Ran Prieur

December 27.

2017-12-27T15:10:36Z

December 27. Like everyone else, I feel like I'm on vacation this week, so I'll just post some links:

In Japan, Small Children Take the Subway and Run Errands Alone. It's because their culture is built on greater trust, and also greater responsibility toward strangers and shared spaces.

Also from Citylab, The Backlash Against Piped Music. It turns out that more people prefer quiet in public spaces, but businesses are slow to adapt.

Philosophy Needs a New Definition. This is not controversial, but it's a nice argument for a particular case of a general truth: that the academic world is too clean and cautious, and anything really valuable is going to be messy.

The Case Against Reading Everything. The point is, advice for writers is never universally helpful, and even though everyone says to read widely, some writers will do better getting obsessed with one thing. This is also true for other kinds of creative work: Jeff Mangum, when he was doing his best stuff with Neutral Milk Hotel, said that he barely even listened to music other than Robert Wyatt.

December 25.

2017-12-25T13:50:53Z

December 25. It's funny that I was just writing about the power of intentional badness, because it's time for my Christmas tradition: posting The Abominable O Holy Night. The singer, Steve Mauldin, was consciously imitating mistakes he'd heard from bad singers, and on top of that, no song inspires singers to really let go like O Holy Night. Check out this O Holy Night Metal Cover that Gene posted to the subreddit.

This new subreddit thread has some great comments about how different we all are in levels of perception and skill: some people can see colors 100 times better than other people, and olympic athletes have won gold medals with less than 30 hours of practice.

I have a terrible ear for pitch -- when I started playing guitar as a teenager, I could barely tell that notes a half step apart were even different. But I believe I have a good ear for timbre, for the quality of vibration that makes, say, a trumpet and an electric guitar sound different playing the same note. Talent is when you don't understand why everyone else is bad at something, and I don't understand why no one else can hear that Joanna Newsom does something with her voice on The Milk-Eyed Mender that she has not done on any other recording.

As a listener, for the last five years I've been chasing sounds that are increasingly raw and weird, and in my own creative work, this year I wrote a novel that went so hard into my own personal taste that no one else might ever get it. Will this become more common? Lukey's comment mentions "the frontiers of human potential," and I wonder if the long tail of new technology is encouraging those frontiers to spread in a greater number of more unusual directions.

December 23.

2017-12-23T23:30:38Z

December 23. I want to take another shot at yesterday's subject, because if you don't read the linked article or read the post carefully, it sounds like I'm talking about jobs, about a world where people live for work that's obviously work.

That's not it at all. It's about a culture where the mindset of work has swallowed every activity, so even if you're unemployed, or on vacation, or playing with your kids, you're still thinking, "What's the right way to do this?" or "How is this an investment in a better future?" or "If I post this on social media, how will people judge me?" Even if an unconditional basic income leads to a 100% leisure utopia, we might still not know how to have fun.

Again, in this comment thread, you can see the tension between creativity that is done for some benefit and feels like a chore, and creativity that's so intrinsically enjoyable that it doesn't have to lead to anything.

As I say in my own comment, that's not easy. Apart from any technical skill, you need the psychological skill of letting go. I've seen this advice for fiction writers: that if you're having trouble getting started, try writing something intentionally bad. It works because objective quality is oppressive, it's about what you should do and not what you feel like doing, and willful badness breaks you from that hold and opens exciting doorways. But then you have to keep going, to stay in that unconstrained mindspace, step after step, without falling down.

That's also the right way to live -- but in life, intentional badness can be severely punished, so it's that much harder to break the hold of always doing the right thing. It seems to be especially hard right now, with both the left and right stacking up rules and punishments, and with the tech world making more paths that start out fun but trap your mind.

December 22.

2017-12-22T22:20:02Z

December 22. A link from the subreddit, If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living? The author argues that total work, a dystopian thought experiment, "is unmistakably close to our own world." We're always doing stuff because it's useful or productive, even play becomes a task, and "there is concomitantly the looming question: Is this the best use of my time?"

I think the author himself is caught in this trap, because his description of the world inside the trap is detailed and spot-on, while his description of the world outside the trap, in the final paragraph, is insipid and unhelpful, as if he's never been there and doesn't know the way. To be fair, it's the hardest problem in modern life. Obviously it starts with letting go of expectations and just doing what feels good in the moment. But that path is also full of traps, and technology keeps creating more of them.

This subject reminds me of a saying from Buddhism: "It takes 20 years to become enlightened -- or if you really push it, 30 years."

Related: a thread on the subreddit, Is anyone here compelled to be creative even if there's no audience? The comments show that even creativity is hard to pull from the realm of work into the realm of fun.

