Ran Prieur

"If observing outer space gives us a view of the past, observing inner space would surely give us a glimpse into the future."

-Ken M

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March 18. Under the word-umbrella of meditation/mindfulness/metacognition, there must be as many things as there are people, and probably hundreds of things distinct enough to eventually get their own word. One of those things is putting attention on your breath while blanking your mind. And out of all the recreational and self-improvement practices I've tried, none of them have such a bad cost-benefit ratio. It's like video game grinding without leveling up or even scoring points.

Then why is it so popular? I see two answers. One is that other people actually are getting a good cost-benefit ratio, because they have a different kind of brain than I do. Maybe when the science gets better, you can go in for a brain scan and get a detailed program of rewarding incremental steps to fit your personal neural profile.

The other answer is that people have fallen under the spell of beautiful stories, and are doing something that doesn't make sense. Andrew sends this brand new Harper's article, Lost in Thought: The psychological risks of meditation. There are a lot of them. In one study...

...forty-three out of sixty meditators representing Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan traditions -- had experienced moderate to severe impairment in their day-to-day functioning. Ten had required inpatient hospitalization.... For Britton, the takeaway was that adverse effects routinely occur even under optimal conditions, with healthy people meditating correctly under supervision.

And if you look at the history of the practice, it shouldn't be surprising: "According to the Pali suttas, the point of meditation was to cultivate disgust and disenchantment with the everyday world."

It seems to me, people who get in trouble with meditation, and people who do too many drugs, and people who work themselves too hard in the everyday world, have something in common. They're all head-heavy. Their head is seeking something so hard, that they ignore the protests of their body.

I'm trying to go the other direction. My main practice lately is to go for walks and continually return my attention to the soles of my feet and the mechanics of walking, trying to have good posture while also being loose. After the game Spirit Island, I call it placing presence.


March 17. On a completely new subject, I've been wondering: is meditation a placebo? That's a lot to unpack, so let me back up. A practice, like meditation or exercise, cannot be a placebo in the same way that taking a pill is. Also, according to this study, meditation is better than a placebo for at least one thing, reducing physical pain.

But according to this article, Where's the Proof That Mindfulness Meditation Works? "A 2014 review of 47 meditation trials, collectively including over 3500 participants, found essentially no evidence for benefits related to enhancing attention, curtailing substance abuse, aiding sleep or controlling weight."

I also think that what we call "meditation" is best framed as multiple things, with some overlap. One is the traditional Buddhist practice of focusing on your breath and trying to blank your mind. I've spent a lot of time doing this, and the only benefit I can report is that if I need to go to sleep, and my thoughts are spinning, I'm better at stilling them. And it's probably a good foundation for other metacognitive skills.

The practice I've found most helpful is creating a perspective inside my head that has no investment in how things are currently done. (I'm trying to work around the word "ego".) It's like an auditor, dispassionately noticing the machinery of thoughts and feelings, and suggesting adjustments.

What I really want to pick on, is the idea that meditation is a realistic substitute for drugs. This is taken for granted in various woo-woo communities, but I've seen no evidence for it except wild-eyed anecdotal reports. Personally, I can crank up my desktop vaporizer, and not even put any weed in, just use the heat to draw trace THC from the residue inside the wand, and get more of an altered state of consciousness than in all the meditation I've ever done.

My hypothesis is that people who sincerely experience strongly altered states of consciousness through meditation, are highly suggestible. And if the same people did meditation wrong, or if they took a sugar pill, or if they held a crystal upside their head, they could leverage a similar aura of belief into similar results.

I mean, I'm envious, except that suggestibility is a two-edged sword, and I wouldn't want to get similarly swayed by social media influencers or charismatic public figures. Related: Placebo Effect Grows in U.S., Thwarting Development of Painkillers.


March 15. Over on the subreddit there are a couple big comment threads on gender. In my experience, the bigger a discussion, the more people have already made up their minds, and the less fruitful it is.

So I just want to add a couple more things and move on. Alex mentions the Mahu, a third gender in native Hawaiian culture, and comments:

It really only seems to be the Abrahamic religions that are hung up about this. Other societies either don't care or actually need transgender people to have a complete society.

And Matt comments:

If the political so-called left has made any serious misstep in recent years, it's arguing for simplicity where complexity rules.

