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"People do not go to hell after death. The designers and builders of hell are human beings. The designs and buildings are almost completed. It is becoming difficult to add more hell."
-Tamo-san
October 29. The Decline of Deviance is a good blog post about the world getting less dangerous and less weird. I disagree that all of these trends have a single cause. Probably the decline in serial killers has a completely different cause than corporate logos looking the same. But he has charts and examples of a lot of different things, and there's also a big thread on Hacker News. My favorite bit from the post is about the novelty of sameness:
Whenever you notice some trend in society, especially a gloomy one, you should ask yourself: "Did previous generations complain about the exact same things?" If the answer is yes, you might have discovered an aspect of human psychology, rather than an aspect of human culture. I've spent a long time studying people's complaints from the past, and while I've seen plenty of gripes about how culture has become stupid, I haven't seen many people complaining that it's become stagnant.
Related: a quote from a novel I've just read, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead:
I grew up in a beautiful era, now sadly in the past. In it there was great readiness for change, and a talent for creating revolutionary visions. Nowadays no one still has the courage to think up anything new. All they ever talk about, round the clock, is how things already are, they just keep rolling out the same old ideas. Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism -- it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means "the dropping of petals." The world has dropped its petals.
But something new is bound to follow, as it always has.
October 27. After heavy posting last week, this week I'll probably just be posting links. Today, three tech links. Laptops create. Phones consume. It's easy to think of exceptions. But it's important to know how to think this way about technology, to see that no technology is neutral, but that every device steers us in a different way.
The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks. "...future generations may face a sort of 'digital dark age' when they look back for material from the past 50 years or so."
New stuff by Gary Larson. Larson has been learning digital illustration, and he has rediscovered "that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks," by practicing a different process, although the ideas are still not as good as peak Far Side. My favorite is the chicken drive.
October 24. Polishing off this week's subject with a comment from Matt (not the same Matt who often comments) on plant work:
A healthy tree produces enough sugars to fuel its own cellular respiration and still have enough left over to trade with other organisms. They "work" more than necessary to produce this surplus. They give the extra sugars to fungi and microbes underground in exchange for micronutrients, microbial cellular parts and soil conditioning. They could give sugars to nearby trees of a similar species in hopes of growing a cooperative forest. They give sugary nectar to flying insects in exchange for pollination, or to ants for protection. They give sugary fruits to birds, squirrels and humans in exchange for seed scattering. Even though trees can survive on much fewer leaves than they actually grow, they are motivated to grow extra leaves because they want to thrive in a vibrant ecosystem. Their extra-work is to foster a nurturing community; interspecies relationships with willing participants.
When modern humans work more at their jobs to earn beyond what they immediately need, it's usually for more personal stuff or more money in their individual savings accounts. In order to earn more, they'll usually spend more time away from their home or community while becoming persons narrower in function and vision. Their extra work usually does little or nothing to enrich their surrounding community. Compared to the trees' extra work, it's a very isolated and isolating practice.
On the other hand, I've noticed that an abundance of people are highly motivated to work for free to immediately enrich their community. Feeding the hungry, planting trees, picking up litter, building community gardens are all examples of the same kind of extra-work that trees do, but when we do it, we call it "volunteering".
This is why I think a 100% volunteer workforce is realistic, and why we're still on the ground floor of the human potential. If we get a UBI, or any other mechanism to make us actually free, if it's not only adults but kids who can find their own path of "get to" and not be suffocated with "have to", and if we can keep it going into the third generation, I think they'll look to us like superhumans, and they'll look back at us the way we look at Dickensian workhouses. Right now there are hundreds of potential Mozarts and Einsteins being used up in wicked schemes to leverage wealth into more wealth, and to replace the cooperative nonhuman world with the controlled human world.
October 22. Continuing from Monday, Roger comments:
It's not like plants really get sunlight for "free" -- they have to work for it. They need to expend energy and materials to build leaves to absorb the sunlight, and stems to support the leaves, etc.
Yes, and by that logic, the statement "He who does not work shall not eat" is perfectly compatible with everyone getting free food, because we still have to do work to chew and swallow and digest it. What those guys were really saying is "I believe in a social order in which people must repeatedly do tasks they do not find intrinsically enjoyable, under the threat of starvation." Out of millions of species on this planet, only one species does that, and not even in all societies. Alex comments:
I've thought about this over the last few years and obviously, in the world that formed us all, the hunter-gatherer world, you had to "work" if you were gonna eat, other than if you were injured or sick or a treasured elder etc. But "work" was a lot less like "work" as we understand it now and more like "play" or "something people just do".
