]]> http://ranprieur.com/#dee313b7672dd1a53d71848c003b6d4fda6761cc 2017-07-10T22:00:33Z July 10. A few months back, I wrote this:

Will science ever cheat withdrawal? Could you go on a drug bender, and when it starts to get ugly, you just take a shot of brain-cleansing nanobots and you're painlessly clean and sober and ready to start again? I doubt it, but I do think it should be possible to bunch the pain, so instead of days or weeks of grinding through rehab, you could reset your pleasure with a few minutes of agony.

A reader replied, "OK, but if pain and pleasure are in balance, could you give yourself a few electric shocks one day, and maybe that would lead to good times down the road?" I said:

Clearly the answer is no, which leads to two options. One is that it is possible, even on a metaphysical level, to have pleasure unbalanced by pain. The other answer is that pleasure must be balanced by pain but pain does not have to be balanced by pleasure, because God hates us.

It turns out, this has been studied by science, and that electric shock trick might actually work. The opponent-process theory of emotion is a long brainy blog post about Richard Solomon's research into pain becoming pleasure and pleasure becoming pain. If you don't want to read the whole thing, the practical advice is to moderate your pleasures, exercise, and take cold showers.

I'm also wondering how much individual variation there is, because none of the author's examples of pleasure-from-pain apply to me. I don't get exhilaration from stress, or runner's high, or "a sense of well being" from donating blood. After my epic and painful moving day last week, I did not feel one shred of euphoria. I just felt tired. But when I listen to music, or write something good, I get pleasure that echoes to the baseline without ever going negative.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#9238fd342debd74359521c859f7a56b767175616 2017-07-08T20:40:40Z July 8. Wednesday morning we got up early and drove out to the valley to rent a 16 foot truck, then drove back here and loaded the truck and the car. Then we drove separately to Pullman, and unloaded everything to a third floor apartment in full sun on a 95 degree day. We could not have done it without the help of Leigh Ann's friend Courtney. I drank at least a gallon of water, and when I ate salt it tasted like candy. Then I drove the truck back to Spokane, left it in the late dropoff lot, and took the bus home, arriving around 10:30.

Getting through such an epic day was not just hard physically, but mentally. Little things are going to go wrong, and if you get caught up in blame or regret, or if you push harder to try to make up for mistakes, you're going to burn out way before the end of the day. Instead, minute after minute, hour after hour, you have to stay calm and constantly refocus on the present moment.

Are lower class people better at these skills, because of the kind of work they're forced to do? As more of our work is done by machines, will humanity become more neurotic? How do we prevent this? That question is too hard for me to answer, but I'm thinking: designing a good society is not primarily about psychology -- it's entirely about psychology.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#8207d8312faa7798da282c082acbadc00f59e5c1 2017-07-04T16:00:27Z July 4. Posting today because I won't be posting tomorrow, and I just want to say the same things I've recently said, in different words. Continuing from yesterday, Michael sends this great video about System 1 vs System 2 thinking: The simple riddle that 50% of Harvard students get wrong. The more I learn about this subject, the more I understand why life is so hard for me. My System 1 is defective. I have to use System 2 for almost everything, which makes me really good at it, but society sees me as a fuckup, and I could never pass a job interview even for a job that's all System 2 thinking, like that proofreading job at Amazon that they gave to some glib charmer whose ass I kicked on the actual proofreading test. We really are living in barbaric times.

I also want to go back to last week's subject. I've been having an email conversation with Anne about "individualism", and wrote this:

That Soccer Assassins article tipped my thinking about the whole individual vs group thing, because it's about how a group can work better if everyone is doing their own thing. But the trick is, they're doing their own thing in service to the group. they're thinking "I want my team to do as well as possible, but I'm not going to trust the coach to tell me what to do, I'm going to figure it out myself in the moment."

Of course this is different from "Collectivism says that society thrives if I trust central planners." But it's also different from "Capitalism says that society thrives if i'm totally selfish."

It's not a middle ground -- it's a whole other angle, difficult for our culture to imagine, something like "cooperative individualism". That's when I realized that people like Ayn Rand ruined "individualism" by tying it to selfishness.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#5f6bf8472b04a55bb6482f8386cbe88522a76dd9 2017-07-03T15:50:06Z July 3. Busy to Death. It's not a new idea, but for me this is a new way of thinking about it. First:

System 1 is our reactive, speedy response to circumstance decision-making. It is a bias loaded, preprogrammed neural network of pathways that essentially exists so we don't have to think. System 2, however, is when we deeply, slowly consider numerous situations, options, and alternatives when decision making.

And in a culture that values looking busy, people in System 2 mode will appear to be lazy, and will be given work that forces them into System 1. So a culture that values looking busy will undermine itself with bad snap decisions.

Personally, I'm terrible at System 1. That's why I could never get a good job, why I hate driving, why I always get in trouble for being clumsy. My autopilot is somewhere between incompetent and nonexistent, and it makes life in this headlong culture really hard. Hammering my favorite political cause: if we had an unconditional basic income, people who thrive in System 2 could afford to be in it all the time, and make contributions from that space.

Related: Anxiety is the new Depression.

Also related: The refugee funding America's psychedelic renaissance.

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