Ran Prieur

July 23.

2020-07-23T23:10:05Z

July 23. And some optimistic links. More precisely, the category is how much room humans have to do things better.

Olalekan Jeyifous Is Imagining an Afrofuturist Brooklyn. These images are awesome. I would call it ecofuturism, but it's interesting that Africa seems to be on the cutting edge of making the human-made world more like the non-human-made world.

Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts, by stabilizing the unstable energy that comes from windfarms.

Spreading rock dust on fields could remove vast amounts of CO2 from air. It's also good for the soil, and cheaper than other carbon sink strategies.

Reinventing the brick (thanks Stephen). These new bricks are made out of construction waste, with a much smaller ecological footprint than regular bricks.

And an article about Eugene, Oregon replacing some cops with medics and mental health workers, more than 30 years ago.

July 20.

2020-07-20T20:40:28Z

July 20. Still feeling dumb this week. It's probably the heat. Here are all the negative links I've been saving up.

Jamie Loftus, the Comedian Who Infiltrated Mensa:

Loftus attributes Firehouse's far-right politics to Mensa's toxic belief in a fixed intellectual hierarchy. "There is no overstating what community can do for someone who, as many members described to me, feel like misfits in their everyday lives and want to belong somewhere. A society with murky goals whose selling point is superiority is not a healthy place to find it."

Related: Beware of Being Right:

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong in some respect.

Reddit thread, What is something that's considered normal today but is actually a successful propaganda made by corporations? And a comment on why targeted advertising is bad.

A critique of efficiency, which in practice is making our lives worse so that money can concentrate itself better.

The abstract of a paper, The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration. You guessed it, the more expensive the wedding, the shorter the marriage.

Finally, a dark reddit thread, What the fastest way you've seen someone ruin their life?

July 17.

2020-07-17T17:10:12Z

July 17. I've been dull-headed and busy this week, but I have more thoughts on the subconscious. Thanks Matt for inspiring this dystopian thought experiment: what if lie detectors got really good, and we used them all the time?

The techno-optimist first thought is, all the truth would be brought to the surface. But the machines that we now call "lie detectors" don't detect truth. They don't even detect lies. They're tools of intimidation that detect the fear of getting caught.

The way to beat lie detectors, which we're already really good at, is self-deception: to completely believe whatever you're saying.

Then where does the truth go? It gets buried in the subconscious. So the effect of widespread and strong "lie detection" would be the shrinking of the conscious mind. Any part of your identity that you would get in trouble for, would have to be hidden, leaving your surface mind sincere and clueless, walled off from the truth.

But this has already happened. The mechanism is inside us: that if there's something too socially unacceptable, we find it easier to just never look at it, than to look at it and keep it in balance with our public self.

I think the subconscious is totally conscious. That's why nobody says, "and then I became gay." They say, "and then I found out I was gay all along." It's right there, it's you, but "you" don't notice it.

In Freudian terms, you are the id, and "you" are the superego, a personality module for getting along socially, which has taken over the whole self. Expanding the self is hard. You can't tame the id, but you can train your moment-to-moment attention to ride it. And it's good to assume there's always more.

July 14.

2020-07-14T14:40:12Z

July 14. A short comment thread on Tulpas and the illusion of conscious unity, including a cool story where MakeTotalDestr0i was alone for six months and had complex people appear in his head.

And from this thread, a quote from Carl Jung, who was way ahead of us in figuring this stuff out:

The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor's consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.

July 13.

2020-07-13T13:30:56Z

July 13. I want to go back to Tulpas. I've always seen the word used for an occult entity, something like a poltergeist or a minor genie, that does stuff out in the world to serve its human creator, but has a mind of its own. The newer meaning is for something that remains completely inside your head. So it's in the same territory as imaginary friends or multiple personalities, but it's done with full intention by sane adults.

My crazy thought is, what if this becomes a long-term trend? What if it's the next stage of human cultural evolution? By 2100, most people will have two or three Tulpas, and you'll introduce them whenever you meet someone. There will be classes on how to make them, and bestsellers on how to switch your mind from one to another to do different tasks.