No, and yes. It's only in the hunter-gatherer world (so far) that prime-of-life non-elites might feel no pressure to be productive. And putting "work" in quotes is exactly why. Plants don't have to make leaves -- they get to make leaves, they get to express their nature in a way that almost no humans get to do at their jobs.
Even modern people who go out hunting or foraging don't resent people who stay home, and for the same reasons: there's enough food, and hunting and foraging are deeply satisfying when your ancestors have been doing them forever. But as soon as a society gets more technologically complex, it starts adding tasks that are a stretch for human nature, and eventually coercion becomes necessary to keep the game going.
We're not going back to the stone age. Humans are pretty flexible. But right now the human-made world is farther than it's ever been from our ancestral environment. That's why the streets are full of crazy people and everything is falling apart.
October 20. Continuing from the last post, with a comment from my old friend Kevin, who moved to Russia in the 1980s.
There was no advertising in the Soviet Union. It was wonderful. In many ways people were happier and freer there. I will add that in the USSR people's labor was exploited in the sense that you produced more value generally than you were paid for. But, unlike in capitalism, people's consumption was not exploited. In fact, they didn't want you shopping and buying things because that meant someone had to serve you in shops and produce things for you in factories instead of getting drunk with friends and telling jokes to each other far into the night.
For balance, a Reddit thread, People from former Soviet republics. What is something people who never lived under communism just don't get about communism? One comment: "My dad described it as living in a country run by the world's most powerful and vindictive HOA. You can't paint your fence, and if you complain about it, you might just disappear."
I'm optimistic, because if there has been even one society without advertising, that proves that it's possible, and can probably be done without all the drawbacks of Soviet life or Medieval life. So what other things, that Americans don't think can be done, can be done?
It's funny, the guy who ruined Communism, the guy who ruined Christianity, and the guy who ruined America, all said the same thing. Vladimir Lenin: "He who does not work shall not eat." Paul the Apostle: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." Ronald Reagan: "There is no free lunch."
Is that true? It's definitely not a universal rule, just look at all the plants getting free sunlight. It's not even true for all humans. I've mentioned before how some primitive cultures don't even have the concept of freeloading. I finally got around to digging up the actual quote, from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, pages 851-2:
A third fact about hunter-gatherer economies also runs counter to the notion of economic man central to modern economic theory: no necessary connection exists between production by individuals and distribution to individuals. Economists argue that sharing has an economically rational basis. The person we share our catch with today may feed us tomorrow when our luck or skill fails. In this view, sharing is a kind of insurance policy that rationally spreads the risk of not having anything to eat. Sharing in hunter-gatherer cultures, however, is much more profound than this. In many cultures at least, there is no connection between who produces and who receives the economic output. According to Woodburn, for example, some members of the Hadza do virtually no work their entire lives. Many Hadza men gamble with spear points, and many are reluctant to hunt for fear of damaging their gambling "chips", yet these men continue to get their full share of the game animals killed. Although "freeloading" is always a potential problem in all cultures, disdain for those not engaged in productive activity is evidently a culturally specific emotion.
October 18. On a tangent from the last post, an easy question: Why do we demand novelty from screens, so much more than we demand novelty from the outside world? It's because screens are a lot smaller, and ultimately shallower. You can dive a long way into Wikipedia, but not as far as you can dive into reality. Because screens are smaller, they need novelty to earn our attention, and the thing about novelty is you always need more of it.
I remember getting addicted to Mattel electronic football when I was about the same age as kids who are now getting addicted to smartphones. That football field has, count em, 27 pixels. Now my phone has a million pixels and I'm like, been there, done that. The other day I got bored with our 40 inch TV and looked out the window at traffic and trees. An 80 inch TV wouldn't work any better.
My point is, the ability of screens to hold our attention, while potent, is well into diminishing returns. We're burning more and more resources just to keep the same level of engagement. AI is the big new thing, and it's pretty neat. If you're alive at this moment in history, you should have as much fun with it as you can. But artificial intelligence is intelligent in the same way that artificial trees are trees. It's not going to gain sentience any more than plastic trees will put down roots.
