readings
favorite songs
search this site
"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr.
November 10. Just submitted to Weird Collapse, Imagination isn't the icing on the cake of human cognition. It's the cake: "The more we understand about the minds of other animals, and the more we try (and fail) to build machines that can 'think' like us, the clearer it becomes that imagination is a candidate for our most valuable and most distinctive attribute."
Maybe humanity's great mistake is trying to make our dreams physically real. Consider all the imagination that went into a place like Disneyland, and then the nightmare of the place itself -- never mind all the dystopian constructions that are supposed to be practical. I'm thinking the best human society is the one that gives the most citizens the most hours of unfettered useless dreaming.
Loosely related, an interesting piece about insincere imagination: If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying.
November 8. Still on semi-vacation from blogging. Here's one negative link: Examining interactions between narcissistic leaders and anxious followers on Twitter using a machine learning approach
And one positive: Scotland wants to rewild its famous wilderness
November 5. Music for the weekend. At the end of last year, I said that the best song of 2020 is surely something I haven't heard yet. I still think that's the case, but among the songs I have heard, this is my new favorite: Pozi - Whitewashing. Pozi is an English post-punk trio with no guitars, only drums, bass, and violin. Their newest EP doesn't have anything as catchy as Whitewashing, but I love its sonic complexity.
November 3. No ideas this week, so more links, starting with two about user-friendly devices: the PinePhone and the Framework Laptop.
A reader sends this page about the The Catacombs of Solaris. "The goal of this game is to find your favourite room in the catacombs. It's a perspective maze that plays with your perception of 3D space on a 2D screen."
Moving from tech to ecology, this is a summary of an interesting paper: Foraging humans, mammals and birds who live in the same place behave similarly.
And Genetic Goldmine in Earth's Harshest Desert Could Be The Key to Feeding The Future. The idea is, as a lot of the planet turns into a desert, we could stick desert genes in food plants so they'll still grow.
November 1. I have a new rule, that if I post a negative link, I have to balance it with a positive link. So, negative: a Hacker News thread about how U.S. house prices are rising exponentially faster than income, with lots of smart discussion about why that's happening and how we could do the economy better.
Positive: a long Reddit thread, What does America get right?
Negative: The First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Leaf Blowers. Even if we fix the toxic emissions with electric leaf blowers, they're still used to move leaves off lawns, when it would be ecologically better to let them stay.
Positive, or at least it will make you feel better: Therapists, what is something people tell you that they are ashamed of but is actually normal?
October 29. One more loose end from Monday. The words "bullshit" and "myth" probably have too much baggage for how I was trying to use them. What I'm trying to get at is, there are different ways that something can be misrepresented, even opposite ways. If politics were sex, then CNN is public school sex education, and Qanon is hentai.
Unrelated stray links:
The Guardian reviews a new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow:
Humanity was not restricted to small bands of hunter-gatherers, agriculture did not lead inexorably to hierarchies and conflicts and there was not one mode of social organisation that prevailed, at least until thousands of years after the introduction of agriculture.
On the contrary, they maintain, prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation, in which people lived in a variety of settings, from small travelling bands to large (perhaps seasonally occupied) cities and were wont to change their social identities depending on the time of year.
Posted to Weird Collapse, an interesting essay about vestigal shamans. The idea is, the weird people we have now, and the ways they serve society with their weirdness, are not that different from shamans in low-tech cultures. At the end the author offers some advice, including "Don't retreat into fantasy worlds." I would say, plunge confidently into fantasy worlds, but don't get stuck there. The Tao Te Ching said it best: "Use the bright light but return to the dim light."
A good Hacker News thread on Willingness to look stupid. From the top comment:
I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk through all the super-obvious stuff to satisfy the one guy who didn't do his homework.
So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have.
Finally, New study calls into question the unique benefits of Western classical music in psychedelic therapy. It's a small study, but it seems that overtone-based music works at least as well as classical. Here's an overtone music playlist.
October 27. Continuing from Monday, inside every human are two opposite drives. No, it's not love and death. It's recognition and surprise. I'm reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, and lesson 4 is about prediction. Noticing something that your brain didn't predict, and integrating it into your mental models, takes cognitive effort, and actual physical energy. Recognition is easy, which is why, to reach the largest audience, you have to give them what they expect.
In every big budget movie, one surprise is permitted. It's called the "twist", and it retroactively changes what you thought was happening. While the content of the twist is supposed to be a surprise, the reveal itself is pure formula. Personally I prefer micro-scale surprise, where lines of dialogue and character reactions are unpredictable. But writing that way takes more creativity, and makes less money, so it's uncommon.
