Ran Prieur

July 28.

2023-07-28T16:00:56Z

July 28. Continuing on evil, my definition isn't airtight, and surely evil is clever enough to have counter-measures for innocence. I think the main one is compartmentalization. Someone's surface personality could be full-on puppy dog, while they're unaware of a sinister sub-personality that's pulling the strings. Conversely, a person lacking empathy can still be benign, through careful understanding of the effects of their actions.

I'm also thinking about institutional evil, which works by outsourcing compulsive selfishness to the rules of the institution. This happens a million times a day: Our company has to do this bad thing, because to do otherwise would lower the stock value. Can a corporation made up of 100% good people still be evil? I think the key, again, is compartmentalization. One thing evil must do to survive, is block the expansion of awareness.

Matt comments:

When you're intentionally harming others, there are basically two metacognitive options: you can tell yourself a story that the harm has a point, or you can understand it as pointless.

I've seen people choosing the second option, but it's mostly in relation to animals -- people shooting jackrabbits from their trucks for fun, or kids stepping on ants. I have this vague childhood memory of getting upset at my best friend for stomping a bunch of ants on the sidewalk. He got mad at me for getting mad.

Spelling it out: First, there's the motive to feel good. Second, there's the discovery that you can feel good by doing something harmful. Third, there's the challenge to be aware of the harm you're doing. Fourth, there's hostility to that expansion of awareness.

I don't think it makes sense to say a person is evil, only that a person has fallen into a compelling mistake, and they may or may not manage to climb out.

July 26.

2023-07-26T14:40:08Z

July 26. Today, evil. What is it and where does it come from? I don't believe in original sin, but I think mistakes are inevitable, and evil is just a very big mistake that humans have fallen into. I've been thinking about how to define it, and come up with three principles.

1) Evil is defined by the mental state of the evildoer, not the feelings of the victim. Otherwise we have to say tornadoes are evil.

2) Evil is social. It's about the relationship, in the mind of the evildoer, with other people. If you have to say "I don't care about other people," then you care about other people. It would not occur to a hawk to say "I don't care about mice."

More precisely, evil is egocentric and adversarial. It requires a sense of "self" that's not just your stream of experience, but a third person view of who you supposedly are, and a preoccupation with the status or significance of that self, in competition with the not-self, such you can score points by setting apart the self and the not-self, and by bringing the not-self down. But this is all normal for humans. Evil requires something more.

3) Evil is compulsive: not just doing something bad once or twice, but surrendering to a pattern of knowingly doing a harmful thing over and over. This compulsion forms a sub-personality that fights back against attempts to dissolve it, and a useful metaphor is demonic possession, although I don't believe in demons as something real outside of humans.

What can we do about evil? Well, there's nothing you can do about the mental state of another person, sometimes not even if they ask for your help. The best you can do is to protect yourself from the effects of that mental state, and not get caught up in the drama.

If you think there might be some evil in you, there are a lot of things you can do, and I think the best word for the antidote to evil is neither good, nor love, but innocence -- not the absence of wrongdoing, but a mental state of receptive friendliness to whatever comes up. Of course innocence makes pain sharper, and threats more dangerous. You don't have to feel that way all the time. It's just a move you can make to break the grip of the compulsion.

July 24.

2023-07-24T12:20:27Z

July 24. This week, theology, by which I mean, subjects that philosophers avoid while religions tell you what to think. I've been listening to a great lecture series, the Early Middle Ages by Philip Daileader. And I found out there was a guy who thought pretty much what I do, back in the year 400. He was an Irish monk who moved to Rome and called himself Pelagius. In the context of Christianity, he said that there's no original sin, that we're all born clean, and evil is just a bunch of bad habits that humans have fallen into. Jesus didn't save us, but set an example of how to live. We all have free will and personal responsibility for living better, and if we eventually get it right, earth will be a lot like heaven.

Pelagius was strongly opposed by Augustine, who believed that this world is a cesspool of misery, that our only hope for feeling good is in the afterlife, and that we can only get there through the incomprehensible whims of an authoritarian supreme being. He didn't even think you could get to heaven by your own actions, only if God, while fixing the deterministic timeline, decided he liked you. This was too much for Christians at the time, although it was picked up more than a thousand years later by Calvinists, with their idea that you can tell who God already likes, it's the rich people.

If anyone has been done a favor in this world, it's the people with good parents, and I assume that Pelagius had better parents than Augustine. There's an interesting book called The History of Childhood by Lloyd deMause (pronounced deMoss). Through heavy cherry-picking of evidence, he argues that kids have been raised steadily and consistently better over time, all through history and prehistory. I think an honest look at the evidence would show a lot of exceptions and reversals, but still roughly the same thing. We have now reached a point where Pelagius is closer to the mainstream than Augustine, and I would even say that heaven on earth is already here, just subtle and poorly distributed.

July 21.

2023-07-21T21:50:32Z

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.

2023-07-19T19:30:01Z

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.

2023-07-17T17:10:33Z

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.

2023-07-14T14:40:14Z

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.

2023-07-12T12:20:08Z

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.

2023-07-10T22:00:55Z

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.

2023-07-07T19:30:06Z

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.

2023-07-05T17:10:37Z

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.

2023-07-03T15:50:38Z

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.