June 10. Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits. There are some good 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 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 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.
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 20. As part of my creative process, I often 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.