 | My Year Without a Car - (Plus a Request) | The Oil Drum: Campfire | Energy, Transport and Sustainability Changes in The Puget Sound Area |  |
"I Don't Know"
Posted by Nate Hagens on March 22, 2009 - 8:38am in The Oil Drum: Campfire
Topic: Miscellaneous
Tags: belief systems, campfire, original, planck problem [list all tags]
Click to Enlarge
Planck Problem - From Michael Shermer -How Thinking Goes Wrong
In day-to-day life, as in science, we all resist fundamental paradigm change. Social scientist Jay Stuart Snelson calls this resistance an ideological immune system: "educated, intelligent, and successful adults rarely change their most fundamental presuppositions" (1993, p. 54). According to Snelson, the more knowledge individuals have accumulated, and the more well-founded their theories have become (and remember, we all tend to look for and remember confirmatory evidence, not counterevidence), the greater the confidence in their ideologies. The consequence of this, however, is that we build up an "immunity" against new ideas that do not corroborate previous ones. Historians of science call this the Planck Problem, after physicist Max Planck, who made this observation on what must happen for innovation to occur in science: "An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning" (1936, p. 97).
Psychologist David Perkins conducted an interesting correlational study in which he found a strong positive correlation between intelligence (measured by a standard IQ test) and the ability to give reasons for taking a point of view and defending that position; he also found a strong negative correlation between intelligence and the ability to consider other alternatives. That is, the higher the IQ, the greater the potential for ideological immunity. Ideological immunity is built into the scientific enterprise, where it functions as a filter against potentially overwhelming novelty. As historian of science I. B. Cohen explained, "New and revolutionary systems of science tend to be resisted rather than welcomed with open arms, because every successful scientist has a vested intellectual, social, and even financial interest in maintaining the status quo. If every revolutionary new idea were welcomed with open arms, utter chaos would be the result" (1985, p. 35).
As cock-sure trainees (in 1992), fresh out of MBA school, our oft-times swaggering attitudes were held in check, and eventually dampened, by a cultural meme that existed in our division at Salomon Brothers (which I was to later understand, was not ubiquitous on Wall St.) We were often purposefully asked a series of questions - the first couple answerable if one had done their homework, but the third or fourth question being very difficult, and most times unanswerable. Our natural tendency was to look smart, speak with authority and confidently 'sell' an answer (or guess) to these tough questions. But our instructors (a rotating collection of senior people at the firm) came down on us HARD if we ever guessed, even if we guessed right. The correct answer, we were told was "I don't know, but I can research it and get back to you". Perhaps the thinking was that the richest clients on the planet could smell BS a mile away, and straight talk was not only ethical, but would lead to more business. This concept of humility was drilled into us to the point where even in social situations outside of work, we trainees were conditioned to say "I don't know" rather than BS our way through some smug, but wrong, response.
Fast forward 15+ years. Being right is still correlated with social respect and success. Being wrong drops us a notch socially, if not to others, at least to ourselves (some more than others). With the explosion of sub-disciplines in science, it seems that the more data we have on various aspects of our environment, our economy, and our energy situation, the more opportunity those with charisma, persuasive skills, money, connections, etc. can latch on to a particular datapoint or study or belief and leverage it into an attitude that becomes more widely held. I used to think that facts were incontrovertible, but "science" (and I have considerable personal anecdotes to this effect) has more interplay with belief systems and political power, than I once naively believed.
The internet has expanded our tribal numbers far in excess of our brains capacity to effectively process on an already full plate. Personally, I get about 1,000 non-spam emails per week. Since my own past crosses many demographic boundaries, I now get correspondence from rich conservatives, liberal environmentalists, risk-prone traders, philosophers, oil executives, tree-huggers, brain scientists, farmers, politicians, and old friends. (And let's not forget family). As such, I have been increasingly amazed at both the disparity and the strength of opinion/belief in what ails the modern world, if anything, and what these various 'circles' believe is our best path forward.
I am a global warming agnostic - a) primarily because I haven't the necessary time to become adequately fluent in the complex issues involved in climate science and b)even if climate change is proven to be primarily non-anthropogenic, there are myriad other Liebigs limiters to scaling up the current conspicuous consumption/energy paradigm globally (i.e. anthropgenic planetary disruption is real beyond a doubt: ocean acidification, habitat destruction, pesticide impact, etc.). I know three IPCC scientists personally (one on my thesis committee). I also have several close friends who think global warming is a hoax - who continually send me data on Maunder Minimum, MWP, solar/sunspot cycles, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and other things that look impressive but I don't fully understand. Occasionally, when I am emboldened, I cross pollinate 'new info' between these various tribes.
Two emails this Tuesday led to an 'aha' moment, and are the genesis for this post. First, I sent a one hour video presentation given by an astrophysicist on the natural drivers of climate change to an IPCC friend. Later that day we spoke. His reply "I watched 5 minutes of it and it mentioned Maunder Minimum so the rest was likely irrelevant too - I get 50 of these a week Nate I just don't have time for such crap - please stop sending it". Not being an expert, I didn't respond and we moved on to talk about a water/energy paper I am completing. That same night, I had sent a brand new pdf on methane hydrates to another scientist friend of mine (who thinks climate change is 90% natural in origin). He lashed out at me with an email 5 minutes later (pdf was 40 pages so he couldn't have read it) saying that "global warming has nothing to do with science - it is only science that is finally debunking the politicization of anthropogenic climate change". How could this be? Two VERY smart people, not willing (or not able) to incorporate new data into their belief systems.
I previously wrote an essay about some possible explanations surrounding resistance to belief change. One phenomenon was cognitive load - that we can only effectively handle seven chunks of information at once. This may play a bigger role than I thought - we live in the age of the internet, and larger tribes are taking up a subsequent larger % of our cognitive processing ability - our brain, by adhering to previous beliefs, stays in the moment and says 'no maas'. (Research suggests that people already holding 6 or 7 chunks of information in their heads, do poorly on math problems and choices involving delayed discounting - e.g. if your mind is maxed out, you care about the present more than the future compared to controls).
Conclusion
In a society assailed from all angles with social and environmental problems, and information (in addition to gambling, pornography, and shopping) available 24/7 on the internet to increasingly 'full' minds, we are moving further and further away from a cultural ability to say "I don't know". Such an answer implies weakness, rather than wisdom, and someone on TV, someone testifying to Congress, or someone publicly asked for answers to our financial or environmental problems replying "I don't know but I can find out and get back to you" would be quickly replaced by someone with a pithy, intelligent, or confident answer (with all three, they'd be branded an 'expert' and invited back). Only history will show that uncertainty could have played a much bigger cultural role than it has, and that the Precautionary Principle should perhaps have trumped the Planck Problem, instead of vice versa.
Campfire question:
How will the belief systems of scientists, politicians, civic leaders, average citizens, etc. converge on a 'best path' forward that integrates energy, economics, equity and the environment?
On the eve of the 4th anniversary of this website, whose mission is to provide a forum for logically and empirically discussing energy and our future, I'll admit that "I don't know".
Previously: Peak Oil, Believe it or Not
nice post, it reminded me generally of heuristics, and this paper, "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting the Judgement of Global Risks"
(PDF) http://www.singinst.org/upload/cognitive-biases.pdf
personally i've got no idea either about this, i'm just dealing with it on a personal level
Nate, great post and I like the graphic above too.
Frankly that is my experience with how humans behave. True open-minded people are as common as enlightened Zen masters. Scientist and engineers are the worst at parsing data and getting all upset if it doesn't match their reality filters.
Heaven help Obama, the poor man is already looking like he is way past overload. Someone becoming a "decider" or claiming "papal authority" starts looking understandable in light of human overload and people being in power. I do think Obama is our most intelligent president in ages, but the problems are SO big and seeing them clearly lie outside of MSM explanations that I expect MUCH LESS of leaders and other people. They're human, and unfortunately almost all of them are overwhelmed with life in general. It takes a truly crazy or determined person to being new ideas and concepts into practice.
"Frankly that is my experience with how humans behave. True open-minded people are as common as enlightened Zen masters. Scientist and engineers are the worst at parsing data and getting all upset if it doesn't match their reality filters."
Yep. We all have our cognitive biases.
Great topic, Nate. Thanks for bringing up a subject that should be covered and emphasised in all science-related courses. At the university I went to, The Philosophy of Science was an optional course for all disciplines, as far as I looked, but it was the best paper I ever took.
Our scientific knowledge seems to be a tiny island of what seems to describe some aspects of our experience.
This tiny island is always changing, and floats in an infinite, inscrutable ocean of mystery.
Wisdom is a way of staying aware of the nature of our supposed knowledge as well as the infinite mystery in which we exist.
We tell ourselves stories that can blind us if we mistake them for reality, but can help us if we do not.
The "pupil's metaphor" is dangerous because the student is apt to be too enthralled with it. The "teacher's metaphor" may be the very same model or image or story, but the teacher uses it carefully as one helpful tool, with an awareness that the metaphor is not the reality.
We wield godlike technology with a great deal of foolishness. (E.O. Wilson)
We commit atrocities because we believe absurdities. (Voltaire)
"I don't know" and "I am sorry" and "I love you" are phrases we use too little and perhaps abuse too often.
We are headed for the world of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" soon enough. In the end, our close relationships will be what matters.
I will try to give the children I've adopted and am raising a chance to survive -- just as the father in McCarthy's "The Road" tried to give his child a chance to survive. I'm not sure that any children alive today will be glad to survive the Bottleneck, but I hope that some do and at some point will be glad of it.
Meanwhile, the high and mighty commit more atrocities each day, all in the name of whatever absurdities are thought to best justify rapacious violence. "And so it goes...." (Vonnegut)
Chris Mooney asks some of the right questions in today's Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR200903...
"Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?"
and finishes with:
"Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists -- following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be -- now more than ever."
Good science is also something else. It's peer review, where peer review builds to wide consensus or alerts to faulty steps in reasoning or evidentiary procedure. What I look for when confronted by a controversy is evidence for scientific consensus. Yes, of course, "paradigm change" means overthrowing a current consensus; but until the scientific community's sense of ponderous anomaly and embrace of new theory (and evidence) breaks through, scientific consensus is the best we have.
"Scientific consensus" isn't just a product of the media, or the counter-media, saying it's so. If that were so, we could write it off casually and still claim intellectual sophistication. It appears when you can pull together umpteen studies starting from different premises, using different methods, all tending to the same result. A good review article will tell you whether there's a consensus or not. That's the sort of thing the IPCC has been doing now for years, and though there be dissenters out there, until they can come up with something better than scoffing to refute the mountains of evidence and confirmatory studies that support the IPCC consensus, I'm not giving them much, or any, credence.
No doubt, we have to be careful of "bad" science. From what I've seen, much of what passes for "science" in "nutritional science", "agricultural science," "social science" is junk: it doesn't meet elementary tests of sound research procedure, statistical inference, or sound reasoning. I'm speaking as an ex-social scientist who's spent a lot of time looking at the so-called "scientific consensuses" in nutrition and ag science.
So, yes, Nate's right. We need to do our homework before we can claim to know anything. But that admonition implies there's some way to find out who's right, or at least get comfortable with a point of view.
Hi Greenuprising,
This is exactly how I felt reading this essay.
I think Nate's essay is excellent and I’m sure he intended to be thought provoking – so here are a few thoughts that Nate provoked from me :-)
I think it is important to parse the opening phrase
The dictionary says that “know” is to be well informed about the facts. Further, a “fact” is that which is really true. And, truth is something agrees with reality and is not false. So, in Nate's case, I believe he intended to imply that “I don’t know the facts or truth about such and such”.
And then he mentioned:
This “research” brings us to the concept of discovering what is the reality or what is true about some question or the other.
And then the Campfire Question:
Or, I might submit, allow us to discover reality/truth. To which Nate dodged the bullet :-)
The “Scientific Method” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method is not perfect and it does not guarantee discovering ultimate “truth”. It is not even one single, indisputable procedure for discovering reality. However, it is completely separate and distinct from all “faith based” religions (despite the critics who like to call science “just another religion”). Science, by definition, is the opposite of “faith” because faith is defined as “unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence” and science is all about proof, evidence and questioning.
Science, and its Scientific Method (variations aside), is the very best way that humans have for discovering reality and arriving at the best approximation of “truth”. Actually, “convergence” is a good word, because that is just what the scientific method attempts to do – converge via experimentation and testing to arrive at a workable set of “facts”. The “knowing” as it might be said.
So, the answer to the campfire question is to educate young people in the scientific method as opposed to “belief systems” that have no rational basis – like all religious faiths. Scientists will always argue and debate (that is their mission) but the idea is to get irrational belief systems out of the mix so that over time some degree of convergence is even possible.
Some interesting variations on “I don’t know” are “I don’t know positively, but I would bet..”, “I don’t know, but I suspect..” and, “I don’t know and I don’t care”. And, of course, there are lots of things, about which, most of us are willing to say that “I do know”. Here are a few of my personal examples:
I don’t know (and probably never will):
• What occurred a billionth of a second before the big bang – but it sure is fun to read speculation about this.
• If string theory in quantum mechanics can ever be tested – again much fun.
• If the universe will start contracting at some time and how fast – scary idea.
I don’t know positively but I would bet:
• That climate change is a very real issue and is significantly affected by human behavior. The facts are clear and measurable: 385 ppm of GHG increasing by 2 or so every year. It is quite possible to reach a tipping point of temperature rise before we have exhausted all means of adding more GHG. It is foolish to avoid efforts to reduce GHG emissions by humans.
• That fossil fuel sources like oil, NG and coal will be depleted according to the basic tenets of Peak Oil theory. These sources are finite and non-renewable in human timeframes. It is a good bet that this depletion process will negatively impact most humans within 20 years or less – probably a lot less.
I don’t know, but I would suspect:
• That the human population on the planet will experience a reduction (after reaching a peak of about 8 billion) to somewhere around 4 billion within 100 years – maybe sooner. The measurable decline of other species and biosphere resources that we depend upon will most likely result in a “carrying capacity” that is insufficient for supporting any greater number of humans – maybe even less.
I don’t know and I don’t care:
• About any NASCAR statistics.
• About the personal lives of Hollywood stars
• About the “purpose” of humans on this planet beyond that which is simply explained by evolution and the drive of any species to propagate itself. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a pretty good explanation for what we should worry about – and Darwin had a better story than stories about a creator.
What I do know:
• When I die, my conscious existence will cease. There is no god overseeing events here on earth or administering the details of an afterlife.
• That most people, in the entire world, are operating under one or more mind crippling delusions. World religions, most of which served a purpose at some point in history, are now frequently just a tool for controlling power and wealth by TPTB.
• That religious indoctrination of young children is the worst form of child abuse. That instilling irrational myths in the impressionable minds of young children before they have the ability to reason critically is a huge reason why Nate’s question about “Belief Systems” is so important. In order to collectively solve the big problems facing mankind, and to find truth, we all need to move beyond reading holy books of faith. We need for our kids to start adult life without the baggage that plagues most current adult generations.
wonderful post, bikedave
Bicycle Dave,
Organized religion is dead and dying. It doesnt' work anymore.
Yet that does not mean that individuals no longer have life changing experiences. Something that can't be discounted so easily.
Read my post below then or not ,,as you wish. I am certain many will sneer and chuck spears. That's ok. It becoming rather universal anyway.
Airdale--BTW I did not post that comment below to enter a discussion about that subject. I did it ...well just for the hell of it. Its where I am and have been for years and where I am slowly disappearing into...me and my remaining right kidney...(and still no reoccurance of the cancer as of last weeks visit to my urologist). Science did save me at that..so I will cut it plenty of slack..but..well...there is another avenue as well ...a path we must all walk someday..me sooner rather than later.... and as Stephen King sez ''a clearing at the end of that path'...
I recently heard someone say that science started out as a branch of philosophy alone, and it only became objective after the religious philosophers sensed too much competition and tried to put distance between the two groups. Eventually science became totally distinct from a philosophy, and the only vestiges are in the title Ph.D. perhaps. But that means that everyone is a philosopher who gets an advanced degree. This gets confusing so it basically boils down to people who believe in the facts and those that don't ... I guess.
So I usually don't invoke science. Instead, one can try to use the word theory to explain something.
But then you realize that the word theory shares the same root as theology. When a scientist tenaciously hangs on to a theory well past its utility he has become theocrazed; hence the term theocracy to describe the self-delusional group-think that he and his followers may acquire.
It ends up being a viscious circle of people following other people who would encounter huge sunk-cost losses if they switched sides. Yet I don't really know either because a lot of this involves spouting tautologies. People who believe in facts are in fact correct about being correct. Those that ignore facts, the religious types who believe in divine truth, are correct because it has been divinely stated. A pair of tautologies that can neither be proven or disproven.
That explains why I usually just try to work out the math :)
I think math is a great tool for helping ask the right questions but I think the often overlooked core of science is finding interesting questions that can be asked then determining if an answer can reasonably be found. To some extent is a game of questioning the questions but only if its a fruitful endeavor which to some extent differentiates math from philosophy but both end up surprisingly close because mathematics itself leaves a wide latitude in the questions that can be asked. Math in the sense of expanding mathematic knowledge itself can and often does pass the realm of anything remotely useful in the scientific sense.
I'd argue that most of the writers and I assume the readers of the oildrum have this sort of basis they care about the questions that are asked. I'd suggest today many Americans are simply asking when their home will start going up in value ? They don't care to ask the right questions about how we got here.
From what I can tell what division exists from contributors on the oildrum tends to boil down to the question of what are the right questions to ask ?
Should we ask if we are on the verge of a end of our growth civilization ?
Should we ask if we only need to make small changes to our transportation network i.e EV's ?
Should we ask questions the lie between these extremes ?
I actually asked myself the question of what is wrong with mankind ?
Why are we collectively dumb as a pile of bricks ?
So I think that its time to even look past the potential fall of our own civilization and begin to ask the hard question of what is wrong with our species why are we wrecking our planet ?
Related of course would be is math usable for this sort of question ? If not why not ?
Can we really use science in the reflexive sense and become dispassionate observers of our own selves ?
Science and math lay claim to this ability yet can science and math actually prove they have this capability ?
Ask to many questions and you end up being a stupid philosopher it seems :)
And I might add I believe I've found answers to some of these questions but the answer itself is unsettling humanity has managed to short circuit evolution for a host of reasons our species is no longer capable of evolution. One one had by triumphing over evolution we have become intelligent on the other I believe having asked and answered the question that humanity itself is a evolutionary dead end by its very nature. Realizing your own species is a very intelligent Dodo bird is not what I expected.
You're cool memmel, could you write book sometime please.
I think you're whole comment WAS mathematics.
I got a feeling that we are potentially capable as a species of managing things better..... yeah, what's the excuse?
The seat of our problem, as I look within, is some "strange ambition". Something that exists in our bodies and our desires, perhaps our souls, can you feel it. But we understand to a sufficient degree how all this occurs on a management level through behavioural neuroscience and related fields(see Nate). We should be able to train it out with education, eugenics if necessary.
My take on evolutionary dead end, though perhaps trivial.
Individuals don't make a species sure we have our Mozarts but overwhelmingly we have our average joe and he has not gotten any smarter in the last million years. In fact its probably a very safe bet hat the average joe of today is a lot dumber by just about any measure vs the past. Maybe I should be politically correct and say more ignorant but to hell with that we are becoming progressively more stupid on average.
As far as genetics goes eventually maybe thousands of years or even millions of years in the future we need to deal with our collective genetic heritage. But we can't isolate human populations basically we are all capable of walking,swimming or sailing any where in the world and having sex. Any attempt to guide our genetics now esp given our mental process is misguided at best.
I may get flamed for this one but if your a smart person then you probably should have 10-12 kids and teach them to think. Instead where we have the highest education levels the population growth rate is the lowest. The educated people are being successfully out bred.
