Ran Prieur

January 26.

2022-01-26T14:00:20Z

January 26. One of the best things you can do for your mental health, is to look for things that you don't enjoy doing, and don't actually have to do, and stop doing those things. A trivial example is socks. I don't even try to match them anymore -- I just stuff them all in a bag, and pull out any two black ones.

A more serious example is arguing on the internet. I used to take for granted that if you have an audience and a strong opinion, you say it. Now I've basically retired from saying anything on any subject where people will get mad if you disagree with them.

It's funny how times have changed. I've written stuff about God that would get me burned at the stake in the 1600's. In the 2000's, "God" is a big-tent word -- whatever it means to you, you're in. This seems like progress in religious tolerance, but only because the word "religion" points to two different things: 1) beliefs about the unseeable world, and 2) beliefs that anchor your identity and meaning of life.

The word "religion" has stuck with the first thing, while the second thing, the tribalistic fervor about how things are, has shifted from the divine to the mundane.

I think this is what we wanted all along. Only now do we have the speed of information to keep tabs on the physical world, and the breadth of interpretation to disagree about stuff that you can actually look at.

January 24.

2022-01-24T12:40:28Z

January 24. Continuing from last week, on the speculation that future humans will take different drugs all day, to fit what they're doing. That has already happened. People drink coffee in the morning and take melatonin before bed. We get drunk or high to party, and athletes take whatever performance enhancing drugs they can get away with. The reason steroids are forbidden, is that if everyone does them, the whole baseline shifts, and then everyone has to use a substance that's bad for them in the long term.

But again, that already happened with cigarettes, which make a lot of service industry jobs tolerable. I wonder if that's part of why so many people are quitting their jobs now, because the jobs were designed in a context of near-universal cigarette use, and non-smokers can't put up with that shit.

Imagine a drug that gives you microsecond reaction time, so everyone takes it for driving, and then we can greatly increase speed limits with only a small increase in traffic deaths. Then you have to take the drug every time you drive, or you'll crash. That's the kind of mistake we have to watch out for, as we develop better drugs.

There's a third way that technology can claim to improve our perception: augmented reality. And if I'm trying to build a dystopia, augmented reality is a lot more exciting than VR and drugs. If China could afford it, they would already have everyone walking around with a headset, showing everyone else's social credit score. Augmented reality is an overlay of stories, about whatever you're looking at, where those stories are told by whoever controls the technology.

January 20.

2022-01-20T20:00:09Z

January 20. Two new articles on virtual reality. When art transports us, where do we actually go? It's a good question, but the answers are just a bunch of fancy language for stuff that should be obvious. Conclusion: immersive experiences are valuable for how they change us when we come back to the real world.

It's hard to say anything on this subject that's both correct and interesting. This article starts with something interesting but incorrect: Virtual reality is genuine reality, says philosopher David Chalmers. Then he backs off and says, yeah, we still have to respect the physical world.

Even professional philosophers struggle to define "real". Real is other people, whether they be humans, cats, or entities that we can't understand from our tiny perspective. Real is a direction of consciousness, toward the relationships that connect the illusory self to the Universal. Real is turning outward, and unreal is turning inward to our own creations: dreams and nightmares, gardens and prisons, video games and cryptocurrencies.

I love video games. I wish I could step into the world of Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, and cross the edge of that game into an infinite world with the same vibe. And maybe somewhere there is a real world with that vibe. But you can't get there through a game.

It's possible right now to make a game that teaches basic ecology better than a real forest. But at some point you have to go to a real forest if you want to keep learning. That's why future humans are not going to spend their whole lives in VR, tied by a thread to the physical world.

I don't think we have a lot of room to go deeper into artificiality than we already are. The next frontier is not packing more pixels into our vidscreens, or hacking our brains to sense what's not there. The next frontier is hacking our brains to sense what is there, better -- or through a different filter.

My favorite thing to do is take a walk in the non-human-made world, on drugs. Then I take the same walk sober, and I'm like, damn, sobriety sucks. Human default cognition is great for general purpose use. You can drive, do your job, make dinner, read a book, whatever. But for almost any specific purpose, there is a better cognitive mode, if we can get there.

January 17.

2022-01-17T17:30:29Z

January 17. No ideas this week, but some of you will like this article, "Home-Free" Man Lives in Sheep-Drawn Covered Wagon, Thrives on Mostly Milk and Wild Edibles. And here's his YouTube channel, 123Homefree.

