Ran Prieur Watch

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candide
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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by candide »

Today's post at Ran Prieur's site has more links than I want to take the trouble to deal with right now, but it is really good on topics that intersect the kind of questions of technology and skills ERE blog and book touch on.

http://www.ranprieur.com/

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

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Ran writes
September 5. For Labor Day, I'm thinking about the word "work". One definition is very broad. Work doesn't have to be productive, because Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill, that always rolls back down, is doing work. It doesn't have to be physical, because chess players thinking about their next move are doing work (and burning a lot of calories). Even meditation could be called work, when the literal intructions are to do nothing.

Another definition is narrow: in the context of a society where tokens are exchanged for goods and services, you're doing a service in exchange for some of these tokens. If you're reading an article about "work", this is usually what they mean, and if you practice reading "work" as "work for money", you'll see the subject more clearly.

Humans like to do stuff. But as a means for arranging the stuff we do, wage labor has only been common for a few hundred years. It is now in decline for multiple reasons, but the main one is that it's failing to satisfy our need for meaning, for our actions to be part of something larger that we believe in. We no longer believe that doing wage labor with more intensity (working hard) will make us rich. Employers are openly calling workers "resources" in their quest for higher stock prices.

In response, the phrase "work-life balance" is putting wage labor in opposition to life. Back in 2004, when I wrote "How To Drop Out", people would say, what would happen if everyone dropped out? That's basically happening now. When I go to the drug store, and half the shelves are empty, I can't complain, because filling those shelves requires a long string of shitty jobs.

It's anyone's guess how it will all shake out. I like to think we're still in the early stages of figuring out how to run an ethical society. For the last few hundred years, the organizing principle of people doing things has been how much money can be made by people doing things, where money is the power to make people do things they would not do except for the money. In a better society, the organizing principle of people doing things is what people enjoy doing.

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Lemur
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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by Lemur »

Part of me just thinks this is the natural cycle of things. Wage workers are in a unique position where they've the upper-hand against they employer...rising wages, low unemployment, remote work, etc., and overall increased negotiation position where the worker can now walk away from bad jobs. So quiet quitting is nothing new - people have been doing this for generations. Barely getting by, doing the bare-minimum, not going above and beyond, your normal so called B-type personalities.

But this could backfire eventually with the talk of upcoming recession. Job layoffs, mergers and acquisitions, cost-cutting efforts, "doing more with less." And once unemployment starts to rise, I could see the power beginning to shift back to the employer. Which employees will make it out the other end? Those with in-demand skills, those who can show on paper what they accomplish, perhaps those who're willing to bend more to manager wishes like going into the office, and those who can prove they are needed to grow the business.

Especially in the USA, I don't think a welfare state exists enough where an "ethical society" can emerge. I think certain Maslow needs have to be met before that could happen. Despite the rising wages and low unemployment, cost of living is still high relatively speaking for the younger generations who aren't home/landowners. So what we see is enough power to demand better...but not enough power to drop out and reform society.
Last edited by Lemur on Fri Sep 16, 2022 3:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by candide »

I didn't copy the links. Click through to Ran's site if you want them. Full disclosure: I didn't read follow any of the links, but still felt I enjoyed the piece as a whole.

http://www.ranprieur.com/


Ran Writes:
September 12. Today's subject is motivation. This is a well-written article, Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs, where eating frogs means forcing yourself to do stuff you don't feel like doing.

| These were students who had eaten enough frogs to get into Princeton and Harvard. Their reward was -- surprise! -- more frogs. So they ate those frogs too. And now they're staring down a whole lifetime of frog-eating and starting to feel like maybe something, somewhere has gone wrong. |

There's also good stuff in the Hacker News comment thread. But missing from both is any critique of industrial capitalism. For hundreds of years, machines have been doing more stuff; and when making decisions about whether to replace human workers with machines, the guiding principle has been making money, rather than arranging society so that we enjoy what we're doing.

Mechanization justifies itself with the assumption that useful physical tasks are all tedious chores, which is not at all true. A good book on this subject is Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford.

In thinking about tasks that we should or shouldn't build our lives out of, I've been framing it in terms of tasks we enjoy or don't enjoy. That's not wrong, but this blog post, On being tired, mentions a framing I find more useful: tasks that give back energy vs tasks that drain energy.

