Ran Prieur

September 25.

2020-09-25T13:50:05Z

September 25. Some happy stuff for the weekend. First, Eric sends this awesome video, Pipelinefunk, where a guy plays a saxophone into the open end of a pipeline, and jams with his own echo. So pipelines are good for something after all.

Soap Dodger: Meet the Doctor Who Says We Have Been Showering Wrong. The idea is, your skin has a microbiome, and instead of trying to exterminate it, you should work with it. It's like how dead soil is first colonized by the nastiest weeds, but if you let it go, eventually you'll get nicer plants. I tried it, and he's right. I used to go nuclear on my armpits and they still smelled bad. Now I just put on a little baking soda and essential oil, and they smell fine.

Some good stuff in this thread, What was your most profound realization you had whilst tripping? At the bottom of the page are all the comments that tried to be clever by interpreting "tripping" as stumbling, but the most downvoted answer is accidentally the most profound: "Wow the ground is much closer than I thought."

Of all the writing I do, this blog is at best my third favorite. Number two is my fiction, and number one is my poetry, because it's the tightest. Poetry has come to mean venting about your emotions with arbitrary line breaks, but the way I do it, it's like watchmaking, where every word is a gear that makes the whole thing run. This is one I wrote earlier this year, and just spliced it into book two of my novel.

You must ask the heart, says the head
And chases its own thoughts instead

The heart says, I must ask the gut
And raps on its sickroom floor -- But

that voice never stopped, deep inside
Be still my head, my heart go wide

(So grateful, the hips and the knees
To bear such a lovely disease)

September 23.

2020-09-23T23:30:38Z

September 23. Lots of feedback from the last post, including this heavy comment thread on weirdcollapse.

Also, Owen sends this video of a Jonathan Blow talk, "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization". He says little about prevention, and mostly talks about how technology has been lost in the past, and how it's being lost now in the world of software. Basically, the people who really know how to do things die, and it's hard to pass on everything they know to the next generation, because so much of it requires hands-on experience.

I wrote about this back in 2010 in this post:

And if a skill dies, even if there are still books about it, the human attention required to resurrect it from books is much greater than the human attention that would have been required to keep it alive in the first place. So if we want to bring back a dead skill, without an increase in population or specialization, we have to sacrifice some living skills.

The technology I'd most like to lose, of course, is the automobile. And that's realistic. Cars are so complex now that it's almost impossible to repair them. They're pretty much disposable, and if we stop making more, the ones we have will gradually stop working.

The technology I'd most like to hold onto is old bicycles. The one I ride is from 1981, and it's not hard to strip it down to ball bearings and rebuild it.

The new technology I'd most like to see is anything that makes good food with high efficiency, like vat-grown meat, or fruit trees with upgraded photosynthesis.

September 21.

2020-09-21T21:10:33Z

September 21. Important Twitter thread about infrastructure decay, specifically an electrical tower where a 97 year old hook broke, causing the 2018 Paradise fire that killed 85 people.

I've been saying for a while now that we'll get an economic collapse but not a tech collapse, but lately I'm thinking there has to be a tech collapse, not only because of the diminishing returns on complexity, but because more of us are unhappy with the effect of technology on our lives.

Something that's always puzzled me is that there's so little infrastructure sabotage. In war, it's totally normal, and it's also common in fiction. Why doesn't some terror group send its members out with shovels to cut fiber optic lines, or hacksaws to cut railroad tracks, or rifles to shoot transformers?

I'm thinking the only reason it hasn't happened, is that everyone still thinks of the tech system as a net benefit to themselves. If that ever changes, look out.

September 18.

2020-09-18T18:40:17Z

September 18. Something nice for the weekend, and also sad, a reddit thread, Have you ever missed someone who doesn't even exist? It's mostly about people in dreams, but there are also some fictional characters, and some projections of people better than they are. This reminds me of my post from earlier this year about tulpas.

September 16.