December 19.

2017-12-19T19:50:37Z

December 19. Another good post by Accountt1234, just cross-posted to the subreddit: Sowing the right seeds.

I'm not in the mood for big ideas this week, so I'll write about some personal stuff. For more than a year I've felt, off and on, like life is an uphill struggle, like I'm washing an endless sink of dirty dishes and can never get in the flow. I thought it might be cannabis withdrawal, but other people who report that symptom have been smoking massive amounts for years, not vaping a thimbleful over three days. And a seven week break this summer didn't fix it.

Now I think it has something to do with dopamine. Since I slashed internet use, I haven't had a bad episode. It's not just that I'm spending less time online -- I'm also trying to notice when I'm about to click a link or a bookmark in anticipation of a reward, and catching myself, and not clicking it.

I'm also trying to move some of my attention from my head to my body. I've never had much "gut" intelligence, and it occurs to me, developing it might be as simple as literally focusing my attention on my gut. So I've been trying that, and I've also been working with a balance board.

The balance board turns out to be a great metaphor for something much harder. I'm working toward following this rule: Never get emotionally invested in anything happening on a screen. So I was watching a football game, and trying to not care which side was winning, and it's exactly like trying not to lean the board on one edge or the other. The funny thing is, sports announcers always keep this balance, but viewers almost never keep it, even though they have the constant example of the announcers.

December 15.

2017-12-15T15:10:38Z

December 15. For the weekend, some happy links, and like the negative links I posted last week, many of these came from No Tech Magazine.

Non-Electric Hearing Aids Outperform Modern Devices, partly because other people can see the device, so they know to talk more clearly. I wonder if there's a lesson here for other ways that people try to hide their weaknesses. Now I'm imagining walking around with a Subtextotron, which converts subtle hints into clear language, and everyone would be objecting, "That wasn't what I meant!"

The Human Power Plant is a working prototype of an exercise machine that generates and stores hydro-pneumatic energy.

How to Build a City That Doesn't Flood? Turn it Into a Sponge, with stuff like permeable pavement, bioswales, and forest restoration. Related: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

Fun reddit thread: You've got exactly 60 seconds to come up with a movie plot, what comes to your mind?

The Ornamental Hermit: A Real Person Paid to Dress like a Druid. With a few changes, like being allowed to trim my nails, this would be my dream job: to hang out in a rustic cabin and entertain guests who expect weirdness.

And a funny video, made to look like one of those pharmaceutical commercials, but it's for Cannabis Delivery.

December 13.

2017-12-13T13:50:56Z

December 13. On the subreddit a reader just posted something I wrote six years ago, about high-tech artificial worlds and what they contribute to the world that contains them. I started a comment there which I'll expand into today's post: my latest thought is that the internet is the matrix. We're seeing what really happens in the early stages of the creation of a global artificial reality.

Fifteen years ago, the internet was the most amazing thing ever. Since then it has been improved into a clunky mess of addictive traps, annoying distractions, and seductive lies. It's getting harder to use the internet in a way that makes life better, but now it's almost impossible to live without it.

What went wrong? The behavior of any subworld is shaped by the values of the containing world, and human society does not hold up human improvement as its highest goal, or even human happiness. Its highest goal is the leveraging of power into more power. So increasingly that's what the internet is being used for.

This is oddly related to all the sexual assault stuff that's coming out, because that's a reason to seek power, to make powerless people do sexual stuff they'd rather not do. Somewhere someone is thinking, "Damn, if powerful people have to follow the same sex rules as losers now, what's even the point?"

My utopian vision is to shine the light way beyond sexual assault, eventually at everything we don't feel like doing but some authority commands it. When power no longer enables coercion, then it's no longer power as we know it, only responsibility, and only the best people will seek it. (That's how we fix personal power, but institutional power is a harder problem.)

December 11.

2017-12-11T23:30:06Z

December 11. Continuing on the subject of antisocial media, we're all in a war for attention, and I've been seeing it from the perspective of a content creator: there are all these abstract messages, competing for views from disconnected eyes. Readers remind me of the view from the other side: those eyes are people with social needs. We have a biological expectation of sitting around a campfire with friends and family, and the attention you get from other people is what makes you feel valuable and real.

The digital campfire seems much improved. You can share more exciting stuff, faster, to more people, anywhere. But this bandwidth is bottlenecked by the same human biology. The dizzying spectacle becomes the new baseline, and we're no happier. The medium is infested with parasitic robots, so less human attention gets through to actual humans, who have some sense of the quantity of attention they're getting, but no sense of the quality.

