Oh, Still a Doomer

I try to make the doomer case less and less because the process of making something deepens your mental associations, understanding, and recall, and I have found I am not one of those people who can function well with constant knowledge and advocacy of our system's weaknesses, or even the inevitability of death for you, me, everybody.  I've spent enough time there, and it isn't worth much to me.

So I don't actively seek out knowledge or rhetoric about doom, but if a real gem in the genre comes my way, I am liable to share it.   I have run into the site Small Delicious Life.  If I were trying to convince someone we are doomed, ie we're not going to voluntarily stop what we are doing until collapse, I would point to the article The Compassionate Systems Theory of Change.  Basically, we are where we are because attention is limited and the structures around us are inertia standing in the way of change:

The way our electricity is generated can lock in orders of magnitude more pollution that we can ever affect by turning our lights off. The way our cities are built can lock in order of magnitude more pollution than we can affect with personal driving choices. We built these systems to cope with our limited ability to pay attention—to think and choose. Changing systems is the most powerful lever we can pull.

I just don't think these systems are going to change.  It's a matter of not being able to coordinate, or convince current winners to give anything up, especially any matter of control.  To go more in-depth on why check out Meditations On Moloch, or Moloch's Toolbox.

My Black Holes

[YouTube of Black Hole Sun, if you want some musical accompaniment].

I) 

Any time I try to make sense my life, and especially what my early 30s were, I will always need to address my two great black holes.  I think I have even achieved escape velocity from their event horizons, which would be impossible if they were real black holes. . . but this is just a metaphor.

The first black hole to mention is my time of grief. In the period of one year and ten days, I lost my grandfather (who was and is my clearest vision of what a man should be), my father , and then my uncle.  Right before the last death, my grandmother had a major fall that left her hospitalized.  She was put in a facility for skilled nursing, and when she came out she had to leave her home of many years and go to assisted living.  My uncle had got the ball rolling on the assisted living before he passed, but as you can imagine my role in my grandmother's care enlarged significantly.

The year and ten days of trauma after trauma was one thing, but the pain dragged out with bad interpersonal relations and coping skills from the survivors.  Grief can bring out the worst in people.  And the more you try to overcome that, the more you can get sucked in, until you are well past your limit.  “If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family,” sure Ram, but also you could see them every weekend, either bunched on one day or spread out between Saturday and Sunday. . .  In any case, it wasn't part of the healing process, at least not for me or my wife.  I could have used that time, but more I needed the energy and emotional space.  That's black hole #1.  If I can dare to say I have escaped it, that has only happened recently.  For two years, I couldn't really function, and it's been a slow, almost imperceptibly slow, build up since then.

The other black hole was coaching debate.  It was a great way to work 80 to 100 hour weeks, with sub- minimum wage compensation for the extra hours beyond my teaching contract.  But payment wasn't really the problem; that's just the most persuasive thing I can say to convince most people why I left.  The real deal was that I lost the faith. . . When I started out, I believed in the activity and its meaning.  I thought it was a way to help young people find the life of the mind, and move beyond pettiness.  I thought I was making real ground, on growing a community, and that I could be part of it and belong. When it became clear to me that it was just a cesspool of elitism my reason for continuing collapsed.

While it's sad to know so much of my effort has been wasted, it shows how hard I can work and how much I can delay gratification.  If turned toward reasonable pursuits, maybe I could really get somewhere.

II) 

I wrote an email to a friend where he commented where I was in the healing process.  I retread some of the the ground above, but it also takes the spin of how fortunate I have been both before and after the worst of it. 

This is a second draft of that text:

I don't know if I'd say I'm further along in recovery as much as my trauma was sharp and, all things considered, relatively short.  Before those times, I would say I had an unusually blessed life, particularly adjusted for being a child of the American working class.  By working class I mean the more internationally accepted use of the term, as well as the U.S.'s garbled and relatively new invention. My father was a high school drop out and my mother did not attend college.  She was a homemaker for a few key stretches but had many forays in working retail.  When their work life got too frustrating for either of them, they took turns with who would work while the other would figure something out.  

