Ran Prieur

November 18.

2022-11-18T18:20:43Z

November 18. Four links about work. The Seven Levels of Busy. My goal in life is to spend as much time as possible at level one, and I would rather be homeless than go above level four. But someone in the Hacker News thread pointed out that the higher levels are more tolerable when you're in a position of power.

A thread on Ask Old People about Elon Musk and Twitter. It's normal in the tech world for executives to clumsily clean house and ruin employee morale, but it's usually done internally, and not in the full public eye.

These companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days. And not by bunching the same hours, but actually reducing the workweek from 40 to 32 hours. "Fully 86% said they will likely continue the four-day workweek policy."

New research disputes the "lazy stoner" stereotype. "In short, we found no support for the idea that cannabis use is linked with amotivation." They were testing cannabis users who were not high at the time, so it is "still possible that people find themselves less motivated to do certain things while they are high." But personally, I'm way more motivated when I'm high, as long as I don't do it every day.

November 16.

2022-11-16T16:00:18Z

November 16. Some practical psychology links. From the Psychonaut subreddit, How do you learn to love yourself?

From Ask Old People, How do you enjoy spending time with yourself?

From Pocket, Rediscovering Boredom in the Age of the Smartphone. "I set myself the challenge of identifying something that I had never noticed before while waiting in public spaces."

And a blog post, Doing what you love when the money won't follow, which links to this 2009 post by the same author, Neither career nor hobby. The idea is, we need a word for something you do that's very important to you, but you have no expectation of making money from it.

November 14.

2022-11-14T14:40:31Z

November 14. Three links about wild animals. The Ants Have Not Read Kant: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid. This is related to last week's subject. Kropotkin actually went out and observed nature, while his opponents derived their belief, in the brutal hyperselfishness of nature, from their own desire to dominate nature and other humans.

Crows Found to Be Smarter Than We Think. I think we'll continue to find that crows are smarter than we think, for a long time to come. This time, researchers discovered that they can understand recursive language.

Octopuses caught on camera throwing things at each other. This reminds me of this 2014 David Graeber essay, What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun?

Generally speaking, an analysis of animal behavior is not considered scientific unless the animal is assumed, at least tacitly, to be operating according to the same means/end calculations that one would apply to economic transactions.
...
Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn't they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?

November 13.

2022-11-13T13:30:44Z

November 13. Nik Turner has died. He was a core member of Hawkwind, the band that pretty much invented space rock. He wrote and sang one of their most important songs, Brainstorm, and was interviewed in this BBC Hawkwind documentary.

Two other great Nik Turner Hawkwind songs are Children of the Sun and D-Rider. "We never knew what time it was. We just knew how sublime it was."

November 11.

2022-11-11T23:10:44Z

November 11. There's a saying: "One martini is perfect. Two is too many. And three is never enough." That's how I feel writing about politics. But I want to say one more thing, as a springboard from politics to psychology.

It may seem that election deniers start with the belief that the election was stolen, and then they say that the election was stolen, and then they start trying to overturn the election.

I think it's exactly the other way around. And this goes beyond any issue. It's a sequence of actions that's a permanent temptation for our big dumb human brains. 1) Identify what you want. 2) Say whatever you have to say, to get what you want. 3) Believe whatever you're saying. 4) Go looking for evidence to confirm that belief.

This is why arguing on the level of evidence gets nowhere. It's too far downstream from where the action is.

This also explains the function of propaganda. Propaganda doesn't tell people what to believe. It takes people who already want to believe something, and puts that belief in a tidy and compelling package.

For the weekend, the women's college soccer playoffs start today, and this is a highlight from last weekend, the ridiculous shot that won the Big 12 championship.

November 9.

2022-11-09T21:50:39Z

November 9. I was all set to analyze the election apocalypse, and it didn't happen. So before I move on to other subjects, I'll say this. I think it's the job of society, the government, and politicians to be as boring as possible, to boringly guarantee a boring adequate standard of living, so we're all free to fart around and find our own meaning. This opinion is not as unpopular as I thought it was.

And two Reddit threads about money. Poor people who have dated rich people, what did you learn? Wealth inequality is not just bad for the poor -- it's bad for the rich. If I had a billion dollars, I hope I would give away 999 million, because that lifestyle creeps me out. I just want to go to the supermarket and not have to look at prices.

And a sub-thread about how much it sucks to turn your hobby into your profession.

November 7.

2022-11-07T19:30:50Z

November 7. With the American election tomorrow, I want to go temporarily back into politics. From Ask Old People, What will the US be like if it becomes a fascist government?

