Ran Prieur

"I see more of what is going on around me because I am not concerned with finding a parking place."

-Risa Mickenberg, Taxi Driver Wisdom

novel

old stuff

quotes
readings

about me

favorite songs

search this site


Creative Commons License

October 5. This is my longest blog post ever. It's about determinism.

Even though we have direct experience of free will, some people believe that's an illusion, and the reason they give is a piece of 18th century pseudoscience. Mechanical devices were getting complex enough that people started thinking, suppose all of reality is as ordered and predictable as this little gadget.

Since then, the clockwork universe has been the foundational assumption that guides science as we know it. It's not a theory, because it was never put up for testing. And it's been falsified at least twice, once by quantum indeterminacy, and again more subtly, by the insight that a system can only be deterministic from the outside, and there is no perspective outside the universal.

Quantum physics is not some weird anomaly that we can brush away. It's the next level down from Newtonian physics, and it only seems weird to cultures that have been looking at reality wrong. Its message to us is that the assumption of a third person universe, if you keep looking, leads to a first person universe.

What's the mechanism for free will? That question might not even make sense, and if it does, we also don't know the mechanism for magnetism, and that's no reason to doubt our direct experience that magnets work.

There's an even deeper assumption that underlies determinism: that every event must have a cause. Yet astronomers say the Big Bang was causeless, a random spike of negative entropy. And theologians say it doesn't make sense to ask where God came from. So if the biggest thing of all can have no cause, it should be possible for anything to have no cause.

Obviously, a lot of things do. But it's an interesting exercise to try to imagine what a causeless event would look like, or feel like.


There is another way to argue for determinism. What does a dog do when a strange person comes to the door? It barks, with such perfect reliability that at that moment the dog has no free will, even if it thinks it does. In the same way, a lot of human behavior is automatic stimulus-and-response. Because humans can expand our consciousness, you can look back at your younger self and say, I thought I was making real choices, when I wasn't. Maybe you still aren't.

I appreciate the moral implications of determinism. It makes you less judgmental, because if you take it seriously, the only difference between Hitler and Mr. Rogers is luck.

If there's a psychological case for determinism, but not a physical case, it leads to a crazy speculation. What if there's more free will in little things than in big things? For example, we all know that our political institutions can't stop climate change. As systems get bigger, their behavior becomes more predictable. In the same way, you might be more predictable than your parts.

Suppose that every electron has free will, in the context of moving between available energy states. Then when you get up to the level of chemical reactions, it all becomes cleaner. But then, when you get to biology, maybe we can have free will again, by channeling the playfulness of the small.

Some nature-based cultures use random divination to decide which direction to go for hunting. Even if they're not tapping into deeper knowledge, they're still shaking up their own routines, and the animals never know when the hunters are coming. Modern people might flip a coin to make a decision. Why not make the decision yourself? Because the autonomous self is an illusion, so let's channel some chaos.

Two tangents: In politics, we could loosen up the machinery of the state with random ballot voting. Over time, it reflects the wishes of the majority, and the best thing about it is, there's no incentive to vote for someone you don't like just because everyone else is.

And this is my latest take on meditation: What I'm doing is not stilling my thoughts, exactly, but stilling the automatic, the habitual, and in that clarity, I might sense the mysterious uncaused.

(Related: Big Blood fans, go to my fan page and scroll to the fifth paragraph past the sun for a new interpretation of Haystack.)


October 1. This is my favorite month. Where I live, it's the month that requires the least heating and cooling, and the month that smells the best. It's also when trees lose their leaves. We're supposed to think that humans look better naked and trees look better clothed, but to me it's the other way around.

Some happy links. The ancient Persian way to keep cool, building towers that draw the warm air up and let the wind blow it away.

Telling the bees "is a traditional custom of many European countries in which bees would be told of important events in their keeper's lives, such as births, marriages, or departures and returns in the household."

And two nice soccer goals, by the same player within five minutes. In the first, Eugenie Le Sommer surprises the goalie with a sudden long strike. In the second, the shot is unremarkable, but it comes from a great run and a spectacular pinball assist. It's funny, in American football, "flag is down" means the score doesn't count, and in world football, it means it does.