This idea gives me the leverage to critique a framing I find less useful: tasks you believe in, vs tasks you don't. That's why I failed as a homesteader. Even though I strongly believed in self-sufficient low-tech living, it turned out that almost all of the actual tasks drained my energy. (The only one that didn't was throwing sticks into piles.)

The culture of motivational speaking assumes that your belief, your attitude, your aspiration are all-important. I think those things are like jump-starting a battery. Then, if doing the actual tasks doesn't give you energy back, your battery is going to die again.

Two related links. Countering the Achievement Society is about reinventing schooling so that it's not about joyless accomplishment, but having the free time to find your place in the world.

And A new way of life: the Marxist, post-capitalist, green manifesto captivating Japan is about how much better life will be if we give up economic growth.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

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Ran writes:
September 13. Continuing on motivation, yesterday's post was all over the place, and today I have a clean point, inspired by research that shows two kinds of love between couples. The first kind is strong and exciting, and gets the couple together. Later they develop a connection that's not exciting, but deeper and more enduring -- or they don't, and break up.

The word "motivation" points to two different things, which I'm calling aspiration and feedback. Aspiration is how good you feel about doing the task, before actually doing it. Feedback is when you do the task, how much that makes you feel like doing more of it.

My hypothesis is, there is little or no correlation between the two things. So being really excited about doing something, or not, tells you almost nothing about whether you'll be able to keep doing it, or burn out.

If I'm right, then the best life strategy is not to set a goal and sacrifice anything to achieve it. The best life strategy is to cast about trying a bunch of different things until you find what fits you.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by zbigi »

I completely agree with this take. I've been excited about dozens of things, only to find out they require a ton of work that is quite mundane and boring for me. That's probably extremely common, seeing for example how many people buy music instruments vs how many people continue to play them a year after the purchase etc. I agree that it's best to try out a lot of different things and see where the natural fit is best.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

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Ran writes:
October 10. Thanks Matt for suggesting a good tangent to last week's post. I've been using the concepts of "first person" and "third person" in the most basic way: first = from the inside; third = from the outside. It's a lot more complicated, and some people have suggested adding a "fourth person". But I'd rather not be constrained by numbers. Here's how I break it down.

The deepest level of "me" is "I am this stream of experience." (Actually you can get even deeper: I am the void that this stream of experience fills.)

The next level is the embodied self: how to interpret raw sense data into stuff like, "This is my leg. That's a tree. That's the sound of rain."

The next level is the reflective self, or what western culture calls the self. It includes stuff like, "My favorite color is orange. I am an introvert. I have a strong imagination." Ego is the stickiness of the reflective self, its resistance to changing and expanding.

The next level is the social self, where I think about what other people think about me. It's complex, but I'll just point out that there's a difference between "I am sensitive to other people's expressions of what they think about me," and "I imagine myself inside another person looking at me."

The latter, we usually call the "second person", and for the first time, you're taking a perspective outside your own skin.

Another way to get outside your own skin, is to shift from I to we. This has usually been done with the local social unit, the family or tribe. When it becomes reflective (this is what my people are like), the multi-person self is more egocentric than the one-person self: more resistant to change, more resistant to expansion, and more sensitive to the expressions of others.

In theory, the multi-person self doesn't need an opponent to define it, and it can be expanded to include all humans, or all beings. In practice, these moves are done by educated people, on an intellectual level, and rarely on the level of feeling.

Now, it's a whole different way of thinking, to look at something and say, "That's not me." And there's a whole range of ways to do it, but they all come down to the habits and values of your constructed self. You can look at a tree like an artist, or like an ecologist, or like a lumberjack.

Also, "not me" raises a peculiar option, which I think is uniquely dominant in western culture: the "view from nowhere." It's an attempt to strip knowing from perspective, to say, "Never mind what you see, this is how things are." Supposedly this is the view of science, and yet the most advanced science refutes it.

On a practical level, the view from nowhere is probably necessary to make a large complex society work. But we don't have to take it so seriously. You can see it even at the level of the reflective self, where instead of saying "This is my favorite song," we're tempted to say, "This is the best song."

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

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Ran writes:
October 17. I don't identify as being on the autism spectrum, for two reasons. One is that I've taken a few informal tests, and I always come out barely neurotypical. The other is, I don't think the present concept of aspergers/autism is going to last. When we understand it better, we'll discover that it's actually different things that we've been lumping together, like we did with "consumption" or "senility".