I've been reading a book, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, and listening to a lecture series on Medieval Europe. The most amazing thing I learned is that under the guild system, advertising was illegal! I would give up a lot to live in a world with no advertising. I would give up my smartphone this minute if it was easier to live without a smartphone than to live with one. That day will come.
October 15. I've got a ton of negative links that I don't want to post. Following the news is like watching buildings collapse in slow motion, with people inside. I've been putting song lyrics into AI image engines because I want to look at my laptop screen and say, "Wow, there's something cool that I didn't expect." The closest thing I have to a positive link is this short thread from Stoner Thoughts: Would be gutted to miss the end of the world
October 12. I've made another AI video. I don't think any good can come from arguing that something is "art" or "not art", but I want to talk about the process of creativity. The myth of creativity is that the Creative person, through Talent, is able to tune into the magical land Where Ideas Come From, and it arrives fully formed on the page or canvas or whatever, the Art. And sometimes that's exactly what happens. But usually there are at least two more elements. One is that whatever you channel still needs a lot of work -- filtering, arranging, modifying -- before it's good enough. Another is that creatives get a ton of ideas from stuff that other creatives have already done.
Let's call these three things channeling, sorting, and copying. AI does no channeling at all, unless there's a metaphysical aspect that we don't understand yet. And AI is bad at sorting, because it has no taste: AI cannot look at its own images and pick out the good ones. But AI is spectacular at copying. It's so good that it can look at a bunch of impressionist paintings and make an image of an apparently new impressionist painting on any subject.
From the perspective of a human creative, this works just like channeling, and it's wonderful. If you enjoy sorting and you're not talented at channeling, you can plug in prompts and get an endless supply of raw material to work with. But you still have to be good at working with it, and it's not exactly endless. AI servers are burning way too much energy, and it's anyone's guess how long we have until the bubble bursts.
That's why I'm not holding back. Luckily, one of my favorite Melissa Kassab songs was not yet on YouTube, and the lyrics are packed with good prompts: Fix The Leak
October 10. Continuing on non-political subjects, an interesting article about why the Yankees always lose in the playoffs. The author lists a bunch of examples of obvious bad decisions about which pitchers to use, and argues that Yankees manager Aaron Boone "is handed an analytical roadmap by general manager Brian Cashman and the front office, and that he follows it, unwaveringly, regardless of the circumstances." Most damning is the accusation that the analytics department doesn't believe in players getting hot. This is an example of how being too smart makes you stupid. Because they're able to run the numbers on a player's entire career, they get fixated on those numbers rather than following the flow of the game.
October 8. I have no ideas this week, but I'm reading two books on the same subject, in very different styles. The subject is entities from outside the reality recognized by physicalism. One book is academic: Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits, edited by Michael Ostling. Academics will never write about what the entities actually are, or even say whether they're real or unreal. They just write very carefully about what people believe, and about what words mean. A sample:
Thus the "demonic" is properly understood less as a specific category of supernatural being than a collective reflection on unfortunate occurrences, on the ambivalence of deities, on tensions surrounding social and sexual roles, and on the cultural dangers that arise from liminal or incomprehensible people, places, and activities.
I can learn stuff from this book, but it's difficult and not fun to read. The other book is for a popular audience: The Eighth Tower, a.k.a. The Cosmic Question, by my favorite paranormal author, John Keel. Keel writes constantly about what the entities actually are, but rather than settling on a truth and defending it, he just spins out wild speculations with no attempt to make them consistent. It's great fun to read. A sample:
Over and over again the Bible tells us how men were instructed to create solid gold objects and leave them on mountain tops where the gods could get them. The gods were gold hungry. But why? ... If the ancient gods were real in some sense, they may have come from a space-time continuum so different from ours that their atomic structure was different. They could walk through walls because their atoms were able to pass through the atoms of stone. Gold was one of the few earthly substances dense enough for them to handle. If they sat in a wooden chair, they would sink through it. They needed gold furniture during their visits.
October 5. I'm going to continue writing about personal stuff, and not politics, until politics does something off-script. For all the apparent chaos, it feels very deterministic.
Anyway, when I did my covers playlist, I had a bunch of softer songs left over that were good enough for their own playlist. So I did a lot more listening to fill it out, swapped some songs between the two lists, and in the end the overflow list is maybe better, and definitely more listenable. I renamed the original list "wild covers", and I was going to call the new one "soft covers", but other Spotify playlists with that title are very, very soft, so I'm calling it Dreamy Covers.
