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.
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.
July 2. 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." This article says the same thing, that the third dimension is a way to "access" the second dimension. I'm confused because that isn't how space works. In three dimensional space, the third dimension is a whole new direction. You don't need it if you want to access different parts of the second dimension. You can just go from side to side.
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.
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."
July 4. For the holiday, positive links about America, starting with a fun Reddit thread, What's the most American thing you've done? "Went to Walmart at 2 AM in my pajamas to buy ingredients for s'mores, then made them using a cigarette lighter in the parking lot because I had a craving. The security guard just watched and shook his head."
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, 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 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 14. 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.
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 24. Fascinating thread on Ask Old People, To what extent could you see your now-adult children's personalities emerging when they were still little? At least half the answers say their kids already had their personalities at birth.
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 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 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.
August 22. Some pretty obvious links about AI, starting with a thorough article from the Atlantic, AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event:
What if generative AI isn't God in the machine or vaporware? What if it's just good enough, useful to many without being revolutionary? ... What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet, reorient our economy and leverage ourselves, outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our geopolitics and culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises?
The New Yorker makes the same point, What if AI Doesn't Get Much Better Than This?
A mirrored article from the Telegraph, Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears
And Texas law gives grid operator power to disconnect data centers during crisis. Because Texas has its own grid, it's a bellwether for grid problems elsewhere. This is good news that they've decided that keeping the lights on is more important than keeping the vaporous engines running.
August 27. A few weeks ago I mentioned the book Wilding by Isabella Tree. It's about a rewilding project on a farm in southern England. Here's a video about it, The story of Knepp. One thing I learned from the book is what I mentioned in last week's post, that thorny scrub is a good tree incubator. Conservationists are spending tons of money and volunteer hours eradicating thorny scrub, and planting trees with plastic doodads to do whatever the scrub would have done, because humans love to control stuff. Also, conservationists romanticize the closed-canopy forest, and they hate to kill trees, but the best landscape for wildlife is the one we evolved in, and the one we pick ourselves for our parks and yards: mixed woodland and grassland.