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"Do you want your heart to feel like it has been pulled across by a rasp? Then don't look away."
-Serial Experiments Lain
June 10. Over on the subreddit, zeroinputagriculture has written a great explanation of why genetic engineering isn't as powerful as we think: Limits of eugenics. Basically, as with drug design, we can't just reverse-engineer any effect we want, even if we can build molecules atom-by-atom. Instead, we have to throw a bunch of molecules at the wall and see what sticks.
Related: an important YouTube video, The Myth of the Objective, about how great stuff is not achieved by aiming exactly at it, but found by accident in the process of seeking novelty.
So I'm thinking, if we get Homo Superior through biotech, it will be a lucky strike on cluster of changes that have synergy, and whatever those changes are, that's what humans will be next.
Down in the comment thread, there's a fascinating discussion about the possibility that one nation will come up with something that gives them a big short-term advantage, like the Nazis got with amphetamines -- or a long-term advantage, like a hack for mental health. From there, the discussion gets pretty weird.
I want to go a different direction, and say that the only enduring cure for mental health is a good society. I won't try to define that right now, but the way to have a good society through brain-hacking, is not to bend people's brains to fit a system that they wouldn't otherwise fit -- it's to bend people's brains to see the way out of a system that doesn't fit them, and into one that does.
June 9. Two tangents from Monday's post. First, on the subject of schooling, this is a great paragraph from a new Paul Graham essay, A Project of One's Own:
It's a bit sad to think of all the high school kids turning their backs on building treehouses and sitting in class dutifully learning about Darwin or Newton to pass some exam, when the work that made Darwin and Newton famous was actually closer in spirit to building treehouses than studying for exams.
And on the subject of eugenics, I've been reminded that the definition of that word is broad enough that it can point to two things with no overlap. First, you can have laws that say people with bad genes aren't allowed to procreate -- but inevitably, the definition of "bad genes" is calculated backwards from whatever makes the people in power uncomfortable.
Second, on a completely voluntary basis, we could use technology to improve the human genome. If biotech keeps progressing, this will turn into a huge issue, maybe the biggest issue of the 22nd century. Because after we fix obvious genetic diseases, like Huntington's, we'll get into stuff where the benefit is less clear. Do we want to eliminate sickle cell anemia, which also gives resistance to malaria? Is autism something to be cured, or a valid way of being human?
I expect trends, where the vat-babies of the 2190's have green eyes and wide noses. Or, if different populations go for radically different looks, it could exacerbate tribalism. (Is there a gene for tribalism?) Humans are short-sighted, especially when we're doing something new, so we're sure to make changes that seem to make humanity better, but end up making it worse.
And it's not like we can just tweak a gene to do whatever we want. Little changes will have cascading effects that we don't expect, so that everyone with the gene for pointy ears gets kidney failure.
Personally, I think DNA is overrated, and it will turn out that a big part of who we are, is neither genetics nor environment, but something we haven't discovered yet. Maybe in the 26th century, the biggest issue will be morphic field generators, or ancestral memory wipes.
June 7. Posted a couple weeks ago to Weird Collapse, The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth. Here's a 2008 article on the same subject, Debunking the 'Tragedy of the Commons', and here's how I've explained it before:
If you go out and look, land held in common tends to be managed well, and privately owned land tends to be exploited. But in 1968 a eugenicist named Garrett Hardin pulled a paper out of his ass that said exactly the opposite with no evidence, and the owning classes thought it was brilliant.
Does it matter that Hardin was a eugenicist? Yes, because it's the same kind of evil thinking. To support control of human breeding, you have to be comfortable that the people who will be doing the controlling, are people like you. So you have to be confident that you are a member of a justifiably power-holding class. Hardin also wrote a paper on "lifeboat ethics," again a thought experiment with no evidence, arguing that it's bad to give money to the poor.
Note that the ecological destruction of the modern era is not an example of the "tragedy of the commons," but the tragedy of central control and private property. Related, from 2007: Iain Boal: Specters of Malthus, a smart interview arguing that population only outruns food supply when there's non-local control of resources.
I should also say, to reduce the human population, we only need two things: easy access to birth control, and some way of supporting old people who don't have kids. If people don't need to have kids for economic reasons, and if women aren't forced to be baby factories, then the birthrate drops to sub-replacement.