Jacques Ellul pointed out that propaganda can never be surprising. Now, with the internet, everyone can be their own propagandist. Whatever you already believe, plug it in and there's your confirmation. Of course, in practice, people do this in groups. And I wonder, when people complain about "bullshit", if what they really mean is other people's bullshit, the pain of encountering another universe of confirmed expectations.
I have an idea for an impossible reform, where news stations are required to choose a certain amount of content at random. Out of all the footage and interviews that any journalist thought was worth recording, just pull something out of the hat to show to viewers. That would be a lot more dangerous and real than the way they do it now.
My personal tactic is to practice looking for the unexpected, to seek the experience: "Hey, there's something I didn't already think was there."
October 25. Inspired by this Weird Collapse post, There's simply too much bullshit today, I want to try to define and explain what we call "bullshit".
It's basically the same thing we call "propaganda", except that bullshit need not have a bias. It can be made by people who are competent and well-meaning, who just want to get an important message to the largest possible audience. Like cafeteria food, bullshit is exciting to no one, so that it can be tolerable to everyone. Like Hollywood in the age of test screenings, bullshit is a filter for anything weird or challenging.
An explicit definition: Bullshit is information pre-digested to demand the least cognitive effort so it can reach the most people.
The most realistic cure for bullshit is media decentralization, but it's still not realistic. Could we split up Facebook into a hundred fully autonomous platforms? Could we split up CNN into a thousand local stations, each getting their info from a completely unfiltered feed of whatever anyone uploads? That's basically what the internet is already. We're still in the earliest stages of figuring out how to moderate universal access to powerful information technology.
I also want to distinguish bullshit from myth. Bullshit can be fully fact-checked and still be bullshit. It can seem false while being technically completely true. Myth is indifferent to fact-checking. It is designed to feel true, even if it's based on no evidence whatsoever.
October 22. Thanks Alex for sending this reddit thread, What are hobbies? It's all about how much better creative activities are if you keep them separate from money, but how the economy is so tight now that few people can afford to do that.
Not to end the week on a low note, this is a rare thing, a song that is really good, popular, and from this century: The Joy Formidable - Whirring
October 20. Stray links, starting with two on transportation. This is the high end of stealthy vehicle living, a studio apartment in a box truck.
And Heavy-Lift Cargo Drone Makes First Public Flight. That link goes to the Hacker News comment thread. It can haul 200kg 40km, or 440 pounds 25 miles. I predict, by 2100, most rural freight and travel will be done by air, because it will turn out to be cheaper than maintaining roads and bridges. Even in places where it is cheaper to maintain roads and bridges, there may not be the political will to do so.
And four medical links, starting with this depressing Reddit thread, What are some of the darker effects Covid-19 has had that we don't talk about?
The Implications of Low Cholesterol in Depression and Suicide. "The brain is the most cholesterol-rich organ in the body, and depriving the brain of essential fatty acids and cholesterol can lead to detrimental health problems."
Black mamba venom is better painkiller than morphine
Psychedelic use associated with lower odds of heart disease and diabetes. "The researchers controlled for age, gender, marital status, race, annual household income, level of education, engagement in risky behavior, and the use of other types of drugs. But... 'The direction of causality remains unknown.'"
October 18. Still continuing on emotions, there's a growing ambition of using AI to detect them. My first question is, what is the context in which this would happen? Why not just ask people what they're feeling and expect them to answer honestly?
Emotion-detecting AI implies a context of mistrust. It would be done by states that don't trust their citizens, or corporations that don't trust their workers, or social media platforms that don't trust their members.
The science is clear: emotions are not the kind of thing that AI can detect. They're so soft-wired that even electrodes in our brains could not unlock their mystery. What AI can detect, and it's getting better, are facial expressions. Facial expressions are not emotions, because they map differently to emotions in different cultures, and because they can be faked.
Ideally, it would be illegal to use AI to detect facial expressions. More realistically, it will be done in special cases, like in the theater of security, detecting shifty eyes in airports. But I want to jump to the worst-case scenario: Everywhere you go, there will be cameras on your face, feeding computers that might reward or punish you for your expression.
Already on social media, everyone is carefully crafting their profile so that they appear to be more happy, successful, and normal than they really are. And in the context of these performances, everyone feels like a weird loser. Expression-detecting AI has the potential to make this nightmare panopticon universal. In the future, everyone will be famous all the time, if "famous" means that your persona is crafted for an audience of strangers.
