Ran Prieur

August 19.

2025-08-19T19:30:53Z

August 19. Continuing from last week, I have a few more thoughts on the UBI. It's not going to bring instant utopia, and a good analogy is the outlawing of slavery. Globally there's still a lot of slavery going on. And in the USA, after 160 years, the descendants of slave owners are still much richer than the descendants of slaves. But outlawing slavery was the right move, and a necessary step in our slow progress toward an adequate society.

The UBI will take the edge off poverty, more efficiently than the present bureaucracy, but the forces of control will surely figure out new ways to keep controlling people who are getting free money. The worst way is by adding conditions to the UBI, which is why I think the "U" should stand for unconditional, a more explicit defense against conditions than "universal". But the most likely way is to keep the UBI low enough that only frugal people can live on it, and everyone else will have to enter the wage economy to some extent.

An obvious objection to the UBI is, "Who will do all the shitty jobs?" The unrealistic utopian answer is that we will just build a society with no shitty jobs, on our first try. The realistic answer is that the worst jobs will have to pay more. And the cynical and also realistic answer is that jobs will be outsourced -- as they are now -- to people in more repressive countries and to non-citizen immigrants. This might even change immigration policy, from "Keep out foreign workers who will steal our jobs," to "Recruit foreign workers who will do our jobs and not get free money."

The most common objection to the UBI is probably the belief that humans aren't fit for freedom, that without firm guidance by the elect, the rabble will descend into wanton hedonism and disgraceful sloth. Well, some of them will. But I see this like ecologial succession. When an overworked piece of land is finally left fallow, first it grows the nastiest weeds. But if the process is allowed to play out, the weeds get less nasty until you've got a wildflower meadow with thorny scrub incubating oak trees.

The education system will have to adapt, to ease off on training us to be interchangeable machine cogs, and start training us to manage our own time. Meanwhile, new private organizations will emerge to fill the gap: UBI communities (which won't be called that) will take your money and give you food and housing, and a purpose, and if they do it right they'll also get your volunteer labor. Conservatives would love the UBI if they understood how much it will help churches. And it will still be preferable to what we have now, because pumping money in at the bottom of the economy will inevitably make society more democratic. Better for the people to rule badly, than for the princes to rule well. Because how else will the people learn?

August 14.

2025-08-14T14:40:29Z

August 14. Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults? The author uses the word "rationalist" in a topical way, referring to followers of Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sequences. I've never read them, but there's lots of speculation, in the article and in the Hacker News thread, about how that kind of thinking could be related to culty thinking.

I've said this before: postapocalypse fiction is full of cults, but I think cults mainly happen during apocalyptic times and not after them. Right now, with everyone losing faith in the old systems, and LLMs that feed back beliefs, and the general difficulty of checking facts, I think we're entering a golden age of cults.

More doom, a removed Ask Reddit thread, What industry is struggling way more than people think? Local journalism, independent restaurants, radio.

From the Books subreddit, Is physical book quality going down? "Back in the day there would be a meeting about manufacturing and how the editor wanted the book to represent -- heft, paper feel, brightness. Samples would be shown, pricing done per unit. Now those different paper stocks simply don't exist."

The age of bronze and steel is a blog post about the death of a once promising 3D printing process, mainly because it required hands-on technical skills that have been lost. The author's conclusion: "Technologies can vanish. Your job can vanish. Companies that you thought were parts of the landscape can vanish. Cities can vanish. The way you live can vanish."

Finally, something inspiring. I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display. My prediction: In one thousand years, wooden pixel displays will still exist, because obsessive hobbyists can make them, but pixels as we now know them will not exist, because they require too much complexity in supporting technologies.

August 11.

2025-08-11T23:10:35Z

August 11. A young reader named Aleck has been asking me questions over email, and some of the dialogue is worth posting here. Today's subject is the economy.

> Do you think that reducing peoples' working hours would solve a lot of the unhappiness that we see? Say, just make it the law that people only have to work a maximum of 20-30 hours a week, and any more is optional.

I think the law should be that all wage labor is optional. People won't just sit and do nothing all day, unless they're depressed, which is caused by modern society being out of step with human nature. Humans love to do stuff, and the more we can do our own stuff, and not someone else's stuff, the happier we will be.

> One might say that working hours should be negotiated among workers and their employers, and if people wanted to work less, it would have happened by now because people have the power to advocate for themselves and control work life.

