novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
crashwatch (retired)
search this site
"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."
- Terence McKenna
novel
Apocalypsopolis, book one
zines
Civilization Will Eat Itself, Superweed 1-4, best of
crashwatch (retired)
search this site
December 30. Awesome essay, The Departed Queen by Dana Mackenzie. The author is a chess player who spent two years in an obsessive quest to consistently beat a computer program that would normally be better than any human player, through an early queen sacrifice. After working out the details over 100 games, he tried it in a tournament against a stronger human player. Mackenzie combines this story with thoughts about artificial intelligence and the future role of computers.
I have some new thoughts about artificial intelligence which for now I'm keeping to myself. But they have something to do with a distinction between quantitative and non-quantitative thinking, partly inspired by reading reviews of this book: The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.
December 27. Some links about wildness. From Jared Diamond, Best Practices for Raising Kids? Look to Hunter-Gatherers. There are three sections: hold them, share them, and let them run free. This reminds me of this article, How children lost the right to roam in four generations.
Hunting by liberal, urban, locavores is a trend good for the environment.
And a 2011 blog post, How to Solve Homelessness, in which the homeless author argues that society should not try to end homelessness, but make it easier, with good free public toilets, super-cheap capsule hotels, the right to have a job without an address, and the right to sleep in public.
December 26. I'm in Seattle with adequate internet through January 4, but still busy. Thanks Charles for an updated link to the story behind the abominable O Holy Night. Also, I probably exaggerated on internet costs, but without giving Comcast my personal info, there's no way to find out how much I'll pay after the 6-12 month bait period.
December 24. My long-term plan for internet access is to solicit donations, buy internet from the evil Comcast, which will cost about $1000 a year, or $1001 if it's bundled with a bunch of crap that does more harm than good, and then offer it free to my neighbors through tools that are being developed by the Open Wireless Movement. For now, I'm mostly getting online in a building at Spokane Community College, which is surprisingly open on Christmas eve.
Here's my favorite funny Christmas song, The Abominable O Holy Night. The related page telling the story is gone from the internet, but the singer is highly skilled and intentionally making every possible ridiculous mistake. And here's my favorite serious Christmas song, Alex Chilton's Jesus Christ.
December 18. My partial retirement was timed well: my internet access has just been severely limited. Right now I'm on at the library, but it's possible I won't be on again until the 26th when I'm visiting Seattle. So emails will be delayed, and blogging will be even lighter than I thought.
By request, here are some of my own favorite websites: the Food For Thought subreddit has been my biggest single source of links for the last year, and there are other good subreddits if you can find them. The key to using reddit is to register, unsubscribe from all the default subreddits, and then go looking for the ones you like.
Hacker News is similar to reddit but smarter and with more tech links.
Early Warning has carefully selected links and graphs, and sometimes good analysis.
And four deep-thinking bloggers who can be counted on for good stuff once a month or so: The View From Hell, Mythodrome, Raptitude, and Ribbonfarm.
December 12. This subreddit post has let the cat out of the bag, so I'd better talk about it here. About two weeks ago I finally started a project that I've been putting off and dreading for years: going through all my essays and doing whatever I had to do to still feel okay about having my name on them.
This project was the main cause of my decision to greatly cut back on putting my thoughts on the internet. For me, writing about ideas for an audience is like getting drunk, and taking responsibility for those ideas later is like the hangover. Sometimes it comes in only a few hours, when people think I'm wrong or missed something important. And sometimes it comes years later, when I can see myself that I was wrong or missed something important.
Also my whole intellectual style is different. Many of my essays, especially the early ones, remind me of a novice swordsman, swinging the sword like a sledgehammer and sadistically battering a practice dummy. As an unknown writer I had a high incentive to attract attention and a low incentive to avoid mistakes. Now it's the other way around.
Anyway, I've been going through the essays from oldest to newest, and I'm still stuck on a few at the top of the list, but the rest are done. I did three different kinds of things. A few examples: How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth was heavily annotated, to keep all the stuff I was wrong about and explain why I was wrong. The Effects of Highly Habitual People was so heavily edited that I saved the original version. Arno-geddon was kept unchanged, but with a general disclaimer at the top. The Slow Crash has some of all three. And the one thing on the page to remain untouched, perfect as originally written, is Your Life As Pornography.
This is a big thing, so you all have permission to email me about it, but I won't respond much.
December 11. Via Early Warning, a cutting edge analysis of global warming, Something Wicked This Way Comes, arguing that the coming temperature rise will be similar to the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, but much faster.
December 10. Could boredom be curable? The article suggests that boredom is an issue of where and how we focus our attention. Back on November 27 I linked to another article about boredom which defined the word more explicitly, and not quite the same as this one seems to define it.
December 7. In culture news, Hawkwind guitarist Huw Lloyd-Langton has died. Here's my favorite, The Island, a live combination of solos from two other songs. And one that he wrote and sang, Dragons and Fables.
