Ran Prieur

March 22.

2023-03-22T22:20:53Z

March 22. Quick thought on using AI for creative work, inspired by this blog post, Why Write?

Why write an essay when you can type a few words and have AI generate one for you?
...
Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.

This is true for all kinds of creative work: music, painting, even programming or making furniture. Anyone who doesn't do the work in question, tends to imagine that the most difficult and valuable part of the job is forming the idea in your head, and then it's just a matter of simple physical actions to stamp your idea on the world.

It's exactly the opposite. Getting ideas is so easy that it often can be outsourced to AI. The difficult and valuable part of the job is negotiating with the world, wrangling with the details, revising your original idea, and so on. Paraphrasing Don Draper: Getting it right can be really hard, but it's inevitable, and you know it when you see it. And that process requires actual intelligence.

March 20.

2023-03-20T20:00:34Z

March 20. This winter I've been getting high more often, which has coincided with having more ideas. Right now I'm taking a break, which coincides with having no ideas. Even though I was still averaging only one session a day, and using small quantities, and still having dreams at night, on my first two nights off I had really vivid dreams, and then on the third night, insomnia, and the return of a weird symptom I used to get all the time, where I wake up super-hot, but not sweating, and I have to stand outside or take a cold shower to cool down and sleep again.

Update: I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that genistein, a supplement that reduces hot flashes, also blocks the correlation between cannabis and heart disease.

Every time I battle insomnia, I get practice at blanking my mind, and I've noticed something that Buddhists probably noticed thousands of years ago. What I'm really doing, when I blank my mind, is avoiding language.

Anyway, a few links. More than one person has sent me this video: Homeless shepherd shares hunter-gatherer diet and survival tips

Going deeper into the non-human world, a thoughtful article from Nautilus, The Octopus Teacher's Student

And Why do dogs tilt their heads?

March 17.

2023-03-17T17:30:58Z

March 17. I'm back in Pullman, where I'll be housesitting until early April. Yesterday I went for a walk and had to adjust to the local culture: In Seattle, if you pass a stranger, you never make eye contact and say hi. In Pullman, you almost always do.

Good Reddit thread from a few days ago, People who lived in 70s/80s/90s, what was it really like?

One doom link, The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt

And five good news links. Growing crops under solar panels, if done right, is better for both crops and solar panels.

California to transform infamous San Quentin prison with Scandinavian ideas, rehab focus

Breathwork may improve mood and change physiological states more effectively than mindfulness meditation

Give babies peanut butter to cut allergy by 77%

With Ships, Birds Find an Easier Way to Travel

March 13.

2023-03-13T13:50:25Z

March 13. I'll be too busy to post for most of this week, but today, two links on AI, starting with a Hacker News thread about a Reddit post, Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here is the proof. Specifically, Samsung smart phone cameras are using neural networks, trained on images of the moon, to fill in details in moon photos, that are not there in the raw photographs. This is a dangerous precedent, of photos being stealthily enhanced to show what's supposed to be there, potentially veering off from what's actually being seen.

And an article about a linguist who is trying to explain why ChatGPT is nothing like a human. The troubling thing is, it's hard to explain, and there are people with a lot of brainpower, who are losing track of the difference between something that you can't tell apart from a human, and something that has a human-like internal life.

A quote from the guy who made the first chatbot in 1966: "No wonder that men who live day in and day out with machines to which they believe themselves to have become slaves begin to believe that men are machines."

March 10.

2023-03-10T22:20:11Z

March 10. Quick loose end on gender. If masculinity and femininity are real, but they're not in pure consciousness, nor reliably in DNA, then they must be real on a level between those things. This is what transgender people actually report: even though my chromosomes say one thing, I feel like another thing on a deeper level. We've been talking about this level for thousands of years, from Plato's allegory of the cave to Jung's collective unconscious. That's all I'm going to say for now.

New subject: three links about work-life balance. The Perks Workers Want Also Make Them More Productive. Specifically, working from home, working fewer hours, and paid leave.

A Reddit thread about why Americans want to move to Germany

And Gabriel sends this tweet from NEETWorldOrder:

It must be nice to live in one of those European countries that peaked 400 years ago. It's like playing the game after you've already finished it. There's no money to be made and nothing to do anymore except sit around and find high quality ingredients for dinner.

March 8.

2023-03-08T20:00:27Z

March 8. I was happy to get no hostile comments on the last post, so I'm going to say a little more. The current looseness and complexity in gender is not an aberration -- it's been a long time coming. The dominant gender roles that we've been living under -- even if you include stereotypical gay men and lesbians -- are much simpler than the full range of human feeling and expression.

