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Let's overturn these tables
Disconnect these cables
This place don't make sense to me no more
-Bob Dylan, Señor
September 15. Cultural disintegration links, starting with three from Reddit. What hobby has become too expensive for the average person? From the top comment: "Fabric is more expensive than premade clothes these days, to a terrifying degree."
From r/Spirituality, Does anyone else feel like modern life quietly erased "the wisdom of elders" and we didn't notice? The top comment: "I think society in general has become very self centered, which has caused this. Short of something catastrophic happening, I'm not sure what will turn back the tide some."
From r/Seattle, Men have been increasingly creepy lately. From one comment:
We're going through cultural disintegration. Societal norms are being destroyed, you can see it in all facets; driving, bureaucratic corruption, and social interactions. The most vile and disturbed are being celebrated and empowered (and are literally in power). Nations with authoritarian regimes throughout history have all experienced this.
Roger sends this article, The Latest Wealth Flex: Big Trees, and comments: "The old saying about wise old men who plant trees whose shade or fruit they will never enjoy. Completely turned on its head by these bastards."
A scientific article, Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. The complete abstract:
Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals' unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
A solution, common in the more enlightened Bronze Age, would be mass cancellation of debts. A 2002 article by economist Michael Hudson, It Shall Be a Jubilee Unto You. The final paragraph:
Rome was the first society not to cancel its debts. And we all know what happened to it. Classical historians such as Plutarch, Livy, and Diodorus attributed Rome's decline and fall to the fact that creditors got the entire economy in their debt, expropriated the land and public domain, and strangled the economy.
Finally, right below the archived post I linked to the other day, is a post where I said this:
It occurs to me that the words "growth" and "progress" and "complexity" and "civilization" and "evolution" are all blurring together the same two things. One of those things could be called adaptation or experimentation or exploration or adjustment or learning. And the other thing is just ever-increasing numbers.
We're confused because in the last age of history, adaptation and increasing numbers have gone together. Techies are afraid to stop the numbers increasing because they think that will make us stagnant. Primitivists think when the numbers stop increasing, we'll go back to how we were before the explosion. But I think the increasing numbers are just a wave that our adaptation has been surfing, and when that wave crashes, we're likely to find ourselves on new shores.
September 13. I'm going again through the blog archives, this time to make an index. I'm being forced to do this by the decline of search engines, which can no longer reliably find posts that I remember making. Deciding how to categorize over a thousand posts is going to take a while, but I think I have a good shot at finishing before the end of the year. And I'm finding stuff that I missed the last time through. When I find a link that's good enough and obscure enough, I turn it into a page in my readings section, and I've just added two pages. In a fast society slow emotions become extinct is a sketchy manifesto from 2001 or earlier, with some bold ideas.
And Return of the Tribes is a 2006 piece about balkanization and tribalism, with some cool stuff about the return of magic, and how monotheism never conquered the forest. What it's missing is an understanding of primitive metaphysics as receptive and participatory, and not simply as imposing your will on the world. Both practices exist, and it occurs to me that "magic" has two different meanings. When I say I want to bring magic back, I mean the vibe. I want the world to feel alive and miraculous, and not this sterile industrial dystopia. But "magic" also means cursing your enemies and gaining coercive power through sorcery.
Related: this 2006 post reflecting on another piece I have in my readings, Richard Sorenson's Preconquest Consciousness:
I've been digesting the Sorenson essay, and now I'm seeing a whole different framework for civilized vs primitive. Sorenson's "preconquest consciousness", or "noble savage", is what I want to call core primitive. In the most remote places, you really do find Eden -- humans with barely a trace of negative emotion. But the core primitive is fragile. Just a little disturbance will break it down into Sorenson's "savage savage". This happens at the edges of the primitive regions, where primitive culture is thrown into turmoil by destabilizing factors, so I call it edge primitive. And because these are the kind of primitives that civilized people usually deal with, we are tempted to think they're all like that.
