Enter the Elephant

In The Happiness Hypothesis , psychology professor Jonathan Haidt compares human brain/behavior to a man riding an elephant. There exists a complex choreography between our newer rational cortex (the 'man'), and our older, more primitive brain structures (the 'elephant'). His point was that our brains can accomplish amazing things when we mesh our analytical abilities with our baser emotions and impulses, but that quite often the 'elephant' (our limbic and reptilian cores) unwittingly assert their dominance, and in the process override any rational, reasoned intentions. In aggregate we are a society that has become both habituated to and confused by 'more facts'. After writing about, thinking about, and interacting with others about the challenges society faces with respect to resource depletion, I am becoming convinced that confronting the 'man' with facts, although necessary to better understand our predicament, will be almost completely ineffectual when it comes to altering our course.

Below the fold I posit that before any meaningful mitigation towards energy, environmental and social challenges occurs, facts will become secondary and accessing raw emotions will be required for change.

In effect, exit the man, enter the elephant.



After restarting from scratch several times in the last 6 years, my brain has arrived at a place where I have fewer questions concerning the opportunities and constraints with respect to our situation. There is still a vast amount that we don't know - but the chasms between our energy trajectory, our insolvent financial system and our global environmental source/sink issues are wide enough that a reasonably well-read person unburdened by too much cognitive dissonance should be able to recognize the unfolding broader trend – that limits to growth are manifesting, now. Over the past generation, a growth imperative spawned a debt imperative which has gone hyperbolic when not buttressed by incrementally high energy gain. Today, the global scale of financial leverage relative to achievable quality adjusted BTU flow rates going forward suggests significant changes to our per capita throughput, or even to capita itself. However, many behavioral paths still lie open, the more likely ones the less promising, the less likely more so.

Most of my social circle is reasonably fluent in the wide boundary constraints that we now face. It is less often that I get into discussions from relative newbies on these topics. Which is why a conversation I had this week with my Aunt offered me a new insight. My aunt is a middle class, middle western, god-fearing, bright and well intentioned retired schoolteacher who forwarded me an email thread boasting about the magnitude of the Bakken Shale oil resource. Below is a brief reconstruction of our conversation:

Auntie F: Hi Nathan. I hope you are doing well in your studies. I was forwarded a report yesterday from Forbes claiming there were 500 billion barrels of oil in North Dakota and if we only allow companies to access it that we can be completely independent of foreign oil for generations. Have you seen this report? Apparently it was from government geologists and Forbes magazine obtained access to it.

NH: Aunt F, These are very complicated issues. Many analysts in the natural resources community conflate resources (how much is in the ground) with reserves (how much we can pull out). The disparity in opinions and understanding on important topics such as this, even amongst intelligent people, is extreme.

Auntie F: Well if all that oil is there why can't we pull it out? Why is it so complicated? Should be pretty black and white, right? The oil is either there or it's not.

NH: The oil might be there. But just like you have gold in your backyard, the amount of energy and natural resources required to get the gold flecks per ton of soil into a concentrated amount would cost more than the ultimate ounce or two of gold would be worth. Same with the diffuse hydrocarbons in the Bakken Shale. My wall st analyst friends tell me we might get 300 million barrels out eventually - MAYBE 500 million - which is alot, and might be very profitable for some companies, but is about 4 days of world supply. A drop in the proverbial ocean.

Auntie F: You mean that these government reports are wrong and we really can't be energy independent?

NH: Basically yes. We could be energy independent but only if we dramatically tightened our belts and relied more on solar flows - but by tighten our belts I mean down to 1/2 of our current consumption levels in the near term and 1/5 to 1/4 in the longer term.

Auntie F: I am so sick of all the garbage out there on any subject! I got an email recently telling me to contact all the seniors I know to vote Republican since the Democrats in Congress denied them their social security increase. How dumb do they think we all are!? I have to believe that Forbes knows the truth, yet he puts out skewed info to further whatever cause he is working for--and I just hate that! Our country is being weakened by people believing so much false information, or it seems that way to me. I'm not sure but I sure as hell am frustrated! Your uncle and I thought of you right away when we heard about the Dakota excitement--somehow it didn't jive with us that America could so easily become home free in the oil department. Thanks for the clarification. See you at Thanksgiving.

NH: OK. Hope so.

Whether its Peak Oil is passed/Peak Oil is 2030+, or climate change is anthropogenic and urgent/climate change is largely naturally forced, or the US and OECD financial systems are insolvent/the economic recovery is in full rebound; the disparity of beliefs on all things of consequence increasingly is heading towards the poles of fundamentalism, denial and dissonance. However, my aunt gave me a hint of what is starting to happen, and probably what will need to happen before we diverge from a business-as-usual path. She showed the beginnings of anger. Sure - it was tempered by politeness and masked by unawareness of our true situation that only 2 generations of energy/$ seignorage subsidies can engender, but it was there just the same.

The same night I spoke with her (Wednesday), I gave a presentation to Leadership Wisconsin, a group of civic leaders appointed to improve and empower local communities. I find speaking to such a group a difficult tightrope act to negotiate - my impulse to be entertaining and benign wars with my need to maintain integrity and illustrate how urgent and messed up things are (a similar tightrope I tiptoe as editor here- the deeper I understand what's going on, the fewer people I can connect with). For many at this talk, I'm sure my speech was an unexpected dash upon the rocks. But some came up to me afterwards and thanked me for my frankness. We got to talking later that night and one woman who has been active in her Wisconsin community working on sustainability expressed similar emotions to my aunt, though from a different perspective. She claimed that she has understood our resource/population/environmental problems for some time, but eventually got frustrated and gave up talking about them to friends and neighbors because there was nothing that one or a few could do. Increasingly I hear this from people that get it - they are willing to do something, perhaps even out of the box and risky, in order to effect change - they just don't know what such a thing is. More analysis and better presentations just aren't strong enough to battle the momentum of entrenched popular dissonance.

JUST ONE MORE FACT......

There are 2 thresholds occurring in resource depletion space. 1)the shifting but low odds on steering the societal Titanic ( turbo-capitalism) away from the iceberg (energy decline) and 2) what individuals are doing to increase their own odds of success of navigating the coming transition. Progress on one is probably uncorrelated to progress on the other.

Sometimes I think I am on the verge of really understanding not only the details of our global situation, but which paths are still open to humanity, and which are dead ends. Sure, I know there is a gargantuan amount of unknown knowledge out there (what we don't know we don't know), but it seems like if I could just get a little bit more info and synthesis, that I could convey such to others and the tumblers of the 'solution' lock combination could be made clear. A concise well written expose in the major newspapers etc. and people would start to change their behavior in the significant magnitude that will needed.

I have come to see this as delusional thinking. As I wrote about in 'Whither TheOildrum?', I suspect the analyst community (to which I belong), are largely puzzle solvers. The unexpected reward from finding new empirical connections and lateral thinking tricks our dopamine superhighway into thinking we are effecting change, when in reality the results are akin to an arcade game. We rationalize said situation by hoping/assuming that others will advance our analysis and effect the appropriate policy steps that logically follow. I have come to believe this is not reality. The reality is people look at these graphs and analyses a)because they are interesting in the same way watching a scary movie with buttered popcorn is interesting and b)they want to improve their own situation (by investing in oil future, or gold, etc.).

What makes paradigms change? There is a kind of recipe. First, things need to be bad in relation to how they were. Relative not absolute. (If our GDP and consumption got cut in half we would still be richer than kings and queens of a few generations ago, yet the psychological withdrawal for most of such a trajectory would be devastating.) Second there needs to be a quantification and general dissemination of knowledge and details of the problem. (enter ecological economists, Ron Paul, theoildrum.com, etc. ) Though these facts may not be assimilated by the mainstream, the fact that some people are snaking an empirical path to the heart of discontent is important. It is how this factual spine makes its way into the social zeitgeist which is the relevant question du jour. Third, there needs to be a real event that pulls at peoples emotions so much that they perceive that doing nothing is worse than doing something. Such a recipe, or close to it, exists today.

"Inaccurate but effective?" "Accurate but ineffective?"


Which of the above images would make people more likely to change their behaviors???

I would guess 30-40% of our population is cognizant that something is wrong with our current path. They don’t need to know the details of net energy decline. They don’t need to understand dispersive discovery or decline rates to know we are dependent on fossil fuels. They don’t need to have read Murray Rothbard or Frederick Soddy to understand we can’t print our way out of a physical bind. However, I suspect that though my Aunt knows <5% of what the average people on TOD do, it is people like her, one day, perhaps soon, that are going to force change. They will do it not out of some epiphany of multidisciplinary understanding but rather out of outrage. Once the inner elephants of a large majority are engaged, anger, fear and resentment are going to matter more than facts, and more than science, at least for a while. I just hope that trust, love, pride, and kindness etc. will function as bridges.

