Ran Prieur

June 18.

2026-06-18T18:40:24Z

June 18. Thanks Nick for inspiring this post with a defense of old-time conservatism. After bashing the right last week with Reddit comments, today I want to bash the left in my own words. This is tough, because in terms of current public policy, I'm with the left on everything except safetyism.

The best way to explain my problem with the left is with the classic short story, Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". I don't like it. It's a smarmy thought experiment about a supposed utopian society full of annoying festivals, all magically paid for by the terrible suffering of a single child. The mechanism for this is so hand-wavy that I can only think the people of Omelas are delusional (like the people in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery") and wrongly believe they can't just give this child a good life and keep their utopia. But I'm probably overthinking it. The point of the story is to push the buttons of the affluent left, who are fixated on obvious suffering and their own moral complicity, and are unaware of the subtle suffering of lack of agency.

Here's how I would write that story. The utopia is lazy hermits like me, wandering in nature on LSD, and it turns out the drug is all being made by a single stressed-out slave chemist. I think being forced to do is worse than being forced to suffer. Cynically I agree with conservatives that this world is a place of pain and we shouldn't fight against that too hard. What we should fight for is the freedom to chart our own path, which starts with the freedom to do nothing -- the freedom from being someone else's NPC. This world is not a place of involuntary labor, something that doesn't exist in nature or even in most indigenous cultures. Having to work for someone else is a human invention of repressive societies. I think anything less than a 100% volunteer workforce is immoral.

The left is all about bringing formerly excluded groups into the fold. All races, all genders, all abilities. Okay wokes, how about lazy people? If you laugh at that, it's because we take for granted that the left is owned by capitalism. Karl Marx was a big capitalist, that's why he wanted rights for workers. If you have to get a job to get rights, then the capitalist who does the hiring is in charge of who gets rights. I support rights for non-workers -- rights that workers do not forfeit but supplement with whatever their employers give them. If rights for non-workers are adequate, the free market will take care of rights for workers.

I believe in the free market but not capitalism, which I define functionally as any economy in which the more money you have, the easier it is to make money. That's positive feedback and it leads with mathematical certainty to cavorting billionaire pedophiles. If we don't want the insane atrocities of the super-rich, we must set it up so that the more money you have, the harder it is to make money, and the less you have, the easier it is. This does not require big government, only better rules for money. It could be done simply with a flat tax on all financial transactions including the stock market, and an unconditional basic income. The way I'd do it is with a depreciating UBI: money that is pumped in generously at the bottom of the economy, but that loses value over time. I wrote more about depreciating currency back in 2008 in this archive.

June 15.

2026-06-15T15:10:28Z

June 15. Good: No, everyone is not using AI for everything. One survey finds that "most Americans use AI once a week or less."

Bad: Teachers of Reddit: Is the "Gen Alpha can't read (write, or do math)" crisis real? If so how bad is it?

...the run of the mill non honors kids have gotten really bad. Very low tolerance for working hard, very short attention span, very short stamina for active listening. This is the brainrotted/fried dopamine group. Blame the screens, the social media, and the parenting for this group. It's the group that is the most worrying because a decade ago, I'd estimate that maybe 10-20% of kids at a school are like this, and now it's probably 40-50% of each graduating class.

Good: The Tiny Solar Panel That Could Change America. They've finally invented an affordable solar panel that you can just plug into an outlet. If energy can be decentralized, power can be decentralized.

Bad: A cold blob in the Atlantic may herald a change in ocean currents, "causing accelerated sea level rise on the US East Coast, plunging Europe into a winter deep freeze and shifting the monsoon in Africa, driving prolonged droughts."

Good: Japanese fans celebrating Daichi Kamada's late equalizer against Netherlands at the Shibuya crossing in Tokyo. Only 90 years ago, the Japanese were probably the worst people in the world, and now they're among the best. This gives me hope for humanity. And even if younger generations are illiterate, they're still less violent than older generations were, and illiteracy is not that bad, just ask the Middle Ages.

June 12.

2026-06-12T12:40:15Z

June 12. Today, some Reddit comments and threads about politics, starting with a rant about the USA at 250. The context is how excited everyone was for the bicentennial in 1976, and how depressed everyone is now.

Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs.

A comment about the soul of conservatism:

There is no "left vs right". There's every single political philosophy that believes in a moral system of governance on one side, and an amoral system on the other. The whole point of conservatism is social hierarchies. From Burke to Trump, from Tories to slavers to Nazis to the Taliban to MAGA. It's why conservatism has been on the wrong side of history, always.

We're supposed put right and left on a spectrum, but I see the right as the center of a flowering, the hard core of the freedom of the powerful to crush the weak under their boots. And around it, in all directions, is anything we come up with that works better than pure domination. Stephen Miller famously said, "We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power." If that were true, then every time Miller encountered someone larger and stronger than him, that person would kill him and take his stuff. What he really wants is a world where he has power and nobody else does. I saw another Reddit comment by someone who went to high school with Stephen Miller. Miller was giving a campaign speech for a student government office, and said that he shouldn't have to pick up after himself because that's the janitor's job. He was booed. Someone with that value system can get no power in high school, but can be at the top of the US government, because the US government is fully owned by that value system.

A comment about how Nazis were not ruthlessly efficient but were incompetent thugs. Farther down in the thread there's stuff about fascism and Peter Thiel.

Another comment about conservatism = hierarchy, and farther down in the thread is well reasoned stuff about how Democratic Party centrists and moderates are still conservative because they believe in financial domination.

To them, the second-greatest injustice imaginable is for those [they perceive to be] on top [of social hierarchy] to be bound by the restrictions, scrutiny, and lack of resources reserved for those on the bottom. The first greatest injustice is for those on the bottom to have access to the rights, credibility, and resources reserved for those on top.

Shifting into culture, an answer to the question Why Do So Many Fundamental Christian Cults All Like The Same Puffy Hair On Women?

By voluntarily taking on complex, expensive grooming that is not even remotely comparable to what any man in the congregation is ever called upon to do, especially with that specific erotic undercurrent, a woman with big puffy hair that is still touchably soft is performing for the entire congregation that she is "womanly". She is centering male desire. She has her husband's erotic comfort at the forefront of her mind. She is conspicuous to the other women as a woman who invests time and energy and investment into making men feel like their erotic tastes rule her life. These women are often rewarded in little ways, like being put in charge of Women's Bible Study or the nursery. She may get to organize snacks for Men's Bible Study.

Finishing with some good news: New Yorkers, what changes have you seen under Mamdani's leadership? "It is absolutely wild how fast landlords can suddenly find the money and motivation to fix decades of crumbling infrastructure the exact second the city actually starts holding them accountable."

June 9.

2026-06-09T21:10:21Z

June 9. Stray links. Dopamine Fracking is a short piece with a really good metaphor. Just as fracking destroys geology to squeeze out the last bits of fossil fuels, the current online world is destroying minds and cultures to squeeze out the last bits of the human capacity to be entertained by screens and pump money up the pyramid. There's also a long Hacker News comment thread, and I want to remind people that dopamine is not a pleasure chemical -- it's an anticipation chemical, and being in a dopamine mental state all the time is hellish.

Neither the post nor the thread contains the word "motivation", but I think that's the most important thing that's going on here. Society is collapsing because everyone is unmotivated, because dopamine fracking has destroyed our ability to be motivated by anything less than concentrated clickbait.

An archive of an Atlantic article (thanks Mr. Quigley) about AI companies hiring philosophers. They would not hire me because I don't think AI is philosophically interesting. Sociologically, it's one of the most interesting things that's ever happened. Philosophically, AI is just a big mirror, and "AI ethics" is nothing more than the question of how AI will reflect human ethics.

Did the Iran war force peak oil? It's funny how the dialogue around "peak oil" has changed. Twenty years ago it meant that when oil production declines, industrial civilization will collapse. In this article, it means the world is finally switching to renewables. Meanwhile society is collapsing for cognitive reasons.

Loosely related: Scientists have found a geospatial link between soil fertility and national intelligence scores

June 5.

2026-06-05T17:30:07Z

June 5. New Spotify playlist: Ocean, a two hour collection of 14 songs that did not fit on other playlists because they were too long.

June 4.

2026-06-04T16:20:28Z

June 4. Great Ted Chiang essay, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious. He starts with a clever analogy, that an AI-generated dialogue between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan does not generate conscious versions of those people inside the machine. In the same way, Claude is a third person character, and Claude's new constitution is like a "character sheet for a role-playing game". The most interesting bit is at the end where he argues that if chatbots are conscious, then they're basically child slaves:

Anthropic would have us believe that it is inventing a new category of being whose needs for protection require essentially no divergence from how a software company would treat an ordinary chatbot that lacks conscious experience. That's so convenient that it's simply not plausible.

A few months back, a reader asked me if I think AI images and videos are important. That struck me as a strange question, and when I thought about it, I decided no, they're not important, and that's good. Pretty much every use of AI that tries to be important, is harmful. In a hundred years, if AI still exists (which I doubt), there may be laws that it can only be used recreationally, for the same reason that drugs are good recreationally but not when you're using power tools.

June 1.

2026-06-01T13:50:55Z

June 1. Five happy links, two Reddit and three science. From Better Offline, The kids are alright is about young people rejecting AI and big tech. "It's also like having had phones from early an age they're just done with them."

From Spirituality, I stopped trying to "raise my vibration" and things actually got better. From the top comment: "Spirituality is about returning to our natural state.... Imagine going out to the woods and thinking everything is dirty and needs to be cleaned.... A lot of spiritual seekers are doing this kind of thing within themselves."

A single dose of psilocybin outperforms nicotine patches for quitting smoking

Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnea. "Regular playing of a didgeridoo reduces daytime sleepiness and snoring in people with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome and also improves the sleep quality of partners."

The Dirt That Refused To Die. "A metabolic process that powers much of life is also possible outside living cells." The details are different, but this is basically what Wilhelm Reich did 90 years ago with bions: he completely sterilized organic material and still found life-like action under a strong microscope.