This does not mean of course that the poor are not capable its just that the average ignorance level is probably far higher today then it was in the past. Many of the poor have lost the knowledge required to be self sufficient and have not gained a high tech education thus they exist without the old knowledge base of how to survive and without the new knowledge base of how to build.
In the wealthier countries the same situation exists albeit with a much higher average standard of living but again few people have a cohesive knowledge set or the ability to learn.
Politically this means groups of fairly intelligent and educated people like the oildrum are impotent in our modern world. The masses are incapable of understanding our problem and our leaders are far more interested in extracting wealth out of the toil of the masses to pay attention to where our society is esp vs the environment.
Anyone that spends any time on the board at all came here to find out about something they did not know about before arriving on one on the oil depletion sites they realized they did not know and they filled in a gap in there knowledge. The number of people willing to do this today that have what you call this "strange ambition" is I'd argue one of the proto branches of humanity that has suffered the most over the last 100 years. Even a cursory reading of history should make you realize that far more people used their knowledge base in the past certainly they lacked education and understanding but people with strange ambitions where a larger part of our society. Many of these of course fell into exploiting both people and resources but being intelligent has nothing to do with being moral or good.
Thats a whole second can of worms that morality and intelligence are not linked. I find it amazing that its true how can some one be intelligent without developing morality. Or worse what circumstance turn intelligent men and women into immoral people ? Your typical master criminal esp a politician or swindler is generally fairly intelligent.
Even discussing this subject trying to understand it opens up massive areas subject to "moral" debate and potentially stepping on someone else's morals. Particularity my example of the smart generally successful person thats chosen not to have children. Your probably doing our species a disservice. Better to have as many kids as you can and teach them to think for themselves and use less resources.
And to reverse myself on that one obviously playing a game of out breeding is not the right solution but then we have to look deep into ourselves and really ask why we are having children whats the goal obviously not having them ensures that a person intelligent enough to understand our problems has chosen not to pass on both his/her genetic heritage and learning to even understand the problem. But yet your in and impasse.
My point is even with what I think I understand I cannot come up with any reasonable way to solve our population problem that sensible for the world. Even a retreat to enclaves probably followed by a massive die off just kicks our basic problem down the road a bit. We grew and declined exploiting renewable resources beyond capacity until they where exhausted before we found oil we can and probably will do it again.
I can see that I'm a member of a species thats collectively screwed but seeing this does not seem to alter the problem. Just like the fact that some small precentage of the current people in the world grok the severity of our overall problems they are helpless now to do anything to alter the outcome. Sure we might somewhat bypass the peak oil bullet but plenty of other constraints will then hit us eventually one will take out our civilization just like its done to every other human civilization since antiquity.
Maybe a few hundred thousand years from now when we have mined the garbage pits of our ancestors great civilization for the ten thousandth time we might just might finally decide to solve our core population problem. Then and only then do I think we can develop a civilization that could create the long term stability required to really look at our intrinsic genetic wiring and maybe at that point we can restart evolution somehow.
Right now anything I could come up with could be warped and distorted and turned into a tool to create people with wealth and power and those without. No noble plan not even one of my favorites ELP solves this. ELP is a step in the right direction but its a baby step its all we have for now and if we just practices Economize Localize Produce for a few thousand years the I suspect we would be able to take the collective next step and the one after that.
Obviously the first thing we must do is start taking a multi decade view then a multi-generational view then eventually we need to be able to collectively work on problems that could take 1,000 years to solve. If we can look beyond the now and the short term then we have the basis to work on our problems. ELP by stabilizing the short term sets the stage for long term thinking to grow. You could look at fusion as and example of the utter failure of our current species. We where forced to make short term promises on a long term problem when those promises did not work out we repeatedly pulled back from fusion. If we had instead recognized it was potentially a 50-100 year problem and stayed at it consistently and realistically we probably would have had functional fusion reactors available today or really in a few years time.
Although I won't be around to see it I'd be surprised if very many of the structures built in the second half of the 20'th century will be around in 500 years and outside of the vagaries of war I suspect many of the ancient cathedrals or say the great wall in china will still be there looking much like they look today.
So I guess the first step is to recognize that somehow we lost a lot of even what our limited species was capable of we have to get that back and then and only then can we as a species start truly looking into a brighter future. Will we dunno but I'm pretty damned certain that once we do collectively either die out our get our act together we will long be dust along with our AIG's and mortgages and Maddofs and probably most of our records. Thats how far we have strayed from why I think evolution created a species that was and evolutionary dead end and eventually had enough intelligence to realize it.
What I find really funny is it looks like natural selection and random mutation created a species almost capable of intelligent design just it seems to have forgotten to put in enough intelligence. We are collectively on the verge of just being smart enough to realize we are the dumbest kid in the room.
"I think evolution created a species that was an evolutionary dead end and eventually had enough intelligence to realize it."
Strikes me as a perfect summation.
Uber post If I had you're facility with language. Hammered. Thank you.
Don in Maine
Are the Eloi busily defining themselves among the bankster elite? How long before the Morlocks tire of the servant role and quietly turn the tables once again?
FAITH AND USELESS DESIRES: WHAT LITTLE I KNOW
Earnest Lux said,
"The seat of our problem, as I look within, is some "strange ambition"."
Let me tackle that one, being qualified here at this moment on the subject not because of a great education, but because of my background of being poorer than average for longer than average, but being reflective and questioning enough to wonder why (you would be surprised how many poor people never bother to ask themselves, "why am I and almost everyone I know poor?")
The strange ambition that Lux refers to is EXPERIENCE. It is caused by having a developed brain that knows experiences beyond our prior ones are possible. A cow never yearns to fly an airplane, ride an Italian motorcycle, Listen to the Metropolitan Opera perform Verdi, or write something that could potentially best Beethoven's 5th Symphony or rival "War and Peace", or build a house as beautiful as Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater".
Humans, on the other hand, will NEVER stop yearning for more experience. We want more so we can do more, or be more, or see more. We want to achieve SOMETHING. Unlike the cow, we know our life on Earth is short, and as Emerson once said "We are like the stream that knows not it's source or to where it is flowing", and remember, Emerson was as religious as the best of them, but still was open minded enough to sense the cause of human restlessness and striving, always striving.
I have heard and read that this is a Western trait, that the oriental philosophies do not suffer from this. Balderdash. For centuries they have been prevented from striving by overlords who taught a caste system, and the masses knew that striving was hopeless. Now that Eastern peoples have the opportunity to strive, they do, and with zeal that would make the founders of capitalist free enterprise proud. The youngest Asians now want MORE. They want the cars, the houses, the motorcycles, the clothes, the WORKS. Young Asian women can outdo even our Western women in their drive, determination and desire for more, and in their flare for consuming it.
Because wherever there is desire for experience, there is consumption. The two come together. Humans, as an animal, are relatively small and do not really consume all that much. Somebody do the math, what is the total weight, the biomass, of human beings in comparison to all the other living animals on Earth? I am willing to bet the insects alone outweigh us! There must be billions of tons of birds! Mammals are a minority, and humans only a sliver of those!
Humans as a living animal should be relatively low impact on the Earth, virtually not noticed. It is HUMANS AS HUMANS that are high impact, because humans as humans want MORE. We want experience, we want to do things, and build things and see things, we want to go to space, we want to go over 100 miles per hour on land, and then over 200, and then over 300 miles per hour...and we want to go from 0 to 100mph in 10 seconds, and then to 200 mph in 10 seconds! We want to go faster, than get to faster faster! We want to go higher! Can anyone explain the biological need for the human animal to build skyscrapers as tall as the Sears Tower, or the World Trade Center? Can anyone explain the biological need for the human animal to blow them down?
Of course not, because these are not biological needs. But they are HUMAN NEEDS.
Robert Rapier, just the other day in a reply to his post on living car free, seemed to be going through a bit of soul searching. Nate, in the post we are commenting on now, seems to be going through a bit of the same. I know I am. Robert the other days asked "what is it we trying to accomplish here?" Nate is asking the question at least as old as Montaigne, "What can I really know?"
I am asking "Can we ever succeed at telling humans the only way they can survive as a species is by finding a way to stop being human?"
And honestly, that has over the last year or so seemed to be what TOD is more and more about. But of course it is a tautological solution, like the old "we had to destroy the village to save it." If humans are to succeed in "sustainability" as humans by stopping being human, how is that success? We may succeed at being an animal that walks upright, but my goal, from poor childhood to my now rapidly advancing old age, has been to succeed at the experience of being human, not upright animal. If living to seek only a crumb to put in my mouth, and enough warmth to maintain my core tempeture and nothing else is to be my goal until old age breaks me down for the last time, then the question "what am I living for" haunts larger and larger in my HUMAN soul. Even at 50 years old, I still must DREAM of doing more. And doing more will consume more. It may not consume much in comparison to the wealthy overlords, but it will definitely consume more than I have in my poorer years. But it is what I must do, or attempt to do, to feel human.
Humans are unique. No one knows of a documented case of a well fed cow hurling itself down a well because of existential angst. It just don't happen. But there are many documented cases of well fed and warm humans killing themselves every year.
What is in your head can kill you. It is at least as important as food or warmth, and surely as important as oil.
Science can answer many questions: What is that made of? If we combine this and that, what will happen? Why does an apple fall down instead of up, and how can we break up light and make a rainbow?
But science was not designed to and cannot answer the question that matters most: WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT?
The BIG questions are aesthetic, philosophical, and in the end, and I know how this word is hated here but there are no other easy substitutes, SPIRITUAL.
So back to Earnest Lux's question of the "strange ambition" and I note that Earnest says he found this "seat of our problem" by "looking within". Fascinating isn't it? The telescopes and microscopes can only do so much looking at the outside, but the real core of our issues are found by "looking within". WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT? WHAT SHOULD WE REALLY WANT? Albert Schweitzer once said that "the problem of the West is essentially an ethical problem."
He also said "Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth."
Schweitzer also said "A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help."
Of course Schweitzer would be dismissed here on TOD as an imbecile believer in fairy tales, his whole being driven as it was by religious faith. How easy it is sit in a comfortable living room banging on keys, to dismiss lives spent in service to humans and minds that reach to the edge of the heavens by defeatists who really are no smarter than yeast. Rapiar is right to ask what we are trying to accomplish here.
It is the great minds and great HUMANS who cause me to ask myself "WHAT DO I REALLY WANT?" "SHOULD I REALLY WANT IT?" "WHY?", those who have proven by example such as Schweitzer and by courage such as the Hindu holy man Gandhi, by thought and meditation such as The Trappist monk Thomas Merton who said "What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous" or the great Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama who said "The purpose of our lives is to be happy." and "Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions." and "I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe." My goodness, how tragic it is that faith has destroyed the mind of these men who pursue FAITH!
So my soul searching continues: What do I really want? Why? Which of my wants are what the great songwriter Patti Griffin calls so poetically "Useless Desires?", and why do I still want them? What should I want?
As has been said, we can know so little, and as Nate Hagens points out, "I don't know" is often the wisest answer we can give and accept. If someone were to ask me what I "know" it probably would not even exceed a few sentences, but I am developing a new one, and my friends and fellow students at The Oil Drum are the first to be privy to it, so THIS I KNOW:
Those who work diligently at destroying hope should not be surprised when they find themselves hopeless.
And remember, what is in your mind can kill you.
Thank you. Roger Conner Jr.
Good points on the size of humanity as compared to other biomass within the earth's biosphere. Here are some data points from Vaclav Smil's, "The Earth's Biosphere:"
Fungi 3,000 - 6,000 MtC
Invertebrates (Land) 400 - 1,000 MtC
Domesticated vertebrates 100 -200 MtC
Ocean Fish <40 MtC
Invertebrates (Ocean) 300 - 500 MtC
Oceanic viruses <300 MtC
Humans 40 MtC
Total biomass (broad definition) 2,200 - 4000 Giga tC
It is comforting to know that at least humans represent more biomass than ocean fish.
Ummm... actually I find it a lot more frightening rather than comforting that the humans outweigh the fish when we consider that the fraction of those fish that are fished commercially provide 40 per cent of the protein consumed by nearly two-thirds of the world's population.
good point. Guess I am not eating fish tonight.
Jim,
No offense, but considering what we are doing to the ocean biomass through overfishing, environmental, and habitat destruction, I'm not sure that this still holds true.
If it does, I wonder for how long, unless you have a real taste for jellyfish.
This http://www.esi.utexas.edu/outreach/ols/lectures/Jackson/ppt/41_files/fra... shook me.
It has been posted recently, but I would like to reiterate, everyone should watch it.
Excellent, Roger. Thank you.
ThatsItMount. I have some questions / thoughts.
EXPERIENCE, striving for "inner" experience does not necessarily consume resources like 0 - 500 in 10 seconds does. I wonders how much craving for worldly experience is really just an excuse to get a fix of endogenous hormones (adrenalin in the 0 - 750 mph scenario)
Maybe that is our evolutionary path, to transcend ourselves. You appear to find that unwholesome though I am short of time right now to think through your words carefully (will have more time in about 4 hours - got to get these raised garden beds finished)
I'm not sure how this conclusion ties in with the paragraph that preceedes it.
Why is MIND so important? Is thought and mentation really the apex of human possibility?
I don't think the "strange ambition" I observed within is deisre for experience, it feels more like "a need to dominate and control, a ruthless passion to be free from the constraints of Life and Creation", but I might rescind that assertion later.
Earnest,
In my heart of hearts, I truly understand your plight.
If the sky were not blue, but some other colour, whatever would we do? If up became down we would truly be in a pickle.
Why is my trip to the store uphill when a flat path would be so much more convenient?
Why do you pose vague, open ended questions with little invitation to true discourse and little insight or alternative thought?
What if I were to ask you a hypothetical question?
I will lay awake at night answering these deep issues.
/sarcanol
On this occasion I wished to draw out further comment from memmel.
I was successful. I also drew out T.I.M, and then requested some clarification of that poster's thinking.
I don't use sarcasm wich is the lowest form of communication.
Pragma, I suggest you re-read the guidlines for Campfire posts, you're beginning to appear intellectually challenged.
First a disclaimer, I'm not a biologist and certainly not an evolutionary biologist. However, while I think I can agree in spirit with what I believe is the gist of your point, (note the lack of certainty)
I will state with absolute certainty that your statement is fundamentally incorrect by definition.
The basic definition of evolution is:
From Wikipedia:
The population of human organisms has most certainly not stopped evolving by any stretch of the imagination, may I suggest you post this statement over at pharyngula.org or pandasthumb.org to get an expert's response.
My point is that when talking about a specific field of science one should at least examine the fundamental underlying premise and be very careful with regards the language and words that one uses to discuss it. As for realizing your own species is a very intelligent Dodo bird is not what you expected. Sorry but to use an expression posted above, "tough nougies", cuz nature doesn't give a rodent's rear end about us it just "is" and so are we, maybe just for a short while.
You should at least read darwin. One of the key aspects of evolution is isolation a population has to become physically isolated from another one that it can interbreed with humans esp homo sapiens have never had enough physical isolation to develop species.
The other speciation drive is a collapse of the ecological niches leading to a single species isolating itself while still maintaining physical overlap this generally is caused by physilogical isolation i.e new beaks claws etc that specialize one species into several.
Again humans as tool users have sidestepped this other evolutionary force.
I stand by my statements and I suggest you read my other post about experts.
In this case I believe that most of the "experts" are wrong. Very few bioligists study actual evolution itself much less in the higher species. You you to suggest that most have a clue about real evolution is nonsense.
Consider other species that that has achieved globalization if you will.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gull
I question if you understand what your talking about.
And again sorry to be rude but this thread is about critical thinking. You just exhibited the classic example of and idiot quoting experts.
Think about it in fact you need only a decent understanding of information flow as long as routes exist that allow a certain amount of hybridization and it takes place then real speciation is prevented by continued re-hybridization. Also understand that I define a species as bounded by its ability to form viable offspring. Once the flow of information is broken then you have a true species.
Gulls are a great underlying example since the exhibit one of the reasons that speciation can be short circuited they have flight and a basically continuous overlapping range.
Its not perfect but they exhibit with only one of the conditions that I'm asserting prevent speciation in humans the retention of the ability to hybridize.
Am I right probably would I need to get a PhD in evolutionary biology and a tenured position at Havard before anyone would take me seriously are even look at the problem.
Probably.
Who is "more" wrong a society that rejects critical thinking without the right credentials or one that allows critical thinking to highlight what I argue is probably a serious problem for our species.
By slicing and dicing our collective wisdom in a number of bins with high barriers to entry we have collectively made a pretty serious mistake. Science itself has become so distorted by the trapping of knowledge that overall its lost the power to ask the right questions.
Why on earth is something as simple and obvious as the exhaustion of a obviously critical and non renewable resource left to a band of amatures on the internet ? Where are the scientists ? I hesitate to go here but our scientific establishment is just as corrupt and misguided at the rest of our society they as a group are just as responsible for our current mess as the most corrupt politician and banker. They literally sold their soul to the devil in exchange for grant money and being told what questions to ask.
Needless to say I double our current scientific community is willing to stand up to the problem of genetic diversity look at what they have allowed with our food crops. We are one disease away from losing a substantial amount of our food supply because scientist have no backbone or political will. Ceertainly some individual scientist are not corrupt and are free thinkers but the overall situation is the same as with the rest of humanity.
Critical thinking has become so diluted at all levels even in the realm of scientist that its been effectively broken and destroyed rational thinkers are now on the sidelines and incapable of turning the masses of humanity from its headlong rush to disaster.
Why becuase to turn each and all of use would have to sacrifice something. Sacrifice is no longer possible. Name a scientist that turns down grant money because he does not agree with the underlying research topic. Name a scientist that can really determine his own direction of research and recieves money with no strings attached. Sure they exist but they are a minority even in our scientific communities.
I actually have, while studying biology at the University of Sao Paulo Institute of BioSciences, I didn't finish that degree because I went on to other things but I have a pretty good idea that you are fractally wrong when you say that humans have stopped evolving.
I'm neither offended nor am I going to descend to your level with my response. Wikipedia is not an expert source but the definition that I quoted for evolution stands.
Excuse me? I believe that most of the "experts" are wrong. Based on what?
You may want to read this article from Scientific American, it is a really good example of a scientific study proving recent evolution in a population of Homo sapiens.
December 11, 2006 in Biology
African Adaptation to Digesting Milk Is "Strongest Signal of Selection Ever"
East African cattle herding communities rapidly and independently evolved ability to digest lactose
By Nikhil Swaminathan
You need to go back to the drawing board as far as lactose goes.
We already have the gene for lactase its just a regulatory change to select for higher lactose levels. Same for that matter for pigmentation changes in humans.
No new genes involved. In fact any human population that adapts a high milk diet develops greater expression of lactose. In fact a certain precentage of the human population has higher lactose expression than others we could go on because of course many genetic disorders are related to variance in gene expression. Its a huge leap to take the underlying fact that we are not all perfect copies and expand it to assume we are still capable of evolving.
Left unmixed long enough humans could eventually evolve into truly different species incapable of interbreeding. But I'd argue that for many species not just humans the planet earth simply is not large enough to allow highly mobile species to become isolated long enough to diverge.
You completely missed my point and assumed you understood what I was talking about I suspect on purpose. I never made the claim that our fundamental dna was incapable under the right circumstance of speciation I said because of our nature or the type of species we are that natural genetic drift will never result in us undergoing further evolution.
Its a geography problem coupled with species mobility. Other species suffer this problem generally to a lesser extent.
I offer without proof that the genetic variation of Locusta migratoria migratorios is far lower than other locust species. Here you have closely related species that only differ by their migration patterns.
Underlying all of this of course is the simple fact that genetic drift suitable to cause speciation has a certain rate if the gene pools are remixed faster than they can drift then speciation becomes difficult.
