Ran Prieur

October 24.

2016-10-24T12:40:17Z

October 24. This book excerpt, Science and the Compulsive Programmer (posted last week to the subreddit) has given me lots of stuff to think about.

It's about the differences between two kinds of programmers, one described as "professional", "hard-working", "careful", and "sensible", and the other described as "disheveled", "transfixed", "possessed", "frenzied", "grandiose", "incestuous", "aimless", "disembodied", and "monastic".

My first instinct is to read against the text: the book was published 40 years ago, and it's firmly in the mid-20th century industrial mindset where getting things done is intrinsically valuable and how we feel about it is secondary. As a 21st century reader, I see human psychology as the only hard problem, and the compulsive programmers have solved it in the most direct way: while responsible programmers are dutifully supporting a tech infrastructure that may or may not make anyone happy, compulsive programmers have simply found happiness. I envy them.

Look at wild animals, and I'm thinking of species you can watch in the city like grey squirrels and house sparrows. While doing what they need to do to survive, they seem to be permanently as happy and engaged as I've only been at my happiest moments, like when I leaned into that curve that wiped out my scooter, or when I bought that exciting thing that turned out to be a burden, or when I played video games until ordinary life seemed like a hellscape of unclear goals and unreliable rewards.

When I think about it that way, compulsive programmers are probably on a similar dead end, and not at all in the same mental state as squirrels or the best and luckiest humans who have found a well-balanced niche in the modern world. And it probably would not work, as a utopian goal, to have all the useful stuff done by machines, leaving us all free to have useless fun forever. Of course we should still try, but I'm becoming more and more suspicious of how hard it is, even with all this technology, to find any kind of hack or shortcut to feeling good. It's leading me away from philosophical materialism and toward something like theology.

October 21.

2016-10-21T21:10:43Z

October 21. Bunch o' links about technology, starting with lower tech that's better than higher tech.

You've probably heard that the makers of the EpiPen jacked up the price hundreds of dollars because the American medical system has no cost controls. Some folks have developed the epipencil, an autoinjector that you can make yourself for $30 in parts plus the cost of the epinephrine.

Old jobs is an image album of jobs that no longer exist. I can't help but notice that some of them look more fun than any job I've ever had. My larger point is that we could make a better world by putting more foresight into automation, like considering whether doing a job by hand is more enjoyable than maintaining the tech that repaces it.

The secret behind Italy's rarest pasta. It's not a secret, just a skill that takes years to learn. Only two people in the world can do it, and it will probably die with them because our culture no longer has room for that much patience.

The Dutch Reach: Clever Workaround to Keep Cyclists from Getting Doored. It's not some high-tech sensor. Drivers are just trained and tested in the habit of turning their shoulders, looking behind them, and opening the door with their opposite hand.

Now here's an awesome use of high tech: the best microscope pics of 2016. My favorite is the spider eyes.

I think human space colonies are silly, first because humans are totally unfit for space while robots are perfect, and second because there are more exciting frontiers toward the inside. But this article on Jeff Bezos's rocket mentions something cool that I didn't know: as a rocket gets bigger, it becomes easier to keep it balanced while taking off and landing vertically, for the same reason that you can balance an umbrella on your hand more easily than you can balance a pin.

Finally, some music. A question on the record store subreddit reminded me of a song I was obsessed with in the early 90's. Hammerbox was a Seattle band from the grunge era with a powerful singer named Carrie Akre. She later fronted the band Goodness, and made her last solo album in 2007. I'm going to look into her later stuff and see if she ever found any more great songs to match her voice, after this forgotten gem from 1991, Hammerbox - When 3 Is 2.

October 19.

2016-10-19T19:50:17Z

October 19. On a tangent from Monday's post, that comment about Trump's hypomania mentions a book called The Hypomanic Edge, in which the author "surveyed leaders in Silicon Valley and they almost universally agreed that the clinical description of hypomania matched what they thought was needed from the most successful startup CEOs."

I'm thinking, suppose we went back millions of years to our primate ancestors, or not so far back to the most brutal groups of humans. In that world, the largest and most aggressive males are the leaders. In our own world, being physically large and aggressive is increasingly useless. There are still lucrative roles in pro sports, but nobody thinks Ndamukong Suh has the right skillset to be a president or a CEO.

My point is, hypomanic people don't either. There is no correlation between hypomania and making good decisions. The correlation is with speed, having the sleepless drive to make a large number of decisions in a day.

This is only a factor because of our extremely fast-paced society. And it's a factor in other jobs too. Peter Higgs, "the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today's academic system because he would not be considered 'productive' enough." There are people out there who would make great leaders, scientists, house builders, chefs, you name it, but they can't hold those jobs because they're not fast enough.

I dream that this will change. If more speed-dependent jobs are automated, if an unconditional basic income moves more jobs into the realm of volunteer work, and if our culture slows down to match the end of economic growth, we might unlock the vast contributions of high quality slow workers.

October 17.

