Ran Prieur

September 15.

2023-09-15T15:10:25Z

September 15. Stray links. On a tangent from sparrows in China, something similar happened with Vultures in India, except they were killed accidentally by a cattle drug.

Without vultures, carcasses attracted feral dogs and rats. Not only do these animals carry rabies and other diseases that threaten humans, they are far less efficient at finishing off carrion. The rotting remains they left behind were full of pathogens that then spread to drinking water.... The authors estimated that, between 2000 and 2005, the loss of vultures caused 500,000 additional human deaths.

A surprising psychology article about nostalgia. "Contrary to the belief that nostalgia primarily revolves around the distant past, the results suggest that individuals are experiencing nostalgia for time periods that are relatively recent."

Some happy local news, Artist's giant troll sculptures bring whimsy to Seattle-area woods

And a thread from r/Psychonaut, What's a lesson that you were taught while on psychedelics? The only one I've received personally is "Trees. Just trees, man." But this one is nice:

On DMT I met an entity. It emerged from the wall opposite me, an agender being made of light. In a moment outside of time I asked without language all the questions I had about life, the universe, and meaning. Its response to every question was the same: "It doesn't matter. Look around you. Isn't it beautiful?"

September 13.

2023-09-13T13:50:40Z

September 13. Continuing on the subject of wisdom, I wrote that neither wise people, nor unwise people, will stand up and say "I am wise." Simon comments, "Plenty of unwise people claim common sense is on their side, though." That's a great point, and that's why I don't think common sense is a real thing. There isn't less common sense than there used to be -- there never was any. When people talk about "common sense", they mean other people sharing their implicit biases. If there seems to be less common sense, it's because implicit biases are getting more diverse.

And Matt takes a shot at defining wisdom:

In the 1950s, Communist China -- in trying to save grain -- began a campaign against sparrows. It was nominally successful: they killed millions of sparrows and saved tons of rice. But they inadvertently triggered years of famine, because sparrows don't only eat rice. They also eat bugs.

We could call their campaign "stupid," but it was observant (sparrows are eating our rice), and it was backed by efforts in mathematics (they measured how much rice each sparrow was eating on average, and calculated the potential savings in tons of rice if sparrows were removed).

Maybe the divide between intelligence and wisdom can be described as the difference between a parts approach and a holistic approach. The Chinese were smart (for a while), but not wise.

I'm thinking about John Vervaeke's concept of the four kinds of knowing, which I summarized in this post. What we call intelligence is about propositional knowing: knowing what statements are true and false, and how to derive true statements from other true statements.

Imagine some future Chinese utopia wants to design a test, such that anyone who passes it would not make that mistake with the sparrows. You couldn't just give them a math problem about sparrows eating bugs, because the real problem is looking for data in a direction that you don't know about. The skill you want people to learn is to disconnect their propositional mind from whatever framework it's in, so they can look outside it.

This reminds me of a bit from James Carse's book Finite and Infinite Games: "Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries." Also, from chapter 71 of the Tao Te Ching (Ellen Chen translation): "From knowing to not knowing, this is superior. From not knowing to knowing, this is sickness."

September 12.

2023-09-12T12:40:01Z

September 12. My new favorite blogger is Skunk Ledger. From two weeks ago, a thoughtful post about Scenes and Villages as two different kinds of communities. "I suspect great cities have both scenes and villages; scenes as exports, villages to keep the city human and anchor it in time, beyond the volatile epicycles of scenes."

And from two days ago, Redemption is a bit of short fiction inspired by a glib quote about how telling simple stories lowers your IQ. The theme is the conflict between doing stuff with your brain that makes people respect your intelligence, and doing stuff that you enjoy.

My serious take on the same quote is that IQ is a simple story. People use those two letters to point to anything a brain might be good at, when actual IQ tests measure a very specific thing. Someone gave western intelligence tests to African villagers, and they had a whole different framework. We would match a broom to a mop, because they serve the same function. They would match a broom to a house, because you sweep out the house.

I've also been thinking about the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Wisdom is one of those things that everyone believes in, even though nobody can define it -- let alone test for it. And it occurs to me: both smart people and stupid people will stand up and say, "I am smart." But neither wise people, nor unwise people, will stand up and say "I am wise."

Loosely related: a Hacker News thread, What is an emotion? Whatever they are, emotions are squarely in the grey area between body and cognition.

September 8.

2023-09-08T20:00:05Z

September 8. Some medical knowledge from Reddit: Your calf muscles act as a pump for your lymph fluid, "which is basically the garbage pick-up and immunity doordash of your body." A few of the comments mention something I thought immediately: Restless legs syndrome is my body trying to help me, because every night I have to do a few hundred calf muscle pumps before I can fall asleep.

