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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
May 25. Today's subject is self-improvement. I wonder if my brain is more of an outlier than I thought. I've already mentioned that weed makes me motivated and LSD gives me aphantasia. Another thing is that most people who engage in self-improvement use the word growth. I've never felt like I'm getting bigger in any way. Instead, I almost feel like I'm getting smaller. I have all these bad habits, physical, mental, emotional, technological, that are spreading me out too much, and as I clean them up, my sense of being me becomes more streamlined.
Someone commented on my piano video, that I should use my thumbs more. The thumb reaches farther and hits harder than any other finger, so of course I should use it, and I do have one spread-out chord that I'm working on. But in general I'm putting off using the thumb because it gives me too many options. The trick to improvisation is constraint, and there are still so many things I want to do inside the tight space of eight fingers on four notes.
Yesterday I had an obvious insight: To make a chore fun, add creativity. Stretching is good for me, but to buy a book about stretches, and go through it doing them, that's a chore. Going to a class where someone tells me how to stretch, also a chore. But making up stretches on the fly, that's fun! I spent an hour standing in front of the blurry mirror of the TV screen, trying to send ripples up my body like break dancers do. It's really hard. I had to isolate the movements, keeping my feet planted and trying to move just my hips or just my shoulders. I'm looking forward to my next session, but I should have started this when I was five.
One bit of advice on changing habits. The first habit you have to change is getting mad at things that are wrong. It might seem like you're getting mad at other people, or at circumstances, but really you're mad at representations of those things in your own head. "Inner peace" is such a common goal of spiritual and emotional practice, that it seems like a cliche. But it's actually not the goal -- it's an instruction for the path: The voices inside you have to be nice to each other. When you catch yourself doing something wrong, a good reaction is, "Cool, now I know how to get better -- I've unlocked an upgrade."
May 22. Stray links. From the New Yorker, It's Time to Embrace Slow Productivity. The article starts with the 32 hour work week, and then it goes more deeply into work volume, "the total number of obligations that you're committed to complete," and how lower volume would reduce burnout and increase the quality of work.
From the Psychonaut subreddit, What weird knowledge did you get from psychedelics? This is why I don't like the saying, "When you get the message, hang up the phone," because look at all the different messages.
Did Scientists Accidentally Invent an Anti-addiction Drug? It's about Ozempic, also known as Semaglutide, Wegovy and Rybelsus. Surely there are bad effects that we still don't know about, but patients "have reported losing interest in a whole range of addictive and compulsive behaviors: drinking, smoking, shopping, biting nails, picking at skin."
And a nice Hacker News thread on Dandelions, how useful they are and why we should stop killing them.
May 19. For the weekend, some personal stuff. Thanks Tim for the inspiration: I've been doing high yoga, and I love it. I've already done enough yoga classes to know the basic moves and poses. Then it's just a matter of trying different stuff and doing more of whatever feels good. Cannabis helps with creativity, and in return, yoga turns cannabis into a means to do something that's good for me.
Also on the subject of improvisation, I've finally rigged a system to make piano videos. I use two different gooseneck phone holders, a thick one clipped to the back of the table and rising up the wall, and then a thinner one to come out over the keyboard for careful positioning. Then I just record it with my iPhone, and use Windows video editor to make an mp4 for uploading.
Recorded earlier this week, a jam in GBCE, meaning I just use those four notes in two octaves. That's the way I like to play, squeezing as much as I can out of one chord, and I still have a lot of room to get better.
May 17. Again, a quick link that fits the previous post, a thread from Ask Old People, Was there anything in your life that you failed at so much that at the end you had to give up or just decided to quit?
Stray links, starting with climate change. From the Guardian, How to halve emissions now analyzes the latest IPCC report:
"First, solar and wind power are by far the best option.... After wind and solar, the biggest prize is stopping the destruction of forests and other wild places.... Nuclear power and carbon capture and storage each have just 10% of the potential of wind and solar, and at far higher cost. The same applies to bioenergy -- burning wood or crops for electricity.
And this article surely overstates the benefits, but it's a cool idea: Seaflooding is a way to mitigate climate change, by opening channels for oceans to fill deserts that are below sea level.
