Ran Prieur

February 28.

2025-02-28T16:00:05Z

February 28. Music for the weekend. I've been listening to Bill Fay, an obscure folk singer who I only heard about last week when he died. He did two pretty good albums in 1970 and 1971, on which the most timeless and perfect song is Be Not So Fearful. Also great, and weirder, are I Hear You Calling and the apocalyptic Plan D. And if you're a fan of Big Star's third album, check out Don't Let My Marigolds Die, which had the same sound a few years earlier.

Also from the same period, I was listening to Melanie Safka's amazing cover of Ruby Tuesday, and my ears perked up at 3:05. I'm not saying Phil Collins copied it, but that is absolutely the "In The Air Tonight" drum lick, ten years sooner, by a drummer named Barry Morgan.

February 26.

2025-02-26T14:40:01Z

February 26. The Alpha Myth: How Captive Wolves Led Us Astray:

In their natural habitat, wolf packs operated nothing like the prison-yard dynamics he'd observed in the zoo. Instead of hierarchies maintained through aggression, he found family units guided by experienced parents. Leadership wasn't seized through dominance - it was earned through nurturing, teaching, and protecting the collective good.
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The irony is that in attempting to model human behavior on what we thought was "natural" wolf psychology, we instead normalized the very behaviors that emerge from unnatural confinement. Just as captive wolves exhibit exaggerated aggression and dominance, humans operating within rigid hierarchies and crushing social expectations often adopt similarly distorted patterns - what we might call "captive male syndrome."

From the Hacker News comment thread:

Supposed "alpha behaviors" are seemingly identical to toddler behaviors to me. I think it's ironically non-masculine to be so terrified of how you appear that you play act as basically a belligerent child incapable of compromise, teamwork, or navigating disagreements with dignity instead of being yourself.

Now I'm wondering, if alpha behaviors only emerge in captivity, then why do we have billionaires behaving like alphas? Are billionaires in captivity? My answer is yes. That's how deep humans are in social dysfunction, that even our masters are just high-level slaves.

So what would an actually free human society look like? I see two angles to approach it: observed low-tech and speculative high-tech. A good example of the former is the book The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott. A good example of the latter is the essay The Economics of Star Trek by Rick Webb.

February 24. Today, politics. While I don't want to dwell in negativity, this sure is an interesting time to be alive. I keep thinking of the Warren Zevon song, "I was in the house when the house burned down."

An insane list of words flagged for removal from the National Science Foundation, including "inclusive" but not "included", "excluded" but not "exclusive", and both "female" and "women". It's funny because not long ago the right was accusing the left of trying to erase women, and apparently not doing a good enough job of it.

A long Reddit thread of heavy answers to the question, How did Trump's presidency impact your life so far? One month down...

Again from Ask Reddit, Non Americans what are your thoughts on Trump? The top comment quotes Nate White, and while this is a wonderful takedown, you could say the same stuff about most of the dictators of the last hundred years. There's nothing more normal than the mutual attraction between absolute power and this exact personality:

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace.
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His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It's all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don't. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And from a comment about the debate:

Talking total nonsense, but then yanks are saying "oh he came across well". I realised then that Americans react to tone of voice and might not actually understand basic language. Like dogs.

I think Trump's tone of voice is literally magical. I remember some comedian telling this joke around 1990, where a guy kills his whole family because he heard voices telling him to do it, and it turns out it was just his practical joker buddy. "Ha ha, I really got you this time Bob, I made you kill your whole family!" It's funny because, why don't crazy people just not do what the voices say? The serious answer is, the compulsion must be happening on a deeper level than words.

February 22.

2025-02-22T22:00:48Z

February 22. Two similar quotes on metaphysics. From the novel Lanark by Alasdair Gray:

God, you see, is a word. It is the word for everything not speaking when someone says 'I think.' And by Propper's Law of Inverse Exclusion (which enables a flea in a matchbox to declare itself jailor of the universe) every single 'I think' has intimate knowledge of the surface of what it is not. But as every thinker reflects a different surface of what he isn't, and as God is our word for the whole, it follows that all agreement about God is based on misunderstanding.

And from Lore of Proserpine by Maurice Hewlett:

Who knows what his neighbor sees? Who knows what his dog? Every species of us walks secret from the others; every species of us the centre of his universe, its staple of measure, and its final cause. And if at times one is granted a peep into new heavens and a new earth, and can get no more, perhaps the best thing we win from that is the conviction that we must doubt nothing and wonder at everything.

The latter is a strange 1913 book by a novelist who claimed to see fairies. It's a great companion to Dora Van Gelder's The Real World of Fairies, and I've just added it to my books page, along with Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, which I'm now reading for the third time.

