Ran Prieur

July 13.

2016-07-13T13:50:07Z

July 13. I got some good feedback from Friday's question: Why do people want to believe that personality is fixed? On this subreddit post, TheAnarchitect writes:

I think the major reason that people don't want to believe that personality is mutable is because they conflate personality with "Self." The idea that one's personality is mutable over time and in different situations thus attacks their concept of self, resulting in the sensation of ego-death. This is a terrifying concept to individualist dualist westerners, because they cannot shift their sense of self away from personality and behavior to other things like their body, their relationships, their community or their environment. To that mindset, becoming "Someone different" is a form of death.

Ben comments over email:

I tend to think of personality as a result of how a person interacts with the world. In some fundamental way, it's an adaptive response to the environment. So, I think the problem with a lot of people who think of their personalities as fixed, or get obsessed with personality typing, is that they have not interacted much with the world and as such they actually haven't crafted much of a personality. So they put the cart before the horse and latch on to some externally provided sense of self.

For older people, I think there is a fear of externally challenging themselves, which I think is a requisite of personality change. On top of that, there is probably dread over an awareness of the opportunity costs they have incurred by not considering other possibilities for their lives.

This reminds me of one of my favorite mental exercises, the "not that" meditation. Ask yourself, "Who am I?" And no matter what your answer, say "not that" and ask again. The point is not to get a final answer, but to cultivate a sense of who you are that's less like a fortress and more like a surfer.

July 11.

2016-07-11T23:30:03Z

July 11. Some links about the psychology of motivation. First, a dense science article, Fatigue is a Brain-Derived Emotion that Regulates the Exercise Behavior to Ensure the Protection of Whole Body Homeostasis. Basically, your brain tricks you into feeling body fatigue when your body still has plenty of energy. To overcome this, you need some kind of mental motivation to push your body farther than it feels like it can go. This is not a psychology article, so when the author gets into psychology in the final section, it's mostly speculation about some kind of drive to win. I'm thinking there's room for a lot more complexity here -- different athletes could have completely different things going on in their heads that help them push themselves harder, and most of these are not just psychological but also social.

I'll Retire When I'm Dead: Why Continuing to Work Is Good for a Man's Health. Personally I've never felt like the guys in this article, but that's because I never had a job I liked, I never tied a job to my identity, and I'm relatively good at managing unstructured time. But I'm not normal, and this is why an unconditional basic income would not solve the deeper problem of modernity: the lack of any enduring social framework that makes day to day life feel meaningful.

Four ways to get motivated when you don't feel like working. No earth-shaking insights here, but I like the stuff about the value of negative emotions: a study shows that visualizing doing a task and hating it, is a stronger motivator than not visualizing it at all.

A simple mind hack that helps beat procrastination: "Imagine yourself starting, not finishing." Because long-term projects require restarting yourself day after day, I would phrase it like this: break the task down into smaller and smaller steps until the very next step is so tiny that you can do it.

This fits a big theme in my thinking lately: that becoming better at life is not so much about learning general skills (generosity, tolerance, agency), but practicing those skills on micro scales and hidden levels.

July 8.

2016-07-08T20:00:44Z

July 8. Some fun and happy links for the weekend:

Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing. The author does a fascinating deep analysis of the lyrics of more than 200,000 metal songs, including showing the differences between three bands (Motorhead, Machinehead, and Diamondhead), and listing the words that appear most and least in metal lyrics compared to normal language. (Most is "burn"; least is "particularly".)

This podcast excerpt argues that human personality can change. Not only can it change over time, it can also vary radically depending on the situation. What baffles me is: given the popular belief that personality is fixed, and the lack of good evidence, people must want to believe that personality is fixed, but why would anyone want to believe something so depressing? I'm guessing, either they want to justify their own reluctance to change, or they don't want to be disappointed when other people don't change.

How Trees Calm Us Down. The crazy thing is that people get psychological benefits from a nature walk even if they don't like it. No one is sure why, but it seems to have something to do with human attention, where it's good to have something complex but undemanding in the background of your moment-to-moment experience.

Moving from actual trees to "trees", which also calm us down: Your Grandma Needs To Be Smoking Pot, because of new evidence that it might clean out the brain crud that causes Alzheimer's.

And this reddit comment explains terpenes and how they determine the smells and also the effects of different marijuana strains. Here's a longer article on terpenes.

July 6.

2016-07-06T18:40:19Z

July 6. Bunch o' links about technology:

Edward Snowden's Life As a Robot is about the "Snowbot", a video screen on wheels that allows Snowden to virtually speak at events in America while exiled in Russia. It's also a long smart article with lots of other stuff about Snowden.