September 30. I just want to say a little about the decline of Rome, and how it relates to the present decline. The simplest idea of why Rome fell is that the Visigoths sacked it. Really, the Visigoths just milled around and left, and things went back to about how they were before. The American parallel, so far, is last winter's Capitol insurrection. It would be interesting to compare the politics and cultures of the two marauding groups, but I'm not qualified to do that.

As Rome continued to decline, the roads got worse. Everyone was like, I can't wait until they fix these roads. When those people were gone, new generations saw the crappy roads as normal.

I think that's going to happen with shortages. Some present shortages will be fixed, but new ones will appear, and neither you, nor your children's children, will ever again go to the big box store with 20 things on your list, and all 20 will be in stock.

Eventually, big box stores will be replaced by some new thing, maybe local fabricators that require less social complexity, and make a smaller range of stuff. The fall of Rome was not a fall to previous levels of technology -- even the darkest dark ages saw innovations in plows and water wheels, and also less slavery.

We call them "dark" because few records survive. In that sense, we are already in a dark age, because so much of our data is on ephemeral storage media. 5¼ inch floppy disks are already unreadable, and that was only 30 years ago, without a collapse.

I don't know anything about Biden's infrastructure plan, but I can confidently guess that it will not return American infrastructure to peak integrity. At best, it will slow the decline that's been going on for decades.

One bold prediction: the decay of transportation infrastructure will inspire innovations in lighter-than-air travel. The problem is, the wind blows west to east, and the American west is turning into a desert.


September 29. Short, smart article, Suppose I Wanted to Kill a Lot of Pilots. The idea is, some problems are too hard to approach directly. So instead of asking, how do get the outcome I want, you ask, how do I get the opposite of that outcome? And then do the opposite of those things.

But the process must be iterative -- you have to re-think and re-test your views of how to best destroy your future self. Doing so will continuously refine how you can succeed by avoiding failure. For every action, you can then ask whether you are aligned with a future failure or success.


September 27. I think the reason I'm posting less is I'm hanging out all day with two dogs, and I'm so sick of being the center of attention. Jason comments on web 1.0:

Try this for weird and old web - Rex Research. I think some of the tech there might be workable but all that aside it's all wall of text.

The key here is that old people like us grew up reading. The old web is like a clickable book. No one born in the digital age would make a website that looks like yours because their baseline is a manic screaming bullshit parade.

Related: can you see what's remarkable about this Super Metroid FAQ/Speed Guide? Hint: margins. I learned about it from this Twitter thread by Matt Gemmell, via Hacker News. Answer: the text is completely right justified -- in monospace font! That takes a heroic attention to detail, to choose the words so that every line has exactly the same number of characters.

Gemmell comments: "The thrilling thing is that life is packed with that stuff. Genius and art and ludicrous feats that we don't see because we don't pay attention, or don't have the domain knowledge."


September 22. I'm dogsitting in Seattle, and even though I have more free time than usual, I've been working on other projects and not thinking much about the blog. Today, Keith sends two more links on the small web. Wiby is another search engine for simple non-commercial sites. And the WetLeather Recipe Database has a bunch of recipes without the usual cruff of recipe sites.

I'm wondering, with the microchip shortage that shows no sign of ending, if the small web could be a big part of a slow tech crash, when more people have to revert to old computers as their new ones break and they can't afford to replace them.


September 20. Today, some psychology. This is a smart essay, but the clickbait framing gives the wrong idea: The mind does not exist. That makes it sound like the word "mind" points to nothing, but the argument is that it points to too many things, and that it's confusing to stretch a word so broadly. For starters, the author suggests splitting "mental" into psychological, psychiatric, and cognitive.

I wonder how many other words are overstretched. Probably, every time there's an abstract question where people go around and around with no clear answer, it's because of careless language. For example, "What is the meaning of life?" has two words, meaning and life, with too many definitions, and if you ask the question more precisely, it's easier to answer.

I want to focus on a small subset of "mind" that is still too big for our words: non-cognitive decision-making. I've been at this for more than 50 years, and I still have no clear sense of how to tell the difference between feelings that I should follow and feelings that I should ignore.

When people say they can listen to their heart, or follow their gut, and it's 100% right, I think that's a cognitive fallacy: When a feeling they followed turns out to be correct, they retroactively label it as heart/gut. And if it turns out to be incorrect, they retroactively label it as something like prejudice or fear or craving.

