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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
July 21. Getting to the bottom of links I've been saving up, Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People. It's a talk from 2016, about the idea that AI will surpass humans and take over the world. The author lays out the premises that lead to this idea, and then a wide variety of arguments for why it won't happen, and why the people who believe it are not trustworthy.
Some good news, California will begin backing intentional burns to control wildfire. Everyone knows this is a good idea, but it's always been difficult to get it through the bureaucracy.
A study about how psilocybin promotes mental health: by making us more willing to face unpleasant experiences.
A body bag can save your life. With more deadly heat waves on the way, it's been discovered that a good way to cure heat stroke is to get in a body bag full of ice water.
And The Banned Barbie Movie That Will Blow Your Mind, Todd Haynes' "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story", animated with Barbie dolls. I had a VHS bootleg of this in the 90s, and watched it a lot of times while showing it, and this description is right on:
The first time you hear about it, you think, "Oh, it's just going to be a spoof of Karen Carpenter," but it's actually a very serious film.... After about 10 minutes the novelty just sort of recedes into the background, and the foreground is incredibly powerful.
My favorite Todd Haynes film is Safe (1995), a strange and ambiguous story of a woman who develops severe chemical sensitivity. On my films page page I write: The atmosphere is a lot like a horror movie, except that every character is trying to be nice, and the horrifying thing is the alienation of modern life.
July 19. More links, starting with a loose end from the last post: Marginalia is another search engine that "focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of."
Cool video, A bell that rings two notes at once. Basically, anything that rings and is not perfectly symmetrical probably rings multiple notes, depending on where you strike it. And this guy is really good at explaining stuff.
Birds Build Nests From Anti-Bird Spikes, and a non-paywalled archive of a similar article, Birds are using anti-bird spikes to fortify nests. So far it's only the smartest birds, crows and magpies.
Interesting Hacker News thread, Whatever happened to the coming wave of delivery drones? The main answer is that FAA regulations are still catching up, but also, drones don't have a lot of range, they're affected by weather, and they need a place to land. My utopian vision for delivery drones is to make it easy for people to be hermits, like Christopher Knight, whose only problem was that he had to steal food to survive. At this point, the technological challenges are smaller than the legal and cultural challenges, for society to tolerate people having stuff openly delivered to land they're not paying to live on.
The other day I had an email exchange about where to go after the critique of industrial civilization, when you find out how unrealistic it is to live outside the system. My answer is to trace your ideology backward to the original need, the thing you wanted that you weren't getting, and try to get that thing inside the system. For me, I only enjoy life if I have large blocks of time with nothing I'm supposed to be doing.
July 17. A few more notes on posture, but first I want to say how much nicer it is to get feedback on mind-body exercises, than to get feedback on politics and society.
Bob mentions a posture guru named Jonathan FitzGordon. I checked out his stuff and it's funny because he's trying to correct a problem that's the opposite of mine. He says people are leaning back too much and not sticking their butt out enough. My problem is slouching toward a hunchback and not tucking my butt enough. The exercise I mentioned, extreme tucking and extreme raising of the breastbone, is good for pushing back against my specific imbalance. But for actual walking around, I can go a long way with a simple instruction: keep my stomach firm all the time.
While my body can't pull good posture out of a hat, it responds well to attention. If I get conflicting advice, I can try both and notice how they feel. One thing I've noticed is that walking heel-toe is much more efficient while leaning slightly backward, than while leaning forward.
And a couple stray links. Rex sends this article about Emil Cioran and the philosophy of being a loser.
And Wiby is a search engine for classic non-bloated web pages.
July 14. Continuing from the last post, Baltasar comments: "I think that ultimately your bones and muscles already 'know' how to stand up with good posture."
I'm sure a lot of people feel that way, but I don't think it's the bones and muscles. When people have good posture without even trying, it's because a subconscious part of the brain is working it out for them, or it could be nerve cells in the spine or something. But there's a limit to what the subconscious can do, which is why professional athletes are always working on form, and why nobody goes into a yoga class and gets the poses right on the first try.
My subconscious brain just has a lower level of what it can take care of. I can stand and walk without thinking, but to stand straight and walk non-clumsily, my muscles need a lot of coaching from my conscious brain.
More generally, it's tempting to romanticize mindlessness: all you have to do is not think, and your subconscious is magically omniscient. In reality, there's no shortcut for doing hard things. This is a 2017 article that I posted a few months ago, The true expert does not perform in a state of effortless 'flow'. It feels good to shut off your conscious brain and go on instinct, but to perform at the highest level requires a state of critical self-reflection, a careful balance between conscious and subconscious.
Matt comments:
From having studied massage therapy, I think the body adapts to whatever the mind is doing with it, for good or ill. If you sit for hours per day, the body learns that's its default position. The body doesn't "know" how to go from sitting hours per day to perfect posture. The body is a dynamic semi-solid system shaped by whatever is done with it.
In the same way, I think, our brains don't "know" how to concentrate. Our brains are artifacts of how we interact with reality. I do think consciousness itself has a quality of centeredness, but experiencing that centeredness (or connectivity) doesn't necessarily rearrange our brains so that we're perfectly happy.
July 12. Moving from the brain to the body: After years of struggling with posture, I've finally figured out the correct instructions. In Tai Chi, they say to pretend there's a string at the top of your head that your body is hanging from. While that's not unhelpful, my body needs something less suggestive and more concrete. A lot of people say to pull your shoulders back, which is the right kind of instruction but completely wrong.
This is what I'm doing. First, stand normally. Second, tilt your pelvis forward as far as you possibly can. Another way to think of it is to tilt your belt buckle upward. Third, raise your breastbone as high as you possibly can. Now, while maintaining those extreme stretches, walk around the room. I wouldn't do this in public, it would be too silly. This is basically the George Jefferson walk. But as an exercise, it's working much better than anything I've tried before. Now I just have to remember to do it more of the time, and work on smoothness.
Related: The belt buckle idea comes from this video on the mechanics of touching your toes.
July 10. Some fun brainy links. Skunk Ledger is a blogger who I can't even summarize. But most recently, there's a satirical Opening Speech for a conference of neurotypicals who feel left out by the coolness of nerds. And Superrational is the story of a ridiculously rational teenage girl, written in the style of Twilight fanfic.
And a fascinating Hacker News thread about crossword puzzles with multiple solutions. I wonder if reality works the same way, if the field of whatever, from which we extract sense data and construct the world, could be interpreted as something radically different.
July 7. Psychology links. Mental Liquidity is about the skill of changing your mind, and not letting your beliefs become part of your identity.
Intelligence and thinking speed: Surprising relationship revealed: "The study discovered that people with higher fluid intelligence, which is a measure of problem-solving ability, actually took more time to solve difficult tasks compared to those with lower fluid intelligence."
The explanation is related to the distinction between System 1 and System 2 thinking, where System 1 is fast and automatic, and System 2 is slow and deliberate, but more accurate.
And an article on Brain bandwidth, the brain's limited capacity to do careful observation and processing.
July 5. Last night was the annual blow shit up holiday, and I wonder, what is it about humans that they can never get enough stimulus? If there's reincarnation, in my next life I'd like to be a tuft of bunchgrass in an obscure canyon, just to get a rest.
Related, from the New Yorker, The Case Against Travel
And a good Reddit thread, What is something that has massively improved your mental health?
July 3. This blog has not been a high priority for me lately. I've been putting more mental energy into writing fiction, making music playlists, making custom spirits for Spirit Island, and what I'm going to call "altered state of consciousness exercises".
The other day I picked up the classic 1969 book Altered States of Consciousness, and opened to a section on meditation. Everyone knows that you're supposed to "be here now". But be here now with what? A suggestion was to be here now with whatever you turn your attention to, when someone asks "How are you?"
If you succeed in being present, you can ask yourself this question: What's more troubling? That this moment will be completely forgotten? Or that it will never be forgotten? I'm sure people will answer both ways. The point is that it has to be one or the other, and neither one is something we go around thinking. And either one, if taken as true, will bring your mind into the present moment, whether to appreciate it before it slips away, or because you don't want to look bad in the Akashic records.
June 29. Stray links. A Growing Number of Scientists Are Convinced the Future Influences the Past
Place Mushrooms in Sunlight to Get Your Vitamin D
The Cloud Appreciation Society
And since we're halfway through the year, this is my favorite song of 2023 so far, and it's more chill than most of what I listen to: Beach House - Holiday House
June 26. On a tangent from last week's subject, I mentioned trying to change my mental state by pretending I'm in a video game. This raises the question: Why do video games feel better than normal life?
I can think of four reasons, and I'll list them in order of increasing difficulty of getting over them.
First is novelty. Getting over novelty is inevitable, and happens with all technologies. Radio was magical when it was new, and now it's mostly boring.
Second is that games have flashier quests. Killing zombies to save the world is more interesting than walking to the store to buy cilantro. But appreciating life's little quests is something we can practice and get better at. And they're usually less stressful.
Third is a denser reward structure. In a game, you're constantly unlocking benefits and upgrades, or at least getting a clear message that you've done something right. How often does this happen in real life? I think this is why people get obsessed with money, because money is a quantitative reward that's at least sort of related to the quality of your actions.
Finally, I don't see any way to get over the fact that games are much easier. How long does it take, in a game, before you understand how stuff works and you feel like you know what you're doing? Minutes for an easy game, and maybe a few weeks for a hard game. In life, even after decades, you're still unlocking new levels of your own incompetence.
This why a good answer to "What is the meaning of life?" is learning. Unlike being happy, learning is something you always have plenty of room to do.
June 25. Don't usually post on Sunday, but I want to polish off the meditation/enlightenment subject with this comment from unwashed mendicant, condensed from a longer email:
Awakening or Buddha-mind isn't some mystical force, esoteric knowledge, or way of beating your mind into submission. Have you ever had a friend come to you with a problem, and you realize it's so fucking simple and obvious, but you know they wouldn't listen even if you told them, so you just keep quiet? It's like that. It's like someone tells you a joke, and you laugh at first but then on your way home you realize the real punch line you laugh so hard you crash your car.
You still think awakening will give you super powers. It's more like learning you've been wearing your shoes backwards the whole time. Except sometimes you forget and you put your shoes on backwards again so you have to remind yourself.
But also once you open the box you can't get mad at anybody or even yourself anymore, because you realize on an intuitive gut instinctual level rather than a cerebral one that you, your best friend, your worst enemy, Miles Davis, Donald Trump, the sun, chocolate cake, and orgasms are all corn kernels in the same dog shit, indivisible and united for all eternity.
June 23. Some nice feedback from the last post, including a recommendation of the Stream Entry subreddit, and from Chris, this comment:
I have been meditating 15 minutes most mornings now for the past couple months, and I have to say I think I finally "get it". It's not about beating my mind into silent submission. It's about cultivating patience with my own hectic thoughts, strengthening the muscle by which I calmly return to a place of intentional equanimity when I notice my mind going astray. And then, just as you say, I carry this muscle with me into the world.
Also, I did three posts on this subject two years ago. And earlier this year I wrote this:
"Mindfulness", broadly defined, serves at least two goals -- and the same goals are served by psychedelics: mental health, and understanding the mysteries of creation. The second actually works against the first. If you seek esoteric knowledge without a firm grounding in mental health, you're asking for trouble.
For me, knowing the true nature of reality is like having a billion dollars. While it sounds exciting, that's a lot of responsibility for something I might not actually enjoy. What I really want is less anxiety and more motivation. I'd like to glide smoothly through life instead of using force of will to drag myself around. And I'm making slow progress through the practice of centering myself in the present moment as I go through the day. My goal is to go an entire day without doing anything clumsy, and if I can do that, my next goal will be to go an entire day without forgetting where I put something down.
New subject. The latest Whippet has some good stuff, including why ghosts wear sheets, a fun story about "shrimps is bugs" tattoos, and a discussion of the Oxford comma. I didn't know this, but anti-Oxford comma is a strawman. Personally, I ignore rules and treat every sentence as its own puzzle, where the goal is smooth diction and clear communication. Lately, I've even started to like comma splices, I just did one and it's absolutely incorrect, but sometimes it flows better than a period or semicolon.
June 21. I've been critical of normal "meditation", in which you sit still, focus on your breath, and attempt to empty your mind of thoughts. If I spend half an hour playing piano, not only do I have a good time, but I make clear progress in whatever little thing I'm working on. Not so with meditation, a tedious chore with no obvious benefit. But I've come to appreciate a subtle benefit, which is that I become nicer at correcting myself.
As a beginner, you're not going to go three seconds with a blank mind, before you slip back into thinking again. Maybe it takes another three seconds to notice and try again. Do the math: that's ten times a minute, or 300 times in half an hour, that you're correcting yourself. It's impossible to get mad at yourself that much. Inevitably, you're going to learn to re-center yourself without making such a fuss. And this is going to rub off on all kinds of other things, not only mistakes you make, but annoying things the world does, like pop-up windows and traffic lights.
Surely some Buddhist already said this a thousand years ago: Paradoxically, the less talented you are at meditating, the faster you learn the skill that's actually useful.
I've said that "enlightenment" is not a thing, but a word that points to many different things, none of which is that impressive by itself. But suppose there is one big thing, that's not too far from what people imagine the word means. Mike Snider has compared it to seeing a magic eye image, where all of a sudden, all of reality reveals a hidden dimension.
I imagine it's similar to a mental state I can achieve by vaping a bit of weed, putting a good playlist on headphones, and going for a walk. This moment, and every mundane detail in it, feels charged with meaning. It's like I'm the POV of a video, or this is the scene that plays over the closing credits of my life.
So I try all kinds of tricks to achieve that mental state sober, and completely fail, but the process is still interesting. I pretend that I'm in a video game, or that I've just noticed I'm dreaming, or that I'm some kind of dimension-shifting traveler, and my normal neighborhood is actually a strange world I've just popped into.
