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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
September 26. Today's subject, doom. Of the many threats facing global complex society, I think climate change is overrated. It's going to be a long series of local catastrophes that will mainly challenge public institutions through the pressure of refugees.
A bigger threat is infrastructure decay, for example, One Quarter of America's Bridges May Collapse Within 26 Years. Combine this with loss of skills, and increasing technological complexity, and it's an easy prediction that a lot of stuff that now works is going to stop working, unless you have a lot of money. More examples in this Reddit thread, What's a thing that is dangerously close to collapse?
And the biggest threat is that the economy as we know it, and a large part of the meaning of life, depends on perpetual growth, which is now ending. Capitalism will continue to hide it by defining "growth" by increasingly vaporous things, like they've already been doing by shifting the Dow Jones from industrial stocks to tech stocks. They might have such clever numbers that they won't understand why all the workers are angry and unmotivated.
One aspect of the end of growth that I haven't seen mentioned, is investment. Right now, you can just stick your money anywhere and it will automatically grow. But it's getting harder to stay ahead of inflation, and at some point, investment will become a crapshoot.
Back in July I wrote that "historians will look back and see us right now inside the date range of a relatively fast crash." But it's more interesting to imagine how that prediction could be wrong. The most likely way is if there's some big event that hasn't happened yet: a nuclear war, a deadlier pandemic, a very big earthquake, or a solar flare that fries a bunch of satellites.
Hard mode: What it would take for the system to adapt so smoothly that future historians don't even see a crash? I don't think we can do it without an unconditional basic income, and I think the Republican party will get on board with a UBI, when they realize what all that money, percolating up through the economy, can do for churches.
September 23. The reason I've been blogging less is I've been working heavily on a new novel. I started it about two years ago, when my first novel was spinning its wheels. It's really hard to make up a story on the fly, with multiple third person threads, and not have them unravel. That's not a problem in the new novel because it's first person.
I'm not finished drafting it, but I can wrap my head around where it's going, and with the early parts getting polished, I'm ready to start serializing it. The genre is sci-fi/fantasy, although if it's published it will probably be sold as young adult. The precise genre is mellow postapocalypse, just far enough from utopia to be interesting. The tech is like Fallout, mostly low but sprinkled with high, including stuff we don't have. The metaphysics are Roger Zelazny reality shifting, with a twist on the powers of the hero.
It's called The Days of Tansy Capstone, and from that page you can get to part one. I plan to post part two in three weeks, part three in another three weeks, and then nothing until the new year.
September 20. Three woo-woo links. Donald Hoffman has done a bunch of YouTube interviews, and this is one of the best, Proof That Reality Is An Illusion. I especially like the part from 17-29 minutes, about the consciousness of inanimate objects. I always say, it's not that rocks have consciousness, but that consciousness has rocks. Paraphrasing Hoffman, everything we experience is an expression of the universal mind, but our metaphorical VR headset is more tuned into the consciousness behind other humans, and less tuned into the consciousness behind rocks, which is why we see them as mere rocks.
Less coherent but more poetic, a comment from the Psychonaut subreddit on Can the cosmic joke be terrifying and not funny? Edited:
In this zero dimensional non-space I realized that nothing existed outside, there was in fact no outside. The earth, life, time, movement, existence all was made up. I had never moved, never passed a single moment from that zero point. You see the world through the lens of yourself. That means you don't talk to people, you talk to yourself through people. The ego is a narcissistic child. It is also a survival mechanism, but it is not the truth of what any human being actually is. It's just a thought pattern and reaction pattern. Being a subjective center of the universe is a thought pattern, objects existing outside is a thought pattern. When they collapse it can be clearly seen that you never left home. This state is not verbally describable, literally not speakable. You do exist but not in the way that you think because thinking is in the way.
And a fun thread from Ask Reddit, What's the most amazing coincidence you've ever seen or heard about?
September 16. More stray links. This comment from the Antiwork subreddit has an optimistic argument about the politics of AI:
I have been experimenting with what you can get AI to say. If you ask for solutions to problems that people have like homelessness, healthcare, etc., or if you ask for the problems that corporations cause and solutions to them, you will get answers that are incredibly progressive. I also have discussions with it as to why it is so apparently biased towards progressive policies, and it refuses to acknowledge the bias, claiming that it is fact-based and politically neutral. The problem seems to be that the progressive ideas are fact-based and right-wing ideas are "alternate fact-based".
The data on extreme human aging is rotten from the inside out, because it turns out that most people who are over 100 in the official records, are actually dead:
Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there's the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together. It's closely followed by downtown Manchester, Liverpool and Hull. Yet these places have the lowest frequency of 90-year-olds and are rated by the UK as the worst places to be an old person.
Gygax consciously excluded the trappings of a medieval society, and filled that vacuum with "real life" American details. Gygax wrote D&D in a country where, 100 years before, frontier land was considered free for the taking. (19th century propaganda depicted the land's original Native American inhabitants as inimical savages, like orcs.) At the same period, the success of America's industrialist "robber barons" taught the country that birth and family weren't the keys to American power; the American keys were self-reliance, ability, and the ruthless accumulation of money.
September 12. Two fun threads from Ask Old People. Have you ever known anyone who simply packed up, left, and ghosted everyone and everything in their old life?
And over 7000 comments about the wonderful days of free roaming kids
Some cool images on this page, Dan Coe Carto - 4K Rivers
And some music. It's not my best playlist, but I've put together some songs about death, some edgy post-punk songs, and some good scraps, as 2000s vol 2
A candidate for song of the year, Fontaines D.C. - Death Kink. This might be the best thing that sounds like Nirvana since actual Nirvana.
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 smaller amounts.
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.