Ran Prieur

August 5.

2026-08-05T17:50:43Z

August 5. Stray thoughts on "apocalypse", a word that points to a lot of things. The ones I like the best are the ones that are weirdest, where reality itself is overthrown. My favorite scenario is the one in my novel, where everyone splits off into their own private universe, and then over hundreds of years we gradually merge back together. Even if we split into only two groups, for example if Jesus returns and sorts us, that would probably be for the best.

If we keep the same laws of reality, but society totally collapses, that would be bad, because the power vacuum would be filled by something worse. A quote I found going through my archives: "The three myths of a disaster are that the dead bodies will kill you, the survivors will kill you, and the men with guns are there to help." But I think a moderate economic collapse would be good. The AI bubble can't pop soon enough, and another thing I found in the archives was this 1997 article, Places to Intervene in a System. It's about leverage points, "places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything."

Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems -- poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment -- are related and how they might be solved, Forrester came out with a clear leverage point: Growth.... The world's leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they're pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.

August 4.

2026-08-04T16:40:12Z

August 4. Just found out from Hacker News that the classic Ray Bradbury short story There Will Come Soft Rains is set today. Also, in the Star Trek universe, 2026 was the start of WWIII. Also, I found out yesterday from this Reddit comment that there is a decent argument for 2026 being the 2000th anniversary of the death of Jesus. Come on, Jesus, do it. I don't believe in the biblical apocalypse but at this point I'll take what I can get.

August 3.

2026-08-03T15:30:19Z

August 3. Going through my archives last night, I found this 2009 post about the importance of autonomy. An excerpt:

American-style "freedom" means you can zip around the world and buy toys and choose from 200 varieties of soda. Autonomy means that as you go through your daily activities, nobody is riding you -- you're not micromanaged, coerced, or denied participation in power.
...
The techno-elite, lacking experience in bad jobs, don't understand what makes a job bad. The reason we hate low-status jobs like burger-flipping and toilet cleaning is not that they're physical or dirty. We love to do physical and dirty things like work on our own cars and tend our own gardens and play sports and go on hikes. The jobs are bad because the story they're part of is "you do what I say," and because the focus is on quantity or speed, rather than quality. Our quantity-worshipping culture thinks "sustainability" means not running out of kilowatt-hours, but it's even more critical for a system to not run out of human will, to be psychologically sustainable.

At the end of that post I've just stuck a link to this 2024 article, Intrinsic Motivation: A deep dive. The author moves from eeevil behaviorism, which does not even acknowledge the existence of intrinsic motivation, to Self-Determination Theory, "a legitimate scientific enterprise, and yet outside of certain academic circles, its ideas don't receive any air time at all." The basic conclusion is that intrinsic motivation comes from autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I would add, society is falling apart because autonomy and competence are more scarce than ever, while relatedness is being monopolized by the culture wars.

Also, here's a 2025 PsyPost article on intrinsic motivation, What really keeps people committed to long-term goals?