At what point do we cross the invisible threshold of 'enough' facts? At what point do we as individuals have at least enough information to act? At what point to local and regional authorities have enough? Governments? This answer almost seems asymptotic to me - as we approach the limit point, we might need more and more details on the facts just to keep an information trajectory intact. In an odd twist, I am beginning to suspect that not connecting the dots is the only ‘fact’ keeping this system afloat. I am yet to decide whether this is a good thing or bad. For the majority, recognition of our situation wouldn’t make them better off, as they would be either unable to act upon the right choices (i.e. have no real options available due to their personal situation or dearth of political alternatives), be too late (i.e. starting a society-independent lifestyle takes 10+ years) or simply unable to arrive at the right conclusions (i.e. desperation/anger can also lead to voting for right wing parties, going postal, going fanatically religious, etc). So if too many people arrive at a state of recognition without a framework and infrastructure to migrate to, we might just undo today’s societies without anything to prevent something worse. In short, we are in a pickle, and it's a bigger and more complicated pickle than I first understood. One that will require both man and elephant acting in concert, as well as taking turns.



For those interested, here were 3 previous essays related to brain/behavior:

The Psychological and Evolutionary Roots of Resource Overconsumption Revisited, June 25, 2009

Living for the Moment while Devaluing the Future, June 1, 2007

Peak Oil - Believe it or Not May 2, 2006

CAMPFIRE QUESTIONS
=================================================================================================
1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?
2. How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant' with the man riding on top?
3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?
4. What to do, if anything?



Yep.

The "yep" was for the essay. As for the questions:

1. How can science, facts and analysis overcome 'our inner elephant'?
2. What to do, if anything?

However, I suspect that though my Aunt knows <5% of what the average people on TOD do, it is people like her, one day, perhaps soon, that are going to force change. They will do it not out of some coalescing of multidisciplinary understanding but rather out of outrage. Once the inner elephants of a large majority are engaged, anger, fear and resentment are going to matter more than facts, and more than science. I hope that trust, love, pride, and kindness will eventually play roles as well.

It's the progression of a system towards ongoing self-organized criticality and collapse, just like dropping grains of rice on a pile. The confluence of anger, fear, resentment, revelation, education, local interactions with other humans etc are to a high degree reduced to yes/no decisions by individual humans, and several other simple patterns. The kinds of connectivity and interaction between these individual players pushes us towards phase shifts which are by and large nobody's idea and certainly not "rational".

If we can train ourselves to see the deep similarities between dropped grains of rice, stock market fluctuations, the size/distribution of forest fires, oil reservoir sizes, the size of human wars, the size vs frequency of earthquakes, and how humans make decisions en masse, we achieve the most control possible. This is not total control, but it also isn't illusory.

Because we experience "learning" subjectively and each believe we are in lucid control of our personal courses, we generalize that to an assumption that the aggregate learning of large groups obeys the same dynamic, and that our species is therefore collectively sentient. It jest ain't so.

Affecting large-scale human behavior is exactly analgous to stampeding mastodons off cliffs. 'taint very flattering of ourselves to think of it that way, but that's the plain truth. Doesn't mean I like it or am unusually machiavellian.

However, the set of "long-thinking motivated altruists" (to the extent there is one) doesn't much intersect with the set of "people willing to engage in realpolitik", it's like trying to find vegan slaughterhouse workers. And the set of people who think ricepiles have anything to do with practical ways of steering aggregate human behavior, and have done it, is a small set indeed.

The thing is, the pattern of future forest fires can be changed. Earthquakes and avalanches can in principle be triggered at pre-planned times. The hand that drops the rice grains may be guided by a mind. The simple reality of the way things really work, leads to a number of counter-intuitive insights about how to steer things, as well as what is and isn't steerable.

The thing about Mastodons going off cliffs is that even elephants are dumber en masse than they are individually. At one time we knew this and built our homes with their bones until they were gone. At its mose basic, steering things isn't really even about convincing our internal elephants or those of others, it's about the criticality topographies formed by the riders, the elephants, and their interaction with the world. It has little to do with logical decision; it is a structural phenomenon. We apply retroactive narratives to it which do not really describe it.

Steering systems is actually a lot simpler than it seems, but it only works in some situations: you need to know where the cliffs are, whether there even ARE any cliffs in the system you want to influence or whether you need to build them. And you need to realize that, like it or not, the elephants' aggregate predictable irrationality, and your knowledge of the terrain are your only assets. Without predictable irrationality, there would be intractible complexity and no hope of achieving a targeted outcome. With it, you're in the game. An unsatisfying game, but the only one being played.

*note: I meant to leave it at "yep", truly.

Greenish,

I have been sitting here thinking about your comment for the last few minutes trying to gather my thoughts beyond yes!yes! yes!

I have been fumbling around with the various pieces( not all of them of course and not expressed in the same words but the ideas you understand )of this jigsaw puzzle for years but I have never been able to assemble the puzzle.

I can't even find the words to express myself-in a few words you have enabled me to see things as if in bright sunlight which were but dimly visible to me an hour ago.

I believe this little composition is the most enlightening short essay I have ever read-and I have read one hell of a lot.

All right -after (not) sleeping on it it and rereading it it still holds up.Probably this will need a few concrete examples given for those not accustomed to thinking in terms of overarching and endlessly interconnected SYSTEMS to get it.Within chaos and what most concieve as the blind hand of fate rolling the dice of the universe there is probabilistic order where it has not yet been percieved to exist by the vast majority of thinkers.

Greenish is a thinker in a new field that may be characterized as the return of the Reniaisiance (sp?) man (-who could reasonably hope to be at or near the forefront in understanding of all that is happening during his lifetime) but in this modern case armed with a general understanding of the basics of all the individual sciences.He is an earlt thinker in finding and teasing out an understanding of the patterns and interrelationships that have not yet been recognized to exist for the most part.A sort of a "theory of everything" is gradually being born-there exists an ecology, if you please, of every activity of the mind, combined with all the natural processes of the physical universe.Random chance plays a big role in it- but probabability theory enables us to understand the randomness.

I need not master of demographics or mathematics to understand the population problem-any high school graduate should understand enough math to comprehend this problen easily.No one here needs to understand geology on the professional level to understand oil depletion.Greenish need not master probability theory , or psychology, to understand either well enough to see that there are predictive patterns to be seen for those armed with the right insights-whereas before chaos appeared to prevail.

I will lie awake for a long time tonight thinking about it.

I gather that you have recently had an accident from your post a couple of days ago.I pray that you are doing well.

I always said the if just one human mind could live for 1000 years it would change human conscience to something unrecognizably complex that is unimaginable to the current mind. (but because of the recognition of a unified theory of everything and hence simplified view of the universe).
Some hints at similarity across the universe at all scales are fibonacci patterns and more recently fractal geometry. I am sure others could add more universally applicable phenomena but you get the point.
I also think that within the context of this dawning revelation we should ensure that any man made systems should follow natures model because in the final anaylsis our synthetic systems will be encompassed in the larger set of nature.

I have always thought that in addition to the battle that rages between the higher and lower brain that the obvious mismatch between the minds potential and the woefully inadequate lifespan of the body to allow time for that development is one of the reasons for the short sighted tendency
of us hairless apes.

I call it the 1000 year mind in the 100 year body conundrum.
It seems that the dynamics of natural selection have yielded this relationship for whatever reasons ( maybe we are suppose to transcend our physiological limits through the use of our minds?? I don't know)
One thing is apparent and that is that a multi-disciplinary education, however obtained, is a prerequisite for this higher level of interconnected understanding that is necessary for a "oneness" view of life and the universe through observable similarities.
I love it!
The Oil Drum is populated with Renaissance Men!!! LOL

Self-similarity at all scales is not that complicated a concept IMO. You can get pulled into the Mandelbrot world of artsy empiricism or you can sit down and do the mundane entropy calculations and realize that in many cases there is not much to it.

All those self-similar concepts pointed to by greenish are real (such as reservoir sizes, etc) and have to do with peeling the onion and seeing the same statistical abstractions at each level.

Saying that the work is mundane is not the same as saying is not interesting. It is in fact very interesting, especially in regards to using it at the predictive level.

I agree that most concepts are not complicated when taken on their own but the integration of all is the complicated part.
I think the thing that is lacking or rare is the person that can integrate and understand the interconnectedness of all knowledge.

and rarer still that such a person is in a position to actually influence change on a large scale...

You guys need to re-read (read) Asimov. The Foundation books come to mind. (or maybe you really are the Foundation!)

The Law of Large Numbers................

WHT, thanks for your comment. For what it's worth, I evolved my own concepts with pretty much no exposure to the theories of others, by making a conscious decision in the early '70's to try deriving my own internal models of the world instead, since my visual-autistic(?) odd brain seemingly wanted to do it anyhow. It was only relatively recently - this decade - that I started reading and found that others had come up with very similar things, and more rigorously.

So what I'm saying is that the basic similarity, not simply in scale invariance within a system but between what would seem to be very disparate kinds of systems, enables a sort of predictability which can be very useful. In what seems to be an impossibly complex world one finds very similar "behavior" between systems. My guess is that in the future, a relatively small number of "types" will be characterized due to deep properties of information propagation.

