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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
September 9. Continuing on motivation, I often wish for life to be easy and fun. But then it occurs to me, if a task is fun, it doesn't matter if it's easy. Sometimes making something harder can make it more fun. That's why games have difficulty levels. And sometimes, paradoxically, making something harder can make it easier.
This summer I watched a lot of Olympics, and it's a good way to approach any task, especially a trivial task, to do it like an Olympic routine, seeking perfection in every little movement. In the short term it's both mentally and physically harder, but it becomes physically easier as your new smoother movements become habitual, and it's mentally less tiring to focus completely on a boring task, than to do it while thinking about something else.
A few years back an old friend asked for advice on self-hate. I said, I'm not qualified because that's not a problem for me. But I was thinking of propositional self-hate, the intellectual idea that I'm worthless or inadequate. I don't get that, but it turns out that I have quite a lot of practical self-hate, in the form of subtle habits, both physical and cognitive, that don't make any sense except as self-sabotage.
The thing that's helped me the most, in noticing these habits, is cannabis. I wonder how much of the anxiety that's seemingly caused by weed, is already there and only revealed by weed. Related: Marijuana Is Too Strong Now. The days of giant Cheech and Chong joints are over, but it's not complicated to just use less. My normal dose is a nug the size of a kernel of corn, vaped in late afternoon, and when I get a high that's more numbing than illuminating, I take a couple days off.
September 5. New post! I'm taking another crack at one of my favorite subjects, motivation. I've said before that motivation is only a problem for humans, but now I'm thinking it's a problem for any organism that doesn't fit its environment. No squirrel ever said, "Oh no, not more nuts to gather." But in captive animals you get a mismatch between what they're made to do, and what they're permitted to do.
With a perfect fit between organism and environment, what you feel like doing and what's good for you to do are one and the same. I have some political ideas on how to get closer to that, to build society bottom-up from intrinsic motivation, instead of top down from money sucking up more money. But realistically, humans are so good at constructing novel environments, that we're always going to be somewhat in a limbo of unfit.
Some people say, instead of motivation, all you need is discipline. Either they're bullshitting, or they're playing on some kind of easy mode. I seem to have good discipline, enough to push myself through the school system with good grades, and do a few jobs where I came home with just enough energy to do basic tasks and sleep. At one point in my 20s, I pushed myself so hard that I started to have nightmares about being dragged to death. Another time, between jobs, I had such fatigue that I could barely walk to the store. Modern medicine drew a blank, and I was advised to have more fun.
Since then I've spent decades trying to tease out a compromise, practicing the subtle art of riding little stretches of feel-like-doing, to get some rest from driving myself. I've found that a good thing to do, when I'm unmotivated, is to play video games -- not all day, just for an hour or two. A good game reminds me what it's like to be in a zone of energizing activity, and that mental state often carries over into the outside world.
Lately I've found another trick. I'm working on being fully present, trying to balance my attention on the smallest bits of what I'm doing, in the smallest bits of time. I've reclaimed a habit from my teenage years, of gently touching objects that I pass, to remind myself of where my body is in space. When I do something clumsily, I slow down and do it again with full focus. Coinciding with these practices, I've noticed that chores are no longer painful. It's not like I enjoy washing dishes, but now the task feels barely harder than sitting on the couch. Also, I seem to have more free time.
I suspect that this is the secret talent of elite doers: they are naturally highly present. They have an intutitive knowledge of when to push through and when to ease off, and they work with such micro-scale efficiency that they tend not to burn out, but to slide into some kind of flow state.
September 2. For Labor Day, a repost from July 2012:
The Busy Trap is one of the best essays I've seen about busyness and idleness:
"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system." This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write "Childhood's End" and think up communications satellites. My old colleague Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income from work and give each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that'll be considered a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage and eight-hour workdays. The Puritans turned work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment.
If we manage to stabilize in a zero-growth society (instead of an endless series of explosions and collapses) then the culture will change, idleness will seem normal, and busyness and striving will seem strange or even unhealthy. I've read three works of fiction that give a sense of how this world might feel: Richard Brautigan's novel In Watermelon Sugar, John Crowley's novel Engine Summer, and Hitoshi Ashinano's manga Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.
