Ran Prieur

April 21.

2025-04-21T21:10:08Z

April 21. Continuing on social philosophy, starting with a quick note (thanks Sjoerd) that according to this book, Marx became anti-growth late in life.

I've been thinking about John Rawls, and his important idea that if we're designing a society, or judging it, we should imagine that we're going to be a person in that society, and we don't know who. I like this practice because it turns our attention to direct experience, to what it's like to be this person or that person, and how to make that experience better for everyone. I love how the concept of deserving doesn't come into it at all. If I'm rotting in some prison, I don't care what I "deserve", I want that prison to be cushy. Even if I "earned" a billion dollars, that money can generate more quality of life if it's spread to my other people.

But I disagree with how Rawls is usually interpreted by the left: to fixate on the worst-off person, and try to minimize their suffering. This starts with Rawls himself, who says you're not allowed to gamble, to accept a risk for a bigger payoff, which most people would totally do if we could. I just think you shouldn't be allowed to make a bad bet, to make a society that over many rolls of the dice will lead to a worse outcome. What makes the most sense is to imagine that you're going to be all of the people. In that case, I would definitely make some of my lives a little worse to make some others a lot better.

Even if you're looking at the worst-off person, there's still the question of what metric you use to judge their quality of life, what aspect of their life you try to upgrade. Affluent liberals would rather make the poor more comfortable, than make them more free, if freedom makes them more troublesome. But if I'm already near the bottom, I would happily sacrifice some comfort for some fun. I'd rather live in the Kowloon Walled City than in an American housing project from the same era. I'd rather live like a wild animal than like a zoo animal.

The right scores a lot of points against the left by casting themselves as wild and free and the left as zoo-like. But if you look at actual right wing policies, a few winners are having fun while everyone else gets stomped on. That's a bad bet. The right is focused on freedom at the top, and the left on comfort at the bottom. I don't know if there has yet been a political party that's focused on freedom at the bottom. Their platform would include squatter's rights, copyright reform, debt cancellation, freedom to roam, urban design that favors the carless, loose licensing laws, and a non-bureaucratic source of free food. Those have all been done at some point. It wouldn't even be that hard.

April 18.

2025-04-18T18:40:53Z

April 18. Continuing on individuality, it can be conceived either vertically or horizontally, and America has a very vertical culture, in which it's hard to imagine being unique outside of being better. This is even more clear with the word "special", where it might seem that "everyone is special" is nonsense. And yet, vertical cultures are less diverse, because the people at the bottom are forced into constrained roles, and the people at the top get corrupted by power into being the same kind of person. Everyone who rises must converge.

A good way to think about horizontal individuality is to look at any good TV show, which has a cast of finely drawn and distinctive characters, who each contribute to the show in their own peculiar way. Multiply that by a billion, and you get the human potential. The present human reality is that we're all heavily socialized by schooling and workplaces designed to turn us into interchangeable machine cogs, which is why I think, if we put all possible societies on a vertical scale, we're still near the bottom. Matt comments:

I'm always returning to a point that Jung made on individuation: that becoming your authentic self takes as much organization as the society trying to fit you into a mold. Here's a specific case: Politicians want the Ten Commandments to be posted in schools so that children will accept the Ten Commandments. As a child, or an adult faced with public displays of the Ten Commandments, you might be able to get away with ignoring them, but you'll probably eventually be faced with expressing either agreement or disagreement. Do you or don't you accept the Ten Commandments as a good moral guide? If you don't, then it's on you to come up with something else.

Coincidentally, I've just finished Orphans 2 and Orphans 3, playlists made of songs that didn't fit other playlists. I already peeled off the softer songs in Orphans 1, and Orphans 3 peels off the most jarring and edgy songs, which also fit well with each other. What's left in Orphans 2 are songs that are each great in their own distinctive way. Even the two Blue Oyster Cult songs are completely different. This was the most difficult playlist I've ever done in terms of putting them in order.

April 16.

2025-04-16T16:20:06Z

April 16. I want to expand on a surprising point from Monday: that the best argument for the welfare state is individualism. For libertarians, capitalists, fascists, and even some anarchists, "individualism" is for Supermen. The strong, the smart, the driven, the lucky, the rich, must have their meteoric selfhood unhindered by do-gooders. The word "meritocracy" was coined as a dystopian word, as something to avoid, but now it's championed by everyone with a big ego: I'm great so I should rule.

