September 1. Continuing from the last post, another 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.
September 3. I keep saying this: 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.
September 7. 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. But 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, I believe that 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 17. 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."
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.
September 20. 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 listen to their heart, or follow their gut, and it's always 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.
September 27. Can you see what's remarkable about this Super Metroid FAQ/Speed Guide? I learned about it from this Twitter thread by Matt Gemmell. 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 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.