Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2025-12-23T23:50:55Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com December 23. http://ranprieur.com/#167e801953c05dfe9ac0a0b38d4cfe5a4cf6e83e 2025-12-23T23:50:55Z December 23. I've been reading more books lately, and these were the two best novels that I read in 2025.

Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett. It didn't win any awards, that's the title of the book, and it's my favorite literary novel of this century. Willett is a writing teacher who published a great book of short stories in the early 80s, which was forgotten and then championed by David Sedaris, which got it republished, which led her to finish and publish her masterpiece. The narrator is a no-nonsense librarian whose cynical takes on human foibles make this book a joy. Her sister is the complete opposite, loopy and trashy. They get in a love triangle with a wicked and charming intellectual, and all three characters are fascinating and sharply drawn. Jincy Willett writes the opposite of AI. The tiny decisions, which AI makes in the most obvious way, she makes in interesting ways, so often that I kept thinking, I can't believe how good this is.

To The White Sea by James Dickey. Famous for Deliverance, Dickey would only write two other novels. This was his last, and on one level it's a badass WWII adventure. An American tail gunner bails out over Tokyo and must make his way north through terrible danger. But this guy is not your normal hero. He's ruthlessly efficient, a creepy loner who grew up in frozen Alaska and daydreams about predation and camouflage among arctic wildlife. James Dickey was a serious poet, and this is some of the most poetic nature writing you'll ever read, in the voice of a terrifying killer. As he goes farther north, it's less like a war novel and more like a spirit journey, and by the end it's basically magic realism.

]]> December 18. http://ranprieur.com/#5f0ed732dcaea6b6bfefcd9a726b01ae50b1df7c 2025-12-18T18:00:47Z December 18. A few more thoughts on charisma. Reality distortion field is an interesting Wikipedia page, mainly about Steve Jobs:

Bill Gates talked in an interview about Steve Jobs using his reality distortion field to "cast spells" on people. Gates considered himself immune to Jobs's reality distortion field, saying, "I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I'm a minor wizard, the spells don't work on me."

I don't think it's quite like that. Being immune to wizardry doesn't make you a wizard. More generally, charisma is not like a light that shines on everyone. It's more like a key that fits a lock, or doesn't. A reader tells a story of a manager at his workplace who had a breakdown because he was accustomed to always succeeding through charisma, and suddenly he was among a group of people who didn't fall for it.

I think charisma has a metaphysical component. My evidence is that people who don't think charisma has a metaphysical component, are continually surprised and befuddled when they see it in action. If you look at the whole phenomenon around a leader like Trump, or an entertainer like Elvis, it doesn't look like sound and light waves tickling the neurons of a bunch of disconnected people. It looks like the activation of an archetypal cohort, like they were already connected on a deeper level and they were just waiting for someone to take the role as their point of focus.

]]> December 16. http://ranprieur.com/#7ce4b65f091c2b612cff674da1955d396dea1b8c 2025-12-16T16:40:26Z December 16. No ideas this week, so I'm going to post a few political links. You might already know about Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who posts frequent YouTube talks about contemporary politics. The point she keeps coming back to is that the Trump administration is not consolidating power, it's falling apart, and while the short term outlook is really bad, eventually things will turn around.

A recent comment on the Atheism subreddit, about how to try to break down authoritarian Christianity by asking questions, rather than making statements.

And a psychology article from this summer, Narcissistic leadership in Hitler, Putin, and Trump shares common roots. "According to the research, all three leaders experienced forms of psychological trauma and frustration during their formative years, grew up with authoritarian fathers and emotionally supportive mothers, and showed signs of pathological narcissism in adulthood."

My unusual belief about narcissism is that it's a side effect of charisma. Mainstream psychology misses this because it doesn't know how to think about charisma, but I suspect that it's impossible for a low-charisma person to develop narcissism, because other people just won't treat them in a way that feeds narcissism.

]]> December 12. http://ranprieur.com/#52816ecfefae2cfab2ebd75d48b165507023cc8a 2025-12-12T12:00:50Z December 12. A few happy links, starting with two about fungus. The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation

CRISPR Fungus: Protein-Packed, Sustainable, and Tastes Like Meat

My favorite coming technology, Noninvasive brain stimulation increases idea generation and originality. If we ever get a cheap home unit for this, it's going to be bigger than drugs in the sixties.

And an archive of a Washington Post piece about a guy who has been walking around the world for 27 years. "Bushby said he has learned a lot over the past nearly three decades, but one thing stands out: '99.99 percent of the people I've met have been the very best in humanity,' he said. 'The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.'"

]]> December 10. http://ranprieur.com/#b83c8dd37ba8bf1a19c177d62cd352f3884b011f 2025-12-10T22:40:45Z December 10. A few more thoughts on autism. Greg sends this article, "Autism is a Spectrum" Doesn't Mean What You Think. It's not like being farther or less far up the spectrum. It's like what colors you pick out. "...autism isn't one condition. It is a collection of related neurological conditions that are so intertwined and so impossible to pick apart that professionals have stopped trying."

This article, Autism's Confusing Cousins, explains how a bunch of different conditions are getting lumped under "autism" by popular psychology. But you can find the deeper message in this disclaimer: "The diagnostic boundaries between conditions are scientifically unclear and often reflect clinical convention." And the Hacker News thread is full of examples of how diagnosis of autism and related conditions is a total clusterfuck.