If you really believe in individualism as a value, then you want it to be fully distributed. Now, some people prefer to fall in line with the herd. But if you want to chart your own path and be your own kind of person, a truly individualist society will give you room to do that, even if you're weak, stupid, lazy, unlucky, and poor.

I'm avoiding the words "right" and "left" because I think they're temporary, and also because the modern left is too influenced by Karl Marx. Marx was a big believer in industrial production, in the holy project of transforming the non-human-made world to the human-made world and calling it progress. That's why he was all about the workers. I don't think he ever said anything about the rights of non-workers.

Every time I walk to the supermarket, I go past the Gates Foundation, under a wall with two foot high capital letters saying, "Every person deserves the chance to live a healthy, productive life." That sounds nice, but when you think about it, that could have been written above the gates of Auschwitz. What would never be written, on the gates of Auschwitz or the Gates Foundation, is that every person deserves the chance to live an unproductive life. But of all the paths in the human potential, productivity is a pretty narrow slice.

April 14.

2025-04-14T14:00:30Z

April 14. Continuing on the UBI, Chad sends a Hacker News thread discussing the Calibrated Basic Income, and comments, "For my part, as a socialist I'm much more a fan of universal basic services rather than universal basic income."

I agree. The best thing would be to have all basic needs be free at point of use, so that money itself becomes optional. I just think that's less realistic right now than the UBI. Jeff Bezos might be thinking: If everyone gets free basic needs, they won't work in my warehouses; but if everyone gets free money, they'll spend it on my stuff.

My goal, as a social thinker, is the conventional modern goal of individual freedom that does not constrain the freedom of others. I'm just sensitive to the constraint of having to do someone else's shit all day, instead of your own shit. That's a pretty big constraint, compared to the freedom of money to play us like pawns. I think libertarians are economic authoritarians, and if "economic freedom" means anything, it means freedom from money. I think anything less than a 100% volunteer workforce is immoral, and even if we never get there, we can do lot better than the low single digits where we are now.

By the way, I've just noticed that most people fill in the U in UBI with "universal". I use the word unconditional because I think it makes the UBI more resistant to its greatest weakness: adding conditions as a means of social control. The worst thing about humans is our drive to leverage power over others into more power over others. Some people say the worst thing about humans is tribalism, but tribalism without power-over is sports rivalries. Tribalism with power-over is genocide.

April 11.

2025-04-11T23:30:54Z

April 11. Stray links. What If We Made Advertising Illegal? It seems unrealistic, but I see it as a set of obstacles that can be overcome, and there's some serious discussion in the Hacker News thread.

Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japan Town. Specifically, the cards are about local men who have served the town. "Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities -- just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards."

In case you missed it, The Return of the Dire Wolf.

The next era of psychedelics may be precision-designed states of consciousness. I'd be happy to just get a random altered state of consciousness and have it be legal.

Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being

And a super-dreamy Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno's Music For Airports

April 9.

2025-04-09T21:10:37Z

April 9. Continuing from Monday, Donald Trump will probably go down in history as a buffoonish tyrant. But he could yet go down as a flawed man who actually made America great again. America has been great twice, in 1789 for our constitution, and in the 1940s when we defeated some badly run countries and helped their people rebuild. Now we have a shot at leading the world into post-capitalism, if Trump gives us an unconditional basic income.

Here's how it could go down. First, he cuts every kind of government help for us parasites and losers. Then he says wow, that's a lot of parasites and losers, and they're pretty mad. I'd better give them something. What would be easier than doing what he already did during Covid, and sending a check with his name on it to every citizen? Then all he has to do is make it permanent: the Trump Dividend. It could be small to start, a few thousand, but when the Democrats get back in power they'll surely raise it.

This is what I mean by post-capitalism. Capitalism is a set of rules and values optimized for concentrations of money to suck more money in. The bigger the pile of money, the more inevitably it grows. This is unnatural. Resources outside of human synthetic systems don't work this way. To justify this strange mechanic, we have the trickle down doctrine, in which the concentrations of money spread wealth to everyone. What really happens, just look around, is that people who already have everything spend money to lock in their advantage and ruin the world with their cluelessness.