2020-09-16T16:20:51Z

September 16. Some local news. Last week my town was the number one COVID hot spot in the country, because we're a small college town and the students came back and started partying. Something I've learned from this virus is that some people really, really like going to parties. Certain extroverted personalities must reach a transcendent mental state similar to what I get on good drugs, or they wouldn't take such risks.

On the other hand, when you look at the numbers for our county, we have more than a thousand confirmed cases, only two hospitalizations, and zero deaths. That seems really low even for young people, so I wonder if there's some other local factor that's making the virus less dangerous.

Of course it's also been smoky. This was our view on Saturday, and the worst thing is that our apartment is too hot. We have no AC, because normally we can just open the windows at night, blowing fans if necessary, to bring in enough cold to get through the next day. But the outside is too smoky to open. I've been keeping the inside air clean with a damp towel draped over the intake side of a box fan, and a Wein VI-2500 ionizer.

By the way, all these fires are not just from climate change. In the 1930's, the acreage burned per year in the American west was a lot more. But those were lower-intensity fires, because the land had always been allowed to burn freely. Only with the fire suppression policies of the late 20th century, did we build the massive dry biomass that is feeding these monster fires.

September 14.

2020-09-14T14:00:39Z

September 14. Some happy links. Singing Dogs Re-emerge From Extinction. Related, a post I made back in 2008, about the evidence that dogs are not descended from wolves, but from now-extinct wild dogs.

Teacher invents low-tech laptop and CD lifehack to reflect your keyboard, or whatever's on it, up into your laptop camera.

Researcher develops a machine to make DMT trips last a lot longer.

Phosphine Detected In The Atmosphere of Venus, in large enough quantities that it's strong evidence of microbial life. This comment on the Astronomy subreddit explains it. "I think I will always remember this discovery as the first step in learning how common life is in the universe."

And this is hilarious, a post on a reddit thread, What conspiracy theory do you completely believe is true?

Disney absolutely believed that Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 election, so they started building her animatronic for the Hall of Presidents well in advance, and after Trump pulled off a victory, instead of starting from scratch they just kinda made a couple half-assed adjustments to the Hillary model and put it up on stage.

September 11.

2020-09-11T23:30:00Z

September 11. Lately I've noticed, in American culture, an obsession with lying. And also, a failure to understand what lying is.

Lying is not an ontological act. It's not about what's true. Lying is a social act. It's when someone derives what they say, not from whatever they're talking about, but from the expected effect on their audience.

What we call a "lie detector" doesn't even detect that. It tries to detect when someone says something different from what they're thinking. If we had machines that did this perfectly, and we hooked them up to politicians, Donald Trump would pass every time, because he has mastered the skill of completely believing whatever he says.

In one sense, everything he says is a lie, because it's all derived from the expected effect on his audience. In another sense, nothing he says is a lie, because he is never conscious of any tension between his mouth and his head. That's why he seems so authentic to his followers.

Another tool against political lying is a fact-checker. But who decides what the fact-checker believes? How can we trust it? As the world gets more complex, there are more and more "facts" that we can't check first-hand, only second-hand through trusted sources. That opens the door for someone like Trump, who with perfect sincerity, mirrors his audience.

If a democracy becomes too complex for a majority of people to understand, it's inevitable that self-interested simplifiers will take power.

Here's an idea for a new anti-lie tech, which might become realistic when we have better brain-hacking. If we can somehow switch off the social regions of the brain, then the subject will be unable to even consider what kind of answer other people are looking for.

September 9.

2020-09-09T21:10:21Z

September 9. Bunching my negative links. They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won't Anybody Listen? The way to prevent them is a checkerboard pattern of controlled burns. That can't be done because controlled burns are bureaucratically almost impossible. More generally, failing systems of any size are too inflexible to do prevention, so they're constantly chasing emergencies.

Avoiding the Global Lobotomy. The idea is, the internet and social media have damaged our brains in a way not unlike a literal lobotomy.

