Ran Prieur

"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."

-James Tiptree Jr.

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April 18. Stray links. This deleted thread from Ask Old People has many perspectives on the hippie culture.

This Ask Historians post has a lot of stuff about recent reassessment of the Vietnam War. I'm not going to try to summarize it, but it strikes me that the ideas that are turning out to be wrong, were believed for so long because they're simple and compelling.

And three links about promising new technologies. A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine, with a lot more info in the Hacker News thread.

Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy. Again there's a Hacker News thread, but it's more about tinnitus than this therapy.

And a nice article about bioluminescent lighting.


April 14. Going early into the weekend with some music. My top song of 2021, which I just discovered, is Chaise Longue by Wet Leg, two women from the Isle of Wight. Not since "Fade Into You" in 1993 has there been a song this popular that I liked this much. The trick is, when they recorded it, they were aiming for neither quality nor popularity, just having fun. Their debut album came out last week, and it has multiple bangers. My other favorite is Supermarket.

It's funny, a few weeks back, when I mentioned playing polyrhythms, Nick asked me about polymeter, a word I didn't know, but I knew the thing. The difference is hard to explain. This video does a good job. Here's me playing a 3:5 polyrhythm on piano, and it so happens that Wet Leg do a great polymeter in the Chaise Longue chorus:

(1) On the (2) Chaise (3) Longue (4) On the
(1) Chaise (2) Longue (3) On the (4) Chaise
(1) Longue (2) All___ (3) day___ (4) long
(1) On the (2) Chaise (3) Longue (4)______


April 11. Continuing from last week, I have more thoughts about "religions" of the future. I've written before about the difficulty of defining religion, and it might turn out that this stuff is called something else.

Back in the 1990's, I started to notice that people were talking about "the universe" in the same way their grandparents would have talked about "God". This is a permanent change. In a few more generations, the idea of an omnipotent deity in the shape of an older male human will seem quaint and silly, except in the world's remaining patriarchal cultures.

For a glimpse of what theology and metaphysics might look like when everyone is doing psychedelics, you can browse the Psychonaut subreddit. The ideas are grandiose, half-baked, and varied, but what they have in common is the same thing that physics has been wrestling with for a hundred years: it doesn't make sense to talk about reality without an observer.

There are so many questions here that a religion could answer. What is the nature of that observer? If reality is first person, is it one person or many? Is it just humans, or does it make sense to talk about the perspective of a tree, a rock, a photon? Future metaphysics will certainly be influenced by gaming, and there will be prickly questions about who is an NPC.

When you die, does your perspective simply merge with the One? Or are there levels between here and there? Some people already think we're living in a simulation. If so, then who's running it, and what do they want?

One possible story is that some highly advanced society is filtering its own members, by putting everyone through simulated worlds until we behave well enough to enter the real world. Or if we behave badly, putting us back in the sim.

So here's one example of a possible future religion. Reform Solipsism holds that you are encased in a world made out of reflections of stuff inside you, mostly subconscious. The meaning of life is to struggle with these reflections. Only when you learn to treat other people as real, will you be permitted to mix with real people. And only when you clean up your subconscious powers of reality creation, will you be permitted to create reality consciously.

Maybe that's too new-agey. If the people of the future are total nerds, they might have religions about math, like this new Stephen Wolfram paper, The Physicalization of Metamathematics and Its Implications for the Foundations of Mathematics.

Wolfram's Concept of the Ruliad is strangely similar to Beatrice Bruteau's concept of the Infinite Intercommunicating Universe -- which was derived with no math at all. As Charles Fort said, one measures a circle beginning anywhere.


April 8. A few more links on the future. Birds Make Better Bipedal Bots Than Humans Do. It's pretty clear that even in a high-tech future, there will not be human-like robots walking around. Simulated humans will be in non-physical worlds like they are now, answering phones or operating NPCs. And where there is risk, there will be laws that AI has to identify itself as AI.

An Elegant Bamboo Structure in Vietnam. By 2050, it might be normal to make large buildings out of wood. From 2020, Has the wooden skyscraper revolution finally arrived?

Finally, in the realm of human behavior, David sends this Twitter thread: "In the 1970s and 80s, anthropologists working in small-scale, non-industrial societies fastidiously noted down what people were doing throughout the day. I've been exploring the data and am struck by one of the most popular activities: doing nothing."

Now, you could argue that we will never again live at such a primitive level, so the age of doing nothing is over. But that's cynical about technology. Some technologies actually do save labor, and as we learn to tell them apart from technologies that stealthily create labor, we could build a high-tech society with more opportunity than ever to do nothing. I think the present manic age is an outlier, and as we abandon the economics and values of perpetual increase, more of us will be free to get off the treadmill.