But it's the same with civilization! Primitivists point to the edges, the interface of conquest, Columbus hacking up Arawak children. But when you get through the edge civilized, to the core civilized, you find people like us, peaceful, cooperative, with fun and interesting and relatively easy lives.
Of course the core civilized is a long way from perfect, while the core primitive is only a short way from perfect. But we've had a million years to work on the core primitive, and the core civilized is still in the testing stage.
September 10. Fascinating article, Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip, based on the book Strange Attractor by Graham St John. In the late 1980s, McKenna and his wife took their usual five gram monthly trip, and a big storm hit. She had a normal trip, but he suffered a dark night of the soul: "completely uncontrollable, unexpected, ineffable, dense and spacious nothingness."
He was so mad that she had a good trip and he didn't, that he vowed never to trip with her again. So much for ego death. The main theme of the article is how McKenna was imprisoned by his own fame. He had become afraid of psychedelics, but still had to play the lucrative role of psychedelic drug guru: "...in 1990, Terence charged the equivalent of $7,000 per talk. Like Alan Watts decades earlier, who numbed himself with vodka before dazzling audiences with cosmic aphorisms, McKenna found himself trapped in the role of spiritual entertainer."
Even at my low level of fame I experienced this. Twenty years ago I wanted to inspire people and be admired, but it turned out, if I showed the slightest deviation from the icon that people had made of me in their heads, they got mad at me. I became fame-phobic and started consciously writing with the goal of filtering my audience. That's why I don't show my face on YouTube, and it's probably why I haven't published a book yet.
Anyway, Terence McKenna was an ambitious thinker and an incredible speaker. Here's a video that synchronizes some of his best nuggets with Big Bird.
September 7. Two loose ends from Friday. We assumed solar farms wrecked the countryside, but research shows birds and insects often thrive beneath panels, where shade and shelter create new microhabitats
And Emma sends this German word:
Waldheimkehr: The forest was here first. Before the clearing, before the axes and the fire and the field boundaries, this ground carried oak and beech and had done for thousands of years, and the village was an interruption in it, a few centuries long, which is nothing. Heimkehr is the word for a soldier walking back up his own road, for a child returning to the house they grew up in. It carries the sense that the returning thing belongs where it is going. So Waldheimkehr says the woodland did not invade and did not conquer; it came back to ground that had been its own, and found the interruption over.
For Labor Day, a full repost of this 2019 post on meritocracy, and an archive of the linked article:
How Life Became an Endless, Terrible Competition. I completely agree with the author's general idea, but I don't quite like the way he frames it. He centers his argument on the word meritocracy, which he defines in terms of "talent and effort." But the crisis he describes is not at all about talent, but about the overvaluing of effort.
Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a society that still describes itself as a meritocracy, but in its definition of merit, it completely factors out the quantity of work you've done. So college admission might be determined by a series of tests, with a generous time limit, and designed so that studying gives you almost no advantage. Then, when you're applying for a job, you could be tested by doing the actual stuff you'll be doing in the job, and your score is simply the quality of your work.
I think that society would be a lot better than this one. Nobody would be in a hurry and everything would be done well. Some kind of balance would be even better. But we're all the way at the opposite extreme. We don't have even one college, or one job, that rewards the quality of your work and doesn't care about quantity.
I've seen some buzz lately about the male-female pay gap. But at least men and women are in the same ballpark. I'd like to close the much wider pay gap between hard workers and lazy people. I'm completely serious. Nobody really wants to do nothing all day. "Laziness" means holding out for activities that you find intrinsically enjoyable.
Another thought experiment. Imagine if the unconditional basic income, and the maximum income, were the same. If there were no connection between how much money you get, and what you do all day, then we'd find out what we really want to do all day. That's how I view the UBI, not as a way to soften the robot takeover of human work, but as a way to rebuild the world of human work, out of what we actually like doing.
