Ran Prieur

February 15.

2016-02-15T15:50:09Z

February 15. Bunch o' links about human development and potential. Today's teens are better than you, and we can prove it. Well, they're doing fewer bad things than my generation, but it's hard to know if they're doing more good things.

When Are You Really an Adult? The article is really long but the big idea is at the beginning:

If you think of the transition to "adulthood" as a collection of markers -- getting a job, moving away from your parents, getting married, and having kids -- for most of history, with the exception of the 1950s and 60s, people did not become adults any kind of predictable way.

How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off. The author starts with the observation that child prodigies tend to fizzle as adults because they were learning success on their parents' terms, instead of learning creativity. Then he drops this bomb:

One study compared the families of children who were rated among the most creative 5 percent in their school system with those who were not unusually creative. The parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of fewer than one rule.

Why Quantity Should be Your Priority. I've seen the anecdote about the ceramics class before, where students who were graded on quantity cranked out hundreds of pieces and eventually did much better work than students who were graded on quality and did only a few pieces. I doubt that it actually happened, but it would happen, and I would explain it like this: When you do work in the physical world, you learn things you could never learn by doing the work in your head.

Related: Positive Fantasies About the Future Predict Symptoms of Depression. That link is the Hacker News comment thread because the full article is behind a paywall and the comments have some ideas about why these things are connected. Personally I'm in no danger of depression, but I wonder if my struggle with motivation is related to my willingness to imagine worlds better than this one.

February 12.

2016-02-12T12:20:07Z

February 12. I was planning to write more about motivation, but I'm just not smart enough today to put the ideas together, so instead I'll post some stray links about drugs and brains. From reddit last month, Addicts: What started it all? And a bigger thread full of great stories, Alcoholics of Reddit: What is your, "and then I realized I was an alcoholic" moment?

New drug: After years of daily 'wake 'n' bakes' I faced my battle with psychological weed addiction. The author thinks she had "amazing story ideas" while high and couldn't remember them. I write mine down, so I know they're mostly lame. But I still think marijuana is a miracle drug in moderation. Recently in my weekly sessions I've had deep psychological insights that I would never have had sober. I used to think communication was 90% on the surface, and now I think it's 90% or more under the surface. My life has been full of baffling conflicts and failures that are gradually making sense as I become retroactively aware of subtext.

Could Ketamine Be Used to Vaccinate for Depression or PTSD? The conventional view is that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, but the evidence is weak, and ketamine works according to a different model in which depression is caused by stress damaging the brain's physical structure.

And No Brainer is a fascinating post about people who have above average IQ despite having 95% water where their brain should be. The idea is, if a tiny brain can rewire itself to work as well as a full brain, what if we did the same thing to a full brain?

February 11.

2016-02-11T23:10:58Z

February 11. Loose end on yesterday's post: Anne informs me that Jared Diamond's story about how the Vikings in Greenland starved rather than eat fish is too simple. If I get a good link I'll post it, but the general idea is that it would have been really hard, not only mentally but technologically, for them to switch their whole way of life to seafood. This is good news, because it keeps open the possibility that they could have made the switch if it was a little easier. So maybe Americans will not fight too hard against an economic revolution, in their own interests, to decouple labor from money.

February 10.

2016-02-10T22:00:55Z

February 10. A week ago I argued that Bernie Sanders voters will get older and continue supporting left-wing policies because they'll still be poor. This analysis by fivethirtyeight has changed my mind: Why Young Democrats Love Bernie Sanders. Of course it's not for economic reasons, and I should have known that, because people always care more deeply about cultural identity than economics. The extreme example would be the Vikings in Greenland, who died of starvation rather than change their cultural identity from beef and grain eaters to fish eaters.

Young Americans, even if they're smart and poor, still accept the American-Calvinist framing story, where your income shows how good a person you are, or money is the phlebotinum of meritocracy. In this context wealth redistribution feels unfair, and young Americans oppose it almost as much as old Americans. They support Bernie Sanders for the same reason they supported Ron Paul: they feel left out of the dominant system, and helping an outsider break into that system is the only way they feel like they're participating.

In normal politics this is temporary, and by the time a new generation is in their 30's, the clunky political establishment will figure out how to make them feel included -- even if it doesn't serve their interests. If this doesn't happen, and older and older people remain radical, then some new factor is at work.

February 8.

2016-02-08T20:40:44Z

February 8. Today, two loooong articles with some optimism. Why America Is Moving Left argues that the whole political landscape is shifting, as shown by the willingness of both parties to take ideas from the left seriously. I still don't like Hillary but I'm impressed with how much she's changing her position toward Bernie Sanders. I remember back in 2000, when Ralph Nader was drawing much larger audiences than Al Gore, and Gore did not move one inch toward Nader's platform. The article also mentions the paradox of Obama: that by running on the promise of change from within, and not delivering it, he energized people to try more radical strategies.

Complexity Rising (thanks Gannon) is a detailed look at complexity in human systems, and the big idea is that our challenges are growing in complexity, and soon they will be too complex to be solved by hierarchy. Then the old systems will either collapse, or adapt by gradually shifting power from top-down control to lateral connections.

February 5.