April 6. Just posted to Weird Collapse, a blog post about predictions for 2050, with links to a bunch of other predictions, all from early January of this year. I've skimmed through them for inspiration, and here are my predictions:

Granular collapse. The postapocalpyse is already here, just unevenly distributed. Infrastructure decay will start in the most remote areas, and work its way in toward the cities. The best places will keep grinding along, while struggling with refugees from the worst places.

Climate change, famine, disease, war. These will kill large numbers but small proportions. 80 million people is only one percent of the world. For most of us, life will just get more difficult.

Economic decline. Economists will have to do more hand-waving to maintain the illusion of growth, while it becomes impossible to find a safe investment that keeps up with inflation. By 2050, everyone will agree that we need institutions that thrive while remaining the same size.

Artificial intelligence is too hard. I have no idea. Also too hard: China.

Space travel. In 2050, it's more likely there will be dead humans on Mars than living humans, but probes and bots will be all over the solar system. There will be realistic plans to mine asteroids and change the atmosphere of Venus.

Materials science is going to do a lot of cool stuff. When I was a kid, rubies were one of the most valuable gemstones. This winter I paid 20 bucks for a baggie of lab-grown rubies to enhance my vaporizer. Section 8 on Strange Loop Cannon's predictions has more.

Virtual reality. Video games will be like movies are now: still big, but nothing revolutionary happening for decades. The action will be in augmented reality, glasses that give you information about whatever you're looking at. There will be all kinds of controversies about who's allowed to see what from looking at other people.

Brain hacking. Psychedelics will be legal in most of the world, and there will be new drugs that do old drug things with more reliability and precision. Personally I'd like a three hour DMT trip. Cheap brainwave readers will make meditation more effective, and the new frontier will be transcranial stimulation of implants.

Body hacking. Everyone wants to look and feel young and healthy, and new tech will help with this. But rather than everyone living past 100, I expect a shift in values, in which living as long as you can will become optional. Suicide will become normal for old people, and there will be a fringe movement to make it acceptable for young people.

New religion. The old religions will be washed away by psychedelics, but the human desire to believe beautiful unfalsifiable things, and to form communities around those beliefs, will be as strong as ever. The trendy beliefs will be less in theology, and more in sociology, philosophy, and science. Radical prediction: solipsism is going to be huge.

Entertainment. The long tail will get longer, as more creators and consumers find their way to more unusual and obscure stuff. I always say: In the future, everyone will be famous among fifteen people.

Values. The word "ecology" was not coined until 1866. The word "metacognition" was not coined until 1976. The word "deconsumption" is still not on Wikipedia. The values and habits represented by these words are just getting started, and there are some important words that don't exist yet.


April 4. Two links on our continuing incremental progress out of dominator culture. I no longer grade my students' work - and I wish I had stopped sooner.

...the practice of grading, and ranking, students is so widespread as to seem necessary, even though many researchers say it is highly inequitable. For example, students who come into a course with little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material. Grades have other problems: They are demotivating, they don't actually measure learning and they increase students' stress.

How To Get Kids To Do Chores. Start them when they're very young, and motivated to help out, even though they're incompetent, instead of waiting until they're competent and you have to force them. The article calls this the "Maya method", which makes me mad, as if not forcing each other to do shit is the crazy idea of one weird culture, and not the way of the whole universe outside of Homo sapiens in the last few thousand years.


March 31. Two psychology links. People who have high levels of self-compassion are less prone to boredom. I always say that the word "boredom" points to two things: the pain of doing nothing, and the pain of having to pay attention to something that's not interesting. But maybe they're the same thing after all, and when people find it painful to do nothing, it's because they find their own self not interesting.

And The ability to control ones attention might eliminate the attentional bias associated with social anxiety:

"In the current study, we found that individuals with relatively poor attentional control are more vulnerable to exhibiting biased allocation of attention to negative social information. Therefore, a take-home message could be that people might reduce their vulnerability to having this bias by improving their attentional control. Doing meditation, improving sleep quality, exercising, having a healthy diet, and spending time in the nature all have been shown capable of improving attentional control."


March 28. I'm taking the week off from blogging, except maybe posting links. Today, two weird physics links. Physicists create extremely compressible "gas of light". And Digital data could be altering Earth's mass just a tiny bit, claims physicist.


March 25. Quick loose end from a week ago, a new Reddit thread about hell and the Bible.

And continuing from the other day, Myles mentions in-group heterogeneity bias. People tend to see their in-group as diverse, while seeing out-groups as monolithic. For me, this raises the question: where do you draw the line? How do you decide if this person is in-group but different, or out-group?

I don't think there's any logic to it. The line between in-group and out-group is drawn for reasons of history and convenience, and then within that framework, in-group differences are noticed and respected. I also think that in-group out-group thinking is optional. It's possible to see the entire universe as one diverse in-group.

