readings
favorite songs
search this site
"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr.
December 18. Just got back last night, and while I work on my next post, some happy links.
They say writers should write what they want to read, and mostly I do, but some of my favorite works of fiction have a certain vibe that I could never achieve, including John Crowley's Engine Summer, Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, and most of all Hitoshi Ashinano's manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. Thanks Alex for sending this fan page with download links, YKK Project.
Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation. Related, from a Reddit comment in a thread about quicksand:
Wolves. Never a threat. Often encountered them doing field research in the Canadian wilderness. We could walk right through the middle of a pack. They'd trot over to our camp, lay down and just stare with a mild curiosity. Sometimes they'd have a bit of blood on their faces where it had been deep in a carcass but zero aggression towards us. Their cubs would play with anything dangling. After a while the pack would get up and just trot off as if 'nothing interesting here.'
And some music. Some people find this unbearable, but I find it soothing: a loop of the Mr. Sandman intro.December 11. Next week I don't expect to post because I'll be on vacation in Las Vegas. We're going for the immersive experiences including Omega Mart. I don't plan to do any gambling, and here's a good page of gambling simulators where you can test out a bunch of strategies and see that you'll still lose.
December 9. Smart article on decline (thanks Greg), America Is Running on Fumes. (That link is a paywall workaround. If it doesn't work, try this one.)
There's lots of stuff about the decrease in new ideas, why it's happening, and how to fix it. But my favorite part is about all the changes at the end of the 19th century:
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up 25 years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting. There are no cars on the road. Telephones are rare. There is no such thing as Coca-Cola, or sneakers, or basketball, or aspirin. The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
...
A quarter-century hibernation today would mean dozing off in 1996 and waking up in 2021... Compare "cars have replaced horses as the best way to get across town" with "apps have replaced phones as the best way to order takeout."
I think this is unfair, but it's also a really powerful idea, to look for 25 year periods where one kind of thing changed a lot. If you're lgbtq, you'd probably rather have the cultural changes from 1990-2015 than the technological changes from 1875-1900.
Or consider all the cultural inventions and openings from 1960-1985. If I could time travel to 1875, I'd rather have that upgrade, than the upgrade that actually happened. A world with punk rock and horses sounds pretty cool.
Of course, the tech changes were necessary for the cultural changes. The music of the 1960's required fully distributed phonographs and radios. And yet, phonographs and radios were around for decades before they drove a renaissance. So I'm wondering, what things have already been invented, that are still waiting for their golden age?
My bet is on psychedelics and transcranial brain-hacking. Future archaeologists, looking at physical artifacts, will surely see our century as one of decline. But if you can stay out of the worst places, it might be a good time to be alive.
December 6. Lately I'm feeling burned out on blogging. Sometimes people caring what I think is not worth people caring what I think, and that's becoming true for more subjects. But this is a cool subject (thanks Jed), Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture.
RS, described as the experience of being able to transcend one's physical confines and visit alternate, mostly fictional, universes, is discussed by many on Internet platforms.... The experience of shifting is reportedly facilitated by specific induction methods involving relaxation, concentration of attention, and autosuggestion. Some practitioners report a strong sense of presence in their desired realities, reified by some who believe in the concrete reality of the alternate world they shift to.
Obviously these worlds aren't real, but it's interesting that there is a cultural trend of more intensive imagination. It's anyone's guess if this is a dead end, or if it's leading somewhere.
Related: a smart blog post from 2017, Reality has a surprising amount of detail. The same thing struck me after playing on the Oculus and then taking the garbage out. In VR, there's a limit to how deep you can zoom before you get to one pixel. In reality -- and you could even use this as a definition of reality -- no matter how deep you zoom, there's always more. That's why physicists will never find a final particle or a grand unifying theory.
December 2. Stray tech links. Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand. This article is loaded with examples of how increasing technological complexity creates more problems than it solves.
On the same subject: Ask Hacker News: Why doesn't anyone create a search engine comparable to 2005-Google? Because the internet is much bigger now and more complex. But the thread does have some examples of good small search engines, including Gigablast. There are a few more examples on this altsearch page (thanks
Alex).
Firefox is the Only Alternative "to a complete Chrome hegemony."
Why a toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today
And two surprisingly unpopular YouTube channels, Ris and Revrart, both makers of fractal zooms into trippy illustrations. I recommend muting the sound and playing music of your choice while watching.
November 30. Continuing from last week: why is modern society so busy? I said it's "built into our culture on a deeper level than technology," but now I'm not so sure. This could be another paradox, like Braess's paradox, in which adding more roads slows down traffic, or Jevons paradox, in which using a resource more efficiently leads to using more of it. Through mechanisms we don't fully understand, our labor-saving devices could be increasing labor.