In two hundred years, they'll look at our culture wars and laugh -- not because they've gone back to the 1950's, but because they've gone forward in ways we can't guess, and maybe wouldn't approve of. On gender and other ways of identifying ourselves, I expect a long tail, where most people identify as something common, but there's no end to identities that are personally crafted and hard to explain.


March 12. On a tangent from yesterday's post, there's a thread on the subreddit critiquing the left on transgender issues, and rather than post there, I'll post here. I'm not a specialist on this subject, but this is my understanding of the left's position:

1) Sex is biology; gender is culture.

2) Whether you have one or two X chromosomes is not a choice. Whether you feel male or female is usually also not a choice. This is an evidence-based statement, backed by the testimony of most transgender individuals.

3) This is not a statement of science but a statement of public policy: Everyone should have the right to choose what gender they identify as, and what gender they present themselves to the world as, including by using medical technology to change their bodies.

None of that should be controversial. Then it's just a matter of working out the practical details. The problems are mainly "it'll be anarchy" hypotheticals.

For example, there's a rule now that allows transgender women to compete in women's sports. It's a nice gesture, but nobody wants to see bio-males dominating women's sports, and if that ever happens, they'll just figure out a new rule.

And don't worry, even if you're a straight male, you won't be canceled if you prefer to date women with two X chromosomes.

I have some personal interest in this subject. When I play video games where you can design your own avatar, I always play as female. When I write fiction, my female characters leap off the page and my male characters muddle along. I prefer women's sports, and Netflix seems to think Leigh Ann and I are lesbians. But I feel comfortable in a male body, so my gender identity is straight male with a strong anima.


March 11. How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation. It's a long article, but the basic idea, in the context of AI machine learning, is that "models that maximize engagement also favor controversy, misinformation, and extremism."

But Facebook has to maximize engagement. It's a business in late-stage capitalism, so its number one priority has to be growth. Changing the algorithm to reduce engagement is not an option, so instead Facebook has to play whack-a-mole with whatever misinformation and extremism the algorithm calls forth.

On the same subject, a few months back I got an email from Nick about YouTube recommendations:

My YouTube habits skew decidedly left... But my recommendations are full of half-baked alt-right pseudo philosophy trying to justify white supremacist nonsense. If I watch one video about how to resole work boots, suddenly my recommendations are full of Trumpist blue collar propaganda (usually in the "bearded white guy ranting while driving a pickup" genre). I watch one video minidocumentary about a gay christian minister who preaches LGBTQ acceptance, and suddenly my recommendations are nothing but "gay sex causes God to send hurricanes."

Certainly, tech industry insiders do not have a right wing bias. So if the recommendations do, it's happening accidentally through AI. Something about the way right wingers think, or navigate the internet, is a better fit for how the recommendation bots operate.

By the way, I think "left" and "right" are ephemeral. The two sides of the body are a useful metaphor for political divisions, but political divisions change with culture, and eventually the words left and right will mean something completely different.

But at the moment, one of the things the right stands for is resistance to metacognition, to critical self-reflection. Their thinking is more automatic and predictable. The way they trace connections between one thing and another, is easier for bots to model.

Maybe the deeper issue is not AI modeling, but human modeling. The best way to understand the world is to observe it with no bias, figure out what it's doing, and then build our models from that. But our big brains give us the option to do it backwards: to start with a model that makes us feel a certain way, and then go looking for evidence to back it up.

For some reason, over the last few decades, the left has been much better than the right at policing itself against wishful modeling. How this happened, I can only guess, but I blame Ronald Reagan. Conservatives before Reagan were sober serious thinkers, like George Will and William F. Buckley. Reagan started down the road of turning politics into candy for children, and Republicans never looked back. So Democrats were like, "OK, we'll be the adults." I wonder if there's an alternate history, maybe one where the Kennedys survived, where now it's the other way around.


March 9. A footnote on the British royal family. I'm trying to read Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake, and he argues that the Norman invasion of 1066 "was probably the most catastrophic single event in this nation's history," and that in some ways England still hasn't recovered. Two things the Normans brought, that are still around almost a thousand years later, are automatic hereditary monarchy, and extreme concentration of land ownership.

