Ran Prieur

November 24.

2017-11-24T12:00:20Z

November 24. For the holiday weekend, some personal stuff. I haven't done much on Picbreeder lately, but this one totally looks like the Mona Lisa on acid.

Not that I've actually tripped on acid. I've tried two different true psychedelics now, and neither one gave me the kind of experience that most people report at similar doses. On cannabis, though I might forget what I was just thinking, I can still plunge ahead, riding introspection and imagination like a surfer. But on one supposedly stronger drug, I just flounder in a somewhat pleasant delirium, and on another, I can't get inside my head at all. I'm tempted to hammer my brain with a larger dose, but I think it's better to be gentle, so next time I'll try a microdose on top of cannabis.

My most transcendent experiences have been from music -- typically music that sounds bad to most people. On my favorite songs page, I've just updated the top playlist after rediscovering Carousel, a 1992 song by the New Zealand band The Garbage and the Flowers. Leigh Ann says it sounds like an ethereal homeless woman, and now it holds the center among nine songs so weird that the median number of YouTube views is under 2500.

November 22.

2017-11-22T22:40:16Z

November 22. I have a few Thanksgiving-related recipes on my old misc page. One I haven't added yet, for homemade eggnog: 6 eggs, 3 cups milk, 2 cups whipping cream, 1½ cups spiced rum, ½ cup sugar, and nutmeg and vanilla to taste. It's best to separate the eggs, whip the whites, and put them in at the end.

Also, there's a new subreddit that is collecting all the links from battleforthenet.com about why it's bad that we're about to lose net neutrality. People are talking like the ISP's are evil, but they're just puppets of a deeper mistake that has existed in every human culture except for some low-tech tribes: that it is acceptable to leverage power into more power.

If we lose net neutrality, it will make the internet more frustrating for me as a consumer, but it will not effect me as a content producer, because this site is pure web 1.0 with a tiny bandwidth. I don't know of any other website that doesn't run any scripts.

November 20.

2017-11-20T20:20:17Z

November 20. Last week a reader sent this quote from the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma: "Those who remain unmoved by the wind of joy silently follow the Path." It struck me as strange, because out of context, if someone asked me if it's better to be moved or unmoved by joy, I would say it's better to be moved. So in what metaphorical context is it better to be unmoved?

I don't want to have a discussion about what Bodhihdharma actually meant. All I know is, that quote gave me this idea:

If you're up in a hot air balloon, you don't feel any wind, because whatever wind there is, also moves the balloon that carries you. Now imagine there are two kinds of wind. If your balloon moves with the wind of joy, then you never feel joy, but you do feel the wind of pain. And if your balloon moves with the wind of pain, then you don't feel pain, but you do feel joy.

I don't know how to translate this metaphor into practical advice, beyond what I wrote last week: to define every bad thing that happens as the new baseline, and to feel gratitude for every good thing that happens, and do these moves with increasing consistency and quickness. Also, this whole subject sounds a lot like Stoicism.

Two unrelated psychology links: The Fine Art of Not Being Offended, by remembering that other people's actions are about them and not you.

And a reddit thread, What is the most toxic aspect of your personality?

November 16.

2017-11-16T16:40:00Z

November 16. From this comment thread about yesterday's post, I most relate to these condensed bits of comments from TheAnarchitect:

Everyone thinks they're immune to anxiety until it gets them. I used to even be able to handle a major trauma here and there without breaking a sweat. Then I got hit with two extreme traumas back to back, and since then, my resistance to daily traumas is gone. What I find funny is that from an outside perspective, I might even seem more resilient.

When I see people who have the same attitude I had before the trauma, I worry. It's like seeing a kid on a highwire. Oh, baby, I know it looks so easy, and everytime you've tripped you've caught yourself. But you don't know how far down it is.

I've written a lot about social collapse, but now I'm thinking about something like identity collapse. You develop a personality, a set of habits, that gets you through life, and it's probably more than half subconscious, learned when you were very young, and hard to change. But then some key component changes -- it could be something in you, or something in the world, or your role in the world. And gradually, or suddenly, your whole way of being no longer works.