Because the songs all have a similar sound, the order was wide open, so I put them in order of the release date of the original. It's strange that there's a huge gap for most of the 70s, almost like that decade was more about style than songwriting. For the image, I used the best of the sixty plus images that I got by putting the prompt "crimson and clover" into DeepAI, for a video that I decided not to make. That's emerging as my favorite use of AI, not to make it do my bidding, but to pull stuff out of a hat.
The songs are mostly obscure, with more under 100k listens than over a million. Lowest, at 8000, is Please Don't Go by Valentina Gaia. You can listen to sappy songs for hours, I know because I did, and not hear a sappy song that good. I also discovered Larkin Poe, two sisters who have done a lot of very good home-recorded covers on YouTube, my favorite being CSN's Southern Cross.
And I've been listening obsessively to Melissa Kassab's cover of Trucker Speed by Fred Eagleton, a 2012 original that conveniently makes it the closer for the new list.
October 2. After more tinkering, I found a good way to get free AI images, using the DeepAI Image Generator. The best thing is that it has more than 100 different styles. The worst thing is that using the same prompt with the same style leads to very similar images, so I used a lot of styles to get variety. I found that the "Olde Model" option, which appears when you select quality over speed, gave much better results. Then it was just like making a playlist: assemble a bunch of stuff, whittle it down to the best stuff, and put it in the right order. AI is not going to transcend humanity, but it's a very good toy, and this was satisfying project with a lot of interesting choices.
It started with a song, a cover of Chim Chim Cher-ee from Mary Poppins, by an obscure band called Branches. On Discogs they're known as Branches(6) and the album with this song is not even listed. I found the mp3 on Soulseek, buried in a massive folder of covers by a user called Stealth. And the song is so good that I had to make this video: Branches - Chim Chim Cher-ee
September 30. This week I'm wrangling with AI art. For a video project, I need a large number of images on the same theme. I tried several online free image generators, and not surprisingly, almost all the images were lame. While trying to get better images without running into paywalls, I downloaded a desktop program called Easy Diffusion. The results were even worse.
But Easy Diffusion has a feature where you can set an initial image and apply a prompt. So at some point I decided to try something random. I took a phrase I got earlier in the day from bibliomancy, "the death of the bishop" and used that as the prompt, and impulsively picked an image from my colorscapes folder, Carving the Crescent. The result was the strange Medieval image that you see here. I liked it so much that I tried the same prompt with five more images, which took quite a long time, and the results were all lame. It's interesting that even in the supposedly deterministic realm of machine learning, there's still beginner's luck.
More generally, I think both the utopian and dystopian fantasies of AI are misguided. Both of them see AI as an agent of control. But given how hard it is to produce something specific, and how easy it is to produce something surprising, I think AI is fundamentally an agent of chaos. Which means it can only go so far before it undermines the system that makes it possible.
September 26. A good comment thread removed by Reddit, and now they're starting to remove the titles, but not yet the answers. The question is, What is the purpose of life (short answers only)?
Related, a much shorter thread from Stoner Thoughts, Life is so much easier when you have no purpose.
September 24. Today, some non-controversial links, starting with a great Ask Reddit thread from a few days ago, What's a small bombshell your therapist dropped during a session that completely shifted your perspective?
The day Return became Enter is a well-written and detailed history of the Return and Enter buttons all the way from manual typewriters to now.
A mirrored NY Times article, Like Humans, Every Tree Has Its Own Microbiome
A Digital Darwin Adventure with Mating Melodies has a "melody breeder" that works like the defunct picbreeder but with melodies. In practice it's disappointing. The best thing on that page is an ambient music generator that works by adding tones to Conway's Game of Life.
A study in which Gamers show no major psychological disadvantages compared to non-gamers
I might be gaming more this winter now that I have a new laptop. It's an ASUS Vivobook 16 from Best Buy, and I've been learning Windows 11 and doing all the tweaks to make it work smoothly, setting up VLC and Paint.net and SumatraPDF and f.lux. I had to download an old version of Notepad++ to keep the tabs horizontally compact. And to make Firefox bookmarks vertically compact, the easy way doesn't work for me, and I have to do it the elaborate way described on this page, How to Create a userChrome.css File. This text file is the text I put into it.
September 22. Continuing from a week ago on the subject of AI. A wargame expert said, "It's almost like the AI understands escalation, but not de-escalation. We don't really know why that is."
