Study Notes: Aug 9-29, 2015: "Homes for the homeless"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 

• Article, "Decoded octopus genome reveals secrets to complex intelligence", by Katherine Harmon Courage
• Article, "Canon of taste", by Jill Neimark
• Article, "The hacker hacked", by Brett Scott
• Post, "Mysticism and Pattern-Matching", by Scott Alexander
• Article, "Homes for the homeless", by Susie Cagle
• Post, "Effective Altruism, spending habits, and Burning Man", by Topher Hallquist

Other notes: 

• Notes to: 4 articles on writing scientific papers

Homework for the future:

• Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
• Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
• Finish the reading for "Notes to: Anarchy: Never Been Tried?"
• Finish the reading for "Notes to 16 Articles on Writing"
• Read Fenrir's Shrine. 
• Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 
• Also, don't forget to flesh this section out a bit more with goals in general, and maybe include a section on which of those goals were accomplished since the last update.

"Decoded octopus genome reveals secrets to complex intelligence"

• "With the largest-known genome in the invertebrate world--similar in size to that of a house cat (2.7 billion base pairs) and with even more genes (33,000) than humans (20,000 to 25,000)--the octopus sequence has long been known to be large and confusing." 
• "Among the biggest surprises contained within the genome--eliciting exclamation point-ridden e-mails from cephalopod researchers--is that octopuses possess a large group of familiar genes [protocadherin genes] that are enriched in developing a complex neural network and have been found to be enriched in other animals, with substantial processing power." 
• Joshua Rosenthal, University of Puerto Rico, Institute of Neurobiology: "For neurobiologists, it's intriguing to understand how a completely distinct group has developed big, complex brains."
• "Part of octopuses' sophisticated wiring system--which extends beyond the brain and is largely distributed throughout the body--controls their blink-of-an-eye camouflage." 
• "In all of that time, octopuses have become adept at tweaking their own genetic codes (known as RNA editing, which occurs in humans and other animals but at an extreme rate in octopuses), helping them keep nerves firing on cue at extreme temperatures." 

"Canon of taste"

• David Shields, University of South Carolina, Professor of Literature: "Tasting an heirloom cultivar is like discovering a lost masterwork. It's like listening to Thomas Tallis' Spem in Alium, a Renaissance choral masterpiece for eight five-part choirs. When you hear it, you sense what heaven must have sounded like then. It's the same when you taste restored cultivars prepared using recipes of an earlier time." 
• "Shields... and Roberts, who owns the artisans-goods purveyor Anson Mills, source grains and seeds from gardens, collections or bootlegger's fields. Then they work with plant geneticists to authenticate them, cajole farmers to grow them, and inspire chefs to prepare them, often using historic recipes from newspapers and letters of the time." 
• "The two men sum up their deep affiliation of the past decade as one long conversation--at the centre of which is the question: can we have a canon of taste? Can we approach cuisine as we do architectural restoration, classical music or great masterworks of art? Above all, can they bring lost flavours to people who consider the culinary pursuit an art?" 
• "From Einstein to Mozart, Buddha to Van Gogh, Michelangelo to Emily Dickinson, certain works--and their creators--are so universally and deeply felt that they enter the realm of the immortal dead, what the 19th-century English novelist George Eliot called a 'divinely human' choir. They belong to a canon that is culturally transmitted, broadly influential and amazingly long-lived. A canon is as much about the artistic, scientific or literary power of a work as it is about popularity." 
• "Exposure markedly affects preference. We like what we have encountered before. In that way, all canons are flawed and fluid, and do not include the indisputable 'best of the best'--but they do a pretty good job of distilling a civilisation's high points." 
• "Cuisine has always been an intimate expression of a given locale's 'terroir', the geology, climate, and microbiology of the soil giving rise to the indigenous ingredients comprising its food." 
• "Paul Rozin, University of Pennsylvania, teaches a course on food: "Cuisine was traditionally regarded as a sort of low art. Everybody had to read Shakespeare, but nobody was required to know what Chinese cuisine consisted of. But I think that's changing. Cuisine has become very creative. Tasting menus are becoming more and more popular. You attend a restaurant as you do a concert. The composer, in this case the chef, tells you what is on the menu, and you all experience it together." 
• Shields: "Personally, I don't care if certain of the ingredients that I bring back can only be paid for by plutocrats paying with bags of gold krugerands. As long as the ingredient is saved." 