When this happens to a society, or to an individual, and they don't flame out in destruction but fall into a deep slump, we use the same word: depression. The whole system becomes disjointed and ineffective, and recovery is a long process of rebuilding a working system from scratch.

I'm thinking about people who are blind from birth, and then their eyes get fixed. You'd think they'd be happy, but normally they become depressed, because they still can't see. It takes years to learn to interpret the light on the retina as a three dimensional world, and they have to learn this as an adult, where normal people learned it as babies with highly flexible brains. Meanwhile, now that they've become aware of that maddening world, they can't ignore it.

November 15.

2017-11-15T15:30:17Z

November 15. Today I want to write about self-improvement. For a lot of skills, it seems like there are two kinds of people: those who understand the skill on such an intuitive level that they can't explain it, and those who don't understand it intuitively, and will never get it unless it's explained carefully. For example, I didn't learn to throw with my wrist until I was 30 and someone gave me explicit instruction. My athletic IQ is so low that I never would have figured that out on my own, and yet there are four year olds who pick it up without even thinking about it.

Back in January I wrote, "my point of emphasis for 2017 is micro-scale toughness." I'm not sure that I'm any better at it, but at least I can explain it better. Somewhere I read about a guy who was out in a sea kayak off Alaska when a storm hit. At one point a wave raised him high enough to see deadly waves dense to the horizon, and he thought, this is it, I'm going to die. But he refocused, and rode out the storm by repeatedly turning to face every wave that came at him, one wave at a time.

This is what life does to us every day. The difference is, modern society is pretty good at keeping us from dying, so when waves hit us sideways, we just get more and more traumatized.

Another metaphor: if you're a professional shortstop, and someone suddenly throws a baseball at you, it doesn't matter if you're at a funeral, on the toilet, anywhere, you're going to catch it, because you've practiced that move ten thousand times. If you fail to catch it, it will smack you in the face, and then you're weaker against the next ball.

Buddhism, in my meagre understanding, says to deal with pain by being fully aware of it as it arises, and then letting it go. To me that feels too passive. You have to see the pain coming, and go out and engage it with focused attention the moment that it hits.

I wonder if the main difference between happy and unhappy people is reaction time. But these are skills we can practice: to define every bad thing that happens as the new baseline, and to feel gratitude for every good thing that happens, and do these moves with increasing consistency and quickness.

On a tangent, when I try to think of examples of life's relentless tiny pains, I notice something. You miss a traffic light, your phone rings, that web page doesn't load, you forgot to pay that bill. These are all technological pains that did not exist in our ancestral environment. I fear a car crash, not because of the physical injury, but because I'll have to deal with insurance and repairs and other duties that are hellscapes of unexpected complications.

The blunder of modernity is to replace threats we understand, that can kill us, with threats we don't understand, that keep us alive to suffer.

November 13.

2017-11-13T13:10:42Z

November 13. If you want to keep up on all the sexual abuse stuff that's coming out, there's a new subreddit, The Weinstein Effect. I like Louis CK's apology because he understands that the core issue is power (even if his new movie fails to understand that). One thing the accusations have in common, is that if someone in a lower position tried the same shit on someone in a higher position, they would be fired.

We imagine these people are bad because they crossed the line between consent and coercion. But when almost the entire world is under authoritarian culture, where it's normal for some people to tell other people what to do, where it's normal for us to do what we're told even if we don't feel like it, then the line between consent and coercion is crossed so often that it almost doesn't exist. (Or, it's only carefully enforced in certain sensitive contexts.)

Once a culture has crossed the line into normalization of hierarchy, it's a constant temptation to cross the next line, between using a position of power for the good of the whole, and using it selfishly. And once that line has been crossed, it's tempting for selfish use of power to veer into sex acts.

I like to think, in a few thousand years, human culture will be so much improved that one person having any power over another will be a scandal.

November 10.

2017-11-10T22:40:10Z

November 10. On yesterday's subject, there's a subreddit thread with some good thoughts, including a link to this scientific article, Running Amok: A Modern Perspective on a Culture-Bound Syndrome.