2016-02-05T17:10:07Z

February 5. Oh no -- 2016 is already ten percent over! Today I want to write about personal stuff, partly inspired by some emails. Last month my restless legs syndrome was really acting up. It's like an itch in my leg muscles that I can "scratch" by vigorously moving them, and if there were a pill that cured it, you couldn't pay me to take it. Leg strength is correlated with brain fitness, and I can spend a half hour a night doing one-legged squats and heel lifts, not because of self-discipline, but because I have an overwhelming urge to do so.

If only I had an overwhelming urge to write novels or play music. We imagine that highly successful people have some kind of magical virtue, when really they have various restless syndromes that compel them to do things that other people happen to find valuable.

As I get older, motivation is the only psychological skill that doesn't get easier. It feels like I'm in a room with a bunch of locked doors, which represent different activities and how hard it is to force myself to do them. Every night I have to push through a tiny wall of pain to floss my teeth, and the one reason I look forward to death (so far) is that I'll never have to floss again. For stuff I don't have to do every day, I watch the doors, and when one of them partially opens I dash through. "Oh, I sort of feel like cleaning the floors or going to the store, so I'd better do it right now or it will be much more painful later."

Other doors lead to long-term projects, but if it's just a hallway with one locked door after another, inevitably I wear out and have to stop. So far the only open hallway I've found -- the only activity that I continue to feel like doing, and that seems valuable, is this blog. But how do we know what's really valuable? It's an impossible question, but we still have to try to answer it. I try to find a compromise between what I feel like doing now, and what I think I'll look back later and be glad I did.

February 3.

2016-02-03T15:50:16Z

February 3. Some quick notes on the Iowa caucus. Trump's weak second place finish shows that it is possible to underestimate the American people, and if he really wants to be president, he has to do fewer PR stunts and act more like a serious candidate. For the Democrats, Bernie's virtual tie is a symbolic win, but in terms of delegate math, Iowa is the kind of young, white, educated state that he needs to win 2-1 to be on track for the nomination. To have any chance to overcome Hillary's superdelegates, he has to do much better than expected among black people.

Bernie's performance among young people is great news for the future: he got eight out of ten voters under 30, and six out of ten aged 30-45. You might say, in 20 years when those voters are older they'll switch to establishment candidates because they'll be better off financially. But they won't! That's age of growth thinking: "a rising tide lifts all boats." There will never be a rising tide again, in 20 years most of those voters will still be poor, and their grandparents will replaced by more young people who want cancellation of debts, an unconditional basic income, and a financial transaction tax.

More about the new economy (thanks Andy): Economics might be very wrong about growth. Experts are gradually noticing that growth is no longer exponential but linear, but the whole financial industry is still based on exponential growth, which is why it keeps collapsing.

And The Fed wants to test how banks would handle negative interest rates. I think the whole economy should be built on a foundation where concentrations of wealth tend to shrink over time instead of growing, and Charles Eisenstein wrote a good chapter on this a while back: The Currency of Cooperation.

February 1.

2016-02-01T13:30:48Z

February 1. I've put off writing about presidential politics because it's easy to get swept up and say dumb things. A few months ago I thought Hillary Clinton would crush Bernie Sanders, because I remember how in 2008 Obama barely beat Hillary despite being an establishment candidate with an all-time great campaign organization. Bernie has almost no superdelegates, his organization is nothing special, and Hillary has learned from the blunders she made in 2008, and yet Bernie is running strong. This makes me think the whole framework has changed, and candidates who can brand themselves as outsiders now have a big advantage with voters.

A few months ago I thought Donald Trump was a joke, and now I see him as an unstoppable juggernaut. Read this month old reddit comment about Trump's mastery of the media. I would go farther and say he has an intuitive understanding of mass psychology, and he's been laying the foundation for this run since the the 1990's. Because he has established a persona where people already expect him to say ridiculous things, he's gaffe-proof. Other candidates have to walk a tightrope between boring the voters and alienating them, while Trump is walking a highway where he can be popular and offensive at the same time. Somehow he can play the strong leader and play the clown. You can read more about Trump's powers in several smart posts on Scott Adams' blog.

Assuming it's Trump against Clinton in November, I see this as a repeat of 1996, where Trump is Bill Clinton, polarizing but charismatic, and Hillary is Bob Dole: unlikeable, boring, and unlucky. And Trump can easily rebrand himself as a moderate, because he has a long history of being a moderate before he talked like an extremist to win the primaries.

I don't think President Trump would ruin America, or save it. I would expect him to propose a bunch of simple-minded reforms, let congress rework them to fit the system, and where the reforms work he'll take credit, and where they fail he'll blame congress. Bernie Sanders could do the same thing, but because of Trump's pre-existing alpha businessman persona, and his myth manipulation skill, he would be more likely to get away with it and win a second term. The big doom scenario is if there's some disaster that shuts down congress, Trump takes temporary unchecked power, it goes to his head, and he doesn't give it up.

If I'm wrong, and Hillary wins, it will be with the votes of sensible old people, or because an independent candidate splits the Republican vote. The establishment Republicans would never admit it but they'd rather have Hillary be president than Trump.

If Sanders is the nominee, Republicans will unite against him, and Trump over Sanders could destroy the Democratic party, if they react to the loss by fearing voter passion exactly when they should embrace it.