The answer is that AI doesn't understand anything. It escalates because the data it's been trained on is full of escalation and not de-escalation. Matt comments, "If we wanted to show LLMs records of skillful de-escalation, what would we point them to? What's the best data set for that?" It's hard to think of anything.
A Hacker News comment thread, You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here. The context is an erroneous AI-generated bug report, and the larger context is AI slop feeding back into itself. An ironic comment: "You should just feed other peoples AI-generated responses into your own AI tools and let the tool answer for you! The loop is then closed, no human time wasted, and the only effect is wasted energy to run the AI tools. It's the perfect business model to turn energy into money."
This is my new understanding of AI, and it's old enough that a book was written on it last year: AI is a mirror. It's a very powerful mirror, and very expensive. We can learn a lot from mirrors and make good use of them. But ultimately all AI does is reflect humanity back at humanity. This perspective can answer a lot of questions. Can AI replace all jobs? Can a mirror replace all jobs? Can AI gain sentience? Can a mirror gain sentience?
Related, a classic article from The Onion, Astronomers Discover Planet Identical To Earth With Orbital Space Mirror
September 19. I've posted my Covers playlist to Spotify. When I was working on it, Leigh Ann said, "You make playlists differently from other people. Other people use good songs, and you use bad songs." Yes, but I'm very picky. After heavy playtesting, I ended up cutting almost an hour of songs that weren't bad enough, and whittled it down to 40 songs. Five of them are not on Spotify, including two that I mentioned last week, Lily Allen's Straight to Hell and the listenable remix of Wall of Voodoo's Ring of Fire. Also missing are Killdozer's offensive cover of Sweet Home Alabama, and an amazing Russian throat singing version of Come Together, Bugotak's Kon' Togethy. I used the Bugotak album image for the playlist image.
Three artists are on the list as both songwriters and performers: Nick Cave and AC/DC happened naturally, and I had to try really hard to find a cover of an REM song that I liked. In the end I found the entire Out Of Time album done by Quivers, an Australian jangle pop band, and picked their dreamy cover of Radio Song to open the list.
I did the whole thing with the sound dead on my nine year old laptop, doing all the listening on my even older Sansa Clip mp3 player. After I plug the songs into Spotify, it's fun to go through and see how many listens everything has. Most popular, at 37 million, is Lissie's ominous version of Go Your Own Way. Most obscure is an accordion cover of She Blinded Me With Science, and second most obscure, at 2500 listens, is the absolute banger I picked as closer, Exuma's reinvention of You Can't Always Get What You Want.
September 17. A few links from PsyPost. Medicinal cannabis may actually worsen sleep. This is why I get high in the afternoon and not the evening. Cannabis makes sleep more pleasant, but the next day I always need a big nap.
Religious leaders become more effective after two supported psilocybin sessions:
Follow-up assessments revealed that these improvements were largely sustained 16 months later. At that time, a majority of participants rated at least one of their psilocybin sessions as among the top five most spiritually significant (96%), profoundly sacred (92%), psychologically insightful (83%), and psychologically meaningful (79%) experiences of their lives.
Of the many crazy devices on Anycrap, my favorite is Thought-cancelling Headphones, which are almost realistic. In ten years we might actually have something you can put on your head that stills your thoughts. Leaning in that direction: Deep brain stimulation reshapes emotional networks in treatment-resistant depression.
Finally, Massive study of Reddit posts sheds light on lived experiences of autism:
"One surprising result was how frequently topics like food selectivity and music listening emerged as central themes," Esposito told PsyPost. "These everyday experiences are rarely prioritized in clinical research, yet they clearly play an important role in autistic people's lives."
September 15. The AI Doomsday Machine Is Closer to Reality Than You Think:
Last year Schneider, director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at Stanford University, began experimenting with war games that gave the latest generation of artificial intelligence the role of strategic decision-makers. In the games, five off-the-shelf LLMs -- OpenAI's GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4-Base; Anthropic's Claude 2; and Meta's Llama-2 Chat -- were confronted with fictional crisis situations that resembled Russia's invasion of Ukraine or China's threat to Taiwan.
The results? Almost all of the AI models showed a preference to escalate aggressively, use firepower indiscriminately and turn crises into shooting wars -- even to the point of launching nuclear weapons.... "It's almost like the AI understands escalation, but not de-escalation. We don't really know why that is."
July 31. My novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing.