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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
August 4. Bunch o' links. Is slowness the essence of knowledge? The article covers slow food, slow science, and mostly slow thinking.
MIT engineers create an energy-storing supercapacitor from ancient materials. Using only cement, carbon black, and water, it "could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day's worth of energy while adding little to the cost."
This tiny device could reforest the entire planet (thanks Erik). Again using very simple design, they've invented a thing that corkscrews seeds into the ground, greatly increasing the viability of seeds dropped by drones.
These Wavy Walls Actually Use Fewer Bricks Than a Straight Wall, because a straight wall would have to be much thicker to not fall down.
Banished to a Remote Idaho Valley, Beavers Created a Lush Wetland
And I've uploaded a video. This is something I've been meaning to do for years. One of my favorite songs of the 80s is My Mother The War by 10,000 Maniacs. Both YouTube and Spotify have a tepid version of the song incorrectly identified as this great version.
August 2. Continuing on the subject of moral recovery, a thread on Ask Old People, Do bad people as they get older ever "get it" and realize they were a bad person? The answer is mostly no, and the top comment lays out the recipe for a bad person: "low self awareness and poor moral development."
Farther down is a link to this fascinating page, Down the rabbit hole of estranged parents' forums. Basically, the parents in these forums say nothing about what they've been accused of doing, unless the accuser makes a mistake they can jump on. Meanwhile, forums for adult children of abusers are loaded with details, and they even challenge each other to make sure they're getting the details right.
Another word for "self-awareness" is metacognition: a perspective that looks inward, and neither reflexively condemns nor reflexively excuses, but tries to understand and suggest adjustments. I've seen it called "the science of self-observation", and it's a difficult skill to learn. Without it, you may fall into the pseudoscience of self-observation, where you start with what you want to believe and pick out evidence.
There's a cartoon trope, where a character has an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, giving advice. That's three voices: the angel, the devil, and the self, and three voices is too many for someone with low cognitive powers. Instead, most bad-doers have two voices: the self, who is completely selfish, and the justifier, who tells the self that they're behaving correctly, and blanks out all evidence to the contrary.
Again, if someone else is doing this, there's nothing you can do. But if you're doing it, you can chip away at those habits with innocence and curiosity. An interesting question is, where does the angel voice come from? Somewhere I read about a hypnotist saying that when people get deep enough, they all have the same calm and reasonable voice. I suppose the goal of meditation is to be in that mental state all the time.
July 31. Another great issue of The Whippet. This one has a cool bit about ghosts of the tsunami, and a review of this essay, Two Failure Modes of Emerging Technologies. The basic idea is that people who say, "Oh no, AI will take over the world" are actually techno-optimists, assuming that AI will work well, and not considering something more realistic: that AI will work badly but be widely used anyway. So the danger of facial recognition is not that the government will always know where you are, but that you'll get arrested for looking like someone else. This is why I always say that the prophet of our time was not Orwell but Kafka.
And then, it's funny, I was already planning to write about the Parable of the Vineyard Workers. While I'm not Christian, there are two things in the New Testament that I've found more helpful than anything in any other religion. One of them is "Judge not that you be not judged," and the other is this parable, in which the vineyard owner pays some workers the standard wage for a full day; but then he keeps bringing in more workers, and paying them the same wage for less and less work. The early workers say, that's not fair, they should get less than us. And the owner says, fuck off, I can be generous.
The standard interpretation is that the wage is eternal life in heaven, the early workers are people who were righteous their whole lives, and the late workers are people who repent late in life. Another interpretation is that the wage is making earth more like heaven, and we can't move in that direction unless we agree that people who come later will get a better deal than people who came earlier.
Another interpretation is that the early workers are your past self, the late workers are your future self, and the wage is any beneficial change in your habits. Your present self may resist this change, on behalf of your past self, because you don't want to admit that you've been doing it wrong all this time for no good reason.
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. 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. 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. 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.