These become more than statistical abstractions at the point one can draw useful predictive parallels between the systems.

Edit: it occurs to me that a clarification I should make, and perhaps have not very well, is that I am starting from the point of view of taking useful practical heuristics I have developed over the years, and applying a bit of reductionism to analyze why they work so well. It may be interesting to compare notes at some point with a person coming at it from the purely theoretical end of things.

However, the heuristics work, and I think have explanatory value. We'll see if I ever get it together to show that more rigorously, disavow it, or if something kills me first.

I would like to see whatever you came up with. So far I haven't had to assume much by way of heuristics, just physical principles randomized via entropy considerations. I can see how heuristics would work as the final expressions can be pretty simple.

Well, Web why don't you just enlighten us and spare the suspense.

My ideas are on a few TOD posts and more detail on http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com . I was just asking where greenish has laid out his ideas; he mentioned that he will try to pull something together.

OK, thanks for the link.
The only reason I commented is that your responses implied that you had something substantial to say.

I personally believe that a right brain intuitive approach is just as valid as a left brained logical one and indeed that they complimant one another.

Easy for you to say these things are not complicated-you are a mathametician.

I would say also that ONCE REALIZED that they are not that complicated, however.

But they have been hidden from me perhaps because I have been blinded by certain assumptions I have made or accepted w/o realizing where the error lay.Getting rid of an intellectual blind spot can be a very tough job-blind spots seem to have a sort of mechanism built into them that allows them to escape detection and destruction by the intellect in the same way that a bacteria or virus can evade the immune system.

This may be a poor metaphor but maybe the idea will come across anyway.

Easy for you to say these things are not complicated-you are a mathametician.

It's simpler than that. It's as simple as noticing patterns. This simple act allows for all sorts of societal actions, such as deciphering the seasons to plan agriculture production. How many millions of people were doing this without any meteorological training how many thousands of years ago?

This is why those of us who see peak as now or soon think our graphs are so powerful: the patterns are simply undeniable. Add those showing energy and population or energy and GDP and you think it's a no-brainer. And it should be.

Nate and Greenish are attempting to sort out why that's not enough. I think there are tons of elements one could expound on, but I think things are quite prosaic; selfish interests simply don't want the info out there that would make the Aha! moment clear to virtually everyone.

Cheers

I think there are tons of elements one could expound on, but I think things are quite prosaic; selfish interests simply don't want the info out there that would make the Aha! moment clear to virtually everyone.

Absolutely and in addition the herd is complicit in the sense that no one wants the party to end.

ccpo,

I agree if we agree that the patterns Greenish and WHT are talking about are higher order patterns-things that are simply NOT EASILY understood until after someone discerns the patterns which in themselves are not obvious.

Witness the heliocentric solar system.How many thousands of years did our ancestors gaze up at the stars and the moon without understanding thier wanderings?

We understand things at various levels-Greenish has the highest bird's eye view of our world that I personally know of, but then on the other hand I am only a sort of wanderer in the wilderness of knowledge and whole new fields of inquiry have opened up in the last few decades.Some I have only heard of,some I have read a book or two, almost certainly there are others that are very important that I haven't even heard of.

(I tend to see Greenish as a sort of pioneer because I have read a lot of stuff by a great many well known scientists who all seem to be headed toward the place Greenish seems to be now.)

One or two of them may evolve into be my personal Black Swans if i live another decade or two-totally unpredictable things will happen that are obvious to only to the early followers of these new fields.

Hey there Mac.

I appreciate your comments, and in my opinion your reaction isn't an exaggeration.

So saying, the timing of this is almost comical; I'm recovering from a concussion from a bit of a car accident, which I trust will resolve OK but which has left me loopy; and managed to get food poisoning on top of it, which is fortunately receding now. So I'm really in no fettle to expound on anything beyond the aesthetics of insomnia. Yet Nate's words, as they so often have, drew me in. Didn't even want to log back on this morning, after only 90 minutes' sleep, since the coincidence of my timezone and the essay's posting meant I was at the top of the comments, and would probably have to defend my odd contentions against charges of facile wankerism to a very tough audience. On the other hand, what the hell? I'm not good for much else today.

I'd be happy to continue the discussion in more depth with you offlist, but will do a few answers.

I've come to my conclusions not by dabbling in theory, but by being a very active activist for 35 years; experimenting with what works and what doesn't on various scales. I was also born with somewhat nonstandard mental wiring, a bit of autism or something, which seemingly caused me to think about the world a bit differently, and continually theorize and test. My methods have often met with success, on many scales, but I quit trying to explain my thought processes to others 15 years ago since I wasn't aware of any useful referents, and it just made me sound insane. My occasional posts here represent my trying again, since my physical limitations now prevent me from operating as I did for so many years.

What I'm describing is not a "complicated" or "advanced" way of thinking about things; it's just very different, and I think more useful in many ways, particularly for anyone who needs to steer large-scale events in a particular way with a short time horizon.

best

Hi Greenish,

As to insomnia? I tend to suffer from it many times. I think its my brain trying to divulge solutions or seeking a different path but whatever it is it can be tiring.

So instead of fighting it I surrendered to it. Several things work for me. First I keep right beside the bed several books to read. Both novels and non-fiction. This diverts my mind from continually seizing on problems from the previous day that were unresolved.

Some are books on electonics, such as Quantum Mechanics,String Theory and various other shades of endeavor. The rest are of a spiritual bent. When I start to read an author I tend to purchase over time ALL his published books. Mostly fiction in this case. Quite a few authors I have read all they have published. Such as Tony Hillerman, DeMille, Patrick O'Brien and so forth.

Failing that I just get up and start cooking or working on a project. Lately a very large jigsaw puzzle, and more recently military aircraft in model form of those I have worked on (McDonnells) or flown in. I also create flight sims aircraft from scratch.

So I just go with a different work/hobby/sleep schedule and welll..it works for me. Sometimes I just browse the net and google the depths on some subject.

To me its weird to follow the herd mentality on scheduled sleep periods. I might also get up in the middle of the night and stalk and record owls as they speak back and forth.

I have a very nice recliner handy to a DVD/Tape player with a small TV and collect older movies that I can watch over and over. Actually I find that I can do well with far less than 8 hours sleep. Yet sometimes I can sleep for over 12 hours at a stretch.

Best,
Airdale

Good to hear from you Airdale, and appreciate the advice.

The current insomnia is just from trauma, so it'll pass. More generally, I and one of my brothers have an odd sort of asomnia which seems to be physically dangerous at worst and a pain in the arse at best, although not so bad for me in the past year. The other brother sleeps like a baby.

My wife thinks that in my case it's mostly just an alien mind wearing out its human body prematurely.

As I noted, I made it a point to pretty much not read any books or research between about 1972-2002 (aside from scifi & such for entertainment), just since I rather enjoyed the challenge of coming up with a parallel way of thinking about things.

Of course, what that means now that my parallel worldview is as good as it'll probably get, is that there are a lot of great books I can read, and I do. When reading TOD, I often have a browser window open to the library system as well, so when someone mentions a book I can click a few times and have it sent to my local library for pickup. Entertaining, educational and free.

Only problem is that they don't put me to sleep; if they're good I get so wired that sleep recedes into improbability. Same with music. (I even used a jungle "environmental sounds" mp3 last night and wound up with my mind analyzing what was moving all around me in the jungle. Which was actually pretty cool but not restful.)

Still, your advice is great & appreciated. Not for the first time, I wish I had you and other TOD'ers for physical neighbors.

Of course, what that means now that my parallel worldview is as good as it'll probably get,

The stuff you were writing about reminds of the stuff the Chaos theory people were generating. The problem with doing it on your own, is that you are isolated from the mainstream who may be working on similar problems -and they are isolated from you. Even if you got together with them, you are likely using completely different jargon, communication would be difficult. Of course if it just a pasttime for you, that is fine. But if you want to be part of the mainstream development ofideas, you'll have to hunt donw and communicate with the people thinking about similar issues.

Hope you get over your accident. Once worked with a former mathematician, who had been hit by a car. Before the accident his short term memory was about a hundred objects (normal is five to seven), and he was reportedly a worldclass mathematician. Afterwards he still knew the stuff, but he just couldn't do the work, though he still functions as a highly intelligent superlogical person.

Hey there.

The problem with doing it on your own, is that you are isolated from the mainstream who may be working on similar problems -and they are isolated from you. Even if you got together with them, you are likely using completely different jargon, communication would be difficult.

I appreciate your thoughts, but isolation was the whole point. When you study the mainstream, you learn the mainstream. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I was seeking to do things nobody else seemed to be doing at the time.

It'd be easier to communicate, but I'd have nothing fresh to communicate.

Of course if it just a pasttime for you, that is fine. But if you want to be part of the mainstream development of ideas, you'll have to hunt down and communicate with the people thinking about similar issues.

Actually, developing the methods and strategies was to affect change in the world. The apparent partial convergences of my private working techniques with general complexity, chaos, and criticality theories is interesting to me in retrospect and may hold general lessons and principles, but it's a side effect.