Looking back at history, they'll say that Tulpas were there all along. They'll bring in Julian Jaynes and say that in ancient times we took them for gods. Then we buried them in the subconscious, where they often became evil and drove wars and genocides. In the 20th century, when they started to come out in the open, they appeared as mental illness, but now that we know how to work with them, they're mostly benign and helpful.

I love the niceness of the Tulpa community, but I think they're underestimating the dangers. Here's a good comment, from the Psychonaut subreddit, on the spirit world. You can take it all as metaphorical if you want, but the idea is that letting entities inside you is serious, and should be done with great care.

July 10.

2020-07-10T22:00:38Z

July 10. Ennio Morricone died this week. Despite his long career, he is rightly best known for his early soundtracks to Sergio Leone westerns. The scene in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, where Tuco runs through the cemetery to Ecstasy of Gold, is my favorite scene in all of film, but the music is more epic in the final shootout, The Trio. Both scenes are music videos, because Leone had Morricone compose the music first, and then shot the scenes to fit.

Demystifying Science is a great blog that I've just discovered. This post is a solid critique of the Big Bang, and this post on the Endocannabinoid System has valuable advice for stoners: that CBD, while it has no mental effects by itself, "appears to provide overt medical benefits and balances the negative effects of THC."

This reddit thread may help your mental health. If you had a friend who spoke to you in the same way that you sometimes speak to yourself, how long would you allow this person to be your friend? Related, the subreddit just linked to the subreddit on Tulpas: "A tulpa is believed to be an autonomous consciousness coinhabiting a brain with their creator, often with a form of their creator's initial choice and design."

My favorite sport, women's soccer, has started up with a tournament instead of a full season, and the best goal so far is this magnificent header by Shea Groom.

July 8.

2020-07-08T20:40:00Z

July 8. Continuing from Monday, this subreddit post reports a mushroom-induced mental state "very similar" to states encountered in meditation. I must be bad at meditation, because I've put in hundreds of hours, and tried a lot of techniques, and I have yet to experience anything remotely trippy. Meditation is like flossing my teeth, a painful duty that's good for me. The one way it feels good, is that by focusing on my body, I've developed what I call a full-body glow, typically in the morning before getting up.

I wonder how much room we have to do meditation better. Linked from above, this chapter on concentration states mentions that different techniques work better for different types of people, but "this sort of information is not in common use today." And Matt sends this helpful page, Six Ways to Meditate.

And of course I wonder how much room we have to do psychedelics better. It's possible that we're already past the point of diminishing returns, in finding more molecules and better ways to use them, or it's possible that we've barely begun. Certainly we've barely begun with other forms of physical brain-hacking. Maybe in a few years I can go in for amygdala stapling to cure my anxiety.

Some links from the Psychonaut subreddit. What I've figured out so far is a fascinating metaphysical framework inspired by DMT:

There is only one reality. Heaven, Hell, and mortal life are not three different things. They are one single thing.... This one single reality is connection to all things, if you are ready for it you experience this as Heaven. If you are not ready for it you experience this as Hell.

A short comment thread, Most of us have been told 1000 times that the stove is hot, but psychedelics let you touch the stove.

A long comment thread, When you're on acid, things happen that would otherwise never have happened. What are your examples of this phenomenon?

And an article, Mainstreaming Psychedelics: Secularizing spirituality with the aid of Eastern religion. The main idea is that we can put psychedelic experiences on a spectrum, where at one pole is the Eastern unitive-mystical state, being one with everything, and at the other pole is the Western interactive-relational state, where you can get specific practical insights.

July 6.

2020-07-06T18:20:22Z

July 6. Continuing on psychedelics, there's a common idea, even among psychonauts, that drugs are just a shortcut to get somewhere that you can get without them. I mean, if what you want is to be emotionally healthy and have a good life, then sure, you don't even need to drink coffee. But I think the idea of having a drug-like mental state without drugs is wishful thinking, even magical thinking, about the power of the unassisted brain.