February 20.

2025-02-20T20:40:44Z

February 20. Have you ever seen a goth downtown? is a thoughtful blog post about the polishing-down of style. Between this post and the Hacker News thread, the idea is that the most authentic freaks are in small cities, because in small towns you'll get beat up, and in big cities, the larger number of more casual observers "steers you towards 'conventionally edgy'". There's also stuff about AI, which is becoming more eye-popping, but in more predictable ways.

The Fremen Mirage is a multi-part series of history posts, about the popular idea that having a hard life makes people more badass, and these tougher populations inevitably conquer the soft and "decadent" populations in the more civilized areas. The author patiently explains why this is not the case. And I put "decadent" in quotes because the way the word is being used lately is not about decay or corruption, but about an educated cosmopolitan culture that rankles authoritarians.

I still think society is collapsing through misguided progress, but the cause of the weakness is not urbanization or soft living. It's the abundance and seductiveness of cognitive pitfalls, easy ways of thinking that lead to bad decisions. And the deeper cause is that we've defined "progress" as replacing the non-human-made world with the human-made world. This is something Jerry Mander wrote in 1991 in In The Absence of the Sacred: that the correct biological metaphor for modern technology is not evolution but inbreeding.

February 17.

2025-02-17T17:10:50Z

February 17. Quick note. A reader has started a Ran Prieur Rap discussion page on Lemmy Today, which is an instance of the Lemmy social network, an alternative to Reddit, and part of the Fediverse, a decentralized network of social media not controlled by big tech. Thanks Eric!

New subject, politics. I continue to think the best metaphor for Trump is a fire. John Mulaney had a bit, during Trump's first term, comparing him to a horse in the hospital. That's no longer valid, because a horse has no idea what it's doing, and this time Trump knows exactly what he's doing. But this part is still important: "You go to brunch with people, and they're like, there shouldn't be a horse in the hospital. And it's like, we're well past that."

I imagine the world like a big building, and in one room of the building, there's a fire. It's not the only fire. There are other fires in other rooms, but this one is the scariest. And I don't want to make any specific predictions about how far it's going to burn, because I don't have a clear sense of how burnable the world is. But what I do know is, a fire doesn't hold back because of human ethics.

I'm optimistic because culture is very hard to undo, and most of the progress of the last fifty years has been on the level of culture, rather than law. You could argue that the Democrats played it perfectly: They spent all their political capital pushing the culture left, and while they obviously went too far on a tactical level, they didn't go too far on a moral level or a strategic level. There was going to be a backlash anyway, and now they've framed it so that the backlash won't go as far back.

The Dems were fully on board with runaway wealth inequality, because there's a limit to how far that can go. Capitalism only works with cheap energy and an endless supply of suckers. Orwell said the future is a boot stomping on a human face forever. But forever is a long time, and the world has now passed the peak of people willing to get their face stomped for the promise of one day getting to do the stomping. Right now there are a lot of resentful people putting on boots. But when this is over, the survivors will have a good opportunity to do things better.

February 13.

2025-02-13T13:30:40Z

February 13. All my ideas this week are half baked. Some fun links for the weekend. Obscure Islands is a page where you can zoom in on interesting obscure islands.

A nice piece on Time expansion experiences, what causes them and what they're like. "A man told me that, during an LSD experience, he looked at the stopwatch on his phone and 'the hundredths of a second were moving as slow as seconds normally move.'"

From the Psychonaut subreddit, Those that have been tripping for 20-30+ years, what have been the insights that stood out to you most that you implemented into your daily life?

jacksonpollock.org is a page where you can make paint-spill images with easy mouse movements.

And this song was recorded by a 15 year old in 1968, and sounds a lot like Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright: J.K. & Co. - Fly

February 10.

2025-02-10T22:00:32Z

February 10. Negative links! Descendants of slaveholders in Congress have $3.9 million higher net worth on average. It's almost like slavery never ended, only became more subtle.

In case you think the USA is uniquely bad, a Reddit thread, Non-Americans, what's the biggest problem in your country right now?

The Liberal Media is a subreddit that's mainly one person's soapbox about "conservative bias in the so-called liberal media". He's not wrong.

Russia-linked cable-cutting tanker seized by Finland 'was loaded with spying equipment'. I continue to think that infrastructure sabotage has the potential to be a huge factor in collapse, if it ever becomes trendy.

And Casual Viewing is a smart article about how Netflix carefully designs content for people who are not paying attention. There's also a good Hacker News thread.

February 7.

