Ran Prieur

July 28.

2025-07-28T16:20:09Z

July 28. Angry essay by a journalist who went to Dubai:

There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world -- and not be blamed openly for this desire -- visit Dubai.

A few paragraphs down she says it more concisely: "Being served makes us cruel infants." But I want to nit-pick about the term "free trade." Most people use it that way, as if "free" means nothing more than the freedom of the rich to crush the poor under their boots. I would call that capitalism, which has never been free, because a truly free economy must be made entirely of free individuals, and nobody is free if they need money to survive. Bashing "free trade" makes it sound like the only alternative is a top-down state-run economy, when what we need is a bottom-up economy in which basic quality of life is guaranteed, so nobody is forced to sell their labor.

Anyway, a few more links about wealth and power. From Reddit, People who have worked for the ultrawealthy, what are some of their deepest, darkest secrets? "My biggest take aways are 1) that many of them have no real understanding how the real world works and 2) it's often a lonely, fearful, and sad life."

An archive of a NY Times article about Beach laws. According to ancient common law, beaches belong to the public. According to capitalism, property owners have the right to put up seawalls that force the beach underwater. This conflict, between preserving beaches and preserving beachfront buildings, will escalate as sea levels rise.

Superman wasn't always so squeaky clean -- in early comics he was a radical vigilante. Before Superman was de-politicized by having him fight supervillains, he was fighting common greed and corruption.

And a Reddit sub-thread, trying to puzzle out why mass shooters don't target the rich.

July 24.

2025-07-24T12:40:02Z

July 24. Unrelated light links. Sailing the fjords like the Vikings yields unexpected insights, about a guy who traveled up and down the coast of Norway in Viking-style boats, and discovered places they would have landed, and why they would not have needed navigational tools.

Vanishing home field advantage in English football, a careful data analysis that discovers two things: home field advantage has been decreasing across all leagues, and in the Covid season, when there were no fans, home field advantage disappeared completely. This suggests that the main reason for home field advantage is fan support, and that the reason it's vanishing is that more fans are traveling to support their team at away games.

Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body. I think this kind of thing has more long-term promise than AI, because AI is just humans looking inward, deeper into the human-made world. By engaging with the agency of other species, we're looking outward.

A fascinating thread on Ask Old People, To what extent could you see your now-adult children's personalities emerging when they were still little? At least half the answers say their kids already had their personalities at birth.

And some music. The Many Sides of Erik Satie is a nice article about the composer, and how strange and ahead of his time he was. "The Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes do not sound like 19th-century concert hall music; they sound like pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios, CDs, downloads." I like listening to his weirdest piece, Vexations, at half speed.

July 21.

2025-07-21T21:10:44Z

July 21. I have a bunch of negative links about AI, but that opinion is no longer interesting. It's shocking how fast the conventional wisdom has shifted, from "Look at this cool thing" to "I'm sick of this dystopian clusterfuck." I'll just post this one link, a cynical subthread about AI from a Reddit thread, What are you starting to lose interest in?

I've started the book Wilding by Isabella Tree, about a rewilding project on a farm in England. It's eventually inspiring, but the beginning is depressing, describing the global trend of obsessive intensification, as giant agribusiness tries to squeeze every last bit of fertility from the land and every last bit of motivation from the poor saps who do the actual work.

This is the zeitgeist of late stage capitalism. It is now spreading from business into government, as described by this article, The Enshittification of American Power. A culture of more and more is meeting a reality of less and less, with an ever smaller number of ever richer people hungrily gobbling the last scraps. The next stage will be "Let's scapegoat some people and kill them." After that, maybe as soon as 2040, I expect the culture to start healing, and eventually come full circle, from "Let's make lots of money" to "Let's make it fun to have no money."

July 18.

2025-07-18T18:40:24Z

July 18. Still putting in heavy hours on my novel. Last week I got it adequately drafted all the way to the end, and with that perspective, I just spent a week doing a deep rewrite of part one. The first six chapters have been shuffled and condensed to four chapters, with a stronger opening, some distracting details removed, and more details added to fill in the semi-utopian postapocalypse:

Because of the Institute, Threeforks was an oasis in yokel-land. All the towns around, Hog Heaven and Plush and Speedtrap, were mostly Nativists and hippies, but we had every quirky passion of the overeducated. We had a fuzz bass and oboe band that sounded like the wind, and a zither and steel drum band that droned in clouds of suss. We had poetry slams in random meter, somebody would crash out on tetric anapest and they'd be rolling on the floor. We had credless swap meets, walled in with your wares until no trades were left, and the person who came out with the most stuff got dunked.

July 16.

2025-07-16T16:20:20Z

July 16. I'm reading Shamanism, a book of essays compiled by Shirley Nicholson, and in one by Mihaly Hoppal, I learned that shamans are not mentally ill. Specifically, there's a common belief among modern people who are sympathetic to other cultures, that the people who we label as schizophrenic and exclude from society, would find respected roles as shamans in indigenous cultures. In fact, "Shamans are much healthier than the rest of the population, due to the psychic and physical strains of the deep trance." And, "Recent studies in in South Asia have shown that, out of more than a hundred Thai and Malayan shamans and mediums, none was mentally ill."

Shamans are highly capable specialists in a level of reality that our highly capable specialists don't go to, because our culture thinks it's crazy. Only our crazy people go there, and they don't know how to deal with it. They are overwhelmed by stuff that a shaman knows how to navigate, and in shamanic cultures they would be given help in dealing with that level of reality, instead of being medicated to stop them from going there.

July 14.