It would be interesting to make a list of all the things in modern society, that are clearly harmful, and that a majority of individuals are against, but there's no realistic way to get rid of them, short of total collapse.


March 8. Today I want to poke the thorny subject of race, and I'll start by saying, if I saw Meghan Markle on the street, I would tag her as white. The fact that so many Brits are hostile to having a non-albino in their royal family, is about as silly as having a royal family in the first place.

This is easy for me to say as a light-skinned person, but race doesn't seem like a big deal to me. And yet, for some reason, it's a very big deal to a lot of light-skinned people. I look forward to more racial equality, more racial ambiguity, and maybe one day a whole different way of thinking about ancestry and identity. In a thousand years, the history books might say something like this:

In 1492, a trans-oceanic explorer wrote in his journal, after meeting the peaceful natives, "With fifty men we could subjugate them all." His people, the Whites, were named after the pale skins of their home region, western Asia. Though emotionally crippled by centuries of plague, famine, and war, they had the best weapons, and would go on to rule the world for 500 years.

Of their last days, little is known, because records at that time were on short-lived and unreadable media; but it is said that the White kings, Rump and Pootin, were defeated on the slopes of Covid, when their troops stood too close together.

Today, the Nords and Merkins trace their ancestry to the Whites, but they are most remembered in the names of sports teams, such as the Washington Palefaces and the Fighting Whities of Florida Island.


March 5. Stray links. The Miyawaki Method: A Better Way to Build Forests? Basically, you plant many species in multiple layers, very densely, and take really good care of them for two or three years. By the way, I'm against planting only natives. The important thing is serving the local ecology, and sometimes a non-native will do a better job.

I think this is a cool use of dangerous technology: Atomic gardening "is a form of mutation breeding where plants are exposed to radioactive sources, typically cobalt-60, in order to generate mutations, some of which have turned out to be useful." The biggest success so far is making grapefruit more pink.

Some good news: Oakland Bans the Use of Combustion Engine-Powered Leaf Blowers and String Trimmers, which typically have no emission controls and are more polluting than multiple SUV's.

And here's a cool photo of a flock of birds in the shape of a bird.


March 3. One more comment on the doomed internet. I'm starting to think that the world of screens is a fad.

I didn't even see a screen until I was three years old. It was a ten inch black and white, and my parents had to limit my hours to keep me from watching all the time, even though there were only four channels. Fifty years later, we have a 40 inch HDTV with Netflix, Hulu, Sling and Prime, and watching it is almost a chore. I mean, I'm glad I saw Queen's Gambit, but I watched it because it was good for me, not because I was excited about it.

I remember when digital watches seemed magical, and when the Atari 2600 was an eternal cure for boredom. Now video games have a million times the pixels and I don't even play them. Billions of dollars are being poured into virtual reality, but in terms of the quality of the experience, the leap from Red Dead Redemption 2 to a full-on Star Trek holodeck, is less than the leap from Mattel electronic football to RDR2, and that's already not enough.

Now my favorite thing to do is walk around looking at tree branches. I found out that tree branches are beautiful from LSD, which is why I think the next frontier of human experience is not VR or space travel, but brain hacking that will make LSD look medieval. Instead of going to strange new worlds, or creating them digitally, we'll discover the strangeness of where we already are.


March 1. Continuing on the subject of technological exhaustion, a reader sends this link, Gopher, Gemini and The Smol Internet, about some really old internet platforms that still work. From the same blogger, The 100 Year Computer is about what it would take, in society and technology, to buy a computer that's still useful in 100 years. I love this paragraph:

There are two reasons to replace a computer. One is an artificially amplified desire for something exciting, new and shiny. The other is the failure of software to run in under 8Gb of RAM. We call this replacement an 'upgrade', when what's really happening is a celebration of sustainability failure.

Related, a Hacker News thread from 2017: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983.

I think it's obvious that information technology can't keep going on this path. Not only is the subjective experience of the internet getting worse, it keeps getting worse faster. But I can't see any smooth way to get off the treadmill. My best guess is, the failure of technology to serve human needs, will lead to breakdowns in mental health, which will cause societal breakdowns, which will cause more frequent failures in the infrastructure necessary for a high-tech society.

Or it could be much more sudden, if we get a Giant Solar Flare.


February 25. Taking another angle from Monday, The internet as we know it is doomed. It's by Annalee Newitz, who wrote that new book about ancient cities. Her argument has two parts. First, that there were two waves of ancient cities, and the first wave failed because it didn't have the right institutions to manage population density, so people got unhappy and left.

Then she argues that the internet is the same way. It's getting bigger and clunkier, and the costs are beginning to outweigh the benefits, so that people are now trying to live without it. Maybe the internet will fade away, and eventually "return in a form we can only guess at."

Chris, who sent the link, comments:

Every time we add extra complexity to our world, there is a decrease in the power of any single person to comprehend the society and technological foundations thereof. It feels psychically unsustainable. The state asks citizens to manage a baseline amount of technical overhead to have a modern life, but no one ever stopped to ask how much overhead it ought to take for our world to be mediated by the internet.

I think this is a big factor in the anxiety epidemic. I've said this before: the prophet of our age is not Orwell or Huxley, but Kafka. Password requirements have become so labyrinthine that I can't possibly remember them all, and I don't trust my computer to keep track of them, because I've seen both software and hardware unexpectedly fail. So I keep them all written down on a piece of paper, and I ever lose it, I might as well go live under a bridge.

In a high-complexity society, I live in the shadow of dread of all the things that could go wrong, that I would be responsible for fixing and have no idea how to fix. The thought of total technological collapse is comforting, because we would all be in the same boat, and our troubles would be comprehensible.


February 23. Following up from yesterday, Alex comments:

We are evolved to be hunter-gatherers, and fairly nomadic. Notice how many leisure activities are just hunter-gatherer "jobs" like fishing, hunting, mushroom gathering and so on.

When I was a teen I taught myself how to surf. Looking back it was tons of hard work. But it was fun. It's hard work tracking and hunting a deer, but it's considered fun. It's harder work gutting the thing and dividing it up, but those are joyous times among hunter-gatherers. I also used to get up at about 4AM and walk a couple miles up and down the beach, to find Japanese glass floats, then sneak back into bed. It was fun!

So hunter-gatherers tend to do things that might be annoying otherwise, in groups, they'll have special songs for that activity, and it makes it fun.

And to pull it off you've got to be very minimalist. Because there's tons more work that has to be done as a modern person and everyone's too busy doing all this work to sit around together and make the activity fun.


February 22. Last week, Weird Collapse linked to this Hacker News comment thread about vertical farming, about this post on Low Tech Magazine, Vertical Farming Does Not Save Space, because the solar panels to power it take up more space than a regular farm.

The techies say, it does save space, because you can use nuclear power, or solar panels out in a desert. Then there are arguments against those arguments, and so on. The angle I want to take is probably not mentioned in the thread: technological complexity, and the challenges it raises for human motivation.

I continue to think that motivation is the number one factor in collapse. A society collapses when not enough people feel like doing the stuff that holds it together, and too many people feel like doing stuff that breaks it down.

Vertical farming presents itself as a cure for malaise. You're not excited about growing food in a stinky old field? How about growing food in a shiny new building? Okay, but who's excited about pouring the foundation for that building? Mining and processing the materials that make the cement for the foundation? Digging the hole? Or doing all the tedious work that leads to a machine that can dig the hole for you? And we haven't even started the building yet.

My point is, technological complexity tends to create tasks that no one feels like doing, and the people who get excited about tech are insulated from those tasks. This actually goes back to the subject of elite overproduction. Too many people see themselves as the designers and beneficiaries of amazing new technologies, and not enough people are willing to do the increasingly fiddly grunt work.

Now, low tech doesn't magically create utopia. But look at it from another angle. Your task is to design a society where nobody is ever forced to do anything. Are you going to go high tech, or low tech? There have been societies where nobody is ever forced to do anything, and all of them so far have been technologically simple.

For growing food, the most motivationally robust system is a semi-wild food forest, all perennials and self-seeding annuals, powered by a fusion plant called the sun. There's a lot of room for highly motivated people to make this system work better, but there's also a lot of room for idleness.


February 18. I've got nothing this week, so I'll dig into the archives for a couple reposts. This is a condensed excerpt of an essay written by mathematician Norbert Wiener, in 1949, about the coming machine age:

These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.
...
Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a value far beyond the books of our sociologists. There is general agreement among the sages of the peoples of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it stupidly than to use it intelligently.

