Ran Prieur

April 29.

2021-04-29T17:50:59Z

April 29. Some happy links about biology, starting with a loose end from Monday, on the subject of whether non-brain organs have their own intelligence. This 2005 article, Organ Transplants and Cellular Memories, has a bunch of reports of personality changes after heart transplants, and here's an abstract of a more recent article, Personality changes following heart transplantation: The role of cellular memory. To me, "cellular memory" sounds like an awkward place-holder for an explanation that will turn out to be weirder.

Drug Discovered to Regenerate Lost Teeth, but it will be a while before it's ready for humans.

Sushi-grade salmon grown from Pacific Salmon cells. That link goes to the Hacker News comment thread, which has some info about pricing. The process is still really expensive, but with economy of scale, and the dying oceans, it should eventually be cheaper than catching wild fish.

From the Weird Collapse subreddit, Neutering is undomesticating cat genetics.

And thanks Mike for this nice article about daisugi, a 15th-century Japanese technique for growing ultra-straight cedar trees. First you grow a large base tree, and then you train sub-trees growing off of it.

April 26.

2021-04-26T14:20:25Z

April 26. Yesterday I had a visit from a long-time reader, Elliot, who lives in his car and travels around doing seasonal work. A few hours later, Nomadland, a movie about people who do that, won best picture.

The future is already here -- it's just not widely distributed yet. This idea seems deterministic, but it's really open-ended. At any given time, there are thousands of little trends and movements, and a few of them are going to get much bigger, but we don't know which ones.

Either car-living has to get much bigger, or housing costs have to get much lower, and one of those things is politically impossible.

Since I'm writing about the future, I've been thinking about virtual reality. So far, it's almost all head-based. Worlds are simulated for your eyes and your ears, and mainly navigated by your fingers. The most advanced VR can also interface your arms and legs.

But your arms and legs don't care what world they're in. They don't care if you're scrubbing the bathtub or slaying dragons. It's your brain that cares, and VR is pulling your arms and legs into worlds that the brain wants.

What about the rest of the body? When people talk about following the heart, or the gut, are they projecting the subconscious brain, or do those organs have their own intelligence? That's how primitive we are, that we still don't know the answer. Maybe in 2050, when you're playing Fallout 9, there will be a wire in your belly so you can get a gut feeling about whether to go into that building.

If technology can do that, I'd rather get a wire in my amygdala to nullify unfounded fear. Or, the best case for virtual reality, is that in figuring out how to bring the whole body into an artificial world, we will discover how to finally bring it into the real world.

It's just like terraforming Mars. The science doesn't add up, but in the attempt, we'll come to appreciate how much easier and more valuable it is to re-terraform Earth.

April 22.

2021-04-22T22:40:40Z

April 22. The Weak Case for Grit. It's about how the concept of "grit", as a path to self-improvement, is just a trendy rebranding of stuff that was already known under the concept of conscientiousness.

I would go farther and say, not only is grit not a good predictor of achievement, achievement is not a good measure of human life. If we're talking about benefit to society, supermarket workers are more beneficial than social media influencers. And if we're talking about subjective quality of life, then we need reforms to make low-status life better, instead of another weapon in the arms race for a shrinking number of high-status positions.

Related: A Life of One's Own is a really nice review of a book with that title, from 1934:

Marion Milner undertook a seven-year experiment in living, aimed at unpeeling the existential rind of all we chronically mistake for fulfillment -- prestige, pleasure, popularity -- to reveal the succulent, pulsating core of what makes for genuine happiness.
...
Happiness, Milner found, was similarly elusive to direct pursuit. Rather, its attainment required a wide-open attentiveness to reality, a benevolent curiosity about all that life has to offer, and a commitment not to argue with its offerings but to accept them as they come.

4/20. For the holiday, I want to write about weed. Most people I know either never use it, or use it every day. Maybe my brain is different, but those would be my last two choices.

Lately I've been doing two or three sessions a day, and then taking two full days off. I might use it two days in a row, but if I go a third day, it just makes me feel numb, which is not what I want.

