Ran Prieur

May 16.

2025-05-16T16:00:24Z

May 16. Stray links. From Ask Old People, Did the stubborn people in your life get less stubborn as they got older? Almost every answer is, they got worse.

Found this Reddit comment after a tip from a reader: How I use self-administered EMDR at home. EMDR is a therapy technique to heal trauma by thinking about traumatic events while moving your eyes from side to side or tapping. Some people report great results, but you might read the cautions in this page, Can You Do EMDR on Yourself?

And some music. I can't get over the mysteries of musical taste. I'm doing research for a psych folk playlist, and a few weeks ago I mentioned this seven hour Psychedelic Folk/Freak Folk playlist by jmd273. Taste-wise, it has a diverse mix of songs I don't mind listening to, songs I hate so much I skip them, and songs I like so much that I check out the rest of the artist's discography.

When I finished it, I dove into this 17 hour Acid folk/Psychedelic folk playlist, and after going through the first 40 songs, and then the ten most recently added, I couldn't find a single song I wanted to keep listening to. For one thing, almost none of it is psychedelic, it's just regular folk. But still, it proves that musical taste is not random. This person has an ear that is the opposite of my ear, and is actively drawn to stuttery rhythms and frilly vocals that annoy me.

Now I'm listening to this three hour Psychedelic Folk playlist by Indie & Folk Radio, and I haven't found any songs I hate, or any songs I love. It's all very chill and dreamy.

May 14.

2025-05-14T14:40:21Z

May 14. Continuing from Monday, I keep thinking about this line: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break." That sentence seems to capture the entire collapse of late stage capitalism. We have all these systems that work pretty well, and we want them to keep working when things go wrong, but instead they're breaking down because someone is trying to squeeze blood from a stone in the name of efficiency.

What exactly is "efficiency"? When I think it through, that word points to at least two things, which I'm going to call internal efficiency and social efficiency. Internal efficiency is if you're doing some kind of task, and you want to smooth out the wasted motions so the task is less tiring.

Social efficiency is a competely different thing, when one person's "waste" is another person's voluntary action. What we're really talking about is selfishness. Government efficiency means self-interested taxpayers want to pay lower taxes and get more services. Business efficiency means self-interested owners want to pay less salary and get more work done.

What if self-interested workers want to do less work and get more money? Does that count as efficiency? No, it's called laziness. Spelling it out: The modern English language is authoritarian and elitist, because top-down self-interest is given a word that means clean and good, while bottom-up self-interest is given a word that means filthy and bad. In a culture with these values, you would expect the people at the top to become power-mad and never satisfied, and the people at the bottom to become depressed and fatigued.

Related, Chris Davis's Idle Theory:

Increased idleness means, on the one hand, increased chance of survival, but it also gives humans idle time in which to engage in activities other than self-maintenance. It is in this idle time that humans can do as they wish, rather than as they must, and they can think, talk, and play - i.e. act as free moral agents. In Idle Theory, humans are seen as part-time free moral agents, only free to the extent that they are idle.

May 12.

2025-05-12T12:20:34Z

May 12. Thoughtful blog post with a dumb title, The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction. What the author actually argues is that the commodity is lack of friction: the breezy convenience of the digital world, which people pay a lot of money for. And because our attention is in the digital world, we no longer appreciate the value and difficulty of the grunt work that holds it together. Examples include AI cheating in college, and air traffic breakdowns.

This is what happens when we treat public infrastructure like a tech platform... always on, low overhead, minimal headcount. My own diverted flight was just one minor data point in a much larger pattern of problems. The FAA's equipment now fails approximately 700 times weekly. Controllers work 10-hour shifts, six days straight. There's a backlog of replacement parts for components nobody manufactures anymore.
...
When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.

Two tangents from that post: Kayfabe is a word from pro wrestling, meaning the portrayal of staged events as real, which has become normal in the world of politics.

And an article about the psychology of the resentful right, Weak Men Create Hard Times:

Who goes out of their way to spend hours each day posting slurs on the internet? Who obsesses over harmless cultural artifacts like a silly TikTok dance? The guy who does this (and it's almost always a guy) is not someone who is succeeding in his own life.

What this article fails to understand is the insanity of the whole project of modernity, which is too big a subject for this post, but I'm not going to judge anyone for being a loser, where winning is about conforming to a human-made world that is going farther and farther from human nature. Trumpers aren't wrong to want a simpler world, they're just unable to imagine less complexity without more domination. The author quotes Francis Fukuyama:

Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

May 8.

2025-05-08T20:40:44Z

May 8. I've been working heavily on my novel, and part 5 is up. So far, just like the books of Harry Potter, each part is longer than the last, and part 5 is tighter than part 4, with two new villains and a multi-chapter plot about the quest to find the Long Now Clock and re-objectify time. I've also made a bunch of small edits to the other parts, and added another religion in part 1.

Also, from Ask Old People, a nice thread for the weekend, What's one simple joy you think younger people overlook?

Quick note. This Reddit comment, and the comments below it, have some good discussion about the new pope.

May 5.

2025-05-05T17:10:16Z

May 5. Four long reads via Hacker News, starting with a Hacker News thread, I'd rather read the prompt, about various issues around students using LLMs. Two short quotes: "Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym." And "Many people are in university to survive a brutal social darwinist economic system, not to learn and cultivate their minds."

The Cannae Problem is about the Roman defeat at Cannae, because they were mentally stuck in a certain way of thinking about warfare, and how it applies to modern issues. "Success creates its own failure mechanisms. The very things that make you successful produce the blind spots that make you vulnerable. Your greatest strengths, taken to their logical conclusion without adaptation, become your greatest weaknesses."

Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire, the thing they do in movies, where they all shoot their arrows at once. It's because 1) arrows can be shot fast enough that volleying isn't necessary, 2) holding a bowstring back is exhausting, and 3) arrow volleys aren't that deadly.

And a massive 11,000 word piece, Intrinsic Motivation: A deep dive. Condensed to five words: external rewards bad, autonomy good.

May 2.

2025-05-02T14:40:55Z

May 2. Today is Bandcamp Friday, when all the money goes to the artists, and I've just bought Daisy Rickman's 2024 album Howl. Only a few times a decade do I find an album that I want to listen to over and over again. The bones of the songs are classic folk, with acoustic guitar that reminds me of Gordon Lightfoot. But both the style and the songwriting are very droney, and I love how she sings at the bottom of her range. Overall it most reminds me of Forndom's Daudra Dura, and what both albums have in common is that all the sounds were made by one person.