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"I said, 'Kiss me, you're beautiful; these are truly the last days.' You grabbed my hand, and we fell into it, like a daydream, or a fever."
-Godspeed You Black Emperor, "Dead Flag Blues"
July 18. Still putting in heavy hours on my novel. Last week I got it adequately drafted all the way to the end, and with that perspective, I just spent a week doing a deep rewrite of part one. The first six chapters have been shuffled and condensed to four chapters, with a stronger opening, some distracting details removed, and more details added to fill in the semi-utopian postapocalypse:
Because of the Institute, Threeforks was an oasis in yokel-land. All the towns around, Hog Heaven and Plush and Speedtrap, were mostly Nativists and hippies, but we had every quirky passion of the overeducated. We had a fuzz bass and oboe band that sounded like the wind, and a zither and steel drum band that droned in clouds of suss. We had poetry slams in random meter, somebody would crash out on tetric anapest and they'd be rolling on the floor. We had credless swap meets, walled in with your wares until no trades were left, and the person who came out with the most stuff got dunked.
July 16. I'm reading Shamanism, a book of essays compiled by Shirley Nicholson, and in one by Mihaly Hoppal, I learned that shamans are not mentally ill. Specifically, there's a common belief among modern people who are sympathetic to other cultures, that the people who we label as schizophrenic and exclude from society, would find respected roles as shamans in indigenous cultures. In fact, "Shamans are much healthier than the rest of the population, due to the psychic and physical strains of the deep trance." And, "Recent studies in in South Asia have shown that, out of more than a hundred Thai and Malayan shamans and mediums, none was mentally ill."
Shamans are highly capable specialists in a level of reality that our highly capable specialists don't go to, because our culture thinks it's crazy. Only our crazy people go there, and they don't know how to deal with it. They are overwhelmed by stuff that a shaman knows how to navigate, and in shamanic cultures they would be given help in dealing with that level of reality, instead of being medicated to stop them from going there.
July 14. It's too hot this week for heavy thinking. Three light links, two from the Stoner Thoughts subreddit. My dog is such a good boy (even when he's a bad boy) so "maybe a higher being sees us the same way we see dogs." I've thought about something similar when I'm walking dogs. I give them a certain amount of slack to mess with stuff and choose their own path, but at some point I take charge for their own benefit (or mine) and I wonder if that's what fate does with me.
This almost uncommented post is subtly profound: I think I died and the afterlife looks just like my apartment
And a fun subreddit of mostly video posts, justgalsbeingchicks
July 11. The other day I said AI is overhyped, but my actual opinion is more complex. I think the hype around a given use of AI is inversely proportional to its helpfulness. So of all the directions we can imagine AI going, the ones that people get the most excited about, like "AI will replace all jobs," or "AI will gain human-like consciousness," will either fail, or will succeed in a harmful way. Meanwhile, a lot of niche applications of AI, known only to specialists, will actually make things better.
I think video games are a great fit for AI: Facts don't matter, mistakes don't kill anyone, artistic standards are mid, and there's a ton of grunt coding that can be automated. Humans will still come up with ideas, and provide a general framework, but AI can fill in the details so fast that we might get a Fallout or a Grand Theft Auto where a whole city is simulated down to every street, and the contents of a million rooms can be AI-generated on the fly.
I also think AI is a good fit for therapy, maybe too good. It's already better than a bad human therapist, and more potent than an old-fashioned passive therapist. The danger is that the machine, in a way that a human would never do, will feed back the patient's madness, and pull them deeper into it. I don't see how more powerful computers will fix this. Here's a good Hacker News comment thread on LLMs as therapists.
July 9. Going the opposite direction from Monday, I think it takes a lot of effort to make life this frantic and unsatisfying, and a much better world is pretty easy. Here's an article about Iceland's four day work week:
The trial was designed to reduce work hours from the standard 40-hour week to just 35 or 36 hours, without reducing employees' pay.... Employees reported significant improvements in job satisfaction, mental health, and work-life balance. This was coupled with a noticeable reduction in stress and a decline in instances of burnout.... This was not just a benefit for employees; businesses began to see tangible improvements in output, suggesting that a well-rested workforce is more effective and efficient.
