Ran Prieur

June 14.

2021-06-14T14:40:41Z

June 14. Last week the Weird Collapse subreddit had its most upvoted post yet, The kids aren't alright. It's an image of some social media posts about how young people, in addition to their personal psychological problems, are objectively in a world threatened by climate change, economic collapse, and bad politics.

I have two pieces of obvious advice. First, avoid social media. For reasons we don't fully understand yet, it's bad for your mental health. Second, stop following national and international news, because it's almost all bad, and there's nothing you can do about it. A phrase I find helpful, to preserve my sanity, is "Not my circus, not my monkeys." Your actual circus and monkeys are local, and with the big systems hanging between gridlock and authoritarianism, it's in the small systems where good stuff can still happen.

My non-obvious advice is to read a holocaust memoir. Because it's probably not going to get that bad, and if it does, you'll see that people can still deal with it. I think Elie Wiesel's Night is overrated. The Maus comics are good, and my favorites are Speak You Also by Paul Steinberg, and From The Ashes of Sobibor by Thomas Blatt.

Related links: Disenchanted Chinese Youth Join a Mass Movement to 'Lie Flat'. And Upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.

On the local angle, The Rise of Remote Work May Reshape College Towns. I live in a college town and it's great. People have to leave because there aren't many jobs. But with remote work, or better yet, an unconditional basic income, the best towns will draw the best people and thrive.

And some grounds for optimism in this thread: What are some small, unnoticed ways we as a society have made social progress in the last two decades?

June 11.

2021-06-11T23:10:32Z

June 11. Matt comments on Monday's subject:

To me, the most obvious rebuttal to the tragedy of the commons is the roommate who picks up after everybody else. It sucks to be that guy. I've been that guy. But I wasn't going to wash a cup every time I wanted a cup.

The tragedy of the commons assumes no one will care about their surroundings unless they fully own them. It's a weird thing to assume.

It also speaks to a weird sick pattern of possessive people: they express care for others/things in proportion to how much they can control others/things. There's also the weird sick pattern of assigning value only to that which can be controlled.

This reminds me of a Steven Wright line: "I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world."

And some music for the weekend. The other day, on weed, I did an experiment, where I put this Seraphim Simulation into this YouTube looper, and play-tested a bunch of psychedelic music to see what made the best combo. The winner: Moon Duo - In The Trees.

June 10.

2021-06-10T22:00:36Z

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 solution 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.

2021-06-09T21:50:36Z

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.

2021-06-07T19:30:26Z

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.

2021-06-03T15:50:04Z

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.

2021-06-02T14:40:18Z

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.