Matt comments:
The problem could be completely cultural. That is, it's possible that technology only accelerates work in cultures that idealize work. If work is seen as virtuous, rather than "some activity necessary for survival and maintaining infrastructure," then people will use technology to leverage themselves into greater virtuosity.
We know from anthropology that when some foraging societies are, say, given access to trucks then they don't spend more time foraging. Rather, they get the week's work out of the way more quickly and spend the rest of the week in leisure.
What's exciting about The Dawn of Everything is how it emphasizes conscious choice in culture. There's plenty of reason to believe that some Indigenous cultures, when Europeans encountered them, were in a mode of consciously rejecting large-scale agriculture, hierarchies, cities, and so on.
Could this happen in the future? I think it could happen in the near future, if we get an unconditional basic income. Of course, this would be in a context of general economic decline. Desperate governments will prevent mass unrest by throwing money at their citizens. Then the worst jobs, and the benefits that depend on them, will mostly disappear.
But the last thing I'm worried about is everyone taking their UBI and staring at the clouds all day. Farmers will continue to work because they're already working for basically nothing. And the worst things humans have done have been done by the over-motivated. I fear the rapid growth of authoritarian movements, gobbling up UBI's as tithes, and using efficiency of scale to put large regions under old-time social dominance culture.
At the same time, there will be lots of other social experiments, and with luck a few of them will find ways to keep going, at a high level of slack, as the old systems fall.
November 26. Weird links for the weekend, starting with a review of a fringe science book from 1896, The Human Soul, featuring lots of trippy primitive photographs.
Bill sends this piece about Colin Wilson and The Robot, in which the "robot" is the human brain's ability to make conscious behaviors unconscious. This allows us to do routine physical tasks with much more efficiency, but then the robot goes too far, numbs our perceptions, and makes us feel less alive. I'm not convinced that we're talking about only one thing here, because when I'm really high, which supposedly shuts the robot down, I can still type.
Transcranial brain stimulation can reduce disgust and moral rigidity. Transcranial means it's done with electromagnetism through the skull, without breaking the skin. I think this kind of thing is going to be huge in the coming decades.
Pretty good Reddit thread, Police, security guards, paramedics etc - Have you ever been called out only to realise it was a seemingly paranormal incident?
And from today, a funny Reddit thread: Have you ever written down a 'genius idea' while drunk/tired/otherwise confused, then gone back to it later to find it was complete nonsense? What was your genius idea?
November 24. Depressing Reddit thread, What is an overly-romanticized job? The key comment:
Reading this thread, I'm starting to think work in general is overly romanticized in our culture. To the point where people sacrifice their relationships, their time, and their happiness in pursuit of a misrepresentation of a career they chose. I think a lot of people feel so committed to their choices and pressured by society that once they realize that their job isn't what they expected, they just white knuckle it to retirement.
And yet it strikes me, a lot of these terrible jobs would be pretty good at a slower pace and for fewer hours. The fact that we're still in such a hurry, with so many labor saving devices and so much material wealth, suggests that the hurrying is built into our culture on a deeper level than technology and economics.
Related: In Portugal, it's now illegal for your boss to call outside work hours.
And here's a job that more people would have, in a better world: Coral Farming to Help Restore Dying Reefs.
November 22. Experts From A World That No Longer Exists is an awkward title for a valuable idea:
Henry Ford was a tinkerer. He revolutionized the factory floor by letting his workers experiment, trying anything they could think of to make production more efficient. There was just one rule, a quirk that seemed crazy but was vital to the company's success: No one could keep a record of the factory experiments that were tried and failed.
Things that failed in the past might succeed now, because "other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical."
The article is about technology and economics, so the examples are stuff like the success of Chewy after the failure of Pets.com. But I'm thinking about other kinds of things, and I don't want to get too specific, but maybe some social experiments that failed in the past could work in the future, because of changes to the underlying culture. Or ambitious lifestyle changes could become possible through different moment-to-moment mental habits.
A couple more links. Deaf Football Team Takes California by Storm. It's paywalled, but this is the key bit:
Many teams try to use hand signals to call in plays, but they are no match for the Cubs, who communicate with a flurry of hand movements between each play. No time is wasted by players running to the sidelines to get an earful from the coaching staff. No huddle is needed.
The coaches also say deaf players have heightened visual senses that make them more alert to movement. And because they are so visual, deaf players have a more acute sense of where their opponents are positioned on the field.
November 20. Over on my favorite songs page, I've just posted a new playlist, in which I alternate songs from my two favorite years, 1970 and 2014.
November 18. Back on October 27, I wrote, "Inside every human are two opposite drives. No, it's not love and death. It's recognition and surprise." It turns out, even Freud was thinking the same thing. Jake writes:
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he introduces the ideas, he tries to make clear that they actually refer to "surprise seeking" and "compulsive repetition" respectively.
