Ran Prieur

March 19.

2020-03-19T19:50:11Z

March 19. Over on the Weird Collapse subreddit, there's a nice quarantine open thread. Yesterday I had time to lay in the grass by the river for almost an hour. I'm sure that extroverted go-getters are going crazy, but this is like utopia for lazy introverts.

A thread on the psychonaut subreddit, The corona-pandemic is like a psychedelic experience for globalized society. History might look back at this as the time when humanity turned inward and reconsidered its values.

Some doom. Are hospitals near me ready for Coronavirus? Here are nine different scenarios. Six of them are pretty bad.

And some good news. Coronavirus has caused a bicycling boom in New York City. On the trails where I walk, I'm seeing more people mid-week in March than I usually see on summer weekends.

As toilet paper flies off shelves, bidet sales go boom-boom. I've been using a $30 bidet for several years now. Think of it this way: if your hands were covered in poop, would they be cleaner after spraying them with a jet of water, or wiping them with toilet paper?

And (thanks Tom) As Italy quarantines, swans and dolphins appear in Venice canals.

March 18.

2020-03-18T18:40:20Z

March 18. Just five days ago I was thinking this was the "raise awareness" virus, which would "immunize" society against something worse in the future. Now I think this is it, the big one.

To measure how dangerous a contagious disease is, there are three important numbers. First is how easily it moves from person to person, which is about average for Coronavirus, not as high as smallpox (source). Second is the death rate -- not the actual death rate, but the hypothetical death rate in the absence of hospitalization. Because after the hospitals fill up, that's the number you're looking at. For Coronavirus, that's 10-20%, at least a hundred times worse than normal flu.

Third is the percentage of the infected who get such mild symptoms that they go about their lives normally. That's also unusually high, maybe 40%. I can't think of any disease in history that's as high as Coronavirus in the mild symptoms rate and the death-without-hospitalization rate.

I still don't think it's a threat to civilization. The most important thing is to keep everyone fed. The danger is not just starvation -- all kinds of violence are strongly correlated with people not having enough to eat. The unsung heroes of this crisis are supermarket cashiers.

March 17.

2020-03-17T17:30:45Z

March 17. We all come at new events with pre-existing filters and biases. One of mine is that modern culture overvalues quantity of life relative to quality of life. So when changes are made in the name of prolonging saving lives, especially when it gives more power to central authorities, my first instinct is to take the other side.

In this case, when you crunch the numbers, heavy quarantine does turn out to be the right move, mainly because the death rate in the absence of hospitalization is way higher than 1%, high enough to still crash the economy.

I expect, when the number of infections and deaths starts to decline, quarantines will be eased. From the article: "We are looking at these social curbs through to July or August - and even when the brakes are taken off, they may have to be slammed back on again." The 1918 Spanish flu came in three waves, and the second was the worst.

Ideally we'll find the right balance, where just enough people are getting sick that the medical system isn't overwhelmed. But at that rate, it will take years for most of us to get immune. Probably, the only way for life to go back to normal is several billion vaccinations, which according to this article, will take "at least a year to 18 months."

We can use math to predict what a disease is going to do. The economic effects of a prolonged shutdown are harder to model, and the social changes are so complex that we'll probably only understand them in hindsight.

March 16.

2020-03-16T16:21:33Z

March 16. Yeah, my post from this morning is probably wrong. From a reader email:

The death rate depends heavily on availability of fairly sophisticated medical care. 10-20% of patients get very sick and need medical support. 5% are critically ill and need ICU care in order to pull through. So if the virus is allowed to "pass through us" without social distancing, quarantines and lockdowns, what you naturally end up with is a huge number of severe cases hitting the hospitals in a short period. Where those medical systems are strained to breaking, you can assume the death rate would be at least 5% and could potentially get as high as 10-15%

I saw a study, among Americans, that my "let it ride" attitude is typical among Republicans, while Democrats want to make any sacrifice to save any life. Which is ironic, because it's mostly old people, who mostly vote Republican, who are in danger.

March 16.

2020-03-16T16:20:16Z

March 16. Finally I'm afraid -- not of coronavirus, but of such a heavy quarantine that it's illegal to go for a walk. Some places have already done it.

You'd think a few countries would say fuck it, we're going to live our normal lives, let the virus pass through us, and move on. Instead, every country in the world has chosen to carry the maximum number of survivors through economic collapse.

People are saying this is a war. But in what kind of war do you lock down your entire army, and burn through its supplies, to prevent 1% of the troops from dying? A war against death, the one enemy we can never defeat.