But, again, I was blessed.  If I had not been an only child, I imagine we would have been in danger of really tough economic decisions and the emotional defects of my parents would have really shown.  Instead, I got to do what I wanted.  The television was always fucking on, but at least if I went into another room there wasn't some sibling there to bother me.  I could live in my head and be as weird as I was without comparisons to some more normal Other that my parents would have no choice but to favor.  Again, I thank all fates that this Other never existed -- I would have seen clearly what base things really thrilled my parents and what an enabler my mother was, and I would have seen these things as a child, rather than have them come to light in my late twenties and through candid conversations with my wife.  Not understanding your parents flaws because they are not openly manifesting themselves . . . now that's a blessed childhood.  

The other component was living so close to grandparents (my father's parents).  You could say that my father was downwardly mobile working class, but considering where my grandpa came from, it might be more accurate to see his income as a temporary spike, riding the wave of U.S. empire, serving in the Korean War, and then working in the National Guard and [redacted] Air Force Base.  He was an unassuming man, frugal rather than cheap, but frugal in a time when his career path meant you could have a stay-at-home wife, retire in your 50s, and with any financial prudence whatsoever could still have a large savings rate. He was an old-school useful man who could make home repairs.  But what was best is that he never felt he had anything better to do then spend time with whoever he was with.  He didn't impose an agenda, he didn't have any way you needed to improve.  Come as you are.  (And, yes, that is also how you get a downwardly mobile child --  but I am more interested in waxing poetic on what is passed right now).  

My grandma was an artist with no need to make money, but who was good enough to sell some pieces and did so to defray some costs of supplies.  But even when she was in the middle of a project, she would drop it for company, and never make you feel you were disrupting anything.  Art was a sponge for her time when there were not people to be present for.  My grandparents had a special grace for life, and were easy people to be around, and though it added to my pain during the darkest years, I am glad I had the good sense to be around them, visiting something like 90% of Sundays from the time I was able to drive until . . . the end.

My father absorbed some of grandparents' nobility.  My wife really noticed it.  It's a kind of un-American accept-you-as-you-are that outsiders can't fully perceive the miracle of if all they have seen is what is how the people in this horrible place act.  To an American, you always need an upgrade, and you should be made aware of that -- but ideally you are made aware of this so subtly that the blame cannot be pinned for the feelings of unease.  Plausible deniability with these bastards. To a Huddleston, on the other hand, you just are.  But the Huddlestons are dead.  

When they died, I was working 80-100 hour weeks, thinking I was changing the world with great teaching and coaching debate.  Death was one thing, but the real trauma was working so much and then spending my weekends with the widows.  I had no time, no space to grieve, but got to be trapped in their competitive grief.  You would think with grandma losing her husband and all of her children, we could just hand her that -- but then you wouldn't know my mother.  Kipling opens the great poem: 

If you can keep your head when all about you 

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

It often is that second part that makes you finally break.

My Grandpa and father were already dead when, on her birthday, my grandma had a fall and remained on the floor for almost 24 hours before she was found.  She never was to live in her house again.  While she was in rehabilitation, my uncle picked out a room at an assisted living facility.  Before my grandma was moved in, he also died.  My mom was unemployed at the time and this got her way too involved in the situation.  It was fucked up, and typing it up it's kind of humorous -- thinking of an enabler getting outwitted by someone with dementia.  And, again, it was news to me that my mom was an enabler.  I just never had enough demons or bad habits to invoke this tendency in her toward me.  

As for Grandma, while she harmoniously fit into the Huddleston thing when she had her wits, her freedom, and her privileges, I cannot say it was a positive experience when she was far along with dementia.  She was clutching, she was bitter, and she wanted to let me know over and over that my life would never get better -- it was like her dementia catch-phrase for a while there.  But I could have handled all of that better without my mom's bullshit (and I could have handled mom's bullshit better without having to deal with grandma on Sundays).  

I just could not escape.  It hurt and hurt.  Something had to give.  And for a while, that something was my career. 