"The hacker hacked"

• Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: "Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems--about the world--from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things." 
• "Curiosity was essentially subversive. It represented a threat to the ordered lines of power within the system. The phreakers were trying to open up information infrastructure, and in doing so they showed a calculated disregard for the authorities that dominated it." 
• "Consider the pranksters who mess with rail operators by jamming ticket-barrier gates to keep them open for others. They might not describe themselves as hackers, but they carry an ethic of disdain towards systems that normally allow little agency on the part of ordinary individuals. Such hacker-like subcultures do not necessarily see themselves in political terms. Nevertheless, they share a common tendency towards a rebellious creativity aimed at increasing the agency of underdogs." 
• "Unlike the open uprising of the liberation leader, the hacker impulse expresses itself via a constellation of minor acts of insurrection, often undertaken by individuals, creatively disguised to deprive authorities of the opportunity to retaliate. Once you're attune to this, you see hacks everywhere. I see it in capoeira." 
• "Hacking, then, looks like a practice with very deep roots--as primally and originally human as disobedience itself. Which makes it all the more disturbing the hacking itself appears to have been hacked." 
• "The hacker impulse is critical. It defies, for example, corporate ambitions." 
• "The machinery of global capital tends to be seen as complex, disempowering and alienating. The traditional means of contesting it is to build groups--such as Occupy Wall Street--to influence politicians and media to pressure it on your behalf. But this sets up a familiar dynamic: the earnest activist pitted against the entrenched interests of the business elite. Each group defines itself against the other, settling into a stagnant trench warfare. The individual activists frequently end up demoralised, complaining within echo-chambers about their inability to impact 'the system'." 
• "I was attracted to the hacker archetype because, unlike the straightforward activist who defines himself in direct opposition to existing systems, hackers work obliquely. The hacker is ambiguous, specialising in deviance from established boundaries, including ideological battle lines. It's a trickster spirit, subversive and hard to pin down. And, arguably, rather than aiming towards some specific reformist end, the hacker spirit is a 'very way of being', an attitude towards the world."
• "The product of such exploration is pragmatic knowledge, the disruption of standard patterns of thought, and also dealienation--you see what's behind the interfaces that surround us, coming closer to the reality of our social world." 
• "Hackers challenge the binary by seeking access, either by literally 'cracking' boundaries--breaking in--or by redefining the lines between those with permission and those without. We might call this appropriation." 
• "A figure of economic power such as a factory owner builds a machine to extend control. The activist Luddite might break it in rebellion. But the hacker explores and then modifies the machine to make it self-destruct, or programmes it to frustrate the purpose of it[s] owners, or opens its usage to those who do not own it." 
• "Gentrification is the process by which nebulous threats are pacified and alchemised into money. A raw form--a rough neighborhood, indigenous ritual or edgy behavior such as parkour (or free running)--gets stripped of its otherness and repackaged to suit mainstream sensibilities. The process is repetitive. Desirable, unthreatening elements of the source culture are isolated, formalised and emphasised, while the unsettling elements are scrubbed away. Key to any gentrification process are successive waves of pioneers who gradually reduce the perceived risk of the form in question." 
• "It becomes open to a carefree voyeurism, like a tiger being transformed into a zoo animal, and then a picture, and then a tiger-print dress to wear at cocktail parties. Something feels 'gentrified' when this shallow aesthetic of tiger takes over from the authentic lived experience of tiger." 
• "Gentrification is an enabler of doublethink, a means by which people in positions of relative power can, without contradiction, embrace practices that were formed in resistance to the very things they themselves represent." Not sure that's what "doublethink" means. Pretty sure the word requires an element of contradiction. 
• "In this setting [Silicon Valley], the hacker attitude of playful troublemaking can be cast in Schumpterian terms: success-driven innovators seeking to 'disrupt' old incumbents within a market in an elite 'rebellion'."
• "In this context, the hacker ethic is hollowed out and subsumed into the ideology of solutionism, to use a term coined by the Belarusian-born tech critic Evgeny Morozov. It describes the tech-industry vision of the world as a series of problems waiting for (profitable) solutions." 
• "The hacker impulse should not just be about redesigning products, or creating 'solutions'. A hack stripped of anti-conventional intent is not a hack at all. It's just a piece of business innovation." 
• "The un-gentrified spirit of hacking should be a commons accessible to all. This spirit can be seen in the marginal cracks all around us. It's in the emergent forms of peer production and DIY culture, in maker-spaces and urban farms. We see it in the expansion of 'open' scenes, from open hardware to open biotech, and in the intrigue around 3D printers as a way to extend open-source designs into the realm of manufacture. In a world with increasingly large and unaccountable economic institutions, we need these everyday forms of resistance. Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit." 

"Mysticism and Pattern-Matching"

• "One of the things that got me interested in psychiatry was the sheer weirdness of the human brain's failure modes. We all hear that the brain is like a computer, but when a computer breaks, the screen goes black or it freezes or something. It doesn't hear voices telling it that it's Jesus, or start seeing tiny men running around on the floor." 
• "Bottom-up processing is when you go from basic elements to more complex ideas--for example, when you see the three letters C, A, and T in a row, you might combine them to get the word CST. Top-down processing is when more complex ideas change the way you interpret basic elements." 
• "To most people, it [the image] looks formless. Even once they hear that it's an old black-and-white photograph of a cow's head, it's [sic] might still require a bit of staring before you catch on. But once you see the cow, the cow is obvious. It becomes impossible to see it as formless, impossible to see it as anything else. Having given yourself a top-down pattern to work from, the pattern automatically organizes the visual stimuli and makes sense of them. This provides a possible explanation for hallucinations. Think of top-down processing as taking noise and organizing it to fit a pattern. Normally, you'll only fit it to the patterns that are actually there. But if your pattern-matching system is broken, you'll fit it to patterns that aren't in the data at all. The best example of this is Google Deep Dream..."
• "Paranoia seems to me to be overfunctioning of social pattern-matching. When Deep Dream sees the tiniest hint of a line here, a slight dark spot there, it pattern-matches it into an entire dog. When a paranoiac hears a stray word here, or sees a sideways glance there, they turn it into this vast social edifice of connected dots." 
• "I notice that the same people who have hallucinations also have mystical experiences... I mean they feel a sense of sudden understanding of and connection with the universe. I know at least three groups that do this: druggies, meditators, and prophets." 
• Lon Milo Duquette, The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford: "Was that the message Ezekiel was trying to convey? Probably not. But who cares! Whatever it was the old boy was originally trying to say shrinks to insignificance. It is far more important to my spiritual enlightenment that my mind was forced to churn at breakneck speed to put all of this together, and then open itself up to the infinite possibilities of meaning. Look hard enough at anything and eventually you will see everything! it [caps sic] doesn't even have to make very much sense what you connect to what. It's all ultimately connected!"
• "The important factor seems to be less about there being sacred truth in the object being analyzed, and more about the process of performing the analysis." 
• "Once the pattern-matching faculty is way way way overactive, it (spuriously) hallucinates a top-down abstract pattern in the whole universe. This is the experience that mystics describe as 'everything is connected' or 'all is one', or 'everything makes sense' or 'everything in the universe is good and there for a purpose'. The discovery of a beautiful pattern in the universe is understandably associated with 'seeing God'." 
• "Imagine one of those Google robots pointing at an empty patch of sky and saying 'No, look,seriously, there's a dog right there. Right there! How are you not seeing this?'"
• "Meditation seems like reducing stimuli, which is known to lead to hallucinations in eg sensory deprivation tanks or solitary confinement cells in jail. I think the general principle is that a low level of external stimuli makes your brain adjust its threshold for stimulus detection up until anything including random noise satisfies the threshold." 
• "Things this hypothesis doesn't explain: why mystical experiences are linked with a feeling of no time, no space, and no self; why prayer or extreme devotion seems to induce them (eg bhakti yoga), and why they can be so beneficial--that is, why do people with mystical experiences become happier and better adjusted? Maybe the feeling of the world making sense is naturally a pleasant and helpful one. Certainly the opposite can be very stressful!" 

"Homes for the homeless"

• "Advocacy groups such as the National Student Campaign Against Hunger and Homelessness say that more than 3 million Americans experience an episode of homelessness each year: a night, a week or a month in a motel, in a recreation vehicle or on a friend's couch might not make you 'homeless' in the eyes of the federal government, but they certainly define your lived experience." 
• "Real median household income has plateaued since the 1960s. Adjusted for inflation, minimum wage has fallen since the 1970s. After the manufacturing industry contracted and unemployment grew in the 1980s, the homeless populations in US cities rose precipitously." 
• "For the most part, homelessness has been approached as a natural and inevitable plight of contemporary urbanity: a thing to be managed, not fixed." 
• "Preventing a fire always requires less water than extinguishing it once it's burning." 
• "The [Housing First] approach has been successful in Utah, where chronic homelessness is down 91 per cent over the past decade, and where rapid rehousing programmes have housed thousands of newly homeless veterans and families quickly and cheaply." 
• "Housing Opportunities' apartment buildings are located away from the downtown business district and closer to residential areas. They feel more like college dorms than institutions. Communal areas, gyms, computer labs, libraries, community gardens and athletic facilities--it's safe to brag about the amenities when all of this is cheaper than the alternative." 
• "The rent is, minimum, $25 per month, or one-third of a resident's income if there is any, which some earn by working janitorial, clerical or landscaping jobs at the facility. The rest of the cost is subsidised by pre-existing HUD funding and special grants." 
• "Americans have a deep and abiding faith in the strength of one's own bootstraps--regardless of whether or not one can afford boots... Aid is almost always predicated on a system of incentives: a Rube Goldberg machine of carrots, sticks and innumerable pulleys to wrench the homeless constantly in new and opposing directions. Assistance is given conditionally and you must earn it, just as you are presumed to have earned your place in hardship." 
• "Many of the cities with the most passionately stated progressive politics are the ones with the most expensive housing markets and the most desperate homeless communities. These are the places we've come to associate with innovation." 
• "If cities set out to solve this complicated and expensive social problem before they've embraced the underlying philosophy that housing is a human right, they are likely to fail." If human beings have a right to life, then they must necessarily be recognized as having the right to clothing, food, healthcare, sanitation, shelter, and water in varying forms and degrees.

"Effective Altruism, spending habits, and Burning Man"

• "I keep trying to kick my energy drink addiction, but worry about saving money on energy drinks coming at the expense of my work productivity." 
• "I basically agree with critiques of Burning Man as just a big party for the rich. Not only do the tickets cost hundreds of dollars, the minimum supplies to survive in the desert for a week will run you higher than that. That, plus the week of vacation time. As an Effective Altruist I think maybe the EA movement should have norms against going to such events [as Burning Man], even if you think you can justify it in terms of networking or whatever." 
• "Cost estimates I've seen for Burning Man range from $1,300 to $1,500. Infamously, some tech billionaires spend vastly more, though I'm going to assume that if you're in the target audience for this article you're not one of them. On the other hand, going through the numbers I can see spending somewhat less, but not less than $1,000 if you're a first-time Burner who needs to buy all-new gear. This isn't any more than many Americans spend on a one-week vacations, but as I hope I've already made clear, I'm also uncomfortable with the standard middle-class American vacation."
• "When I look at the future of the EA movement, a future where there's a strong tendency for self-identified 'Effective Altruists' to spend lots of money on expensive parties that they go to to network with fellow affluent techies seems like a future where something has gone wrong. And there may be a coordination issue here: if everyone's doing it, you may as well do like the Romans, but it might still be worth trying to avoid winding up in the place where everyone's doing it." 
• "In many parts of the world, $1,000 could literally be someone's entire earnings for the year. It's money that could literally put a roof over someone's head. Imagine if you heard about a party for the ultra-rich where the ticket price is equivalent to what you make in a year, or what you'd expect to pay for a house. What would you think of people spending their money that way?"

Miscellaneous

• John Waters: "We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them. Don't let them explore you until they've explored the secret universes of books. Don't let them connect with you until they've walked between the lines on the pages. Don't let them connect with you until they've walked between the lines on the pages. Books are cool, [and] if you have to withhold yourself from someone for a bit in order for them to realize this then do so." 
• Scott Alexander, "Figure/Ground Illusions": "I probably sound like some sort of huge AI partisan by this point, but I give less than a third of my donations to AI related causes, and if you ask me whether you should donate to them, I will tell you that I honestly don't know. The only reason I keep speaking out in favor of AI risks is that when everyone else is so sure about it, my 'I don't know' suddenly becomes a far-fringe position that requires defending more than less controversial things." 
• Scott Alexander, "Figure/Ground Illusions": "Or at least this is how it feels from the inside. Maybe this is how everybody feels from the inside, and Ayatollah Khameini is sitting in Tehran saying 'I am so confused by everything that I try to mostly maintain an intellectual neutrality in which I give Islam exactly equal time to every other religion, but everyone else is unfairly hostile to it so I concentrate on that one, and then people call me a fanatic.' It doesn't seem likely. But I guess it's possible." 
• Rob Bignell: "Every word I write is another stroke that takes me to the shore of a completed book." 
• Charlie Jane Anders, "Help! I Put A Placeholder In My Story--And It Became Permanent!": "In his great book About Writing, Samuel R. Delany says that revising a story always requires convincing yourself that the new version is how it 'really' happened, and the original version was just you remembering it wrong." 
• Eliezer Yudkowsky, Facebook post: "Lots of superforecasters are programmers, it turns out, presumably for the same reason lots of programmers are correct contrarians of any other stripe. (My hypothesis is a mix of a lawful thinking gear, real intellectual difficulty of daily practice, and the fact that the practice of debugging is the only profession that has a fast loop for hypothesis formulation, testing, and admission of error. Programming is vastly more scientific than academic science.)... You'd need to have lived the lives of Newton, Lavoisier, Einstein, Fermi, and Kahneman all put together to be proven wrong about as many facts as a programmer unlearns in one year of debugging, though admittedly they'd be deeper and more emotionally significant facts."
• Eliezer Yudkowsky: "In nonfiction writing, your first priority is not to make the reader agree with you but to have the reader understand what the hell you're talking about. Persuasion comes after identification. This means that in your opening paragraphs, your goal should not be to persuade but to inform--to rapidly orient--to convey as plainly and quickly as possible, without any attempt at persuasion, what the hell you're talking about." 
• The Law of the Splintered Paddle: Oh People, / Honor thy god; / respect alike people both great and humble; / May everyone, from the old men and women to the children / Be free to go forth and lie in the road / Without fear of harm. / Break this law, and die." 
• Chuck Wendig, "The Writer and Depression": "Approaching depression as if it's just writer's block is only going to turn up the volume on all the lies that depression already tries to tell you... Sometimes, we do have to push ourselves. We have to do things that we feel are difficult, or scary, or frustrating. But you also have to know that pushing too hard can make you break. And sometimes you have to let yourself heal before you strain, sprain, and snap." 
• Chinua Achebe: "It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have--otherwise their surviving would have no meaning."