Still, those words are not useless, and some people really are good at acting without thinking. We have a long way to go in developing a vocabulary for people who are good at non-cognitive decision-making, to explain to people who are bad at it, what exactly they're doing.

I did some web searching for "how to follow your gut", and the only article I found that actually tried to answer the question was this: A therapist explains exactly what it feels like to listen to your gut. The idea is, do what feels expansive, and don't do what feels contractive.

I think that's good advice, but the article describes expansiveness as always feeling good, and contractiveness as always feeling bad. In my experience, sometimes it's the other way around, which is one of many reasons that making good decisions requires a commitment to feeling bad.

Related: The pressure to avoid negative emotions might help explain why some approaches to happiness backfire. This reminds me of how drowning people don't call for help, because they're so focused on just getting one more breath. In the same way, people who are always trying to be happy right now, are unable to invest in actions that feel bad right now but lead to feeling good in the future.


September 17. Bunch o' links: Marginalia is a new search engine "that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features."

Why is walking so good for the brain?

When we take a walk outside, the fractal rhythms of our heart synchronize with the fractal rhythms of our lungs and our fractal gait. Researchers have also shown that our wandering bodies make our minds wander too. On a walk, our brain waves slow down. The underlying spontaneous fluctuations bubble up more easily, creating experiences of spontaneous thoughts and associations that seem to come from nowhere. We often call them "moments of inspiration."

A proposal for a Lunar Crater Radio Telescope on the far side of the moon, which would be insulated from Earth noise, and also detect long wavelengths that are filtered by Earth's atmosphere. Of course, this could be a solution to Fermi's Paradox: the aliens are only using wavelengths that primitive civilizations like ours can't hear. Or, they could be using something we haven't even imagined. Terence McKenna said, listening for radio waves from other planets is like looking for Italian food on other planets.

A big thread on Ask Old People about video games. It's almost completely positive. Personally I still feel a little bit guilty about gaming. On the one hand, game worlds are not real, and they're rewarding in a way that's probably harmful in navigating the more-real world. On the other hand, we don't know where humans are going, and given that video games are at the cutting edge of interactive world-building, they could be an essential step in our story.

Lots of laughs in this Ask Reddit thread: What is your favorite article from The Onion?

Finally, sports. Morgan Weaver is my favorite soccer player, and not just because she went to college in my hometown, but because there's nobody else like her. She's both tall and fast, both unpredictable and clutch, and plays with a joy that's rare in any sport. Here she is scoring the late winner against Lyon, the European powerhouse, squeaking the ball through the narrowest angle.


September 15. I just got back from a trip. I wouldn't say that I hate traveling; but I hate being busy, and I hate spending money, and I hope one day to take a journey where I do neither of those things.

On the flight home we had some heavy turbulence, and I noticed that they no longer call it turbulence. Apparently the new airline policy is to call it "rough air".

I see why they did it. If English is your second language, or if it's your first language and you're dumb, "turbulence" is a difficult word. If you want passengers to return to their seats, "rough air" is easier to understand. But if a passenger wants to understand why the air is bumpy, "turbulence" points to the explanation.

This is part of a general cultural trend of black-boxification. It's the same reason that computer programs with viewable code, have changed to "apps" with airtight user interfaces. It's the same reason that bicycle bottom brackets have changed from user-serviceable spindles and bearings, to factory-sealed cartridges. These changes make the whole system less robust, because if things go wrong, fewer people know how to fix them.

Related: Norm McDonald has died. One of the principles in the book Finite and Infinite Games is that finite players play within the rules, while infinite players play with the rules. That's why other comedians laugh harder at Norm McDonald than ordinary people do. In his best bits, like the Moth Joke, or the Bob Saget roast, at first you're like, what is this weird thing he's doing? And then you're like, oh wow, he's showing us the machinery behind comedy.


September 7. Heading into a busy time, so I might not post again for more than a week. Today, a quick thought on nostalgia. I like the Ask Old People subreddit because it has good discussions, and I don't like the Gen X subreddit because it's mostly image posts of 70's and 80's pop culture.

And it occurs to me: nostalgia is a new thing. The farther back you go, the slower the pace of change, and the more likely that the culture of your youth would still be dominant when you got old.

Now, I'm glad the Brady Bunch is not in its 53rd season. My point is, a rapid pace of change makes a culture weaker, because most of the stuff that people are really into, is not around any more. On top of that, most of the stuff that people are really into now was never practical in the first place.