Using wikipedia again :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation
Again you simply don't know what your talking about your making assumptions.
However your posts are providing a perfect example of the incorrect use of science.
And I do have and extensive background in biochem before I moved to theoretical chemistry.
I've worked on liver physiology, trace mineral toxicology, tetrogenisis and briefly pheremone isolation. I'd argue that biologist vastly underestimate the role enviromental toxins play in complex animal speciation. But thats yet another place where me and the "experts" differ. My experience has been that chemical toxins and diseases play a huge role in a rapid filtering of the underlying genome under immense stress regardless of the complexity of the species. New species are often born of duress. Going from changes in gene expression to creation of new proteins via successful genome rearrangement is at its heart a chemical problem and I'd argue that its generally in response to a chemical change in the environment. Plants are different despite the claim of organics are good plants are nasty chemical factories to begin with producing toxins in abundance. We are fortunate that these factories of death have found it advantageous to allow animals to eat a few parts. Plants have retained a effectively complete set of synthetic pathways capable of producing almost any organic or organometallic compound. I mention them since they act as the source of toxins that cause the various non-plant species problems. Basically the repeatedly and routinely drug the crap out of us. At a biochemical level they have us beaten.
My point is simple the ideas I've brought up are actually found in the literature I'm not the only one that suggests these are important behind what I'm saying are actually works from true experts published in peer reviewed journals. Because I presented them as a non-expert you assume I'm wrong. Well I'm not and I'd argue that if anything the expert literature is in general coming around into agreement with the exact points I've made.
And yes I don't always link wikipedia but wikipedia has links back into the expert body of literature from those papers you can find alternative paper and after about ten years right a review of the literature of interest to workers in the field but only of course if your and expert in that field in the first place.
Science does not have to work this way and indeed the best science rarely uses these routes.
Maybe I'm not a scientist I don't know but more important I don't care. If I'm right about our species then we face some serious problems as a species.
And I might as well present my conclusion. First and foremost we must learn to live within our means which means live in harmony with our planet and prove we can do it for thousands of years but next if I'm right this is not good enough. We have to leave we have to scatter beyond this planet and most importantly we have to do it in such away that we cannot be followed. This is the only way to restart the isolation I claim is so important for species to continue to evolve and create new branches. We are only a dead end on this planet but evolution has almost given us enough collective intelligence and understanding that we may someday collectively realize we must leave.
Makes you wonder why evolution creates intelligent dead end species in the first place. At this point I have no answer maybe one day we will maybe at some point in the far future we could prove that evolution on a single planet results in species that has to leave or die.
I personally have no problem making these leaps of insight maybe in a few thousand years the experts will "prove" it.
But one argument at a time.
WHT
Theory and Theology have the same root?
Nice theory but not true :)
Theory from Greek "theorein" to look at
Theology from Greek "theos" god and "logos" word
Probably right. Back before fundamentalists got a hold of religion, the ancient Greek philosophers actually practiced speculation, and likely asked the questions "Who is god?"
Sometime later, dogmatism crept in.
Bicycle Dave,
"Organized religion is dead and dying. It doesnt' work anymore." Pope Benedict (Arnold?) still seems to pull a crowd in Africa. Now that is ironic. The continent in the most need of reality is hosting the Vatican puppet show. LOL.
airdale!
Good to see you back.
I would love to agree, but I can't. Yes, it doesn't work anymore, but as Samuel Clemens said, "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated". It may be ebbing right now, but WTSHTF, there will be a resurgence in organized religion and there will be a host of new scams disguised as religions (assuming most religions are not scams to begin with). A thirsty man will see a mirage and drink the sand.
IMO, the term "Organized Religion" is redundant. The tenets or beliefs are structured, and most beliefs are intolerant of any deviation. Religions are corporations that pay no taxes.
Spirituality is another thing entirely, but perhaps a topic for another post.
Cheers
Great to see you back,Airdale.
bikedave: I'm with you all the way (and thanks for all that) until you get to "What I do know." Whoa! Really? How? Not that I know any different. But science will not get us there.
Hi GreenUprising,
Well, once I get on a roll...
And, I think you make great comments also.
Seriously, I think science does help us NOT believe in something like an afterlife because there is no proof, it cannot be tested, it is not falsifiable, etc. I suppose I could take the wimpy position of being agnostic - but, why should I even accept the idea that an afterlife might be "true" when there is zero reason to believe that?
My second point about delusions, simply follows from the first point - If there is no valid evidence or proof then why would billions of people "believe" all kinds of nonsense.
And my third point is an answer to my second point - people believe this stuff because they have been indoctrinated before at an extremely impressionable age by the people they trust the most.
The book "God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist" is an interesting read if you want to pursue this thought.
http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520/...
As you can probably tell, I am convinced that religious beliefs, at this point in human history, cause far more harm than good. Good human behavior can easily be taught without resorting to supernatural beings for enforcement.
I don't expect many people to agree with me on these points - 30 years ago I would have been fairly upset to even hear this kind of reasoning. I just hope that a few people might begin the process of examining why they hold such passonate beliefs about things for which there is no proof.
I'm currently rereading "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris, and recommend it. The first chapter stands alone as an essay. I wish I could post it here.
I'm afraid that it's a fact that mythological dogma will have greater fitness than the scientific method in occupying human brainspace as things get tougher, except perhaps in predominantly atheist countries. (if there are any). Religion has evolved fitness in viral competition and adaptation over millennia, while "science" is simply a method of sorting knowledge.
I keep extra copies of that book so I can give one to any friend that is interested.
hmm... I wonder if you really believe that? Nuclear power or DNA mapping did not just fall out of some sorting process.
I've been reading "Making of the Fittest" - perhaps would give an insight to your fitness thoughts.
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Fittest-Ultimate-Forensic-Evolution/dp/0393...
Also, Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, discusses the evolution of religion at length - again this might shed some light on your position,
http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618918248/ref=sr_...
I'm not seeking to diminish science, I'm a scientist by any reasonable definition of the term, even a slightly newsworthy scientist now and then when I don't keep my head down. Science is incredibly powerful as a method of figuring out how the world works, sorting from among hypotheses. And Nuclear power and DNA mapping did fall out from that process.
My point was that despite being a powerful method, it has not evolved virally to reward all including the lowest-common-denominator human brains by quashing dissonance and directly providing reward. Thus, science and religion are qualitatively different in terms of vigor in times of stress. It takes discipline and training to stick to the scientific method, and only enthusiasm to burn a witch who has cast a spell on your crops.
I enjoy your comments, feel free to click my user name and drop me a note offlist any time.
Greenish,
Point conceded - very hard to argue with that observation. It is the witch burners that bother me.
BTW, I am working something that I'd like to run past you offlist to get your opinion - probably in a week or so. Thanks.
You might enjoy reading "The Closing of the Western Mind, the Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason" by Charles Freeman.
Hi Jim,
I read the Amazon reviews and added the book to my wishlist. I've always been most interested in history before the 10th century or so, and then going back tens of thousands of years. Your recommedation fits nicely.
I recently finished a fun history book that is a very light read and not really intended for serious history scholars - but I enjoyed the book. It also covers the time after the fall of Rome.
"How the Barbarian Invasions Shaped the Modern world"
http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Invasions-Shaped-Modern-World/dp/1592333...
Dave I find myself wondering what you will do when (if) you discover you are wrong about no life after death. Do you have a backup plan?
Hi Other Jim,
And what will you do if you find the movie Matrix was not fiction :-)
I guess we could explore every supernatual theory and have a backup plan. Let's see:
the Hindu or Buddhist doctrine that a person may be reborn successively into one of five classes of living beings (god or human or animal or hungry ghost or denizen of Hell) depending on the person's own actions --- I would ask to be reborn as a god so I can teach the Republicans a few new tricks.
Mormons believe in heaven, which is defined as "the place where God lives and the future home of those who follow Him." Faithful Mormons and their families will live in the presence of God and be rewarded in accordance with what they have done during their lives. ---- I don't know if I really want to spend eternity with some of my relatives.
Ancient Egypt - Arriving at one's reward in afterlife was a demanding ordeal, requiring a sin-free heart and the ability to recite the spells, passwords, and formulae of the Book of the Dead. In the Hall of Two Truths, the deceased's heart was weighed against the Shu feather of truth and justice taken from the headdress of the goddess Ma'at.[4] If the heart was lighter than the feather, they could pass on, but if it were heavier they would be devoured by the demon Ammit. --- I think I would be in trouble here because I just don't have the time to learn this stuff.
Zoroaster, who lived in Iran around 1000 BC, teaches that the dead will be swallowed by terror and purified to live in a perfected material world at the end of time. --- sounds like I don't need any special plan.
Norse religion - Valhalla: This heavenly abode, somewhat analogous to the Greek Elysium, is reserved for those brave warriors who die heroically in battle. --- hmm... I was drafted into the US Army, but did not die in battle - but, maybe I get some points for serving.
Judaism - The Talmud offers a number of thoughts relating to the afterlife. After death, the soul is brought for judgment. Those who have lead pristine lives enter immediately into the "World to Come." Most do not enter the World to Come immediately, but now experience a period of review of their earthly actions and they are made aware of what they have done wrong. Some view this period as being a "re-schooling", with the soul gaining wisdom as one's errors are reviewed. Others view this period to include punishment for past wrongs. At the end of this period, approximately one year, the soul then takes its place in the World to Come. Although punishments are made part of certain Jewish conceptions of the afterlife, the concept of "eternal damnation," so prevalent in other religions, is not a central tenet of the Jewish afterlife. According to the Talmud, eternal punishment is reserved for a much smaller group of malicious and evil leaders, either whose deeds go way beyond norms. --- I guess my plan would be to tough it out for a year. But George Bush might have some worries.
Christianity - Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven, over which He rules, to a net which was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into vessels but threw away the bad. So it will be at the close of the age also known as the Last Day. The angels will separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. --- This one is a little hard for which to make a plan B. The key would be to understand the angels that are doing the separating and appeal to their bias. So, I have been pretty nice to the angels I have met.
Christian Science teaches that the after-death state consists of a form of "probation" and spiritual development / progress whereby the experience of the deceased is in proportion to their ability to avail of the unlimited love of God. Consequently, a person dying in a state of sin would experience God's love as suffering (like a person used to darkness whose eyes are hurt by the light) while someone who passed on in a state of spiritualized consciousness would experience a corresponding level of happiness. There is no concept of eternal punishment in Christian Science: hell and heaven are both states of thought that correspond to the presence, or absence, of self-centredness that characterise the individual undergoing the experience of death. A person who seems to die does not "go" anywhere: he/she simply adjusts to another level of consciousness which is inaccessible to those they have left behind. The ultimate, and inevitable, goal of all of us is the experience of divine Love (heaven, harmony). Death is not necessary for the experience of heaven: it can be experienced here and now to the extent that one's thought is elevated to a spiritual level. Indeed, Christian Science teaches that death itself is an illusion, and that it can, and will, be ultimately conquered through the conquest of sin, as taught by Christ Jesus and exemplified in his life. --- so, not much to worry about here
Personally, I think the afterlife thing is the ultimate con job: you give me your support (and usually some money) and I'll make sure that you never really die. Of course, I have a few rules that you must obey or I'll make sure your contract is cancelled (usually in an unplesant way).
"Christian Science teaches that the after-death state consists of a form of "probation" and spiritual development"
What's your source for this?
I googled Wikipedia Afterlife. But, if you are trying to have a debate about the exact doctrine of each belief system, you missed the point of my comment. I really don't care if Wikipedia satisfies your understanding of Christian Science. Almost every one of these belief systems has internal debates about all kinds of articles of faith. The point is that trying to have a plan B for an afterlife is a silly exercise given all the different concepts about what it is, how to get there, and how to secure a better deal.
" if you are trying to have a debate about the exact doctrine "
No, I was just curious - this did indeed not fit my understanding, and I wondered if I'd missed something.
Sorry Nick, Didn't mean to sound grumpy - I do try hard to always be civil.
We seem to have gone from oil flow stats to musings about God on this website. I guess we have to find something to keep us nattering while there's dirt cheap gas at the station, eh?
Ok, so what about "higher things", as Huxley asked of Hemingway's work? I'll be brief: absorb everything Joseph Campbell wrote, then move on to Alan Watts.
All your questions are thusly answered, and those not answered no longer seem important.
Because there are so many religions that have a different concept of the afterlife, even if one assumes that there is one true truth and there is an afterlife, then probably the majority of so-called believers will need a backup plan along with the non-believers. That sounds like a pretty big group. Why did (or will) so many people get it wrong? Did us heathens choose the wrong metaphysical ISP?
Many associated sects will be chagrined that they picked the wrong team, assuming that they still get a pass, the rest will just suffer in the pit of eternal fire.
Before you ask, yes I am in the camp of Richard Dawkins, but I have issues with his delivery.
Cheers
Hi Pragma,
I really like that! I expect to quote you often when my religious friends ask where I went wrong in my life and fell from grace.
Thanks Dave,
I chuckled to myself when it popped into my head, but then again, I am likely my biggest fan. :-)
Your posts have been great, but right now my brain is mush from reading this intense thread, so further comments would be unworthy.
Cheers
bicycle dave - I find it a little bit frightening that I agree with pretty much everything you have to say here. Rarely does someone else's world view match mine. Anyway, I have been accused that science is my religion, but as you stated, the two have very little in common.
-Crunchy (who survived 10 years of Catholic school, complete with the plaid skirt uniform and a giant helping of Guilt n' Baggage)
I disagree. The Scholastic "consensus" was that the Earth was the center of the universe, blah, blah, blah. One or two lone individuals challenged the entire consensus--and they were right and the entire consensus was wrong. Having "peers" review their works had those peers forcing them, some on pain of being burnt at the stake, of renouncing their views.
Regardless of the field involved, "peer review" is nothing but mob psychology--and has nothing to do with science. It matters not if the entire world holds that 2+2=5--they're all wrong.
Yet peer review can find a mistake in the math and prevent you from suffering further public humiliation.
And it can root out the complete frauds, like your incompetents Martin Fleischmann and Jan-Henrik Schon.
"Peer review" comes along as part and parcel of the empirical scientific method, which is observe-hypothesise-test-adjust-repeat.
The Scholastic method was deduction, where,
general principles --> specific examples
That is, by applying the general principles someone had come up with long ago, they interpreted specific examples. The scientific method added induction, that is,
specific examples --> general principles
or from looking at facts, try to induce the general principles which give rise to those facts. After a while, the general principle is well-established, and so you can move on to discovering the others while taking that one as given; in this way, the scientific method uses both deduction and induction.
Peer review is the process by which people look at the facts gathered, question whether the method of gathering them was good, and if the inductions from those facts are good.
While climate change denialists and the like are fond of comparing themselves to Galileo, even if they were correct in their denialism the comparison would be wrong. Galileo was establishing the scientific method against Scholasticism and the like. For example, it'd long been assumed that heavier objects fall faster: Galileo said, "Well, let's see if they do or not," thus his famous experiment of dropping cannon balls off the Pisa Tower.
Climate change denialists are merely challenging the scientific consensus. In this respect, a better comparison would be with Bohr and the others involved in subatomic physics, or with the Blondlot who thought he'd discovered N-rays.
So there's a difference between scientific consensus and Scholastic consensus. Scholastic consensus can't be changed, because it's based on old texts. Scientific consensus can be changed, because it's based on facts and general principles drawn from those facts.
Proof that 2 + 2 = 5
* Start with the identity
− 20 = − 20
* Express both sides in slightly different, yet equivalent ways
25 − 45 = 16 − 36
* Factor both sides
5^2 - 5 \times 9 = 4^2 - 4 \times 9
* Add the same thing to both sides
5^2 - 5 \times 9 + \frac{81}{4} = 4^2 - 4 \times 9 + \frac{81}{4}
* Now factor both sides again
\left(5 - \frac{9}{2}\right)^2 = \left(4 - \frac{9}{2}\right)^2
* Take the square root of both sides
5 - \frac{9}{2} = 4 - \frac{9}{2}
* Cancel the common term
5 = 4
*Proof
2+2=5
Source(s):
wikipedia
I am unclear whether you support or reject the previous post. Are you presenting a specious (and flawed) argument to be clever or silly?
The concept of zero is perhaps (arguably) the biggest development in fundamental mathematics ever.
Having read your posts before, I suspect you forgot the /sarcanol tag.
Cheers
My post is intended in jest. I thought that because it was so far out there it might not need the /sarcanol
Cheers
I've seen some pretty "out there" stuff posted here in earnest, so I just needed to check.
Nice "proof" BTW.
Cheers
I agree. Two areas where I suspect paradigm shifts in the near future are in nutrition, overturning the 'high fiber, low fat' paradigm; and in evolutionary science demonstrating a more flexible genome than allowed by current neo-darwinist theory.
Memmel's admonition to 'smart' people to have 10 kids may easily be based on erroneous assumptions about how evolution takes place.
Won't be debating these as i have a disabling tremor, besides I generally find debate a waste of time.
That is something that I am realy good at for a large number technical and other systems.
And I have done enough usefull stuff to prove that I got a reasonable ammount of intelligence.
Anybody want to hire me?
I don't know, but I expect that this negative correlation of IQ to openness to other alternatives very much depends on what IQ tests are used. Most, especially more modern ones, tend to reward guessing (and hence "I know" behaviour), for instance by not giving negative scores to wrong answers. I myself consider this inability to unthink ideas to be the most dominating flaw in human intellect and one that psychologists have grossly failed to investigate or even recognise.... probably because academics themselves would score particularly abysmally on it.
(see http://cogprints.org/5207 for just one alternative being religiously ignored by the "distinguished experts".)
Nate -
This is a fascinating subject, and one which gets at why I am not overly impressed with the concept of 'peer review' when it comes to scientific research.
While peer review of scientific papers is of course necessary to weed out clearly incompetent research and erroneous conclusions, the downside of it is that it can also serve to suppress inconvenient anomalous evidence, reinforce prevailing dogma, and to discourage exploration into areas outside the current scientific mainstream. The scientific establishment is like a big flywheel and does not change its position easily, which is perhaps as it should be.
However, there is a somewhat unwholesome feedback mechanism at work here: areas of research that get favorable peer review tend to more easily receive further funding, thus generating more published research in that area and so on. Areas of research running counter to such, tend to become orphans. I think nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of medical research, particularly those areas involving the efficacy of pharmaceuticals.
On the subject of not wanting to accept what is right before one's very nose, I got a good taste of that several years ago at Christmastime. We were visiting some friends, and our host was wearing a nice new sweater he got as a Christmas gift. The fireplace was going, Christmas candles were lit on the coffee table, and everything was nice and cozy. Then I suddenly observe a dull blue flame dancing up and down the arm of our host's sweater as he's serving drinks and pleasantly chatting, totally oblivious to what is going on. For an uncomfortable few seconds no one, including myself, seemed to be capable processing the information that this guy's sweater is actually on fire, even though our eyes are clearly receiving the raw data. It was totally out of context with the situation, particularly since everything was so pleasant. Finally, the unavoidable fact that our host's clothes were on fire sank in, and he quickly brushed it out with no injury whatsoever. I guess the lesson here for me was that physically seeing something and actually perceiving it are two very different things.
Hi Nate
This is a great provocative post. I have always wondered why people who I know have a very high IQ and a strong ability to argue are the most difficult to convince of things in the light of new data.
In my last place of work, asking clarifying questions and admitting that you don't know the details of a subject were seen as a sigh of weakness. It's a regressive cultural habit at the moment and one which is holding us back from assessing new ways of dealing with the problems we have.
I have just finished an old book on thinking laterally by Edward De Bono called "I am right, you are wrong" which, while being a little bit didactic, shows some techniques for testing arguments to see if important possibilities have been discounted by the thinker's existing bias and assumptions.