But I do have a speculative self-diagnosis. I call it asynchrony, and it's based on the concept of neural synchrony , "the correlation of brain activity across two or more people over time."

I think this happens through mechanisms that we haven't discovered yet, and I think there will turn out to be a huge variation among different brains, in how easily they can "tune in" to other brains.

A few signs that you may be asynchronous:

1) It seems like everyone but you is a mind reader. You ask people how they know to do something a certain way, and they say, "You just know," but you don't.

2) You don't understand what the big deal is with music shows, live sports, or parties. Other people seem to be getting something out of these events that you're not getting.

3) You find popular trends to be more baffling than compelling.

4) When walking in crowded places, you have to devote conscious attention to not bumping into people.

There are a lot of directions to go with this. Are extraversion and introversion causes of high and low synchrony, or are they effects? Are there trade-offs? Does being worse at syncing with humans in real time make you better at syncing with humans in other ways, or with nonhumans? Can you be bad at receiving but good at broadcasting?

I also wonder how this relates to John Vervaeke's concept of participatory knowing, and the concept of the flow state.

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Lemur
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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by Lemur »

Ran did a second interview with Hermitix recently:
Freedom, Attention and Psychedelics with Ran Prieur
https://anchor.fm/hermitix/episodes/Fre ... ur-e1m9v1g

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by candide »

I have a feeling that Ran is going to be pivoting away from core ERE topics for some time to come ...

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by ertyu »

I listened to this interview; diverting, but nothing that deep or earth-shattering imo? Did someone else find something deeply insightful that I missed?

Paradoxically the one idea that was interesting to me came from the interviewer, not from Ran -- that when it comes to the salaryman grind, we stick the stick inside the carrot: the salaryman life is based on fear; you stay in your job and get a new one, ultimately, due to a fear of penury and a raw terror for your own survival. But societal propaganda -- and even self-propaganda -- dresses this in, "I want to be more successful, more affluent, have more toys and higher status etc" -- and all of that is just an edifice which rests on the deep foundations of that fear.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@ertyu - Ran used to talk more about ERE themes, but he's lately been diverting into psychedelics/spirituality/the nature of reality. He's been out of the working world so long that I think his attention has just completely shifted to topics that might not align with the forum so much.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by Western Red Cedar »

ertyu wrote:
Wed Dec 07, 2022 10:42 pm
Paradoxically the one idea that was interesting to me came from the interviewer, not from Ran -- that when it comes to the salaryman grind, we stick the stick inside the carrot: the salaryman life is based on fear; you stay in your job and get a new one, ultimately, due to a fear of penury and a raw terror for your own survival. But societal propaganda -- and even self-propaganda -- dresses this in, "I want to be more successful, more affluent, have more toys and higher status etc" -- and all of that is just an edifice which rests on the deep foundations of that fear.
I think there is a lot of truth to this. I'd suggest that there is another layer of fear to what is described as societal or self-propaganda that isn't simply rooted in fear of penury or survival. Fear of judgement, fear of not living up to one's potential, fear of failure, and a fear of the unknown.

Stepping away from the grind shifts a lot of control back to the individual. That can be a daunting prospect for many people. Particularly those who rely on external validation for some piece of their self-worth.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by ertyu »

Western Red Cedar wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 12:16 pm
Fear of judgement, fear of not living up to one's potential, fear of failure, and a fear of the unknown.

Stepping away from the grind shifts a lot of control back to the individual. That can be a daunting prospect for many people. Particularly those who rely on external validation for some piece of their self-worth.
Wise. I was projecting my own biggest fear which is survival (grew up in one hella economic crisis, heh) and I wasn't seeing the full picture

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by Western Red Cedar »

ertyu wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:41 pm
I was projecting my own biggest fear which is survival...
I was speaking to some of the fears I'm dealing with at the moment :lol:.

I tend to thrive when I have external accountability paired with a project/goal that fits well with my own values. Traditional careers and academia can be quite effective in these situations.

I need to work on shedding any preference for, or reliance on, external validation.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by candide »

Just when I had my doubts that Ran might not be able give us any more gold...

