Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2022-04-20T20:00:23Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com April 20. http://ranprieur.com/#1dc8895acd86cda0d70c0d0ac24fc1deff753519 2022-04-20T20:00:23Z April 20. No ideas this week, but it's 4/20, so I'll mention something I've noticed about cannabis and creativity. With fiction, I write high so that I get ideas, and then I edit sober so that the ideas aren't stupid. With blog posts, I write sober so that the ideas aren't stupid, and then I edit high to make them sing.

I don't usually get on the internet when I'm high, but when I do, a cool thing to watch is this Mars in 4K video, with the sound muted, while on another tab, listening to Hildegard von Bingen.

Or if you want something quick and funny, Joaquin Phoenix's Forehead (Rotated).

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April 18. http://ranprieur.com/#6eb628d52d8dd85c2ec7fec607f65c9543fc4d3e 2022-04-18T18:40:40Z 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.

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April 14. http://ranprieur.com/#05c0624465579c7f34977f7e4b22448f9bba5f08 2022-04-14T14:00:05Z 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)______

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April 11. http://ranprieur.com/#4cc8f6e140d4ceb630a65e0e9f639f2f311a6563 2022-04-11T23:30:54Z 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.

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April 8. http://ranprieur.com/#ffee8e9b0d83cd98aee535ddc20485cc9c414a5f 2022-04-08T20:00:35Z 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.

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April 6. http://ranprieur.com/#b87a9ac4cab77c6b10ff9780c881d260e3200ac2 2022-04-06T18:40:32Z 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.

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April 4. http://ranprieur.com/#6e99d80ca67ac850d6e6220cdb24c8b460c09bd1 2022-04-04T16:20:26Z 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.

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