One comment mentions the "14 defining characteristics of fascism." That list comes from this article, published in 2003 by Lawrence Britt. But it's not the only answer. Umberto Eco, who grew up under Mussolini, had already published a different list of 14 Features of Fascism in 1995.

I don't like the word "fascism" because everyone agrees that it's bad. In the 1930s, politicians would stand up and say "I am a fascist." Now we have Rudy Giuliani, who totally would have self-identified as a fascist in the 30s, calling his opponents fascist because the popular definition has been watered down to anything the government does that you don't like.

So I want to try to do what I tried to do last week with "love", and look for a low-level definition from which high-level definitions can be derived. And I want the definition to be emotional, because I think it's obvious that people decide what they're going to believe for half-subconscious emotional reasons, and then cook up rational justifications.

I suggest, as the root of repressive human institutions, feeling good about positive feedback in power-over -- and by extension, feeling bad about the erosion of power-over.

So whoever already has power over someone else, you feel good about them using that power to consolidate and increase their power. From that, you can derive everything from supporting China annexing Taiwan, to supporting paddling in schools. You can derive the philosophical belief that humans are basically evil, because that's what you have to believe, to rationally justify solving social problems with more police and prisons (positive feedback in power-over) rather than wealth redistribution (negative feedback in power-over).

The good news is that power-over makes people stupid. Surrounded by yes-men, they make bad decisions, no one likes them, and inevitably they fall. So whatever happens tomorrow, or in the even scarier 2024 election, I just remind myself that Hitler only ruled Germany for 12 years, and I might live to see the pendulum finally swing the other way.

November 4.

2022-11-04T16:00:15Z

November 4. Continuing from yesterday, when I say "Love is feeling good about it, whatever it is," I'm not holding that up as the true and only definition, only suggesting a useful way of thinking. What I like about it is how low-level it is. It doesn't require a relationship or even another person. I don't want to exclude, from my definition of love, something like loving the sound of rain.

But if you want to get from there to a high-level definition, like Erich Fromm's in The Art of Loving, the path is to practice feeling good about feeling good, whether it's another person or yourself. And then you can continue the recursion: feeling good about feeling good about feeling good, and so on, sensing your way out into the universe.

Related: last week I mentioned Bruno Latour, and this Aeon article is the best explanation I've seen of what his deal was. Bruno Latour showed us how to think with the things of the world. Basically, Latour was an anti-reductionist. Reductionists are like, look, I've boiled down this complex subject to only one thing, and now we can ignore all that other stuff and just focus on this. And Latour was like, no, you can't do that.

Because he wrote about the social construction of facts, he might seem like a radical relativist, but he was the opposite. You can't just believe anything you want -- you have to unpack your belief, look at the actual things that it came from, and go out and engage with those things.

November 3.

2022-11-03T15:50:32Z

November 3. Psychedelics: a personal take is the report of someone who was very lucky: "After I did psychedelics for the first time, I waited for that magical feeling to go away, waited to slide back into a vaguely anxious numbness. It didn't happen."

Yeah, the only permanent effect I ever got from psychedelics is seeing the beauty of trees. Everything else fades when the drugs wear off. That's why I keep using them once or twice a year, to remind me of the mental state I'd like to have all the time.

When the drugs don't do the work for us, we can still do the work ourselves. So I've been edging closer to that mental state by grinding through numerous practices, and it's all obvious stuff. Get out of your head and into your body. Move your attention to the present moment. Be grateful for small things. Talk to yourself the way you'd want a friend to talk to you. Be curious and non-judging about your own emotions. Have fun, but don't do anything you know is wrong.

A lot of people come back from psychedelic trips with the insight that love is all-important. I'm sorry, but that's not helpful. Everyone is already in favor of love and no one can define it. So I've been casting about for a practical application of that insight, and this is what I've come up with.

Love is feeling good about it, whatever it is. If you can't feel good about it, feel good about feeling bad about it. If you can't feel good about feeling bad about it, feel good about feeling bad about feeling bad about it.

A lot of us look at the world in search of what's wrong with it. I don't know why, but this is such a strong urge that it has taken over the media. On Ask Reddit, "What's something everyone likes that you hate?" gets way more comments than "What's something everyone hates that you like?"

Sometimes I think fate is like TikTok: it gives you more of whatever you're looking at, even if you don't like it. But looking at things you dislike, and disliking things you look at, are simply habits, no different from physical habits like grinding your teeth or slouching. The cure is to make a commitment to watch yourself, and calmly correct yourself, about ten thousand times over several years, and gradually the new habit will take hold.