Via No Tech Magazine, These scientists lugged logs on their heads to resolve Chaco Canyon mystery. We'll probably never know how the Chacoans hauled wood from 200,000 trees 70 miles, but this experiment shows that a good way to do it is with "tumplines", where two people walk with a log against their lower backs and the weight carried by straps over their heads.
On the AI front, something unsurprising, a Jesus chatbot that answers silly questions live. I want to see an AI Jesus that looks like a first century Galilean and not a white Millennial.
And something surprising, Scientists Use GPT AI to Passively Read People's Thoughts. I thought this was still decades away. Using an fMRI scanner, GPT-1 was able to learn to associate brainwave patterns with specific language:
For instance, when a subject envisioned the sentence "went on a dirt road through a field of wheat and over a stream and by some log buildings," the decoder produced text that said "he had to walk across a bridge to the other side and a very large building in the distance."
I'm not worried about privacy, because no one can read your brainwaves unless you put your head in an expensive device. But I'm excited about the possibility of doing this with moving images. If you could envision a scene, and that scene could be projected on a screen or recorded, then someone with a strong imagination could make movies without a camera.
May 15. Quick loose end on the last post. Eric comments: "Another cultural bit to explain why certain people like certain music is that it doesn't just say things about them as a person, but it actually transports them to a different cultural place than where they started."
Today's subject, ancient wisdom and living well, starting with a link from the subreddit, a nice article about Diogenes and the Cynics.
Related: 12 Ancient Greek Terms that Should Totally Make a Comeback
I think I've posted this before, a 2017 review of the 1934 book A Life of One's Own by Marion Milner:
I had been continually exhorted to define my purpose in life, but I was now beginning to doubt whether life might not be too complex a thing to be kept within the bounds of a single formulated purpose.... So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.
Another take on the same idea, Instead of Your Life's Purpose:
The idea is not that we will participate in one story that can be easily wrapped up by our biographers -- but that there are many adventures and quests that we can pursue. Rather than the attitude of the saint who is given a mission by God, it takes the attitude of the swashbuckling adventurer who goes out to seek his fortune.
...
When there is only one possible source of meaning in our life, we adapt ourselves for efficiency: our goal might be to be a bed-net maximizer, win souls for Jesus, or stop Skynet. We make ourselves machine-like.... Instead of looking for a cause to devote your life to, you might try to become someone who is useful and level-headed in a crisis, who is well connected and makes friends easily, or who regularly has good ideas.
May 13. For the weekend, music, but don't worry, I'm only writing about it. Baltasar surely speaks for many of you when he says that I have never linked to a song he likes. Musical taste is fascinating, because it varies so widely with no apparent logic behind it.
I think quality is a matter of fit. Musical quality is objective to the extent that our brains are the same. Any human who listens to enough jazz will agree that Miles Davis is better than Kenny G. And yet, the more we listen to Miles Davis, the more we disagree about what his best song is.
I know what I like when I hear it, but I can't explain it in a way that enables anyone to predict what I'll like, including AI. I imagine it's like a fingerprint inside the brain, except unlike actual fingerprints, it gets more complex the more you listen. The listening brain is like a keyhole looking for the right key, and everything has to fit to unlock it. And every time that happens, more keyholes are revealed, as we go deeper into the sound.
There's also a cultural component. People like songs or genres because of what that choice says about them as a person, and I think that's something we have to get over, get out of our personas and into our ears.
May 11. One more link about drugs, a new article on Nautilus, The 19th-Century Trippers Who Probed the Mind.
And an update from a week ago. I knew that post was half-baked and now I know why. I wrote, "the value system of efficiency only arises when the person doing the work doesn't enjoy it, or when someone is paying for it." But Kathryn points out that efficiency can be intrinsically enjoyable:
There can be a great deal of satisfaction in arranging your work efficiently... everything happening in a logical order, no wasted motion, no wasted resources. Think of a chef, and mise en place... chopping and measuring all ingredients first, arranging them in the order they're going to be added to the dish being prepared, making sure that all needed utensils are within reach. The chopping, measuring and arranging can be pleasurable in themselves, and once everything is ready, you can just COOK, paying attention to the sights, sounds and smells of what you're cooking, with nothing to interrupt the process.