Mirror of a NY Times article about a Space-Out Competition in Seoul. "Part pageant and part boredom-endurance challenge, it requires participants to repose in silence for an hour and a half, with gentle interruptions every 15 minutes to have their heart rates measured."
From PsyPost, New brain stimulation method shows promise for treating mood, anxiety, and trauma disorders. I continue to think that AI is overhyped and transcranial brain hacking is going to be huge.
Mood and anxiety disorders are often linked to overactivity in the amygdala. While some treatments like medication and talk therapy may help regulate this region, non-invasive brain stimulation options like transcranial magnetic stimulation have limited ability to reach deeper brain areas. Focused ultrasound, by contrast, can target these deeper areas directly and precisely.
July 7. Some links about late stage capitalism eating itself, starting with many of the answers in this Reddit thread, What is currently on the brink of collapse but no one is talking about it? Ominously, it includes both private equity, and businesses not owned by private equity.
Good blog post on Engineered Addictions. "The pattern is always the same: start with connection, end with extraction."
Long article (thanks Jason), That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose
And a short rant, Are we the baddies?
You want to opt out of this all you say? Good luck running a competitive business! Every metric is now a target. You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen's race we can't afford to lose! Burn all the social capital, burn all your values, FEED IT ALL TO MOLOCH!
July 4. For the holiday, posting negative links about America would be too easy, so here are some positive links about America, starting with a mostly fun Reddit thread, What's the most American thing you've done?
America's Incarceration Rate Is About to Fall Off a Cliff, basically because the career criminal boomers are dying off.
ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts. The application "allows users to add a pin on a map to show where ICE agents have recently been spotted."
Not exclusively American, or necessarily good, but this thread makes me smile. What profession has way more people on illegal drugs than people realize? "Every single meal at every restaurant you've enjoyed has been lovingly prepared by a team of potheads. If it's a fancy restaurant then it's coke heads."
And a cool video from 2018, Washington, DC to Seattle: A Complete Road Trip
July 2. Today, metaphysics. Since the last post, I've been trying to figure out this new idea about the three dimensions of time, because the articles don't explain it well. In three dimensions of space, the third dimension is a whole new direction. But in time, they're saying that the third dimension is just a way to "access" the second dimension. Why can't you use the second to access the second, like you can in space?
Matt mentioned a train station, and the metaphor popped. The first dimension is a single train track, a normal timeline where a bunch of things happen in sequence. The second dimension is all the train tracks. And while it's possible in theory to switch from one train to another out on the tracks, in practice you always switch trains in the station, which is the third dimension. Just as the station is outside the tracks, the third dimension is outside time as we know it.
Donald Hoffman says that time and space are data structures and not the fundamental reality. The best explanation I've read, of how time and space are constructed out of consciousness and relationships, is in the 1982 book Physics as Metaphor by Roger Jones. And this is a cool Jaron Lanier piece from 2006, Does time come together like an island of boats floating on the open seas?
This also fits with many near death experiences that report a realm outside time. From Michael Talbot's 1991 book The Holographic Universe, lightly edited:
The Aboriginal concept of the "dreamtime" is almost identical to the afterlife planes of existence decribed in Western sources. It is the realm where human spirits go after death, and once there a shaman can converse with the dead and instantly access all knowledge. It is also a dimension in which time, space, and the other boundaries of earthly life cease to exist. Because of this, Australian shamans often refer to the afterlife as "survival in infinity."
June 29. Brain links. Finding Peter Putnam is a fascinating Nautilus article about the "Einstein of the mind", a weird genius who remained purposely obscure to avoid the machinations of his wealthy mother. He saw the mind as a "different kind of computer", not deductive but inductive, and argued that the most basic behavior of an inductive machine is "to repeat your existence". See the The Peter Putnam Papers for more.
From Joan Westenberg, I Deleted My Second Brain.
Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I'd synced since 2015. Every quote I'd ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I'd ever borrowed, broken, or bastardized. What followed: Relief.
Time Has Three Dimensions, New Theory Says. The first dimension is normal time, the second is what we usually call alternate timelines, and the third is "the means to transition from one outcome to another." I'm confused because that isn't how the third dimension of space works. You don't need to go above a plane to go from side to side on a plane.
Study links moderate awe in ayahuasca journeys to better well-being. Too much awe "might overwhelm rather than heal".
And a cool site, ambient.garden. If you're using it in the background, I recommend the default settings. To play with it, I get the best results by turning the listening radius all the way down and the speed all the way up.
June 27. I don't usually write about politics on Friday, but here's a cool article on Zohran Mamdani's Campaign Logo. He's the outsider who just beat Andrew Cuomo in the primary for mayor of NYC, and his signs have unusual colors and a font inspired by bodega signs. I assume Cuomo's signs are completely conventional, because if you're going to step outside of completely conventional, it's going to look bad unless you have creativity, which is hard to define, and harder to capture the more you're inside a hidebound control structure.
Now Cuomo is staying in the race. I hate the Democratic party so much. Even though I disagree with the Republicans on every contested issue, at least they're having fun. The Democrat establishment would rather throw America to fascists, than allow their own voters to become excited. If America is an abusive household, the Democratic party is the enabling mother, a fucking wet blanket that says everything is fine. Burn it to the ground.
New subject, a thread on the Enlightenment subreddit, Does wanting to be enlightened prevent you from attaining enlightenment? There's a variety of interesting answers, and I don't think this is the kind of subject where you want one answer.
June 25. Rebounding from Monday with two more threads, What company or corporation DOESN'T suck? King Arthur Baking, Newman's Own, Costco, and many more.
From Ask Old People, Psychiatric issues in the 60s and 70s. This depressing thread is optimistic because of how much progress we've made in only a few decades. Maybe we're dumber now, but we can also be gay or depressed without getting shock treatment or a lobotomy.
Related: new playlist, Ramones Deep Tracks, including Teenage Lobotomy but not Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment. My personal top three are Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue, Oh Oh I Love Her So, and Questioningly.
June 23. You'd have to ask Noam Chomsky, but out of all the worst things American foreign policy has ever done, Trump's attack on Iran is probably not even in the top fifty... so far. Here are some negative Reddit threads on other subjects.
What are the best examples of shifting baseline syndrome you've seen in your lifetime? Three of the top five comments are about insects disappearing.
What's a well known brand that's in decline? Subway, Southwest Airlines, Doc Martens.
What's a very American problem that Americans don't realize isn't normal in other countries? Prescription drug commercials, medical bankruptcy, losing your job without warning.
Has America always been this stupid, or is it a recent development? It's recent.
June 20. Personal update. I'm making good progress on my novel through refinements in my process. I've never been a coffee drinker before, but I've started to drink it to synergize with weed. Around four days a week, around 3PM, I'll vape a nug the size of a small blueberry, drink one pod of Nespresso, and crank out a page or more. Also I usually do a bibliomancy reading, by riffling through a dictionary and putting my finger on a random word. I make no paranormal claims about bibliomancy, but in my empirical practice, a dictionary or a thesaurus works much better than any other kind of book, and surprisingly often I get a word that's useful.
Earlier this week I got the word Socinianism, an obscure branch of Christianity that I'd never heard of but basically agree with. The best explanation I found is this one from an evangelical site arguing against it. The Wikipedia page led me to this page on Process theology, which led me to Bruce Epperly's book on the subject, which led me to this awesome quote by Alfred North Whitehead:
God is in the world, or nowhere, creating continually in us and around us. The creative principle is everywhere, in animate and so-called inanimate matter, in the ether, water, earth, human hearts. But this creation is a creative process, and the process is itself the actuality, since no sooner than you arrive you start on a fresh journey. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine, of God, and that participation is his immortality, reducing the question of whether his individuality survives the death of his body to the estate of an irrelevancy. His true destiny as a cocreator of the universe is his dignity and his grandeur.