My nonstandard ideas and targets have generated a lot of original science over the years, published by whatever PhD's I had working on projects at the time. I have my doubts that would have been the case if I'd followed a more normal career course.

Hope you get over your accident. Once worked with a former mathematician, who had been hit by a car. Before the accident his short term memory was about a hundred objects (normal is five to seven), and he was reportedly a worldclass mathematician. Afterwards he still knew the stuff, but he just couldn't do the work, though he still functions as a highly intelligent superlogical person.

Thanks, and I relate. Unrelated to the recent car accident, I've experienced a progressive pathological neuromuscular decline over the past 30 years and am now physically quite limited and about 50 IQ points shy. Still not a total dumbass, but it's interesting "remembering" being more intelligent; sort of a slow-motion "flowers for algernon" deal. I can't do the math anymore, It's like there's a blank space where that all used to be, and it used to be as easy as swimming.

ah well.

Get a Standard Poodle. They're super-smart, great in bed, and inspire deep sleep somehow. Not sure what it is. They just get it. Great listeners too.

I'm straight.

Just how many hours are there in a day where you live airdale?

Greenish,

Breakthroughs are often simple enough once made.The genius may reside in being able to start from "true scratch"-getting rid of ALL the assumptions made by previous thinkers and making all new ones as necessary.If we made that decision as individuals perhaps more of us could come up with some original thoughts.

Original thinkers are few and far between.The fact that you decided to seperate yourself from the mainstream may be the key.The farther you got from the herd the less it would have influenced you.

I will be in touch as soon as some family problems resolve themselves.

I seldom reply to my own comments but my first one up looks as if I were on drugs- not at the moment.

I intended to post it in two parts but I got involved in a little emergency and apparently hit the save key without realizing it.When I got back with a reply already made I could not edit the random portion of it of course.

There has always been a soft spot in my heart (or more likely in my head) for 1/f (pink) noise and self-organized criticality, ever since I serendipitously discovered it in my robotic foraging work (what I called a drunken sailor walk -- he eventually makes it back to the ship but not by any direct route). In researching the phenomenon I found that most of nature seems to work with this kind of semi-randomness.

But when you say:

The thing is, the pattern of future forest fires can be changed. Earthquakes and avalanches can in principle be triggered at pre-planned times. The hand that drops the rice grains may be guided by a mind. The simple reality of the way things really work, leads to a number of counter-intuitive insights about how to steer things, as well as what is and isn't steerable.

It seems to me we have to be clear about the what is steerable and what isn't part. For example, what might you imagine is going to lead to steering the hand that drops the grains of rice? Such a device would be akin to greater control of the forcing function, which, while conceivable, is generally beyond our ken. I controlled my robot's tendency to wander in a manner similar to the way it occurs in our brains and spinal chords. I used a central pattern generator to produce the wobbly sine-like form with 1/f characteristics.

The control, in a natural CPG comes from inhibitory and excitatory inputs to the circuit.

Working all of this out is no easy task. The dimensionality of my system was smallish. What might you imagine would be feasible for nudging the hand? I don't think we are talking about governments because I don't think they are actually the CPG (by analogy).

Anyway, thanks for a thoughtful and thought provoking comment.

George

Meadows-Leverage Points (2005? Thinking in Systems)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers
11. the sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows
10. The structure of material stocks and flows.
9. the length of delays relative to system change, also hard to change
8. the strength of negative feedback loops relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops
6. The structure of information flows (who does and doesn’t have info)
5. The distribution of power over the rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints)
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
3. The goals of the system-what is the point of the game
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system (its goals, power structure, rules, and culture) arises
1. The power to transcend paradigms

This is a useful list in terms of priorities for manipulation of systems. The list de-emphasizes energetic mandates, however, which are key. Maximum power fits in there somewhere around #3. The current goals of the system need to shift, and critical tipping points in the dominant social paradigm are overdue, due to media manipulation of the message. Corporate power potentiates positive feedback to MSM messages that potentiate system goals, which are to facilitate more profits for large corporate entities. Nate wonders whether to wish for it all to come apart or not. Do we have any choice?

This is from her "leverage Points-Places To Intervene In A System"

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you come yourself, loudly, with assurance, from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don't waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

Which boils down to:
Call a spade a spade, don't be afraid to tell those that are full of it that it's coming out of their ears and for crickey's sake don't feed the fracking trolls!

Hi George.

It seems to me we have to be clear about the what is steerable and what isn't part. For example, what might you imagine is going to lead to steering the hand that drops the grains of rice? Such a device would be akin to greater control of the forcing function, which, while conceivable, is generally beyond our ken.

As noted in the response I just did to Mac, I'm mentally "out of it" today, but in reply:

I'm wandering in and out of metaphors in what I say here, which is perhaps unavoidable, and am invoking the ricepile experiment as a possibly useful referent to describe the way I see and interact with the world. That experiment is an idealized system, while I've derived my own thinking from perturbing very complex systems and observing patterns over these many decades.

But lets see if I can clarify what I'm saying without mucking it up. Say you, the ricepile activist, observe the system from effectively outside it. The topography/connectivity at a given time is observable by you, and you understand how gravity works. You are not part of the system which slowly evolved to that state, but you have one grain of rice. By deploying that grain in a directed way, you can cause an entirely predictable cascade, limited by the pre-evolved criticality topography.

What might you imagine would be feasible for nudging the hand? I don't think we are talking about governments because I don't think they are actually the CPG (by analogy).

One of the counterintuitive things about approaching the real complex world this way is that knowledge of the system's topography is more important than the size of the perturbation, and it can be done better by very small groups - or individuals - than by governments. Without bringing my past exploits in to complicate the discussion, suffice it to say for now that I have found it to be true. Imagine, for instance, that there are five observers with rice grains instead of just you. The situation changes dramatically with regards to predictable outcomes. And if there are a lot of people throwing rice, all you get is a general flattening of the criticality topography without useful predictability. (this last is a decent metaphor for how activism is usually done).

Thus, ironically, problems which seem impossible are often more tractible simply because nobody else is trying to influence them. This turns out to have large implications for steering things.

And if there are a lot of people throwing rice

... can they influence the happiness of the marriage?

Sounds like a long shot.

Greenish,

I write a fair amount about sapience, the brain capacity for (as opposed to the realization of) wisdom. One of the key factors in sapience, one of the behavioral attributes of it, is deep, natural systems thinking. All humans think systemically to some degree. It is essentially the ability to categorize, recognize patterns, and link disparate things together causally. We have, as Homo sapiens a native ability to do this symbolically (i.e. with language) and recursively. But as you might expect, it is variously developed in various people. Some have more 'talent' at it than others. I have maintained that the majority of people have mostly rudimentary capacity. Sapience is a fairly recently evolved function of the brain. And deep (and whole) systemic thinking is still only poorly developed in the population.

Part of the evidence for this is the degree to which specialization takes its toll. Most humans are perfectly happy to become specialized in skills and knowledge to be productive in society (earn a living) and NOT HAVE TO LEARN MUCH MORE! What I have noted, over the years, is that people who have connected formal methods with their native abilities for systemic thinking tend to demonstrate the highest levels of wisdom in their works. By formal I don't mean mathematics per se, but the ability to form and manipulate symbolic representations consciously. These same people seem to be life-long learners and are willing to delve into any realm because they recognize the patterns of 'systemness' wherever they look.

If I may hazard a guess, I would say you are expressing observational skills and symbolic mentation at a deeper level than average level! What you note as a difference between yourself and others may be valid but not necessarily autistic. Concussion or no, take it where you will!

George

Hi George, thanks for the comments.

Whether or not I'm "autistic" is an open question; what's autism anyhow? Certainly I'd have been considered one if my parents had taken me to a doctor or a shrink: I spent a large part of my first 6 or so years screaming, trying to find salt, and banging my head on things. My parents did set me on the sofa so I didn't damage the wall or my head.

But there was some nonstandard stuff going on; I have clear indexed memories which go back a very long way. Until about age 30 I had a semi-eidetic memory and a few savant-type tricks, but that burnt out pretty early.

If I were to guess at the difference between me and my playmates, I'd say that my thinking was visual, with verbal reasoning learned incompletely and late, tacked on like a seldom-used second language, for interacting with other humans. I have speculated idly that "thinking" directly and abstractly in the visual cortex is both a lot faster and less subject to some kinds of fallacies, while not working as well to facilitate human social interaction. (As is often the case with me, I haven't researched what anyone else thinks about this, so I may either be totally offbase or stating something that's well-known.)

I seem to recall a year or more ago doing a post here in which I wrote about my musings on primary visual processing, visually-indexed verbal thinking, and straight verbal-linear as three distinct sorts I seem to use. I can't find it in the TOD archives though, and I seldom write anything down except commenting here and sending the odd email. I probably should. I've always found internal cross-modal abstraction transfer to be an interesting aspect, and benchmark, of cognition.