Another medical link, a video: Could the sun be good for your heart? When that speech became famous, that the one thing we can be sure about is sunscreen, I knew at the very least it would turn out that sunscreen is not something we can be sure about.

And some music for the weekend. Over on my songs and playlists page I've added a new Spotify disco playlist. I'm not a big fan of disco, but I found almost an hour of stuff that I continue to enjoy listening to, and my new favorite disco song is Amii Stewart's Knock On Wood.

I've also been listening to this 2021 jangle pop album, Modern Fiction by Ducks Ltd. And this is a cool page, A Guide to Alternate Tunings on Bandcamp.

September 6.

2023-09-06T18:40:31Z

September 6. Thanks Karthik for sending this video, The Art of Life. It's about Michael Behrens, who is basically the Unabomber's good twin. He was a math genius who took the position vacated by Ted Kaczynski at Berkeley, and later built a house on primitive land. He has lots of cool stuff to say, but don't romanticize his lifestyle too much -- if he got his food in any other way than driving into town, they would have shown it.

It's funny, for someone who talks about the value of doing nothing, he's very good at doing something, or he wouldn't have cleared that land and built that house. In my experience, western Buddhists are naturally busy people who are drawn to Buddhism to keep themselves in balance.

Some people think my values have changed because I no longer write about the critique of civilization or try to live outside it. Those were both spinoffs of my number one value, which has not changed since I was five years old: I love giant blocks of time with nothing I'm supposed to be doing. Some people are horrified by the thought that after death, it's just your consciousness floating in the void. I'd be like, free at last!

Seriously, my new favorite thing to do when I'm high, is silent darkness. The ringing in my ears, and the dim shapes on the backs of my eyelids, are so interesting that I keep forgetting to focus on my breathing. When I do, I've noticed a subtle catch in my throat at the top and bottom of every breath, and I've been working on cleaning it up, which is hard because it's halfway buried in involuntary.

I'm not claiming causality, but at the same time that I've been doing this, I've been getting better at being present in each moment. Buddhists talk about "craving", but I didn't really get it until I got down to the micro scale. I was watching soccer and noticed the difference between watching the player kick the ball, and hoping for some result of that kicking.

One of my favorite lyrics, from Camper Van Beethoven's Lulu Land, is "How can you lose when you choose what you feel?" That sounds like a magic power, but again, the key is the micro scale. When something happens, you have a habit of how it's supposed to make you feel, but if you can make yourself small enough in time, you can cut that habit off and do something different.

September 4.

2023-09-04T16:20:14Z

September 4. For Labor Day, a repost from exactly six years ago:

Imagine you live in a world where money is completely disconnected from work. Not only is there an unconditional minimum income, there's also a maximum income -- and they're the same! Corporate executives, sled dog racers, insurance agents, and people who just watch TV all day, all make the same amount of money.

In that world, what would you do with your time?

And how similar is that to what you actually do with your time?

To the extent that those things are the same, you're successful -- even if you're poor. To the extent that they're different, your quality of life is being constrained by cultural assumptions and economic rules that tie activity to money.

You've all seen that political grid, where one axis is social freedom and the other is economic freedom. That's always rubbed me the wrong way, and now I can say why: because it has economic freedom exactly backwards, defining it as the right to trade your labor for money, even if it's something you wouldn't do if not for the money, and then turn around and trade your money for the labor of others, even if they're only doing it for the money. That's not people being free -- it's money being free to control us.

In a value system that puts quality of life first, economic freedom is not freedom of money but freedom from money, and the more disconnected money is from activity, the more free we are.

September 1.

2023-09-01T13:50:29Z

September 1. Three trippy links for the weekend, starting with a scientific article. Insular Stimulation Produces Mental Clarity and Bliss:

For the first time, an ecstatic aura has been evoked through the electrical stimulation of the dorsal anterior insula during presurgical invasive intracerebral monitoring in a patient who did not suffer from an ecstatic form of epilepsy.
...
On the MEQ‐30 questionnaire, completed to describe the ecstatic symptoms experienced during the AI3‐4 stimulations, the patient had a total score of 130 of 150 points... which is considered a "complete" mystical experience.

From the Psychonaut subreddit, What's the most interesting thing to happen to you on a psychedelic? Of course selection bias is going to make psychedelics seem more reliably mind-blowing than they really are. This whole thread is better than my answer, which would be sensing the personalities of trees.

And from Ask Old People, What coincidence has occurred in your life that pretty much convinced you that we are living in the matrix? My explanation for all this stuff is simply that the fundamental unit of reality is the first person perspective. Each of us is dreaming the world on the fly, and we've dreamed up a physical universe as one way to be characters in each others' stories; but it's not seamless and it's not the only way.