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"'Where are the new frontiers?' the Romantics cried, unaware that the frontier of the mind had opened..."
-Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
November 22. This week I'm just writing about music. Last month I polished off my third 70s playlist -- the sappiest -- and turned to the 80s.
My process is to download mp3s with Soulseek, painstakingly date-tag them, load them on a Sansa Clip player, then get high and walk around the neighborhood listening on full-ear headphones. If you have a good walking route, I totally recommend this. It's like walking inside a video, and the songs line up with the scenery more than you'd expect.
I don't get a lot of nostalgia. Mainly my focus is on evaluating the music. These are all songs I know, but my tastes have developed, and I love to be surprised by which ones sound better or worse after 40 years. I'm still working on an early 80s rock playlist, but my new wave playlist is pretty much finished.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
October 31. What "Work" Looks Like is a brief blog post about how the best results do not come from stuff that looks like "work" to managers -- "I can see people meeting and talking and there are sticky notes all over the wall!" -- but from stuff that looks like being lazy. Lots of examples in the Hacker News comment thread.
Related: First-ever study shows bumble bees 'play'. I wrote about this subject seven years ago in this post. I think the whole universe is playing with the exception of humans. A few thousand years ago, we started to develop social systems of such complexity that the only way to keep them going, was to invent "work" -- tasks that you have to force yourself to do. And now, that's almost the only thing left.
October 27. Radioactive traces in tree rings reveal Earth's history of unexplained 'radiation storms'
...the most widely accepted explanation is that Miyake events are "solar superflares". These hypothetical eruptions from the Sun would be perhaps 50-100 times more energetic than the biggest recorded in the modern era, the Carrington Event of 1859. If an event like this occurred today, it would devastate power grids, telecommunications, and satellites.
Loosely related, from the Psychonaut subreddit, Has anyone else experienced problems with their Bluetooth headphones but ONLY when tripping? The thread is full of reports of all kinds of electronics malfunctioning while people are tripping.October 24. No ideas this week, just links. The Moorish invention that tamed Spain's mountains is about the practice of carefully diverting spring runoff so that it soaks into the local landscape, instead of going to the ocean.
Buzz stops: bus shelter roofs turned into gardens for bees and butterflies
Related, a Hacker News thread for a paywalled article, Why are there so few dead bugs on windshields these days?
Another Hacker News thread, Butterfly wing patterns emerge from ancient 'junk' DNA. It's mainly about how the phrase "junk DNA" is obsolete, but people keep using it because of language inertia.
Related: Bruno Latour has died. He was one of my favorite living philosophers, and mainly wrote about the sociology of science. The main idea that I got from Latour is the "black box" -- a cognitive assumption that, once established, is taken for granted and used to go "downstream" and build bigger black boxes -- but you can also go "upstream" and take black boxes apart.
October 21. Light stuff for the weekend. Back on the 9th, Earth got hit by the largest gamma ray burst ever recorded. I happened to be up on an airplane, so I'm looking forward to my new mutant powers.
A new article, Human hibernation is a real possibility, which reminds me of an old article about how Europeans used to sleep all winter.
In America, cranberries are now appearing in stores, so I want to share my recipe for unsweetened cranberry sauce. First take a 12 oz bag of cranberries and carefully remove all the soft berries. Taste one and you'll know why. Then, in a food processor or powerful blender, mix the berries with one large apple (or two small), one large orange (or two small), and around a cup of tart cherry juice. You could use a different juice, and the exact proportions aren't important, but try to keep the grind somewhat coarse.
October 19. Continuing from Monday, Matt comments:
A lot of social synchrony is like 19th-century group dancing, not upsetting power dynamics, not challenging other people's psychological defenses or pointing out their obvious problems. Some of my deepest moments of connection with people have happened in conscious, careful, respectful asynchrony.
And from the Wikipedia page about flow: "The flow state shares many characteristics with hyperfocus. However, hyperfocus is not always described in a positive light."
Yeah, I don't think flow should be always described in a positive light. Think about people of the enemy political tribe, whatever that is for you, and how dangerous they are when they give up rationality and self-awareness to groove with the crowd.
I wonder about the difference between wide-focus flow and narrow-focus flow. My guess is, it's the same thing happening in different parts of the brain. It's a personal goal of mine to experience wide-focus flow, and I continue to put a lot of effort into widening my perception, but it has yet to pay off, except in preventing me from getting hit by cars.