Loosely related: Station Eleven: Where the end of the world is a vibrant, lush green. This reminds me of something I wrote back in 2008, in a brief review of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road:

In reality, if there are dead trees, there will be grubs and insects eating the wood, and if there are dead humans, or living humans leaving shit, there will be flies, and if there are insects, there will be birds eating them, and feral cats eating the birds, and coyotes eating the cats. If there is enough sunlight to scan distant cities with binoculars, there will be enough for plants adapted to living in dense forests. There will be mosses, lichens, beetles, earthworms, and crows. McCarthy has excluded all these creatures for purely literary reasons.

January 14.

2022-01-14T14:00:48Z

January 14. Continuing from yesterday, Nightwalking is a classic article about the practice of walking around at night, without artificial light, focusing only on your peripheral vision. What I wrote the other day, whether or not it's true, is not a new idea. This was written in 1991: "Fear, anxiety and even physical pain are seemingly associated with focused vision, while peripheral processes engender relaxation and delight."

Last night I walked around shifting between soft and hard looking, and I noticed that it's easy to go suddenly from soft to hard, and then gradually from hard to soft, but it's difficult to do it the other way around.

Also, a reader comments: "You talk about attention, motivation, and focused awareness a lot, but you don't often talk about ADHD which is a biological dysregulation in controlling these things."

Yeah, I don't feel qualified to write about ADHD, because I basically have only one symptom, the one it's named after, that I don't have enough attention to go around for all the things in this world that demand my attention. And I think that's the world, and not me.

January 13.

2022-01-13T13:50:54Z

January 13. Wow, lots of responses to yesterday's second paragraph. Something I've linked to before, an animated video about Iain McGilchrist and the divided brain.

And Dominic quotes Scott Thybony's book Burntwater: "...the Navajos have two ways of looking at the landscape. One's with hard eyes and the other's with soft eyes. Hard eyes are used when looking for things like game, water, pop machines. Soft eyes are used to take in the beauty of the scene."

January 12.

2022-01-12T12:40:40Z

January 12. One more note on anxiety, and where the last post was based on science and personal experience, this is mainly speculation. I think that anxiety is correlated with a pattern of attention, in which you're small in space and big in time. For example, you're fixated on a single social media post, worrying that it will ruin your career, which can actually happen. Conversely, you can reduce anxiety by being big in space and small in time: focusing on your full sense experience in this moment.

I have a new exercise, when I'm going for a walk, where I alternate my visual attention between big and small. For a few seconds, I'll focus my mind on my full field of view, periphery to periphery, and then for a few seconds I'll focus on some tiny detail. Something I've noticed is, the big view feels better than the small view, but going small feels better than going big.

January 10.

2022-01-10T22:20:18Z

January 10. Today's subject is anxiety. Here are two transcripts of interviews with anxiety specialist Judson Brewer, one by Ezra Klein (paywalled) and one by Rich Roll (with transcribed ads).

The basic idea is, anxiety is something that your brain constructs. And the more time you invest in watching your brain in action, the more skill you have in consciously choosing what it does.

There's a lot of discussion of anxiety as a habit, and I've noticed the same thing. I have a physical habit, when I'm stressed out, of blinking my eyes really hard. It must have a genetic basis, because my grandmother did it all the time. The way to fix a physical bad habit, eye-blinking or teeth-grinding or whatever, is to build a meta-habit of noticing that habit, and immediately stopping it. This isn't just something you can decide to do -- you have to practice until you get good at it.

Telling a depressed person to just cheer up, is like telling an out-of-shape person that they can climb Mt. Everest by just walking uphill. That advice vastly underestimates the difficulty, but it's not wrong. One of my favorite sets of lyrics, Camper Van Beethoven's Lulu Land, has the line "How can you lose when you choose what you feel?" Choosing what you feel is probably harder than winning an Olympic gold medal or a Nobel Prize, because people have done those things while still being emotionally unhealthy. But I think it's possible.

Something I did last fall, which was surprisingly helpful for my mental health, was dogsitting with two neurotic dogs for more than two weeks. The way to clean up a dog's behavior is to give it plenty of attention, and the moment it starts to do something you don't like, immediately correct it. How exactly to discipline a dog is a huge subject, with plenty of room for error -- as is correcting your own mental behavior. But they're not that different.

There are TV shows and movies in which a person has multiple people inside their head. That's a valuable metaphor, but what the shows get wrong, to fit the medium, is making the people verbal. The stuff you have to notice, to straighten out your emotions, is pre-verbal. By the time your head is making words, it's too late.

January 7.

2022-01-07T19:50:55Z

January 7. Fun stuff for the weekend. First I want to recommend the new Netflix movie, Don't Look Up. Don't watch the trailer -- it has too many spoilers. All you need to know is that it's about a comet heading for the earth, and all the dumb things people do in response to it. Maybe the most interesting thing about the movie is Mark Rylance's performance as a billionaire tech guru. The character is absolutely a villain, but he's unlike any movie villain I've ever seen, and yet totally believable.

