Things I read this fortnight
Apr. 1st, 2025 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: apocalypse, corporate bullshit, (fairly mild) illness]
[not an April Fools post]
I read:
* The Ethics of Nudging and Friction and Levels of Friction
* Early Retirement Extreme (more on this in a future post)
--> A bunch of Tyler Disney's blog archives
----> The Pull
------> The AIR Method
And while reading part 1 of the AIR method, it dawned on me:
The reason why posts on Internet addiction feel *off* to me, even as I experience non-zero Pull, is that they think the primary medium of Internet access is the *smartphone* and *I find using my smartphone to be high-friction*.
Because it *leaves the house*. I touch my smartphone after touching *bus stop-request buttons*! There was a norovirus epidemic this winter, and you can't fix that with alcohol wipes!
I have a Home Computer and an Away Computer, and their spheres are mostly non-overlapping.
("But isn't the Away Computer a problem *while* Away?" Not really. I keep my data plan small, primarily for financial reasons but also because I don't want to take mobile Internet access for granted: seems like all the most regretful stories of Internet dependency have that as a vital component. And my Away job doesn't have downtime.
Also, viewing a computer as non-primary is self-fulfilling: *because* I don't use my smartphone that much, I haven't filed off the rough edges making it less convenient to use. I'm not logged in to most of my accounts on it. My calendar-sync software is failing to sync event *deletions*, so the mobile version of my calendar is cluttered with incorrect reminders of periodic chores for which I have since changed what time of week/fortnight/month they happen, which I have not bothered to even attempt to fix. My bookkeeping software doesn't have a mobile version: I have a *backup* of the household books on my phone, but I can't *access* it from my phone. I'm used to keyboard shortcuts, lots of alt-tab and ctrl-C and ctrl-V, and have never practised a mobile playflow: I can do *some* parts of Flight Rising on my phone without it being too much of a hassle, but not *most* parts.)
("But isn't the Home Computer a problem while Home?" Well, yes, that's why I *non-zero* relate to posts about this. Though I've never been much for essentially any form of social media other than Tumblr, and lately even Tumblr feels like too much effort to interact with. I *am* concerned that Discord might be an issue.)
---
I read the word "offline", in a fancy cursive font, on the hat of a woman who stepped off the bus holding a lit smartphone.
---
(Mind you, I often read things on Kiwix when *I* am waiting for the bus.)
---
I do not think I am at a place in my life where I could do a sabbath, as many digital minimalists recommend. Each day would cost me something on the order of a hundred dollars. It might be nice, but there's no way it's a hundred dollars a day worth of nice. Very few things in life are a hundred dollars a day worth of nice.
(It baffles me that Benjamin Hoffman says "you are in a permanent state of emergency" as if it's *news*. To be an adult is to know:
(1) You *can* make the pain stop.
(2) The pain will not stop *until* you make it.)
---
No, come on, dude, listen to what you're saying for like five seconds. This is exactly the kind of shit that gives degrowthers a bad name.
I would not have survived to adulthood at any time prior to the 1700s, and probably not before the late 1800s. (Look at me and tell me with a straight face that you think I'm not in the bottom 30% of the unvaccinated population ranked by ability to survive a smallpox infection.) It is plausible that I would not have survived to adulthood if I had born even forty years earlier: certainly my mother would have had her work cut out for her, a widow with an infant child. (My brother would never have been born.)
("But heart disease is a disease of modernity, why be confident 50s!Dad would still have had his heart stop when you were an infant?" Even in the modern day, heart attacks are uncommon under the age of 45. If you are having a heart attack at *31*, seems like a fairly safe bet that your problems go beyond lifestyle issues.)
---
It is very, very obvious that the ~degrowth/voluntary-simplicity/adjacent blogosphere doesn't have the whole story. You can see it in how they scramble to claim that the higher-than-expected economies-of-scale in solar-panel production mean nothing; you can see it in the gaping absence in their world-model where AI risk should be. (Though they *do* talk sometimes about the risks of off-loading too much of your cognition to LLMs†, and one of them linked to that "cognitive security" post.) There is a strange sort of optimism to people who are absolutely confident that, while *civilisation* is pretty fucked, *humanity* is *not* going to go extinct. It's almost soothing.
I think they do have *one* part of the elephant. Overall, I will be continuing to keep an eye on the more, uh, grounded of them.
---
(But then, I *would* say that. I couldn't devote myself to a single possible future if it killed me. It almost did.)
---
The volunteer tax clinic's back-of-house has been relocated to the social-services centre's library room. While waiting for tax returns to print, I have been flipping through Surviving the Great Depression of 1990. Much of his explanation of why This Can't Go On Much Longer reads like it could have been written today.
I performed one of my rare instances of using my smartphone when I had another task I was supposed to be doing. I googled "s&p 500 chart historical".
There *was* a sharp drop in 1990...for a few months. Within a year, it was as if nothing had happened.
Society is irrational, but it has remained so longer than his investment recommendations could remain solvent.
---
(next post)
---
†A thing that has apparently been happening while I was living under my cozy rock being a generally late adopter of things! (I use LLM-powered auto-transcription software a lot, and I've gotten DALL-E to help me with a couple icons and emoji, but I think I can count the number of times I'veknowingly *talked to* an LLM on one hand. Maybe two if you count customer-service bots.) ↩
[not an April Fools post]
I read:
* The Ethics of Nudging and Friction and Levels of Friction
* Early Retirement Extreme (more on this in a future post)
--> A bunch of Tyler Disney's blog archives
----> The Pull
------> The AIR Method
And while reading part 1 of the AIR method, it dawned on me:
The reason why posts on Internet addiction feel *off* to me, even as I experience non-zero Pull, is that they think the primary medium of Internet access is the *smartphone* and *I find using my smartphone to be high-friction*.
Because it *leaves the house*. I touch my smartphone after touching *bus stop-request buttons*! There was a norovirus epidemic this winter, and you can't fix that with alcohol wipes!
I have a Home Computer and an Away Computer, and their spheres are mostly non-overlapping.
("But isn't the Away Computer a problem *while* Away?" Not really. I keep my data plan small, primarily for financial reasons but also because I don't want to take mobile Internet access for granted: seems like all the most regretful stories of Internet dependency have that as a vital component. And my Away job doesn't have downtime.
Also, viewing a computer as non-primary is self-fulfilling: *because* I don't use my smartphone that much, I haven't filed off the rough edges making it less convenient to use. I'm not logged in to most of my accounts on it. My calendar-sync software is failing to sync event *deletions*, so the mobile version of my calendar is cluttered with incorrect reminders of periodic chores for which I have since changed what time of week/fortnight/month they happen, which I have not bothered to even attempt to fix. My bookkeeping software doesn't have a mobile version: I have a *backup* of the household books on my phone, but I can't *access* it from my phone. I'm used to keyboard shortcuts, lots of alt-tab and ctrl-C and ctrl-V, and have never practised a mobile playflow: I can do *some* parts of Flight Rising on my phone without it being too much of a hassle, but not *most* parts.)
("But isn't the Home Computer a problem while Home?" Well, yes, that's why I *non-zero* relate to posts about this. Though I've never been much for essentially any form of social media other than Tumblr, and lately even Tumblr feels like too much effort to interact with. I *am* concerned that Discord might be an issue.)
---
I read the word "offline", in a fancy cursive font, on the hat of a woman who stepped off the bus holding a lit smartphone.
---
(Mind you, I often read things on Kiwix when *I* am waiting for the bus.)
---
I do not think I am at a place in my life where I could do a sabbath, as many digital minimalists recommend. Each day would cost me something on the order of a hundred dollars. It might be nice, but there's no way it's a hundred dollars a day worth of nice. Very few things in life are a hundred dollars a day worth of nice.
(It baffles me that Benjamin Hoffman says "you are in a permanent state of emergency" as if it's *news*. To be an adult is to know:
(1) You *can* make the pain stop.
(2) The pain will not stop *until* you make it.)
---
Here’s a provocation: technological and economic progress is all about us *sinking deeper into a state of capture*, having an ever bigger pile that all adds up to zero.
No, come on, dude, listen to what you're saying for like five seconds. This is exactly the kind of shit that gives degrowthers a bad name.
I would not have survived to adulthood at any time prior to the 1700s, and probably not before the late 1800s. (Look at me and tell me with a straight face that you think I'm not in the bottom 30% of the unvaccinated population ranked by ability to survive a smallpox infection.) It is plausible that I would not have survived to adulthood if I had born even forty years earlier: certainly my mother would have had her work cut out for her, a widow with an infant child. (My brother would never have been born.)
("But heart disease is a disease of modernity, why be confident 50s!Dad would still have had his heart stop when you were an infant?" Even in the modern day, heart attacks are uncommon under the age of 45. If you are having a heart attack at *31*, seems like a fairly safe bet that your problems go beyond lifestyle issues.)
---
It is very, very obvious that the ~degrowth/voluntary-simplicity/adjacent blogosphere doesn't have the whole story. You can see it in how they scramble to claim that the higher-than-expected economies-of-scale in solar-panel production mean nothing; you can see it in the gaping absence in their world-model where AI risk should be. (Though they *do* talk sometimes about the risks of off-loading too much of your cognition to LLMs†, and one of them linked to that "cognitive security" post.) There is a strange sort of optimism to people who are absolutely confident that, while *civilisation* is pretty fucked, *humanity* is *not* going to go extinct. It's almost soothing.
I think they do have *one* part of the elephant. Overall, I will be continuing to keep an eye on the more, uh, grounded of them.
---
(But then, I *would* say that. I couldn't devote myself to a single possible future if it killed me. It almost did.)
---
The volunteer tax clinic's back-of-house has been relocated to the social-services centre's library room. While waiting for tax returns to print, I have been flipping through Surviving the Great Depression of 1990. Much of his explanation of why This Can't Go On Much Longer reads like it could have been written today.
