Ran Prieur

March 11.

2020-03-11T23:30:38Z

March 11. It's an axiom of military history that every war is fought like the previous war -- at least by the losers. We're fighting coronavirus like SARS, which had around a 10% mortality rate, and was somewhat contagious. Coronavirus has maybe a 1% mortality rate, and is extremely contagious.

If coronavirus can't be contained, then hard decisions have to be made about how to moderate its inevitable passage through the global population. Maybe these decisions are being made, behind the scenes, competently. But I doubt it. What I see is hopeful panic: bring the hammer down on the most obvious vectors for transmission, and pretend it will all be over in a few months.

The new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, has been postponed until November, when coronavirus is likely to be ramping up for the deadliest flu season since 1918. Sports are being played in empty stadiums, which only makes sense for a short time, and as the lost revenue piles up, I expect team owners to call for cancellation of entire seasons.

If there's already something wrong with your lungs, or your immune system, then the media is giving you the right message: avoid infection at all costs. But if you're healthy, getting sick is probably your second biggest problem, after where your money is going to come from, when all human activities that require a bunch of people to be in the same place, are shut down for months or years.

March 10.

2020-03-10T22:20:05Z

March 10. When you catch a virus, your symptoms don't come from the virus, but from your body's attempts to fight it. The same thing is happening to the global economy.

If we decided to do nothing to stop coronavirus, it would run its course in a few months. There would be a big strain on industries that deal with sick people and dead bodies, but for civilization as a whole, it would just be a bump in the road.

By trying really hard to stop it, we've probably already done more economic damage than an unchecked coronavirus would do in its entire run. And we're just getting started.

I'm not complaining. The economy is mostly bullshit. But I'm curious how deep this is going to go, how many things we're about to lose, that will not come back.

March 9.

2020-03-09T21:10:50Z

March 9. On a loose end from the last post, there are two ways to slow down audio. The way that I used is like changing the speed on a record player, so as it gets slower, the pitch drops. Another example (thanks Gabriel) is Chipmunks On 16 Speed. The other way, which is more technically difficult, is to slow the sound while keeping the pitch the same. A popular reduction factor is "800% slower", which offends my sense of math. I would call it one eighth speed, or 12.5%. Anyway, at that tempo, everything sounds like ambient music, sometimes really good ambient music, like Radiohead's Pyramid Song or The Price is Right Theme.

New subject, but still audio: a smart essay from last month, The Other as Noise. It's about misophonia, a mental disorder where people find certain sounds, typically repetitive sounds of other people doing normal things, unbearable. The author speculates that it's "an emergent characteristic of a society supported by a phone-driven individual-centric infosphere that is itself split into bubbles."

Personally I have the opposite problem. I'm so good at tuning things out, that I get in trouble for not noticing things I'm supposed to notice. The way other people get absorbed in their phones, I can get absorbed in my own head.

It's funny, you'd think I'd be a talented head-tripper on psychedelics, but it turns out I get much milder internal effects than other people on the same dose. Then I go outside, and my mind gets blown by trees. I don't want to to call it "nature". There's the human-made world, and the non-human-made world. I'm getting burned out on the former, while the latter keeps looking more impressive.

I can also report a minor breakthrough in meditation. Eastern ways aren't always better than western ways, even in meditation, but in this case they are: A reader cites John Michael Greer, that "western traditions of meditation focus on the willpower, while the eastern focus on emptiness." So lately, instead of trying to hold a border wall against thoughts, one breath at a time, I just try to repeatedly create emptiness in there, and it works. I don't even have to focus on my breath, because if I do a good job of generating emptiness, the breath is the only thing left.

I've also been trying to put my attention on my body for at least an hour a day, which doesn't sound like much, but it's a lot for this culture. In some ancient and indigenous languages, there is no word for body, presumably because the self is the body.

March 6.

2020-03-06T18:40:00Z

March 6. I just made a video. Wednesday on college radio I heard the song: "International Dateline" by Ladytron (2005). Thursday night, becoming obsessed, I slowed it down to try to get all the lyrics. It occurred to me that it might sound better slow, so I put it into Audacity, and applied the change speed effect, 50%. The sound called for more doom, so I added distortion.

At this point I was pretty high, and decided it was possibly the third greatest song of all time, and it needed a video. So I started clicking through my "colorscapes" folder, mostly stuff from the imaginary colorscapes subreddit, going slow to fit the beat. It often happens, at the beginning of a project, that I'm really lucky. The images were in random order, but some of them perfectly fit the parts of the song where I happened to view them.

It usually happens, partway through a project, that things stop falling into place, and I have to grind it out. The song goes on a long time, and I didn't have enough good images. So the biggest part of the job was surfing google images, and clicking through various subreddits, to find more images, and then getting them in the right order. I tracked down artists with reverse image search, and looked through their galleries, and it's strange how often the artist had only that one image that I really liked. After that, I used paint.net to shrink, frame, stretch, or cut the images to make them all 1280x720, loaded them in the Windows video editor, and went through several times listening to the transitions, to give them all the right number of seconds.

It sounds better loud: Ladytron - International Dateline (doom edit)

March 5.

2020-03-05T17:31:53Z

March 5. Update on subreddits. The ranprieur subreddit is working again. According to this comment, reddit suspended it because someone was linking to sites that sold psychedelics.