It also occurs to me that nobody is ever doing nothing. Even meditation masters are focusing their consciousness. When we talk about "idleness" we're really talking about potential idleness, the absence of external demands on your time. The freedom to do nothing is the foundation of the freedom to do anything.
August 29. While not blogging, I'm making good progress on another project that might go public before the end of the year, and still cranking out playlists. My latest is a two hour condensation of Tom Waits. As a stylist, he didn't become interesting until Swordfishtrombones in 1983, but he was always a great songwriter, and I gave a lot of minutes to his early ballads. I'm currently obsessed with this song from 1999, Cold Water. Also, it's too difficult for the playlist, but Oily Night is crazy!
Related: Many of Us Have Perfect Pitch Without Knowing It
August 26. Still in repost mode. This is a post from June 28, 2017:
This sports article, Soccer Assassins, describes two coaching styles, where the normal one is to use physically strong but uncreative players as chesspiece thugs. That wins more games in the short term, but in the long term, the best players and the best teams are built on a foundation of individual skill and improvisation.
This confounds modern thinking about "individualism" because it's about how a group can work better if everyone is doing their own thing. The trick is, they're doing their own thing in service to the group. They're thinking "I want my team to do as well as possible, but I'm not going to trust the coach to tell me what to do, I'm going to figure it out myself in the moment."
This is different from "Collectivism says that society thrives if I trust central planners." But it's also different from "Capitalism says that society thrives if I'm totally selfish." It's not a middle ground -- it's a whole other angle, difficult for our culture to imagine. That's when I realized that people like Ayn Rand ruined "individualism" by tying it to selfishness.
Bottom line: the best human collectives, in sports or whatever, are built out of 1) people with all their quirks 2) with strong fundamental skills 3) making it up on the fly 4) for the good of the team. A good human society, which is probably thousands of years away, will be a fractal structure that works like that on every scale.
August 22. Stray links. Scientists reveal a fascinating neurocognitive trait linked to heightened creativity: "Our study found that creative individuals do not perceive unusual information as odd; they process it similarly to typical information." Or maybe creative people perceive all information as odd.
"Frost Crack" Sounds May Come From Sky, not Trees
From Ask Reddit, What's your most accurate description of a drug you've used?
And I have a new video. Back in 2020, I was housesitting with an actual piano, so I set up two Sansa Clip mp3 players, using the voice recorders for the left and right channel, and played a couple jams. At the time, it just felt like I was doing my job. Listening to it now, I don't know how that came out of me, and it's a good fit for the lo-fi recording. I spent yesterday making a slideshow video, with scraps of my image collection that hadn't been used yet: Three Note Dirge
August 19. Still in repost mode. This is a post from April 1, 2020:
A nice trick for understanding economics is to factor out money. An economy is just a bunch of people doing stuff that keeps the system going. The strength of an economy is the overlap between what's necessary to keep it going, and what people want to do anyway. By this definition, a weak economy has to threaten people with hunger and homelessness to get them to do their jobs, and at the other extreme, Utopia doesn't even have the concept of freeloading.
This has actually been done. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers mentions tribes where some people do no productive work their whole lives, and nobody cares. Obviously not every tribe has done it, but even if it's just one, that tells us that it's possible.
In a complex high-tech society, the challenge is distribution, getting stuff to people who aren't making stuff. Communism tried it through central management, which didn't work, and capitalism is trying it through money, which is now also failing. I think the failure of capitalism is a slip between two functions of money: 1) a mechanism of exchange, and 2) a source of the meaning of life.
The problem is, money is zero-sum. If you hang meaning on it, then meaning is zero-sum, and it gets sucked up by people at the top. The poor become NPC's in the quests of the rich.
That system is now breaking down. Human motivation is the most powerful force on the planet, and as the economy collapses, there is more and more human motivation languishing, waiting to be tapped.