2025-02-07T19:30:40Z

February 7. Nothing can flip me from "life sucks" to "life is beautiful" faster than a good song. I sometimes wonder if the masters of the simulation are farming us for our music, and that's why we have to suffer. Anyway the other day I put together my 2020s playlist, and it was surprisingly easy. Compared to the last two decades, the songs fit together well, and there are more artists with multiple songs. More than half of the songs are from 2024, a great year. Some highlights:

The Sprouts - Sometimes is my latest obsession, a timeless slice-of-life song.

Hardest rocking: Sprints - Up And Comer

Most compelling beat: Girl and Girl - Mother

Best lyrics: Grian Chatten - All of the People, and the best line is "They will celebrate the things that make you who you're not."

Most improved by weed: The Heart Attack-Acks - I Get So Moody When I'm Not In Love

February 5.

2025-02-05T17:10:46Z

February 5. It's snowy and it looks like the Seattle protest is minor, so I'm staying home until things get worse, and moving on to some stray links.

Finland's Zero Homeless Strategy: Lessons from a Success Story. Homelessness is a hard problem and Finland has tackled it with a level of competence and dedication that is not realistic in most other countries.

A Hacker News comment thread on the Zizian cult, explaining how highly rational people are still susceptible to culty thinking.

You can volunteer reading cursive in old documents for the National Archives.

And a wonderful Ask Reddit thread that was removed by mods for no reason I can imagine: People who have a pet at home, at what point did you realize that the pet really, consciously, understood you?

February 4.

2025-02-04T16:00:31Z

February 4. Some feedback on the last post, about the Limits To Growth model. Simon writes, "There's no reason to assume human ingenuity: society was different back then... so the LTG model simply doesn't model it - much like a model predicting interest rates in the USA right now wouldn't apply to Sentinel Island." And a post on the ranprieur subreddit references this ten year old post, Models always crash, with some smart stuff about models vs reality.

New subject. 50501 is a subreddit about all the protests. I'm probably going to whatever local one they have tomorrow, and I want to be clear about strategy. Nobody thinks this is about influencing Trump. At this point he's moving with the relentless inevitability of a fire. It reminds me of this line from Thaddeus Golas: "When your consciousness is open, any action you take in reference to evil has no more significance than digging a ditch to channel floodwaters away from a house."

For me, the "protest" doesn't even have to be against something. It's about local solidarity, people of the city making other people of the city feel like this is our place, that we're going to be strong for each other in these dark times. Future historians will not say that Trump made America great again, but they might say he knocked America down and then other people rebuilt it not as bad.

February 2.

2025-02-02T14:40:55Z

February 2. Thanks Roger for digging up this 2013 blog post from The Automatic Earth, Quote of the Year. The quote is from one of the authors of the 1972 Limits to Growth report, that "we are going to evolve through crisis (my italics), not through proactive change." The idea is, forget about reducing consumption to prevent resource exhaustion and climate change, because that's not what humans do. "We don't change course in order to prevent ourselves from hitting boundaries. We hit the wall face first, and only then do we pick up the pieces and take it from there."

That would have been a cynical take in the 1990s, and was unusual enough in 2013 to inspire that post, but in 2025 I think it's the conventional wisdom. Only wild-eyed optimists think we're not going to hit that wall.

Here's a Limits to Growth simulator where you can set parameters and plot some curves, all of them falling. The most interesting critique I've seen of this model, was where someone applied it to the past. I forget if it was the year 1500 or 1700, but the model made the same prediction: collapse within a few decades, which obviously didn't happen. Instead, human ingenuity found ways to keep the game going. For the same reason, here we are buzzing around in SUVs in 2025, when twenty years ago every peak oiler ran the numbers and proved that was impossible.

This leads me back to psychism. It's almost like the numbers will do whatever they have to do, to back up whatever humans want to do. If reality is a dream, then maybe the momentum of modern living pulled fracking out of a hat. But one way or another there are limits, if not in matter than in mind. What appears, to matter, like the conquest of inert nature, appears to mind like cutting ourselves off from the greater reality, turning away from God. If "progress" means replacing the nonhuman world with the human world, then the limit is how deeply we can go into our own obsessions, before we're too insane to maintain the complex systems on which our progress depends.

I'm playing a lot of Spirit Island, a game where you play nature spirits fighting colonizers, and there's something called a Fear victory: Even if the island is packed with towns and cities, if you get enough fear points, you win. So I'm wondering, what would that be like for the colonizers, to have all that success on the physical level, and still fail on the psychological level? Maybe they turn against each other in adversarial politics and compulsive tribalism. Everyone is cynical and opportunistic, or worn out and depressed. The rich flee to better islands, while public services are slashed and the streets are full of muttering homeless. Yeah, I live there.