Anyway, now we also have the weird collapse subreddit. That subreddit's founder writes, in this thread: "I think the best way to handle it is that people may post Ran content over here if they'd like, but r/ranprieur one should be the go-to as the 'comment section' for Ran's writing." I would be okay with just having r/weirdcollapse, but for now I'll continue to check both subreddits and see how it shakes out.

March 5.

2020-03-05T17:30:03Z

March 5. In postapocalypse fiction, the death rate is always around 99.99 percent. To find out how many people are left in a place, take off four zeros. I'm guessing that number of survivors comes from our ancestral memory, or our biology, in which we lived for all of prehistory at about that population density.

Coronavirus death rates are being estimated at anywhere from half a percent to 3.4 percent. The problem is that people who get a mild case are invisible to the medical system. That's also why it's probably not containable. But suppose it ends up at two percent. That's 20,000 in a city of a million, or one square out of a 7x7 grid.

Honestly, I feel in more danger of dying every time I drive a car. What I'm more worried about is that supermarkets will close, or supply chains will be disrupted by quarantines, and we won't be able to buy food. So yesterday I went out and stocked up on staples: dry beans and rice, potatoes and butter, flour and nuts. Also, If I get the virus, I want to be able to comfortably stay home for a couple weeks.

By the way, Snopes says it's false that the coronavirus wrecked sales of Corona beer, so score one for humans not being completely irrational.

In other news, over on the new subreddit, someone made a really ambitious post, the book of the living, a seamless compilation of inspirational quotes, with references. I've done something similar with my quotes page.

March 3.

2020-03-03T15:10:04Z

March 3. So, coronavirus. This article, You're Likely to Get the Coronavirus, explains how it hits the sweet spot for pandemics: mild enough to escape containment, but still 20 times deadlier than the flu.

But I want to go back to this article, also from the Atlantic, Coronavirus and the Blindness of Authoritarianism. Back in December, Chinese medical workers tried to warn the public, they were punished for "rumors", and the virus was allowed to spread unchecked for another three weeks.

I don't think the west is immune from this. It's what we call "politics", as in, "I hate all the politics at my workplace." Politics is like corruption, in that individuals are putting themselves ahead of the common good, but it's milder. Corruption is when individuals are cynical about the system, and break the rules to increase their wealth and power. Politics is when individuals believe in the system, and work within the rules to preserve their status.

You can't stop politics with surveillance. In some future pseudo-utopia, there may be no corruption at all, and politics brings the whole thing down. Like coronavirus, its mildness makes it more dangerous.

I've been watching the TV show Hunters. It's about Nazi hunters, but it's set in a comic book alternate universe where ex-Nazis, decades after the war, are still fanatical ideologues plotting to exterminate Jews. In Hollywood, everything that's wrong with the world is caused by Voldemorts.

In real life, there are no Voldemorts, and most of what's wrong with the world is caused by Ron Weasleys: large groups of nice people who veer off into terrible behaviors because they want to be liked, and feel good about themselves.

Going back to this post about individuals as neurons in social brains, I think the quality of individuals that makes a society healthy, is not empathy, or competence, but the ability to tolerate discomfort: to listen to things that make you uncomfortable, and say things that make others uncomfortable.

In our culture, are we getting better at that skill, or worse?

March 1.

2020-03-01T13:50:09Z

March 1. The weird collapse subreddit is off to a good start. Here's a breaking the ice thread.

Yesterday, leap year day, I took my first serious dose of mushrooms, five dry grams on an empty stomach, in late morning, in quiet darkness. Even on smaller doses, I find that quiet darkness is necessary, because the mushroom launch is so challenging. An LSD launch is a tease, with everything gradually getting more interesting -- but mushrooms are a gut punch. You're nauseated and tiny stimuli are overwhelming.

The peak was underwhelming. I didn't encounter any entities, I got nowhere near ego death, and I didn't even hallucinate, beyond snatches of involuntary daydreaming. At the edge of sleep, I asked the mushrooms to heal my anxiety, a realistic request, and they told me I must carry my anxiety with me, as a fish habitat.

Finally I got tired of lying in bed, vaped some weed, and went outside. That's when it got good. Mushrooms and LSD both enhance nature, but the aesthetics are completely different. On LSD, nature is heaven -- gnatclouds are companies of angels, everything looks like Dr Seuss, I'm walking on the sun.

On mushrooms, I'm walking on the moon. Terence McKenna uses the word "peculiar", which is the best word, but still doesn't describe it. Shapes are crystalline and sophisticated. Nature is fairyland, and trees are literal fairies. I could sense their personalities: stodgy pines, surly willows, elegant aspens. Not only is every tree a person, but every branch of every tree is a person. Whatever you're looking at is completely important -- but also completely unimportant, because if a branch dies, that life just moves to somewhere equally good.

I wonder how subjective this is, or how suggestible. If I say, LSD is like this video, and mushrooms are like this video, other people might say, "Yes, I've noticed that too," or, "I didn't notice that until you said it," or, "No, for me it's completely different."

I read about a study, maybe in 90's, of groups of friends in high school. They found wide differences, within groups, of every variable except one: kids in the same group all used the same drugs. Now I'm wondering, in the future when psychedelics are normal, if humans will form tribes based on shared psychedelic experiences.