Coincidentally, I've been making progress in my lifelong battle against clumsiness, and it came from piano playing. The goal of improv is for your fingers and your ears to get so connected, that you can play stuff that sounds good without your brain getting involved. I've been at that level for a while, and it's a nice plateau, but the only way to get better was to bring my brain back in. So I made the rule that my eye has to touch a key before my finger does, which forces my brain to form precise intentions and my fingers to follow. It's really hard, but it has carried over into stuff like putting forks away.
May 9. Back to my favorite subject lately, altered mental states, starting with this article from Aeon: "Long before it entered the urban playgrounds of the 20th century, the swing was a ritual instrument of healing, punishment and transformation."
Meditation Wasn't for Me -- Until I Tried It While Hiking. I've noticed exactly the same thing: blanking my thoughts and being in the moment is easier and more effective while walking around than while sitting still.
A scientific article, Effect of LSD on reinforcement learning in humans. "Computational modelling revealed that the most pronounced effect of LSD was the enhancement of the reward learning rate." I think we have all kinds of room to use psychedelics for focused practical applications.
And a great Reddit thread, What drug will you never touch again and why? I learned that breathing air dusters is extremely dangerous, and that ambien causes creepy blackouts.
There are many good comments on cocaine, including this one that says "It doesn't do anything for me except make me want more cocaine." And this one by someone whose life and health got ruined, "All for the same effect of four Red Bulls basically."
And some good comments on DMT. This one has a fascinating metaphor: "I felt like a kid who spoiled Christmas by looking at his presents early." A sub-comment has an unusual set of beliefs that I expect to become more common:
Thanks to DMT I'm an atheist who believes in an afterlife, but I don't think a god exists. I just think it's another dimension as natural as this plane of existence. One day maybe science will figure it out. But shit dude, I've been there and it's all math and fractals.
May 8. Continuing from last week, a thought experiment. What would happen if humans became permanently incapable of doing any task that we don't find intrinsically enjoyable?
First, the global economy would disappear like smoke. Then, over the next few years, billions of people would die -- not because farmers would quit working, but because they'd have to start over without industrial supply chains. By the way, during famines, most people don't die from actual starvation, but from disease and violence that emerge when people are hungry.
A hundred years down the line, would we all be back to the stone age? No way. Unlike stone age people, we would know about all the cool stuff we can do. We would have books and tools and skills. Eventually, enthusiasts in garage workshops would be making everything from transistors to bike tires.
How complex could a society get on a 100% volunteer workforce? How complex is the forest? We wouldn't have big box stores with a hundred thousand items. Instead, there would be ten million items all spread out across the land. Instead of schools forcing everyone to learn the same boring stuff, every student would follow their own peculiar obsession. It would take many generations to work out the details, but eventually a low coercion society is going to have a higher ceiling than a high coercion society.
The problem with this scenario is that it ignores the main reason people do things: not because particular tasks are enjoyable in an absolute sense, but because they fit a social context. People will happily do work to feed their children, where they would revolt against doing exactly the same work to feed strangers.
That's why our system is collapsing. I think in a thousand years, historians will look back and see us, right now, somewhere in a transition more epic than the fall of Rome, and faster. They'll probably blame climate change, but I blame psychosocial factors, one of which is atomization, the stripping away of context. We've become isolated individuals scanning our screens for isolated pleasures. We no longer feel like we are part of anything larger that gives us a reason to do things. And dangerous movements are filling this void.
May 4. I have no ideas this week. This is a post I drafted a while back, that didn't meet my standards, but this week my standards are lower:
Efficiency is a value system, which seeks to minimize the human work that goes into doing something. But if someone is doing work they enjoy, outside the money economy, then it doesn't matter how long it takes. So the value system of efficiency only arises when the person doing the work doesn't enjoy it, or when someone is paying for it.
Imagine there's a factory owner who's obsessed with efficiency. He makes sure that in his factory, everything is done in the smoothest possible way, with no human movement that's not necessary. Then he goes out on weekends and climbs mountains.
Of course, climbing mountains has no practical value at all. It's completely about feeding the owner's hunger for meaning.
