Ran Prieur

October 7.

2020-10-07T19:30:59Z

October 7. Matt comments on Friday's post about the clickety-clack people:

It's possible for humans to look at a screen, believing that they're looking through a window, and listen to a debate about policies that haven't been enacted but might be. Millions of people react to these ideas as if they're real. They feel rage or fear or hope at the uttering of sounds, or vision of characters, that represent a reality that might manifest and might not. And, generally, people are far more intrigued by this than their own backyards (or heartbeats).

Loosely related: We Learn Faster When We Aren't Told What Choices to Make, and we also learn faster when our choices have consequences. It seems like both of these are increasingly missing. More than our ancestors, we're told what to do all day, and we don't see how it matters what we do. And...

This insight could also help explain delusional thinking, in which false beliefs remain impenetrable to contrary evidence. An outsize feeling of control may contribute to an unflagging adherence to an erroneous belief.

Or, human society has become so constricted and insulated, that our only opportunity to make real choices and see real feedback, is to make clearly wrong choices.

Also on the subject of the world getting worse, a thread from Ask Old People, What old technology do you miss/still use?

October 5.

2020-10-05T17:10:35Z

October 5. American politics is such a shitshow, I don't want to say anything about it until I have some hindsight. I'm also low on ideas lately, so I'll probably be posting links all week.

From the weirdcollapse subreddit, an interesting Twitter thread about declining grip strength. The author argues that this is not caused by a decline in physical work, but that it's something in the nerves or the brain, and that it's related to the rise of autism.

If he's right, this is probably a temporary disease of modernity, and when humans emerge from this strange time, we'll go back to normal. But I always wonder if there is some hidden level of reality, where either human extinction, or human transcendence, is already in the cards, and this is part of that.

Loosely related, from the ranprieur subreddit, an Ian Welsh review of Robert Sapolsky's Behave, a book about human biology. There's a nice bit about how being busy favors the lizard brain, while having lots of time favors the prefrontal cortex. Also this:

We have been propagandized to view testosterone as related to violence... But what testosterone appears to actually be related to is status seeking. If violence and bullying is what a society rewards with status, then yup, testosterone is about violence. But if hugging and caring for people will get you more status, suddenly high-T individuals are the biggest huggers and carers around.

October 2.

2020-10-02T14:40:17Z

October 2. Yesterday I ate five grams of Psilocybe cubensis and went to a patch of ancient woods at the edge of town. It's called Magpie Forest. Here's a photo I took. The trees are mostly hawthorn, wiry and gnarled. We used to walk across the wheat fields to get there. Now the apartment district has expanded right to the edge of it, and WSU has bought the property as a nature preserve.

I'm not going to drive on mushrooms, so I had to ride my bike there, and the first thing I noticed was how far uphill it is. For almost half an hour, I was mostly climbing, sometimes so steep that I had to get off and walk.

When I got there, the drugs were taking effect, and I locked my bike to a tree and went down a little-used footpath, and then up a wildlife trail aiming for the center. It got too dense, and there were ants, so I backed up, and borrowed a bed from a deer to ride out the launch.

I have a thick head against mushrooms. The trip's plateau, even after I smoked weed on top, was hardly trippy, and I was disappointed to not see crystalline geometry in the branches, or sense the personalities of individual trees, like I did on my last trip.

But I did get a sense of the vibe of the forest. Compared to river trees, hill trees are hostile and suspicious. But they really know how to have fun. If you could get outside of time, you'd see them dancing in the meadows.

I found some cool places, including a patch of bare dirt, made by a large bird for dust baths, before a great thistle luminous in the sun. It felt like a temple, and I scattered some catnip seeds I brought from the river trail.

The biggest insight I got, was after a few hours in the woods, coming to the edge and looking down on the human-made world. It didn't strike me as evil, or ugly, but unreal. These strange animals, with their clickety-clack machinery, have taken the bounty of the earth and used it to go ever deeper inside their own insane constructions, and they don't even like it. It's anyone's guess how long they can keep going.