Ran Prieur

August 17.

2016-08-17T17:10:35Z

August 17. You've probably noticed that my regular MWF posts are getting later and smaller. This blog appears to be on semi-vacation since my concussion has temporarily reduced my brainpower, and accelerated an ongoing shift in what I find interesting. I'm not completely done writing about politics and society, but I just don't feel like getting into that stuff now.

But here's a good link from a reader, The End of Globalization. It explains in detail how globalization is ending, largely through technology shifting manufacturing from foreign labor to domestic automation. And it has some predictions, that more trade will shift to regional blocks of nations, and that the US military might stop trying to stabilize the world.

August 15.

2016-08-15T15:50:19Z

August 15. At the bottom of my misc page is a "Readings and Mirrors" section, for stuff that I liked enough to host it myself when I couldn't find it anywhere else on the internet. It's mostly the kind of thing I was interested in ten years ago, like The origins of agriculture, which argues that humans persisted in growing grains because grains contain opioids and other addictive substances.

Last week one of the authors emailed me with links to two newer papers with updated ideas. The one that's publicly available is Pharmacological Influences on the Neolithic Transition, which argues that a bunch of different psychoactive substances were involved.

Coincidentally, this new article fits my new thinking as well as the old one fit my old thinking. I used to think large complex society was simply a mistake, and now I think it's a really interesting transition that still has a long way to go, and to do it right we need more and better ways to alter consciousness.

August 12.

2016-08-12T12:20:57Z

August 12. This week the most anticipated video game of the last few years, No Man's Sky, was released. I was thinking about building a gaming desktop just to play it, but I've decided to wait for cheaper computers and a better game.

It might be a long wait. This No Man's Sky review on reddit goes into detail about the game's weaknesses, and here's a page with more reviews. The most exciting thing about No Man's Sky is its massive and revolutionary use of procedural generation, using fractal math to make 18 quintillion beautiful planets. But it looks like the procedural generation is not integrated on a deep level with gameplay. So if one planet has green elephants in a jungle and another has red dinosaurs in a desert, it changes what you see but doesn't change what you do.

To be fair, building great gameplay out of procedural generation is really hard. Here's a post from 2012, Procedural Content: When it sucks, when it doesn't. Is No Man's Sky just a really pretty version of Telengard, the 1982 dungeon crawler whose two million rooms were basically the same?

What I'm waiting for is good graphics over something like Dwarf Fortress, and my best hope remains Starsector, a slow-developing independent game by a single programmer, Alex Mosolov. In this 2014 interview, Alex explains why he continues to avoid Kickstarter and Steam so he can develop the game on his own terms. You can tell from his blog that he has a great sense for gameplay, and this year he's starting to add procedural generation.

Here's another fun thing for the weekend, a video of a windmill on fire.

August 10.

2016-08-10T22:00:25Z

August 10. Today, some presidential politics. I wouldn't take this article at face value, because everyone involved is a Clinton supporter, but Understanding Hillary makes an interesting argument in her defense: that her great political skill is being a good listener, and it just doesn't translate to speaking in front of huge crowds.

Also, a reader has a speculation about why Hillary is so unlikeable. Back in 2012 she had a blood clot in her brain, and if she had a more recent episode, she might have "a vascular dementia, or a post-stroke syndrome" which could make her "more inflexible and more confused by changes and the unexpected."

August 8.

2016-08-08T20:40:28Z

August 8. Unrelated links. Minds turned to ash is a smart article about why people burn out at their jobs. If I had to distill it to one idea, it's that holding tension between where you are and where you want to be is an effective short-term motivational strategy, but in the long term it's a dead end.

Hacker News comment thread, The LHC nightmare scenario has come true. This comment summarizes it:

The LHC is a multi billion dollar project designed specifically to help physicists build physical models that are more accurate than what currently exists. Countless man-years have been devoted to its operation. Apparently, the only thing it has done is confirm what we already knew decades ago. The nightmare scenario is the waste of billions of dollars and a decade of your life, with no alternatives in sight.

I had no idea that those "warranty void if removed" stickers are illegal. More precisely, "The obligation is on the manufacturer to demonstrate that your third-party repairs or modifications caused the failure, not the other way around."