Personal robotic aircraft are hovering over the horizon. They're calling them "passenger drones" because they use drone-like technology, but basically this is a next-generation light helicopter where computers take care of stability while the operator just gives simple commands. I'm wondering how far this could go. I don't see them replacing cars, because we still need to move really heavy stuff, so we still need streets, and if we have streets then surface vehicles will always be more efficient (especially if they go slower -- see below).

The dying breed of craftsmen behind the tools that make scientific research possible. It's about scientific glass blowing, an extremely difficult and increasingly rare skill, and a good example of how tech systems are held together by skills that can't be learned from books, only passed on through long apprenticeships. It wouldn't take much of a collapse for a skill like this to be totally lost.

Chatbot lawyer overturns 160,000 parking tickets in London and New York (thanks Lacy). As far as I can tell, the chatbot is not talking to the bureaucracy, only talking to people to walk them through dealing with the bureaucracy. Still, I wonder how many lawyer jobs will eventually be replaced by AI.

A reminder that No Tech Magazine always has interesting tech links. Right now at the top of the page is an article about a super-efficient battery powered rail vehicle. This would be totally cool in postapocalypse fiction, where the few survivors could navigate a continent on the abandoned rail lines. But as soon as you have two vehicles that want to go different directions on the same track, you have a problem.

Finally, from the Onion, Secretary Of Interior Unveils Plans For New High-Speed Creek. If you think about it, this is a sneaky critique of high-speed shit. We know that a high-speed creek is ridiculous, because we understand that creeks are part of an ecology where there are good reasons for them to go the speed they go, and trying to make them go faster would be both difficult and harmful. But humans, in some ways, are part of the same ecology, and some of our ambitions to speed things up are equally difficult and pointless, and make sense only from an ideology that faster is better just for being faster. This subject reminds me of this 1905 San Francisco streetcar video, where you can see the elegant beauty of urban traffic before we ruined it by trying to speed it up.

July 4.

2016-07-04T16:20:19Z

July 4. I'll probably spend all this week catching up on links. I'm tired of last week's subject, so today I want to tie it off well enough that I don't have to write about politics for a while.

First, a reader sends this pdf article that shows unadjusted happiness scores on page 31, and in earlier pages it talks about how difficult it is to measure happiness even by asking people how happy they are.

On the subreddit, a reader makes an interesting argument that cultural myths have an ecology, and functional old myths have been replaced by dysfunctional new myths in the same way that monoculture crops replace a forest. It's a fun metaphor, but to buy into it I'd have to see examples of how the old myths had symbiotic interconnections like species in an ecology, and how the new myths don't.

Another link from a reader, Some stuff economists tend to leave out. The basic idea is that it's easier to model things than to model human emotions, so our whole system is based on economic models that improve the world of things while accidentally making us all unhappy.

Finally, a Hacker News comment thread on a brief article about collapsing trust in government. I think government is being scapegoated for collapsing faith in our whole way of living. But we have nothing to replace it with, only a massive squabble of whatever bad ideas and charismatic leaders are easiest to follow.

July 1.

2016-07-01T13:50:01Z

July 1. Two self-critiques on this week's subject. First, like a lot of public intellectuals, I've been framing this in terms of myth vs reality, as if the problem is that suddenly too many people are behaving mythically. But as soon as Leigh Ann said it I knew it was true: myth is the human default. To challenge ones own mythic instincts with careful observation and rational thinking is a learned skill, and one that not many people have learned in this time or any other time. So the real question is not how society veered from reality into myth, but how our cultural myths have veered from creative to destructive.

Second, I mentioned the lack of evidence that Brexit or Trump will make people's lives better -- but how do we even define that? The best place to start would be subjective happiness, but it's surprisingly hard to find data. I went on Google looking for a ranking of countries based purely on asking people how happy they are, and instead I found stuff like the World Happiness Report, which muddles up subjective happiness with numbers like GDP per capita. That seems like circular logic from people who have already decided that quality of life goes hand in hand with economic development. I mean, I still don't see evidence that Brexit will increase subjective happiness, but we shouldn't assume it will decrease happiness just because it crashes the economy.

On exactly these subjects, a reddit comment argues that zombie fiction reflects a societal death wish:

In many ways the return to a simpler life about survival in a hostile environment, is a fantasy about how to remedy alienation. The feeling of hating one's job and doing it only for the money has never been as prevalent as it is now. Even fifty years ago when many jobs appeared worse, people took a certain pride in them. Today most workers feel like their job is absolutely pointless. That's what they would like to overcome, but they don't know how, so the outlet is an apocalyptic fantasy promising the return to human nature. Imagine living as an animal, or in an ancient tribe instead, as a very natural life where issues like depression don't come up the way they do in our developed way of life.