As fun as it might be to consider my native type of thinking some sort of x-men mutation, it's a heck of a lot more likely to be an atavism, the sort of thinking which helped our anscestors usefully model the behavior of other animals. What I've done is expand the bestiary to include a broader class of systems than critters, and have found that the thinking it takes to choreograph antelope running off a cliff (if that's what it is) can be quite useful in purely abstract ways to visualize solutions and strategies. If you're familiar with the concept of "fitness landscapes" in biology, I use something like that to model a much broader class of systems and "environments", but I do it visual-heuristically rather than rigorously. Indeed, I think heuristics is probably the only way a human mind will usefully deal with that sorta stuff. Nothing wrong with a good heuristic.

Part of the evidence for this is the degree to which specialization takes its toll. Most humans are perfectly happy to become specialized in skills and knowledge to be productive in society (earn a living) and NOT HAVE TO LEARN MUCH MORE! What I have noted, over the years, is that people who have connected formal methods with their native abilities for systemic thinking tend to demonstrate the highest levels of wisdom in their works. By formal I don't mean mathematics per se, but the ability to form and manipulate symbolic representations consciously. These same people seem to be life-long learners and are willing to delve into any realm because they recognize the patterns of 'systemness' wherever they look.

I think some of my past employees considered me more than a bit eccentric, since I made it a point to refuse to specialize, rejecting the reading of books. I consider it a monkey trap of the fist-in-jar type. So many good minds are lost to it.

I entirely agree with your point about manipulation of symbolic representations. My own life choices have tended towards the "mission impossible" sort, and over an eclectic mix of fields and situations. I've never figured a way to impart it to others, though, and have regretted that.

If I may hazard a guess, I would say you are expressing observational skills and symbolic mentation at a deeper level than average level! What you note as a difference between yourself and others may be valid but not necessarily autistic. Concussion or no, take it where you will!

Thanks for the kind words. As for my "oddness", my dad was so twitchy they thought he had Huntington's. He didn't, and by not being drafted for that reason, he was able to compete for a mate with a much improved female/male ratio, so had he not been mentally odd I wouldn't have been born. No complaints here.

I think it is an atavistic trait and that trait is of a hunter.

I made it a point to refuse to specialize

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -Robert A. Heinlein

(havn't tried the dying or conn'ing a ship portions)

If I were the master of a school Hienlein would be well up on the required reading list.

Odds are the School Board would not grok your reasons.

Or accuse you of supporting cannibalism.

@ George

Homo Universalis

We need a second Renaissance.
It looks like we are going to get a second Dark Age in the extreme.

edit: this comment reply format makes it tough to associate responses with original posts but I don't think there is another way.
Got to remember to address each response I guess.

Hi porge,

I generally address with the name of the person who draws my comment.I think it's an easy way help make sense out of long threads, especially a day or two later.

George,
Do you think that Sapience is a new set of mental abilities or an old one that was pushed out of relevance because of agriculture and civilization?
I think that the visually oriented mind is one that would have been superior in a hunting society and prior to civilization would have been represented to a high percentage in the gene pool.

It seems to me that prior to civilization a constellation of mental features that allowed for maximum flexibility and general pattern recognition and association across different and disparate circumstances would have been a key to survival.
In other words to see the world as dynamic patterns rather than static objects and see those patterns repeat in many different situations.

It is really just what works best for a given circumstance and what is normal or abnormal is really just what is common and uncommon.

Physical anthropologists, studying the insides of skulls, have been able to track some of the evolution of particular lobes of the brain throughout hominin evolution. The frontal lobes have received a lot of attention of late and there is a growing collection of skull fragments from this area, esp. in more recent (<1m years) species. In that work it appears that the prefrontal cortex has undergone considerable relative enlargement starting about 200k years ago (give or take 10k!) And the specific patch right behind the eyebrows, Brodmann area 10, seems to have exploded within the last 100k (give or take 50k!). That explosion can be correlated with a number of behavioral innovations in human evolution, including speech and various artifactual technologies. It also seems to correspond with our species emergence from Africa.

So the answer to your question is that some form of tacit knowledge-mediated judgment, guiding decision processing, has been around a long time in the hominin line, but really seems to have taken off when sapiens took on its present form.

There is reason to believe that this also corresponds (probably follows) the emergence of pair bonding, hidden estrous, menopause, and grand parenting. The latter is essential for the effect of wisdom to have selective value since old women and men, though benefiting from their acquired wisdom, would not be reproductively more successful except through their grandchildren. I suspect that this along with a strong group selection effect led to two phenomena. 1) all humans developed greater sapience to benefit group dynamics and 2) certain individuals probably developed greater than average sapience (the sages and elders). Groups with the right mix of most people with average sapience, needed to promote group survival through better logistical and tactical activities, and a few people with superior sapience, needed to provide strategic leadership, out competed groups with lesser overall sapience and/or little or no strategic thinkers.

What appears to have happened with the advent of agriculture and settled territorial life with ever larger groups is that the needs for group/individual talents shifted from strategically oriented to put a heavier emphasis on logistical management and tactical for protecting the land. The latter may have also included increased selection for aggressiveness and in-group/out-group dynamics that we see today.

In other words, agriculture may have killed the selection pressures that might have led to even greater levels of sapience all around. We will never know for sure. But we do suspect strongly that sapience hasn't developed further in our species. Our only clue that greater levels of sapience are "genetically" possible are the very occasional occurrences of obviously wise sages throughout history. This indicates that there are alleles out there for greater sapience, but that they are also very rare.

Everyone else just muddles through.

See:
Donald, Merlin, (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Donald, Merlin, (1991). A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, W.W. Norton & Co., New York.

Geary, David C., (2005). The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.

Goldberg, Elkhonon, (2001). The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind, Oxford University Press, New York.

Goldberg, Elkhonon, (2006). The Wisdom Paradox, Gotham Books, New York.

Hauser, Marc D. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, HarperCollins, New York.

Hogarth, Robin (1980). Judgement and Choice, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

Mithen, Steven, (1996). The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science, Thames and Hudson, London.

Sober, Elliott & Wilson, David Sloan (1998). Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.

Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (1990). Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (2002). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Striedter, Georg F., (2005). Principles of Brain Evolution, Sinauer Associates, Inc., Sunderland, MA.

for starters!

As usual there is much more to it than I thought.
Thanks for the reading list. Is it in any particular order?

That explosion can be correlated with a number of behavioral innovations in human evolution, including speech and various artifactual technologies. It also seems to correspond with our species emergence from Africa.

George, are you aware of the work of Lambros Malafouris in Neuroarchaeology?

My research interest is in the archaeology of mind and the anthropology of the brain artefact-interface (BAI) – covering topics extending from early stone tools and the ‘exographic’ symbolic technologies of more recent periods, to the latest developments in neuro-prosthetics and cognitive enhancement. My research aims at developing ways to understand the long-term implications and causal efficacy of material culture in the functional architecture of the human brain and the evolution of human intelligence (especially with reference to human capacities related to self awareness, memory, theory of mind, agency and the body schema).

What I find fascinating is that if indeed our material culture and artifacts become prosthetic extensions to our minds then what might the implications be if we are very suddenly cut off from these devices due to some external forces beyond our control. Certainly our minds are plastic and can change or adapt to such losses but the trauma would be, I think, profound. Imagine the blind man who suddenly has his walking stick removed from his grasp by force and then is suddenly pushed onto a street with heavy traffic. Imagine his panic if he is threatened with this scenario.

How many of us would easily adapt to being forced to eschew all of our communications devices, cell phones, internet, radio, TV etc.. Now imagine the cultural resistance of being threatened with no longer having unlimited access to everything that cheap fossil fuel allows us to enjoy.

I would be very surprised if this does not in some way underlie our gut wrenching reaction to being made aware that BAU can not continue!

The best explanation behind 1/f noise is very mundane. Telegraph noise is a common random process with no memory, and if you generate a distribution of various telegraph noise characteristic frequencies under the maximum entropy principle, you will get 1/f noise.

Just about all the fat-tail phenomena are caused by mixing populations of effects together by maximizing entropy. All the normal statistics phenomena are basically caused a homogeneous population going through random walks, etc.

Many people don't believe in this because they want to see something more mysterious.

Let me explain my modus operandi (as best as I can) and my motivations.

I look for leverage points, and I am willing to take what appears to be a low probability/high payoff option.

I assume at some point there will be panic in our society (see the quote in the upper right corner about complacency & panic).

A drowning man "grasping at straws" is an all too real reaction to panic. However, if that man had been trained in a variety of self rescue techniques, he would use those, even in the midst of panic. Perhaps not well enough to save himself, but certainly a better option than grasping at straws, hoping that they would support him.

A priori, before the panic, I wanted to create a meme (now memes) that would surface when panic set in. Peak Oil is quite likely, in my analysis, to be the trigger (other potential triggers do exist).

4 years ago, in the early days after Katrina in New Orleans, I scanned the Peak Oil sites and settled on TOD for good reasons. I was quite explicit in the early days that I wanted to use TOD to leverage an idea, create a meme. I believed that the Peak Oil community would grow in influence (never to the point of dominance, but enough to be listened to) and I wanted the concepts of electrified rail (inter-city & urban) (and later bicycling) to be part of the dogma here.