August 16. Four woo-woo links. What Is a Twin Flame? Lately it's a trendy word for a soulmate, but this 2022 article explains how it started out as something more specific and interesting:
Unlike life partners -- what we consider to be soul-mate relationships or "the one" -- twin flame relationships are intense and challenging relationships that force us to deal with our unresolved issues and, through trials, tribulations, and breakthroughs, become a bigger person. Because of this intensity, it's uncommon for twin flames to be a lifelong partnership. Rather, they are people who enter your life for a period of time to help you grow and steer you on course. "It is common for those relationships to separate because they are very difficult to maintain."
From Ask Reddit, What's the strangest interaction you've had with an animal that made you rethink their intelligence?
A short Reddit thread, Can you point me toward any of the times that Alan Watts talked about the squares who are the most caught up in samsara as the most "far out"?
Now, ordinarily we say someone's very far out when they are oddballs, when they are exceedingly unconventional. But I want you to turn the picture 'round and look, as a conventional person, look at a square as a person who's very far out. That is to say, he is so involved in the seriousness of the game he is playing that he is lost.
Related, a thread on the Psychonaut subreddit about the cosmic joke: "We spend our entire life trying to make ourselves whole and when we die we figure out that we were always whole we just wanted to feel broken."
And some music. My 2010s Spotify playlist was long, disjointed, and missing too many good songs. So I moved the loudest songs plus the new stuff to a new playlist, 2010s vol 2. My momentary favorite (via YouTube) is Amen Dunes - Lonely Richard, one of the best psych folk songs of the century.
August 13. No ideas this week. This is a repost of this post from almost ten years ago:
Google Is Not What It Seems. Julian Assange writes about being interviewed by some people from Google who appeared to be politically neutral, but they turned out to be representing the American foreign policy establishment, and he argues that Google has been allied with these people and their world view for a long time:
By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the "benevolent superpower"... This is the impenetrable banality of "don't be evil." They believe that they are doing good.
If you think about this, it puts a twist on the popular idea that the elite simply rule the world. On a deeper level, the world is ruled by the stories the elite have to tell themselves to feel like they're the good guys. These stories include: that global-scale decisions must be made from the top (or center); that political stability is more valuable than political participation; and that anything you can call "economic development" is good.
But the story I find most interesting, is that you raise the quality of life of ordinary humans by taking away their pain and giving them stuff. I'm thinking what people really want is interesting choices -- partly inspired by Sid Meier's famous definition of a game as a series of interesting decisions, and partly by an email I got more than a year ago from Owen:
In game design, they talk about choices that matter. If a choice is presented but people feel obligated to take only one of the branches, that's not really a choice. You must take this option, taking that other option is stupid. Or if taking a branch doesn't result in any perceived consequence. Then take any branch, the choice doesn't matter. They put those kinds of choices in front of you all the time. How do you like your steak cooked? Should I use the gelpacks or the powder for the dishwasher?
This is important so I'll say it again in my own words. If the choice doesn't effect your path, like Coke or Pepsi, then it's not interesting; and if one choice is obviously stupid, like keep your car on the road or run it off, then it's not interesting. But deprive people of interesting choices for too long, and they start making the obviously stupid choice just to feel alive. Another way to say it: we would rather do the wrong thing that we choose ourselves, than the right thing that is chosen for us. I think this explains a lot of behavior that otherwise doesn't make any sense, and it's why even the most benevolent central control can never make a good society.
August 9. Continuing from the last post, if there is a world beyond this world, the closest I come to it is listening to music. The mystery is how something so profound can be so subjective, with completely different songs giving different people the feeling of connection to something greater. My favorite playlists are the ones constrained by obscurity, and this week I revised my ultimate obscurities playlist, songs that are Not On Spotify, and posted it to YouTube. It's just over an hour long, and the song I'm in love with right now is a dreamy 2009 ballad by the Australian band The Kill Devil Hills, Lucy-On-All-Fours. At first I thought it was about drugs. Now I think it's the same kind of song as Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna.
August 7. Five Reddit links, starting with the silliest. From a thread about things that only Americans do, I was surprised to learn that it's an American thing to lean on stuff.
A large and fascinating thread, What's the worst drug ever? It's between fentanyl and deliriants.