More negative links. Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie. Basically, by forcing third-party sellers to keep their prices high, and charging them massive commissions, Amazon subsidizes its free shipping. Without illegal monopoly practices, Amazon's business model falls apart.
A lot of pandemic homeschoolers are not going back. On the same subject, by Rebecca Solnit, Abolish High School.
Finally, The Age of Autonomous Killer Robots May Already Be Here, because last year in Libya a weaponized drone hunted down a human target without being told to. If we want to avoid the normalization of killer robots, we need a law that explicitly denies robots the right of self-defense. So if you try to destroy a drone, the most it can do is take your picture and use it to bring charges for vandalism.
June 3. Right after making Monday's post, I took my annual early summer LSD trip. My supply is low enough that I'm only doing it once a year now, but this time I decided to try a tab and a half. The only difference I noticed was that it came on a lot faster. I've still never hallucinated on any substance -- I see what everyone else sees, but differently.
I should also say, LSD is serious, and the younger you are, the bigger the risk. If you're over fifty, your brain is a rusty old engine, and psychedelics are like whacking it with a pipe to loosen it up. You wouldn't whack a cat with a pipe, and that cat is your sixteen year old brain. And unlike cannabis, LSD can bend your brain so it can't be bent back. Anyway, if you're going to do it, my advice is to stock up on fresh fruit, and go walk around outside.
First I took a walk downtown. I've never liked the metaphor that people are asleep, and should wake up. Metaphors should be based on something that makes sense literally, and literal sleep is wonderful. What I saw on my walk, is that humans are not so much asleep, as we are deeply unalive. I mean, we're getting better. But still, what a delicate balance, to be alive enough to set a good example for others, but not so alive that they kill you.
Then, as I always do, I walked up the river trail out of town. I was reminded of the Wallace Stevens line, "We live in an old chaos of the sun," and the Steven Wright line, "God is a huge amplifier and life is just feedback." Nature is not a temple. Nature is a filthy nectar-dripping riot, and human hedonism is pinched and clunky in comparison.
I don't want to be too ungrateful to be human. We can do a lot of things that no other animal can. We can go deep into our own imaginations and take others along. We can tell stories about the stars. And we can listen to, and create, a huge variety of beautiful sounds.
The next day I went back and filmed a new video. It's for one of Big Blood's trippiest and most challenging songs: Sequins. The structure of the song is nine similar sections of 80 beats, so I took the best bit I filmed, and looped it to sync nine times. So far I haven't used Windows Movie Maker, just Windows Video Editor. The birds are cliff swallows.
June 2. The new Firefox update (89) does at least two things I hate. Here's how to fix them.
When you try to search in the search box on the Firefox home page, it moves your search to the address bar. To keep it in the search box: 1) Type about:config into the address bar, and accept the danger. 2) In the search bar that comes up, type handoff. 3) Double-click "browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.improvesearch.handoffToAwesomebar" to false. "improvesearch"? "Awesomebar"? What is this bullshit?
The other thing is it massively pads my bookmarks. This can't be fixed from about:config. You have to make a userChrome.css file. 1) Find your profile folder using these instructions. 2) Create a userChrome.css file using
these instructions. 3) With a text editor (I recommend Notepad++), open your userChrome.css file and copy the code suggested here, but with fewer pixels. I've set all the numbers to 1, and I'm considering 0.
Taking a step back, this is all part of technological collapse. Things that could be simple are made increasingly complex, under the guise of "upgrades", so that engineers can justify their jobs. This complexity makes the practical level of our world less accessible to ordinary users. Stuff that used to be out in the open, is put into black boxes that are hard to get your hands in.
Everything is getting slicker on the surface and more kafkaesque at the core, and we all feel more powerless, and justifiably anxious about things going wrong that we can't fix. When enough things go wrong at once, whole subsystems fall to the highest technological level that people still understand, which might be quite low.
May 31. Wading back into politics, the weirdest thing that's happened recently, was when Caitlyn Jenner, who's running for governor of California, said she didn't vote in the last election -- but then it turned out she was lying and did vote. Why would someone vote, and say they didn't vote?
I think Caitlyn Jenner is nutty enough to be in tune with the zeitgeist, in which voting is now uncool. Voting is for saps. If you really want to make a difference, the cool thing to do is have a violent revolution and install a charismatic leader.