It's good that technology has given us the freedom to care about things that are useless. I'm grateful to be living at just the right time to play Starsector. But a robust society needs a lot more overlap between what people love to do, and what they have to do keep the whole thing going.

Imagine if all the attention that is now put into superhero movies, was instead put into woodworking, or agroforestry. Or if all the headspace we now fill with commercial jingles, was used for birdsongs. Taking a step back, a common theme of my fiction and nonfiction is this: I believe, if you put all possible human societies on a scale from 1 to 100, where 1 is worst and 100 is best, we're not even out of the single digits.


September 3. I've said this many times and I'll keep saying it: the prophet of our time is neither Orwell nor Huxley, but Kafka. Three quick links on Kafkaesque tech, starting with how i experience web today. Just keep clicking and you'll get it.

The Rise Of User-Hostile Software, defined as "software that doesn't really care about the needs of the user but rather about the needs of the developer."

And Minimum Viable Technology, a thoughtful post about how technology keeps grinding along and making things more complicated, long after it has improved quality of life.

My favorite personal example is user interfaces for ovens. In the old days there were just two dials, one for OFF BAKE BROIL, and one for the temperature. You could tell what the temp was at any moment just by twisting the dial and feeling the thermostat click. Every change since then has increased complexity and decreased ease of use.

Related: Redditors who remember life pre-internet. What the heck did you occupy your time with?


September 1. Continuing from Monday, one more societal failure incorrectly framed as a personal failure, is obesity. A month ago I linked to this scientific article, A Contamination Theory of the Obesity Epidemic, which argues that some contaminant, either PFAS or lithium, is throwing off our lipostat, our sense of how much to eat. Via the weird collapse subreddit, here's another article, Bear Nation, arguing that the culprit is linoleic acid, which puts us in a state of torpor like hibernating bears.

I don't know which is right, but what they have in common is a rejection of the two most popular ways of framing obesity: 1) That the culprit is some broad class of food, like carbs or fat or calorie-dense meals. 2) That the solution to obesity is for every individual to keep track of calories in and calories out.

Until very recently, no one had to do that. Whatever food you think is bad, you can find populations in the past who ate worse than us, and did not have a problem with obesity. We think our bodies are stupid, and will inevitably get fat unless our heads intervene, but this has only been the case since around 1980. Something, we don't know what it is yet, is messing with our fine-tuned intuitive sense how much to eat.

I have a personal stake in this, and it's not that I struggle with weight, but that I'm tired of my intellect having to constantly overrule my feelings, in order to not crash and burn in life. Some days I feel like my will is dragging around a ball and chain.

We think it's our nature to be lazy, and we'll just sit around doing nothing unless we're forced to work for money. But look at all the things humans have done through history and prehistory, never mind the activity of wild animals. It's the nature of life to be highly motivated, and something, we don't know what it is yet, is making more and more of us want to stay in bed all day.


August 30. Today's theme is societal failures incorrectly framed as personal failures. From a blog post about the fall of Rome:

Overall the various Romans who contemplated reform were in a way hindered by the tendency of Roman elites to think in terms of the virtue of individuals rather than the tendency of systems. You can see this very clearly in the writings of Sallust - another Roman writing with considerable concern as the republic comes apart - who places the fault on the collapse of Roman morals rather than on any systemic problem.

One example from our time is littering. I've written about Keep America Beautiful, an organization formed by manufacturers to make us think of waste "as an individual responsibility, and not one connected to the production process."

Another example: Big oil coined 'carbon footprints' to blame us for their greed

And another: How the work ethic became a substitute for good jobs

One of my pet subjects is procrastination. Of course, as an individual, there are things you can do to overcome it. But you shouldn't have to. All wild animals, and many primitive humans, make no distinction between "work" and "play". That distinction is an artifact of a society in which it's normal to be compelled to do things you do not find intrinsically enjoyable.

The only time a wild animal needs to distinguish between what it feels like doing, and what's good for it to do, is when it's facing a trap. Our whole civilization is a trap we've caught ourselves in, where we're getting in more and more trouble for not forcing ourselves to go against our nature.

I like technology, and I think it's possible for us to have quite a lot of it without involuntary labor or ecological destruction. We just have to make those constraints absolute, and then see how much cool stuff we can get away with.





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 / April / July