June 18. Stray links. The Homelessness Experiment is by a guy who saved a lot of money by living in the jungle in Hong Kong. I continue to think that high end homelessness is going to be a trend, that is, highly capable people who just think homelessness is a better deal than high rent. There's probably already a lot of it going unreported.
Because this is tagged as entertainment I thought it was satire, but it's real: AI company files for bankruptcy after being exposed as 700 Indian engineers
Scientific article, Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions. After 16 months, "participants rated at least one of their psilocybin experiences to be among the top five most spiritually significant (96%), profoundly sacred (92%), psychologically insightful (83%), and psychologically meaningful (79%) of their lives."
And another scientific article, I just like the title: Photon transport through the entire adult human head
June 16. Here's a time lapse video of the No Kings Seattle protest. The official count was 70,000, but that's a stadium full and this video looks like two or three stadiums. The march went close to my apartment and I hung out for a bit, and I kept thinking, There's no way Trump can put all these people in camps.
I mean, this is no picnic and it's going to get worse. But the generation that ruled Nazi Germany was raised during an extreme fad of breaking the child's spirit (see Alice Miller's book For Your Own Good) and my generation was raised by Mr. Rogers. We just don't have the cultural environment for fascism to thrive. I don't know how many immigrants and dissenters Trump is going to end up killing, but it will be way fewer than the unseen deaths from slashed health care and public services. That doesn't count as murder because under capitalism there is no right to life, only the right to sell your labor for the right to buy someone else's labor.
My point is, Trump has just put a full clown suit on a deeper error. I've been trying to understand the right by imagining them as Rawlsian gamblers. John Rawls said you have to design a society without knowing which person in that society you're going to be. The left says, "Then I'll make sure every person has their basic needs met." The right says, "Then I'll make a thousand peasants for every king, because maybe I'll get to be king!" What I don't understand is how someone can continue to think that way when they're a peasant.
This Reddit comment (lightly edited) explains:
Most of them believe hierarchy is morally justified even if that means they would not benefit. They believe their position in the hierarchy is due to their own mistakes. They trust that the billionaires with power deserve their position. If you think conservatives would behave differently if they only understood that the hierarchy isn't going to make them kings, your messaging will fail.
They are much like the character Oprah plays in The Color Purple who urges the protagonist to beat her son because punishment is the only form of social change she can understand. Their parents beat them and used their authority as the justification for their child-rearing. They were taught you do things because Daddy says so and daddy is in charge. Everything in their values and beliefs fits in to this worldview, even in their religion they choose moral actions only because the God daddy says they should. Because these are foundational beliefs that touch on so many things they take for granted, any ideas that challenge these beliefs are going to create cognitive dissonance and thus be very difficult to change. Even if that means that they would not benefit from the authoritarian policies. Even when the hierarchy leads to their own suffering they simply blame themselves.
It all comes down to a foundational belief that America is a meritocracy and hierarchies are good and good people get what they deserve and bad people must be punished.
My strategy to break down this belief, which will not succeed any time soon, is to reject the whole idea of "deserve". Nobody deserves anything. Let's just get stuff without deserving it. Or, let's get what we get, and miss what we miss, not from morally charged ideas of reward and punishment from past actions, but from looking forward with the moral principle that you are everyone.
June 13. Three links on drugs. It turns out the runner's high does not come from endorphins. It comes from endocannabinoids.
Only a specific dose of psilocybin induces lasting antidepressant-like effects. In a study on rats, both lower and higher doses failed to make the rats happier.
New Olympics-Style Games Will Let Contestants Dope Up on as Many Steroids and Drugs as They Want. This sounds cool for spectators, but a lot of athletes will ruin their bodies because they're desperate for money.
And some music. This week I did an expansion and overhaul of my Classic Rock Deep Tracks Spotify playlist. The old list was under two hours and mostly my favorite bands. The new one is over three hours and more comprehensive. Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, and Bowie are now represented, and there's even more Blue Oyster Cult. The song with the median number of plays is Blondie's Fade Away And Radiate at 4.5 million. This isn't my best playlist, but it definitely has the best guitar solos.