2025-07-14T14:00:49Z

July 14. It's too hot this week for heavy thinking. Three light links, two from the Stoner Thoughts subreddit. My dog is such a good boy (even when he's a bad boy) so "maybe a higher being sees us the same way we see dogs." I've thought about something similar when I'm walking dogs. I give them a certain amount of slack to mess with stuff and choose their own path, but at some point I take charge for their own benefit (or mine) and I wonder if that's what fate does with me.

This almost uncommented post is subtly profound: I think I died and the afterlife looks just like my apartment

And a fun subreddit of mostly video posts, justgalsbeingchicks

July 11.

2025-07-11T23:30:33Z

July 11. The other day I said AI is overhyped, but my actual opinion is more complex. I think the hype around a given use of AI is inversely proportional to its helpfulness. So of all the directions we can imagine AI going, the ones that people get the most excited about, like "AI will replace all jobs," or "AI will gain human-like consciousness," will either fail, or will succeed in a harmful way. Meanwhile, a lot of niche applications of AI, known only to specialists, will actually make things better.

I think video games are a great fit for AI: Facts don't matter, mistakes don't kill anyone, artistic standards are mid, and there's a ton of grunt coding that can be automated. Humans will still come up with ideas, and provide a general framework, but AI can fill in the details so fast that we might get a Fallout or a Grand Theft Auto where a whole city is simulated down to every street, and the contents of a million rooms can be AI-generated on the fly.

I also think AI is a good fit for therapy, maybe too good. It's already better than a bad human therapist, and more potent than an old-fashioned passive therapist. The danger is that the machine, in a way that a human would never do, will feed back the patient's madness, and pull them deeper into it. I don't see how more powerful computers will fix this. Here's a good Hacker News comment thread on LLMs as therapists.

July 9.

2025-07-09T21:10:11Z

July 9. Going the opposite direction from Monday, I think it takes a lot of effort to make life this frantic and unsatisfying, and a much better world is pretty easy. Here's an article about Iceland's four day work week:

The trial was designed to reduce work hours from the standard 40-hour week to just 35 or 36 hours, without reducing employees' pay.... Employees reported significant improvements in job satisfaction, mental health, and work-life balance. This was coupled with a noticeable reduction in stress and a decline in instances of burnout.... This was not just a benefit for employees; businesses began to see tangible improvements in output, suggesting that a well-rested workforce is more effective and efficient.

Mirror of a NY Times article about a Space-Out Competition in Seoul. "Part pageant and part boredom-endurance challenge, it requires participants to repose in silence for an hour and a half, with gentle interruptions every 15 minutes to have their heart rates measured."

From PsyPost, New brain stimulation method shows promise for treating mood, anxiety, and trauma disorders. I continue to think that AI is overhyped and transcranial brain hacking is going to be huge.

Mood and anxiety disorders are often linked to overactivity in the amygdala. While some treatments like medication and talk therapy may help regulate this region, non-invasive brain stimulation options like transcranial magnetic stimulation have limited ability to reach deeper brain areas. Focused ultrasound, by contrast, can target these deeper areas directly and precisely.

July 7.

2025-07-07T19:50:09Z

July 7. Some links about late stage capitalism eating itself, starting with many of the answers in this Reddit thread, What is currently on the brink of collapse but no one is talking about it? Ominously, it includes both private equity, and businesses not owned by private equity.

Good blog post on Engineered Addictions. "The pattern is always the same: start with connection, end with extraction."

Long article (thanks Jason), That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose

And a short rant, Are we the baddies?

You want to opt out of this all you say? Good luck running a competitive business! Every metric is now a target. You better maximize engagement or you will lose engagement this is a red queen's race we can't afford to lose! Burn all the social capital, burn all your values, FEED IT ALL TO MOLOCH!

July 4.

2025-07-04T16:20:05Z

July 4. For the holiday, posting negative links about America would be too easy, so here are some positive links about America, starting with a mostly fun Reddit thread, What's the most American thing you've done?

America's Incarceration Rate Is About to Fall Off a Cliff, basically because the career criminal boomers are dying off.

ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts. The application "allows users to add a pin on a map to show where ICE agents have recently been spotted."

Not exclusively American, or necessarily good, but this thread makes me smile. What profession has way more people on illegal drugs than people realize? "Every single meal at every restaurant you've enjoyed has been lovingly prepared by a team of potheads. If it's a fancy restaurant then it's coke heads."

And a cool video from 2018, Washington, DC to Seattle: A Complete Road Trip

July 2.

2025-07-02T14:00:19Z

July 2. Today, metaphysics. Since the last post, I've been trying to figure out this new idea about the three dimensions of time, because the articles don't explain it well. In three dimensions of space, the third dimension is a whole new direction. But in time, they're saying that the third dimension is just a way to "access" the second dimension. Why can't you use the second to access the second, like you can in space?

Matt mentioned a train station, and the metaphor popped. The first dimension is a single train track, a normal timeline where a bunch of things happen in sequence. The second dimension is all the train tracks. And while it's possible in theory to switch from one train to another out on the tracks, in practice you always switch trains in the station, which is the third dimension. Just as the station is outside the tracks, the third dimension is outside time as we know it.

Donald Hoffman says that time and space are data structures and not the fundamental reality. The best explanation I've read, of how time and space are constructed out of consciousness and relationships, is in the 1982 book Physics as Metaphor by Roger Jones. And this is a cool Jaron Lanier piece from 2006, Does time come together like an island of boats floating on the open seas?

This also fits with many near death experiences that report a realm outside time. From Michael Talbot's 1991 book The Holographic Universe, lightly edited:

The Aboriginal concept of the "dreamtime" is almost identical to the afterlife planes of existence decribed in Western sources. It is the realm where human spirits go after death, and once there a shaman can converse with the dead and instantly access all knowledge. It is also a dimension in which time, space, and the other boundaries of earthly life cease to exist. Because of this, Australian shamans often refer to the afterlife as "survival in infinity."