I would love to see a step-by-step process, something on the same order of difficulty as playing a musical instrument, where even after a few hours you can see results, and at high skill levels you can meet machine elves or step outside of time. Instead I see a spiritual elite making vague and untested promises about the benefits of doing what they say for thousands of hours.

There's a famous story of Ram Dass giving LSD to a guru, who just sat there as if it wasn't affecting him. There are doubts about whether this really happened, but even if it did, it's not evidence that the drug didn't affect the guru, let alone that he already had LSD consciousness. It's only evidence that he had the mental discipline to not show the effects outwardly.

Meditation and drugs are not two ways up the same mountain -- they're two different mountains. Meditation is about training your awareness of where and how you focus your attention, and your agility in changing that focus, within the world that your brain is tuning in. Drugs are about changing your brain's filter to alter that world.

This model actually makes meditation more important. If meditation does basically the same thing as drugs, but with more work, than we lazy people have no reason to do it. But if they complement each other, if meditation makes drugs better and drugs make meditation better, then we should be doing both.

July 3.

2020-07-03T15:50:51Z

July 3. I've heard that John Michael Greer wants to start a religion. (Update: here's the thread.) I'd advise him to do a lot of psychedelics, because by the end of this century almost everyone will be doing them, and some metaphysical ideas can survive that, and some can't.

I've been asked why I'm so optimistic. My answer is that I've walked up a wild stream in midsummer on LSD. I don't want to use the word "nature" because there's always some jerk who says "everything is natural" -- a valid semantic choice, which erases a really valuable distinction, which I preserve by framing it as the human-made world vs the non-human-made world.

The non-human-made world is basically heaven. You don't need LSD to see it but it helps. And beside it, or often on top of it, the human-made world is like mean kids playing with blocks, all clunky and ugly.

And yet, humans are supposedly better than trees and grass and bugs and birds. Maybe that's an illusion, and we're intrinsic degenerates who need to go extinct. But if we really are better, then we have the potential, instead of poisoning and paving the non-human-made world, to take that riotous beauty and run with it.

For a tease of what we could do, look at the picture at the top of this 2015 article, Wonderful Widgets. With 3D printing and evolutionary design, a crude component has been turned into one that looks like art -- and is more functional.

In terms of culture, game theory predicts the eventual victory of cooperators over dominators. We've already done it many times at the tribal scale, and we've only been playing with large complex societies for a short time.

In the short term, things look bad. The climate, the economy, and the internet are all going to get worse. The meaninglessness of modern life will continue to produce mass insanity. Right now we're passing through a bottleneck. The reason George Floyd's death was so powerful, and the reason mask-wearing has been so politicized, is that we all feel suffocated by this dreadful world that our recent ancestors have made for us, and it's getting tighter. But eventually there will be a reopening, and I think we're still at the beginning of history.

July 2.

2020-07-02T14:40:34Z

July 2. Continuing from yesterday, I just want to say a bit about systemic racism. I think it's a mistake to try to define it in terms of laws. There are some racist laws, like crack cocaine having worse penalties than regular cocaine, but there are also affirmative action laws that go the other way.

Where I see systemic racism, is in the largely subconscious habits of ordinary people, of treating different races differently. It shows up in a million snap decisions, often by people who think they see all races as equal. The funny thing is, it's easier to see it if you're an object of it, than if you're doing it.

July 1.

2020-07-01T13:30:09Z

July 1. A few days ago, some North Carolina cops were fired after being caught on video saying they can't wait for martial law because "We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them fucking n-----s." And yet they say they're not racist. Do they actually believe that?

I think they do, and it's partly the fault of the mainstream left, for encouraging a concept of what racism is, that has almost no basis in reality. You can see it all the time in badly written TV shows, like the Rosa Parks episode of Doctor Who. As soon as a racist sees a person with the wrong skin color, they go full-on Voldemort.

Actual racism is a lot like a sports team rivalry. You understand intellectually that fans of your rival team are fully human, and it's not hard for you to treat them as fully human, one on one; but in aggregate, it's fun to think of them as the enemy, and it's frightening that they might have power over you.