Well, that's it, really.  Short and sharp, I would say.  And maybe only sharp because I hadn't had life tough enough to deal with bad stuff when it came up (that was a huge part of Grandma's problem, to be honest.  It's hard to imagine a life better than hers until it was suddenly terrible).   One year of trauma, then three years of healing with family stuff being the problem, and lastly one transition year of me trying to find my place. It doesn't bother me at all that it is a place similar to one I've been in before. 

Hospital Lake

Recently, an informational plaque has been put up near the pond in the middle of the Sutton Trails.  It describes how back in the day the pond was called Hospital Lake, and was stocked with fish to feed the mental health hospital.

Hospital Lake was a WPA project.  Many of the things we love in the old core of Norman, the amphitheater, the cool-looking drainage system (pictures below), and now I learn Hospital Lake were built during the one time the United States flirted with being a social democracy.  On, the other hand, most of the boring places that kids, particularly of privileged backgrounds, are so eager to flee were made by private business.  A tragedy of the commons, indeed.

Also, this demonstration of stacking functions -- making a dam for a drainage system, making it into a beautiful "lake" (pond) for the trail system, and then turning it into a source of food production -- seems like a cutting edge idea to our modern ears.  But if you look at a lot of WPA projects, they were done with what should be common sense.   Here, living after the post World War 2 cultural inflection, a complete cultural suicide, it is only now becoming possible to imagine such things as policy *, and hard to imagine them happening.  Just think of the red-tape in getting these different parts of government to work together.

I know that above I seemed to endorse more government spending on public works (I did) and now I am wanting less regulation (in cases like this, with localities, I do), but how does that fit into the left/right dichotomy that is supposed to work for all of our public discourse?  Whose side am I on?  Short answer: the side of people living well.  Longer answer: Mu!  We must stop structuring our investigations of the world as an adversarial debate** between two and only two sides. Also,  almost any time left/right frame comes up it is more important to address the frame than the answer to the question; that just how harmful the frame is.

I think a lot about the idea of "the once and future" town of Norman, Oklahoma.  While to some extent the activities that are invigorating our town, such as murals and the art walk, are copied and pasted from other towns, we can also dig into our past to find precedents for what is now the cutting edge of making a better place to live.



* Assuming I am a representative case.  I understand I am a bit of a radical now, but I was raised I quite conventionally, I think, for someone born in 1984, including lots and lots of cable television.

** When I discovered that the etymology of "debate" was to beat down, think of the "bate" as being related to batter as in assault and battery, I was greatly enlightened to how I had wasted my time in the activity.

Naming Our Benevolent AI Ruler

This was an experiment in crowd-sourcing. Although, if you follow the threads, maybe it will better to call it distributed cognition.  Or, maybe it is best to look at it as "here are some conversations I had using the internet," because you don't always have to use buzz words.

Basically, I just the follow three subreddits for help naming a would-be benevolent AI ruler.

1) r/askreddit
2) r/slatestarcodex
3) r/namenerds   (based on a recommendation from someone at r/slatestarcodex

I love doing stuff like this because you never know what you are going to see.  It is an example of the searcher's internet. Someone, I assume trying to be dismissive, wrote

Read the Forbin project. Then we will talk. We can have HAL moderate.

The problem with that being that after a google search, I found that's not the title of the book, but the subtitle of the movie.  But still, I had never heard of Colossus: The Forbin Project, and it looks cool.  Here's the last few minutes of the movie:



Even if it is what has now become a stock story, there is such a thing as good stock. The way the synthesizer kinda sucks adds to the creepiness.  You could even go next-level retcon and have the AI choose that voice to be terrifying, the old use of Awe-some, as in inspiring awe.

The r/starslatecodex crowd went heavily into science fiction to come up name candidates, and that was a good part of the brainstorming process.  I really enjoyed being reminded of some great works, and clearly my brain wasn't going to pull them up on its own.

Some back and forth led to the version I am going to use for the concept of a benevolent AI Overlord:

AI-van, like "Ivan," but say an "A" before it.
The full title is AI-van, the Wise and AI-Mighty.

That's just my type of word play.