June 19. Today, some cool science. Surges of cosmic radiation from space directly linked to earthquakes. Either cosmic rays are somehow causing earthquakes, or when Earth is getting ready to have a quake, its magnetic fields change, changing the cosmic rays detected on the ground. Either way, this is a robust correlation whose causal mechanism has yet to be filled in. Lots more discussion in the Hacker News thread.
Landmark study challenges century-old neuroscience paradigm: Brain shape might trump connectivity. "In other words, ripples in a pond may be a more appropriate analogy for large-scale brain function than a telecommunication network." I wonder if this has something to do with the mysteries of musical taste, or misophonia. Something comes in your ear, gets turned into brainwaves, and bounces around in just the right or wrong way.
Related: Scientists Say A Mind-Bending Rhythm In The Brain Can Act Like Ketamine. For now, this trick requires electricity to be applied inside the brain, so it will be a while before it's available to the general public.
June 15. Continuing from yesterday, I got a few replies about why people might keep wanting more money. What it comes down to is, at every level of wealth, there's always some new comfort or benefit available, and then it's easy to feel like you need it.
And it occurs to me, these are also reasons that an unconditional basic income would not lead to a nation of people moping by on the minimum. It's just a more honest and efficient safety net. And the knowledge that you could get by on the UBI would lead to more risk-taking, and a more interesting economy.
On the subject of a million dollars not being enough, Cormac McCarthy wrote his best novel on a fellowship of $236,000. I think there are thousands of people out there, maybe millions globally, who could produce something equally good if they were able to give all their time to it.
One more note on McCarthy. I wrote this in 2008 about the ecology of The Road:
It's important to remember that he's not trying to be realistic. Just as some authors write about wizards and elves, and some authors write about faster-than-light spaceships, McCarthy writes about hard men walking bleak landscapes where strangers are likely to kill them. In The Road, he has pushed bleakness into the realm of fantasy by creating a world where nothing at all lives but his two protagonists and the dying or murderous humans they encounter.
In reality, if there are dead trees, there will be grubs and insects eating the wood, and if there are dead humans, or living humans leaving shit, there will be flies, and if there are insects, there will be birds eating them, and feral cats eating the birds, and coyotes eating the cats. If there is enough sunlight to scan distant cities with binoculars, there will be enough for plants adapted to living in dense forests. There will be mosses, lichens, beetles, earthworms, and crows. McCarthy has excluded all these creatures for purely literary reasons.
June 14. On a quick loose end from yesterday, both Erik and Matt mention Cory Doctorow's concept of Enshittification. That's an essay from earlier this year where he goes in painful detail through the whole process of how money ruins platforms. Matt summarizes, that it "isn't just the result of extractive capitalism, but a middle-man business model in which tech companies create chokepoints between customers and content creators -- whether the creators are musicians or journalists or advertisers."
I'm still more interested in the psychological angle. Why don't these middlemen retire on their first million and chill out, like I would? Where does the mental state come from, that no matter how much money they have, they're not satisfied? I don't know, but I think the cure is to practice appreciating every moment, and that's something we can all work on.
By the way, Cormac McCarthy has died, and I'm not a fan of his bleak and violent world-view, but wow is he a good stylist. Above is my favorite sentence from his best book.
June 13. With the Reddit blackout, I was planning to take a week off from blogging, but this morning I woke up early full of words. When this all blows over, Reddit will go on to make a lot of money for people who already have a lot of money, while being an increasingly unsatisfying platform for its users.
Orin comments: "I'm unaware of a 'solution' to this sort of trend where online communities get eaten by... capitalism?"
I think capitalism is the right word. Reddit is preparing itself to go public, to go on the stock market, and everyone knows that stocks do better when the business model is indifferent to the user experience, safely top-down, and in the case of tech stocks, set up to maximize data harvesting. For financial reasons, Reddit has to force users onto its own clunky app, even if that means half the users quit, because the half who stay will do their jobs to keep the system working properly. We're taking longer to get there, but the result is the same as Soviet communism: citizens trudging cynically through their duties.
I don't think this is some kind of natural cycle, like the aging of organisms or the change of the seasons. Google and Amazon and Reddit aren't doomed to become evil -- they become evil without being doomed, through completely optional tragedies of human error. The main error is optimizing systems for the leveraging of power into more power, rather than for human well-being.
Taking a step back, what is it that makes people who already have enough, want more? Personally, if I had the choice of getting half a million dollars, or a billion dollars, I'd take half a million, because I don't want the responsibility, the lifestyle, or the power over others that comes with a billion dollars.
Some people say they're trying to fill the emptiness inside. I don't know what they're talking about. I have exactly the opposite problem: trying to empty the fullness outside -- seeking shelter from the outside world's exhausting barrage of demands on my attention. Now I'm going to go take a nap.