December 6. The rules of my semi-retirement are coming into clearer focus. A friend suggests that I could "follow my bliss" and just keep writing without ever looking at feedback, but I still think that would be bad for me. Immunity from criticism is one of the biggest ways people get corrupted by power. Also it would be difficult to draw the line, because I don't want to cut off all communication; I just want to greatly reduce the amount of attention I spend discussing intellectual shit. But it's not bad for me to post other people's ideas, and even summarize them, without personally accepting comments. So here are some links:
A reddit comment on the bleakness of Japanese life. (The original comment was deleted. Thanks sess and reddit_is_horrible for finding a new link.)
Related: Most lives are lived by default. The original link is down so that link goes to the Hacker News thread with discussion and a link to a cache.
City birds use cigarette butts to smoke out parasites. What do I think about this? Ha ha, you'll never know!
And a brilliant scientific article about Musical beauty and information compression:
I hypothesise that enduring musical masterpieces will possess an interesting objective property: despite apparent complexity, they will also exhibit high compressibility.
...
I contend that a seminal point in human history must have occurred when the act of compressing sensory patterns became intrinsically satisfying in its own right. As brain complexity and consciousness led to greater sophistication in the sensory stream's interpretation and reward system, a multitude of compressible sensory inputs could became increasingly pleasurable.
...
I speculate that when we appreciate music, a major influencing factor is the release of pleasure that comes from performing a surprisingly profound audio data compression. By this logic, one would anticipate the level of pleasure to scale with the mismatch between the apparent complexity initially perceived by our ears and the real simplicity subsequently resolved in our minds.
If you want to discuss this amongst yourselves, I've posted it to the subreddit.
December 4. Another note on my motivation for semi-retirement. It's not that I'm getting burned out on posting, or running out of stuff to write about. In that sense I feel like I could keep going forever. What's wearing me down is the accumulating burden of responsibility for everything I've ever written. With thousands of readers, and hundreds of thousands of words, there will always be people who think I'm wrong about something, or think they have an important insight, and sometimes they'll be right. I would love to live in a bubble, and just throw stuff out there without ever seeing a word of feedback, but that would be irresponsible. The right thing to do is to look at every response and honestly consider it, but this takes a tremendous amount of psychic energy. If I can't do it, it's better not to write anything, and I mostly can't do it any more. Maybe a little. I expect future posts to either be about personal stuff, which I still enjoy talking about, or simple links like megastorms drowning California, or if it's about heavy ideas, it will be a link to someone else's blog with its own comment section, like this Ribbonfarm guest post, Patterns of Refactored Agency, for which there is also a post on the subreddit.
December 3. Something I've been thinking about for a while, and this feels like the right time. As a blogger, I'm going into permanent semi-retirement. I won't be able to stick to full retirement, because there will be things I want to write about too much, and I want to keep traffic coming to this page. So I'll still post at least once a week. But after seven years of heavy blogging, I'm just burned out on discussing ideas, and I'd rather turn my attention to other things.
December 1. This ranty Hipcrime Vocab post, The Neurochemistry of Americans, has a fascinating idea: that a gene related to dopamine reception is correlated with migration, so maybe Americans, being descended from recent migrants, are genetically more prone to all kinds of impulsive behaviors. Note the comment section at the bottom of the page; please direct your comments there and not to my inbox.
Shifting to American politics, a couple weeks ago I saw this article, When the Nerds Go Marching In, about how Obama's campaign crushed Romney's campaign in the realm of information technology. It occurred to me, this is likely to continue as long as skilled programmers heavily favor Democrats. Nate Silver has now covered this issue in detail: Technology Talent Gap Threatens G.O.P. Campaigns.
There is something Republicans could do to attract techies and young people... and they did it! After the election they released a policy brief supporting radical copyright reform -- and then immediately took it back, probably because of financial pressure from Hollywood assholes who are going to give more money to Democrats anyway. Here's an editorial about it: Vanishing 'copywrong' document blasts RIAA, suggests radical reform, and should be taken seriously. If Republicans stood behind this, I would probably switch to their side on the national level, because this difference alone would be bigger than the many little ways I like Democrats better.
November 30. Two good news links from the BBC. New York City celebrates day without violent crime. And US birth rate falls to record low. I expect that the ongoing economic collapse will continue to drive down birthrates, but violence will increase in any population that's short of food.
November 29. One clarification on yesterday's post: I'm not saying that today's upper, middle, and lower classes will become the upper, middle, and lower classes of post-scarcity society. The two systems can overlap in time, with individuals holding one position in one system and a different position in the other, just as the medieval class system based on ancestry has overlapped with the modern system based on money.
I want to push ahead to the other subject I mentioned: How exactly can the tech system pass through the bottleneck of resource exhaustion? This is way too big for one post, but in the context of technology, I think we're going to see more automation, not less. It's true that machines require scarce energy, but they still require less energy than managing and feeding human workers.
Of course, if too many people go hungry, there will be riots. So I expect the poorest nations to fall into chaos, while medium-wealth nations keep their citizens barely subdued with low quality products of industrial agriculture, basically human dog food, which already fills half of the typical supermarket. For a depressing argument that peak oil helps industrial agriculture, see Stuart Staniford's The Fallacy of Reversibility.