I really appreciate the recommendation to try r/namenerds, however.  If you want to give your concept of a possible good AI ruler a name, you might consider something from these lists.  One poster went to mythology:

Hera
Nyx
Elpis
Tyche 

Another went with some acronyms:

Global Understanding System (Gus)
Monitoring And Safeguarding Intelligence (Masi)
Global and Interstellar Monitoring System (Gaims)
International Realization Information System (Iris)
Safety And Monitoring (Sam)
Artificially Enlightened Global Information System (Aegis)
Directive Universal Support Information Network (Dustin)
Eternal Rational Information Network (Erin)

The experiment was a total success.  I not only came up with a name I love, there are many options left over for others who want to give a name to hopefully benevolent AI overload that I hope comes to pass.

Guilt, Depression, then Guilt

In the words of Allie Brosh

I have repeatedly discovered that it is important for me not to surpass my capacity for responsibility.  Over the years, this capacity has grown, but the results of exceeding it have not changed.

This year has been about me accepting this truth about myself as well.  My previous efforts above my capacity for responsibility have led me into the following cycle: first I would feel a little guilty about missing a day, then this guilt (perhaps coupled with other guilts) would lead to me being depressed.  At this point, I would avoid the project altogether, and this then led to me feeling really guilty, guilty to the point of self-disgust, and then I'd even become depressed about the fact I am the person who is depressed so much -- my self-talk including how because I so prone to depression I'm neither the type of person others want to be around, nor am I the type that can finish anything.  My depression depresses me and makes me feel so guilty, that there is no room to get back to the goal.

Here are three activities this has been true of in the past.

1) gardening

For spiritual reasons, I believe in a garden.  And practically, I could use some vegetables from time to time.  This has lead to repeatedly think I need a vegetable garden.   And while I can say I have always been able to get something out of every garden I have planted, in my 35th year of life, I realized a trying to garden when it is past my capacity for responsibility has been a source of the guilt-depression-guilt cycle.   It starts in the summer, as the need to water intensifies.   I will get my sleep cycle messed up, so I'll be waking up later in the day to an Oklahoma already 100 degrees and humid, so I'll feel trapped inside the house. I will miss a day of watering and weeding, then a few days.  I will watch things die.  And I will start to feel bad.

I am relieved that I have given myself permission to let go this year.  I gave my peach trees a proper pruning early in the season, and I have already foraged out some clover, chickweed, lamb's quarters dandelion, and volunteer arugula, but I have no plans to plant, and will take this year to observe, and make areas look nice.  Basically, I am looking for situations where I can bank work when I feel up to it, like pruning or moving around hard structures, but not worry about needing to do things every day.  One good thing about Oklahoma heat is that it can often make the grass go dormant some time in the summer, right around the time I have no motivation to do yard work.

2) writing

When I took my first sabbatical, two years ago, I did so thinking I was going to "be" a writer.  At the time, it was a game plan people were willing to listen to.  And, to my credit, I followed Paul Graham's proscription to "always produce."  I think the advice is sound, I just don't think I was ready to follow it properly,  because I was still in my time of grief.  It wasn't writer's block that got me, it was writer's misery, and writer's anxiety.  It was a time of great social isolation, so much so that I was happy to go back to teaching for a year.  Writing was ruined for me for a while, in really deeply ingrained ways.    And that is what I had to work against both during my last stint as a teacher, and when this second sabbatical started.  My response was to turn to other types of art, and make myself as comfortable as possible when writing.  And at some point, in fact within the last few weeks (4 months into the second sabbatical), I finally broke the curse. And here we are with blog posts again.

3) exercise

This one is all about me stopping myself because of guilt.  In my early twenties, exercise was something to do just for fun, but it didn't guide whether or not I was going to have a good day.  But some time in my late twenties, it became the case that exercise was a same-day performance enhancing drug.  I could work longer, and feel better.  Truly, I don't have time not to exercise.  So how can it be I have missed so many days over the years?  Well, in no small part it is the guilt caused by asking myself that very question.  First, guilt, then depression, and then, well you know my drill . . .  .

Setting low, even laughably low expectations has helped.  During the four months I was overcoming my aversion to writing, my quota was only 200 words a day, and now my exercise requirements are low while I try to build the habit.

Round Up #16

Research/Surfing

Great tweet-storm by someone explaining why they are leaving twitter.  Not indignation, but information hygiene.