Carbon - Coventry UK
Great essay, Nate. More and more, I find myself wondering about how we react to the world around us. And more and more I think that our hardwired and acquired systems for processing information will lead us away from any kind of convergence in the belief systems of scientists, politicians, civic leaders, etc. Solutions that require cooperation and agreement seem more and more like fantasies--and those where agreement or some degree of consensus is achievable (e.g. we can all agree on "hope" or that yes, we in fact "can") seem increasingly meaningless. I think that, for precisely the reasons you highlight about our belief systems, and because those people who can admit "I don't know" are (generally) prevented from attaining positions of power through structural vetting, efforts that depend on achieving consensus are a bit like world peace--something we "can" achieve tomorrow if we just all agree to stop fighting, but that we will quite likely never, in fact, achieve.
So where does that leave us? What the hell are we doing here if we accept that we won't be able to convince everyone (let alone those in power) that 1) there's a problem, 2) what that problem is, and 3) what specifically to do about it?
If we accept, for the sake of argument, that we will NEVER achieve a workable consensus on energy, or on climate change, or on the basic structure of our civilization, does that mean that we cannot do anything of value? Does it demand either fatalism or selfish action? I don't necessarily think so, but this troubles me. Maybe the most relevant question to ask ourselves right now is this: what is our most effective course of action if we accept that the large majority of people will never agree with us or cooperate with our efforts?
Is any action under that assumption either 1) fundamentally selfishly motivated or 2) doomed to failure? Is there some set of actions that we can take that will propagate among those who disagree with us and lead to coordinated action by default? Or can we have the greatest altruistic effect by pioneering a path that is both self-interested and in the greater-good and thereby demonstrate to others how they can do the same? I tend to think the latter is our best path, but I'm not convinced--for example, showing that we can be happier, healthier, and more secure by reducing total consumption, increasing localized self-sufficiency, and building a network of interaction that is more closely aligned with our ontogeny?
I think we should each do what we think is necessary for our own long term good. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the vast majority of people with either not be given enough information to make their own decisions, or will be led by those who refuse to consider alternatives to their long held beliefs (i.e. those "we" elect). So we can only have a limited impact and, hopefully, it will give us a head start and provide some needed experience for our local communities.
In the case of an individual, their "long term good" period is somewhat under 100 years; the effects of elevated temperatures from climate change, even if we went to zero carbon emissions today, would last for over a thousand years.
Some native Americans had the concept of considering 7 generations; we need to consider 70+.
Oh, I agree, in spades. In fact, I think 7 generations must have seemed like forever when those native Americans came up with the notion. So we should be looking to live sustainably with no time limit.
What I meant, in my previous post, was that it is probably no good waiting for the majority to figure out that we need to live sustainably, and certainly no good waiting for governments to figure it out; the frantic attempts to resurrect national and global economies is clear evidence of that. So we really have to do what we can for ourselves and our families and hope some of that attitude lives on through our descendants and spreads slowly throughout our communities and beyond.
Not at all.
Significant social change, both good and bad, never occurs because a majority wants it, but because a small group of annoying people want it.
A majority of women did not starve themselves with the Suffragettes. A majority of Indians did not march with Gandhi to make salt. A majority of Germans (at least in the beginning) did not support the Nazis. A majority of blacks did not march with MLK, still less a majority of whites support the Civil Rights laws. A majority of Iranians did not support the Ayatollah. And so on.
Social change, both good and bad, is brought about by small groups of angry and annoying people.
Excellent. If that's an original, I'll attribute you when I quote it... though I'd add "angry and annoying individuals".
I think that the empowerment of a few individuals to extraordinary action may have a lot more potential than general enlightenment. I may expand on this here in the future, or encourage others to...
Something like the phrase comes from Sharon Astyk. I couldn't tell you which article, they're not very well-catalogued at her site.
I've heard, don't know if it's apocryphal or factual, that the United States came into existence even though only 1/3 was pro, 1/3 was con and 1/3 didn't give a rat's ass.
fwiw
Cheers
Yes but the 1/3 pro had muskets, that really helps your argument :)
Annoying and concerned, perhaps, but not angry. Anger and negative emotions do not build anything of lasting value, though they can be instrumental in starting (or destroying in order to start) something.
Such words always remind me of MLK's Letter from Birmingham Jail.
This is true of all socially progressive movements. Always there are those saying, "wait, don't be angry, be patient, don't rock the boat". But it is only by rocking the boat that we get a little refreshing water in, and get the passengers to ask the crew exactly where are we going, anyway?
There's a big difference between taking action, and promoting anger.
MLK was pushing action, not anger. His whole approach was designed to maximize action and minimize fear and anger.
Nonviolence - that's the point.
Your point that change is brought about by a few annoying people, though, is just a way of saying that a workable consensus IS reached by enough loud, influential people taking up an issue to force broad action. This was true in India, in Nazi Germany, in the civil rights movement, etc. It took a long time (in some of these examples), but a consensus was eventually achieved.
My question--and this is more directed at the belief that we can achieve perpetual growth than at a more narrow understanding of peak oil--is what happens if we CANNOT acheive a workable consensus. IF you accept that as an assumption, for the purpose of this thought experiment (it is campfire, after all), can our individual or small group actions amount to anything more than 1) ultimatly meaningless self-sacrifice or 2) selfishness? What are the "best practices" for such action, if possible? I feel intuitively that this is possible--perhaps along the lines of emergence (yet another key phenomena that we simply don't understand), but I'm having a difficult time articulating why this is so, and how it is best approached.
Call me a pessimist, but something tells me that this question will be critical because we will (again, still) not be able to convince others of the near-axiom that infinite growth on a finite sphere is a poor premise for lasting civilization.
Well, "consensus" is generally understood to mean the compromise position agreed to by every member of a group, after contributions by all of the members.
Which is a bit different to people just saying, "oh alright then, if it'll make you buggers shutup and leave us alone." To make people agree with you can be pretty hard, to make them put up with you is a lot easier.
As to this question of what if not everyone follows, the basic response is what Pat Meadows and Sharon Astyk called "the Theory of Anyway." That is, the things we do to reduce our impact on climate change, fossil fuel depletion and the like, these are good things to do anyway.
Some examples:
- using less electricity saves you money
- getting rid of your car and using public transport saves you money, lessens stress from traffic, and gives you extra time each day to read or study
- walking and cycling makes you physically healthier, which is inherently good, and particularly useful in countries without socialised medicine
- eating less meat, more fresh fruit and vegetables and less or no refined foods, likewise saves you money and makes you healthier
- borrowing consumer goods rather than buying, buying secondhand rather than new, this saves you money and reduces clutter around the house
and so on. These are things which we must do if climate change and fossil fuel depletion are real. But even if burning coal gave us vitamin C and the Earth had a creamy nougat center of oil, still these would be good things to do anyway.
My last observation is that while genuine change seems impossible, we may be surprised. Good change always seems painfully slow, and bad change terrifyingly fast.
But genuine change is often gradual, or not so much gradual as sinking into you like a sponge. Rebecca Solnit writes,
[definitely worth reading in full]
Now, I don't think productive change is likely by itself. It takes a deliberate effort. I think that if nobody tries to be annoying and effect change, then the natural drift of things is to severe climate change, turning the middle third of the world into desert, with the EU, Japan and parts of the US develop ecotopian gated cities surrounded by slums of effectively slave labourers, mostly migrants from desert zones.
But the same trends which may make the world so bleak could be turned by annoying people into something better and more equitable. And when it's changed, those changes will seem as flat and ordinary to us as "Bob and his boyfriend", "Madame Speaker" and so on.
Good thoughts.
Some thoughts about being annoying: here's a big difference between pushing for change and being willing to annoy people, and making annoyance your goal.
King and Gandhi used non-violence, respect and communication, combined with a willingness to passively accept violence until their opponents could no longer look themselves in the mirror. They raised the level of the debate, and appealed to their opponents better selves (or their pre-frontal cortex, if you like the materialist approach).
The Nazis used fear, scapegoating, manipulation and violence to reduce everyone to thinking with their lizard brains - a completely different approach.
The freedom riders would have been delighted if they had been allowed to sit at the lunch counter, but they were willing to provoke controversy to make progress. Similarly, if no one had objected to sitting at the front of the bus, that would have been great.
King and Gandhi would have been delighted to make progress without annoying anyone - they simply accepted annoyance (to the point of violence) as a price of making progress. But, it's worth pointing out that they wanted to minimize hurt feelings as much as possible. They didn't want to scare anyone - that was the whole point of non-violence.
Being annoying was not a goal, and minimizing "annoyance" (while still making progress) was an important goal.
Nick, I agree with you and those up the thread, but if one is angry and annoying, I question whether that has any relevance to democracy.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge proponent of democracy but I could argue that Fox News is also angry and annoying. I suspect that they are pandering to a perhaps (and hopefully) limited base which guarantees Fox a certain advertising revenue.
Maybe this is democracy by proxy, but I have always believed in direct democracy regardless of income, beliefs etc.
So, if change occurs by propaganda, whether it be Ghandi or Hitler, does democracy truly exist?
{cynical}
WTF am I saying? Most people don't give a fat rat's ass about the big picture until they can't get fed or laid or they are threatened with death, IOW there are those that want to maintain a status quo annd those that want to improve their status. It's all propaganda. We pick and choose which propaganda fits our belief system. Some listeners are more discerning than others. That said, survival trumps ideology every time. As Nate has said, our time discount is our doom (No, Nate didn't say that directly but...)
(/cynical}
And Fox News, I would say, has created social change.
Which reinforces what I said, that small groups of annoying and angry people create social change - both good and bad.
This is neither inherently democratic nor undemocratic. Small groups of annoying people can have undemocratic aims (extremist political parties, religious write-in groups, corporate lobbyists, Fox News) or democratic aims (Gandhi and MLK and followers, the Suffragettes, etc).
In his Birmingham letter, MLK talked about how others were saying that all the things he wanted would come with the passage of time. He replied that there is nothing inherent in the passage of time that makes good or ill come, only that people make these things happen. And so, he concluded, those of good intent must ensure they use time more effectively than those of ill intent. "The time," he said, "is always ripe to do right."
"Fox News, I would say, has created social change."
No, they've impeded it. They spread disinformation, and create fear and anger which impedes progress.
"This is neither inherently democratic nor undemocratic."
No, fear and anger cause people to defend themselves - this is the opposite of progress. Democracy requires communication and cooperation, both of which are impeded by fear and anger.
We may need to tolerate others fear and anger when we push for change, but fear and anger are very rarely helpful or productive. Oh sure, cathartic anger can be therapeutic during consciousness-raising, and may accompany one's own move into action, but one shouldn't confuse one's own private therapy with something that can be a productive tool for progress "out in the world".
Nick:
I agree, but I think we are both talking about democracy in its ideal form. If the people are fed a steady diet of destructive propaganda and then vote accordingly, one could argue that the process is democratic.
In fact, we have seen just that for the past two years and the US is heralded as "The Great Democracy".
That's not very comforting.
Yeah, you can fool everybody part the time, and some people all of the time (gosh, where have I heard that before...).
OTOH, sometimes we do better - this last Presidential election was somewhat reassuring.
We get impatient, those of us who've been lucky enough to have the time and resources to learn about these things. We don't understand why everyone else isn't with us, yet.
We're muddling our way through. If we're too slow (as is almost certain with AGW), then we'll hit crises that make it clear, and then I think we'll act faster than seems believable now. It won't be pretty, but we'll make it one way or another.
I tentatively agree, depending on the definition of "it".
More and more, I am convinced that we are so far into overshoot on so many levels that "it" will be the fight to make it through the bottleneck to a population level appropriate to the earth's carrying capacity. Reading between your lines, it appears you are more optimistic.
To say it won't be pretty, IMO, is an überunderstatement. (Is that an oxymoron? :-) )
Yes, I'm more optimistic than that.
This is a very large discussion - you could take a look at my site if you want.
Here are a few posts:
Peak Oil
Climate Change
Malthus
I had a recent conversation about this:
Nick, our disagreement about Peak Oil boils down to a question of capital replacement. While I do not foresee the collapse of civilization I do think that the costs and lead times on capital replacement and lead times in organizing new industries around new ways of doing things will cause a long deep recession as Peak Oil's decline hits full force.
I've become more pessimistic about Peak Oil due to the financial crisis. Imagine how bad the next financial crisis will get when the amount of oil available is declining 3%-10% per year.
I answered:
"Our disagreement about Peak Oil"
I don't think we differ that much - I think we have a real challenge ahead, that certainly could hurt us economically. That said, I'm somewhat more optimistic. Below I'll comment on each of your points in detail.
"a question of capital replacement"
Peak Oil (PO) is mainly a liquid fuel problem, and cars turn over fairly quickly, even now (9M per year is still not bad). We have substantial idle production currently, and putting it to use making extended range EV's (EREVs) is a social problem which I am reasonably hopeful we'll solve. EREVs are currently ready for production - I recently saw a fully finished production-ready prototype of the Chevy Volt. It's just a matter of ramping them up.
Hybrids are a transition to plug-in's (PHEVs) and EREVs, and Honda Insight and Prius production could be ramped up fairly quickly (Toyota has a second plant waiting in Texas for expansion of Prius production).
"costs and lead times on capital replacement"
The Volt R&D is pretty much done. Production will start in 18 months - that's not bad.
"organizing new industries around new ways of doing things will cause a long deep recession as Peak Oil's decline hits full force"
Well, GDP measures activity, and PO could keep us mighty busy. GDP gets a bump up after natural disasters.
High oil prices hurts the US's GDP mainly because of the income transfer to oil exporting countries. If OEC's can be persuaded to take T-bills, then GDP will be ok (at the cost of a large long-term wealth transfer). After their current reminder that oil prices can also go down, leaving them to live off investments, I think OEC's will be more receptive to that.
The current crisis is largely a failure of petrodollar (and Asian exporter dollar) recycling: low income households were borrowing directly from oil-exporting (and Asian) countries through CDO's, but it turned out they didn't have good collateral, and we're returning to financing our trade deficit with national debt, rather than personal debt. That's much more workable for the long-term.
I'm a bit more pessimistic about Climate Change, and a bit more optimistic about PO, because of their differing dynamics. Take Y2K: it was a problem with a purely man-made system, and so it's cure was relatively straightforward. PO has a geological element, but ultimately it's mostly a problem with human systems - heck, with the right national consensus we could reduce oil consumption by 10% overnight, 25% in 3 months, and 50% in 5 years. CC, on the other hand, has enormous natural lag times, and dynamics which we understand only poorly.
Well, history suggests you're wrong. Fear and anger are often but not always productive. They're more productive than being patient and reasoned. I mean, blacks in the US were patient and reasoned for a century after the end of slavery, and they got more and more segregation and oppression. A decade of being impatient and angry, and scaring whites, and voila, the end of segregation.
The examples of social change, both good and bad, created by small groups of annoying and angry people are legion. Usually those most against that kind of action are those with something to lose. Those who are most upset about people rocking the boat are the passengers in first class.
"Fear and anger are often but not always productive. They're more productive than being patient and reasoned"
That's a false choice. The less scared you are, the more action you can take.
"blacks in the US were patient and reasoned for a century after the end of slavery"
No, they were scared, of lynchings, etc.
"A decade of being impatient and angry, and scaring whites"
Is that how you would describe King's tactics? Seriously??
No, what created change was patient assertiveness in the face of fear and anger. It was the sight, on national television, of harmless children and students being wattercannoned and herded by snarling dogs. It was the Federal Government that did it, because they were embarrassed by the sight of calm, harmless protesters being hit with batons. It wasn't fear, it was shame and compassion.
"The examples of social change, both good and bad, created by small groups of annoying and angry people are legion."
Well, King and Gandhi aren't among them, not if you're looking for groups whose tactics were to be deliberately annoying and provocative of anger. King and Gandhi may have been angry, but that wasn't their tactic. They may have been willing to face anger, but they weren't trying to create it.
"Usually those most against that kind of action are those with something to lose."
Your MLK quote is about people who didn't take action because they were scared.
I'm not talking about action vs inaction, and I'm not talking about whether people were willing to face angry opposition, I'm talking about tactics. MLK and Ghandi never used fear or anger as a tactic. They inspired change, in both their followers and in their opponents.
The British could have suppressed Gandhi. They had the military power, if they were willing to kill enough people. The British people simply no longer had the stomach to kill people they began to realize were human too. That was Gandhi's genius - to connect on a human level.
I think you both are overlooking an important element in this discussion. Anger is a motive force when focused/re-focused.
This idea that anger has no place in civil action, public debate, etc., is bogus and ignores basic psychology. Anger focused and expressed as assertive action is healthy. Anger expressed as violence, you might be able to build a strong case against.
It is inaccurate to say neither Ghandi nor King used anger, nor that they didn't intend to rouse anger, both in their followers and their opposition. It is equally inaccurate to say did.
In both cases, their own anger - and King's was obvious, in my opinion - and that of their followers was harnessed and focused on internal change and external change. Just because people are not violent does not mean they are not angry. Otherwise, why were they protesting at all? Joy?
The anger aroused in their opposition was evident, also, and intended: else, how else to get them to make mistakes? How else to get them to grow tired of the whole affair? If the protesters' actions had not engendered anger and frustration, their oppressors could simply have ignored the marches and let the marchers wear themselves out.
Cheers
All IMHO, of course.
Well, I believe emotions like anger, fear, sadness are an oddly under-researched area, perhaps because of the influence of behaviorism (that terrible wrong turn in human psychology). Their interplay with liberation movements, not surprisingly, gets even less attention. So, the following is also my humble opinion from my observations. OTOH, if you've seen research, I'd love to see it.
"Anger is a motive force when focused/re-focused."
Not really. It gets you started, but will burn you out in the longterm. It also tends to create unproductive schisms in movements, and alienates potential allies.
"that anger has no place in civil action...ignores basic psychology. "
Have you seen research on this? I'd love to.
"Anger focused and expressed as assertive action is healthy. "
Again, not really. Continued focus on anger is very stressful. Acting in anger keeps you in your lizard brain, and out of your pre-frontal cortex. You're just not as smart when you're angry. I'm struck by the fact that you've seen that, when you say "anger...get[s] them to make mistakes ...[and] grow tired of the whole affair". You're talking about the oppressors, but this applies to the oppressees as well.
"t is inaccurate to say neither Ghandi nor King used anger, nor that they didn't intend to rouse anger, both in their followers and their opposition. "
Could you show me an example or two?
"Just because people are not violent does not mean they are not angry. Otherwise, why were they protesting at all? Joy?"
Anger isn't a good long-term motivator. Hope and determination to build a better life, love of compatriots and children, are better.
"The anger aroused in their opposition was evident, also, and intended: else, how else to get them to make mistakes? How else to get them to grow tired of the whole affair?"
Please re-read what I said earlier. King and Gandhi depended on reaching what's human in their opponents, not tiring them out. The history of oppression is full of oppressors outlasting their oppressees.
"If the protesters' actions had not engendered anger and frustration, their oppressors could simply have ignored the marches and let the marchers wear themselves out."
Then the protestors would have won. They were marching (in part) for the right to be in those places. They were sitting at lunch counters because they wanted to be served. If they had been quietly and peacefully served lunch - they would have won.
You are referring to the "consensus" model of decision making, which is based on unanimous agreement. But as used in phrases like 'scientific consensus,' no such unanimity is assumed or implied. The two senses of that term are rather different.