A more poetic article on the Amok phenomenon, which I've linked to before: Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere. And an article on how anti-terror urban design can also make cities more livable, by physically blocking vehicles from pedestrian spaces.

November 9.

2017-11-09T21:30:56Z

November 9. Just a quick thought on the latest mass shooting. Despite the gunman's long history of violence, he was not in any FBI database. Meanwhile, I'm sure their database is full of harmless Muslims. The mistake they're making is to see the world as an ideological battlefield, in which the danger comes from beliefs. Really the danger comes from mental illness, and ideologies are just tacked-on rationalizations for crimes that people are going to do anyway when they get deep enough into pain and anger.

It's an easy mistake to make, because ideology is easier to track, to pin down, to wrap your head around. Mental illness is getting more common and more severe, and I'm not sure why. But it wouldn't surprise me if mass shootings become so normal that the deaths are almost invisible, like car crashes, and we only hear about the really big ones.

November 7.

2017-11-07T19:10:30Z

November 7. I just spent four days in Florida for Leigh Ann's brother's wedding. Her family is fun, we had a good time, and I did not bring my computer. Catching up, I see there was a lot of action on the subreddit, including this thoughtful article about Ted Kaczynski, Waiting for the End of the World.

I read two books on the trip, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America by Cabeza de Vaca, and Earth Abides, the classic 1949 postapocalypse novel by George R. Stewart. It was ahead of its time in many ways, but Stewart makes a choice that seems strange to me: the protagonist is the only character in the entire novel who wants to rebuild civilization. Everyone else is content to live off abundant canned food and wild game, and human culture shifts toward the people you find in anthropology books, hunter-gatherers and horticulturists who have never encountered civilization.

To be fair, I believed this myself until around 2008: that our paleolithic ancestors were an evolutionary attractor, as stable as sharks. Now I think they were a stage in a steady and accelerating movement toward greater social and technological complexity, which has brought changes in human nature. So even after a global hard crash, given all the surviving materials and books, we would rebuild a high-tech society much faster than we did last time.

But just lately, now that I'm thinking in terms of a collective subconscious, I'm wondering if that's what it wants. Maybe part of our motivation to build this world was its novelty. Now if it crashes, we'll be like "been there, done that," and instead of doing the same kind of thing again, we'll turn our big brains to something so different, that when space aliens do it, we see no evidence of their existence.

There's another thing in Earth Abides that never occurred to me: even the survivors of a deep crash might die out from shock, because they just can't wrap their heads around a post-crash world. But in this way, we're much better off than our grandparents, because we've all seen postapocalypse fiction. We'll be like, "This isn't what I expected from playing Fallout or watching The Walking Dead, but it's close enough that I can figure out what to do."

November 1.

2017-11-01T13:10:33Z

November 1. I will probably not be posting again until the middle of next week. Today, a bunch of stray links.

Critical Shower Thoughts is a subreddit for ambitious questions and answers on various political and philosophical subjects.

And a few more from reddit. This comment tells the story of how Keith Jarrett recorded a classic solo piano album when he was forced to adapt to a crappy piano. It reminds me of another musical story, from the PBS Rock and Roll documentary, where some other band found the exact mixing board that New Order used for their landmark hit "Blue Monday", and they expected it to be intuitive and easy to use, but it turned out to be painful and difficult. There's a saying, "Genius emerges from constraint."

An inspiring thread about secret employee nests.

And a more inspiring thread, What's the story about the person you once met in a day and you never saw again, but marked you for the rest of your life?

On the subject of how much room there is for the world to get better, The scientists persuading terrorists to spill their secrets, showing how winning trust works much better than torture. I think the reason there's still so much torture, is that the torturers enjoy it. Also, in a dictatorship, the dictator enjoys the thought that his enemies are suffering -- and in a democracy, sometimes the public enjoys it.

Another example of how much room there is for the world to get better, The Grain That Tastes Like Wheat, but Grows Like a Prairie Grass.

And a great trippy gif, The view from under the tap.