Ran Prieur

June 15.

2016-06-15T15:30:49Z

June 15. State of Surveillance is an episode of HBO's VICE where they interview Edward Snowden. To me, the least interesting thing is how much surveillance is going on and how easy it is. The most interesting thing is from 20:45-23:00, where they argue that broad-scale surveillance is ineffective: The more information the government collects, the harder it is to sort through it and find what's useful.

This reminds me of the unconditional basic income, where it would work better to just give everyone money than to keep a file on every person to try to figure out if they deserve it. The problem is, if you have the power to collect any given piece of information, it's really hard to not use it. I see this as a psychological challenge of letting go of control, but Snowden mentions the political fear that you'll get in trouble for failing to collect some piece of information that turned out to be important. Anyway, this isn't just a weakness of government but also private powers like Google.

Another YouTube video on a whole other subject, Why Poor Places Are More Diverse. It's about the diversity of plant species in poor soil. Where nutrients are abundant, the fast-growing species suck them all up and crowd out the slow-growing species, but where nutrients are scarce everyone can find a niche. Then the video tries to apply this model to human society! This is fascinating, but I think it's a stretch. Notice that their plant argument has detailed evidence for a simple story, and then they project it onto the much greater complexity of human systems with less evidence. And even if they're right, the political implication is ridiculous: that we can make a better world by forcing every place to be poor. Clearly it's better to have abundance and also have laws and social customs to keep the abundance widely spread instead of gobbled up by a few powerful interests.

June 13.

2016-06-13T13:10:27Z

June 13. A reader reports on the Illinois budget crisis:

Our state did not pass a budget last year. It was a tough year for lots of people, especially those in social services and education. But everybody knew that eventually a budget would be passed, so it was just, Hang on, borrow money to get through, hang on...

But our state also did not pass a budget this year either. Shit is officially hitting the fan. MAP grants for students didn't get funded last year, but schools mostly funded them anyway. This year, students have been told if the government doesn't fund them, the students will have to pay. Universities are cutting staff. Staff are fleeing to more secure jobs. Students are choosing more stable universities.

Public elementary and high schools are unable to begin school next year without funding. Yep, Illinois school children may all be home schooled next year! The homeless shelters in our town for men have closed down. Social services are closing down right and left.

This article explains the political background: Fallout of Illinois budget feud grows. I think the Democrats are being smart and ruthless, allowing a disaster to unfold to gain a long-term political win, while the Republican governor is being stupid and ideological. Republican voters believe that most government spending is waste, but Republican politicians are supposed to know this is bullshit, and promise to slash taxes and spending but never actually do it, because then voters learn through direct experience that government spending is more valuable than they thought.

And a loose end from Friday's post. As I thought, my psychic pain self-immersion idea is not original. Max sends this 2013 Alex Robinson post, strong medicine, where she describes basically the same thing and calls it "sitting with pain".

June 10.

2016-06-10T22:40:59Z

June 10. For the weekend, some personal thoughts about self-knowledge. I've been practicing meditation for many years, not that often, but it adds up, and I'm understanding better how it works. I don't think posture matters except as a placebo, and actually keeping your mind blank is not the point. The value in meditation is that you have to turn your conscious mind inward, and you notice stuff. It's like the Undercover Boss reality TV show, and you're putting in time as the undercover boss in your own mind and body. If meditation makes you a better person, it's because you find harmful subconscious habits and you grind through the process of fixing them.

I've invented another technique that enhances meditation, and it's pretty powerful on its own. Someone must have figured this out thousands of years ago, but I've never read about it anywhere. You know how you feel when you think about doing something you dread? Try to capture that feeling, let go of the thoughts that brought it up, and just open your soul to that pain, as intensely as you can for as long as you can. Obviously this feels terrible! It's the opposite of the serenity you expect from meditation. But I find, if I can stay immersed in the pain long enough, it wears out, and then it has less power over me in daily life, and I can face more difficult stuff.

My third practice, you guessed it, is marijuana. It lowers my intellectual intelligence while raising my emotional intelligence, so that they're both about average. It also gives me mind-blowing awareness of music, so that's usually where I put my attention, focusing on my strength. But lately I've been focusing on my weakness, combining pain immersion therapy with drug-enhanced emotional awareness to do a full life review. And I wonder if this is why weed gives people anxiety, because they sense the horror of looking at their life with new eyes and seeing all the mistakes.

Anyway, I've learned that I'm not as good a person as I thought I was, but maybe stronger. My subconscious mind actually has more social intelligence than my conscious mind, and it would be a pretty successful Game of Thrones character, except that it's sloppy and erratic. So I need to integrate the different parts of me, and bring the whole thing into sharper focus.

By the way, over on the about me page I've updated my photo, so you can see the trendy vintage glasses I've worn for more than a year now, and just last week I tried using henna on my beard. Next time I'll leave the temples grey.

June 8.

2016-06-08T20:20:33Z

June 8. After some reader feedback, I want to apply some logic to the unconditional basic income. Start with the fact that more and more jobs are being automated. Now, this might be reversed in a total technological collapse, which makes the question moot. For the sake of argument, let's assume that automation will continue to increase. What does society do with the people whose jobs are replaced?

Broadly there are two answers, and they can both be framed in moral terms. One is that it's wrong to let people starve and die, and it's right to spread the benefits of technology to everyone.

The other is that it's wrong for people to be given the necessities for survival without doing any work, so people whose jobs are replaced should starve and die. Nobody will stand up and say this, but they'll hint at a more moderate position: if your job is replaced, you must invent a new job serving the big money interests that benefited from replacing your other job, and if you lack the initiative to do this, then you starve and die.