Ran writes:
December 9. Five links about animals. Physics study shows that sheep flocks alternate their leader and achieve collective intelligence. Basically, when a bunch of sheep are deciding how to move around, they "give full control of the group to the temporal leader, but there is also a rapid turnover of temporal leaders." When are humans going to finally be as smart as sheep? Seriously, if rich people had to spend most of their lives being poor, they wouldn't be so clueless. And if they knew they had to go back to poverty, they would make sure it doesn't suck.

Two from PsyPost: Encounters with birds linked to improved mental wellbeing for up to approximately 8 hours. And Listening to birdsongs might help to alleviate anxiety and paranoia

Australia: How 'bin chickens' learnt to wash poisonous cane toads

And a thoughtful article, How Rats Are Overturning Decades of Military Norms. The rats are being used to detect land mines, something dogs can also do, but dogs are a good fit for military culture, rats not so much. So the rat personality is percolating up to change the vibe of the human organization.
I'm not sure why toad washing made the cut, but sometimes it's just nice to keep the conversation going.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

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Ran writes:
January 30. On a tangent from one of my favorite subjects, the afterlife: Suppose reincarnation actually happens, that there's an aspect of you that goes through any number of lives as any kind of being. This raises the question: Why be human?

What can we do or experience, as humans, that makes it worthwhile to be human and not something else?

Flying a plane, surely, is not as good as being a bird. Driving a car is not as good as being a wild horse. The internet has made our social world less satisfying, and even without it, human social behavior rarely matches the elegant synchrony of other social animals.

We have large brains, but dolphins have larger brains, and more folds and ridges in their cerebral cortex. Could they develop human-level abilities to live mentally in elaborate worlds of abstraction and imagination? Probably, but they have no reason to, because it's so much fun being a dolphin.

I think what makes humans special is creating our own environment. And this goes hand in hand with our isolation, our separateness from the rest of the living universe. Why did our ancestors do cave paintings? Because they were big-brained animals stuck in a cave all winter, and they got bored looking at a blank wall. And since then, the better we get at creating our own environments, the more time we spend in them, the more separate we get, and the more reason we have to be even more inventive.

When we talk about finding "intelligent" life on other planets, this is what we mean: another creature that has explored separateness and self-created environments in the same way that we have. If we weren't looking for something so specific, we would be trying harder to talk to large-brained animals on our own planet.

This topic can help us think about the meaning of life. Even if you think life has no meaning beyond what we give it, you might still want to play to your strengths. Some people seek to become one with everything, but I think that's what humans are worst at. Why should I spend my human life struggling for something that's part of the package in my next life as a gnat? Meanwhile the gnats are like, I wish I were human so I could write novels and play video games.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by candide »

Wow, really good one! Pure Ran at his best, as well as most applicable to our little slice of the internet:

Ran writes:
February 27. My 2004 Dumpster Diving FAQ has just been linked on Hacker News. There's a comment about how I later declared some of my essays to be fiction. That would be more like . The dumpster diving stuff is completely true. I haven't done it for years, because I have more money now, and I assume the good dumpsters are harder to get into. But the other day, I ate an apple I found on the sidewalk.

Since we're talking about 2004, back then I was part of the doomer community, and we used to argue about whether the future would be techno-utopian, or techno-dystopian, or post-apocalyptic. Look around -- it's all three! I expect all three trends to continue, and not even in different places. There will be camps of climate refugees, under total surveillance, with food delivered by drones.

We used to think peak oil would bring the system down. Now it looks like we're going to muddle through on energy, with some nice innovations in renewables: Putting solar panels in grazing fields is good for sheep, and New Solar Farm Is A Carbon Sink and Prairie Preserver, and Here comes the world's first offshore wind seaweed farm.

Now I see doom in two other places. One is infrastructure. There's more of it than ever, it's getting more complex, and I don't see how we're going to keep maintaining it, with birthrates falling and younger generations not learning how to fix things. I expect that well-run cities will do the best, because they have more people per mile of wire or pipe or road, and a lot of remote places will go permanently off grid.

The other is motivation, which is too big a subject for this post, but I'll just say that humans are not a lazy species. Look at all the stuff we've done all through history. But the trend is that we're less motivated to do stuff that holds the system together, and more motivated to do stuff that destabilizes it. It's interesting that in the most expensive stories of Hollywood, the heroes are trying to save the world, and the villains are trying to end it.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

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Ran writes:
June 13. So much for taking a week off from blogging. This morning I woke up early, full of words about the death of Reddit. Actually, when this all blows over, Reddit will go on to make a lot of money for people who already have a lot of money, while being an increasingly unsatisfying platform for its users.