June 12. Thanks Tim for this fascinating article, Seven Days At The Bin Store. (If that link doesn't work, here's an archive.) Bin stores are a growing business model where they buy truckloads of random stuff and sell it in bins. It's "where late stage capitalism goes for one final hurrah." Where does the stuff come from?
Returns, repairs, refurbished products, and even recalls fall into the purview of reverse logistics. They are joined there by products that never made it to a consumer because the season ended, or a box was a little dented, or the purchaser never picked up their order, or a retailer was just running out of room in their warehouse.
This is why I like eBay better than Amazon. Now that Amazon is full of Chinese counterfeits and fake reviews, it's not clear which site is more reliable, but Amazon is fed by making new shit and eBay is fed by scavenging already made shit. By the way, I think the day-by-day pricing could be done better. Instead of 10-8-6-4-2-1, I'd go 20-10-5-2-1-free.
June 10. Links via Hacker News, starting with a thread on the death of Bill Atkinson, one of the greatest programmers of all time. There's some discussion of how his key invention, HyperCard, could have evolved into a much better tech world than the dystopian one we're in.
A long thread about EMP weapons, with lots of debate about whether they would fry small electronics, and how to build a Faraday cage.
Coventry Very Light Rail is a "rail-based travel system that can be delivered at less than half the cost and in half the time of conventional light rail systems, while providing the same benefits." Basically, by spending some money on lighter and stronger materials, it saves a lot of money on digging and infrastructure.
Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits. There are some great ideas here, but the author doesn't quite capture the benefits of following constraints over goals, and the Hacker News thread goes completely wrong by changing the title from "smart" to "successful". I would say it like this. If you want to do a specific thing, set a goal. If you want to do something interesting, set constraints. But there's no guarantee the interesting thing you do will be recognized or rewarded.
June 7. For the weekend, three happy links about practical things. The Rise of the Japanese Toilet
Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia
The Right to Repair Is Law in Washington State
June 5. Quick note on politics. I was just reading how, in 2016, conservative author P.J. O'Rourke endorsed Hillary Clinton, saying "She's wrong about absolutely everything, but she's wrong within normal parameters." I feel something similar about Trump: He's wrong about everything, but at least he's wrong outside of normal parameters. Neoliberalism is dying because it cannot conceive of any alternative to the present system, while the right offers a time-tested alternative: charismatic warlords and fanatical tribalism.
Three Reddit threads about the failure of normal parameters:
What's a thing that is dangerously close to collapse?
What's one thing you think is quietly fading away from our lives or society?
And the most powerful thread, of course removed by mods: What's a sign that someone has quietly given up?
June 3. Probably just posting links this week. I check the Ask Old People subreddit twice a day, and it's mostly just nostalgia, but sometimes there's a great thread that inevitably gets removed. Here are two: How many older people have decided to just stay away from Doctors? And a thread full of good stories about ways people have died besides in their sleep.
I've been heavily following the college softball playoffs, and here's a great play from this weekend where a Texas Tech player steals home, taking off with the pitch and the catcher doesn't notice.
May 30. I've posted my Psychedelic Folk Spotify playlist. Psych folk is a hard genre to define. Some of the songs are maybe not psychedelic, and some of the artists are definitely not tagged as folk, but I knew what sound I wanted and I found enough good stuff to go over three hours. Nine of the 47 songs are from 1971, with no other year having more than three, but 19 are from this century. I'm obsessed with Spotify play counts, which on this list range from Big Blood's Blind Owl II at 1600 plays, to Pink Floyd's Fearless at 72 million. The median is Carissa's Wierd's Phantom Fireworks at 140K. The most psychedelic songs on the list are from These Trails and Camper Van Beethoven. The most beautiful song on the list is Beat Happening's Godsend. And the one that blows me away on every listen is Melanie Safka's epic cover of Lay Lady Lay.