I think we should continue to try and help people become better informed. It takes time for new concepts to sink in and if people are exposed to the concepts of ecological economics they may internalize these realities quicker as the negative impacts to our environment become even clearer. The light bulb may come on sooner once we have helped people to become more sensitized. This can be done by holding small meetings with your collegues and friends, community meetings, speaking to business leaders, testifying before your legislators or local planning commission, holding conferences, etc. etc. The transition towns concept is a good example of this. I invited our management team to view the DVD "A Crude Awakening" last spring and we spent some time afterward discussing its implications. We also hosted a Conference on Michigan's Future: Energy, Economy and Environment last year and put the word out to 200 attendees. www.futuremichigan.com This is like eating an elephant, one step at a time and there is no shortcut.
As far as I am concerned, the more people who know about these issues the more likely we will reach a tipping point of larger scale behavioral changes. For a good example of this go to a "Bioneers" conference and talk with the young attendees. Most are pretty aware of these issues already and are living a different less consumptive lifestyle than the previous generation.
Of course, if you look at the facts our situation is very daunting. One of my friends calls it the 80% powerdown. But, I would rather work toward making some positive progress because any success will help to reduce the hardships that are an inevitable part of our transition.
Good post, and good question.
Ans: They won't.
At least by any reasonable definition of a "best path". We've become spoiled, since huge amounts of free "net energy" have not only put off the immediate consequences of boneheaded decisions and belief systems, but spared us the effort of reconciling one with another. The cold equations of the physical world will ultimately bend our path away from this disconnect.
Paths are interesting thing. In hiking, rather a zen question whether one makes a path or whether it makes itself, whether the intersection of the landscape and the organism create an optimum path that in a sense pre-existed. Path-dependency establishes the subset of remaining options, and we have each foreclosed options this morning. I recommend the nice little book Ubiquity by Buchanan for a wide-ranging discussion of the interconnection of different kinds of systems, but I digress...
There will, in retrospect have been a path forged of attrition and default, but our ways of thinking don't really allow us to get outside the system and optimize it very well in advance for ourselves, as an intelligent alien advisor might. And if that intelligent alien showed up with logical advice, we'd nail her to a tree as our only point of majority agreement.
Still, I'd say there are some paths that are much better and some that are much worse. I expect that our individual senses of entitlement, of egalitarian ideals, may doom us to ignore the best paths while assuring ourselves of the fairness of the process of achieving the worst ones through compromise.
Guess we'll see.
I just got back from a talk by head of UMaine climate change institute. In the presentation he was well able to distinguish between natural and human caused climate change. Not a problem there. These are various volcanos and it's easy to correlate magnitudes and rates. But his conclusions? Release corporations from liability - they are afraid of being sued like tobacco companies if they admit to climate change. The Obama stimulus package is on the right track because of all the green energy. Windmills off Maine will provide us more energy; it's only a couple of trillion dollars. Write your legislators. Change your lightbulbs. And this is the same person talking about climate flipping in as little as a year or two - 11 months of winter in Maine.
On the way out I stopped at the coffee shop for a pickerupper. "How's it going today?" the 20 something barrista asks. "I'll recover; I was at this climate change talk." She had done posters for the institute off and on it turns out. "They don't understand their own work and what it means," she said.
Gradual, eh? Everything is happening faster than anyone could have predicted. There is not much "gradual" about a discontinuity. I've been joking that we should issue AKs to everyone under 21 on the promise they not shoot anyone under 21. Maybe Gandhi would suggest everyone over 30 walk into the sea. Sadly, as the talk pointed out, the rates and lags are such that even mass suicide wouldn't have much effect in the short term. And the "opponents" are not only those who won't accept a human component to climate change, but those who refuse to accept limits and those who prosper from the system as it is even if they do understand limits.
The last thing the planet and life on it needs - human and otherwise - is an economic recovery.
cfm in Gray, ME
If by "recovery" you mean a return to the status quo ante, the way it was up until 2007, then you are surely right. But recovery can also mean a process of getting over an illness, and surely recovering from the illness of despotic capitalism (or debt-based consumerism, if you prefer) would be a good thing?
The last the the earth needs, is for us not to speedily get to some sort of economic recovery. Otherwise, the push for a greener way of making a living dies, and the old dirty ways are desperately continued until the fuel runs out. We are already seeing quite a bit of retrenchment in "clean" energy business. Our progress towards better sources of energy -and also more efficient usage is threatened by the financial panic. Of course a return to pre crisis BAU won't do, and in fact resource constraints would put a stop to it before a year or two have gone by.
Re. climate science not knowing the implications of its work.
This is so true. Read the IPCC.
The first part is about our global future of unrelenting economic growth, lifting the poor out of poverty, etc.
The second part is about how the climate system goes wacko as a consequence of the economic growth.
The third part is about how the ecosystems of the planet and the human managed systems we rely on food food, water, fibers, etc. get clobbered.
Nobody seems to look at #3 and say: How can #1 occur given #3? Isn't this kind of "growth" uneconomic since it causes even greater problems than it "solves?"
There are two points about economic growth.
The first is that it takes relatively little energy and money to give people tolerable lives. For example, Human Development Index (education, longevity and GDP per capita) reaches above 0.8 ("highly developed") with 2,000kWh per person annually; more electricity than that doesn't improve things much at all. By comparison, the USA and Australia have around 12,000kWh, Germany and Denmark 8,000kWh, Iceland and Norway 25,000kWh, and so on - with countries like Ethopia stuck on 300kWh.
So "economic growth" doesn't necessarily have to mean wasteful and destructive growth. Obviously there's a big difference in environmental impact between Ethiopia getting six times as much electricity as today, and Australia even just doubling it.
It takes relatively little income and energy to make for decent lives. It takes enormous amounts to satisfy Westerners. Or as Gandhi put it, there's enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed. So we can talk sensibly about economic growth in the impoverished parts of the world, without contradicting our desire to minimise environmental impacts.
The second thing is that there's growth and then there's growth. If there's an oil spill and it costs $50 million to fix up, or if we spend $50 million on a prison, or $50 million cooling an indoor skifield in Dubai for a week, well $50 million just got added to the GDP. Whereas if we spent $50 million on a school or a hospital or wind turbines, again $50 million was added to the GDP. In all cases there was "economic growth", So when we say "economic growth" what we really mean is "spending money", and money can be spent on both good and bad things, spent usefully and spent wastefully.
Thus when the IPCC and similar organisations speak of economic growth in the Third World, generally they're speaking about the more positive kind of growth. About money being well-spent.
This is a very thought provoking thread, and one that resonates in various ways with my aptitudes (basic analytics related to systems engineering) and recent motivations (being a little less smart and a little more wise).
Two posts above reconcile -- the one above on consensus and another on belief system change. The one on major belief system change notes that paradigm shifts are accepted when the primary defenders of the old system die of old age. Consensus is easier to build when you kill (or otherwise dispose of) detractors.
Elsewhere I have heard that the human mind self-reinforces pathways that are traversed repeatedly. This can be good as when learning a new language or other skill, inherently destructive as when brain seizures strengthen over time, or learned destruction when dopamine pathway stimulation results in drug dependence.
As noted previously, the human mind is also wonderfully adept at filtering and categorizing data, probably through a process of continual prediction and correlation. I'm not sure how this plays into the pathway reinforcement, but it seems to incorporate a heavy hysteresis and a bias toward existing "knowns".
In other TOD posts I have also heard the viewpoint that "man is a rationalizing creature, not a rational one". The human mind seems perfectly capable of quickly and effortlessly matching up observed data to a preferred existing world-view (discarding "outliers" that don't fit will), and then cleverly and inventively justifying the conclusion and exclusions.
I wonder if these all point to a meta-stable multi-variant belief system where each of us quickly self-sorts data to form initial opinions (landing in some semi-stable local minima in a vast and complex universe of possible beliefs), and then once settled for a moment each of us immediately begins to dig with a vengeance, entrenching ourselves permanently in our little spot.
I see this tendency at every turn -- in picking significant others, in choosing religions, picking college majors and careers, selecting autos, buying houses, etc. In many cases where we start is more chance than anything (who you bump into as potential mates, the household church you grow up in, what you pick on college sign-up day, the dealerships in your area, and the first "good" neighborhood in town you were exposed to, respectively), yet once selected by a semi-random mechanism it takes very little time before you've convinced yourself you've met your one and only soul-mate, you're part of the one true religion, you have a good major at a great school, you're driving the best deal on the best model from the best manufacturer, and you're living in an appreciating house in an upwardly-mobile community in a good school district.
In fact we hold this ability to stay firm in face of duress in high esteem, "if you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything", "stand by your man", "vote the party-line", or "bloom where you're planted". Marketing and sales people understand bits and pieces of this too, as does Gail the Actuary with her "herd mentality" commentary. We all know the power of making your boss think your bright idea is his, or of socializing the benefits of a plan long before a decision discussion is warranted. I think it doesn't take much to bias an individual into a relative small range of relatively shallow local minima, while safely ignoring much more profound and more stable zones elsewhere.
In my personal and professional life I try to betray my conclusion-jumping brain and trick it into considering additional paths. If a decision is needed, I make matrices of features and attributes, assign relative weights, and tally up totals only after some research and perhaps some give-and-take with a disinterested party. I strive to revisit base assumptions with each new decision or project, at least in a cursory manner. If an assumption is "I'll always make more money this year than last", a lot of my decisions made sense from 1990 to 2002, but not afterward (so I revisited, researched, and ended up here!). I endeavor to spin scenarios forward to extremes, and then see what the (often ridiculous) conclusions reveal about the present and its scalability. I step-back and draw a quick picture of how the problem/decision/project fits in a larger world-view, and see if mega-trends or large-scale issues play havoc with desirable paths.
Command and control. The best way. The one truth.
or
Laissez-faire. Let people choose their own truth and way.
The best form of command and control is by making people believe they have choices, but either is acceptable to the controller, and the controlled remains blissfully unaware of other options.
Say hello to Republicans and Democrats, in a free voting society.
The human pattern which appears unbroken in history is the need to maintain large, paradigmatic beliefs. (Early 20th C Existentialism will probably go down as a brief experiment in non-meaning that simply couldn't last.) In addition, there is also a crisis cycle in human civilization in which peaceful complacency devolves into conflicts and scarcities--thus reviving the need for belief systems. As one modern psychologist put it "life lacks any obvious meaning" thus we're propelled into an inescapable quest for meaning. Oh sure, we may travel through a number of these in a single lifetime. Belief in Love, then belief in Art, then belief in Capital, then back to Love. Then a 2-3 year nihlist period, before resumption of the belief trend. "I believe in my garden." "I believe in the redemptive experience of having and raising children." And so on.
The current Crisis (which I have started calling the Comprehensive Crisis for its brilliant fusion of so many problems into a single, monolithic jack-hammer) will no doubt trigger a starburst of new beliefs. Of course, it has to dislocate a ton of belief in the process. And that's surely underway.
I could give a different answer on a different day, but the dislocation that interests me the most right now is how this crisis will eventually tear down the pathways in which we created and maintained Experts and Expertise. This will come a little later - after the crisis chews its way further through the material world, dislocating wealth, ownership, and denominators of such. (my take is that a crisis in the material world is generally the most effective way to get society to change its paradigms)
G
In my last mgmt job before retirement we taught "critical thinking" as well as both de Bono's "lateral thinking" and Joel Barker's "paradigm paralysis", and took people through exercises in all 3. This was in the microelectronics business where you tend to find highly intelligent and opinionated engineers and scientists. When people were made inescapably aware of their own "paralysis", often through peer pressure and/or management reenforcement, they usually became quite open-minded and able to consider conflicting inputs openly and critically. My experience is that resistance to new thinking and blind clinging to cherished paradigms can be largely overcome with effective training. It is quite gratifying how much less contentious and more productive "knowledge" work becomes when this kind of success is achieved. Unfortunately, I have never experienced any such success on the internet.
I believe time and inescapable evidence will be the only way to get convergence, and that probably only through crisis. Peak oil and NG will become inescapable quite soon, and global cooling not too long thereafter. Murray
Global cooling? Jeez, you need to read up on hysteresis effects and time lags...
If temperature is a matter of perception, lack of fuel could cause a semi-global shivering. ;)
An ongoing leader in the microelectronics business, IBM, used to have a simple mantra, "Think".
I still have some pencils and stationary with the word.
But now IBM has gone loopy. They have a television commercial currently playing during the NCAA:
- “Math can do anything … it can fix the economy.”
A question and a comment:
Q: What is your IQ?
Comment: Geologists are nearly always wrong, but know so.
€
PS - u need to get a new thesis supervisor
Yoon, my IQ is high, but probably just in the interquartile among TOD staff.
I suspect your intent was to ask 'because I have a high IQ, isn't this post itself, subject to the Planck Problem'? Insightful. I am aware that in my life I 'like' to be right, but not overly so. I readily admit when I err, and am aware that I err probably more than I know.
But the purpose to me of this discussion, and even this website is not to point out the answers, but to ask better questions. We have not changed policy much if at all in the 4 years of this sites existence, but I know that people spending time here have a better understanding of the constraints we face. It is reasonably accepted now that oil is finite and that flow rates and cost are important. Other beliefs are going to be much tougher to change.
You and I share a different view of the world, though the common intersection of our beliefs is large. By definition, if I thought your view of world was better than mine, then it would be mine. I have learned from you over the years, both from your posts and private emails, and my viewpoints have changed accordingly. TOD has allowed me to 'trade up' in the people I listen to and learn from. But I continue to wonder: at what point do we have enough knowledge? At what point do we stop learning and start doing? And are those 'doing' using arrows from the right knowledge quiver?
A common delayer tactic is to proclaim that we don't know enough or have enough certainty, and that we should wait until we do.
I think that's a false dichotomy.
Every inaction is still an action. Every non-choice is still a choice.
We act according to our beliefs (and to a lesser extent, our knowledge).
There's no commandment carved in stone saying that our choices be similarly inscribed and followed for eternity.
So, we iterate a sequence like this:
act on our beliefs; observe; (hopefully) gain more knowledge; modify our beliefs;
"Plus ca change; plus c'est la meme chose" "The more that things change, the more they stay the same"
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"
-- Canadian rock group Rush
Nææt, You don't know. I know I am wrong. And another good quote from Colin Campbell "all numbers are wrong". Its a miracle that The Oil Drum has made it this far.
The Planck problem is of course a generalisation, to which there may be exceptions. In your case, you worked in an area that involved taking risks within a multi-dimensional and dynamic system. In order to succeed you had to understand what the risks were and to do what you could to reduce them. Geologists are working in a similar environment, in both exploration or reservoir characterisation. Hundreds of poorly constrained variables upon which multi-million $ decisions have to be based.
I heard a story about a Norwegian company that wanted to drill a well on a field because the reservoir model showed a large fluvial channel system - that may be full of oil - that had not yet been drilled. It was pointed out to them that the nearest well control points showed that the channel did not in fact exist - this was only a model which in this case was clearly wrong. But the young geologists still wanted to drill it. The model had disconnected them from the real world and they were struggling to relate to the fact that the real world was very different to the model upon which all their views had been based.
I don't know what my IQ is - but I'm guessing its below 100;-)
€
That joke just isn't fair.
If Colin Campbell really said "all numbers are wrong" my opinion of him just went up a notch.
As for saying "I don't know.", it may be honest, false modesty, a delaying tactic or good salesmanship. But in the end we can never have perfect information about anything IMO. But we have to make some sense of the world in order to function.
That is what religion does. It makes sense of the world to believers. To atheists like myself it makes no sense. But even atheists have to at some point make the jump that while the available evidence and reasoning says there can not be a god, to come out and state that there is no god is a leap in a country where about 90 percent say there is. It would easier to say "I don't know." like the agnostic. But to me that is just avoiding making the conclusion necessitated by evidence and reasoning.
As for changing belief systems and perceptions, I like the cynic who said "Progress is made funeral by funeral". It is insightful in that it is the way evolution has brought nature and us to this point. Change is gradual but over time those things that do not work are slowly dropped and replaced with things that do work.
The outcome is never clear ahead of time since the changes affect each other and the environment as they go. Those who think they can predict the future implications of climate change or peak oil are delusional IMO. They should say "I don't know." We can not know the future except that aging occurs as time passes, that we will die and that change never stops. That is it.
This is all good perceptive stuff and I agree with most of what you say. One way to tackle this is to break the problems down into smaller, more manageable sized chunks, and then it may be possible to draw more certain conclusions from this smaller data base.
In the UK, an energy gap was forecast, and it was forecast that this would have negative consequences for trade balance and value of £. The energy gap began to appear in 2004, and is getting bigger each year, our trade balance is getting worse and the £ has been heading S. At this level I think we can be more certain about cause and effect and what should be done to mitigate the consequences of energy decline in the UK.
Trying to model the whole system is fraught with difficulty and massive uncertainties.
"Progress is made funeral by funeral".
Oh god, that's the funniest thing I've read in a very long time.
Indelibly implanted!
"Knowing" carries such heavy binary connotations that it can drive analysis paralysis on the one had (for those who require certainty) and it can carry much faith on the part of those who do not. Coming to grips with probabilities and statistics is necessary to make clear decisions in the face of uncertainty, IMHO. This of course flies in the face of emotional arguments, cherry-picked testimonials, and scenario weighting. Some people drive cars despite a very good chance of dying in a crash over the course of their life yet hesitate to fly despite a much lower chance. Many buy lottery tickets but can't justify flue shots.
In my line of work there is strong mantra of "if it's your decision to make, make it" and "if it's not necessary to make a decision, then it's necessary not to make a decision". Anyone who has done cost-benefit analysis or project scheduling knows that all numbers are inaccurate, but projection must be made. For short-term business needs simply striving to limit the scope of estimated items and then aggregating based on historical trends generally works well for an "incremental" world, but it fails in a "sigularity" world, such as Taleb's Black Swan event. Some combination of the two, via scenario gaming or weighted options, will often enable "good enough" decisions while raising awareness of potential issues.
A recent trend I have seen in business is the notion that risk identification serves only to drive risk mitigation, and that mitigated risks are no risk at all. This is obviously a logical fallacy, yet it seems to have stricken and infected the financial world, as well as other industries. The corollary is that many people when facing a black swan will say it does not exist, because in their carefully constructed world-view it CANNOT exist, and if it MUST NOT exist for key tenets to hold then it cannot be recognized, no matter how obvious it may be. I think this is exactly the sort of discontinuity we see in the Geitner/Bernanke plans of late -- it is obvious the system is broken and the underpinnings are flawed, yet those who most need to have clarity of vision cannot or will not or choose not to admit it.
I'm sure we're all guilty of dismissing, without consideration, ideas that conflict with our own, especially if our opinion has be painfully arrived at, in an apparently rational manner. It's probably even more likely, if our current opinion has actually reversed a previously held position.
I try to cut through the conflicting arguments (climate change is a classic example of the kinds of arguments that go round and round with both sides feeling, and believing, that they have thoroughly countered, or debunked, the other) and focus on realities.
All species affect their environment, in some way. This leads to new local, or even wider, balances and a new mix of species or relative proportions of species. So it's highly unlikely that humans (a science mag article, a couple of years ago, reported on some analysis suggesting that there is very little of the earth that humans have not left their mark on) don't affect the environment. Also, it's highly unlikely that the earth has infinite resources or that renewable resources can be harnessed at whatever rate we would like (either because that rate is beyond the renewal rate or the harnessing and use is having a detrimental impact on our habitat).
So, for me, it comes down to the fact (surely incontrovertible) that the earth is finite and that we rely on the biosphere for our survival. Our ability to expand our reach for resources beyond earth is open to question and, so, a matter of belief. Am I confident that the society I live in can survive, more or less intact, for the rest of my life? No. But, if I were, would that be enough for me? No. I have kids and may later have grandchildren; will some limit bite them after I'm gone? That is very possible. If I was confident that any grandchildren I may have would see out their lives without too much disruption to what has become regarded as normal functioning for their society, would that be enough? It might, but I'm not sure I would be happy feeling that the current generations had known about limits but either decided to lump the problem on a future generation (possibly including descendants of mine) or to cling to the belief that "someone will think of something" that will push the problem so far out (let's say a thousand years) that it is not worth doing something about now.