From here @ TOD, the ideas on mitigation could spread; ideas that would make things a "little bit better than they would otherwise be".

I believe that I have succeeded.

More Later on the next step(s).

Best Hopes for Making a Difference,

Alan

I think you've succeeded too. Your embrace of relatively low probability but high impact goals is IMO one of the most astute and unselfish things a self-aware mover can do.

Anticipating a future context and designing memes beforehand which will have high fitness in that context is a very sophisticated strategy.

And you're living it, despite the real-world human challenges life throws.

A great example for those who figure it can't be done. Kudos.

Thanks :-)

Wait till I describe my next goals.
--------
One works with the tools and materials available. Via TOD and my other work, I have a number of smaller contacts & resources. And two big ones.

I wrote "Multiple Birds - One Silver BB" on TOD

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4301

I was contacted by a major railroad where this article closely paralleled a secret 6 month, VP level internal study. I have some slight access to that railroad now.

And Hans Herren and the Millennium Institute. Hans has "climbed the mountain" before#, alone, and now he has substantial contacts (private cell #s for 4 Nobel Peace Prize winners, co-chair on UN review of world agriculture, Nat'l Academy of Science member (US & Developing Nations), etc.). His next goal is to help solve our energy & environmental problems.

# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Rudolf_Herren

MI is a non-profit economic modeling firm (Hans is President) that has modeled the US economy for ASPO and then more pro bono. In summary, the USA with BAU is headed towards becoming a 3rd World economy with out of control carbon emissions. A maximum push for renewables controls CO2 and slows the decline in GDP. Pushing for efficient Non-Oil Transportation reduces CO2 (not as much as renewables) and also slows decline in GDP.

Combining the two has very positive results by every metric. In twenty years, vs. BAU, a maximum push for renewables & Non-Oil Transportation results in

GDP +13%
Employment +4.7%
Oil Use -22% (BAU also declines so this is an extra -22%)
CO2 -38%

This was done on a shoestring and did not look at all good options.

I would like major RR to contact GE (I may have Sierra Club already on board) and have all 3 go to Sec. of Energy Chu and ask for a gov't sponsored (a la Hirsch) report on all rational options in dealing with PO & Climate Change. Different major sponsors would provide technical expertise for each option, and sign their name to that chapter (implicitly endorsing the entire report).

GE - Wind, Hydro, Nukes
Major RR- Electrified railroads
Sierra Club - Conservation, etc.
others for other options

and create a common measuring stick of 4 metrics for each option and several combination of options. Metrics are Environment (CO2), Energy (oil use), Employment, and the Economy.

Basically what we do ad hoc on TOD, but with massively more resources and good numerical analysis.

Hans Herren would be the face & voice of the report. He has the smarts (different than mine), his motives are above reproach, he has a very good character (very down to earth, recently vacationed by picking grapes in a vineyard). He readily changes his opinion when presented with contrary facts.

I expect baby steps in the right direction before panic sets in. But when we do panic, the best available road map will have been published.

Best Hopes,

Alan

Increasing GDP will bring together a larger coalition than just CO2 reductions alone, or reduced oil use alone. It creates a larger set of goals, and hence has a much better chance of being implemented IMO. The various components of GDP will be much more sustainable and have less environmental impact than GDP today.

few who reflect at all, (and most do reflect here and again) think they are in lucid control of their lives. 'Chance' incidents like sleeping through and alarm and missing and exam or seeing a frostbit postal worker while enroute to enlist can make for very sudden changes in course.

Some avalanches and earthquakes may be able to in principal be triggered at preplanned times, but the knowledge of the system that would be required to reprogram major such events would be approaching that of a deity. The interrelationship between seemingly minor and seemingly external events and the event which is being planned, and the relationship between planned result and the consequences of either going through with the plan or not cannot even be minimally understood. Unfortunately your using such an example shows up just how unlikely we are to grasp what can and can't be steered. Redirecting a course is not the same as steering, the former merely implies changing the direction of travel, the latter implies navigating toward an achievable goal.

Some avalanches and earthquakes may be able to in principal be triggered at preplanned times, but the knowledge of the system that would be required to reprogram major such events would be approaching that of a deity. The interrelationship between seemingly minor and seemingly external events and the event which is being planned, and the relationship between planned result and the consequences of either going through with the plan or not cannot even be minimally understood.

You're pointing out the valid fact that the result of future iterations of a massively nonlinear system to a specific input in the present is unpredictable. This is certainly true for the relationship between a given butterfly flapping its wings, and the size and timing of hurricanes a dozen years later. Such a calculation could not be performed even in principle.

That doesn't mean, though, that all complex systems are wholly intractable in all ways. The trick is realizing that the partial knowledge which you can have can be very useful.

I'm making this up on the fly, but -

For instance, it does not take godlike knowledge to lower the risk of avalance at a ski resort. Without knowing the disposion of every snowflake in a mountain snow storm, it is knowable that on many size ranges, in a predictable size distribution, poised avalanches will evolve themselves near to collapse due to the deep characteristics of the system.

Firing a cannon provides a shock wave which will trigger all avalanches whose threshold trigger is at or below the intensity of the pressure wave that reaches them. Moreover, doing it before allowing any people on the slopes assures that that subset of poised avalanches, many of which are nested and will set off others with their own pressure waves, are offset in spacetime from being able to kill humans. Thus, from only basic principles it's possible to drastically alter the possibilities of humans being crushed by snow, by perturbing these massively complex evolved systems in real time. And indeed, they do that.

By the same token, by altering the logging practices and changing the "potential fire connectivity" in a forest, you can in principle greatly alter the odds of large fires and thus total trees burned, even though each individual lightning strike, and which trees get burned when, remains inherently unpredictable. In other words, unpredictability can coexist with a quite practical probabilistic alteration of outcomes.

Moreover, since we're on trees, if one was sufficiently callous and calloused to chop down a giant redwood tree, nothing would happen for awhile; but with each cut of the saw the system would proceed closer to a criticality. In principle, that person could, with the final small cut, determine which direction the tree dropped; whether it landed on other trees and took them down, whether it landed on his ex-wife's cottage to obviate his alimony payments, etc. So a very specific time and direction of outcome, and a huge release of energy, is achieved with a very small expenditure of energy in a directed way due to knowledge of the system and the rules which govern it. The callous logger's recognition of the old tree as a potential wife-crushing mechanism would be an example of a relatively "critical" state, in the sense that a relatively small directed perturbation can set a much larger set of things in motion.

I'm stating that quite analogous things, and much more subtle, may be done in wildly disparate kinds of systems which share simple structural characteristics at the most basic levels, that such systems and critical states are ubiquitous to the human world and experience but not recognized as such, and that whether we realize it or not, a very large part of what goes on in the world is determined by what might be thought of as overlapping criticality landscapes.

Unfortunately your using such an example shows up just how unlikely we are to grasp what can and can't be steered. Redirecting a course is not the same as steering, the former merely implies changing the direction of travel, the latter implies navigating toward an achievable goal.

Not only can it be done, but I and many others have done it; it just isn't usually described in these terms, which are apparently not intuitive.

Perhaps this will be expanded upon here in the future when I don't have a concussion and it isn't past my bedtime.

Until then, I'd submit that many of the "rules of thumb" for advertising, politics, playing the stock market and much else in the realm of "expertise" are just rough approximations of these underlying simple realities. And that if science continues apace for another hundred years (I wonder), that a more advanced version of what I poorly describe here will be the shared base paradigm in many disciplines which are now seen as entirely unrelated to one another.

That's all.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I noticed earthquakes disappeared and the avalanches you meant were the 'little' snow type varieties, not the tsunami starters I have in mind. I live in AK, we think big. The 9.2 Good Friday quake in '64 took out at least three harbors hundreds of miles apart and flattened a big part of Anchorage. Takes a heck of a knowledge base and tool kit to trigger those beasts at preplanned times (or to trigger enough little ones to avoid them while not screwing something else up).

I actually am fairly deft with an ax when directionally falling timber, so I am very familiar with the concept. Easy enough to put a single tree pretty much where you want it if you cherry pick the tree. The whole system will have trees leaning lots of directions, limbed unevenly and or containing unpredictable hidden rot. The ability to add additional external forces (lines and wedges) will be required to lay a forest directionally with an ax. Things change some when adding power saws as the time element in material removal becomes very important. In other words if you don't have the proper tools in hand or enough additional external force, or the situation is opaque (rot), when the critical state is reached you may very have very little control over the movement's final.

I guess going around one obstacle at a time is steering but without a good idea of the scope of the entire landscape going in circles is a likely outcome, especially if the item being steered is weighted to one side. Anecdotally I was once trying to find a plot of land a section or two deep in the Arrowhead region of MN. I carried an ax to mark my trail. After about an hour plus I figured I should be approaching the plot. Low and behold I topped a ridge, looked down the slope and spotted the car I had started from. I was quite a surprised city slicker. Later I related that to a local and he said when you want to walk straight in the woods and are carrying something in one hand (ax or rifle) it is a good idea to find an item of similar size and weight (branch) and carry it in the other. If you don't there is a good chance you will circle to the side that is weighted. Transferring the weight from hand to hand theoretically does the same thing but in practice the terrain changes make that unreliable even if the timing is accurate.