2016-10-17T17:30:50Z

October 17. Some notes on the presidential race:

1) What an embarrassment for the Republican party, that all this stuff is coming out now after Trump sailed through their nomination process. And it's not like Trump is the kind of guy you'd never suspect. The accusers were probably thinking, "I'm not going to stick my neck out to put Ted Cruz in the White House, and Republicans probably won't believe me anyway." And I wonder who made the decision to release the tape that started the whole thing. Maybe they would have held onto it if they thought Trump would be a good president.

2) Everyone knows that Bill Clinton has used power to get sex. I don't think Bill has been perfect, but there's a continuum all the way from full consent to creepy sexual assault, and clearly he has been a lot closer than Trump to the good side of that range. How has he done it? By knowing how to read women. Where Trump sees injustice and a double standard, I just see a competent person and an incompetent person.

3) This reddit comment diagnoses Trump as hypomanic:

I'm moderately bipolar and have become very aware of when I become hypomanic. High energy, drive, sleeplessness, grandiosity, a compulsion to talk a lot, and extraordinary self esteem are definitely part of it. At my highest levels of hypomania, I was driven towards a goal where I felt like it was the singular purpose that my whole life was converging towards, I was the one person in the world that could best accomplish it, and it was something the world desperately needed. That is certainly Trump right now.

4) Hillary Clinton has her own tragic flaw. She cannot let go of the belief that people at the top deal with truths that ordinary idiots can't handle. That's why she hid her emails, not because she was using power selfishly, but because she believed she was using power for the greater good in ways that she does not trust you and me know about. In the age of Wikileaks and Russian hackers, Hillary's Nixon-like obsession with keeping secrets is likely to bring her down, because if she does something even a little bit shady, and it comes out, it's going to look like she was trying to cover it up.

October 13.

2016-10-13T13:50:54Z

October 13. I'll eventually write about deeper stuff, but next week it will probably be politics again, and today, TV show reviews. I used to think it was a real danger that high-tech superstimuli would devour human attention, but as I get older that no longer matches my personal experience. It's getting hard for me to find shows that I like better than daydreaming and listening to the rain.

Starting with the worst, The 100 has a good premise, teenagers from a space station exploring Earth after a nuclear war, but the writing and acting could not be any worse without being more interesting. One notch up, Zoo is more interesting by being more trashy, with a ridiculous plot about a mutation that makes animals attack humans worldwide.

I love 19th century gothic literature, so I wanted to like Penny Dreadful, but the writers have no idea how to tell a story. Episode after episode drags by without advancing the plot, and the whole thing becomes a tiresome showcase for the beautiful dark cinematography and Eva Green's acting. (Update: the key to enjoying the first season is to view every scene as a stand-alone short film and pretend you don't speak English, or to skip episodes 4-7.)

You've probably heard about Stranger Things. It's sort of like Close Encounters or E.T., except that instead of advanced and benevolent space aliens, it's a brutal and horrific parallel world. The whole thing is really well done except that sometimes there are overacted arguments for no good reason. My favorite thing is that the people who seem completely crazy are the ones who best understand what's going on.

A while back I mentioned Dark Matter, the trope-heavy Canadian show about a space ship crew. It's no Firefly, but it continues to get better, and it's one of two shows we're currently watching where I look forward to the next episode.

The other is Scream Queens. The story is a parade of horror cliches, I can't relate to any of the characters, and most of the conversations are annoying macho posturing, but on the micro scale every element is bursting with creativity, and everyone involved seems to be having fun.

October 10.

2016-10-10T22:20:20Z

October 10. I've been avoiding writing about the election but it's getting too interesting. Here's Nate Silver with a good summary of where it's been and where it stands, The Second Debate Probably Didn't Help Trump, And He Needed Help. Last night Trump excused his 2005 boast about groping women as "locker room talk", and here's a reddit thread in response, What are actual "locker room talks" usually about?

Back in January I called Trump "an unstoppable juggernaut." I like being wrong, because it's an opportunity to examine deeper assumptions and bring them more in line with reality. In this case, I assumed that the general election is not that different from the Republican primaries. It turns out that it's a lot harder, and that's a problem for Republicans.

This video, How Donald Trump Answers A Question, gets good around the 2:10 mark when they analyze his language: 78% one syllable words, 17% two syllables, in a rhythmic cadence that usually puts the strongest word at the end of the sentence. As a writer I know how hard it is to put words in a good order, and I'm impressed with Trump's ability to do it ~~extemporaneously~~ on the fly.

Is this a skill that Trump has studied and practiced, or does he do it without quite knowing how? I'm sure it's the latter, because otherwise he would study and practice how to talk in a way that resonates with general election swing voters. I think Trump is some kind of idiot savant. He's really good at one thing, and he has relied on it so heavily that he's not much good at anything else, and now he has finally reached a level where talent is not enough. More than anything he reminds me of a quarterback who was great in college and bad in the NFL, like Johnny Manziel or Ryan Leaf.

He could still win if Hillary has another health crisis. During last night's debate a fly landed on her face, which means nothing rationally, but it's not a good omen. And I don't see anyone from either party who looks strong in 2020. It will be fun if Trump runs again and the party elites try harder to stop him.

October 7.