In no particular order, these are some of my favorite things to do while high:

1) Put on headphones, walk around outside, and pretend I'm the POV in a video. With the right song, and in the right place, this is absolute heaven. Lately my favorite song is New Yorker Cartoon by Jenny and Johnny. At the same time, I practice turning my attention to my physical senses. My goal, which I'm nowhere near, is to last a whole song without falling into my head.

2) Improvise on piano. Whenever I find a good chord, I'll use label paper and colored markers to show it on the keyboard, and then I'll keep my fingers on the colors and jam. For a while I've been practicing keeping my left hand doing the same thing while my right hand does increasingly complex stuff. Lately I've been working on the opening of Wall of Voodoo's Ring of Fire, doing the synth with my left and the guitar with my right. Separately the parts are easy, but playing them together was so hard, that I had to figure it out with pen and paper, and then play the tricky bit until I could do it smoothly. Now, that pattern is part of my toolbox for improvising.

3) Write fiction. When I'm high, I get much better ideas, on everything from plot to how to put words together. The problem is that I think all my ideas are great, when some of them are dumb. To know the difference, I have to edit while sober. Oddly, blogging is almost the opposite. I get ideas high, draft posts sober, and then for major posts, I'll get high and do a style polish.

4) Explore emotions. Weed raises my emotional intelligence to nearly normal. People always say "listen to your heart," and I wish they had more precise instructions. It occurred to me, maybe I've been taking it too metaphorically. So I've been focusing a lot of attention on my literal blood-pumping muscle, and I noticed something. When I do my "expanding into pain" exercise, my heartbeats are sharper. Also, focusing on anything below the neck seems to settle my anxiety.

5) Strobe-enhanced CEV's. I close my eyes, turn my bike taillight to flashing, and point it at my eyelids. If I'm high enough, I'll see all kinds of crazy patterns, and can consciously navigate from one pattern to another. I told Leigh Ann, "I'm afraid this is too self-indulgent." She replied: "You're you!"

April 19.

2021-04-19T19:10:31Z

April 19. Negative links! Present Punk is a website arguing "that we are either currently living in a cyberpunk dystopia, or that we are transitioning into one."

Related: The secret ideology hiding in SimCity. The designer of Sim City was inspired by a book with an economic authoritarian agenda, and he put the book's formulas into the game's "black box". Later, the Magnasanti project showed how you can maximize success in the game by building a dystopian nightmare.

More evil tech, Is Facebook Buying Off The New York Times?

Three links on toxicity. Experts are sounding the alarm about the dangers of gas stoves "Over the past four decades, researchers have amassed a large body of scientific evidence linking the use of gas appliances, especially for cooking, with a higher risk of a range of respiratory problems and illnesses."

Rates of Parkinson's disease are exploding. A common chemical may be to blame. It's trichloroethylene, and it's already been banned in the EU and two US states.

And a well-written guide to identifying narcissists online.

Finally, climate catastrophe. Antarctica's Doomsday Glacier close to tipping point. "The glacier acts like a cork in a wine bottle, stopping the rest of the ice in the region from flowing into the sea."

This 2017 article, The Doomsday Glacier, goes into more depth. Bottom line: this stuff is hard to model, but the worst predictions are for 10-13 feet of sea level rise by 2100.

April 16.

2021-04-16T16:40:07Z

April 16. For the weekend, two happy links. Buildings made with fungi could live, grow, and then biodegrade. Related: Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature.

And US suicide rate dropped 6 percent in past year, even amid pandemic. I'm not surprised. This is a simplification: the suicide rate is inversely proportional to the rate of death by other causes. Because death by other causes means that society is facing a challenge that makes life more meaningful, and it means you're not suffering alone.

With summer coming (in the northern temperate zone) I want to recommend a product. It's hard to find a good summer overshirt. By that I mean: 1) You can wear it over a t-shirt. 2) It keeps the sun off. 3) It lets the air through. 4) It looks good. 5) It has good pockets.

I've only found one shirt that does all those things: the Prijouhe kimono. It says they're true to size, but I recommend going big. Here's a photo of me in my earth-tone summer outfit: Uniqlo linen shorts, medium t-shirt, and XXL kimono.

April 14.