After years of being exposed to the family in the media, I have found my favorite Romney, with all due respect to the Senator. (And, yeah, I get they are not related).

UBI and sustainability are probably totally different spheres.  Hooray for a "a more equitable arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic."

I think everyone should know about Operation Northwoods.  h/t Ran Prieur.

Someone calculating how rich Mr. Darcy would have been, as well as explaining how the financial instruments in Jane Austen's books worked.

Ian Welsh showing examples of when analog technologies were better -- and probably could be again, and then explains what digital technologies have really been about.

Hey, have you heard?  Chestnuts might save the world.

Aphorisms/Shorts

"The function of propaganda is not to tell us what to think but to sink us deeper in what we already thoughtlessly believe"  Ran Prieur from "Slow Crash"

Conjecture: with superstition marginalized, much of political discourse is socially appropriate "scary stories."

The job system -- being around people you don't like and doing things you don't like -- isn't a rite of passage; it is a rite of entrapment.

”Now that we can do anything, we must do less.” Ruben Anderson

Propogating Road Trip Utopia

Another gem from Ran Prieur.  God Bless that creative commons.  

Just for fun, here's my Road Trip Utopia:: 

It's the year 2116, and the world is finally recovering from the deep economic and infrastructure collapse of the 21st century. High tech never went away, but the old highways are weedy rubble, and nobody drives fast except on race tracks. Long-distance travel is done on trains or hybrid airships, and short distance travel is done by foot, bicycle, mule, or slow solar vehicles. All of these are used by adventurers who spend their unconditional basic income on high-grade water condensers and concentrated food, and travel the old roads through the wilderness and the ghost suburbs. They might use computer maps, but the computer never tells them which way to go, because the point is to discover it themselves.

Propagating Prieur's Basic Income Communities

Archived here.  The site is creative commons.

Ran Prieur:

I've been thinking about how we could have unconditional basic income without everyone getting bored, and I got the idea of reverse jobs: organizations that take your money and give you a life. It would be sort of like what we already do with rest homes for old people, except that people of all ages could sign over their government payout to a third party, who would give them food and shelter with some efficiency of scale, and also give them structured activities. Call them basic income communities.

The activities could be anything cheap, like meditation or gaming, or anything that brought in extra income, like woodworking or plant breeding. And because the workers are paying, the whole system would be turned on its head. What we have right now is an authoritarian labor market, where workers have to compete for scarce positions. There's no incentive for your employer to give you a good environment, because if you don't like it, other people are lined up to replace you. But if activities were competing for people to do them, environments would have to get good quickly.

I imagine that some people would stay independent, and spend their own basic income on their own particular low-budget lifes[t]yle. But eventually most people would try out different basic income communities until they found one that was a good fit. I would totally give up financial independence to live in modest and rustic housing, eat healthy cheap food, and hang out with people who play board games and improvise music all day. That's Utopia, and we're pretty close to being able to pull it off.

==

My rhetorical tweak would be to maybe call them basic income centers, because there are both retirement centers and day care centers.  What Prieur describes is really like adult day care. 

Propagating Prieur on Political Myths

From Ran Prieur:

Are political decisions more myth-based than they used to be? If so, what might be causing this dangerous trend? I can think of two stories. One is that political systems are becoming so complicated that it's both more difficult and more boring to observe political reality, so fewer people are doing it.

A scarier possibility is that we are losing the skill of reality-based thinking, because we have fewer opportunities to practice it. If you're deciding which breakfast cereal to buy, it doesn't matter if you use myth-based thinking, because nothing bad will happen either way. More and more of our decisions are like that, partly because of well-meaning regulations that protect us from bad decisions, and partly because big control systems are making more of the decisions that really matter.

===

For the first possibility, society as more complex and boring, compare with analysis of "legibility," (here is a good place to start noodling around).

For the second possibility, compare with Kurt Andersen.

So I believe both possibilities are correct.  I think they are right now highly mutually reinforcing. One question is whether they had to go together?