In practice, societies are leaning toward the first answer, to spread the economic benefits of technology to everyone. There are two ways to do this. One is to maintain a massive bureaucracy strictly defining what people have to do to survive, and what they can spend their money on. The funny thing is that some people are comparing the UBI to communism, but this scenario, the most realistic alternative to the UBI, is basically communism. In comparison, the UBI is libertarian: strip down the social bureaucracy, just give people money, and they're free to spend it however they want.

The other day I said this was inevitable, but I've changed my mind after an argument from Anne: the urge to control people is too strong. Even if all jobs are automated and no one is left behind, and even if bureaucracy is less efficient than just giving people money, governments will still distribute benefits in a way that allows them to manage our lives, because that's what governments do. Now I'm thinking that an unconditional basic income is at least a hundred years away, because of how hard we'll have to fight for it.

More generally, my philosophy on economic freedom is that it should be inversely proportional to economic power. So I support a corporate death penalty, a financial transaction tax, and aggressive antitrust laws, but there should be a level of economic power, maybe $20k/year for individuals, below which you're free as a bird.

June 6.

2016-06-06T18:00:50Z

June 6. Paean to SMAC is a massive project by one guy, Nick Stipanovich, writing in depth about the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's a great game, easily the best in the Civilization series, but the most interesting thing about his blog is how obsessed he is.

In this kind of obsession, I see the massive untapped potential of humanity -- not for objective progress, but for subjective quality of life. I think everyone in the world could find something they love doing as much as Stipanovich loves writing about SMAC -- and if they get bored with that they can find something else, and this is possible even if we exclude passive entertainment and crime, because the range of benign creative activities is basically limitless.

Right now the limits are imagination and economics, which are linked, because our imagination must first figure out how to escape the economic emergency of ordinary modern life, before it looks to the vast ocean of activities that are not worth money.

Voters in Switzerland just gave a big no to an unconditional basic income, so it seems to be decades away, even in Europe. But I think it's inevitable if we continue to see improvements in 1) automation, and 2) general support for the poor. The main thing holding back a basic income is the moral belief that money should be connected to work -- a strange idea that's only a few hundred years old. The cultural link between money and work will eventually give way to efficiency, when enough jobs are done better by machines than humans, and when simply giving everyone money becomes clearly cheaper than paying a giant bureaucracy to enforce conditions on money.

By the way, my own obsessions do not include this blog. I keep posting on this page because I keep thinking of stuff to write about and it keeps me connected to other people.

June 3.

2016-06-03T15:30:53Z

June 3. Stray links, mostly from readers. On the subreddit, zenfulmind is very optimistic about virtual reality, and doubts the claims made in Monday's link.

Dutch Firm Trains Eagles to Take Down Drones. This is cool but I don't see a future. It takes a lot of money and human attention to train eagles to attack drones, and these costs will not get any lower, while the cost of drones that attack drones will drop a lot.

Magic mushrooms lift severe depression in clinical trial. I imagine this works by reconnecting the brain, taking apart a network of connections that isn't working, and allowing new connections to form that are better adapted. And I wonder if there's a political equivalent, a way of suddenly rewiring society. My guess is that a psilocybin-like transformation is relatively easy in a group of a hundred people who all know each other, but in a large complex society, it's so difficult that the drug equivalent of historical revolutions is drinking random stuff under the sink.

And a fun reddit thread for the weekend, What are some weird, real life X-files type mysteries? For much more on this subject, check out the books of Charles Fort or John Keel.

June 1.

2016-06-01T13:10:56Z

June 1. From a month ago on reddit, an epic four part comment on environmental history. The author, agentdcf, begins with ideas from new book, Capitalism in the Web of Life by Jason Moore. The basic idea is that before around 1500, value was seen to reside in land, and the peasants who worked the land were seen as part of that value. Then this changed:

The new way of seeing humans and nature divided the universe into the "human" realm and the realm of "nature," with a firm separation between the two, so that all things must fall on either side of that boundary. The human half contains all of the things that register in our metrics of value, order, and control; the nature half contains the world that is unknown, chaotic, and illegible to humans. Humans became the subject, the thing that acts; nature the object, the thing acted upon.

And the boundary, then, is in human labor, which acts upon nature to bring order, to impose control, and to create value by extracting things from nature and bringing them into the human realm. Nature itself has no value in this scheme; only by acting upon it and bundling our labor with it to create commodities do we assign value to it, but in doing so we bring it into the realm of humans, and thus out of nature. Labor productivity became, at this point, the best way to accumulate greater amounts of value... What is labor productivity, then? It is the appropriation of greater and greater streams of unpaid work-energy from the nature side of the binary, so that they may be made into commodities on the human side.

Then agentdcf goes beyond Moore's book into a critique of science...

in which a relatively small group of wealthy European males began to assume both that nature had universal laws that operated the same everywhere and all the time, and that they could apprehend these laws through empirical observation and experiment... It was now up to this group of people to say what was True -- to define nature, in other words. This all fed into the Cartesian binary because it understood nature to be static, defined by its laws, while humans -- at least some of them -- could effect change.

And here is where we begin to use the concept of nature in really contradictory ways. On the one hand, "nature" is a model; it's the way that things are supposed to be... At the same, though, we also think of nature as a thing to be conquered, controlled, improved, bent to our will. Our ability to apprehend universal laws brings the ability and the confidence to manipulate those laws, and to manipulate nature itself.

From here, agentdcf talks about biopolitics, the attempt to transform human nature to better fit the control systems, and also critiques free trade as the dismantling of local economies that still care about ecology and social justice, to fit big money economies that only care about growth.

I want take the critique of science in a different direction, but that's a topic for another post.