Ran Prieur

May 9.

2016-05-09T21:50:45Z

May 9. Writing about presidential politics is like a bad drug -- I enjoy it at the time and regret it later. So I'm going to try to avoid it for a while. Today, two links about different kinds of bloat.

Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street? The author does some math to make a boring subject interesting: most residential property taxpayers are not covering the costs of maintaining the section of street right in front of them. He explains this with two stories that seem to contradict each other. 1) Urban sprawl is a Ponzi scheme, where growth is subsidized by the next round of growth. 2) Urban sprawl is a parasite, where growth is subsidized by dense urban cores. Anyway, in either case, the suburban infrastructure is doomed.

The crazy thing is that sprawl is not caused by the free market, but required by law: "Zoning, setbacks, minimum parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, maximum units per lot, minimum road widths." Now, maybe with no laws we'd still get sprawl, but certainly, with different laws we could have dense, walkable cities with sustainable infrastructure. I expect this to happen in about two hundred years, and meanwhile the suburbs are going to turn into crime-ridden wastelands, and then really cool ruins.

The Website Obesity Crisis is a speech transcript loaded with outrageous examples of how big web pages are now. On top of the tiny footprint of actual text, there's usually bunch of badly designed graphics, and on top of that, a massive network of ad-serving surveillance scripts. The author's solution is to ban third party ads, so "Ads would become dumb again, and be served from the website they appear on." This is politically impossible, but I'm curious to see what will happen when the bubble bursts and everyone admits that the cost of ads exceeds the value of ads to increase consumer spending.

The most interesting bit is the conclusion, where he uses a video game metaphor for two visions of how the web could be. The first example is Minecraft, where simple rules create wide-open gameplay and "you are meant to be an active participant." The second example is Call of Duty...

...an exquisitely produced, kind-of-but-not-really-participatory guided experience with breathtaking effects and lots of opportunities to make in-game purchases.
...
The user experience... is that of being carried along, with the illusion of agency, within fairly strict limits. There's an obvious path you're supposed to follow, and disincentives to keep you straying from it. As a bonus, the game encodes a whole problematic political agenda.

Never mind web design and video games -- that sounds like a description of ordinary life in the developed world in the early 21st century. We can't even imagine a society where life is like Minecraft, let alone agree on how to get there. That's why politics are getting so crazy, because the only clear path is to push the Call of Duty world so far that it breaks.

May 6.

2016-05-06T18:20:54Z

May 6. Sometimes I think all arguments are semantic, and after some reader comments, I want to use different words to explain what troubles me about Trump supporters. I called it "tribalism" and defined it as "the habit of generating meaning by dividing the world into the in-group and the out-group." But those words cast too wide a net that pulls in stuff that's harmless or even beneficial.

I'm thinking about friendly sports rivalries. From the NFL subreddit, here's yesterday's post-draft trash talk thread. The comments are in all caps because they're pretending to be shouting but it's all in fun. This is us-vs-them thinking in a healthy larger context that brings people together, and generally /r/NFL is a civil community that has a good sense of the line you don't cross and if you do cross it you get downvoted.

Compare this to the poisionous atmosphere of another subreddit, Hillary for Prison -- and I'm sure that's not the worst political community but I'm not interested in looking harder. I know some Trump supporters are sane people who don't think like that, but my point is, that's why sane people should fear Trump, because he is serving as a focus for the kind of energy that makes sports fans assault fans of rival teams and political enemies kill each other. Even if we fantasize about the system falling into chaos, I don't think we want that kind of chaos.

So, if we can generate meaning by dividing insiders from outsiders in a healthy way, how does it become unhealthy? I think it has something to do with compulsive narrow focus. There's always a larger context in which apparent insiders and outsiders are really both insiders, and shifting your mind to that context is a valuable skill. If you have it, then you can gain the benefits of competition without any nastiness. When people lack that skill, when they know how to focus down into "us-vs-them" but not focus back out, then there's a ratcheting effect where former allies fight each other about ever smaller disagreements. This is socially unstable, like a black hole collapsing in on itself, or maybe like a forest fire. If you see this happening, the first move is to put the fire out, to make peace; if that fails, the second move is to isolate it and let it burn itself out, to let the enemies fight in a way that doesn't harm the world around them; and the emergency third move is to run away.

This shit is so bleak, I need something happy for the weekend. Here's the most awesome dog photo I've ever seen.

May 4.

2016-05-04T16:00:50Z

May 4. So Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee, and today I want to try to explain his success. One prominent blogger told the story that Trump supporters are lower-income wage workers, while Democrats are higher-income salary workers, and the salary workers exported the wage jobs to other countries, so now Trump is leading a wage worker revolt. I don't believe this. Wage vs salary is an interesting way to divide things up, but there is no evidence mapping this division to any political division, or if there is, it goes the other way.

From FiveThirtyEight, The Mythology Of Trump's 'Working Class' Support:

The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That's lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it's well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It's also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

There's a chart of 23 states, and only in Vermont do Clinton supporters have a much higher income than Trump supporters. Clinton is slightly higher in Connecticut and Virginia, and in every other state Trump supporters are making more money than Clinton supporters. Bernie Sanders supporters are richer than Ted Cruz supporters in New York, but in every other state Sanders has poorer supporters than all three Republicans.

This is the key sentence in the article: "Class in America is a complicated concept, and it may be that Trump supporters see themselves as having been left behind in other respects."

My explanation goes back to the deepest problem of being human: the need for life to feel meaningful. This is a book-length subject, so I'll skip ahead to the modern age and say that, in humanity's search for meaning, economic growth was a temporary hack: for a brief time, ordinary people could be part of a great story in which almost everyone was getting more prosperous.

If you've played video games, you know that almost all of them are built around some kind of improvement, and it would be hard to make a compelling game in which nothing is getting better. But that's where we are now as a society. Trump supporters don't have to be poor to feel like they're missing out -- they just have to not be getting richer. But almost nobody is getting richer, so how does this translate into different political factions?

Sanders supporters want to make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. The establishments of both parties refuse to accept that the age of economic growth is over. And the Republican fringe, which is now taking over the party, has given up on economics and gone back to tribalism. Nate Silver agrees: in his analysis of Why Republican Voters Decided On Trump, his number one reason for why he was wrong about Trump is "Voters are more tribal than I thought."

He never explains this, but I'll try. My off-the-cuff definition of "tribalism" is the habit of generating meaning by dividing the world into the in-group and the out-group. Liberals do this too, we all do it a little, and I'm not going to excuse it. It's a mistake and something that humanity has to overcome. But in the short term it's going to get much worse as it expands to fill the void left by the end of economic growth.

Other things are also expanding to fill this void, like prescription opioid addiction and the desire to colonize Mars. I have at least two horses in this race. One is conscientious hedonism, letting go of achievement and having a good time in ways that don't lead to having a bad time later. The other is to find meaning in downsizing.

May 2.

2016-05-02T14:40:12Z

May 2. I don't expect to post much this week, so here are some other sites that some of you might like. A reader reminds me about Slate Star Codex, a really smart blog that I don't follow because the guy often writes more than my brain can digest. His most recent post is wondering why early psychedelic researchers were so weird.

True Reddit is a subreddit that links to lots of thoughtful articles, including political and negative stuff that doesn't interest me as much as it used to.

And through True Reddit I just now discovered Craigslist Confessional. The author, Helena Bala, posts on Craigslist offering to listen to people, and shares their stories about once a week.