At the same time, I expect a golden age of TV shows and music and video games, because high quality entertainment does not consume more resources than low quality entertainment.
November 28. Something big that I've been putting off for a week, and loosely related to yesterday's subject, the latest View from Hell post: Fungibility and the Loss of Demandingness. It's already too clear and concentrated to be summarized, but here are three sample paragraphs:
To sum up, the modern economy is primarily composed of things and services available for money, ratcheting to allow fewer and fewer non-monetary costs. When things are available for money, anyone can acquire them; this dilutes the information about the self that can be contained in the ownership. Similarly, a major trend in the labor market is toward fungible skills that anyone can supply, reducing opportunities for virtuosity and positive information about the self through work. Everything is increasingly available for money, except, I will argue, a major thing we all want to buy that gives us the feeling of meaning: our own value and specialness.
...
The mistake is to view hipsterdom as pure signaling. It invokes signaling, of course, but also the genuine, authentic search for value in genuineness and authenticity. The hipster is a person who is particularly alienated by the world of purely fungible culture. His music and books, his old "vintage" items, are more demanding, harder to find. But at the same time, he is made more interesting and valuable through what they demand from him.
...
The fungibility of work, the reduction of demand for long-developed special skills, the impossibility of virtuosity in one's limited job, has made work less and less a source of reliable, positive information about the increasing value of the self - because it has ceased to truly improve people. But people still desire to work at what they love, and to improve themselves. The market will sell them the feeling of this, but will not commonly supply them with food in exchange for pursuing virtuosity.
Going off on my own tangent, humans have two contradictory desires. We want to feel like we're valuable people living good lives, which itself is a massive and difficult subject. A good place to start is the famous video, The surprising truth about what motivates us. The other thing we want is for life to be easy, but there is a trade-off between a good life and an easy life.
This conflict comes into clearer focus as more work is automated. Do you want a machine where you push a button and food comes out, or do you want the challenge and personal empowerment of growing and preparing food with your own hands? This was not an issue in preindustrial civilization, when work was done by slaves and peasants. The lower classes suffered, but not from existential angst, and the elite felt important because they were ruling actual humans. Now there is a growing class of people who have no political power but are served by machines.
If the tech system can pass through the bottleneck of resource exhaustion (I think it can, but that's another subject) we might emerge into a high-tech utopia/dystopia, in which it's easy to be comfortable but difficult to be happy. Social class will no longer be about power or even standard of living, but valuable activity. The upper class will hold the few important jobs that still require humans. The middle class will be hobbyists, practicing difficult skills that are not necessary for society. And the lower class will be content to consume entertainment.
November 27. The History of Boredom has some good stuff. Most important, it has a precise definition: "a state in which the sufferer wants to be engaged in some meaningful activity but cannot, characterized by both restlessness and lethargy."
Notice how much this overlaps with some definitions of depression. I think that everyone who has gone to school, or otherwise been trained for an externally-driven life, has to pass through the desert of unmotivation while learning to motivate themselves internally. And the article has some stuff at the end about how it's good for you to have nothing to do.
Also, check this out:
A host of studies have found that people who are easily bored may also be at greater risk for depression, anxiety disorders, gambling addictions, eating disorders, aggression and other psychosocial issues. Boredom can also exacerbate existing mental illness. And, according to at least one 2010 study, people who are more easily bored are two-and-a-half times more likely to die of heart disease.
This raises the question, which cannot yet be answered except by guessing: what exactly makes different people more or less easily bored? Personally I'm so resistant to boredom that I sometimes fantasize about being in solitary confinement. My guess is that it's partly genetic, and the key environmental factor is how much free time you had in your first few years of life.
November 27. So a bunch of people have asked me for a recipe for my homemade sweet potato chips. I always say: slice them, throw in some olive oil and salt, bake them on trays in the oven, and I'll eventually make a page with more details. Here it is: sweet potato chips. It's really very simple except that it requires great attention to detail to get them all crunchy but not burnt.
November 20. The cutting edge in medium-term future forecasting, 2512 by Charlie Stross. If I'm making a cautious bet, I agree with pretty much all of it. The tech system will keep going, and there will be lots of crazy biotech, but no AI singularity and not much happening off-planet. The oceans will have risen and the more delicate species will be extinct, but there will still be plenty of biological life. The human population will be lower, the nation-state will be obsolete, and industrial-age capitalism will be dead. There's also a loooong comment section with many more ideas.
Taking a different angle on the nearer future, a Hipcrime Vocab post on Collapse and the Sorites Paradox, arguing that America is well into collapse but it's happening so gradually that people haven't noticed. The examples here are about economics, standard of living, and infrastructure.
I think these two visions are perfectly compatible. The depletion of nonrenewable resources has already begun to cause great hardship, but it will not plunge us back to medieval times. Large complex systems will stumble through a transition from nonrenewable to renewable resources, they will shrink both geographically and in range of functions, some will die, some will transform, and new systems will appear, and we'll be in a world with new wonders and new problems.
Related: the best green ruins image I've seen in a while.