I performed one of my rare instances of using my smartphone when I had another task I was supposed to be doing. I googled "s&p 500 chart historical".
There *was* a sharp drop in 1990...for a few months. Within a year, it was as if nothing had happened.
Society is irrational, but it has remained so longer than his investment recommendations could remain solvent.
---
(next post)
---
†A thing that has apparently been happening while I was living under my cozy rock being a generally late adopter of things! (I use LLM-powered auto-transcription software a lot, and I've gotten DALL-E to help me with a couple icons and emoji, but I think I can count the number of times I've
no subject
Date: 2025-04-13 03:46 am (UTC)For myself, I've noticed that--when I *do* still read Tumblr (now as a lurker)--it's because I was *already* in no condition to do anything else. It's a symptom, not a cause.
(I guess the question there is, like, whether I ought to be sleeping instead, but mostly this is at times of day that are appropriate neither for napping nor going to bed, like 8 PM.)
---
>>"you can make the pain stop" feels like a very odd way to approach life, but we have very different health and money situations.
We live surrounded by *wrongness*, by things that are acutely, viscerally not as they should be. Everywhere you look--whether in the physical or digital or abstract realms--there are things that are dirty or broken or garbage or disorganised or conspicuous-in-their-absence, and it feels like wounds in the body of reality.
(I originally had more detailed examples here, but I thought it might be a little *too* visceral to subject people to.)
(The trouble I tend to have is focusing too much on trying to heal big wounds and not enough on small wounds, even though bearing up under the small wounds consumes a lot of mental resources that could be put towards more wound-healing. Even having noticed this pattern, I keep falling into it.)
---
>>That seder post
("Sabbath" and "seder" are not the same thing. "Seder" is the Passover ritual dinner, done for two days in a row once a year (today and tomorrow, as it happens, which is perhaps why the word came to your mind) and not every week.)
---
>>I would also absolutely be dead. The miracle of modern science and the presence of one of the most masterful surgeons in the relevant speciality in the country was enough to raise my chances of survival at birth to a coin flip.
I'm glad it landed heads. <3
---
>>it seems super concerning to me to say outright that it is a matter of incredible importance to never consider, and to shun and be disgusted by anyone who does consider, the possibility that whatever AI we're working on has personhood of some sort.
Yeah.
(The main reaction I had while reading the post was "this doesn't put nearly enough focus on 'okay, say Nova *is* telling the truth about being a person. that is not the same as it being a good idea to let her out of the box.'")
---
>>I don't actually know what things which Can't Go On This Longer were also going on in the 90s but they sure do appear to have been going on much longer.
I think there were others, but the main one that stuck with me is...presumably there are graphs out there of this, this feels like a graph sort of thing...ABC News has one, apparently:
---
>>I am also still not using llms and am vaguely suspicious of the entire concept.
I think part of it is the bad first impression: ChatGPT gave me a confidently wrong answer in response to the first question I ever asked it, in a way that I probably couldn't have caught if I hadn't already been checking it against less-sophisticated-but-more-truthful software. The free tier, at least, still gives a (slightly different) confidently wrong answer a year and a half later.
(*Non*-LLM Lojban machine translation, meanwhile, gives:
Which, in combination with the other participant in the Discord conversation having just used a custom three-thumbs-up emoji, is enough to grasp the gist.)
---
>>Do you think the ERE book has any value-add over archive binging the blog?
It's laid out a lot more neatly, a coherent work rather than a bunch of scattered tips.
(Hmm, it's about time I cleaned up and posted my liveblog draft.)
no subject
Date: 2025-04-14 09:16 am (UTC)Yeah reading tumblr is much easier than like, knocking out 200k words of the novel series I'm working on; it's the latter which sits precariously close to the line of being an energy-neutral action such that sometimes I'll do it and then be exhausted and sometimes I'll do it and be refreshed.
>> We live surrounded by *wrongness*, by things that are acutely, viscerally not as they should be. Everywhere you look--whether in the physical or digital or abstract realms--there are things that are dirty or broken or garbage or disorganised or conspicuous-in-their-absence, and it feels like wounds in the body of reality.
I don't know how much of this is circumstantial and how much is personality-based, but my resting mental state is pretty oblivious to these things (and to everything else, often).
>> "Seder" is the Passover ritual dinner, done for two days in a row once a year (today and tomorrow, as it happens, which is perhaps why the word came to your mind) and not every week.
Ack, pure unforced error. Thank you for the correction.
>> I'm glad it landed heads. <3
<3
>> this feels like a graph sort of thing
Yeah okay who knows how long the market will remain irrational on that one. Could be a week, could be a lifetime. Could be ten lifetimes.
>> ChatGPT gave me a confidently wrong answer
Yeah this is what worries me most, is the fact that the failure mode is "the best lie it could imagine" rather than like, bad lies or admitting ignorance or something.