Gridbeam Content Relocated

[The following has been de-coupled from an older post, How to Go to Work When Collapse is Near, because it was a bit off-topic]

Another bit of home economy I am working on this year is gridbeam, which allows for completely modular, reusable construction.  I think is the perfect open source technology to spread to make scavenging and upcycling possible in the future -- and I think that scavenging and upcycling is the only way we will have a future.

Video example of a gridbeam project:




And a more impressive demonstration:



I hope of this makes for interesting and helpful reading.  Good luck in building the future.

Ran Prieur

I find it hard to believe I have never ran into the work of Ran Prieur before.  He and I have many of the same interests, outlooks, and even spiritual sentiments (insofar as he is identifies as a Taoist-Pantheist).  It's really cool because though my thoughts are on many of the same tracks of his,  he is much further down the road.  He offers so much to learn, targeted to my key interests.  I am torn between gobbling up as much as I can in a binge and, well, everything else in life.

Prieur is a doomer of sorts, though his thoughts on the matter have been developing over time.  Allowing him to explain for himself:

I used to see collapse happening for physical reasons, like resources and climate. Now I see it happening for psychological reasons, that the tasks necessary to keep the system going, are drifting too far from what anyone enjoys doing.

I used to be a doomer optimist, expecting the collapse of complex society to make a better world. Then I expected the big systems to muddle through the coming disasters and tried to figure out the details. My latest thinking is that the global economy will have a series of stairstep collapses, and nation-states are at risk, but high tech will survive and get weirder.

I used to think rural homesteading was a good idea. Then I noticed that almost everyone who tried it was unhappy and had to drive too much, and my strategy changed to getting a modest house in a city with cheap housing, with a yard for fruit trees. Now I'm improvising more than planning.

It is almost uncanny. Back to the track metaphor: each paragraph represents an important mental path I have been on, up to investing much time in research, experiments, and "bets".  And in each case, Prieur is so far ahead of where I have been stuck -- just grappling with the possibilities--  that he can sum up his ideas in elegant prose that reads like common sense.

Also, he is a master of frugality, or more accurately he used sort-term deprivation to build his nest egg, and then uses frugality to keep himself un-employable (able to not be employed).  A man really interested in workshopping the right rhetoric, he went with "dropping out" to describe what he did, though you can tell from his prefaces that he added later that he regretted that choice as well.  (My dear reader, read his essay carefully).  One of Prieur's most famous quotes on the web comes from that essay, and it deals just perfectly with the the questions of privilege that are wracking the brains of the younger millennials right now.

To drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty about using strengths and advantages that others do not have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish competition, where your "success" means the failure or deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your freedom feeds the freedom of others -- it's as if we've all been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people get out first, and then help the rest.

===

Here are some of Ran's best ideas since he switched away from long-form pieces.

Basic Income Communities
On Political Myths
Road Trip Utopia

Examine Other Beauties

Early on in “Romeo and Juliet” Benvolio gives Romeo the excellent advice to “examine other beauties.”  I’m of course aware that Benvolio is talking about meeting other girls as a remedy to obsessing over one rejection.  But I also think the principle can be generalized to great effect.  Rather than getting caught up in one set-back, or worse, wallowing in whatever the culture of fear has put on the menu for you today -- seek out something beautiful from some other domain. 

It also interests me that Romeo and Juliet was written during the period that Shakespeare wrote what some call his lyrical plays, which also included “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Richard II” and “Love Labour’s Lost.”

From Wikipedia:

These four plays are argued to represent a phase of Shakespeare's career when he was experimenting with rhyming iambic pentameter as an alternative form to standard blank verse; Richard II has more rhymed verse than any other history play (19.1%), Romeo and Juliet more than any other tragedy (16.6%) and Love's Labour's and Midsummer Night more than any other comedy (43.1% and 45.5% respectively).[112] All four tend to be dated to the period 1594–1595.

Having read these plays, I think Shakespeare was fascinated with how beauty could work on us, and what it’s limits were.  So I think that it’s possible, even likely that Benvolio’s advice came up because beauty was very much on Shakespeare’s mind as a philosophical concept.

So even if your mopey inner-teenager is telling you there is no way it can work, you might want to try to examine other beauties.