly focus on details. That's why we like them so much.

The Sports Bubble Is About to Pop. Here's how I would say it: 1) The price of Netflix makes the price of cable look outrageously high, which it is. 2) As more people drop cable because of better values elsewhere and the ongoing economic collapse, cable brings in less money. 3) ESPN is the heart of American basic cable, and a ton of money has been making its way through cable bills via ESPN contracts to sports leagues and teams. 4) As this money dries up, sports organizations will be less profitable, and if you're not in on those profits, the collapse will be fun to watch. I'm guessing this will make salary caps meaningless, because the caps will be higher than any team can pay and make a profit, so it will be like the old days where the richest owners can buy championships.

December 7.

2015-12-07T12:04:19Z

December 7. Today, and probably all week, unrelated stray links.

Timothy Burke wrote one of the posts I mentioned a week ago, and I looked through his blog and found this great post from earlier this year, The Trouble With Sustainability II: A Dynamic Steady-State? It's all about how difficult it is to build a stable society in the absence of perpetual economic growth, whether you do it with a strong central government or by imitating nature. Obviously the latter is what we should be aiming for, but I think it would take us at least a thousand years of boom and bust cycles to get it right -- assuming technology remains stable. If technological craziness keeps going through economic collapse, and I think it will, the future becomes even more unpredictable.

The quantum source of space-time. I'm not even going to try to summarize this, but it's fascinating stuff if you're into physics. Here's the Hacker News comment thread.

H.P. Lovecraft Invented a Horrific World to Escape a Nihilistic Universe. The author makes a great point about Lovecraft's style: that he has remained fresh to many generations precisely because he ingored the literary fashions of his own time.

I would say he did the opposite with his philosophy. Rather than ignoring the fad belief of his time (and ours) that all of reality can be reduced to mindless interactions of particles and waves, he embraced materialism so tightly and understood it so deeply that he had to invent a mythos of incomprehensible evil as a less bleak alternative.

My philosophy is similar but completely opposite. Here's Lovecraft describing Cthulhu: "There is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order." But you could use almost those same words to describe an entity of total benevolence and joy, but so concentrated that merely to glimpse its reflection would drive modern over-domesticated humans into madness. Basically that's my God, and my religion is anything that enables me to see it a little better while remaining sane.

December 3.

2015-12-03T12:03:30Z

December 3. Over the last few years my interests have been moving away from politics and society, and toward psychology and metaphysics. But politics and society are much easier to write about because there is a constant stream of new events.

Imagine a world where there was a constant stream of events in psychology and metaphysics. Like if someone actually succeeded in putting LSD in the water supply, or if Japan was swept by a religion that made them stop valuing productive labor, or if scientists discovered where ancestral memories are and how to recover them, or if hallucinations could spread like viruses until they became physically real. Maybe they can, and it happens so slowly that we don't notice. I wonder if the whole physical world is just a negotiation ground for events in mass psychology.

Anyway, I'm going early into the weekend and writing about drugs. It's been a year and a half since the legal marijuana stores opened, and I feel like I'm only now getting competent at using it. A drug is just another kind of tool that can be used clumsily or skillfully. Before legalization I would only use it when it was offered in social situations, and it was frustrating trying to have a conversation when I kept forgetting the context. I was fighting against how cannabis makes me stupid, instead of exploring how it makes me smarter. Now I sit on the couch hearing things in music that I can't hear sober, and reflecting on my life to see hidden levels that I can't see sober, usually about communication subtext. I'm starting to think that every personal conflict is just a misunderstanding, and most people who fight are not even conscious of why they're fighting.

A more basic skill is to find a sustainable pace. Willie Nelson and Snoop Dogg can smoke all day every day and thrive, but many heavy users are miserably chasing a high that they're not getting. Here's a funny excerpt from a Terence McKenna talk, How to use Cannabis. He recommends using it "rarely", which to him means once a week, "in silent darkness with the strongest stuff you can get and then immense amounts of it." At that level I would never get out of withdrawal, but I'm getting great results with moderate amounts of strong stuff once a week, especially since I started using a larger number of smaller loads in the vaporizer. The less stuff is in there, the easier it is to get a good lungful without my lungs getting burnt.

I'm also experimenting with the program in this video, The Resensitization Process. This dude claims that microdosing two or three times a day reduces tolerance better than total abstinence. I'm skeptical but I'm going to try it on alternate weeks for a while. The shocking thing is how little it takes to get a little bit high. Last week I got to a [3] with one long draw from a single bud.

November 30.

2015-11-30T12:11:58Z

November 30. A couple weeks ago a reader sent a speech transcript by Kenan Malik, Radicalization is not so simple. Focusing on middle class western Muslims who go fight for the Islamic State, he argues that they're not really motivated by religion or American foreign policy; those are tacked-on justifications of a decision they've made for psychological reasons. Like other young radicals, they are searching "for identity, for meaning, for belongingness, for respect."