Why is this so difficult? Maybe because hatred toward collective entities inspires meaning in life. Also relevant, an abstract of a study in which, "Although subjects discriminated significantly against a homogenous out-group, this discrimination disappeared when the out-group was heterogenous."

The broader subject here is intellectual hygeine, practicing healthy ways of modeling reality, when unhealthy ways are more tempting. Another example of this is the choice between either-or thinking and spectrum thinking. For example, in the current war, TV news draws a line between Russia (bad) and the West (good). Some people want to lump the West with Russia on the bad side. I see it like this: Russia is worse than China, China is worse than the USA, the USA is worse than New Zealand, and New Zealand is not even 10% of the way to the full human potential for how well we could live.


March 23. Jumping right back into the usual subjects, there's a valuable concept in the book The Dawn of Everything, called schismogenesis. The idea is, people like to choose their values and behaviors, not so much from practical needs, as from the desire to be different from other people. This is why identical twins raised together end up more different than if they're raised separately; and it's why two neighboring tribes, in basically the same ecosystem, might have different cultures and even different diets.

This makes sense for the survival of the species. If one year there are no fish, or no tree nuts, then one of the tribes will still eat. But for your personal survival, and mental well-being, sometimes you have to recognize the urge to stand apart and overrule it.

There's a recently coined word, edgelord, which I would define as someone with the habit of believing or saying things that are provocatively untrue, so that they can distinguish themselves from other people, typically on the internet. The internet has buffed the power, the speed, and the danger of the schismogenetic urge. Flat earthers are the perfect example of people showing off their own ability to ignore evidence in order to make their lives more meaningful, but at least they're not doing any harm.


March 22. There's a lot of personal news that I've been waiting to post all at once. In the last year, I sold both the house and the land. I bought the land in 2004 and the house in 2011, and you can still read about the various projects here.

For both sales, rather than fix up the properties and get as much money as possible on the open market, most likely from flippers, I was lucky to find local buyers who planned to hold onto them for a long time, and who made it easy for me. In return, I gave them heavy discounts.

I bought the land with the idea that by living there I could escape the money economy and hang out in the woods all day. It turns out, homesteading is for workaholics who love driving. In practice, you're going to have to go into town so much that you're basically a remote suburbanite, and many back-to-the-landers are just little developers, extending the human-made world into increasingly remote places.

It's not even a good way to survive economic collapse, as Toby Hemenway explained in two essays in Permaculture Activist magazine, which I've saved here.

At this stage in my life, survival is not a high priority. I mean, my intention is to live at least to age 80, and spend many more wonderful hours doing creative work, gaming, and walking around looking at trees. But I'm so sick of these interesting times. Life feels like a three minute yoga stretch, and after two minutes, I feel the urge to quit, but I know I can make it to three, and I'll be glad I did.

Right now, I'm getting rid of most of my stuff, and preparing to move to whatever city Leigh Ann gets a job in. When we're settled there, I'll post another update.


March 18. Bunch o' links, starting with this Hacker News thread about permanent daylight savings time. While I look forward to not changing clocks, what we need is permanent standard time. Setting clocks permanently an hour ahead is an act of aggression by morning people against night people.

A detailed Reddit comment about the origins of the Christian concept of Satan. There's also some stuff about hell, to which I would add: the modern Bible translates multiple words as "hell", and all of them originally meant places where your dead body goes, not places where your soul is punished.

Why some Canadians are moving to so-called medieval villages. It sounds great, except there's no mention of how far you have to go to get to the nearest town. I suspect it's a long car drive, when what we need is a short bike ride.

Scientific article, Lawn mowing frequency affects bee abundance and diversity in suburban yards. "Mowing less frequently is practical, economical, and a timesaving alternative to lawn replacement or even planting pollinator gardens."

A long thread on Ask Old People, What's a skill that's slowly dying? The answers range from complaining to nostalgia to actually scary.

Some good news, Potato farmers conquer a devastating worm with paper made from bananas. "The new technique has boosted yields fivefold in trials with small-scale farmers in Kenya, where the pest has recently invaded, and could dramatically reduce the need for pesticides."

Finally, Music theory for nerds is a nice overview of frequencies and pitch intervals, with a healthy skepticism about modern musical conventions. From the conclusion: "I get the feeling that treating the whole chord/key ecosystem as a set of rules is like studying Renaissance paintings and deciding that's how art is." And from one of the comments:

The 12-note octave is basically just a compromise that evolved as common ground between a whole bunch of different instruments. It's not very good... Sheet music is a lossy transmission format for providing note data between performers. Most of the musicians I know don't even know how to read it.


