Ran Prieur

April 8.

2016-04-08T20:00:18Z

April 8. Some stray links where I have little or nothing to add. The sugar conspiracy is a long article about how nutrition scientists got it backwards for 40 years, telling us that fat was worse than sugar, despite never having good evidence. The deeper message is that science doesn't work as well as it thinks. Eventually the evidence wins out, but in the short term scientific truth is more a function of politics, culture, and ego. A good book on this subject is Science in Action by Bruno Latour.

Two more negative links, both by Bruce Levine: Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill, and Living in America will drive you insane -- literally.

An argument for an unconditional basic income that I haven't seen before, A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage:

By guaranteeing basic survival, a government provides a service as necessary as, say, policing the streets or fighting off foreign enemies. At the same time, once this service is provided, the government can get out of trying to regulate the labor market: Its goal of keeping people fed and clothed is already achieved.

Something fun, Every Meal In Wuthering Heights Ranked In Order Of Sadness. In college I was obsessed with Wuthering Heights and took four different classes that covered it. People think it's about romantic love when really it's about how modern society is a prison for the soul -- and apparently also about crappy food.

Finally, one of my favorite reddit threads ever, with hundreds of creative answers to a good question: You just died. God escorts you to a door, telling you that this is your own personal heaven. What's behind your door?

April 6.

2016-04-06T18:40:50Z

April 6. I've got some good stuff in my link bin, but first I have one more thought on motivation: that it only becomes a problem in a special case, which is historically rare but really common right now. We have social pressure to do certain things, but no social support.

Imagine you're stocking shelves at Walmart. Everyone knows the job sucks, so the managers take care of motivation: they give you a clearly defined task and if you do it you get money and if you don't you get fired. I would call this vertical external support, and it gets the job done, but the better system is horizontal external support: you're working with your friends toward a clear goal, and the motivation is that you don't want to let them down, and also they're right next to you helping you through rough spots.

At the other extreme, I think the only purely internal motivation is obsession: your whole being is engaged with a task, and other people are not just unnecessary -- they get in the way. Even on a project that other people don't know about, your beliefs about how they will receive it can get in the way. That's why I've been failing to write fiction, because I've been thinking about it backwards, more in terms of its public reception than what I enjoy writing moment by moment. And that's why George RR Martin can't finish the Game of Thrones books, because at first he was creating his own universe for fun, and now he's carrying the burden of the expectations of millions of people, who are giving him no help with the actual writing.

My point is, the whole world is more and more like this, and it happened accidentally through good intentions. You're no longer stuck doing the same job your parents did, but now that you're free, you're still burdened by social pressures: if people ask "what do you do?" you're supposed to say "I work at a nonprofit indigenous something something and build artisan furniture in my spare time," not "I work at a convenience store and write Harry Potter erotica." And you're supposed to carve out this almost impossible perfect life completely on your own. At best your parents will keep you from living on the streets and you'll get predictable advice from strangers on the internet.

I see two ways out of this. I mean, the thousand year solution is to build a complex society with a wide perspective and a high standard of living, where every task that holds society together is done voluntarily by healthy social groups. But right now I see two ways people are responding to this difficult world. Young people crave social collapse: life becomes mentally easier because you're driven by survival and (ideally) surrounded by friends, but it's physically harder. Now that I'm an old person, physically weaker but mentally stronger, my solution is to not care what people think. Give me an unconditional basic income and let me follow my unfashionable obsessions.

April 4.

2016-04-04T16:20:38Z

April 4. Continuing from last week, yet another stray thought on motivation. I was watching an interview with UFC champion Miesha Tate, and she was talking about how she got obsessed with wrestling in high school. Her school didn't have a girls wrestling team, so she would wrestle the boys and always lose. How was this motivating? Because every time she lost she learned stuff, which she applied to her next match to lose by a smaller margin. She established a rhythm -- fight, learn, adjust, fight -- with positive feedback in two places: the reward of learning and the reward of coming closer to winning.

(I do the same thing when I write about music: listen, notice stuff, put it into words, and use those words to guide my next round of listening, approaching but never reaching full understanding.)

How often does life work like this? Almost never. In social behavior, when you make a mistake, you rarely find out exactly what you did wrong, and you usually don't get another chance with that same person -- unless they're a family member, and then you're just learning to match their particular dysfunction, which will not work when you're out in the world getting one chance each with people who have completely different dysfunctions. It's a miracle that anyone ever becomes socially competent.

In school, when you take a test or turn in a project, they tell you what you did wrong, but you don't get another chance -- you're stuck with that low grade for life, and then you move on to badly learning something new (that you'll probably never use).

You do get good feedback and multiple chances when you're being trained for a job -- but only if your trainers are good, and pretty soon you reach a plateau where you're no longer learning, just going through a routine for a paycheck.

I've just spent all afternoon writing and deleting drafts, trying and failing to go somewhere interesting with this idea. All I can say is that we need to set up society so that we spend our lives enjoying getting better at skills that make life better for everyone, and this is going to take a really long time.

April 1.

2016-04-01T13:50:12Z

April 1. Another stray thought on motivation. Last week I wrote that nothing I've done in real life matches games for rewarding moment-to-moment action (but writing can be close) and someone asked me, what about the stuff I did on the land? This illustrates a principle that you can only really understand with life experience: what makes a project seem rewarding from a distance is completely different from what makes it feel rewarding as you're doing it, and it's normal to have one without the other.

Building a cabin sounds wonderful, but it's such a massively complex and alien project that I just felt overwhelmed; and how-to books, with thousands of things that have to be done in just the right difficult and expensive way, only made it worse. Growing fruit trees is something I can wrap my head around, but it's not something where you can get in the flow, and there's little connection between effort and reward: I put countless hours into trees that died, while the most successful thing I planted was a blue elder that I probably spent ten minutes on.

One thing I did up there that felt rewarding was throwing logging debris into piles. It has clear benefits, making the land more beautiful and walkable, and making habitat for critters, and every little action is clearly visible permanent progress. Cutting lower branches off trees to open up the woods and reduce fire danger was similar. In hindsight, by writing the landblog, I was carrying readers on my shoulders so they could enjoy stuff I wasn't enjoying enough myself, and if I had it to do over again, I would do a lot more stuff that's fun to do and boring to tell other people about. This is good life advice in general.