To be fair, voting is really unsatisfying. Until you're in an election that's decided by one vote, your vote has never made a difference. I'm a serious supporter of random ballot voting, where for each candidate or measure, the election is decided by picking a single ballot at random. The best thing about random ballot voting is there's no incentive for tactical voting. So a no-bullshit no-charisma candidate has an actual chance of winning.
It's going to be hundreds of years, or thousands, before humans figure out a good large-scale political system. In the short term, I expect many of our half-assed democracies to be overwhelmed by a tide of authoritarian sentiment.
Something I learned from James C. Scott's book Against The Grain, is that human prehistory was politically very complex, and there were some groups that alternated seasonally between top-down and bottom-up systems. I think that's where the present authoritarian sentiment is coming from. We have something like an ancestral memory, in which, when the system has too much cruft, someone with a strong personality can come in and sweep it away. That probably works pretty well in a group of a hundred people who all know each other. But when it's a hundred million people, you get an insane dictator and piles of dead bodies.
More optimistically, I think populist authoritarianism might just throw a wrench into the big systems, so that local politics become more important. So some regions and towns will be a lot worse than they are now, and some will be better.
May 27. A few notes on the pandemic. Yesterday I got my second dose of Moderna, so I'm fully vaccinated, for now. It's not that I have a huge amount of faith in the medical system, but as I said on the subreddit, it's simple risk analysis. The evidence that COVID-19 is harmful, both short and long term, massively outweighs the evidence that the vaccine is harmful.
Related: a long reddit post where a guy who almost died from COVID tells his story.
I've been on the fence about whether COVID-19 came from nature or a lab, because I'm not a biologist studying the issue, so any opinion I had would have been based on social factors, not scientific. It's better to say nothing than to be right for the wrong reason. But as the social buzz dies down, and the evidence comes in, it's looking more like the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Here's an article making that case, The origin of COVID.
Also on the subject of new diseases, Deadly Fungi Are the Newest Emerging Microbe Threat All Over the World.
I plan to continue posting the best goals from the NWSL. Here's potential rookie of the year Emina Ekic beating three defenders and the goalie with a spectacular curving shot.
May 24. I'm still on vacation from offering my opinion on social issues -- except my opinion that all of these links are good news. Also, notice how many of them are local:
The Psychedelic Revolution Is Coming
Senegal architects ditch concrete for earth
Homeless Oaklanders have built a cob village
When One City Gave People Cash, They Went Out and Got Jobs
Washington State Removes All Barriers to Municipal Broadband
The Number of Cities With Municipal Broadband Has Jumped Over 450% in Two Years
Newark cops, with reform, didn't fire a single shot in 2020
Renton physician cuts health insurance out of the picture
May 20. This week I'm living the dream. It's been years since I've had such large blocks of time with nothing I'm supposed to be doing, and it's wonderful. On top of that, I'm not gaming, and not doing my favorite time-waster, checking Ask Reddit.
Last week I mentioned "hedonic blowback," my own term for something that's been well-studied under other names. It's when you feel bad for no other reason than having recently done something that feels good. I don't get it from most stuff that feels good, but two hours of a great game, like Starsector, is enough to make the whole next day feel bleak and painful. I hope to find a way around this.
After a 12 day break, I'm back on moderated weed. The conventional wisdom about cannabis is that it's bad because it makes you okay with being bored. I was born okay with being bored. When I'm sober (and not gaming) my favorite thing to do is nothing. When I'm high, I'm a workaholic. It's like, if you're an astronomer, and you only have ten hours a week of telescope time, you're going to spend every second of that time looking into space.
But I wonder, am I really seeing things I can't see sober, or is it just that the things I can already see look better? When I think it through, it's some of both, with the greatest benefits in creative ideas, introspection, and listening to highly complex music, and the smallest benefits in watching movies.
So on my sober days, I've been catching up on movies that I know I'll enjoy, but don't really feel like watching. That's how hedonically advanced we are: that cinema, which was considered pure escapism just a hundred years ago, now feels like a chore compared to digital dopamine hammering.
Anyway, for now I just want to report another coincidence. Yesterday I watched two consecutive movies, Prospect and Ms.45, in which a woman saws a man's arm off.