Now I'm even more convinced that all of this stuff will be conceptualized very differently when we understand it better. More radically, I suspect that "autism" is a feature of the present age. A diagnosis always reflects a problem, a mismatch between how people are and what society needs. Late stage industrial capitalism is so far from human nature that it's generating a lot of problems that require increasingly fiddly diagnosis. In a few hundred years there will still be neurodiversity, but it will interface with a more flexible and human-scale society in such a way that many ways of being will not be problematic enough to require experts to figure out what's wrong.

But I've changed my opinion on the practical dimension of diagnosis. I think it's good that a bunch of stuff that's not technically autism is getting lumped under autism. This paragraph from the second article explains why:

Social communication disorder is rarely diagnosed in favor of autism primarily because autism provides access to critical services, insurance coverage, educational support, and legal protections that social communication disorder does not reliably offer, creating strong practical incentives for families and clinicians to prefer the autism diagnosis. Additionally, autism has an established evidence base, validated assessment tools, clear intervention protocols, and a large supportive community with a neurodiversity-affirming culture, while social communication disorder has none of these. It has no community, minimal research, no specific treatments, and little professional awareness since it was only introduced in the DSM in 2013. Service delivery, insurance, and educational systems are built entirely around autism rather than social communication disorder, and since both conditions require similar interventions for social-communication difficulties, there's little practical incentive to make the diagnostic distinction, especially when the boundary between them (whether restricted/repetitive behaviors are truly absent or just subtle) is often unclear and clinicians are often unsure the distinction really matters.

]]> December 8. http://ranprieur.com/#36a7294c6538ea3885df8cc880c93ce546a0de55 2025-12-08T20:20:09Z December 8. Negative links, starting with four articles about industrial chemicals:

Parkinson's is a man-made disease

Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics

Common artificial sweeteners linked to cognitive decline

Prenatal exposure to common insecticide linked to brain structure abnormalities in youth

And a big Ask Reddit thread from last week, What change is coming that people aren't prepared for at all?

]]> December 5. http://ranprieur.com/#13d4a561af766f6b2da29dd59ee557f47f45fd86 2025-12-05T17:50:30Z December 5. Five Ask Reddit threads loosely related to this week's subject. Redditors with extremely niche interests: What's the one thing you are completely obsessed with that almost no one else you know cares about? Answers include training crows, Medieval coin making, and hunting without killing anything.

What does an uneducated genius actually look like? Have you ever met someone who was incredibly smart but had little or no formal education? A lot of examples are people who are really good at fixing machines, which tells me that after modernity collapses, we're not going back to the stone age, but potentially to a decentralized utopia of garage tinkerers.

Which hobbies attract the kindest people? Pottery, knitting, birdwatching, gardening, and heavy metal music.

Removed by mods, Who is someone everyone branded as crazy but they turned out to be right?

Who died believing themselves a failure, but was judged otherwise by history?

And for Bandcamp Friday, Appalachia Borealis is a cool solo piano album inspired by birdsong.

]]> December 3. http://ranprieur.com/#d32c41d3ce348ec29a586752c94ef20c471cae56 2025-12-03T15:30:33Z December 3. Continuing from Monday, it's unfair to say that I live life through a straw. A better way to say it is that perception can be narrow or wide, like a laser or like a floodlight. This has something to do with left brain and right brain, but until I can stick something in my actual brain, it's more helpful to just say that my attention defaults to narrow. An elite perceiver can switch easily between narrow and wide, and stay effortlessly in either one. I can get to wide focus but it takes an act of will, and a continuing effort of will to stay there. It's not like sliding into a groove, it's like holding up a weight. Lately I've been walking around practicing wide focus, being mentally aware of both sides of my peripheral vision at the same time. Some people who do this report an altered state of consciousness, but I haven't noticed anything except that it's easier to not bump into people.

I don't think there's anything wrong with me. An adequate society would have plenty of social roles for people who perform best with narrow focus and wide time. I say "role" and not "job", because in a job someone is making sure you're in a hurry so that they can make more money from your labor than they're paying you. That's what they mean by "time is money," and it's a recent invention. Medieval crafts and primitive flint knapping were done with narrow focus and no time pressure. These kinds of tasks have been replaced by mechanization. The soullessness of AI writing is not new. The same thing happened over a hundred years ago when physical items went from hand made to machine made. We live in a weird dystopia with miraculous devices and rampant "mental illness" which is what they call it when the way you are has no place in a society that's obsessed with perpetual increase.

]]> December 1. http://ranprieur.com/#bda0eba8a878eabc6200ff3b8417e410cdded0d9 2025-12-01T13:10:52Z December 1. Today, psychology. From the Autistic Adults subreddit, Driving isn't a neutral task for everyone. For many autistic people, it's a high-stakes multitasking nightmare. I think autism will eventually be understood as multiple different conditions, because descriptions of what it's like to be autistic are all over the map, and often contradictory. For example, this thread, your favorite part of being autistic, includes both hyper-logic and hyper-empathy, both intellect and intuition, both sense of style and indifference to style. Even in the driving thread, there's a sub-thread about autistic people who love driving.

I haven't been diagnosed with anything, but it seems to me that neurotypicals have a mode I call "self-driving human". They can "zone out" or "stop thinking" and their body automatically does the right thing while their conscious mind can just sit back and watch. I've never done this. When I'm driving, I have to constantly pump out my attention: look at the white line, look at the speedometer, look at the mirror. If I zone out, I crash. Even in my own apartment, I need fully conscious attention to not bump into things. Even when I'm walking, I have to monitor and instruct my mechanics and posture or I get stiff and slouchy. I live life through a straw. Peak performance is not expansive but contractive, not tuning into some larger being, but tuning out everything but this one little move, which in total isolation, with unlimited time, can be done perfectly. This is the opposite of driving, and the opposite of how this society is tooled.

]]>