2021-04-14T14:20:07Z

April 14. Bunch o' links, starting with a few from the subreddits. Ancient cave painters may have been stoned. More precisely, they would have needed torches, which could have had them tripping on oxygen deprivation. But they didn't know about oxygen, so they probably thought the caves were intrinsically trippy places.

A City for Poets and Pirates is a deep historical piece about some crazy stuff that happened a hundred years ago in Italy:

We cannot understand the events in Fiume (or the subsequent rise of fascism) without making an effort to imagine a world in which hundreds of thousands of young men who had been promised a share in the spoils of victory returned, after years both frightening and exhilarating -- some of them half-blind or deaf, some insomniacs or addicts -- to anxious mothers and wives unwilling to listen to their stories, to jobs in industries where bosses worried about productivity.

Our Brain Typically Overlooks This Brilliant Problem-Solving Strategy: removing things rather than adding them. If, somehow, we could get as good at removing things as we are at adding them, it would greatly prolong the lifespans of our institutions and technologies, which are always getting weighed down and crippled by feature bloat.

Ask Hacker News: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible? You can tell our civilization is declining, because the thread is massively upvoted and everyone thinks this is a good idea.

Another Hacker News thread, about a 20% probability for a large satellite collision. It didn't happen this time, but eventually it will, and then we might get a chain reaction satellite apocalypse, where the sky is full of meteors and the TV doesn't work.

This is the best reddit thread I've ever seen about lifehacks. It has everything from how to fight a dog to using chips as kindling.

And I've just done an update of my Favorite Films page, adding a few films and a new interpretation of Terry Gilliam's Tideland.

April 12.

2021-04-12T12:00:49Z

April 12. Lately I've been allergic to social issues, but today I'll dip a toe in, by way of brain wiring. Diablo 2 Resurrected helped me love my brain. The author is unable to make mental maps, which is a perfect fit for a game with procedurally generated maps where it doesn't matter which way you go.

And a reddit thread, Does it happen to you sometimes when you are driving, you suddenly realize that you are driving normally but not aware of what happened in the past minutes? This has never happened to me, because I have no autopilot. This is also why I'm a terrible athlete, and why I'm always bumping into things. My body can't do anything right without fully conscious micromanagement by my head, and I can't micromanage two things at once, or even one thing if it's going too fast.

As an autopilot-impaired person, I see autopilotry everywhere. That's my only explanation for why there aren't a hundred times as many car crashes, or how certain political movements succeed without any rational basis. People are tuning into mysterious signals, going with flows that I can't feel.

At the same time, I'm better at things that require mental micromanagement. So in middle school, where I never got on base in kickball, I was also the best lathe worker in shop class. And we have a long way to go in understanding these differences. I think every homeless person and every prison inmate has a talent that could serve society, if society knew how to find it and work with it.

Related: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time. I think this is because churches formed communities based on ancestry and physical location, which worked well in the old days. But now, with cheap travel and the internet, we can form communities based on what kind of person we are.

April 8.

2021-04-08T20:20:22Z

April 8. Another deep non-political piece, a long reddit comment about How actors talk about acting. Being believable is the bare minimum, and then there's stuff like understanding your character's motivation, disappearing into a role, "outside-in" technical stuff, and making interesting choices:

For example, actors seem to love Jeff Goldblum, Nic Cage, and John Malkovich. Even in something like Holy Man, or Rounders, or Wicker Man, where they're giving pretty much objectively bad performances, other actors sometimes love those performances. Choices come up a lot in conversations about these. It's just so amazing to see people who naturally make choices that we have to work towards.

My definition of creativity is making a choice that's unpredictable with foresight, and yet, in hindsight it seems inevitable. And as a writer, I respect small-scale surprises more than large-scale surprises. There's lots of bad popular entertainment, where they surprise you about which character is evil, but every character's emotional reaction to every little event is exactly what you expect.

April 7.

2021-04-07T19:10:36Z

April 7. Continuing from Monday, this new reddit thread is loaded with good stuff: What's something creepy that happened years ago but to this day you can't figure out why it happened?