Even if you get face to face with people, you're competing with their phones -- and they're competing with yours -- because what's on the phone really is more interesting.

I'm not sure how we'll get out of this trap as a society, but as an individual, you get out of it through a commitment to going into boredom and out the other side. I just read this in an email: "It's crazy that when I am not on my computer, I find myself doing creative projects out of boredom. I think that's how it is supposed to work!"

And another line from my weed journal: "When you burn out looking for beauty in beautiful things, look for beauty in ugly things."

December 8.

2017-12-08T20:00:38Z

December 8. When I was in high school and college, back in the 1980's, I don't think I even once heard the words "social anxiety". I mean it existed, but it wasn't enough of a problem that ordinary people gave it a name. Now it's everywhere, and I don't think it's limited to the millennial generation, because I've got it too, and worse than when I was younger. So where does it come from?

Yesterday, cog-boosted by cannabis, I wrote this: "Does the internet cause anxiety by normalizing a socially easier simworld?" In more words: The internet is an unprecedented global artificial world (I call it Internesia) in which social behavior has looser rules and less serious consequences than the world of modern society. If you're at a job interview, or at a party, or even just going to the store, the rules are tighter and the stakes are higher than when you're goofing off anonymously in some comment thread.

So what happens to someone who spends more time on the internet than out in society? The easier world becomes the new baseline, and what used to be the normal world now feels difficult and frightening. As the social internet grows, this happens to more and more people.

Notice that I haven't used the word "real", because even before computers our world was already unreal. If we avoid social interaction for being difficult and frightening, then why do we embrace the danger of something like rock climbing? Because it's a better fit for our bodies and minds than the nightmare of modernity. It used to be rare for teenagers to cut themselves, and now it's almost normal, because the pain of our culture has wandered so far from human nature that the pain of drawing blood feels comforting. It's a cliche now that Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right, but I think the guy who really nailed it was Kafka.

Anyway, I'm so serious about this that I've decided to slash my internet time, especially Reddit, which might reduce my posting.

December 6.

2017-12-06T18:40:05Z

December 6. It's been a while since I posted a bunch of links about what's wrong with the world. This article from the Guardian has a lot more about last week's subject: 'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. There's some good stuff about how the atmosphere of competing for scarce attention has made politics shallower and more impulsive. Also, I trimmed this bit from the original URL: "?CMP=share_btn_fb"

Related: an abstract of a scientific article, The influence of the number of toys in the environment on toddlers' play. Unsurprisingly, "an abundance of toys present reduced quality of toddlers' play," and "fewer toys at once may help toddlers to focus better and play more creatively." Obviously this is also true for adults.

Another long one from the Guardian, sent by a reader, From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over. It covers the whole 20th century, and ten years ago my take would have been, "Look at all the ways that evil corporations have tried to trick their workers." Now I'm thinking, look at all the ways that well-meaning humans have tried to make a better world, but it remains impossible in a social mechanism that puts profit first.

From Reddit, a good rant against suburbs, arguing that bad urban design has poisoned American culture and politics.

The Switch to Outdoor LED Lighting Has Completely Backfired. Instead of reducing energy consumption, cities are burning the same amount of energy to create more light pollution.

Related, and written with spirit: Bitcoin = Death Processors. The rules for generating bitcoins make it increasingly difficult and expensive, proportional to computers getting more powerful, so that more and more real resources go into something completely imaginary and useless. It reminds me of one of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books, where Earth's first humans used leaves as currency, and then to make their value meaningful, they burned the forests.

December 4.

2017-12-04T16:20:49Z

December 4. No ideas today, so here are three old Ask Reddit threads on the same subject. This fascinates me because I have low intuitive intelligence and I'm envious.

Have you ever had a gut feeling that something was bad so you left, only to find out that something bad actually did happen?

Have you ever had a "something isn't right" feeling, and you were right?

What's the craziest gut feeling you have ever had that actually became true?

December 1.

2017-12-01T13:50:53Z

December 1. Drugs and music for the weekend. Brazil Is Giving Prisoners Ayahuasca as Part of Rehabilitation.

I meant to post this a long time ago and forgot: What Science Says To Do If Your Loved One Has An Opioid Addiction.

With music, as a general rule, back in the classic rock era the good stuff was popular, and in this century the good stuff is obscure. But there are exceptions. From 1971, with 44k YouTube views, Exuma - 22nd Century. From 1975, with 14k views, Big Star - Kangaroo. And from 1968, with under 3000 views between this and another video, The Turtles - Can't You Hear The Cows?

And three great somewhat popular songs, all from 2006: Band of Horses - The Funeral, and The Black Angels - Young Men Dead, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Cheated Hearts.