But people don't have that power. They're desperate for money and forced to negotiate from a weak position. A UBI would give workers a stronger position, and then instead of workers having to compete for scarce jobs by being more subservient, employers would have to compete for scarce workers by offering better work environments.

> Do you think UBI would somehow collapse our mixed economy? Would UBI be incompatible with our current economic system somehow?

UBI is a better fit for a dynamic steady state economy than a perpetual growth economy. If America suddenly got a UBI, the best way to pay for it would be a financial transaction tax, which would weaken the financial markets. And with everybody getting free money, it would be harder to find workers for the worst jobs. That's why I don't think we're going to get one until the growth economy has collapsed.

> Are you of the mind that the collapse of the current economic system will inevitably happen? Do you see any current indicators of it happening?

I think it's been happening for years. The economists will be the last ones to notice, because they just look at numbers which are more and more vaporous. If you look at people, they have lost faith in the system, lost hope that things will get better, and if you look at the big money players, they're cynically sucking up the last of the wealth. To maintain the illusion of perpetual growth, things that are necessary for future growth have been consumed: resources, topsoil, and the will of the people to keep the whole thing going. The only thing keeping it going now is inertia, and the lack of an alternative.

I don't know how it's going to shake out. It's very complicated. But I'm optimistic that Trump will be blamed for a depression that was eventually going to happen anyway, and in the backlash against Trump, we can get some reforms that would not have been possible under the old Democratic party.

August 7.

2025-08-07T19:30:34Z

August 7. As I get older, I'm getting more into theology. When I was growing up, only two beliefs were available, Christianity and physicalism, which calls itself "atheism", but in practice it's a lot more than the denial of a supreme being. While pretending to be opposites, these two belief systems share a radical and counterintuitive idea: that the future has already been written. Under physicalism, it's all been clockwork since the Big Bang; under Christianity, it's all part of the plan of an all-knowing and all-powerful God.

To get to a living and creative universe from physicalism, you need heretical science, like this Rupert Sheldrake video, Is The Sun Conscious? Sheldrake points out that if stars have some influence over their own motions, we don't need to invent dark matter.

To get to a living and creative universe from Christianity, you need heretical theology, like Pelagius, or Socinianism, or in this century, process theology. Quoting from Bruce Gordon Epperly's book Process Theology: A Guide for the Perplexed:

At the heart of traditional Christian theology is the belief that God has unchanging knowledge of the universe, past, present, and future.
...
Ironically, when changeless omniscience and absolute omnipotence are combined, God's creativity and freedom as well as love are compromised.... If God determines all that will occur in advance, then God cannot exercise power in novel and creative ways.
...
In contrast, process theology affirms an open source, adventurous, and constantly evolving universe in which God and creatures are constantly doing new things.... Rather than planning all the important events of our lives and then testing our responses to adversity, process theology sees God as the Holy Adventurer who invites us to be companions on our own holy adventures.... Although God cannot, and does not, do everything, a constantly creative God is ultimately infinite in power and creativity, that is, there is no limitation, other than God's loving care, to the unfolding of God's power in the ongoing evolution of the universe.
...
We may creatively choose to embody positive ideals that go in a different direction than God's ideal for the moment. In the open system universe, our creativity and freedom is not necessarily a fall from grace, even when it diverges from God's vision, but an adventure in action and imagination that enables God and us to do new things.

August 4.

2025-08-04T16:00:13Z

August 4. Stray links, starting with something optimistic, a long New Yorker piece about solar energy and how much better it's getting. (mirror)

But you could argue that having more energy is bad for us. This bleak Reddit thread is almost entirely about problems that have been caused by energy-intensive information technology: Older men, what have you noticed about young men that has you concerned?

Another Reddit thread, People who have done sex work, what is something that surprised you? It's mainly about loneliness and emotional needs.

A reader sends this article on the Air India crash, which presents good evidence that it was not pilot sabotage, but a cascading electrical failure, probably caused by Boeing cheaping out. Update: another reader sends this video arguing against that article.

And finishing with something inspiring, At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery. Specifically, she disproved a conjecture that mathematicians felt was "so simply and elegantly stated, and so broad, in the end it had to be true." Yeah, when I see a statement that's simple and elegant and broad, I figure it's not true.