See what I just did there? I was telling you (and myself) what a good boy I am to not participate in consumerism! In other words, I was "signalling my virtue".

This is one of those concepts that, once you learn about it, it pops up everywhere. It is deeply intertwined with prestige and how much we care about what others think of us. And with mating behaviour, for example when males (of any species, including us) try to convince females that they would make a good mate, by whatever criterion that is relevant in the situation.

This podcast with Geoffrey Miller, who literally wrote the book called Virtue Signalling, is quite good as an overview, if I remember correctly - it has been a while since I listened to it. One of the points he stresses is that virtue signalling is generally a good thing! It is a way to build trust and allow for cooperation.

Recently however, the term has mostly been used in a derogatory sense, like accusing accusing someone to be "just virtue signalling" instead of being sincere in their proclamation. For example, a male calling himself "feminist" can be suspect to ulteriour motives, that is saying anything that "gets the girl"; he might even be a sneaky fucker.

Similarly, social justice activists' opinions, while certainly being convinced of their own noble motives, can easily appear repulsive to outsiders when attitudes get polarized within the group from everyone's trying to gain prestige by having the "purest" opinions on the subject matter at hand.

All this, just to say: I bought a new coffe machine after all, thereby negating the virtue I was signalling before.

It works well, makes good coffee and I hope it lasts for as may years as the old one.

While chopping wood earlier today, I listened to this FLI podcast with Joscha Bach in which he says:

We obviously live in a dream universe. And the dream is dreamed by a mind on a higher plane of existence and that is implemented in the skull of a primate. In the brain of some primate that is walking around in a physical universe. This is our best hypothesis that we have. And so we can explain all the magic that you’re experiencing by the fact that indeed we live in a dream generated in that skull.

And now the question is, how does consciousness come about? How is it possible that the physical system can be experiencing things? And the answer is no, it can’t. A physical system cannot experience anything. Experience is only possible in a dream. It’s a virtual property. Our existence as experiencing beings is entirely virtual, it’s not physical. Which means we are only experiencing things inside of the model. It’s part of the model that we experience something.

For the neurons, it doesn’t feel like anything to do this. For the brain, it doesn’t feel like anything. But it would be very useful for the brain [to know], what it would be like to be a person. So it generates a story about that person. About the feelings of that person, the relationship that this person has with the environment, and it acts on that model. And the model gets updated, as part of that behavior.

This is quite dense and almost incomprehensible without a lot of prior knowledge that is not yet obvious to "normies" like myself. I had to turn down the listening speed to 1x, which I rarely need to, but I think I got the gist of it.

It reminds me of Anil Seth's TED talk where he argues that coscious awareness is a hallucination contrained by reality, whereas a dream has no such contraints.

Mind-blowing stuff to think about, maybe literally so.

Spring is late at 60°N, compared to central Europe where I grew up. March and April feel like a waiting period every year and can be quite grey and ugly. While lush greens are still some weeks away, the first dots of colour have now appeared in our garden.

I listened to this podcast the other day and want to highly recommend it! There is a transcript at that same link, if you prefer text over audio. It has lots of information that was new to me, and a nuanced discussion on a topic that triggers a negative gut reaction from most people: intervening in the climate, for example by increasing cloud cover over the oceans, or by putting reflective particles high into the atmosphere.

The argument is of course not that we should stop other efforts to decrease and mitigate climate change, even though it looks like this is what everbody reacts to. Instead the point is to at least do the research needed to know what does or does not work, before an intervention gets done in the future without such knowledge, in a state of emergency. Nevertheless, as soon as it became public that some US researchers wanted to do this kind of research in northern Sweden, there was an outcry and it just got cancelled. Sad.

In the podcast I especially enjoyed their discussion of moral hazards. Like with COVID, there are often strong warnings that the public will receive certain information in a way that makes things worse, while the opposite reaction is just as plausible.

I find geoengineering to be quite enticing and if I ever were to switch careers, this would be on my list of things to check out. It is not discussed much in the interview but that humanity in the long run takes charge of the climate makes perfect sense to me, it is probably inevitable. For example, we do not want to be subject to the mercy of nature, like a supervolcano erupting, or to the whims of rogue states that do a climate intervention that only suits local needs. Solving the problem of world-wide agreement on what the right temperature is, will certainly be difficult, but might well become a catalyst for stronger global institutions, which we need for other problems as well.

(Photo by Farzin Izaddoust Dar, CC BY-SA 4.0)

This is the winner of this year's photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments , and deservedly so! A great picture well worth clicking to enlarge. The other contestants are worth checking out, too, but the official link above shows them only in small format. This one is better.

I like to fix things when they break, and also to use them until they really no longer work. Replacing something that does its job well enough, just because there exists a "nicer" version of it out in the world, is an itch that I am able to resist scratching most of the time. The aesthetics of objects has value, sure, but I generally rank it lower than the enviromental impact of consumerism and the sheer hassle of buying things. Deciding what to get and then doing so is effort that has to be priced in.

All that is to say that I broke our coffee pot when I took it out of the dishwasher yesterday. A large corner is missing and while it still works for now, I am quite sure the rest of the glass will disintegrate very soon.

That machine came with the house when we bought it more than six years ago and who knows how old it was by then already. Not a chance that I find a replacement pot! I fixed/modified the electrical part twice already and the plastic is starting to disintegrate, so I admit it is time to give it up.

We have a Moccamaster at work and I like its no-nonsense approach and that it brews very quickly. That they are so popular should help with future repairs and replacement parts, so I am leaning in that direction for now.

My pandemic impatience is not as bad anymore as it was a few weeks ago. I am hearing of more and more people I know getting vaccinated and I am happy for them. They should restart their lives and not listen too much to those who revel in admonishing people to keep up with the precautions as if the risk had not been drastically reduced.

XKCD's comic on how the nRNA vaccine works is fantastic, by the way. He has a whole series on the pandemic, all quite witty: 1 2 3 4 5 6

I almost just went to bed for some reading* when I caught it just in time that I had not blogged yet today. A catastrophe it would certainly not have been, but I like to keep the streak alive for now, however trivial the post turns out to be.

It is funny to observe the own mind in caring about such trivial things like streaks, points or badges, in whatever gamified context they appear. Will it rebel eventually, when one part of the brain gets tricked by another part, in this case me trying to consciously exploit some built-in mechanism for motivational gains? Probably not, the automatic "primitive" bits are not aware of context.

Viewing one's own mind not as a single unified entity, but a mess of different motivations, feelings and thoughts, often conflicting ones, can be helpful and generally rings true to me. You can make up a theory of willpower this way, or call out the "internal press sectretary" that tries to weave a flattering story out of the underlying mess, as Simler & Hanson describe in The Elephant in the Brain.

Not very pretty to look at up close, what these brains of ours are up to.

(* still the LessWrong books and a new one on the Viking age, called River Kings.)

No better way to spend a rainy Sunday than to make full use of the kitchen. Bottling the last batch of beer and brewing a new (split) batch takes the better part of the day, but everything went smooth today and I was done by 4pm, including the cleaning of all equipent and the kitchen itself.

I was reusing the yeast from last week, this time for a Pale Ale with lots of fruity hops: Simcoe, Mosaic, Citra, you name it. And part of the batch became a single-hop with HBC 692 which I had not used before.