As we analyze human decision making systems and try to steer humanity toward an imagined goal it is very likely we will be weighted to one side in spite of our attempts to remove the bias. Besides, we are way too close to the trees and the forest is huge.

Hi Luke, thanks for the comments. Caution: ramble alert.

I'm still dizzy and silly from my concussion - very much today - so probably shouldn't be posting (or allowed to run loose), but it looks like the comments to this article are about tapered off, so I reckon it won't bother anyone much if I respond to your recent posting.

I think there is a lot of substance in what I'm poorly describing, but I obviously haven't prepared it for discussion. So this may be good practice.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I noticed earthquakes disappeared and the avalanches you meant were the 'little' snow type varieties, not the tsunami starters I have in mind. I live in AK, we think big. The 9.2 Good Friday quake in '64 took out at least three harbors hundreds of miles apart and flattened a big part of Anchorage. Takes a heck of a knowledge base and tool kit to trigger those beasts at preplanned times (or to trigger enough little ones to avoid them while not screwing something else up).

I'm picking my metaphors on the fly, but they do reflect a real underlying reality; that is, are more than metaphors.

Quakes and avalanches are very similar phenomena. In principle one could perturb an earthquake system to shake out critical parts of the system as well, having evacuated critical areas first, though obviously that's beyond us now, and isn't really relevant to the way I apply it, I just think it's a cool thought exercise in showing how disparate things are much alike at deep levels. One big difference is that the criticality landscape of a forest is accessible whereas the landscape of a network of seismic faults is not. For targeted results in the human sphere of things, detailed knowledge and characterization of the systems you're working with is necessary.

I actually am fairly deft at directionally falling timber with an ax, so I am very familiar with the concept. Easy enough to put a single tree pretty much where you want it if you cherry pick the tree. The whole system will have trees leaning lots of directions, limbed unevenly and or containing unpredictable hidden rot. The ability to add additional external forces (lines and wedges) will be required to lay a forest directionally with an ax. Things change some when adding power saws as the time element in material removal becomes very important. In other words if you don't have the proper tools in hand or enough additional external force, or the situation is opaque (rot), when the critical state is reached you may very have very little control over the final direction.

I'm delighted that you have tree-felling experience, that was just a chance notion on my part that I thought I'd try out. The limitations you describe are quite true, in pretty much all criticality landscapes. So you're familiar with examining a forest and "cherry picking" a tree; this is a good example of one aspect of one kind of criticality landscape. The trees and forest have slowly evolved to their current state, and left to themselves will undergo a continual process of several kinds of thresholds naturally reached and triggered at all scales, so you find all sorts of variation in a mature forest. Some of the landscape's status is discernable by viewing, some is hidden.

By getting to know how it works, you have developed heuristics for increasing the probability of placing a tree in a given spot at a given time, as well as some idea of the probabilistic limits to your predictions. Some situations will obviously be unpredictable, and in others a tree will already "want" to fall in a given direction due to its history. Your axe blows are a tiny input to the system energy-wise but quite efficient at quickly bringing the system to supercriticality. By the same token there's some stuff you can't do. Your axe can't cause a tree to stand up again. But you do have some control and the size of your tiny perturbation is greatly magnified.

I'm saying that many important things in the world of human experience are a lot like this in ways which are not well appreciated yet. From the global climate to the memescape of the zeitgeist.

One subtype - and a subtype only - of this general strategy is individual "campaigners" looking for pre-poised critical parts of systems and then analyzing what can be made to happen if they are triggered in a specific sequence or at a specific time. For instance if a tree is already leaning at a 45-degree angle over a river, it might be utter simplicity to make it into a bridge even with sloppy cutting. This is trivially obvious; yet the nature of most human advocacy amounts to blindfolded swinging of axes in a forest in all directions until something happens, or chopping on a tree that's already down hoping it will stand up and fall a different direction.

Or to take my example of yesterday another step further, I'll note that different kinds of criticality landscape coexist and effect one another. For instance, in the case of the logger who dropped a redwood tree on his wife's cabin, the target effect may have been to alter the numbers in his bank accounts. He looked outside the narrow confines of that system to see what criticalities in parallel systems might be used to affect them. This sort of process can be many steps deep and in principle quite predictable since it doesn't involve a lot of iterations of any complex system, just a chain-reaction domino effect based on the pre-evolved topography of the systems.

Like, one time in order to obtain necessary visual images to close down a large destructive activity which was potentially in a supercritical state, I convinced a billionaire to fund a (nonviolent) invasion of a large belligerent unrelated nation for an entirely different stated reason and issue. The nested events were set up in advance like multidimensional dominoes and triggered in an exact way to the downstream effects would achieve the specific objective. As far as I know, I'm the only one who has done this sort of thing repeatedly in this exact way, and I have no particular wealth, connections, status, fame, etc. My only advantage has been looking at the world in a somewhat different way.

I guess going around one obstacle at a time is steering but without a good idea of the scope of the entire landscape going in circles is a likely outcome, especially if the item being steered is weighted to one side.

I haven't described it well yet, obviously, my illustrations were to show that I'm not BSing, at least not intentionally. But yes, one type of criticality-campaigning might simply be to look around and see which ones are poised to be "chopped" and which are not. This amounts to a self-selection by the topography itself; and perhaps goes a bit to the zen notion of whether people create a path or it creates itself. (I would say that the path is simply one more example of topography and simple choices intersecting predictably according to knowable rules, and I think those zen philosophers were barking up the same leaning tree I am). So in such a case as that, a single human might accomplish something huge, but is confined to only doing a huge thing where that huge thing is possible, and not at another part of the system which the human might prefer to affect.

Yet even this simple awareness would make that person one of the "powers that be" compared with those who pick their targets by preference alone. It isn't circular at all. It's the difference between drowning in waves and surfing them intentionally.

As we analyze human decision making systems and try to steer humanity toward an imagined goal it is very likely we will be weighted to one side in spite of our attempts to remove the bias. We are way too close to the trees and the forest is huge.

I fully agree that defining your target state in advance, which is seemingly our default mode, displays a complete misunderstanding of the stepwise, path-dependent way nested and overlapping chaotic systems evolve. It's a huge fallacy and again it comes from flawed mental models about complexity the way it actually exists and determines outcomes.

That's not at all what I'm talking about doing, although I hope I have made clear that specific highly-altered changes of arbitrary scale are achievable roughly instantaneously through nested collapses that don't involve much system iteration. That is where the leverage in human "steering" of events comes in, and near as I can tell few understand how it works.

My own work, which has not been trivial, has typically focused long-term on preserving options for the future; preventing (or delaying) species extinction and irreversible ecosystem destruction to keep future possibilities alive. For instance, if rough-toothed dolphins make it past the human population/energy/resource bottleneck, they and their descendants may or may not be around in a million years, but if they become extinct, they definitely will not be a part of that future. That is one real sense in which one can probabilistically alter the far future if they feel like it.

But the methodology is about seeing the world in terms of criticality landscapes, and realizing that the systems which seem intractable are often not.

Better have someone lock up all firearms and check in on you--concussions aren't a joking matter, had a couple. Better double check the knots next time ?-)

Your description is clear enough, so you are probably okay, unless you are normally somewhat indecipherable ?-) but one of the problems that often accompanies seeing things others don't is not seeing things the way others do, that can lead to unanticipated results if the reaction of those others is critical to success. That is why some of the best classic styled manipulators have common human failings in spades, but then they are generally all about 'advancing' themselves. You do fine as long as your vision remains unimpaired.

Perhaps one of the most effective things to do is what is suggested in the article
Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil:
"If we are to resolve these issues, including the important one of climate change, in any meaningful way, we need to make them again central to education at all levels of our universities, and to debate and even stand up to those who negate their importance, for we have few great intellectual leaders on these issues today. We must teach economics from a biophysical as well as a social perspective. Only then do we have any chance of understanding or solving these problems."

http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/2009-05Hall0327.pdf

It would be very effective also if the documentary: A Crude Awakening, The Oil Crash
is played at many auditoriums of universities.

First, Nate, you are supposed to be at OUR house for Thanksgiving, not Auntie F's!..... :-)

My brief comment as dinner is getting cold: There are several, but a declining number, of indigenous tribes that have ethical systems constraining them never to have had to address this question. AND their ethics are as much about the love of their surroundings as the Malthusian facts of overconsumption. I recommend starting there....

Readings: Jean Liedloff's 'Continuum Concept'
Colin Turnbull's 'The Forest People'
Dan Everett's 'Don't Sleep....There are Snakes'
....others

Have read 'Forest People'. Girlfriend is reading 'There are Snakes' now. The question isn't whats possible from tabula rasa, but from tabula Americana circa 2009.

There is no tabula rasa, never has been, never will be, in human affairs.