In the better system that we will eventually figure out, concentrations of money tend to get smaller, and the economy is trickle-up, so money is pumped in at the bottom and is spent directly on human needs. The UBI will not make us lazy. Humans love to be busy, and it will enable us to finally be busy on our own terms. Instead of workers competing for barely tolerable jobs, workplaces will have to compete on the level of life satisfaction. And if some people still want to be useless all day, then there's your subsidy for the arts.

April 7.

2025-04-07T19:50:37Z

April 7. There's an early Philip Dick novel called Eye in the Sky, in which eight people fall through a particle beam and pass through different dystopian dream worlds, each one constructed out of the ideologies and prejudices of one of the eight. That feels like what's happening now, where a few people have enough power to impose their boneheaded utopian visions on the actual world.

It's easy to believe that tariffs are a beautiful way to take money from other countries and give an advantage to domestic manufacturing. Every hundred years, America gets dumb enough to actually try it. In 1828, the Tariff of Abominations destroyed the southern economy, and in 1930, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act tried to stop the Great Depression and made it worse.

Another belief, which makes sense on an emotional level and no other level, is that the state should be run the way a strong father runs a household. Two articles from the Atlantic explain it. One Word Describes Trump, and it's a strange word that will never catch on: patrimonialism.

It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

And America's Future Is Hungary, explaining how Viktor Orbán has ruined his country, and the American right is in love with him because if you have power, or just fantasize about having power, that's the most exciting way to fantasize about using it.

I'm still somewhat optimistic about America. We're finished as a global empire, and we will never return to the prosperity of the late 20th century. But we have a long tradition of being relatively democratic and respectful of the rule of law. Supposedly things go in cycles, and I'm pretty old and have not yet seen America move to the left on economic issues. It has to happen some time.

April 5.

2025-04-05T17:30:52Z

April 5. Quick note on politics. I went to the big protest today, and maybe it was just the weather, but the vibe was a lot more cheerful than the protest I went to a couple months ago. Also, until now the big media have been mainly ignoring protests, but this one was announced in advance as the lead story on Google news. I wonder what changed. The people who make the phone calls are like, fascism schmascism, but don't mess with my economy.

April 3.

2025-04-03T15:10:16Z

April 3. I'm still taking a break from politics, but if you're interested in discussion of the Trump tariffs, here's a massive Hacker News thread.

My subject today is music, magic, and fit. When a person says a thing is too hard, it means that thing is a bad fit for that person. That's totally normal in modern life, which is why we're all preoccupied with ease and convenience. But if you really enjoy something, you don't mind if it's hard, because that makes it a fun challenge.

I enjoy making playlists so much that I add rules to make them harder. They have to be between one and two hours, and every song has to fit, if not by sounding similar to the other songs, at least by having good transitions with the songs right before and after. I end up cutting a lot of good songs, and when I do, I move them to an "Orphans" folder.

That folder finally got big enough that I divided it into categories and started making playlists. Making songs fit, that were selected by not fitting, is so challenging that I developed a new system. I listen to the songs on shuffle, and when I notice a good transition, especially if it's surprising, I make a note of it.

Here's where the magic comes in. On my laptop, I use VLC, and its shuffle is hit and miss. But when I walk around on headphones, I use my old Sansa Clip mp3 player, and its shuffle is hit hit hit. This is neither objectively testable nor mechanistically explainable, but to me it's obvious that the Sansa is much luckier, and my explanation is that it's a rare item that I've used and appreciated for many years. I even soldered in a new battery. I've put enough energy into it that it's now a minor magic item, with the power of picking the perfect song.

My four Orphan song categories are soft, regular, jarring, and long. I used the shuffle trick for the "jarring" category, and the Sansa pulled up one great transition after another. That list still needs work, but the soft list is done and polished, and I really like it, Orphans 1: Flowers. While it's not in any order other than good transitions, it happens that the first song is the oldest and most played (1963/25M), and the last song is the newest and least played (2024/6K).