May 17. Still on vacation from serious issues, but I want to write about music. Leigh Ann is in Florida, so I'm listening to lots of sappy stuff that I'd normally have to put on headphones, and yesterday I made a 52-minute summer playlist.
My playlists put quality over quantity, and music over lyrics. So I started with my favorite songs that sound like summer, cut the ones that weren't as good or didn't fit, and arranged the others for flow of sounds. My first thought was to start with "Turn On The Summer" and end with "Summer's Over", but musically it made more sense to do it the other way around.
Summer's Over is a sad and dreamy song recorded in 1969 or 1970 by a teenager named Dennis Harte, and it's the only song on the list that's not on Spotify. Here's the rest of it on Spotify, and it's also at the top of my songs page.
Related: over on the subreddit, 2handband wants help naming a YouTube channel about metal.
New subject: the NWSL regular season has just started, and this goal from Portland's young guns is one of the funnest you'll ever see. Morgan Weaver one-touches a sixty yard bomb from the goalkeeper, right into the path of Sophia Smith who puts it away.
May 10. I'm taking multiple breaks right now: a break from cannabis to reset my tolerance, a break from video games because of hedonic blowback, and a break from blogging because I'm really tired of discussing social issues, and I'm not getting ideas on other subjects. So I probably won't post again this week, and we'll see about next week.
I do want to report a cool coincidence. Only once in my life have I bought a green vinyl album (Insecure Men - self-titled), and only once in Leigh Ann's life has she bought a green vinyl album (Squid - Bright Green Field), and they both just came in the mail on the same day.
May 6. Some happy links. ZAP! Lightning, Gods, and Mushrooms is a 2013 article about how lightning helps wild mushrooms, and how electricity might help with mushroom farming.
Related: Fungi on Mars? The author of this article is a dedicated woo-woo scientist, and there's probably another explanation. But given my own woo-woo philosophy, I wonder if there are potentially fungi on Mars, if humans are ready for it, and if we're not, then the observed color changes on the Martian surface will turn out to be something non-biological.
Nice article about the Moderna vaccine, and the huge potential of using mRNA to hack the immune system for other purposes, like treating cancer or snakebites. By the way, I got my first dose of Moderna a week ago, and the only obvious effect was a bit of soreness in the muscle around the shot.
This is bad timing with all the COVID pyres in India, but Maine might legalize Viking-style funeral pyres. Related: Recompose is a Seattle company that will compost your body.
This is the first house to be 3D printed from raw earth. It's pretty cool, but I'm wondering how much it cost to build a giant 3D printer that can build a house, and how much cheaper it would be to just build the same house by hand. Of course it would take a lot more time, but most people in the world have more time than money.
And a fun subreddit, FairytaleasFuck, for pictures of real places (and sometimes art) that look like they're in a magical world.
May 3. Some doom links, starting with The 'Capitalism is Broken' Economy. It's about how American employers are having trouble filling their crappy jobs:
Stick with me here, but what if people weren't lazy -- and instead, for the first time in a long time, were able to say no to exploitative working conditions and poverty-level wages? And what if business owners are scandalized, dismayed, frustrated, or bewildered by this scenario because their pre-pandemic business models were predicated on a steady stream of non-unionized labor with no other options? It's not the labor force that's breaking. It's the economic model.
I would explain it like this: Of the many reasons a person gets a job, two of the big ones are 1) to rise from poverty to wealth, and 2) to not fall from poverty to death. Now, with economic decline, and the rich bunkering up with their money, upward mobility is a lot harder. At the same time, through moral progress and upgrades to the safety net, falling from poverty to death is also harder.
Another reason Americans get jobs is to buy cheap stuff from China, and that's also not going to last. Related: Brace for shipping tsunami as container capacity maxes out.
Long speech transcript, How Tech Loses Out. The idea is, big companies now outsource everything. Tech companies have become intellectual property and finance companies, and they no longer employ anyone who knows how stuff actually works.
And at some point, the technical skills of the company become negative. And what does that mean? That your company knows so little about what it does that if you would ask a random person on the street for advice on the thing that your company makes, they are more likely to provide correct answers than the people that actually work for the company.
In the Hacker News comment thread, the top comment is about a sci-fi novel, where people keep using technologies that they don't understand, until the machines break and no one can fix them. Related: my 2010 post on the coming skill crash.