Ran Prieur

March 13.

2019-03-13T13:10:33Z

March 13. Moving from the outer world to the inner world, Against Willpower. The idea is that willpower is a pre-scientific concept, a social invention, that doesn't match what's really going on. But for me, it seems to match pretty closely. I don't feel like going to the gym, or taking the garbage out, or brushing my teeth, but I force myself to do that stuff because I know it's good for me; and if I force myself to do too much stuff that I don't feel like doing, I get burned out.

But when I take a second look at the article, it's completely about negative self-control, blocking yourself from doing stuff you think is bad for you, and not at all about positive self-control, forcing yourself to do stuff you think is good for you. The latter is usually framed as "procrastination", which is stupid. The problem is that there's all this shit we don't feel like doing, and to frame that problem as putting off doing that stuff, is like framing a knee injury as walking with a limp.

Anyway, one useful concept in the article is "intrapersonal bargaining". I would explain it like this: instead of "me" forcing "myself" to do or not do something, there are different voices inside me, with their own personalities and motives, and they need to have conversations and reach consensus about what to do. It's funny, because the phrase "inner peace" is such a cliche that we don't bother to unpack the words, but that's exactly what the words describe: the voices inside us working together instead of fighting. Maybe in some future enlightened age, they'll look back at our concept of "self-control" as a weird symptom of an authoritarian culture.

March 11.

2019-03-11T23:50:54Z

March 11. Two links from the subreddit. Is a Harvard MBA Bad for You? It's becoming more obvious that, not only do people with MBA's make the world generally worse, they're also unhappy. The article blames a deeper cultural shift "towards valuing profits and markets." I think it's something even deeper, but I can't put my finger on it. What have we lost, that we're so receptive to the idea that money is a good measure of value?

And this video, Thief vs AAA gaming, compares a great 1998 PC game with its lame 2014 remake. It's funny because the new game is bad in the same way that our whole society is bad. Instead of being immersed in a story with an unfolding mystery, in which we enjoy the process of growing our understanding, we're just given a bunch of quest markers for a tedious grind.

In my last post I wrote: "The real reason society is going to collapse, is when enough of us sense that we'll be happier living in a much simpler society." But "simpler" isn't the right word. Leigh Ann and I have been playing a really complex board game called Spirit Island. It's much better than a simple board game like Risk.

If a game designer looked at our world, they would see that it's highly complex in a way that's not at all fun. We don't actually want to live in a simple world -- we want to live in a well-designed complex world. But the best path from one complex world to another, is through simplicity, by stripping it down and building something different.

March 7.

2019-03-07T19:10:43Z

March 7. I don't wanna do my video game chores. It's about Red Dead Redemption 2, a new game that's highly rated for its scale and graphics, but a lot of people think it's boring.

I'll probably never play RDR2, but after I thought I was getting bored with all entertainment, Fallout 3 went on sale for $10 at GOG.com, so I started playing, and I love it! Like RDR2, it's a gritty open-world game with lots of quests and weapons. Here's a long video, Fallout 3 Is Better Than You Think.

When you look at discussions about which game in a series is better, like Fallout 3 vs 4 vs New Vegas, or Elder Scrolls Morrowind vs Oblivion vs Skyrim, everyone knows the newer games will have higher resolution graphics, but ultimately nobody cares, because whatever level of graphics the games have, players will get used to it. Instead people talk about things that are harder to quantify, like the feel of the game.

Strangely related: Why So Many Smart People Aren't Happy. The interviewee argues that people are seeking mastery, but they don't know how to measure it, so they fall into measuring it through quantifiable comparisons to other people, like salary, or awards. But those are also the kinds of things where whatever level you're at, you get used to it and aren't any happier than someone at another level. So instead, we should measure success by how much we enjoy what we're doing, and try not to look at the outcome.

You know, that's easy to say if you're already a relatively successful person, who fits well with the dominant culture, and can pick from a broad menu of jobs. I've known basically what kind of life would make me happy since I was 16 and wanted to run off and be a hermit in the mountains of Idaho. The real reason society is going to collapse, is when enough of us sense that we'll be happier living in a much simpler society, even if it's less comfortable.

March 4.

2019-03-04T16:40:04Z

March 4. Major Games Publishers Are Feeling The Impact Of Peaking Attention. "Consumers simply do not have any more free time to allocate to new attention seeking digital entertainment propositions, which means they have to start prioritising between them." The article is focused on the video game industry, but I see this as much bigger. Human attention is the world's most valuable resource, but it's not like oil, where the fields are drying up forever. It's more like farmland, and there's no more room to make new fields. Also, existing fields are getting depleted, as people burn out from all the low-quality demands on their attention. (Related: Let's Destroy Robocalls)

So what's a high-quality demand on your attention? That's for each of us to decide, and it changes with experience. If I had seen today's video games in 1980, I would have thought they could entertain me forever, and now it's hard for me to find anything I even want to play. A week ago I finally quit Ask Reddit, because what I can learn from that crowd, and what they can learn from me, are both approaching zero. About the same time, I wrote this in an email: "I've been meditating a lot more lately, for a strange reason, that I'm getting bored with almost anything else I could do. It's like the mind is a prison, and when you lose interest in all the stuff at the center of the prison, you start looking at the walls."

I see two kinds of walls, one between conscious and subconscious, and one between head and body. I think that's why the basic meditation technique is to focus on your breath, because your breath straddles both boundaries. Related, a long article from Aeon about conscious breathing.

Also, Seven Practical Facts about the Human Brain, including that 80% of signals go from your body to your brain, and only 20% from brain to body.

And an article about intuitive eating, which basically means getting better at sensing what your body needs to eat, instead of trying to force diets on it from your head.

February 28. Loose ends from Monday. It's probably not true that autism is the next stage of humanity, but it is a fun idea. From the other side, this subreddit post suggests that the recent surge in autism/aspergers could be a symptom of human consciousness going out of balance, through technologies that have made us too narrow-focused. I don't think little kids are looking at smartphones and suddenly becoming autistic. It's more like autism has emerged as a message from some hidden level of human identity, reflecting our culture's mental imbalance back at us.

And about my utopian vision of making all necessities free, when I think through the political details, it's completely unrealistic. We're probably going to get an unconditional basic income, maybe in as little as ten years. The corporations need it, so they can continue to sell their products while spending less on labor.

Something cool that might come out of it, is what I'm calling UBI communities. A bunch of people with common interests can sign over their incomes to an organizer, who gets some economy of scale on food and housing, and gives them all stuff to do. I remember visiting the Twin Oaks community in 2005, and my only real complaint was that they worked way more hours than a frugal person in the normal economy. But with everyone contributing their UBI to support the place, that problem goes away.

I've got a sore neck now from the crash, but my brain seems to be already clearing up. Today I put together a new playlist on Spotify, American Indie Rock 1985-1993.