March 15. Smart article about car crashes during the pandemic. In the USA, "2020 saw the biggest single-year spike in traffic deaths in a century," while in Europe, "as driving went down, crashes went down."

The idea is, American roads are designed not for safety, but for speed and volume. The main thing keeping crashes down is congestion, which forces drivers to go slow. Remove the congestion, and the roads become deadly. And when the media reports on this, they generally ignore road design and focus on psychology. Instead of looking at the failure of roads to stop people from driving dangerously, they look at the failure of individuals to stop themselves from driving dangerously.

This is a theme I covered in this post last summer: societal failures framed as personal failures. Another example is obesity, which is caused by some new factor, maybe PFAS or lithium or linoleic acid, throwing off our intuitive sense of how much to eat, and forcing us to count calories to stay thin.

In a perfect society, no self-control is necessary, and right now we're about as far from that as we can get. We're all exhausted from constantly forcing ourselves to do the opposite of what we feel like doing, and meanwhile judging anyone who isn't as good at it as we are.

Back to car crashes, the Hacker News comment thread has some discussion about the word "crash" vs the word "accident", and a link to this page, Crash Not Accident:

Before the labor movement, factory owners would say "it was an accident" when American workers were injured in unsafe conditions.

Before the movement to combat drunk driving, intoxicated drivers would say "it was an accident" when they crashed their cars.

Planes don't have accidents. They crash. Cranes don't have accidents. They collapse. And as a society, we expect answers and solutions.

Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers. They are not accidents. Let's stop using the word "accident" today.


March 13. I like to write about the far future being better, because the near future is going to be a total shitshow. The other day I said that it's hard for a society to be two of these things at once: global, repressive, planned, and stable. But when I think about it more, two of those things are a natural fit: repressive and planned. The two that are hardest to combine are global and any of the others.

If we survive another million years, I don't think there will be a global government even once, because the things that government does are better done regionally. Also, something I learned from The Dawn Of Everything is how much humans love to differentiate themselves from other humans.

The best case would be what Leopold Kohr imagined in The Breakdown of Nations: thousands of diverse autonomous states, each made up of a city and the farmland around it. More realistically, we could have pretty much the nations we have now, with well-enforced global consensus about what a nation can and can't do. Like, no slavery, no killing protesters, and no invading each other.

If we can just get that one rule, no military invasions, then the door is open for all kinds of good stuff. Because right now, if a small nation does something that clearly works better, then a large nation, so as not to lose face, can just invade them to cover it up. But when good practices can't be crushed, they will eventually spread.


March 10. Wordle, 2/10/22 It may seem that sanctions on Russia are based on ethics, that we're making economic sacrifices for ideals. But a lot of ethical decisions are just non-short-sighted practical decisions. The reason so many countries are coming down hard on Russia, is that the world is poised to get more dangerous, with climate catastrophes and resource shortages looming. And in that global environment, the last thing we want is countries invading each other willy-nilly.

Maybe we'll fail, and by 2050 there will be wars all over. After WWI they tried to make a League of Nations to prevent another war, and of course that didn't work. But it had never been tried before, and I think we're getting better at it.

It's funny how certain combinations of words can take on meanings far beyond the meanings of the words themselves. If someone says "New World Order", what they're saying is: I fear a society coming soon, which will be 1) global, 2) repressive, 3) planned, and 4) stable.

I don't fear that, because you can't have all those things at once. It's hard to even have two of them. The trend, at this juncture of history, is almost the opposite: 1) balkanization, 2) more attention to human rights, 3) more need for improvisation, and 4) rapid change.

The old-school authoritarians are playing chess, and the rest of the world is playing Wordle. Chess is a steady marshalling of forces toward a clear objective, in which a single mistake can be fatal. Wordle is a series of wrong answers on the path to a right answer that you don't even know until you get there.


March 7. I'm thinking about the difference between Russian and American propaganda. What all propaganda has in common is, it's always what you expect. Putin is never going to say, "Oops, those Ukrainians are tougher than I thought, and my military has terrible morale, so now I have to piss off the world by bombing Kyiv to rubble." Everyone knows he's going to say, "It's all going according to plan."

In America, and I'm thinking specifically of 24 hour news, they really try to get the facts right. Then, given the rule to not say anything false, they craft exactly the narrative that you expect. First they correlate the little views to make a simple big view, and then they show only the little views that match it. How much footage are they filtering out, not to hide some sinister truth, but to hide the fine-grain complexity of reality itself?

In a better world, mass audiences would be trusted with surprising details, like a happy refugee or a pessimistic soldier. But America still has more sophisticated and more effective propaganda than Russia. And this is not exactly about authoritarian vs non-authoritarian systems. The USA is still more top-down than bottom-up. It's just that we have enough bottom-up mechanisms that the rulers can't be ham-fisted.





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 / September / December
2022: February