September 4. Stray links, starting with two good news articles. Offshore wind farms are unexpected havens for marine life, and Newly discovered enzyme can break down some plastics in less than three months:
They found that the plastic in some soil samples was pocked with tiny holes that happened to exactly match the size of a specific bacteria that was much more abundant in these samples. This suggests that certain bacteria have plastic-eating enzymes attached to their surface and challenges a widely held assumption that bacteria simply ‘disperse’ enzymes and wait for them to break down materials.
Two fun Ask Reddit threads. What is your favorite foreign word that doesn't have a word in English? And What is the cringiest midlife crisis you've witnessed?
From the Spirituality subreddit, Does God exist? If Yes Why he dosnt speak to anyone or visits anybody? The answers include a wide range of options for thinking about "God" other than a man in the sky. It's funny, when I was a kid, God the father totally made sense, and the Holy Spirit made no sense at all. Now it's exactly the opposite.
And some music. The band Green Lung has made a new Spotify playlist, Black Magick Radio, a tight 82 minute collection of "Occult bangers of the 60s and 70s". One of the songs, A Witch's Guide To The Underground by Carolanne Pegg, I have just added to my Psychedelic Folk playlist.
September 1. Dougald sends this page, Illich at 100, with a map of local gatherings all over the world this weekend to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ivan Illich's birth. The best source of his writings online is this Ivan Illich page by David Tinapple. I haven't read that much of his stuff but I've read Tools For Conviviality three times. Nobody is better at explaining how modern technology makes things worse while seeming to make things better. This is a page I made about Ivan Illich on Cars.
Also, Dougald has a new book out, At Work in the Ruins.
August 31. Doom links, starting with an archive of a NY Times piece, The Blackout That Could Devastate America. "The power grid relies on thousands of aging, hand-built transformers. If enough fail, the blackout could last years." And doing that through sabotage would not even be that hard.
Related, from Ask Reddit, If electricity permanently disappeared, what's an old-school skill you think would suddenly become incredibly valuable again?
Two more from Reddit, Has anyone noticed US noticed food quality degrading recently and if so what product in what way?
Academics of Reddit, what is the most disturbing RECENT study you saw? Answers include increasing cancer, diminishing returns in cancer treatment, coastal erosion, microplastics, cognitive debt from AI, and a removed comment about antibiotic resistance.
Linked from that thread, Carbon dioxide overload, detected in human blood, suggests a potentially toxic atmosphere within 50 years. This is not extinction level toxicity, but it's going to create a wide range of health problems. I expect the rich to be walking around with tanks and masks while the rest of us tough it out.
Finally, The AI Layoff Trap is a dense economics article: "If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on." The authors do math that I don't understand to show that even a UBI will not prevent this, it will only buy time, and the only thing that can fix it is an automation tax. I really don't think the government is smart enough.
August 27. I've just finished going through all 100 pages of my blog archives and adding visible permalinks to every post. I also fixed a lot of broken links, did some editing, and read everything. I found out that I repeat myself more than I thought.
Leigh Ann and I have also just moved to another apartment in the same building. I thought our old apartment was perfect, but they kept raising our rent, so we moved to a slightly larger apartment on a lower floor, which has turned out to be better in almost every way. It's cooler, my tiny bedroom is laid out better, there's more storage, the appliances are newer, and I can realistically take the stairs instead of the elevator. We fixed the smaller kitchen by getting some new furniture, and the one thing we can't fix is that street noise is much louder. The funny thing is, they rented out our old apartment for much less than we were paying, after denying our attempt to negotiate. I'm not complaining. It's a win for everyone: we get a better deal, whoever moved in gets a better deal, and the only loser is the landlord. I think it happened through bots with different motives. One bot was set up to keep raising rent no matter what, and the other bot was set up to offer our vacated apartment at bait-and-switch rate, which the first bot will now raise.