Moreover, if we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us.

And a post I made on January 28, 2015:

Fascinating technology article, I paid $25 for an Invisible Boyfriend, and I think I might be in love. For a monthly fee, a company will pay nameless freelance workers to send you texts pretending to be your boyfriend. Supposedly the purpose is to fool your friends and family, but the article points out how easy it is for people to use this service to feel loved.

This is oddly similar to the previous subject of travelers encountering friendly natives. Wealth inequality creates unreal relationships, in which poorer people do not present themselves according to their own perspectives and their own needs, but according to the expectations of richer people. In one sense the crowdsourced texters and impoverished natives are being exploited, but in another sense they're in the better position, because they're not being made stupid. If the performers and servants are all eventually replaced by AI's and robots, is that progress?

This reminds me of a key insight from the book Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita: that you can judge your environment by whether it is indifferent to your gaze, like nature, or designed around your gaze, like television or a theme park. With continuing advances in artificial intelligence, artificial environments will not just be designed around the gaze of the average person, but each person's particular gaze. We can each have our own Disneyland, and the shared human reality could splinter into billions of tiny echo chambers.


February 15. This blog is like my job, and lately it's been bumped by another job: shoveling snow. So today, more links, starting with a capitalist argument for wealth redistribution: How Poverty Makes Workers Less Productive. Cynically, I think the only reason we still have poverty in this age of abundance, is that it's human nature to want to have someone below you.

Two weeks ago I linked to a piece about urban collapse. This is a longer piece by the same author: How Early Megacities Emerged From the Jungles of Cambodia. It's an excerpt from a book that I'll have to read.

Loosely related to elite overproduction, two reddit threads, one long and one short. At what point did you decide you were never going to be exceptional but that was ok? And from Ask Old People, For those of us who make art, has aging changed you and your work? It's mainly about how much better the creative process is, when you don't care about success.

New model could explain old cholesterol mystery. This is one of my pet subjects. Science has known for decades that eating foods high in cholesterol does not cause heart disease. Also, there is still no evidence that eating saturated fat leads to heart disease. But there is a connection between eating saturated fat and having high cholesterol in your body, and also between high cholesterol in your body and heart disease. How can this happen? The new hypothesis is that both heart disease, and high cholesterol, are symptoms of chronic inflammation.

Finally, one of the great piano players, Chick Corea, just died. One cool thing he did was to improvise musical portraits of people. This is a nice video of that, Chick makes a spontaneous composition for two audience members.


February 11. No ideas, more links. From Ask Old People, What did you used to do as a kid/teenager that you could never get away with these days? Keeping in mind that "right" and "left" are ephemeral cultural terms, I think this is where the recent left has made a big mistake, in conceding this territory to the right. We have a lot of room to make life more fun and dangerous, while still having aggressive recycling of wealth, and legal protections against domination.

This Ask Reddit thread, removed by mods for some dumb reason, is packed with great stories. Have you ever known anyone who has changed from who they were to practically a different person?

I spent most of January working on this project for the Spirit Island board game: 12 presence colors with custom reminder tokens.

Arkadia Zoomquilt is an amazing fractal zoom through trippy landscapes. Zoomquilt 2 is even trippier. The Hacker News comment thread explains how it's done. The code is pretty simple, and the hard part is producing a bunch of hand-drawn images that fit inside each other.





I don't do an RSS feed, but Patrick has written a script that creates a feed based on the way I format my entries. It's at http://ranprieur.com/feed.php. You might also try Page2RSS.

Posts will stay on this page about a month, and then mostly drop off the edge. A reader has set up an independent archive that saves the page every day or so.

I've always put the best stuff in the archives, and in spring of 2020 I went through and edited the pages so they're all fit to link here. The dates below are the starting dates for each archive.

2005: January / June / September / November
2006: January / March / May / August / November / December
2007: February / April / June / September / November
2008: January / March / May / July / September / October / November
2009: January / March / May / July / September / December
2010: February / April / June / November
2011: January / April / July / October / December
2012: March / May / August / November
2013: March / July
2014: January / April / October
2015: March / August / November
2016: February / May / July / November
2017: February / May / September / December
2018: April / July / October / December
2019: February / March / May / July / December
2020: February / April / June / August / October / December
2021: February