When asked to come up with solutions for crime, those who read the passage with the "beast" metaphor thought that crime should be dealt with by using more punitive solutions. Those who read the passage with the "virus" metaphor thought crime should be dealt with using more reformative measures that addressed the causes of crime.
I'm thinking, who are the storytellers today? Mostly they're advertisers, giant concentrations of money that seek to get even bigger by influencing the way we think without us noticing. There are also pundits with political agendas, and a shrinking number of ethical journalists, and of course the openly fictional stories of movies and TV. Tragically, the most popular stories feature conflicts between cartoonish good and evil.
New subject, The Tyranny of Convenience:
When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more "easy" tasks. At some point, life's defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions. An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is "easy" is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask.
I would make the argument like this: Technology saves time and labor with total indifference to whether we enjoy spending time doing certain things. It assumes that we never do -- that sitting and doing nothing while machines do the thing, is always preferable to doing the thing ourselves. Taken to its logical extreme, the message is that nonexistence is preferable to existence. A milder conclusion would be that everything useful should be done by technology. No wonder more and more people feel that life is meaningless.
The Nomad Who's Exploding the Internet Into Pieces. It's a decentralized social media system called Scuttlebutt, which hopes to solve this problem:
The 20th century saw the rise of intermediation: centralized media systems run by corporations and governments. When the web became popular, it promised disintermediation -- allowing individuals to reach one another directly, without middlemen. But harnessing disintermediation proved hard for ordinary people, and corporations like Google and Facebook discovered they could build huge wealth facilitating those interactions in aggregate.
A month ago, in the context of new evidence of benign ancient civilizations, I wrote: "If our ancestors experimented and found Utopia, how did they lose it? It's suspicious that we have no written record of a non-repressive large scale society. Did the world get fucked up by writing?" This long essay from ten years ago, The Evolution of Transformation, argues that the Greek alphabet changed human consciousness for the worse. It's a nice idea, but if it were true, I would expect China to be a better place to live than Europe.
Japan's Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women, who are shoplifting because they like prison better than the outside. I think this is good news, and I almost envy the lives of Norwegian prisoners. Modern society is already a constructed environment that we're not allowed to leave. Let's look at the sub-prisons for ways to make the big prison better.
Finally, a promising new subreddit, Explain Like Caveman. Right now the questions are mostly about caveman subjects, but I look forward to people trying to explain advanced science and philosophy. Here's my caveman explanation of how a particle accelerator works: "Smash rock, make rock small. Some rock too small for eye, too big for head."]]>...at that age, a lot of "bad" behavior is really just a kid's imperfect way of expressing and processing big, new emotions. When Mr. Rogers knelt down to talk to me, it was the first time any adult had outright acknowledged my feelings, made me feel safe to express them, and made sure I knew that expressing them was okay.