I also encountered some dystopia in changing my address with the state health care agency. You can't do it online, only over the phone, but my failed efforts to do it online triggered some kind of Kafka bullshit where the poor phone guy had to walk me through a bunch of other stuff, including having to read the privacy statement out loud while I pretended to listen. At the end there was a bot quiz to rate the human, but there was no option to rate the system. This is a reverse centaur with no AI involved, in which humans are forced to perform subroutines for an increasingly insane mechanistic order.
August 24. Reddit links, starting with two threads about homelessness. People who were homeless, what was way worse than you thought it would be? And, Former homeless people, what were some of the places you slept at night that were safe? My position on homelessness is that it should be legalized.
Two threads removed by moderators (and added to my lost reddit page). Fit guys who let themselves go, what was the most surprising thing about getting fat? And, Men who prefer fat women, what do you like most about them?
Two spirituality threads. My grandma was messing with us from beyond and My daughter has a tree she talks to
Finally, a sharp insight from Stoner Thoughts, This thing with specific facial surgery is tribal behavior. The complete post:
I'm talking about Mar-a-Lago face. Really obvious facial reconstructive surgery, it's not subtle and it's not meant to be. It's a group indicator signal.
Study about how primitive humans identified themselves. Not like they had business cards. No recording of anything at all, really. This is really old stuff, like before agriculture and all that mess.
You might be able to talk to a stranger. Might not. If you could, you could then figure out who each other was. Where each of you were from. You might both recall the same recent event. You could figure out whether to trust each other, but it was time consuming.
Not so with stuff like body modifications, scarification, tattoos, and body paints. That stuff indicates a lot of information. And if it doesn't, that's information, too. You're either in, out, or a threat.
So, these freaks I'm talking about. This surgery indicates a ton of stuff, most obviously either great wealth or aspirations of/attachment to the same. It's an in-group tattoo indicating membership - or desire for membership - in some profoundly anti-human, sociopathic club.
Looking at a human face rings bells all the way from your prefrontal cortex to your limbic system, a big zap that throws everything into overdrive until you figure out exactly who you're looking at. Trust that. You really should be scared of these scary-looking people.
August 23. Another thought on AI, inspired by my 2020 post about tacit knowledge, and this new Hacker News thread where people claim they can tell the difference between AI and human text, even though this video says it's very difficult to tell through technical analysis. What if everyone's right? Suppose that humans can learn to identify AI writing, without knowing how they know, just by seeing a lot of examples and picking up the vibe. Suppose that AI cannot do this nearly as well. If tacit knowledge is shown to be beyond the reach of AI, we might start using tacit knowledge a lot more. More generally, the potency of the Machine in the realm of the quantifiable, draws our attention to the potency of humans in realm of the unquantifiable.
August 21. Full repost of this post from 2021:
There's a growing ambition of detecting emotions with AI. My first question is, what is the context in which this would happen? Why not just ask people what they're feeling and expect them to answer honestly?
Emotion-detecting AI implies a context of mistrust. It would be done by states that don't trust their citizens, or corporations that don't trust their workers, or social media platforms that don't trust their members.
The science is clear: emotions are not the kind of thing that AI can detect. They're so soft-wired that even electrodes in our brains could not unlock their mystery. What AI can detect, and it's getting better, are facial expressions. Facial expressions are not emotions, because they map differently to emotions in different cultures, and because they can be faked.
Ideally, it would be illegal to use AI to detect facial expressions. More realistically, it will be done in special cases, like in the theater of security, detecting shifty eyes in airports. But I want to jump to the worst-case scenario: Everywhere you go, there will be cameras on your face, feeding computers that might reward or punish you for your expression.
Already on social media, everyone is carefully crafting their profile so that they appear to be more happy, successful, and normal than they really are. And in the context of these performances, everyone feels like a weird loser. Expression-detecting AI has the potential to make this nightmare panopticon universal. In the future, everyone will be famous all the time, if "famous" means that your persona is crafted for an audience of strangers.