From a year ago, an interview with the authors of a self-help book called Fuck Feelings. It's not actually against feelings, but it uses humor to counter some of the overly simple advice of other self-help books.

Finally, the thread I linked to on Friday has exploded to 70 comments, probably the biggest comment thread in the history of the subreddit, which is strange because the perceived inequalities between men and women in dating is not a subject I'm interested in or have ever written about. When I was younger I thought I had terrible luck with women, but it turned out to be all because of stuff I was doing, or not doing. One thing was being unaware of vast levels of nonverbal communication, and this is also why I never passed a job interview for anything above office drone. My other mistake was focusing on one person at a time and trying to get with her, when the correct strategy, in dating and in life, is to remain broadly receptive to opportunities.

August 5.

2016-08-05T17:10:00Z

August 5. Over on the subreddit there's been some action on this post about MGTOW. It stands for Men Going Their Own Way, because they "believe that legal and romantic entanglements with women fail a cost-benefit analysis and risk-benefit analysis."

I think most of these guys are either looking at the wrong women, or they're taking a narrow view of benefits. This is normal human behavior: we tend to be hyperaware of the benefits we're offering and unaware of the benefits we're getting. Or we skew our perspective so that what we're good at seems important and what we're bad at seems trivial or nonexistent.

From the other side, here's a popular feminist post from a year ago, On Unpaid Emotional Labor, and an article in the Guardian with lots of examples, Is emotional labor feminism's next frontier?

This is just one corner of a huge subject that also includes stuff like why Clint Eastwood hates political correctness, what lefties really mean by "privilege", and maybe why certain technologies that satisfy our desires make us unhappy. It's all about self-reinforcing disconnection from reality, and I'll try to get deeper into it another time.

Some music for the weekend. I've linked to this song before but I'm linking again because it's easy on the ears, super-obscure, and I really like it. John Matthias - Pre-Loved / Vintage.

August 3.

2016-08-03T15:50:59Z

August 3. A couple months back, a question on the subreddit got me thinking about the quote at the top of this page: "The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed." I think in the original quote, from one of Terence McKenna's recorded talks, it was "the bonfire of understanding," but the question was: Why a bonfire? I think it's a great metaphor for a few different reasons. 1) It's primal. For a million years our ancestors sat around fires at night wondering what was out in the darkness. 2) It puts the darkness in all directions, and endless. Compare it to the metaphor of peeling an onion, where under each layer there's another layer, but soon you come to the center. With a fire you're peeling outward forever. 3) Like understanding, a fire can be any size, and it gets bigger incrementally. 4) A bonfire is the biggest controlled fire that most of us have seen. He could have used a candle, but imagine the size of a bonfire and all of that darkness.

August 1.

2016-08-01T13:30:26Z

August 1. Concussions have been in the news for a while because of the NFL, but I had no idea how serious they are until I got one. Two weeks after my accident, my body is mostly recovered but my brain is still foggy. Apparently it's common for post-concussion syndrome to last months. I have a constant barely noticeable headache, mild memory loss, my happiness ceiling is lower, and it's much harder for me to concentrate. The other day I tried to convert ten meters per second into miles per hour, something I could normally estimate in my head, and I couldn't even get started without pen and paper and even then I made a mistake.

So today I'm not smart enough for original thinking and I'm just going to post a few links, starting with this awesome headline: Climate change is weaponizing the atmosphere. Here's an article with a better photo of the recent Phoenix microburst, where clouds blast near-tornado force wind straight downward.

And two reddit comments sent by readers. One of the smartest people on reddit, Erinaceous, describes Permaculture founder Bill Mollison's political vision, which uses...

existing institutions and legal forms which largely serve corporate interests but turns them to the service of regenerative social ecological systems. Rather than sitting on our thumbs waiting for nations to collapse it gives us an effective means of using the existing nation states to become incubators for permaculture federations which would have some measure of independence from centralized means of control.

And this comment, on the subject of marrying for love, argues that the history of what we seek in partners mirrors Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from food and shelter to belonging to love to self-actualization. The commenter calls the last thing "nearly impossible", and I don't believe in the "true self", but I see a lot of couples where one or both partners successfully challenges the other to be a better person.