Thread on the Psychonaut subreddit, What if people on psychedelics aren't actually hallucinating? I was expecting dumb stuff about the machine elves being physically real, but it actually has a lot of thoughtful comments about how psychedelic mental states can be better than our default mental state.

By the way, a couple weeks ago I made tea out of seven dry grams of psilocybe cubensis and liberty cap, and the high was totally lame. The launch was a mildly unpleasant delirium, and on the plateau I went for a walk on a beautiful winter day and it wasn't any different from being sober, except that I was mentally foggy. Seriously, I've had better results from a 20th of a gram of weed -- except that two days after a mushroom trip, I always feel like the cobwebs have been cleaned out of my brain. But I can get that from one gram, so I think I'm done with large doses.

From yesterday, an Ask Reddit thread, People who used to not believe in the paranormal but do now - What experience changed your mind? It's mostly about ghosts. And it makes me wonder, suppose there are actually millions of ghosts floating around, and it's only a tiny fraction who make themselves known to the living.

Finally, I don't think I've ever posted NFL highlights, but this video is exceptional: Every One of Joe Burrow's 15 Touchdown passes of 30 yards or more. Burrow may turn out to be the most accurate passer of all time, and right now Ja'Marr Chase is the most dangerous receiver.

January 5.

2022-01-05T17:30:22Z

January 5. Again with the new year, I want to check in with the ongoing collapse. It's going pretty fast lately -- if you were to take the rate of change and breakdown over the last five years, and keep it going for a hundred years, it would be way more than in any hundred year period of the decline of Rome.

Maybe the rate of collapse will slow, but it can't turn around. The nonrenewable resources are almost gone, the climate is sliding into chaos, and our institutions are bloated and ossified. The skillbase is shrinking, to continue the world as we know it, as that world's needs increase.

But it would be a mistake to take a general forecast of decline, and project it on every place and every person. I have a hypothesis that a falling society is more granular than a rising society. If you go from town to town in the 2050's, or from neighbor to neighbor, you'll see bigger differences in how people are living, and how happy they are, than you would have seen in the 1950's. Already, during Covid lockdown, some people were having the worst time of their lives while other people were having the best.

One thing that would shift the whole bell curve toward worse, is if people are going hungry. But wherever there's enough food, I'm optimistic that human ingenuity will come up with some cool stuff. In the best places, they won't even tell the story of having gone through a crash, but of figuring out better ways to do things while the old ways died out.

It's fun to imagine what the world might look like in a few hundred years. Some things we could never guess, but I expect the population will have fallen, and because of that, there will be a lot of ghost towns and abandoned urban sprawl. The economy will not be based on exponential growth, unless it's hurrying toward another collapse. Will they be digging up our landfills for scraps, and reading our mouldering books for ancient wisdom, or will they have moved on to a way of life that doesn't need us?

January 2, 2022.

2022-01-02T14:00:46Z

January 2, 2022. The turnover of the year is a nice motivational tool to make changes, and there are different kinds of changes. When people talk about New Year's resolutions, they're usually talking about changing habits, or default behaviors. The main thing I want to work on this year is being more physically present in every moment. I'm making it a game, where I break my actions down to small things: open dishwasher, put spoon in, close dishwasher; and I count how many things I can do in a row before I mess up and have to do something twice. This includes typing without having to hit backspace all the time.

Another kind of change you can make is in your priorities for living. The last couple years I've been thinking more about death, which generally feels like a relief. But the closer I get to understanding it, the more I see that I really don't want to die -- I want to continue living with no responsibilities. So that's my number one priority from here on: to minimize the number of things I have to do. Part of this is that I'll probably be blogging less, especially on hot-button subjects. Or, as I wrote last month in this thread: I used to want to be Gandalf, the famous wizard who saves the world. Now I want to be Radagast, the obscure wizard who hangs out with trees.

One thing I did in 2021 was get better at playing piano. I just follow whatever is fun to do with the keys, and I've ended up putting at least 50 hours into polyrhythms, before putting one hour into chord changes. My usual style is to park my fingers on the same keys for an entire piece and improvise. I have my favorite chords that I come back to, and over time I develop melodies and patterns that I come back to.

Over the holidays, I had a brief housesit at a house with a real piano. It's a bit out of tune, some of the keys are half-dead, and my recording system is super lo-fi, but it still sounds better than MIDI on my digital keyboard. So I recorded some stuff and ended up with three decent tracks. I call them Faewater, Jam in F, and Sunburst.