So we can't understand motivation and meaning without looking at power. The workers are not allowed to do their jobs in a way that feels more meaningful to them, unless it fits the owner's sense of meaning. And that owner-defined sense of meaning -- quantity of wealth produced per quantity of human activity -- goes hand in hand with economic domination.
I suggest a numerical measure of a society's health. I call it intrinsic-extrinsic overlap, and I can think of two ways to measure it: 1) Of all the people who are really into something, what percent are into something that the economy considers valuable? 2) Of all the people with jobs, what percent would still do their jobs if money was not a factor?
May 2. Gordon Lightfoot has died. I've been listening to his stuff for decades, and he has a lot of great songs other than the hits, so I whipped up a 95 minute Spotify playlist.
May 1. 
Today's subject is drugs, a word I'm using to include alcohol. There's a set of things that a lot of people say about drugs: they make you numb, they temporarily block the misery of existence, they take you away from reality.
My experience is exactly the opposite, and I'm specifically talking about cannabis a few times a week and psychedelics a few times a year. Drugs take me closer to reality. Edges are sharper, sounds are clearer, social situations are more comprehensible. Emotions are stronger, including unpleasant emotions. I get some anxiety from weed but it's worth it for the benefits. Rather than zoning out on the couch, I pack every experience and activity I can into the magic hours before I return to the padded cell of my thick head.
I think this is related to the fact that I don't like alcohol or opioids. I mean, I won't try heroin, but I've had prescription hydrocodone, and after one pill I'm like, nope, the negatives outweigh the positives.
Last week I took my yearly LSD trip. In Pullman I would always walk up the Palouse River. In Seattle I walked around Westcrest Park, an urban forest that has gone long enough without logging to have trees you can't reach halfway around. And it was nice, but I still like the river better. I feel like the best part of the forest must be up in the treetops where the sun is.
About the drug, I discovered something crazy. Neither LSD nor psilocybin has ever given me visuals, so I thought, I'll try to jump-start some visuals by imagining something. And I couldn't! LSD gives me aphantasia. A substance known for taking people to dreamland, takes me extra hard into my senses. I've poked around online and can't find anyone else reporting this.
I suppose my point is, a lot of what we think drugs do is really down to individual brains.
April 28. This is a good summary of a recent discovery about pre-human evolution. The old story was, 10 million years ago the forests in Africa shrank, and our ancestors learned to walk on two legs so they could adapt to the grasslands. It turns out, those grasslands were already there 21 million years ago. So why did humans become bipedal? Definitely aliens.
Seriously, this doubles the weight of wooded grasslands as our ancestral environment -- as the kind of landscape where we feel most at home. We might romanticize the forest, but look at our suburbs and city parks: they're mostly grass with some trees.
Something fun for the weekend, thanks Tim, Pelicans Are Some of Trump's Best Friends.
April 26. One more negative link, a Reddit comment about Tesla self-driving cars. Basically, every other company is doing really careful testing, while Tesla is just throwing half-baked stuff out to be tested by consumers. This creates the illusion that they're more advanced, when really they're more reckless.
And three more links from Reddit. From Ask Old People, a well-written comment about what it's like to be a Baby Boomer.
A fun thread from the other day, What weird flex you proud of?
And an interesting five year old comment about the three waves of coffee. First, brand loyalty; second, the rise of the coffee shop; third, conoisseurship. It occurs to me that something similar has happened with music, and probably other things too, where we've gone from loyalty to categories, to seeking out particular stuff across many categories.
By the way, I've revamped my 2010s playlist on Spotify, cutting it to under two hours, adding more variety, and arranging it to flow better.
April 24. Negative links, starting with this Hacker News thread from last week about social media and mental illness.
A rant from Cory Doctorow about banning surveillance, and how American tech giants are worse than TikTok.
From the Atlantic, America Fails the Civilization Test, because our death rates are double Western Europe at almost every age. Causes include guns, drug overdoses, car crashes, and health problems from sedentary lifestyle and lack of access to health care. There's no clear single thing tying all of these together, but one surprising culprit is NIMBYs, people who don't want high-density affordable housing built in their neighborhood, so instead of walkable cities, we have sprawl, and more people spending their days driving and sitting around.