I would love it if those who analyse to death possible solutions to isolated problems (like how do we generate our existing power requirements from some long term energy source) looked at the bigger picture and considered what we know to be true - that the earth, and it's biosphere, is finite. What should be our strategy for dealing with limits, or should we just act like any other species and let nature take its course for ensuring a long term stable population size?
I hit one of those "I don't know" things the other day.
I read an article in the local newspaper about building a(nother) interchange on US Hwy 14 going through North Mankato MN. See:
http://www.mankatofreepress.com/archivesearch/local_story_077221320.html
After reading the full article I found myself asking:"What about all the other bridges in North Mankato (3 more over Hwy 14) and in Nicollet County? How many of them are already listed a deficient or worse? Are any of the 3 other bridges over US 14 listed as deficient or worse? How the hell can we keep building more bridges when we can not maintain those we already have?
So I called the newspaper and asked about this. The writer of the story admitted he had not thought about that.
How do you start to get newspaper people interested in doing investigative reporting instead of just publishing quotes from someone. How do you get them to come up with the "I don't know" so I will dig into it and find out mode?
Or are they so financially stressed that they will never have/be given the time for such deep reporting?
Great posting as always, Nate.
Recently I had a thought that goes in line with your conclusion:
Most people prefer "popular" statements, which are catchy and simple - even if they are wrong. (Otherwise intellectuals like Al Gore should have been much more successfull than guys like the Bushs).
But I have also the impression that this mindeset is changing as soon as people realize that they have run into a crisis - and that these populists were responsible for it.
Take for example the 180° U-turn of Germany in 1945. Before it was a "perfect" totalitarian state. And I also have the impression that in the overall mainstream mentality among the people (BTW: also in large parts of the world) ideas like nationalism, racism etc. were socially very acceptable. However with the desastrous outcome of WWII and the exchange of the major leaders this mindset changed completely: People strived for a completely different world, which lead, among other things, to a constitution that puts equality and human rights at a paramount position. I am hoping that with this crisis people again will strive for some new sorts of fundamental change.
Another thing I am rather optimistic meanwhise refers to the cognitive bias issue:
More and more I am reading about this or similar topics (empirical finance, the black swan...). So I do have some hope that these new ideas won't stay limited to a small bunch of intellectuals but that it will eventually become mainstream. In fact I hope that one day even our kids will learn to become aware of the limits of their brain at school.
Maybe right now we are experiencing an intellectual revolution similar to what happened in 1968. When the protests of students spread over the world many people of all sorts lost their respect of the old establishment, no matter if these had a PhD, were university professors or whatever - so even much of the university personnel got a thorough overhaul.
Recently I heard Taleb complain about the masses of overrated PhDs on Wall Street. Just the same thing - but now in 2009.
"In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane."
~George Orwell, Ignorance is Strength
These so called smart people are just like the rest of us but have more at stake. They erect around themselves some sort of self maintaining delusion to give their life meaning and direction. The more time and energy spent building the illusion the more one has to lose so it is crucial that it never be exposed for what it is. These "VERY smart people" have to erect very thick walls of denial so their life's work isn't exposed as meaningless. Could you imagine spending the majority of your life laboring to prove something like anthropogenic global warming only to wake up and find out one day everything you did was worthless and has been proven wrong by some nobody with internet access and a laptop? That would yank the rug right out from under the little world one created to ward off the existential dread that rumbles beneath the surface of us self conscious creatures.
A great example of this was in the movie "Good Will Hunting". They took Will to some professor that had spent most of his adult life laboring over the solution of some mathematical theorem. Will walked up to the blackboard and worked out the solution in five minutes. The professor just slouched and began to weep. His entire life was exposed right in front of him for what it was, a fraud. He spent so much time and energy building his illusion that after it was exposed all that was left for him is to find somewhere quite to lay down and wait for sickness death and decay to return him to nothingness.
Freud clearly felt this when he confessed to the Reverend Oskar Pfister:
"I can imagine that several million years ago in the Triassic age all the great -odons and -therias were very proud of the development of the Saurian race and looked forward to heaven knows what magnificent future for themselves. And then, with the exception of the wretched crocodile, they all died out. You will object that...man is equipped with mind, which gives him the right to think about and believe in his future. Now there is certainly something special about mind, so little is known about it and its relation to nature. I personally have a vast respect for mind, but has nature? Mind is only a little bit of nature, the rest of which seems to be able to get along very well without it. Will it really allow itself to be influenced to any great extent by regard for mind?
Enviable he who can feel more confident about that than I."
Ernest Becker commented on Freud's confession:
"It is hard for a man to work steadfastly when his work can mean no more than the digestive noises, wind-breakings, and cries of dinosaurs—noises now silenced forever. Or perhaps one works all the harder to defy the callous unconcern of nature; in that way one might even compel her to defer to the products of mysterious mind, by making words and thoughts an unshakable monument to man's honesty about his condition. This is what makes man strong and true—that he defies the illusory comforts of religion. Human illusions prove that men do not deserve any better than oblivion."
There is much at stake for these "VERY smart people". We deserve better than oblivion....
==AC
I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.
Perfect, and I knew I should know it, but an attribution would have saved a geezer who thinks Bach is god the trouble of looking it up.
Good post. Whether things are worse now than earlier is not clear. We continue to give credence, clout and high positions to those that ignored all the signals of the coming debacle, Summers, Bernanke etc, and continue to ignore those that predicted it... Roubini, case-schiller, maybe Krugman, Mish , etc. BUt, much the same happened back in the thirties, maybe even worse then (we hope.) Could be just herd behavior in the absence of those older and wiser that died off.
"How will the belief systems of scientists, politicians, civic leaders, average citizens, etc. converge on a 'best path' forward that integrates energy, economics, equity and the environment?"
I don't know, but I will get back to you in about ten years and tell you how it is going so far IMHO.
Sometimes I think I am a goose and wake up in a new world each morning (maybe I am a black swan). One thing I have figured out over the years is that the typical impression of IQ has nothing to do with wisdom or much of anything else.
One time I took an IQ test at Squadron Officer's School. I scored 99 percentile (for those into testing, this is high beyond belief). Now if you want someone who can turn a complex multi-colored figure inside out and tell you what it will look like, I'm your man.
Another part of the test was about what I knew of AF regulations and I scored very low. My instructor who was from one of the academes was excited and said, "You are just the kind of student we want because you will be able to learn so much quicker than the other students." What he didn't know or even think about is that I just wanted to fly airplanes and didn't give a good Goddamn about AF regulations, paperwork or making four-star rank. I was just at Squadron Officer’s School because the Colonel said I couldn’t make Major without it.
So I believe that often people will overlay their own goals to other people’s actions or lack thereof. This is in addition to rationalizing actions of people based on their beauty, wealth or possessions.
I’m working on wisdom. Some of the wisest people I have found to date believe reality is only here and now. My new motto: “Hope for the best … prepare for the worst … love when you can.” Is that wise … I don’t know.
I am right there with you. I used to be intelligent and as a young man I strove always to learn more. Now I strive to be wiser, and upon setting this path I quickly learned that it is not that important to be smart.
Motivation, tenacity, and luck count for a lot too. Smart people often work for people with other gifts and higher motivations!
Nate, by the information you supplied, the proximate problem was cognitive load due to time constraints, and the underlying problem was lack of knowledge due to time constraints. In both cases the time constraints are effects of complexity.
Over the last four years myself, I've spent at least two hours a day reading up on the interrelated material and reviewing forgotten subjects. Systems theory, physics, complexity, the history of law, fluid dynamics, psychology ... but who besides freaks like me have the time to acquire that level of understanding?
If I break this down from my own experience, intelligence is only one component. I have a high IQ.
There is also a time component. I have ample free time for research, reflection, and experiments.
There is an existing infrastructure component. I have computer expertise, access to the Internet, access to a library, and a reasonable education.
There is an available energy component. I have electricity and food.
There is a motivation component, driven (or impeded) by emotional components. After having exited denial, which took some time and during which I accomplished very little learning, I found that fear can be a motivator if used properly. And I also find this material interesting. And I'm also no longer afraid to say to myself, "I don't know, but I'll go figure it out." Even more powerful, but much harder to do at the beginning, was saying, "I was wrong with what I thought before, now I'll go find a better way or more accurate model."
The trick lies in being able to ask yourself the hard questions and being able answer them yourself, before someone else asks you.
In the end, though, your campfire question can be re-phrased as, "What does Utopia look like?" Because if we are capable of addressing and reconciling the difference in belief systems, why would we waste time with scientists and politicians without first reconciling faith-based systems?
As far as the methodologies and ideas concerned, though, dynamical systems theory, chaos theory, and complexity theory are inherently cross-disciplinary. They could be the framework. How would it be implemented given the actual humans and resources we have to work with? I don't know. If I have the time, resources, and inclination to figure it out, I'll bring back a solution.
Time indeed is the rarest of commodities, which is likely a good % of why we generally have positively sloped discount rates. I too have spent a great deal of time reading on similar subjects and noticed there ARE definitely decreasing returns to complexity, both in the world and with myself. Believe it or not, I recently re-read that belief essay I linked to above and I was like 'Wow! I didn't know that - great!, interesting!, etc.' when I was the one who wrote it just two short years ago! The human brain was not designed to handle/integrate and retain the sheer volume of data and topics we are now synthesizing. We need specialists. We need generalists, and maybe even a higher level above that - like new generalists every 5-10 years as the others forget and become outdated.
I don't know...;-)
I am reminded of Alvin Toffler's book, "Future Shock," written in 1970. Apparently, he coined the term "Information Overload."
Future Shock (1970)
by Alvin Toffler (Author) "In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future..."
Amazon Customer Review:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R34DP245546Y4U/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Barron Laycock "Labradorman"
I don't think humans are truly synthesizing all the information.
With the increase of easily accessible information and "knowledge," people, especially younger ones, have become good at filtering information that suits their needs. It doesn't mean they are filtering "good" information to make "good" decisions, but it is a way to screen out the onslaught of information. Websites are getting pretty good a picking up on individual filtering patterns and presenting specific advertising to the user that the user might like to see.
I agree with you.
But exactly this is the problem: If you are the gatekeeper who pre-selects the information you want to notice then you will ignore all the information you don't want to reach you. This may easily lead to an information lock-in effect (or bandwagon effect, groupthink): If there is any unexpected "black swan" out there you won't notice it. This effect would be avoided if also people with a completely different state of mind could inform you. This could be for example a very broad-minded newspaper with a mixed team of editors.
At present I am trying to build up a better information feed for me, which currently consists of several rss-newsfeed. But I am seing how hard this is: Sometimes I subscribed to neewsfeed from editors that had quite opposing standpoints, but I unsubscibed them very soon again because I simply didn't like their writing style and found their news a waste of time.
I fear there is still a long way to go to overcome this information lock-in issue.
CBS Sunday Morning just had an interesting segment on the mistakes that humans make and how we process information. One of the people interviewed said that the implementation of a simple checklist had significantly cut surgical mortality rates, which reminds me of an airplane crash that a friend of mine was in years ago (he survived). The pilots apparently skipped the checklist and took off without the flaps deployed. They stalled and crashed at the end of the runway.
Not following the checklist(s) have been the downfall of many aviators. Checklists can be a great tool for producing standardized, repeated outcomes if: 1) They are accurate, 2) the intended audience uses the checklist as intended, and 3) the user has the knowledge and experience to know the context when to use the checklist and to have the judgment to make decisions outside of the checklist boundaries when required. Overconfidence in one's memory when accomplishing complex tasks is a set-up to fail.
Even a checklist can fail when it's so well rehearsed that checking-off becomes automatic. It's like a kid who gets his eyes checked but while waiting on the doc inadvertently memorizes the eye chart.
Complacency is a dangerous enemy.
you raise an intersting point. And it brings to mind an interesting thought!
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The golden rule that transcends all religeons and belief structures.
The Platinum Rule (from Eric Allenbaugh) is "do unto others as they would have you do unto them."
If you want to see almost every issue we discuss on TOD discussed in 1980, get Toffler's great book "The Third Wave". It is the book that introduced me to almost every issue we now discuss here in early adulthood....so I had a 20 year head start! For me it could be called (with apologies to Kubrick) "How I learned to stop worrying and love the peak!" :-)
RC
Hey hey Nate,
I think I may have a solution to this problem, it's a little out there though.
You correctly identified the root of the problem here:
When a person is confronted with new arguments, theories, philosophies, etc there are only two responses: 1) To spend the time to get to the bottom of it. 2) To defer to either your preconceived notions or an outside authority. This is an inescapable problem as spending time to look at one problem necessarily prevents you from spending time on other problems. Consequently, one must defer to another who does have the time, an authority or expert, which seems reasonable except that it introduces a further problem. How to pick the expert? If you pick an astrophysicist and I pick a meteorologist then we could end up in a situation where we both have it 'on good authority' that the other is wrong.
To state it concisely how do you choose the authority to appeal to without biasing the decision? There exists in our present society a mechanism for addressing just such a problem that many of us participate in and believe strongly. In fact we consider it to be a fundamental principle upon which a free country depends: Trial by jury.
A pool of jurors is randomly selected. Some are disqualified for preexisting bias and some for conflicts of interest. The remaining jurors are relieved of their present time constraints and commissioned to get to the bottom of it. They listen to the arguments then sit down to talk it over until they reach a consensus. There is an appeals process to allow for errors and oversights and a retrial can be held if new evidence comes to light.
There are of course problems with this arrangement and it would need to be modified from it's present form to be suitable for scientific problems. Innocent until proven guilty obviously fails for peak oil and climate change because definitive proof won't be available until after the point is moot, some other standard will need to be developed. In fact innocent and guilty are unsuitable terms for such trials and a spectrum of outcomes from conclusive to erroneous would need to be crafted.
I believe that even though 'trials' of 'science' by jury feels unpalatable it's benefits are great enough to merit consideration as a viable method for dealing with otherwise intractable disagreements in a society. First, unlike a committee it settles a dispute in a binding fashion; the results are conclusive and actionable. Second, it frees the debate from powerful influences and political meddling; no lobbyists, campaign contributions, PR campaigns or backroom dealings. Lastly, the exact same trial would be conducted in numerous different countries giving a broad sampling of the state of the issue at hand; if there is a great divergence of conclusions exists between nations then more research is needed if there is substantial agreement then it is clearly time to forge international policies.
I wrote this up as a persuasive argument. It makes sense to me and seems like a rational solution, but to be honest it doesn't quite feel right. Aditionally, the boundaries of what topics are acceptable and unacceptable for trial would need to be clearly defined, religion for example is a bad candidate for trial whereas climate change is a good candidate.
What do you think?
-Tim
O.J. Simpson?
Hey hey Lynford,
First, If two dozen different nations held a trial for OJ, each with their own varying rules for evidence and procedures, would they all reach the same conclusion? If they differed what would happen? What would the result of the OJ trial have been if the standard was something other than 'proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?'
More importantly, the OJ trial is an infamous case of the system failing, but is it by itself the best case to judge the system by. It seems equivalent to judging nuclear power by Three Mile Island or NASA by the Challenger.
But, I do have to admit there would be mistakes. Some of them are bound to be horrendous and costly, but we are making horrendous and costly mistakes right now. The question is would binding trial by jury be an improvement or not?
I was on a jury once. Myself and a couple others argued it out and decided the case-everybody else basically slept through the trial and picked one side or the other (I prevailed eventually). God help you if your fate is ever in the hands of a jury.
If you were in the hot seat how would you like your fate to be determined? Would you prefer some other system?
I think "perceived fairness of process" is erroneously conflated with validity. This is a deeply held human conviction. Even the brightest humans embrace the fallacy as fervently as rhesus monkeys do.
There are alternate ways of weighing issues which one may not have time to become an expert about. Precautionary principles - walking along the edge of a tall building is physically the same as walking along a sidewalk, but any sane person will lean away from the abyss, and this may be usefully applied to situations in which a significant number of intelligent analysts see the possibility of catastrophic results. Probabilistic considerations are valid as well: coincidences should be highly suspect. And even a simple soul should be able to understand on which side of a question lies the scientific burden of proof. Then, one can apply a corrective factor for human optimism and rationalization to maintain whatever feels good. Even without knowing a thing about the subject matter, this would probably give a good first cut.
Hey hey Greenish,
Perceived fairness is required for a system to gain public support because we embrace it so tightly.
I believe these things would come up in the course of the case and the 'simple souls' on the jury would on average reach a conclusion consistent with the simple prudence that our society presently seems to lack when taken as a whole. Whats more, the outcome would be binding, forcing action on problems that we would be happier to ignore.
heydee hey, ttt.
Yes. And my point is that this may not be a good thing. Trials are a mechanism for socially accepted resolution rather than useful prescriptive decision-making. Just as the salem witch trials served a social function, but majority mythological belief systems like that are a poor match for navigating the real world. Sometimes fair process and popular agreement are useless. More often than not, in the big picture.
They would come up with a decision. This would be based on the opinions and relative personality strength of the temporary tribe. Again, there's a big difference between social resolution and validity. Galileo mumbling "Eppur si muove" after having his life threatened by the majority. Really, if you get past "fairness" there are few realworld problems which actually cry out for a committee of ignoramuses.
Or, more likely, preventing action on problems that struck the jury members as a bummer.
But I give you points for thinking outside the box, thanks.
Hey hey Greenish,
First, thank you for your thoughtful replies. I am basically thinking out loud here and I expected some level of outright dismissal to come of it before any meaningful discussion was reached. So I appreciate you considering this at all.
I agree that social resolution and validity are very different beasts, but I disagree that that there are few real world problems that cry out for a committee of ignoramuses. Galileo is in fact a perfect example: "And yet it moves" the words he is reported to have uttered after leaving his trial in which he publicly proclaimed that the Earth was the stationary center of the universe. The reason this is the perfect example is that he was tried by the church, not a jury of his peers. A committee of ignoramuses would be far more likely to see things his way after careful explanation than a group of intelligent experts with preformed opinions and convictions.
The problem that trial by jury solves is the selection of decision makers. It removes undesirable interference from the equation. It doesn't give you the best and the brightest, what it gives you is the least biased and in a heated debate with ideologically driven opponents and far reaching consequences to politically powerful groups. I see the lack of bias as outweighing the lack of expertise. If the oil industry gets to pick the experts in the climate change debate then the out come is every bit as certain as Galileo's trial conducted by the church.
That is the primary benefit of trial by jury, but it doesn't address your important point about social resolution and validity.
You are absolutely right about this and there would be negative consequences of employing a jury to determine the veracity of scientific arguments like peak oil and climate change. But employing any system has pros and cons. The question is whether trial by jury is a better system than the one we are currently using.
I encourage you to stop and think about peak oil and climate change for just a second. How is it being settled in our present system? Just what exactly is our present system anyways? When is the debate settled? Who has the final say that compels congress to act?
I'm not wedded to the idea. I'm not sure that it would offer superior performance to our present hodgepodge of news networks, voters and politicians playing out in fair and balanced interviews between experts that disagree, but I think that it is intriguing enough to merit consideration. Ultimately I think the deciding factors would be success rate, expediency and damage control. That is:
1) Would trials reach the same conclusions that the scientific community eventually settled on with an acceptable frequency?
2) Would trials result in meaningful action sooner then our present system?
3) Would the damage done from mistakes be greater than the damage presently done by in action?
Nate asked what is the "best path forward?" I believe by that he meant "what system can we use to address the 'I don't know' problem?" That is, if we are to implement a best way forward what would the mechanics of it look like and though he framed it in in the context of individuals I believe the question is more pertinent to our fate at the societal level.