Freud uses "death drive" for compulsive repetition because, looking at amoebas, he believed that repetitive, "automatic" movement was what defined "inorganic" (or dead) things, while surprise seeking is a specifically "organic" or "living" behavior.
Related: The First Horror Movie Written Entirely By Bots. If automatic movement can't be surprise seeking, then why is this so funny? It's because the bot is reflecting our own cliches back at us, but getting them slightly wrong, in ways that we wouldn't think of.
November 16. Continuing from yesterday, two comments on subworlds serving worlds. Matt writes:
The most I've ever been changed by a "game", I think, is acting training. The semester in college where we did Meisner acting games was somewhat destabilizing for a lot of us, because they prime you to spit out the truth, to not hide your emotional reaction to anything, and to pay attention to others' authenticity. Meisner training is something that serves that subworld of acting really well, but can cause social upset because our culture abets white lies, bullshit, and emotional restraint.
Unwashed mendicant writes (lightly edited):
I think the best example of a fictional world that has the potential to inform the physical isn't exactly a fictional world, but a set of practices intended to run that world. I'm thinking of the Old School Renaissance of D&D.
Modern D&D has grown more bloated and waddling as each edition goes on. It takes hours to make a character. There's a big incentive to keep player characters alive, since so much effort goes into making them. Dungeon Masters are expected to carefully craft scenarios that match the abilities of the party. Player abilities are there to support combat. The Adventures are scripted. The Dungeons are linear. The experience feels like walking through a hallway knocking things down.
As a reaction to this we have Old School Renaissance. Rulebooks are generally free or cheap. Play is fast. You roll up a character in seconds. You don't have to read many rules -- you just say what you want to do and if it's reasonable it happens.
Player abilities and magic items are there to support exploration and problem solving. Combat is very deadly, and experience points come from finding treasure, so it's smarter to avoid combat. DMs are encouraged to think on their feet and improvise. The rules encourage emergent play with many random elements that can surprise the DM as much as the player.
I often walk away from an old school D&D session with fresh ideas to bring to my actual life; ideas on how to simplify, to make meaningful choices, to encourage agency and choice in myself and those around me, to be open to opportunity, to think on my feet, and move in a creative flow.
November 15. Continuing from Friday, I wrote, "In the worst case, VR will lead your body astray like Facebook leads your mind astray." But we're talking about two different kinds of misrepresentation.
As I said a few months ago, nobody ever believed anything unless they got something out of it. It's normal for humans to ignore evidence about social issues so that we can belong to a group. It's less common for someone to tie their whole identity to something like the correct way to swing an axe.
So I expect VR representations of physical skills to get steadily closer to reality. Where there is distortion, it will be in social aspects of physical skills, like the attitude of your partner in VR porn.
On another angle of the subject, why is it that video games have always been associated with nerds? I think it's because there's a lot of variation in the human ability to narrowly focus. I can play a game with low-res graphics in the center of my eyesight, and block out everything else. Some people can't do that. They're not going to get really absorbed in something unless they can focus widely. Now, with devices that allow head-turning and engage the arms and legs, everyone can be a gamer.
Assuming there isn't a tech crash, the coming decades are going to be interesting. Other "planes" aren't just something from fantasy novels. You're on another plane right now, reading this. Things bubble up from the human subconscious, take shape in cyberspace, and influence the physical world.
In the long term, every subworld must serve the world that contains it. I think the best way game worlds can serve the physical world is the way imagination always has: by showing us how things could be better. So, if you could step into any fictional world, which one? And how far can we go making our own world more like that?
November 12. I've been skeptical about the value of virtual reality, because I can play a good PC game from the 90's, like Lords of the Realm II or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and get just as absorbed as in a new game with 100 times as many pixels. So what's the point? But Leigh Ann wanted to get an Oculus Quest 2, so this week we got one and tried it out.
I think it's revolutionary, not because it adds more detail, but because it involves the body. When you turn your head from a screen, you leave the simulation; when you turn your head on the Oculus, you go deeper into it. One of the most popular games, Beat Saber, can be a workout of arm-swinging and squatting. From a review of A Township Tale:
Axes won't chop trees with a series of unfocused blows but must instead be carefully aimed and leveraged, slicing into the same point time and again. Lighting a fire, meanwhile, requires you to knock two bits of flint together over dry grass.
In many cases, you need to consider the angle and speed of your approach. Swing a hammer at the wrong angle when crafting and you can hit nails in the wrong direction or even break materials. Chiseling away at wood needs just the right touch or you might end up making a soup ladle by accident.
Of course, you're not learning from the real world, only from some programmer's guess about the real world. In the worst case, VR will lead your body astray like Facebook leads your mind astray. But in the best case, with increasingly good real world modeling, you could get halfway to a difficult physical skill with a lot less investment.
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.