In this blog post from last month, On the Eating of Lotuses, Timothy Burke makes a similar argument, that Muslims going to fight for ISIS are like 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.

Both Malik and Burke have other axes to grind that don't interest me. But last week Anne sent this interview transcript, Can We Construct A Counter-Narrative To ISIS's End Goal? The interviewee, Scott Atran, has surprising strategic advice:

So far, the counter-narratives proposed in our societies have been pathetic. First, they preach things like moderation. I tell them, don't any of you have teenage children? When did moderation do anything? ... We've got to provide young people the possibility for some other mode of life that's hopeful, adventurous, glorious and provides significance.

And in an email about this essay, The Fire Is Here, Anne writes, "it will be fascinating and beautiful to see what we now think of as the left flying banners of irrational mysticism, danger, adventure and attractive madness."

I hope I live to see this, but it might take a while. Consider music: it's easy to make a raw and intense song with negative emotions, and it's easy to make a bland and polished happy song, but a raw and intense happy song is difficult and rare. For similar reasons, it's easier to build an exciting popular movement around destruction than creation -- especially when there's so little room for creation. I think the best ethic for this movement would be negligent creation: focusing on what you're building but indifferent to what gets accidentally destroyed. This is how nature works and humans need to get better at it. I think it will take a deep economic collapse, and a new generation with nothing to lose, rebelling against their Anxiety Generation parents.

November 25.

2015-11-25T12:25:58Z

November 25. Yesterday on the subreddit, marsomenos commented on Monday's post with some good insights about the medical system.

Also on the subject of health, a new study shows that strong legs are correlated with healthy brains, and they used identical twins to show that the effect really is caused by exercise and not genetics. This reminds me of another study that found a correlation between how fast old people walk and how much longer they're going to live.

And remember that over on my misc page I have some Thanksgiving recipes.

November 23.

2015-11-23T12:49:43Z

November 23. Today, everyone's favorite thing: negative links! Are Good Doctors Bad for Your Health? Well, a doctor who is bad for your health is by definition not a good doctor. But a study shows that doctors we think are good are not good: heart patients do better when senior cardiologists are away at conferences. So the high-status doctors are worse than the low-status doctors, which is hardly surprising -- the same thing is true for musicians, authors, actors, politicians, probably everyone except athletes. But I'm wondering, were the high status doctors always bad, or were they once the best doctors, and high status made them worse? If it's the latter, I'm guessing it's because they become both inflexible and overconfident: whatever made them successful, they keep doing it, but less creatively and more aggressively. The article suggests that high status doctors do more tests and treatments, which are often harmful.

Another NY Times piece, and this is the last thing I expected as an endangered resource: Why Sand Is Disappearing. There's plenty of small-grain smooth-edged desert sand, but large-grain rough-edged sand is being used up in beach restoration and concrete.

Thanks Tibor for this speech transcript with images, Haunted By Data. Maciej Ceglowski argues that we should stop thinking of data as a resource, and think of it as a waste product. I think he's exaggerating the danger that intelligence agencies will blackmail us, but I like his examples of how tracked people behave worse than untracked people because of how they game the tracking systems.

Finally, this is the best post ever to the Shower Thoughts subreddit, and it leads to dark thoughts about the social and psychological effects of information technology: My activities on the internet are basically the same things I would do if I were a ghost: Listen in on people's conversations, spy on people having sex, and watch whatever movies and concerts I want for free. One of the comments adds anonymous trolling.

November 20.

2015-11-20T12:29:30Z

November 20. For the weekend, some practical philosophy. I mentioned last week that I was reading David Abram's book Becoming Animal. Someone would have to be stubborn to read the whole thing, because the point is to use poetic descriptions of sense experience to get readers to stop running words through their heads and go out and fully be in the world. There are also occasional philosophical arguments about how our culture got it wrong: the world is not a remote lifeless place that we understand through mental abstractions, but a living thing in which we participate through sense experience. Anyway, once I got the idea I didn't have to read any more.

Then, lying in bed in the morning, I put Abram's idea together with something I wrote back on August 31:

Humans have been extremely successful at hacking the external world, and it's strange, given how well we have mastered nature, that we have failed to master ourselves. This implies that God, the Tao, the metaphysical frontier, is not out there in the universe, but inside us.

According to modern western metaphysics: 1) The Self is the stream of words and pictures and stories and desires inside your head; 2) the Mystery is the physical world on the outside; and 3) you explore it through your senses. But try thinking this way: 1) The Self is your stream of sense experience, which is already grounded in the physical world; 2) the Mystery is toward the inside; and 3) you explore it by pausing your internal narrative, like holding open a curtain or stilling the ripples on a pond.