Related, from the Ask Old People subreddit, What is the old-fashioned version of "thirst-trapping?" "A thirst trap is defined as a sexy photo posted on social media to attract the attention of the masses. Before social media, how did people do this?" Of course, we didn't. Seeking validation from strangers is a new thing that's not good for us.

And some interesting answers to this one: People who have a memory of 1968: How did it compare to what we are living through in 2020?

From regular Ask Reddit, What has simultaneously gotten worse and more expensive?

And from yesterday, People who have been on TV game shows, what are some 'behind the scenes' secrets that regular viewers don't know about? It's always depressing to be reminded that almost everything we see on our screens is calculated backward from its effect on the audience, and not forward from what's actually happening.

September 7.

2020-09-07T19:50:42Z

September 7. Links for Labor Day. What David Graeber Noticed is a nice overview of his life's work and why it's important. From the archives, here's a post I made five years ago about Graeber's essay on fun.

What If Certain Mental Disorders Are Not Disorders At All? This is not a new idea, just a true idea that we're unable to do anything about. As I wrote earlier this year: Every time the human-made world drifts farther from human nature, there's another group of people who can't deal with it, and they're diagnosed with some disorder that makes it their fault.

Teens' anxiety levels dropped during pandemic. "Researchers surveyed 1000 secondary school children in southwest England. They said the results were a 'big surprise' and it raised questions about the impact of the school environment on teenagers' mental health." Of course, most kids hate school because it's regimented, authoritarian, and makes learning unfun for the rest of your life. A few kids love school, and they go on to rule society and make it continue to suck for everyone else.

A nice article that I would title Seven reasons highly successful people are still unhappy.

And there's always good stuff on the Antiwork subreddit.

September 4.

2020-09-04T16:20:31Z

September 4. I made a video. This is one of my favorite songs of the 2010's, and the best song I've ever heard about the beauty of small moments. It's also the first music video that I've filmed myself, from my favorite local graffiti wall. Hana Zara - You Burnt the Toast.

September 3.

2020-09-03T15:10:43Z

September 3. More evidence that we're in the worst timeline. David Graeber has died. I think he was the best living social philosopher, and the best since Ivan Illich. Although James C. Scott is also excellent, and still alive at 83.

September 2.

2020-09-02T14:00:08Z

September 2. Thinking more about Monday's post, it doesn't really work as a grid. It's two questions in sequence: 1) Where do you draw the line between in-group and out-group? 2) To what extent, in each group, do you think might makes right? You could make a chart of the answers, but it would be more complicated than one-person one-dot.

Eric comments:

There is more going on than "don't ask me to make sacrifices for people I don't know personally." While that may be the basis for some of the reactions we see, there is also a militancy, striving to make others hold their own views.

I keep trying to get my friends to recognize that within their own 'in-group' as you say, they are largely able to behave however they want, just so long as they don't insist upon going public with it.

This gives me another idea....

The five stages of culture war:

1. Self-acceptance. You no longer think you're crazy, immoral, or inferior.

2. Private communities. You can do your thing with other people, even if it's still illegal.

3. Public tolerance. You have basic rights to do your thing, even if people don't like it.

4. Public acceptance. The difference between tolerance and acceptance is subtle, and the main benefit is you can have higher status, which is why I think it's overrated.

5. Domination. Everyone has to do your thing.

For example, gay rights. In the 1950's, you were lucky to be at stage 1. Now, in most of America, you're at stage 4. There is no plan for stage 5, but some people seem to be afraid there is.

Or kneeling for the national anthem. Colin Kaepernick is still blacklisted from the NFL for breaking into stage 3, but this year's NWSL games were pushing stage 5, with uneasiness about players who did not kneel. Having to kneel is bad, but it's no worse than having to stand, which has been normal for decades. What is it about anthems and conformity?

Also, the movement through stages can go in the other direction. Racism in America used to be almost at stage 5, and now it's fallen all the way to stage 2.

September 1.

2020-09-01T13:50:06Z

September 1. Just heard the newscaster say, "We're going to ping-pong between COVID and Kenosha," and I thought, "The apocalypse has already happened, and we're in fairyland."