Related: San Francisco could be on the verge of collapse, after decades of hostility to new housing and small businesses.
April 21. Something nice for the weekend, Space Elevator is a really well-made page where you scroll upward through the atmosphere. The music even changes.
April 20. A joke for the holiday: What happens at 9:11 on 4/20? You never forget what you were just talking about.
Continuing from yesterday, I believe intellectually that relationships are more fundamental than things, but it's like believing that matter is mostly empty space. It's not something I've ever experienced. I suppose the dog universe is more relationship-based than the human universe. When I go for a walk, it's all about exploring the landscape with my eyes, or thinking about stuff, or working on my walking form. When I'm walking two dogs, from their perspective, it's about their relationship with each other, with me, and with whatever they're smelling.
Dogs always like me after they get to know me, but they're often uneasy when they first meet me. I've been told I move wrong, but nobody has been able to explain how to move right to make dogs comfortable. By the way, dogs loved Hitler, which disproves the idea that they're good judges of character.
April 19. So I'm dogsitting this week and next. When you walk a dog, there is a spectrum of strategies. At one extreme, the human decides the route and the pace, and the dog just goes along. But I'm in no hurry, with nowhere particular to go, so I lean toward the other extreme: let the dogs decide. My role is to keep them from wandering too far, or dawdling too long, or messing with nasty stuff. (Sometimes I think fate does the same thing for me.)
The problem is, there are two dogs, and they often want to do different things. Suspiciously often. I finally decided, when the dogs disagree, it's less because they actually want to do those different things, and more because they're testing dominance, against me or against each other.
This is so annoying. I just want to have a nice walk and let the dogs have fun, not be a pawn in the bullshit social games of another species. But humans aren't that different. I've written before about schismogenesis, an anthropology term for when a population does something primarily because those other people are doing the other thing.
How many of the conflicts of history are less for any practical reason, and more because people just like having conflict? Humans create meaning in life from "us vs them", and chase that meaning to the point of mass murder.
Here's a test. If someone gets really worked up about a certain issue, consider how much their day to day life would get better or worse, depending on if they get their way or don't get their way. Or ask if there's anyone they legitimately care about, who has that kind of practical stake in the issue. For example, conservatives are currently horrified that men might identify as women and out-compete real women in sports. When did these people ever care about women's sports until now?
Related: Exposure to authoritarian messages leads to worsened mood but heightened meaning in life. Can't we just be in a good mood and have life be meaningless?
April 17. This is pretty cool: Mathematicians discover shape that can tile a wall and never repeat
New subject: A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived
Related: there are some great answers in this Ask Old People thread: Do you ever think about the fact that no one will remember you in 100, 200, maybe 300 years after your death?
April 13. More self-help. How To Do Hard Things is an overview of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), with a lot of helpful little things to practice, like grounding yourself in the present moment, completely feeling pain, and not taking your own thoughts as true.
Flexibility has nothing to do with stretching your muscles; it's neurological. Is that true? Because I've always had extremely inflexible hamstrings, like I can't even touch my knees without pain, while my quads are so flexible that I can do a saddle pose like it's nothing. I always assumed my knees were set funny, but when I think about it, stretching the fronts of my legs feels good, and stretching the backs of my legs feels bad, I don't know why. Maybe I've been overstretching my hamstrings all these decades, and I need to start with super-gentle stretches and work up.
Anyway, that link is from a great newsletter-style blog called The Whippet, thanks Greg. From the most recent Whippet, The true expert does not perform in a state of effortless 'flow'. People who are really good at stuff are usually in a state of critical self-reflection, and if they can shut off their conscious brains and just go on instinct, it feels better, but they perform worse.
April 12. Two links on practical mental health. The Status Trap goes quickly through why you shouldn't care about status, and goes deeper into how to not care about status.
An On-Ramp to Flow suggests that when you're doing a long project, don't stop at obvious or convenient stopping points. Instead, "stop just short of a neat milestone," so that when you start next time, you'll have something easy to get up to speed and do the next thing. When I'm writing fiction, I like to overshoot the milestone and write a few sentences of the next part. Then when I come back to it, I usually end up crossing out the new stuff and trying again.