You can find that last idea in any book about meditation, but putting it together with the other stuff, suddenly I'm meditating a lot better. Framing the practice as fully outside-in works better than framing it as inside to more inside; and I don't know why they always tell you to come back to your breath, because it feels much more powerful to refocus with my entire body.

November 18.

2015-11-18T12:48:28Z

November 18. From the Shower Thoughts subreddit: People are talking about tragedies the way hipsters talk about bands. "Oh, you're into that trendy tragedy? Whatever. There's this other tragedy I'm into, you probably haven't heard of it..."

I was tempted to keep writing about political violence, but instead I want to write about popularity and fame. The Greatness of William Blake is a review of a book called Those Who Write for Immortality, which argues that there's hardly any connection between the quality of an author and their future reputation, because William Blake would have been forgotten if it weren't for a couple of dedicated fans who published a biography 35 years after his death. I'm wondering how many other people were equally great and not so lucky. At least writers and painters might leave behind a physical artifact, but consider musicians: before recorded music only top orchestra composers had any way for their work to be preserved. Whoever your favorite musical artist is, there was probably someone equally good in every generation going back thousands of years.

Jessica Livingston is a new post by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, a highly successful company that funds tech startups. Graham is the famous one, but he explains how his wife is the important one, because she's an exceptional judge of character and she always decided which people they were going to fund: "Jessica knows more about the qualities of startup founders than anyone else ever has." But she has this power through an extreme sensitivity to bullshit, which also makes her fame-proof.

Even at my low level of fame I understand this. The famous "Ran Prieur" is a mythologized fictional character loosely based on the real me. If you want to prevent this, it's not enough to be honest -- to prevent people from seeing Jesus in a tortilla, you have to go out of your way to make it not look like Jesus. I would have had to anticipate exactly how I would be mythologized, and carefully craft my writing to directly contradict those myths, and if I'd done it right I would have earned a smaller, smarter audience. Over the last few years I've been trying to gently filter my audience down to that level, and it's like backing out of a thorny bush, where the thorns are emails and subreddit comments chastising me for not being the bullshit me that I never was.

Finally, I think fame defeated Ronda Rousey. If you don't follow UFC or popular culture, Ronda Rousey is such a dominant fighter that she won her last three fights in 16, 14, and 34 seconds, and seemed unbeatable -- but last weekend she got her ass kicked by 12-1 underdog Holly Holm. If both fighters were unknown, I think Rousey would consistently beat Holm by playing to her own strength, waiting for a perfect takedown and then using her elite judo skills to get a submission hold. But that's not what "Ronda Rousey" does now. Rousey the real person was possessed by Rousey the icon, who is no longer content to win by patience and craftiness but has to be some kind of superhero. So she played exactly to Holm's strength, getting into a slugfest with a champion boxer and disciplined hard hitter. If Rousey wants to regain and hold the title, it's not enough for her to improve her boxing -- she has to re-ground herself psychologically.

November 16.

2015-11-16T12:59:12Z

November 16. I don't want to say too much about the Paris attacks because it's not a subject I want to have a long discussion about. But I'll repost this link from last month, Terrorism is not about Terror, which I would title more precisely as: "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."

Also here's a reddit comment by a Muslim on why they attack, with more discussion below it. To me this seems like a special case of a more general problem: that we are not yet biologically adapted, or even culturally adapted, to living in large complex societies. If your enemy is a hundred warriors with spears, it makes sense to attack those people, but if your enemy is the foreign policy apparatus of western civilization, attacking humans is the wrong move.

I'm just curious, hypothetically, what would happen if Islamic extremists attacked the technological infrastructure: power plants, oil refineries, electrical substations, railroads, fiber optic lines, server farms, cell phone towers, container ports. I'm not sure it would help them in the long term, but it would certainly be more disruptive and it could potentially crash the global economy.

Why are they not attacking the infrastructure? Because attacking humans feels more meaningful and theatrical. But that's an aspect of culture. A wild speculation: if immersion in technology changes global culture, and we all start thinking about things instead of people when we think about big systems, then sabotage will become the normal action of marginalized groups, which will place a limit on technological complexity. If the control systems want to prevent this, they have to make technology invisible, so that no matter how complex it gets, we still see the world in terms of people.

November 13.

2015-11-13T12:54:14Z

November 13. Some happy news: How beekeeping jobs are giving ex-cons in Chicago a second chance. "Graduates of the program have a recidivism rate of only 4%, compared with the national average of 40% and the state average of 55%." Partly this is because the program teaches stuff like how to make a resume, and I think it's also because bees are wild animals, and engaging with nature keeps us sane.

And some music! My girlfriend has put together a playlist of her top 100 songs. Her taste is a lot different from mine -- if my songs page had not been influenced by her stuff, the only overlap would be Led Zeppelin.