When I think of my own death, or the deaths of people I know, or don't know, it feels like getting off work early. Being alive is a heavy burden. What keeps me going is, first, that certain moments make it all worthwhile. Also, I don't want to let down the people who depend on me, the same reason workers at crappy jobs still try to do the jobs well.

I just finished the Philip K Dick novel We Can Build You. The first half is good sci-fi, and the second half is about the narrator's descent into insanity. At the end, he goes to a mental institution, and they cure him with strong psychedelics, under which he lives fragments of an entire imaginary life.

I think that's what this is. This world is a mental hospital that reflects our own insanity back at us. If we die, the one part of us that has to survive, is the part that's out of balance, to move on to the next cure.

March 14.

2020-03-14T14:00:30Z

March 14. Yesterday I did some apocalypse scouting. I walked around Wal-Mart, not looking for products, but looking for empty shelves, and reading them to see what they used to hold. By now everyone knows that the first thing off the shelves is toilet paper. Also paper towels, and of course disinfecting wipes. The emptiest food shelves were all starchy staples: flour, pasta, and rice. I'm impressed that the flour was gone. That means people still know how to bake.

Good interview, The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming. He backs up my initial hunch, that we could be playing whack-a-mole with coronavirus all summer, and it will rise again in next winter's flu season.

Everyone seems to be assuming this will be over in six weeks. Maybe I'm missing something, but I see only three ways for life to go back to normal. 1) Manufacture and distribute fifty billion test kits, enough for most people in the world to test themselves multiple times. 2) Make a vaccine and give it to most of the world. 3) Most of the people in the world get coronavirus, and thus become immune.

I don't see any of these happening soon. Another thing the interview mentions is that the virus is likely to mutate. If it becomes more deadly, it will be less transmissible. If it becomes less deadly, it could stay around as part of the background.

March 13.

2020-03-13T13:50:13Z

March 13. In this cartoon, Coronavirus, Spanish Flu, and Black Death are sitting in a bar. Coronavirus says, "My vision is not to kill people, per se, but to raise awareness around access to public health." Black Death says, "Fucking millennials."

For the last few years I've been thinking that pandemics are no longer a threat. Now that we understand how disease works, have instant global communication, and the political tools to impose quarantine, nothing bad will escape containment. I was wrong because I failed to consider political factors.

But now I'm even more certain that pandemics are no longer an existential threat to civilization. Coronavirus will take its one percent, and the global health system will be "immunized", and deal more skillfully with the next virus.

Why has the USA been less competent against coronavirus than the rest of the first world? Because we've been so prosperous and powerful, for so long, that we've become insulated from the consequences of our own stupidity. America has been able to build levels of stupidity that other countries can only dream of.

After yesterday's post, I've been thinking about cults. A cult is a social organism that looks primarily inward, at its own value system and its own model of reality. A cult looks outward through a heavy filter, designed and tested to maintain internal coherence.

Postapocalypse fiction is full of cults. I think they've got it backwards. Cults are a pre-apocalypse phenomenon. They thrive in societies that 1) are prosperous enough that people can afford to distort reality, and 2) fail to make people feel like they belong.

If we ever get a hard crash, the social groups that survive will be pragmatic. They might be violent gangs, but they'll be violent gangs with a realistic understanding of the world they live in.

March 12.

2020-03-12T12:40:20Z

March 12. This is a simplification: there are two kinds of intelligence. You could call them "people" intelligence and "thing" intelligence, but I want to call them in-human and out-human intelligence, where in-human is the human social world, and out-human is everything else -- including human biology.

I'm framing it this way because our culture tells us that social intelligence is good, and everything else is less good -- but the more power the human social world has over everything else, the more the human social world becomes a bubble, defined by its ignorance.

To get power in the human social world, in-human intelligence is necessary, and the more power humans have over non-humans, the less necessary it is to have any other kind of intelligence.

Power corrupts on the level of attention: we use power to not have to give attention to what makes us uncomfortable.

Trump's first reaction to coronavirus was to call it a hoax: he was interpreting an uncomfortable threat, from outside the human world, as a comfortable threat from within it. The first reaction of Chinese power-holders was exactly the same. When medical workers tried to warn the public, they were punished for "rumors", and the virus spread unchecked for three weeks.

Trump's latest take on coronavirus is to frame it as a foreign invasion. That's why he's banned travel to the USA from everywhere except the UK, the nation most culturally similar to us. It's ridiculous, but it makes sense if Trump is simply unable to wrap his head around anything outside the human social realm. You live by the bubble, you die by the bubble.

The good news is that coronavirus, and at a slower pace, climate change, are revealing the limitations of in-human thinking, and giving leverage to out-human thinkers, to bring human cognition into balance.

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.