2016-10-07T19:50:58Z

October 7. Leigh Ann says my last post sounds like an Enneagram 1, and that if I really understood fun, I wouldn't have to argue that it's important, because it's enough that it's fun.

It's true, keeping life fun is not something I do naturally but something I have to work at. This post, The problem with perfection, describes how falling away from fun has happened in classical music:

Imagine a theatre where the author dictates the speed at which the actors should read each sentence, and how loudly each word should be read, the length of each word and the tonal character of the voice of the actor.

On to my usual weekend subject, drugs and music: High Hitler is an article about a new book, Blitzed, and the close relation between Nazi Germany and powerful stimulants. German chemists invented methamphetamine, and soldiers all took it so they could stay awake for three days and nights and invade France. Hitler himself was addicted to cocaine and oxycodone, and Mussolini was getting the same drugs from the same doctor. At the end, on top of losing the war, they were all going through withdrawal.

Anyone on cannabis will enjoy this video, Minecraft Acid Interstate V2. I hate the music, but I love how the video is synchronized to the music, with the stone things passing exactly on the beats. It shouldn't be too hard to make software that can take any music and go farther, with different kinds of trees and buildings matching different instruments and vocals.

And some better music. Diane Coffee is the stage name of Shaun Fleming. He's a good songwriter and performs with an energy that's going to make him much more famous than he is now. I think his strongest song is WWWoman, and here's a live performance (at 14:05) of his prettiest song, Green.

In honor of Hurricane Matthew, here's a video I made in 2014 using footage of Typhoon Haiyan, and a live graphic mapping its location and wind speeds.

October 4.

2016-10-04T16:20:40Z

October 4. When I said that a perfect life is one with no obligations, I was trying to get at something more fundamental, but so obvious it's hardly worth saying: a perfect life is one where every action is intrinsically rewarding. And a perfect society is one where every action by everyone is intrinsically rewarding.

This is not as unrealistic as it sounds. At the beginning of his book In Search of the Primitive, Stanley Diamond argues that many tribal cultures, said by anthropologists to make no distinction between work and play, would be more fairly described as doing no work. Of course they do lots of stuff that might feel like work to us, but they carefully maintain a cultural and psychological context where everything necessary to keep the tribe going feels like what we would call play.

How did we get from there to here, where we spend half our lives doing useful chores, and the other half having useless fun, with almost no overlap? This is how I imagine the Fall of Man: not that we were lured from innocent righteousness by wicked fun, but that we were lured from fun by stodgy pragmatism, when someone said, "I don't care if you don't feel like doing it, you're going to do it anyway." Or maybe it started with prehistoric slavery, and once it became normal to separate useful activity from freely chosen activity, it got locked in, and it spread.

An activity redefined as a chore can be done on a consistent schedule, instead of waiting for people to feel like doing it. This is what we call industry, and it drags related activities into the same mind space -- if horseshoes can't depend on a whim, then nails can't depend on a whim. And if you try to go back, you have to pass through a stage where nobody wants to do any of that shit, and any benefits gained will be lost.

So what can we do about it? On the level of society, there are utopian dreams of re-merging the useful and the fun, but we're actually getting somewhere with another strategy: to shift the whole world of useful chores to machines, and leave humans doing only useless fun. I support this one hundred percent. Of course there will be challenges, described in dystopian fiction from The Machine Stops to WALL-E, but I trust human nature. If we all have the absolute right to do nothing, we will eventually learn to do things that reconnect us in a healthy way to the wider world.

Meanwhile, is there anything we can do on a personal level, maybe change our outlook so that our chores feel more like play? Once I stayed at an intentional community where the idea was that work would feel meaningful if people were doing it for their friends. In practice that didn't happen, and there were firm requirements, enforced by penalties, to do more hours of work per week than a frugal person can get away with in the dominant society. But one guy did figure out a mind hack. He turned washing dishes into a game, where the crew would try to do it as fast as possible, so they would get credit for however long it was supposed to take, while getting off work sooner and having fun.

Another thing is just to notice what makes us feel better or feel worse, and act on it, especially when it goes against what society calls normal. I just rode my bike to the store in the rain, even though we have a car, because I've noticed that driving is stressful and makes me want to curl up under a blanket, while bicycling is fun and I come home energized, even if I'm less comfortable.

October 1.

2016-10-01T13:50:28Z

October 1. Quick topical note. The Clinton campaign has found Trump's weakness: that he will not back down from public feuds even when he seems to be in the wrong. His first collapse in the polls came right after the Democratic convention when he bizarrely attacked the family of a fallen soldier. Now he's doing it again, making hostile tweets at 3AM in a nonsensical grudge against a former beauty queen.

This is especially bad for Trump because it undermines his strength in the world of myth. Trump represents the trickster archetype, and people are hungry for a trickster because the established order is getting more and more lifeless. But now he seems less like a joker and more like an uptight straight man. He needs to be Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack and he's turning out to be more like Ted Knight, or he needs to be Ferris Bueller and he suddenly seems more like the principal.

Trump could still pull it out if Hillary has more health problems. And even if she wins, she's clearly a one-termer, and in 2020 we're likely to get a trickster president if a candidate without Trump's negatives can play that role.