Orin comments: "I'm unaware of a 'solution' to this sort of trend where online communities get eaten by... capitalism?"

I think capitalism is the right word. Reddit is preparing itself to go public, to go on the stock market, and everyone knows that stocks do better when the business model is indifferent to the user experience, safely top-down, and in the case of tech stocks, set up to maximize data harvesting. For financial reasons, Reddit has to force users onto its own clunky app, even if that means half the users quit, because the half who stay will do their jobs to keep the system working properly. We're taking longer to get there, but the result is the same as Soviet communism: citizens trudging cynically through their duties.

I don't think this is some kind of natural cycle, like the aging of organisms or the change of the seasons. Google and Amazon and Reddit aren't doomed to become evil -- they become evil without being doomed, through completely optional tragedies of human error. The main error is optimizing systems for the leveraging of power into more power, rather than for human well-being.

Taking a step back, what is it that makes people who already have enough, want more? Personally, if I had the choice of getting half a million dollars, or a billion dollars, I'd take half a million, because I don't want the responsibility, the lifestyle, or the power over others that comes with a billion dollars.

Some people say they're trying to fill the emptiness inside. I don't know what they're talking about. I have exactly the opposite problem: trying to empty the fullness outside -- seeking shelter from the outside world's exhausting barrage of demands on my attention. Now I'm going to go take a nap.

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Re: Ran Prieur Watch

Post by Lemur »

Thanks for sharing these Candide. Also totally unrelated, but I've always read your username as "Candice."

Ran has interesting perspectives...
I think this is an interesting question...
Taking a step back, what is it that makes people who already have enough, want more?
I'll take a short stab at this with scattering thoughts. I think partly is that there is a constant internal battle of security vs freedom where money is always seen as supporting the former. At least that is what I see in the FIRE community as a whole. $1m back in MMM days used to be enough if I recall circa 2012 or so. But since you've the money, why not just get a better more reliable car? And why not move into one of the best neighborhoods while you're at it? And also, perhaps another zip code has lower crime rate? And you don't want to eat terrible foods that could harm you, best to just get the organic right? And on and on. Some of these might be legitimate concerns if society continues to break down of course (though I reminded that "objectivity is an asset", I could be wrong but isn't crime actually decreasing as a whole? Maybe that is location dependent).

Okay my other thought on this is a bit more philosophical. Maybe it is that society generally just has lack of gratitude for the simple things in life? Social media exacerbates some of this through the constant subconscious comparisons to other "better" lifestyles. I rarely have bad days, and when I do or I'm stressed about something that doesn't ultimately matter in the grand scheme of things, I find myself always saying "today I've a roof on my head, a belly filled with good food, money in the bank, and a family that loves me." What more is it that one needs? Other problems are easily solved when falling back on gratitude. Consumerism is truly a disease I suppose that robs a person of this simple gratitude for the small pleasures in life. I'm reminded of something David Wallace said in a graduation speech and I'm paraphrasing "If you worship money and items, you may feel like its never enough. Worship your beauty and you could always feel ugly. Worship power, and you will always feel week and afraid. Worship intellect, and you'll always feels stupid."

Known alternatives is probably another issue among the general populate. Its much easier to follow the script of school --> college --> get married --> house --> work --> die. And imagining alternatives is rare and done by exceptional people that are either cut above the rest, "crazy", or eccentric depending on how they're viewed by the general public. And also how much money and status they've helps with the perception. The general populace wants what they've but don't know how to get it. So its easier to follow the script as society has set it up that way. Much less roadblocks.

Sometimes I feel like the self-actualizing part of Maslow's pyramid is a place of privilege and something we should have great gratitude for because the vast majority of people throughout history were not lucky enough to get to live in that part of the pyramid. Some people don't know what to do with freedom once all needs are met...so maybe is just easier to fall back on getting more of the same. In other words, if you've the time to contemplate meaning and purpose, then that is something to truly be grateful for. And if you're not grateful for this, then maybe you try to fill the hole with more money, power, things, etc.

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