Humanitarian technologist & big data wrangler, on a quest for evidence-based policy. Rational optimist, post-statist, contemplative humanist, mystery enthusiast, bardo tourist.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Make a small spray paint stencil or vinyl sticker that represents your crew, or inspires people to think differently, and put them around your town or natural areas in subtle, cleverly inconspicuous locations.

    Explore your area with Alltrails, or a similar app, finding new hiking or biking trails.

    Urban exploration: creep through abandoned buildings, climb fire escapes to reach the rooftops, use catwalks under bridges to cross roads and rivers, scurry through large water drain pipes and abandoned steam tunnels.

    Start a lucid dreaming competition with your friends, and share your experiences every morning. As you all develop more dreaming skills, you can share them with each other, and slowly become the masters of your dreams.

    Come up with scavenger hunts that guide people into the coolest, hidden areas of your town, using clever clues, and share them online, similar to geocaching.

    Pick up rubbish off the ground, one area at a time.

    If it doesn’t exist publically in your country, get equipment to either test air or water quality at several spots around your community, and then share them online through posts, or by hosting an Ushahidi map. Encourage others to chip in.

    Get your gang to volunteer together to help homeless, elderly or disabled people once or twice a month. You will both bond with your buds and gain new perspectives from the people you work with.

    Arrange spontaneous dance parties in public with little flash mobs made up of your mates. Try to get strangers to join in on the fun. Disperse after one song, so you don’t get in trouble.

    Learn to identify the 10 most common trees in your area, then the 10 most common flowers, the 10 most common weeds, the 10 most common birds and the 10 most common insects.

    Explore local theater, try to find weird niche performances at churches, swingers clubs, primary schools, corporate retreats, futurist festivals, government events, and street corners. Make sure to cheer loudly and throw flowers.




  • Short answer: Yes! Partially!

    Long answer: Belief is a feature that humans have that can give you confidence both in proven outcomes and in the unknown. It stems from our prefrontal cortex survival capabilities to remember past experiences and simulate future experiences. Aka imagination. We can believe in anything we choose to.

    Yes belief is psychologically comforting. Certainly a lot more than worrying about the unknown. It’s even more comforting if the belief is shared by a social group, reinforcing it to each other.

    Other aspects of religion make life easier too. Rituals, traditions, stories and social ties.

    Those things can help with depression! Depression is a cognitive-affective response to a body that isn’t living the way our bodies were evolved to live. Key factors of that include: Daily socialization, getting the right nutrients, sleeping well, getting enough exercise, getting enough sunlight and having strategies to keep our minds from worrying. Belief can do the last one, as can meditation, or triggering flow states by engaging in activities. Religion can also help with the socializing one.

    Hope this helps!






  • I’m thinking an RPG Maker style game. You play as Morpheus, the god of dreams. Each level is a different person’s dream. When you arrive the dream is a nightmare fueled by past experiences and internal feelings. You have to journey through the dreamscape and find these factors and resolve them to heal the psyche of the dreamer and turn the nightmare into a good dream.

    An example would be a dream where the dreamer is delivering a presentation in front of a classroom naked while the other kids and teacher make fun of them. As that scene plays out, you walk around the school and discover little tidbits about the dreamer. Some of these tidbits are external factors that led to the dream, like memories of people making the dreamer embarrassed for being themselves. You could resolve these by fighting and defeating them in the form of nightmare creatures. And some of the tidbits will be internal factors, like feelings of insecurity and defense mechanisms like reinforcing ideas, that give power to the twisted logic of the dream. These, you have to heal by pointing out the flawed logic and encouraging the dreamer to accept themselves. Once you do everything, you go back to the classroom and find the dreamer giving a TED talk to an enraptured and admiring crowd.





  • I mean, hypothetically. That is the end result of the neoliberal, or late capitalism economic philosophy if applied on a model. But economic systems in practice are never the philosophy, and are only there in the first place to support the governance of a nation state. I spend half my time in Italy, for example, where the laws protect both the big international brands and the mom and pop shops.

    My point is that we are the citizens that make up the government that designs the governance rules for our nation-state. Capitalism is not a government, or people, or the entire story when it comes to commerce and trade systems. We can shape it and use it, like any other framework.

    Likewise, regardless of your economic system, greedy people will try to accumulate power, bend the rules to benefit themselves, and extend those benefits across borders if they can. Powerful egos will warp people and rules around them like gravity. All governance systems that strive to be just, collaborative and promote the quality of life of all its citizens have to both put strong rules in place to check the power-hungry, and constantly monitor and adapt to keep them in check.



  • Having continuous population growth leads to continuous economic growth. But…

    1. You can also achieve that by squeezing more economic productivity out of fewer people, by continuously improving education, diversity of thought, legally protecting creativity, fostering small businesses through seed money and tax incentives, and lots of other stuff.

    2. We have already been scaling the amount of productivity that comes out of a population since the invention of the steam engine and the factory line. Digital automation, AI and robotics are expected to keep that trend going for a long time.

    3. Not to mention, that it’s easier now to operate productively in areas of less dense population. Previously small towns would die, but with clever infrastructure that supports broadband everywhere, public transportation, self-driving vehicles, drone delivery, additive manufacturing (3d printing), virtual presence through XR, and so on, you can operate a rural population like a big productive city, and get the benefits of both.

    4. And at the end of the day, if your economy doesn’t grow, it just means that wealth in the country doesn’t grow.You can maintain that indefinitely. Or if an economy shrinks, society doesn’t come collapsing down until everyone gets poor enough that bribery and corruption overcome lawfulness. But if the society was already wealthy, that will take a long time, and you can mitigate it by doing things like spreading out concentrations of wealth among the population (taxing the rich), increasing immigration, and adopting socioeconomic sustainability planning approaches.


  • Not necessarily. Also this is already happening in many countries, and they don’t collapse into ruin. They just stagnate for a few generations.

    It doesn’t necessarily reduce population density though, because often what happens is that young people leave small towns and villages that have fewer opportunities and move to the big city, causing those little towns to die. That’s usually bad for maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity across a country’s landscape, but good for biodiversity, because as people go, the environment recovers.

    Also as population declines, land and resources tend to consolidate more and more into the hands of fewer oligarchs. But the oligarchs all own us already anyway, so NBD.