From Ask Old People, why there are no useless degrees. The entire comment:
Because in our day, education simply for the sake of education was a good and desirable thing. Colleges used to have the goal of turning out well-rounded citizens and no education was ever "wasted" because being educated - no matter the degree - was considered an objectively good thing. There were a lot of ways to contribute to society no matter what your degree was.
Now colleges are nothing more than job training programs churning out cogs for the machine, and have no interest in education for its own sake. Society no longer values an intelligent and well-rounded citizenry, either. In a culture where everything is monetized, most degrees will be "useless" if they're not strictly utilitarian.
Related, from two years ago, a very well written comment about the causes of the political troubles in America. The comment below it is less correct but more interesting: "The factories moving to low-cost countries has resulted in poverty for people who cannot wrap their heads around poverty not being caused by a moral failing, and it's driving them crazy."
Finally, from the Spirituality subreddit, a cool thread about kids saying things that suggest awareness of a reality beyond this world. I wonder how far we could go with this, if it was encouraged in normal families.
August 5. Posted nine days ago to the subreddit, The Failed Assassin, The Dictator, and The Magus. That link goes to the subreddit post, which contains the link to the article. What I find most interesting is that Mussolini survived an assassination attempt, just like Trump did, by making a sudden head motion which happened to dodge a bullet, and getting barely clipped, in Mussolini's case on the tip of his nose. This is a perfect example of the saying that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes.
The rest of the article is about occult mind control, and while I accept the occult, I don't think there's any magical shortcut for control. There are two ways to get someone else to do your will: find someone who already wants to do that thing and organize them, or apply overt social force and overcome stubborn resistance. It's possible that occult rituals could help, or synchronistically line up, with the first of those methods, to give motivation and luck to someone who already wants to do an assassination.
The comment in the post goes deeper into the esoteric beliefs of the American right. What I find most strange is that J.D. Vance and Opus Dei both believe in spiritual evil, and see themselves as fighting against it -- while I believe in spiritual evil and see them both completely serving it. It's almost like serving evil, and fighting evil, are not opposites, but two views of the same thing. Quoting Thaddeus Golas: "The seduction of evil is precisely in that it involves us in trying to eliminate it."
The common thread is compulsive fixation: a narrowing of focus that is self-reinforcing and hard to pull out of. Compulsive fixation looks like evil to everyone whose interests are excluded by that fixation. And if you're prone to fixation, an easy thing to fixate on is something you're against.
July 31. I don't plan to do any original thinking this week, but I'm really enjoying the book An Underground Journey Through 20th Century Philosophy by Jonathan Hockey. I can't remember how I even heard of it. It's clearly self-published, and the author is an amateur, but he stepped up and wrote a book that needed to be written. The chapter on Alfred North Whitehead is especially helpful because Whitehead is really hard to read, and Hockey figures out what he's trying to say and explains it in easier language:
The notion of dead matter, of entropy, of empty space and time, that have haunted ontology since the time of Descartes and Newton are ultimately incorrect, for they rest on a false division between mind and matter.... Once you have hypostatised bare extension in space and time, the container of space and time as pre-existing and predetermining the things within it, you have rendered it impossible to place living things back into that abstraction.
From a later chapter, a direct quote from Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
It is not a matter of having to choose between determinism on the one hand and absolute freedom on the other because we are neither things nor pure consciousnesses but instead, incarnate subjectivities inhering in a situation which we assumed and modify.
July 29. From the Mutating Man chapter of the book Operators and Things (1958) by Barbara O'Brien:
Is man now in the process of adapting to an environment too complex or too restricted for his present physical or mental equipment? Is he in the process of becoming something capable of dealing with an environment which is, itself, only beginning to shape and which the force of life is sensing? The first attempts at shaping birds probably produced creatures which looked like poorly adapted lizards. Other lizards, observing their queer cousins, must have shaken their heads sadly and wondered if the world of lizards were falling apart at the seams. I shall prepare men for a changing universe, says the river of life, so that he may be able to live in it. In the process of experimenting to develop new man, I shall make more than one mistake.
July 26. Stray links, starting with some good news. Mangrove Trees Are on the Move, stabilizing coastlines in places that used to be too cold.
Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes. AI generated humans have less consistent eye reflections than real humans.