I see three broad strategies for dealing with this as an individual. 1) Perform the rewarded expressions, and really believe that that's how you're feeling. 2) Perform the rewarded expressions, but keep track of the difference between who you're pretending to be, and who you are. This takes more cognitive energy than the first strategy. 3) Live as if nobody is watching, and accept the punishment.
August 19. Back to AI, starting with a repost from 2020: AI is an Ideology, Not a Technology. The key paragraph:
"AI" is best understood as a political and social ideology rather than as a basket of algorithms. The core of the ideology is that a suite of technologies, designed by a small technical elite, can and should become autonomous from and eventually replace, rather than complement, not just individual humans but much of humanity. Given that any such replacement is a mirage, this ideology has strong resonances with other historical ideologies, such as technocracy and central-planning-based forms of socialism, which viewed as desirable or inevitable the replacement of most human judgement/agency with systems created by a small technical elite.
Sjoerd sends this video, What Gives AI-Generated Text Away? Almost everything that supposedly gives it away, AI can be trained to not do. Meanwhile, human written text is increasingly being flagged as AI written, and this is more likely to happen to people who are neurodivergent or not native English speakers. One thing that AI cannot fake, yet, is that humans tend to skip around while AI is very linear.
A follow-up video by the same person: Did AI Write It? That's the Wrong Question. "The useful question is not simply whether AI touched the text, but what the writing was meant to accomplish, what the AI changed, what the person reviewed and reworked, and whether the final result worked." So we need to stop the AI witch hunt and accept that machines can contribute to creative work that is still human-centered.
A good essay, The Future Of Knowledge Workers In An AI-Driven World, also titled "Why Is Everyone In Tech So Sad?" It covers a lot of stuff, including David Graeber's bullshit jobs and Guy Debord's society of the spectacle. This is the part I find most relevant:
There are two broad categories of Knowledge Workers. The first are outcome-first workers. Their focus is on the business, on winning, on efficiency. Human needs and faults and emotions are an obstacle to be overcome. The second group has an experience-first perspective. These workers love the messy middle. They value the journey.
AI is forcing our whole culture to confront the distinction between product and process. If all you want is the product, fine, let AI crank it out. But AI can never replace the experience of making something. I wrote this in a 2018 post:
Technology saves time and labor with total indifference to whether we enjoy spending time doing certain things. It assumes that we never do -- that sitting and doing nothing while machines do the thing, is always preferable to doing the thing ourselves. Taken to its logical extreme, the message is that nonexistence is preferable to existence. A milder conclusion would be that everything useful should be done by technology. No wonder we increasingly feel that life is meaningless.
August 17. Another dip into the archives on the theme of playing, this is a full repost of this post from 2017:
This sports article, Soccer Assassins, describes two coaching styles, where the normal one is to use physically strong but uncreative players as chesspiece thugs. That wins more games in the short term, but in the long term, the best players and the best teams are built on a foundation of individual skill and improvisation.
This confounds modern thinking about "individualism" because it's about how a group can work better if everyone is doing their own thing. The trick is, they're doing their own thing in service to the group. They're thinking "I want my team to do as well as possible, but I'm not going to trust the coach to tell me what to do, I'm going to figure it out myself in the moment."
This is different from "Collectivism says that society thrives if I trust central planners." But it's also different from "Capitalism says that society thrives if I'm totally selfish." It's not a middle ground -- it's a whole other angle, difficult for our culture to imagine. That's when I realized that people like Ayn Rand ruined "individualism" by tying it to selfishness.