I see three broad strategies for dealing with this as an individual. 1) Perform the rewarded expressions, and really believe that that's how you're feeling. 2) Perform the rewarded expressions, but keep track of the difference between who you're pretending to be, and who you are. This takes more cognitive energy than the first strategy. 3) Live as if nobody is watching, and accept the punishment.
October 15. Continuing on emotions, this Lisa Feldman Barrett TED talk explains that "emotions are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment," turning vague and simple physical sensations into specific and complex emotional states.
Putting this together with the idea that educated westerners are unusually preoccupied with emotions, and also that we're more sedentary than other societies, this is my hypothesis about modern mental illness: that a lot of it is caused by feedback loops, emotions untethered from physical actions, just chasing each other around the brain and inevitably veering off into places that feel bad and are hard to get out of.
On top of that, for the last fifty years our culture has told us that emotions should never be suppressed, so now they're all running around like unruly children.
This is my new tactic against anxiety: If I'm having an emotion that feels bad, I ask if it's connected to something I'm doing, physically, right now. And if it's not, I rein that sucker in. That makes it sound easy, but fully developed emotions can dig in hard in your brain. The trick is to catch them early, and that might require a lot of time observing their life cycle.
I'm still skeptical of "meditation", when it's defined as blanking your mind and focusing on your breath. All the breath-focusing I've done has never taken me anywhere. But maybe the greater value is not where it takes you, but where it stops you from going. The best way to still an emotion that's not connected to something you're doing right now, is to focus on something you're doing right now, and your breath is always there.
October 13. Another psychology link, posted to the Weird Collapse subreddit, What if emotions aren't universal but specific to each culture? Western academics believed for decades that their own emotional experience was universal, just because of one weak study -- that's all it takes to make people believe that everyone else is like them.
It turns out that there's a lot of variation in how cultures map emotions to facial expressions. Also, educated westerners think and talk about their own emotions way more than anyone else. Some Chinese get depression with only physical symptoms. Some Japanese say it doesn't even make sense to talk about emotions outside a social context. And in one study in Ghana:
"My students would sit there with this one page of emotion terms for 30-40 minutes, just that page. And when I ask them what is happening, they would say: 'Well, I understand all the words... but how am I supposed to know what I feel?'"
And one more psychology link, Exposure to authoritarian messages leads to worsened mood but heightened meaning in life. Can't we just be in a good mood and have life be meaningless?
Isak Dinesen said, "All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story." That's pretty optimistic. The way it usually works is that people are capable of causing any suffering if it's part of a story.
Taking a stab at putting it all together: All life seeks to be part of something larger. Humans are in the process of trying a bunch of new ways for many people to become one. Most of them are not going to work out. A lot of those failures are breaking down right now. Some older things are filling the gap, the worst of which is to follow the most belligerent ape in fighting the enemy apes.
Personally, I'm not seeing anything I want to be part of, except my own body and all life on earth.
October 11. Two quick tangents from last week. It's funny that some people experience their thoughts as popping into their head out of nowhere, because my thoughts seem to be part of pretty reliable causal chains, while what comes out of nowhere are emotions. I often feel irritable or anxious for no good reason, and I have to remind myself that those feelings are free-floating in my psyche, and not to project them on the external world.
And in the context of the self being an illusion, I finally came up with a good definition of "ego": Ego is when being the same person gets in the way of doing better things.
October 8. Continuing from the last post, over on the subreddit there's a post about Sam Harris, in which sordidbear summarizes Harris as observing his own cognition closely, and discovering that "thoughts, ideas, intentions etc are simply popping into consciousness seemingly out of nowhere and then leaving just as abruptly to be replaced with new ones."
I haven't read Sam Harris, but if someone says, I looked really closely at consciousness and this is how it really is, I'm going to call observer effect, because if there's anything that behaves differently when it's being observed, it's consciousness.
Likewise, advanced meditators and psychedelic trippers have reported that the self is an illusion, that there are no persons, only actions. While I find that a compelling idea, I wonder if they've discovered a universal truth, or just found a local one.
Probably what Harris has discovered, is not how consciousness is, but how he can make it. And where one could see that as a refuation of free will, with the illusory chooser overwhelmed by meaninglessness, I see it as a necessary condition for free will, by getting off the treadmill of cause-and-effect.
So if something pops into your head, and you follow it, is the freedom really yours? It doesn't matter. You're participating in the creativity of the universe. Matt comments:
An idea that I keep coming back to is: the main lever of will is awareness. As awareness expands, our choices expand.... It seems to be the case in multiple spiritual traditions that, as awareness deepens, interconnectivity becomes more obvious. Causation looks more like connection. Your "own" desires are suddenly contextualized within a web of being.
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."