Thanks again,
Tim
On a lighter note, did you know that the ancient Athenians, upon which our democracy is ostensibly modeled, practiced appointment by lottery more than election by vote? Allotment in Athens
*I didn't mean for the jury to determine the "prescriptive decision-making" only for them to settle the debate in much the same way that a jury renders a verdict and a judge decides on the sentence.
You're essentially proposing "resolution by electorate in a vote", which is what we have now in the end, regardless of what internet debaters would like to believe. Personally, I'm not sure it's the best system, but likely better than most.
In many situations an acceptable end may be to assign probabilities to two or more scenarios, while potentially leaving options open for further future work.
Once a probability becomes high enough to be actionable based on the probability-severity product, then a different mechanism is needed. Deciding what to "try by jury" and what to do with the results will likely require a different approach and simply determining "fact". Some problems are simple enough to say "if X is true then the solution is to do Y". Most thorny issues are more like "some fraction of A, B, C, and D are true to varying degrees, and we can at least do X, Y, and Z in some combination".
I am sure there are experts in decision theory that could help with both parts of the equation. The real problem is that there is no consensus that we need a better way to define fact and develop consensus. We're already stuck in a status quo that excels at preserving the status quo. What will cause us to believe "we don't know" in enough depth to make a new process a driving change?
I think I'd rather sell peak oil than a new decision process!
An important issue is the extent to which a question actually "matters". Whether Jupiter's moons were all formed out of leftover debris from the planet's formation, or whether some were actually captured asteroids, is an example of a question that doesn't really "matter". An interesting question to speculate upon, but it makes no practical difference to one's everyday life which answer proves to be the correct one. One can also simply be content to say "I don't know" (which is probably the honest and correct answer, at present), and that won't matter either.
Global Climate Change, on the other hand, does "matter". How that all plays out, and what we do or don't do about it, will directly impact each of our lives in some way. The younger one is, the more substantial that impact might be. The honest truth is that we probably do not know with absolute certainty, even now, exactly to what extent GCC is anthropogenic vs. natural in causation; nor do we know the full extent to which GCC will play out given each assumption of relative responsibility for causation (for 0% natural/100% anthropogenic through to 100% natural/0% anthropogenic); nor do we know with certainty to what extent GCC can actually be moderated or even reversed, even if strategies to attempt such were even possible (and we don't know that either). However, while we may not know any of the above with certainty, it does indeed matter very much that we try to know as much as we possibly can. Many of us might also have to take personal action based upon that less-than-certain knowledge. For example, those living in very low-lying coastal areas will sooner or later have to make a decision whether to stay put or relocate to higher ground. Those living in the arid southwest will have to make a decision sooner or later whether to stay put or to relocate to areas which are more likely to be better endowed with precipitation. When faced with such decisions, "I don't know" is not at all helpful. Given the need to make such very significant, possibly life-or-death decisions, in the face of uncertainty, a better approach is to try to acquire as much reliable and relevant information as one can, and then to try to weigh the pros and cons of each course as carefully as one can.
Thirty years ago I found a book called the 'Encyclopaedia of Ignorance'. Each chapter was written by someone emminent in their field, it was British and most authors had FRS after their name, they each wrote about the profoundest mysteries in their field, everything from cosmology to diet and blood transfusion, and postulated what might lie just over the horizon of their ignorance.
The introduction was by an American philosopher on the nature of knowledge.
In a nutshell what he said was 'One should never totally believe or totally disbelieve anything'.
He said that one should imagine a short wire rod in one's skull that ran from zero, represesenting total disbelief, to one, representing total belief. One's integrity and credibility are represented by a bead that slides along this wire. Should it ever get all the way to either end it will fall off into the pit of pride and prejudice from which it can never be retrieved!
One should always maintain some shred of disbelief in one's most cherished ideas and some shred of belief in those of one's arch enemy.
There are a lot of people around whose beads are totally off the wire.
I try to keep my bead on the wire by thinking lots of little thoughts rather than just a few big ones, I get just a much thinking done but it keeps me flexible.
Excellent suggestion.
One way to implement this is to make it a point to read people (or websites) of vastly different persuasions every day. Currently, we face a small set of fundamentally divergent assumptions and conclusions in the social/political/economic field, ranging from (1) Everything will soon be back to normal, (2) Maybe it'll take a while, to (3) We're all in decline and are headed for serious dislocation like (a) depression, (b) tribal systems, (c) stone age existence, (d) extinction, and even (e) total universal annihilation.
Considering this variety on a daily basis is a good way to retain perspective and sanity.
One aspect of this problem is specialist vs. generalists. The trend and bias in our society has been toward increasing specialization. That is where the job opportunities are, and society seems to attach more prestige and respect to those who are more specialized than the average person, in all fields and at all levels.
Everyone pretty much knows - consciously or unconsciously - that it is impossible to know everything. Thus, the implicit assumption is that it is better to know everything that there is to be known about some small specialized subset of knowledge - or at least to think that you do, and appear to do so. The problem with this assumption is that the world and our lives in it do not fit as nice and neatly into our specialized cubbyhole mental constructs as we think that they do. Everything is connected to everything else, which means that there are no real hard boundaries defining knowledge. At the artificial boundaries that we construct around our specialist fields, we cultivate a practice of deliberately ignoring the interconnections and interactions between that which resides within our specialized realm and that which resides outside of it.
What this means is that specialists -- ALL specialists -- inevitably end up knowing less about their subject than they think they do.
Generalists tend to be more immune to this problem. For those very few of us who have deliberately turned our back on the specialist career pathway and have taken the hard road of being generalists, we KNOW that we DO NOT know it all. But we do tend to be very much more aware and sensitive to the interconnections between distinct fields of intellectual specialization; we are much more likely to see or at least be open minded to things to which specialists are blind or closed minded. Unfortunately, society usually pays us very little attention. Interestingly, though, in times of crisis, turmoil, and drastic transition, being a generalist rather than a specialist can be much more advantageous; generalists have less invested in BAU and the status quo, and are thus better equipped to adapt to a changing world. This pattern mimics what we see in the natural world; highly adapted specialist species thrive as long as an ecosystem is undisturbed, but when an ecosystem is greatly disturbed, opportunistic generalist species tend to be the ones that survive and thrive.
One final, and somewhat related thought, is wrt Kuhn's "Strucutre of Scientific Revolutions" and the idea of "Paradigm Shift". I'm not a very "ideological" person, but this is one of the very few things that constitutes something close to a basic, unalterable ideology for me. I operate on the assumption that knowledge isn't complete, that we don't know it all, that theories are subject to revision as new data becomes available. As a generalist, it is very easy to see the truth of Kuhn's thesis; I am aware that it has played out over and over again in the past, and will certainly do so again in the future. One of the things that Kuhn points out is that the older specialists have a lifetime investment in the old paradigm; it is very difficult and "costly" in many different ways to abandon the old paradigm, or even to countenance its being questioned. It is the younger ones coming up the ranks that have less investment in the old paradigm, and who also have the opportunity to make a name for themselves by pioneering the new paradigm, that thus usually end up being its champions. I would just add to this that generalists also have less invested in old paradigms, and thus are naturally more open minded toward new paradigms early on.
Once you have this all figured out could you write something whether nuclear power is a good thing or not?
Nuclear power is definitely a good thing or not.
Is fire good or bad? Fission is like fire.
I am also agnostic on global warming. Either way we need to move beyond fossil fuel.
Hi Nate,
Knowing that I was just 1 of your 1000 emails this week to process...are we "on" for the Wednesday 3/25 Campfire slot (Pacific NW update?). Thanks :-)
Thanks for the interesting article.
I've often thought it would save a lot of argument and time if there was some easier way of determining clashing presuppositions for an argument. I often find myself at odds with somebody, and after a good deal of rational debate, we manage to pinpoint where we differ on some axiomatic principle. I think the gradual formation of these axioms over time predispose us to other axioms and memes, and thus our very development is guided down what often proves a one-way route.
(I'm referring to subjective axioms here, if they can be said to exist)
In this process, some people seem to develop in a depth first way, capable of learning quickly and specialising in an area of expertise (and typically being socioeconomically successful), and some develop in more of a breadth first way, taking longer to overcome doubts but acquiring knowledge over a broader horizon (and generally meeting with less socioeconomic success).
(The last bit isn't a fully formed thought, but there may be something to it)
Love your work Nate - always thought provoking and worth the time to read. I think you hit a lot of nails on the head by drawing on an unusually wide range of professional and personal experience, even if it makes your brain hurt at times.
You are not alone musing about the force of prior beliefs. Here is a recent article from the Sydney Morning Herald by Ross Gittins, one of the few popular economists I bother with because he has a great way with words and actually understands the big issues at play.
http://business.smh.com.au/business/clashing-ideologies-behind-the-globa...
Cheers, Mark
And let us not forget that what we do know is first an imperfect abstraction of reality, filtered through incomplete perceptions.
We perceive a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, have limited tolerances to pressure, temperature, and environmental content, and thus most of the Universe is physically imperceptible to us without immediate death. Without aid and understanding, we can't experience the microscopic or the galactic. And while these things are all around us and affecting us on a constant basis, our awareness of them is in bits and pieces.
The knowledge that results from these perceptions of bits and pieces of reality is encoded in our memory, another abstraction, and then abstracted again through communication in gestures, language, and pictures.
And the foundations of how our limited experiences are processed in our brains, they are laid down without our input or choice during the first few years of life.
It's almost a wonder any of us "knows" his or her own name. Maybe nobody really knows anything at all.
It's interesting how loosely formed and tenuous all of our knowledge is. Even the things that we hold up as "Truth" can only be tied to reality through our incomplete perceptions. Yet, subjectively these "Truths" feel absolute. Everyone has been on the wrong side of a heated argument. Whenever I KNOW that I'm right, I think about all the those times I KNEW I was right. What can be done to foster an atmosphere where uncertainty is favored over false-knowing?
It seems to me that the hardest thing to see is reality itself.
I recently read of a brain experiment where introduction of drug (IIRC) to a specific area of the brain led to a sense of sureness, a "knowing" feeling, even though a premise was obviously false -- once you realize your own brain is a machine which is miraculously complex and capable yet surprisingly fallible you can help mitigate your own weaknesses.
"It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so." Will Rogers
I happen to be re-reading Diamond's Collapse. Frankly, there is too much psycho-theory here and not enough historicisity (no such word but it sounds nice - or else I don't know how to spell it). Coupling Diamond and Tainter, few simple societies could pull it off survival, much less complex ones like today. There are simply too many issues for people to grasp what needs to be done to cope with them all simultaneously. I also would like to add that people today have few real-life, useful skill-sets.
So, Todd's view of the future is that most countries devolve into areas of shared interest/resources and any central government ispretty impotent.
The IQ thing is funny to me. I didn't know until years later that I was suppose to have an IQ of 160. It sure as hell didn't help me in college when I took calculus without even having advanced algebra in HS. :-). I did get a high D however.
Todd
Hi Todd,
It's been awhile since I read Collapse (thought it was a great work), but I recall how many cases were characterized by the way the masses were distracted by irrelevant activities while the essential problems were being ignored.
Perhaps maintaining a massive military machine to fight Terror in non-Christian countries is that type of preoccupation. Maybe worring about socialism (which is close to godless communism) that might deny us the "right to choose our own doctor" is another distraction. Or the horror of embryonic stem cell research and abortion is one of those ways to avoid talking about PO, GW and 10 billion people.
A common thread which I saw running through Diamond's examples was the non-adaptability and responsiveness of CULTURES in the face of environmental/situational change and crisis. For example, the Greenlanders were surrounded by edible seafood, but their culture was not based on seafood, so when the climate became too cold for cereals, they simply died out.
Civilization and its institutions, including governments, rests upon a foundation of culture. Peoples have cultures even when they don't have civilizations. It is culture that is more basic, and it is that which needs to change and adapt. And that is exactly what is hardest to do.
If I understand Holmgren and his Permaculture concepts correctly (and I am still studying), he tends to place more emphasis and hope on a bottom-up, person-by-person cultural transformation; top-down transformation dictated from on high has a very poor track record of success - even if the people at the top can somehow be convinced to attempt it, and to attempt the right thing. This is very hard and unlikely to happen, because the elites at the top of an existing culture have gotten where they have gotten because of that culture being the way it is; massive cultural change is the LAST thing they would want to promote.
The fact that neither these discussion on the reality of knowledge or the topic of peak oil are discussed on a blog ending in mensa.org should be enough to illustrate the tenuous value of IQ.
A high IQ doesn't prevent lubricating differential equations with beer in order to produce a personally acceptable but scholastically non-viable result either.
That's a trick question and the correct answer is: I don't know and neither does anybody else ;-)
For complex problems an optimum solution is not often required. If you can first define the threshold for "good enough" a plethora of more reasonable solutions may well exist.
Empirical evidence is that "good enough" is usually not very good, and nowhere near as good as most people intuitively believe to be necessary.
Rephrased question: how can a working majority of these belief systems be managed to non-orthoganal paths such that the resulting overall direction does not completely destroy the environment or decimate humanity?
The admission that "we don't know" and that the universe contains a "maybe" might perhaps be the best option we have for finding a way through this mess.
Is there a problem with language?
Quantum Psychology: E and E-Prime
Interesting. I have almost finished a long tome (+400 pages) and I purposely got rid of every passive construction I could find (except for quotations and formulas). I did this because it forced me to credit every statement I made to someone, either as a source or target. Then when I reread it I search for any ambiguities. With the active voice, I usually don't find many. People will go nuts reading it because it does not sound normal. I say tough nougies.
I didn't know that much about E-Prime, so I will try to research the concept. I go by the classic advice of Strunk&White: "Omit needless words"
Oh yeah. If you read my blog, you will rarely find any passive voice constructs either. I have posted there only rarely recently while I work on the book. I find writing this way takes a lot of work. I say tough nougies to me.
BTW, I found two passive constructs in the two sentences you posted. You have batted o for 2. Congrats :)
I looked at the E-Prime site, and yes indeed I try to write E-Prime when it counts (although not on TOD comments usually). I have quibbles with some of their examples.
5. The car involved in the hit-and-run accident was a blue Ford.
5. In memory, I think I recall the car involved in the hit-and-run accident as a blue Ford.
The second active phrasing sounds awkward, as it would rather state:
5. In memory, I think I recall the person involved in the hit-and-run accident drove a blue Ford.
Note that their active substitution created the ambiguity that the car may have driven itself, or you don't know if the victim or the criminal had that car.
As a logic programmer, hierarchy constructs always confound me:
9. Grass is green.
9. Grass registers as green to most human eyes.
Instead, I would say
9. The color of grass is green
because it fits into the hierarchy of "things" classified as "green".
So when I write something like that, I would usually use some formal logic.
The other weird one:
10. The first man stabbed the second man with a knife.
10. I think I saw the first man stab the second man with a knife.
The first one sounds perfectly alright to me. Like, if it happened, it happened, you know?
Otherwise, you might have to preface everything you say with, "In my non-dreaming state, I think..."
Quotes from the referenced article
Note that their active substitution created the ambiguity that the car may have driven itself, or you don't know if the victim or the criminal had that car.
Instead, I would say
9. The color of grass is green
The first one sounds perfectly alright to me. Like, if it happened, it happened, you know?
You have to know when to stop parsing a sentence. If you keep going and begin invoking existentialism, writing that way will drive you crazy.
Short comment:
I find it saddening that the more complex sentence sounds akward to you. So you prefer simplicity to reality?
@5: You cannot state someting as a fact as long as it is not perfectly sure if this statement is true. For example the Ford owner may state he wasn't involved - now which one is true statement? For example the media are not allowed to simplify that a person is guilty for a crime as long as this hasn't been acknowledged by a legal court. So they have to use the more complex statement.
@ 9. Grass is green. This statement is often not true, for example after very dry weather. So one can only say things like it is mostly green (this is true even if some people cannot discern colours).
@ 10. same as 5.
First off, I usually don't write in legalese, as I don't have any interests to protect.
@5
I merely invoked readability concerns. Adding an anonymous driver makes the sentence more active. Arguing with Beldar the Conehead, I find "Go, Man, Go" better for readability than "Proceed, Human, Proceed".
@9 "It is mostly green"
Not if you look between the little bits of chlorophyll. You may find it mostly non-green. You have to know when to stop parsing and make a pragmatic decision. Besides, you just used a "is'm", which basically torpedoes your argument. :) :) :)
@10
Time to give it a rest.
1. The first man stabbed the second man with a knife.
Put that in the context of trying to educate someone about some fact
1. The one country imported oil from the other country.
vs
1. I think the one country imported oil from the other country.
So if WestTexas tried to establish the Export Land Model, he wouldn't say
"I think the one country imported oil from the other country."
Instead, he would assert that as a premise and build his model from that. You just want to make the phrase active to engage the reader.
Please stop messing with my head.
I agree. At some point a pragmatic decision has to be made as to what the sentence means, and whether it meets the intention. It's almost like a quantum Wave Function Collapse.
To preserve the doubt through each stage of argumentation, would defeat the object of readability, and therefore communication of the meme. Taken to it's logical extreme, this approach leads to a solipsistic dead end, where nothing can be trusted or taken for what it seems.
Words are about rhetoric, and forwarding memes and emotions to their next host. In a strict logical sense, I don't see how they can ever be trusted for conveying an objective reality, since words and sentences mean different things to different people.
I worked especially hard on the second sentence :)
Nate's campfire question:
is too broad. Sure scientists suffer from the Planck Problem like everyone else, but under different parameters than politicians and the general public. Scientists have to subject their actual work to scientific review through the peer process. Every article submission is another thesis exercise, where a committee works over your logic, your evidence, your theories, your spelling, whatever. Then, if published, your work gets attacked or imitated by other scientists, subject to the same process. The result is "science," a process of discovery we can often rely upon, at least when we're talking about the "hard" sciencies -- physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
The Planck Problem is much more severe for those of us not subject to such rigorous challenges. It is worst of all, in my experience, for the inside-the-beltway crowd and the politicians they depend upon. Here the smart response is carefully nurtured and shaped, not in a process of scientific discovery, but through varieties of "groupthink" enforced by sarcasm, arrogance, and shutting out (and ocassionally shutting up) contrary voices. So it is assumed that Iran is a threat, though the intelligence agencies keep saying it ain't. It is assumed that single-payer health care is a non-starter, even though sizable majorities in poll after poll say they would prefer it. You can't mention the name Chomsky without evoking a sneer, or an angry response. And you can't criticize Israel, no matter how much dissent appears in Israel's own press. This is Washington. Some social settings are just as bad, none more influential. It's an entirely different world from the scientific world, which has it's own burdens; and it requires radically different solutions.
Hi GreenUprising,
Once again, I think you have made a good point. What I worry about is how did it become so easy for this "groupthink" to take hold? And, once they have crafted a message (as you describe) why don't the masses of citizens pick up pitch forks and come after these guys?
Least I sound like a broken record, I'll just quickly submit that religious indoctrination of young children to accept so called "truth" based upon "faith" is a process that seriously degrades the resulting adult person's ability to decide what is true and what is false.
In Washington's case, it ain't religious indoctrination. OK, you pointed to the soft spot in that post. I didn't suggest how you get that sort of consensus (as opposed to scientific consensus). In Washington it's a combination of culture and money. The money's pretty clear. Washington's bought, lock, stock and barrel by Wall Street, big insurance, big pharma, big you name it. The money defines what Congresscritters are willing to hear, hence what the pundits and think tanks are willing to risk saying, even what the advocacy groups, the so-called "mainstream" ones, are willing to risk saying (think big enviro).