It's interesting to look at the responses to these kinds of reports. Some people want to explain it all in terms of stuff we already understand, and some people want to go deeper into the unknown. That decision, which of those things to do, is sub-rational and subconscious. Given the scariness of some of these reports, my decision could be wrong. Some people feel that consensus reality is a fortress -- if you see a crack, you'd better seal it up. And I feel that we're in a prison, and cracks should be widened.

Related, reposts of two reddit threads on the afterlife: Despite what you believe or don’t believe, what do you WISH happens when we die? And if you actually go to a paradise after you die, but the paradise automatically is set up in a way which will be the absolute maximum best and pleasing experience for you, how would your paradise be like?

These threads have so many cool ideas, that I wonder if the purpose of this painful human civilization, is to serve as a platform, from which we can imagine a great variety of places to go next.

Last week I saw Soul, a movie with a radical metaphysical foundation. The idea is, down here is our world, and up there is the Universal, God, whatever you want to call it. And in between, there are other worlds. These worlds are not physical, and also not perfect, and we can come and go from them. In the 1600's, you'd get burned at the stake for saying that, and here it is being released by Disney.

April 5.

2021-04-05T17:50:32Z

April 5. This week I want to continue posting stuff that's thoughtful and not political. Fire in the Sky is about the psychology of exploring weird phenomena.

We seem to have a psychological block that prohibits us from entertaining a class of "strange ideas" outside some personal, identity-based window of acceptable thinking.... Conceptually, the block is related to, but notably different from, the Overton Window, which concerns socially-acceptable speech. Our focus here is not exactly what one can or cannot say for fear of social ostracism, though it likely does contribute to the phenomenon, but is rather what one can or cannot say for actual inability to conceive of a subject.

It's funny, because I'm the opposite. This is probably the one way that I want life to be harder. I'm hungry for stuff that stretches my ability to conceive it, so I've devoured the most challenging woo-woo books I can find, from Charles Fort's The Book of the Damned to Ted Holiday's The Goblin Universe to George Hansen's The Trickster and the Paranormal. My conclusion is that it's our world that's unusual. Reality is a roiling sea of first person perspectives, and we live on an island where the illusion of a third person reality becomes plausible, if you don't look too closely.

Another nice quote from the essay:

On the topic of UFOs, we have often turned to "serious scientists" for understanding, which is our euphemism here for debunking. But "serious scientist" is not a profession, it's a popular identity, and that identity is a plague on knowledge. Why qualify the word "scientist" at all? Presumably one is either doing science, or one is not. One is either a scientist, or one is not. The word "serious" divides inquiry into classes. The prestigious, and popular, is separated from the low, the weird, the socially unacceptable. In this way "serious science" is just a Cerberus that guards consensus reality, and on the question of consensus science is agnostic. Any qualification of the word "science" negates the method, and "serious scientists" are therefore not scientists at all.

April 2.

2021-04-02T14:20:38Z

April 2. Some feedback on Reiki. A comment in this subreddit thread suggests that it could work on a social level, "by simulating social connections and support, so the body then feels it is worth investing limited resources in healing and immunity." And over email, Alex comments: "Americans generally don't touch each other unless it's fighting, fucking, or obligation. So being touched in a way that can be interpreted as actually caring is a rare thing." It could be like vitamin A, which is good for your eyesight, but only if your eyesight is bad because of a vitamin A deficiency. (Or money, which is only correlated with happiness below a certain income.)

Probably, those factors are stacking with the placebo effect, which works with lots of things other than touch, and remains unexplained. It's interesting that the placebo effect is cultural, and can change. According to this article, placebo responses have been rising in the USA, but not in other places.

If it can change, than it can be trained. Someone who takes a placebo and gets no benefit, can learn to be someone who takes a placebo and gets a huge benefit. So what exactly would you be training in? I said before that it's not belief, but Hani points out that there are levels of belief. Now we're getting into the subconscious. Changing a fully conscious belief is hard enough, and it probably gets harder the deeper you go. And maybe more powerful.

Related: my friend Erik has co-developed a self-improvement practice called Meliora Meditation. Erik has done a lot of work straightening out his own mind and body, and this came out of that. Also, he has a page of good writings on other subjects, Fragments of Pre-History.