August 13. My big project this month is going through the blog archives adding visible permalinks. I've also been fixing broken links, doing minor edits, and noticing some of the best posts. This is a full repost of this post from 2015:
David Graeber piece, What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun? When industrial age biologists see animals playing, they assume it must have some hidden utilitarian value -- but this assumption is purely cultural, a projection of our selfish and mechanistic society onto nature. Graeber looks at some other perspectives that could put play at the heart of reality:
Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely -- if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, "does anything it likes" -- it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake -- which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
So if electrons are playing, and bacteria and insects and squirrels are playing, and tribal humans are playing most of the time, and modern humans are hardly playing at all, then what happened? One answer is that this is a dead end and we should go back to the stone age or go extinct. I like to think we're a work in progress, an attempt by universal play to manifest at higher levels of complexity, or within our particular mode of consciousness.
Right after reading the Graeber essay, I went with Leigh Ann to a catsit where part of the job was to play with the cat. Watching it jump around chasing a toy on a string, I thought, how often do modern adult humans get to play like this cat?
Basically never. When we're "playing" sports or games we're much more serious, especially at higher levels where winning and losing have heavier consequences. Even board games and card games are more about competitive focus than strict-definition play. One partial exception is Cards Against Humanity -- and that's an interesting name given the idea that modern humans might be the least playful thing in the universe.
Video games can focus and expand our minds in valuable ways, but I can't think of a single one that's truly playful. Is this a failure by human game designers, or is it built into the hardware? How hard would it be to build an AI that could design and improvise a virtual world more creatively than a good human game master? Would we have better artificial intelligence if we judged and improved it by looking at playfulness, instead of using the Turing test which is based on symbolic language? Do we need to start over and build AI from a foundation that cannot be reduced to numbers and logic?
What can we do to make ordinary life more playful? Today I rode my bike to the store, and I noticed that there's a lot more room to playfully ride a bicycle than drive a car. Play is about sudden unpredictable movements, and if you try that in a car you're going to crash. So the most playful society is the one that can tolerate and use the most surprising behavior.
You can read more about this subject in a book called Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. Huizinga uses children as an example of what real playing looks like, but that doesn't work in the 21st century because even children's activities are too structured now. I had to use a cat. Maybe that's why so many Millennials have social anxiety.
August 10. I thought Ask Reddit had a bias against doom, but this thread was not removed by mods: What industry is secretly on the verge of collapsing, but people outside of it haven't noticed yet? And this thread was removed: What product genuinely got BETTER over the years instead of worse?
Four more optimistic links. For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides. I continue to think that biotech is eventually going to be bigger than computers, both in doing good stuff and being dangerous.
Natural experiments prove phytoplankton carbon removal works. There's some doubt about how permanent the carbon removal is, but we can easily cause massive plankton booms just by adding cheap nutrients to the ocean, mainly iron.
As the Climate Warms, Beavers are Coming for Canada's Arctic
170 Years Later: Flowers return after lawn abandoned for film shoot. For the movie 28 Years Later, they left a lawn unmowed, and orchids bloomed that had not been seen there since the 1850s. I continue to think that utopia is easy: there are a lot of very simple things we can do that would make the world much better, and most of them involve just giving up control and letting things go.
August 7. Great analysis of the implications of AI, Taste Is All That's Left:
Ninety percent of every field is bad.... We have now removed the throttle and left the ratio intact. Ninety percent of an infinite output is still infinite. The signal did not get worse. The noise became free, and free noise rises without limit, and every real thing you make now arrives into a sea of plausible nothing that looks, at a glance, exactly like it.
Which means the scarce act is no longer making. It is choosing. Deciding what, out of the endless generated plausible, deserves to exist and be kept. Curation was a minor virtue when things were expensive to make. It is the whole game when they are free.
People in this thread are using the phrase "AI slop" as if everything made by AI is automatically slop. If you believe this, fair enough, but then you must support the abolition of AI.
If you believe that AI is capable of making good things, then it doesn't matter whether this article, or anything, was AI generated. Whatever it is -- software, prose, images -- if you have taste, you don't have to figure out if it was made by AI or not. All you have to do is apply taste and determine how good it is.
August 5. Going through the archives I found 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.