Culture, as usual, is harder to grasp. My reading is that the culture of Washington on foreign policy issues has been shaped by political competition and the military. Political competition in that politicians played the "red card" for fifty years, ensuring that each party was (and still is) intent on proving its mettle by taking almost any "threat" seriously and spending lavishly on what has been euphemistically call "defense" since, what? 1952? The military, and the industries it pampers, has enjoyed this game and used it to expand, service by service, weapons system by weapons system, foreign base by foreign base. "Smart people" in the business of thinking about foreign policy take these realities for granted and build their careers on catering to them. It's also the case that since before World War II, Wall Street has seen it's interests in open world markets, and the political figures it has groomed, starting with Dean Acheson, saw to it that Wall Street's interest became "national interest."
So, to generalize, "groupthink" takes hold in all sorts of settings (the term was coined to describe the behavior of decision making teams around successive American presidents), but one clear condition is that you have to think that taking your cues from those around you is the only path to advancement, and for people in authority to reward such behavior, something the guys at Salomon Bros. apparently avoided like the plague, at least while Nate was there.
As for the pitchforks, it's a troubling question, though lately we've seen some evidence that even Americans might finally rise up. I won't tackle it, having to admit that, though I can speculate (and the above is what for me is advanced speculation), I don't know. But I'm working on it.
Hi GreenUprising,
I don't want to belabor the point because I agree with 99% of your comment.
In other comments, I've suggested that there are two sides to this coin. There are people who are susceptible to being manipulated and those who are good at doing the manipulation. You are talking mostly about TPTB who take advantage of the general citizenry for the reasons you suggest.
So, for example, you mention the "red card" and I recall very vividly all the references to "godless communism" and how the "atheists" wanted to take over the world. It is these underlying elements that in the general psyche on a nation that I suspect make fertile ground for the abuses you describe. Even today, a convicted child molester would be more likely to get elected to public office than a self described atheist.
Even the groupthink element may be supported by a culture of not questioning certain "sacred values" - and guess where that comes from.
In any event, I think you are right-on about corruption and the whole business of having a military budget that is bigger than all other military budgets in the world combined.
I think there's a difference between someone saying, "I've seen this before, and don't have time to deal with it again," and someone saying, "it's all politics! I won't look at it!"
That is, there's a difference between someone who's already contended with a particular point of view, treated it seriously and after consideration rejected it, and someone who never treats it seriously or considers it in the first place.
As for people testifying before Congress, it's actually quite common for them to say, "I don't know, but I'll get back to you on that." But these sorts of people are not the sort who bombard your email inbox with strong opinions. Those with doubt are silent, those without doubt are noisy. So you get the impression no-one has any doubt.
Now we come to Planck. His perception came from a revolution within physics - quantum uncertainty and the like, which gave us the atomic bomb. Most science is not so revolutionary, and so it's easier for old scientists to accept. For example, when Meitner found atoms splitting, people doubted her; but when Crick discovered DNA, no-one doubted him. That is, when the new discovery turns everything else on its head, people doubt it, and we get the Planck Problem. But if the new discovery simply adds to the existing understanding, there's no such problem.
Lastly, sometimes the dissonance comes not from the science itself, but from the conclusions it leads to. Darwin and evolution are a good example: if creatures evolve, then it's not necessary for the world to have been created in one go six thousand years ago, it could happen over millions or even billions of years. So people's problems with Darwin's work weren't really with the science itself, but with the conclusions it lead to.
Likewise with your example of global warming and whether humans have caused it, the dissonance comes not from the science itself. The President's National Science Committee predicted global warming becoming a serious problem by 2000... in 1965. The science is complex, but not really controversial.
The dissonance comes from the lifestyle changes - use public transport, eat less meat, generally burn less stuff - which would be needed to avoid the problem. We see a similar resistance to people believing in peak fossil fuels, and for the same reasons. The basic science is not in any doubt: fossil fuels are finite, and must run out some day, and long before they run out, they must run short. This would apply even if the entire planet were made of coal, oil and gas. But the conclusions is leads to - "we need to burn less stuff" - are shocking to Westerners.
Before you can analyse people's defence of something, you have to realise what they're defending. The climate change and peak fossil fuels deniers are not really defending "natural processes" or "abiotic oil" or whatever; they're defending our wasteful Western lifestyles. Once you realise that it becomes easier to talk to them.
While I think that is true of probably 99 percent of AGW skeptics, I see a substantial number in this comment section, who I would classify more as scientific agnostics on the question. I doubt any of them have decided, they don't like the lifestyle -or political implications of a true answer to the question, but rather they aren't convinced by their understanding of the science. Now, I suspect, this may be more a result of being influenced by associates who are influenced by the cultural issues, than of having made a major effort to understand the issues. But, nevertheless I think they are all sincere, and would be amenable to convincing science.
Now, I would claim, that they need to look into radiative transport, and the effect of changing the opacity of the medium on heat transfer. That gives one the first order warming effect. The rest is simply, how a complicated system responds to an incremental increase in heating.
In the case of TOD commenters, and I believe a couple of the editors, there's a financial interest in believing in peak fossil fuels, but not in climate change.
If peak fossil fuels are real, but human-caused climate change isn't, then as fossil fuels become scarce, demand will stay high, their price will rise; so that investing in them is a wise financial decision.
If peak fossil fuels are real, and human-caused climate change is, then as fossil fuels become scarce, well even if they don't we ought to use less of them, demand drops, and their price drops; so that investing in them is a bad idea.
This is possibly why so many fossil fuel geologists show up in lists of climate change "sceptics" (and engineers, for that matter). If nobody wants to burn the stuff anymore, they'll be out of a job. Expecting a fossil fuel geologist, or one with investments in such companies, to believe in human-caused climate change is like expecting a hedge fund manager to believe in regulation.
Of course, it's also that it's hard to even imagine a different world. Frankly, I don't blame them. I mean, I hate cars, but when I look around at all our roads and traffic jams and cheap stuff from overseas, I just can't really imagine its being any different. It's such a different world we're going to, I can't really feel it in my guts. It seems so alien, so impossible that all this could just be gone someday.
I suppose it was much the same in the USSR in the 1970s or 1980s. They couldn't imagine a different world, and so a different world was forced upon them. And those who found it most difficult to imagine a different world were those who were benefitting the most from the current one.
Nobody in the Politburo or in the immense bureaucracy thought the Soviet state would simply collapse one day. The peasantry and factory workers were a bit more sceptical about it all. He who benefits from the system, believes in the system. This is why we we don't find fossil fuel peak or climate change denialists in the Third World, but heaps in the West.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/science/10quant.html?_r=1&em
You have it 100% absolutely right. Whatever makes money becomes the truth. Gulp.
Thomas Hobbes from The Leviathan:
The key, of course, is to eliminate dominion.
Kiashu, Excellent point among many excellent points by other posters. Nates questions and many of the responses are important but when it comes to humans I find that often it isn't that complex. I think you hit on a very important point that a great deal of the denial and in action is based on protection. Protection of self image, self esteem and wealth which for most is very much threatened by acknowledging PO &/or GW. As individuals, corporations and a society the west has the most to lose and to gain in this process. It is bound to create massive cognitive dissonance. Is it really surprising that we haven't been able to overcome the denial or inaction when you consider this? I would like to pose the question to the community of whether we, as an annoying minority on a short time frame, should be trying to reach consensus with the greater community or acknowledge that for the time being that it is a losing battle? If it is a losing battle should we be simply looking to implement solutions as part of that annoying minority?
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.asp?showID=13459
As noted in the presentation above, and not explicitly stated in any of the comments I've read thus far, there absolutely is an ideological, thus also economic, agenda involved in AGW denialism. Of course, this should be common knowledge as ExxonSecrets , the UoCS and others have clearly demonstrated this, but people want to be comfortable. Acknowledging that lies are pretty much the sole reason for what you believe - or don't believe - on a topic is pretty hard to swallow. It may mean you are not very bright. It might mean you are naive. It might mean you are highly suggestible. It might mean you are lazy. It might mean lots of things. What it doesn't mean, and I have disagreed on this contention with many her at TOD, is that you don't know.
Here's what I know: To say "I don't know" often means "I can't be certain." That too often extends to:
I can't be certain and don't want to look the fool.
I can't be certain and don't want to appear to be arrogant.
I can't be certain and don't want to stick my neck out.
I can't be certain and I don't give a damn, anyway.
I can't be certain and I have something to gain from my ignorance.
And many more. The problem with this is we often don't need to know. When you don't know you do a risk assessment, then you know. This is the best risk assessment for AGW I've ever seen:
How It All Ends
Despite having posted this on TOD a number of times, I'm fairly sure few, if any, have watched it. Why? ZERO responses. If people were sincere in their opposition or interested in getting past their agnosticism - one direction or the other - wouldn't they spare the ten minutes?
So, what is there supporting Nate's agnosticism and others' denial? Nothing. Literally. The supposed science doesn't exist. There was a recent paper posted that looked pretty good if you're a sceptic. Where was it published? In a rubber stamp denialist journal. Who was it written by? One of the two authors had already published using similar arguments at least two times. Each time real climate scientists critiqued the work as being highly flawed.
And this is best the agnostics and denialists have to offer. In the literature, the number of papers on climate that support AGW vs. those that don't run in the thousands to one. This isn't hyperbole.
I read somewhere, and I don't know where, but it was recently, a quote from one of the majors at the Heartland Institute's denialist jamboree that their gathering wasn't about the science so much as gathering for moral support.
Wow.
So, when someone says we can't know, and I am speaking generically here, I say you are not grounded in reality. We can know. We do know. We just don't know everything. And we don't need to. I see this position as nothing more than a collective way out of dealing with reality and/or avoiding responsibility because the claim is patently false.
I like to point out my little successes:
I knew Bush would invade Iraq.
I knew methane would be increasing as early as last August with the first report of thermokarst lakes.
I knew sea level change was way ahead of the IPCC statements back in Feb. '07.
I knew climate change was coming far faster than most thought years before the IPCC IV report.
I knew my baby was a boy.
Now, that last was pure intuition and had, of course, better than 50% chance of being right, so let's set that aside. The rest? That's analysis. It's observations. It's subconscious calculation masquerading as intuition - or arrogance if you think I am full of crap.
The mind knows far more than our conscious awareness would indicate. This we all know. The curious thing is, why is it not mentioned? This is the danger of relying on science. Science cannot begin to account for what our minds/brains can do. Is it too much like mystery for most people, so much so that they can't trust their own brain functions?
But let'sthrow all that out and look at a question raised above: how do we choose the experts to listen to if we really don't know and are not able to do the work ourselves to answer the question? Again, no mystery.
Query: How do you know when someone is lying, beyond the physical tells and such?
Answer: Do their actions match their words?
Query: How do you know which experts to listen to?
Answer: Does their research/observations/recommendations match what you see happening?
Let us test our test:
Washington: Free market. Socialism is evil.
Observation: Bankruptcy reduced for public, corporations bailed out. With public money. Socialism.
AGW denialism is based in science: Temps are falling globally.
Observation: '08 temps one of warmest years on record, moving the overall trend higher. Virtually all proxy data, i.e. real observations of the natural world, indicate warming.
Of course you can know thins without being able to prove them. More importantly, sometimes you have no choice but to act because the risks are simply too great to not act.
To answer Nate's question, it's an issue of risk. The risks of inaction and the benefits of action have to be made clear. Unambiguously so. The only answer to dealing with not only AGW, but every other major risk, is action. Inaction brings a risk of societal death that is actually quite high. It's not as if there is a 1% chance. It is significant. The scientific community, as per reports out of the recent Copenhagen conference, sees virtually no chance of staying below 2C. How much more risk can you have than that? 2C is now the minimum warming we will see. What is that? 3F? 3.5?
Peak Oil? The same. I refer everyone to Hirsch, et al.
Fisheries? God, they're virtually gone already, but since there's still mahimahi on the store shelves...
Food? GM seeds are moving us toward a world where Monsanto owns everyone's food.
Politics? Bush and Cheney are free. Obama is socializing the economy. The people talk about parties and personalities, not issues. The people talk about what the government is doing and is going to do while ignoring completely they ARE the body politic.
Etc.?
So, where will the real change come from? Not the governments. There are too many deal breakers the government will not, and cannot, address. But we can. We can just change. We can stop buying and start growing. We can have one or two children. We can decide that politics equals talking about problems and solutions with our neighbors and telling our reps to do what they are told, or be removed from office, if not jailed.
Do we really have a choice?
Humility? Sure. Honesty when you really don't know? Sure. Hey, I've been called arrogant on more than one occasion. But there are things I don't know.
I don't know when collapse will happen, or to what extent. I'm not certain there must be a depression. There could be a positive Black Swan. I don't know if my petition for my wife's residency will be approved. I don't know how to model climate. I don't know how to assess world oil supplies or figure out decline rates.
So what? I still have insight. I still have the ability to analyze. I can still look at the evidence and make a decision. And I can make mistakes and then adjust to deal with that.
And I can compromise if truly necessary.
But I can't do nothing.
You *can* know. Don't accept that you can't prove it so you can't speak and act.
Cheers
That is totally incorrect as the fuel geologists that have posted on this site in the past were met by the religious dogma of the climate changers. The climate changers never quite admit that the earth was much "warmer" and CO2 was much higher PRIOR to man being on the Earth and was a necessary precursor to the formation of the algal mats that formed the vast oil deposits found in the traps.
The "dogmatic" shouting of the climate changers drove off one of the best posters on this site MUDLOGGER in the same manner that Preachers drove enlightened people out of the church. Go look up his posts. Great writer, great humor and great at providing insight, unlike others. I can see the benefits of the MUDLOGGER and Airdale, but most of climate change nuts are not focused on the correct things or things that matter.
Climate change or not MUDLOGGER knew the same thing that the CIA knew in Three Days of Condor. They are going to burn the stuff, no matter what you say, but we may affect the "way it gets burned" and that is the goal. Keep the Amazon rainforest, but burn the oil, beneficially of course. :)
It's not religion if it's backed by science.
Show us the science that humans aren't causing climate change. Write that article for Nature. When you turn modern science on its head you're sure to get a Nobel Prize, it's the better part of a million bucks even if you don't care about the prestige.
Go on. We're waiting.
If people who ignore evidence presented to them, presenting none of their own in return - "it's just religion!" - were driven off by those who do present it, then I say good riddance.
It's still science if climate change is proved to be anthropogenic. It's still pointless if that will result in no meaningful action.
Before undertaking any proof, it is worth asking "What will be the action taken if the proof is validated?"
For CC, or AGW, or whatever it's called this week, I think the answer is "nothing". Therefore, I'm not spending too much time researching the details or forming a strong opinion.
If you convince be that the world population could and would make a change, then I might pay more attention.
I do think energy shortages and economic crisis will force change soon, while CC will force changes later.....so I'll spend more time on the former rather than the latter. There's that nasty human-centric time-discount at work again.
Well, you've got it backwards.
You're saying "nothing will be done, so there's no sense having an opinion."
Whereas the truth is that if nobody has strong opinions, nothing will be done. Ignorance leads to indifference, which leads to inaction.
Also, don't blame your own indifference on the world's indifference. You're responsible for what you do, don't blame the world for it.
God Grant Me The Serenity To Accept The Things I Cannot Change, Courage To Change The Things I Can, And Wisdom To Know The Difference... (The AA Grapevine, Vol. 26, No. 11 April 1970)
I can change my own behaviors, and that'll be challenge enough for me. Convergence of approaches for mitigating CC, peak oil/energy, environmental damage, petro-farming, nat'l security, world economy, world starvation, and population growth would be helpful -- we should first do those which most broadly offer value.
Ignorance leads to indifference? Don't know, don't care. :)
I don't blame the world, and to do so would be pointless since it won't even notice. My personal assessment of US bureaucracy and sociology is that the effort for intentional proactive change was a luxury which will not be sustained, and from here on we're mostly going to react to continuing emergencies.
JD does not post here any more. All the dogmatic shouting of the peak oilists drove off one of the great posters on this site.
He still posts here. And he always threatens to quit. And he never does. And, plus, he usually spouts secondary gibberish, essentially mitigating and marginalizing all the claims he made in the past. Like this "Look, it's not that I don't believe in peak oil, I just said it would be a smooth landing, if we do everything correctly".
But of course!
Your right, I was being glib. The funny thing is that the course of events that follow the anti peak oil post is almost exactly the same as an anti AGW post. It is difficult in the AGW denialist world as there is not much in the way of scientific evidence to back them up.
Why is this issue so black and white? I'm absolutely convinced we're enduring anthropogenic climate change today. What I'm entirely unsure of is our ability to make quantitative cost benifit analysis of any mitigation strategy. ie, how much will x cap and trade regime cost and what costly consequences will it prevent? I'm entirely skeptical that the science is definitave enough to say anything except avoiding excess CO2 emissions where its very inexpensive is probably a good idea.
It is relatively straightforward-the public (taxpayer) pays up to a TRILLION dollars a year out of their pocket-Wall Street insiders have a new source of scam revenue as old ones aren't as popular. If anyone has a logical argument connecting the necessity of a cap and trade futures exchange to the prevention of climate change I would love to see it. If an activity is taxable then tax it and put the tax revenue toward guv expenses-this idea that you can run everything through "private sector" powers that take a huge slice without a cost is absurd IMO.
Cap-and-Trade for CO2 mitigation is simply a scam to further enrich the gamblers on Wall st. etc. A straightforward carbon tax on source production / imports would do a better job, at lowwer cost, with greater stability. The only factual argument the Traders are posing against a carbon tax is "the revenue will accrue to the government", which is utterly farcical since their LAST great set of scams have put the government so far into debt that it absolutely must have a lot of new revenues simply to survive. Of course the traders are also muttering something about "let the market rather than the regulators set the price", which is just farcical having watched the market for oil, (or shares for that matter) over the past few years. Markets work better than any alternative ONLY if tightly regulated. Markets for CO2 emissions are totally pointless and un-needed, as volume fluctuations for CO2 emissions (supply / demand) are very stable overall, with hopefully an easily forseeable gradual decline which in no way needs to be anticipated.
"Cap-and-Trade for CO2 mitigation is simply a scam to further enrich the gamblers on Wall st. etc" agree completely, I have lobbied for this much simpler tax at source. Unfortunately IMHO this is unlikely to be adopted since the tax would be obvious to the "voteriat" and thus unpopular whereas "Cap-and-Trade" can be fudged and is of course a new source of income for our gambler/dealer friends (who do not have to actually make anything beneficial) and thus to more contributions for the corrupt politicians.
Could I communicate with someone who gets 1,000 emails a week? Could I answer 1,000 emails a week? Could I even read 1,000 emails a week. I don't think I could survive 1,000 emails a week. Maybe this is why people are so scatter brained these days.
This is where filters come in for email, just set your email client to send the mail to certain folders based on sender & content then read the ones that end up in the most important folder first and work your way down from there when you can.
Super thread folks, all you clever folks can(not) think after all. Cool.
Nate, re catching fish or cutting bait. I'm wondering where you will be most usefull and self fulfilled, you are most certainly appreciated here.
Ever thought of punching your thesis supervisors on the nose. If not perhaps learning about Hypnotherapy or Neurolinguistic Programming may give you a few more tools to successfully navigate your way to eternity (the grave).
Sorry, we won't find best path. All entities in this universe are born, exist and then die (and perhaps reborn cyclically).
And the entity known as "Piscean Humanity" is getting very geriatric. So the question becomes one of palliative care.
It should all be over very soon, RIP.
Another vector:
"With our thoughts we make the world", a buddhist thing. Often interpreted as "How we experience the world is dictated by our perceptions and cogitations about the world".
I would suggest that is an incorrect interpretation and would give the following;
"By the carefull construction of thought models of what we desire in the world and the exercise of spiritual will we create the physical universe".
My wife's observation; "(Laughing) Oh my I'm so naughty. I was looking at that lady crossing the road and wondering whether those silly shoes are safe to walk in, and just at that exact moment she tripped and smacked her face on the pavement. I must guard my thoughts more carefully in future"
Fortunately, I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING: true liberation.