Matt comments: "Phenomenologically, I can't find any 'masculinity' in pure consciousness. Where should I look? What should I look for?"

If masculinity is not in the Y chromosome, nor femininity in XX, and if pants and hair and makeup are arbitrary cultural signifiers, then what do we have to hold onto?

All is vapor. And yet, people like to belong, and to create categories. I expect the way we think about gender now will not be the way we think about it in 20 years, or 50 years.

My optimistic guess is that chromosomes will mainly be used for medical purposes, and the line between men's and women's sports will be drawn by testosterone testing. And then there will be clusters of common gender categories, not that different from the ones we have now, but more people comfortably outside them.

Personally, although I can't answer the question "What is a woman?" I just find women more interesting. In fiction, I love female villains -- not Dolores Umbridge, but Azula for sure. And if I find something interesting, I'm going to cultivate it inside myself. At the same time, my external performance remains completely about convenience.

March 6.

2023-03-06T18:40:40Z

March 6. Another thread from Ask Old People, and I've been putting off writing about this because it's such a contentious subject: How do you guys feel about the new generation's idea that gender is malleable?

Most of the comments are agreeing that gender has always been varied and complex, it's just now becoming mainstream and politicized. I would say, the whole subject of gender has been sucked into the engines of polarization -- and not just in the world of politics. A key paragraph:

I also had kids in the 2000s-2010s and was really frustrated with the shopping choices. If you had a girl, everything had to be PINK! Even car seats for crying out loud. Things that should never ever be gender specific suddenly were. Cups and plates--can't kids even take a drink without being gender-conscious? I couldn't find plain pajamas for my kids. It was pink and purple princess and unicorns for girls, or red and blue sports and cars for boys. I actively searched for something that was just blank or stripes or something, but no. Everything had to be printed with words like "mommy's little princess" or else be covered in soccer balls. Suddenly girls can't like dinosaurs or planets. Boys can't wear any color that approaches pastel. I think that division drove a lot of backlash. I'm a girl who likes science and math. I must be part boy!

Calling gender a spectrum doesn't go far enough, because a spectrum is only one dimension, and both poles have been locked down by marketing and Hollywood. I don't want to be anywhere on a spectrum from sports cars to unicorns, or from Marilyn Monroe to Burt Reynolds.

Lately I've been really enjoying exploring my feminine side, whatever that means. I'm writing female protagonists in fiction and playing female avatars in video games. But I don't identify as trans because I feel comfortable in a male body. Even if I'd been born female, and if I had a magic sex changing power, I would still be male for going out in public, because testosterone is a cheat code, and I don't want to be creeped on.

I don't see anyone saying, "I'm the spirit of one gender in the body of another, and I like it." So I'll continue to say that I'm a cis male who's ambitious about developing my anima.

March 3.

2023-03-03T15:10:24Z

March 3. Lately my favorite subreddit is Ask Old People. Today, two mostly negative threads, For those who lived through the 80's and 90's, how do you feel about today?

And Do you wish you grew up in today's culture? From the top comment: "Turns out an ultra fast paced, globally connected, hyper competitive world with polarized politics and a never ending flow of vain imagery and information isn't healthy for humans."

And one weird thread, What premonition did you have that later turned true?

Music for the weekend, my favorite album of 2023 so far, There's No I In Spice World. "Endearingly scrappy, Spice World perform DIY, ad-hoc pop music that is sometimes sad and sometimes silly, but always offered in earnest. They bring a punk mindset and laissez faire approach to sun-drenched kitchen table music."

March 1.

2023-03-01T13:50:20Z

March 1. Since student loan cancellation is back in the news, I'll say it again. Don't call it "forgiveness", because borrowing money for college is not morally wrong. More generally, this is something humans have been doing since ancient times, confusing the financial with the moral/spiritual. In the other direction, doing something wrong does not create a "debt" -- you just have to do it right next time.

New subject. While practicing piano, I finally started paying attention to form. I watched this video and watched myself play, and was shocked. My left hand, as far as I can tell, is perfect, while my right hand is all twisted and awkward, not just the fingers but all the way up to the shoulder. (Update: my right wrist developed a gooseneck form to fit a style of hovering for quick precise hits. But it does need some cleaning up.) So now I'm playing symmetrical chords, making the same motions mirrored, and my left side is teaching my right side how to move. By the way, I'm right handed.