October 17. I don't identify as being on the autism spectrum, for two reasons. One is that I've taken a few informal tests, and I always come out barely neurotypical. The other is, I don't think the present concept of aspergers/autism is going to last. When we understand it better, we'll discover that it's actually different things that we've been lumping together, like we did with "consumption" or "senility".
But I do have a speculative self-diagnosis. I call it asynchrony, and it's based on the concept of neural synchrony, "the correlation of brain activity across two or more people over time."
I think this happens through mechanisms that we haven't discovered yet, and I think there will turn out to be a huge variation among different brains, in how easily they can "tune in" to other brains.
A few signs that you may be asynchronous:
1) It seems like everyone but you is a mind reader. You ask people how they know to do something a certain way, and they say, "You just know," but you don't.
2) You don't understand what the big deal is with music shows, live sports, or parties. Other people seem to be getting something out of these events that you're not getting.
3) You find popular trends to be more baffling than compelling.
4) When walking in crowded places, you have to devote conscious attention to not bumping into people.
There are a lot of directions to go with this. Are extraversion and introversion causes of high and low synchrony, or are they effects? Are there trade-offs? Does being worse at syncing with humans in real time make you better at syncing with humans in other ways, or with nonhumans? Can you be bad at receiving but good at broadcasting?
I also wonder how this relates to John Vervaeke's concept of participatory knowing, and the concept of the flow state.
October 13. Four happy tech links. An Australian startup is "growing" water for drought-parched California. Yeah, growing is not the right word. What they're doing is capturing the massive amount of water boiled off when tomatoes are turned into paste and ketchup.
Geothermal May Beat Batteries for Energy Storage. Specifically, they can drill down into impermeable rock, blast out underground reservoirs, and pump hot water down, which can later be pumped up to extract the heat.
Nasa invents 'incredible' battery for electric planes. I expect a lot of action this century in materials science, and these batteries use new materials to discharge fast enough to fly a plane.
Airships Rise Again. The new generation of airships are heavier than air, but still light enough to hover.
October 10. Thanks Matt for suggesting a good tangent to last week's post. I've been using the concepts of "first person" and "third person" in the most basic way: first = from the inside; third = from the outside. It's a lot more complicated, and some people have suggested adding a "fourth person". But I'd rather not be constrained by numbers. Here's how I break it down.
The deepest level of "me" is "I am this stream of experience." (Actually you can get even deeper: I am the void that this stream of experience fills.)
The next level is the embodied self: how to interpret raw sense data into stuff like, "This is my leg. That's a tree. That's the sound of rain."
The next level is the reflective self, or what western culture calls the self. It includes stuff like, "My favorite color is orange. I am an introvert. I have a strong imagination." Ego is the stickiness of the reflective self, its resistance to changing and expanding.
The next level is the social self, where I think about what other people think about me. It's complex, but I'll just point out that there's a difference between "I am sensitive to other people's expressions of what they think about me," and "I imagine myself inside another person looking at me."
The latter, we usually call the "second person", and for the first time, you're taking a perspective outside your own skin.
Another way to get outside your own skin, is to shift from I to we. This has usually been done with the local social unit, the family or tribe. When it becomes reflective (this is what my people are like), the multi-person self is more egocentric than the one-person self: more resistant to change, more resistant to expansion, and more sensitive to the expressions of others.
In theory, the multi-person self doesn't need an opponent to define it, and it can be expanded to include all humans, or all beings. In practice, these moves are done by educated people, on an intellectual level, and rarely on the level of feeling.
Now, it's a whole different way of thinking, to look at something and say, "That's not me." And there's a whole range of ways to do it, but they all come down to the habits and values of your constructed self. You can look at a tree like an artist, or like an ecologist, or like a lumberjack.
Also, "not me" raises a peculiar option, which I think is uniquely dominant in western culture: the "view from nowhere." It's an attempt to strip knowing from perspective, to say, "Never mind what you see, this is how things are." Supposedly this is the view of science, and yet the most advanced science refutes it.
On a practical level, the view from nowhere is probably necessary to make a large complex society work. But we don't have to take it so seriously. You can see it even at the level of the reflective self, where instead of saying "This is my favorite song," we're tempted to say, "This is the best song."