The Hacker News thread on some interesting AI tech, An Analog Network of Resistors Promises Machine Learning Without a Processor
Prenatal cannabinoid exposure appears to have a strange impact on early language development. By "strange" they mean they expected weed to make babies dumber but it made them smarter. This result will probably diminish with further research, but it's unlikely to be reversed.
A great Reddit comment on the differences between women's football and men's football
In a way the men's is more breathtaking. But slower is better sometimes because you can see better. The men also crash into each other more, kind of dart around, fall more, foul each other more because they're just bigger, moving faster, and more aggressive. So the men's game is more choppy and the women's is more smooth.
And some music. In doing research for my eventual 60s playlist, I found this great Spotify playlist, Seriously 60s, under three hours and full of good obscurities. My favorite so far is Fifty Foot Hose - Rose. In 1967, this band was years ahead of their time in combining guitar jamming and electronics.
July 23. Last week on the subreddit there was an interesting post about the weirdness around the Trump shooting. I would say it like this: How unlikely is it that an untrained 20 year old was able to show up at a rally, with a five foot ladder he had just bought at Home Depot, find an unsecured rooftop with a clean line of sight, and then miss by an inch, just as Trump made a head movement to dodge the bullet, while saying "Take a look at what happened."
I want to make this about metaphysics and not about politics. There's a famous Sherlock Holmes line: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." I think it's the other way around. When things get too improbable, it's more likely that you're wrong about what's possible.
History is full of improbable events at key moments. I can't find a source for this, but I heard it from historian Jon Bridgman: Napoleon, early in his career, in the thick of a battle, was shoved out of the way of perceived danger by an assistant, who was then immediately killed by a bullet. This convinced Napoleon that he could not die until he had fulfilled some destiny.
From Ross Douthat in the NY Times, Donald Trump, Man of Destiny, "...a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics. In Hegel's work, the great man of history is understood as a figure 'whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit.'"
The impossible thing I accept is that history is an aspect of something outside time and space. I mean, so is daily life, but with history everyone can see it, and to us it looks like retrocausality. Certain events must happen, and previous events fall into place to make them happen. That doesn't mean Trump is going to be king. Maybe that iconic image is his Austerlitz, and his Waterloo is sooner than we think.
What is the "world spirit" and what does it want? My guess is, it's the human collective unconscious, the totality of all of us making up reality on the fly. It seems to want good stories, and it clearly doesn't want to avoid suffering. Related: Rudy Rucker's Reality is a Novel theory.
July 18. Today's subject is mental health. Whatever change you want to make to yourself, I think the key is at the micro scale. The first thing you do at that scale, is to catch something you want to change, while it's happening. For this, meditation is helpful. I've never had an altered mental state from meditation, but it's like taking my attention to the gym. The more endurance my metacognition has, the more it notices my cognition doing dumb things.
The next thing you do is to make the actual change, which is not easy. It's like this one time that I was listening to battery-powered headphones. They sound fine without power, but if you flip the switch, the sound is louder and sharper. I'd been listening for a while and thought, wait, did I forget to flip the switch?
Now, what do you hope for? My first thought was, I hope I haven't just wasted minutes of my life listening to music on the crappy level. That hope was incorrect. The correct hope is, never mind what I've just been doing, I want the action of flipping the switch right now to make it better.
In hindsight, that was a breakthrough, but at the time it just seemed like a neat idea. Another time, after waiting in line at the supermarket, I remembered something I absolutely needed, way at the back of the store. While walking back, I thought, instead of thinking of this little trip as a tedious chore, I can think of it as an epic quest.
This is not the kind of thing you nail on the first try. It's something you practice and gradually get better at. Another trick I do is to pretend that my life is a TV show, and whatever I'm doing right now is in the closing credits. If you're young, you might want to imagine the opening credits. Don't do it while you're driving, but it's a good thing to do while you're washing the dishes.
July 8. I've been working on a complete rewrite of my Books page, and while I'll surely be adding more, it's finished enough to post. The emphasis is now heavily on metaphysics, with smaller sections for social philosophy, fringe science, and fiction. I've also just updated the sidebar to the left, to clearly distinguish my stuff from other people's stuff.