I doubt the concept is valid except AS a concept-a theoritical constructon such a mathematical or geomertic idea.Something that might possibly be approximated but never achieved, as in trying to solve a problem starting with a "clean slate".

The slate itself dirties the water, as taking a quantum measurement changes it.

I don't think that even on the most abstract level that there is a "Clean Slate" if the Theory is to be valid and it's propositions repeatable.
Everything must comply with the immutable laws of nature and the universe if only on the most basic level.
In this sense humans never really invent or develop anything new but only observe and discover and apply and sort information in their minds.

A theory explains phenomena and I bet such things as the beauty perceived in art could be shown to have some relationship to natural symmetry and form etc.

In other words.........I don't think that there is anything that is purely abstract but only unrecognized.

There are well known mathematical ratios that must be preserved in the art of representing humans.IIrc, Michealangelo's "Grotesques" paintings , although outwardly repulsive at first glance are actually quite believeable, even warm , to me.

A mathematical model of a female face can be created by mapping the exact measurements of a thousand randomly selected real faces , averageing the measurements, and WHAM-you can fall in in love or lust with a woman who exists nowhere but on your screen-not even in Hollywood could you find so beautiful a face.Or so one of my psyc books says.

Yes, there are people living on islands near me that have never used fire, have no leaders, no internal heirachy no money, no overpopulation, no clothes, and no conflict (except with outside boneheads who wanted to 'enlighten' them and steal their timber, and that was done without killing-just cutting off their hands so they couldn't do it again). Have done no environmental harm whatsoever over a period of hundreds of years. How and why did they see the illusion? Perhaps it was knowing the danger of producing and using fire.

Can you offer a name or two for the society you describe? I mean what they call themselves? Something seems very fishy here.

Yes, indeed. There is evidence for use of fire by hominids at least hundreds of thousands of years ago, some suggest it was used well over a million years ago. Homosapiens are so evolved to live on cooked food that an all-raw-food diet is difficult for even relatively sedentary urban dwellers to maintain without severe negative consequences.

Now I won't say that is all fiction, but I will add that if such a society does exist their not using fire would appear to be regressive behavior. Whoever originally migrated to the island would have known how to use it. Dug out canoes used to reach islands were typically made with the use of controlled fire before the appearance of metal tools.

So if the society referred to gave up the use of fire at some time, that change likely would have been central to the radical new religious belief system that had surplanted what was there before. Religious zealots often do gain sway and can cause huge change, but what they bring is rarely if ever anything approaching enlightenment.

But for a great experiment control groups are required ?-)

I think that an understanding of anthropology and less-hierarchal, less-growth-oriented societies is useful for teasing out the structural rules of human society, and that it may help us develop at least isolated solutions to our structural problems. I also, however, agree with some of the other comments that remaining examples of such societies are, at least in large part, a symptom of the isolated and marginal land they occupy--their structural solutions are not directly applicable to our problems. Paraphrasing Nate's comment, the pertinent question is what lessons these tribes may have for modern industrial societies.

Another interesting book on this topic is "giving up the gun," by Perrin, about Japan's cultural decision to abandon the use of firearms in warfare. There are a lot of historiological problems with Perrin's work, but it is an interesting counter-point where a very complex and hierarchal society consciously guided its own cultural emergence.

Nate - I think you are on to something regarding to try to talk to the elephant (emotions)instead of the driver (reasoning mind). Copywriters - those folks who write persuasively to get people to part with their money probably do more research on what works to convince people than any other group. They know what sells. They have learned the following.

No one ever buys anything based on facts and reason.The buying decision is always based on emotion and happens very quickly. Once you have hooked them emotionally then you feed them the facts - because they need the facts to justify their emotional decision.

Now I am not suggesting that the people on TOD are trying to sell a product. But human behavior is what it is. Most decisions are emotional, not rational. I know many of the engineers and scientists on TOD will probably deny that (I am one of those nerdy engineers) but I know that logically I did not need that new Iphone - but after I bought it I was ready with all the logical reasons I needed it. The real reason I bought it though was that it was just cool.

Now - how to wake people up about resource depletion through emotional triggers? I'll have to think on that.

I tend to think that, if you're trying to sell anything about resource depletion to the populace, to evoke emotion, and thus Petty and Cacciopo's central path to persuasion, then we could look to the successes and failures of the "sustainability" movement in the US over the past couple of decades.

Look at the effect that a crying Indian had on American pollution.

Think about the effect that John Muir had on American values with regard to the environment.

There are many other examples, but from them, we can think of two traits of all of them: 1. they had a glacially slow but cumulative effect, and 2. they affected different social groups differently. I'm sure there's other commonalities.

Will the societal norms that surround resource depletion/net energy change in a different manner? I can only think that they'll be similar, but there may be more economic causation--and in that the stimuli will be more volatile--and have greater and lesser effects over time.

We hardly recycled anything twenty years ago, now it's standard service in most urban areas. Some people actually turn off their lights, turn their heat down in the winter from where it used to be (and wear the dreaded sweater). I hardly ever see trash on the side of the road anymore, do you?

That is real, tangible social change, but it is change on the margins.

Is what we're doing here and in other resource depletion venues/idea generators going to have an effect in twenty years the same way that being "green" or "sustainable" affected our current social order? If so, then things aren't going to change much quickly enough to ameliorate the potentialities we face, in my opinion.

That's why I tend to think that Lin Ostrom has it right in Governing the Commons: it's up to the institutions of government to put policies in place to constrain consumption behavior AND it is up to the concerned elite to change tribal norms such that we consume less and direct said government to make smarter choices about those constraints.

Americans, they won't like those ideas so much, because there's no doubt that these kinds of government actions will constrain freedoms--freedoms to consume, enjoy, eat, destroy. But the wonderful freedoms we treasure are the very gateway for too much consumption--and I don't know many people willing to give up those freedoms to make the world around them more "sustainable," at least not easily.

Still, times are changing. People are becoming more aware. And that is because there are people like you Nate, like the people on this site, educating others, sharing perspectives, generating ideas. The more of that we have, the better off we will be.

There could indeed be a tipping point, an emotional trigger, an rallying phrase or cry or movement...but I still tend to think that it will be a slow overall trend.

So, what/who is our crying Indian? Who is our John Muir? Or is it all of us--having conversations with others?

What is the emotional trigger? The end of growth? Governments spending your great grandchild's pension? Something unforseen?

I am guessing many of you here believe that it will have to get much much worse before there's any real change in cultural perspective. And that is because societal values are very slow to change, partially because social and political institutions perpetuate them, and because we construct the world around us in accordance with them. When some stimulus threatens that structure, we view the threat in the terms of the extant structure and values.

This will require, as Nate says, a new paradigm; and you all are constructing it just by having this conversation. But don't expect it to change overnight. This will be a generation in the making.

"So, what/who is our crying Indian?"

Apparently he was an Italian actor but he looked the part and it did the trick.

Went to see Roland Emmerich's 2012 last night. I know -- bogus -- but what can I say? I'm a sucker for special effects; have been ever since 2001 and Star Wars. And Emmerich has been the master of innovation in special effects.

However, WRT the questions, it did occur to me that a "blockbuster" film (and 2012 made a big splash at the box office), a cross between Children of Men and The Day After Tomorrow (TDAT), with the crises being the depletion of energy resources, might get people thinking/feeling about what might happen. There was a surge of attitude shift toward the prospects of global warming right after TDAT that might have softened up the crowd for Al Gore's "factual" Inconvenient Truth.

I don't think that there is really anything that can be done to get people to behave differently in a time scale necessary to actually change the outcome of a civilization and population crash. But it might be possible to, at least, prepare some minds for that eventuality, the ones that are receptive via their emotional response to a 'story'. One of the aspects of sapience is that our emotions, which come as a first response, should trigger the higher rational powers to think about the larger meaning of what has happened. Regrettably the evidence suggests that the majority of human beings have rather low levels of sapience and hence never develop true wisdom as they live life. Too, the emotions tend to win out in terms of influencing behavior. But there must exist some portion of the population with sufficient sapience that would get the message and begin the process of preparing for survival in the coming chaos. Some of them just might succeed. [Side note: Sapience seems to have been an evolutionary response to the need to better integrate rational (intelligence) and emotional (limbic) mental processes. It probably just got a foothold between 150-200k years ago and then we went and invented agriculture, essentially ending the selective pressures that led to greater sapience!]

A story film might do the trick.

If Emmerich were to do the film, he would show mass destruction followed by a resolution that left some survivors wiser and more fit to survive. Anybody want to produce a film???

Question Everything
George

It probably just got a foothold between 150-200k years ago and then we went and invented agriculture, essentially ending the selective pressures that led to greater sapience!

Thats as interesting (at the moment I'll call it an assertion), I assume you have some reasons for thinking this is the case. If true it might indicate that perhaps we should look to genetically isolated subpopulations that never did the agricultural thing for our next generation of thinkers. Bushmen come to mind.

If you want you can check my response to Porge re: evolution of sapience and its possible cessation with the advent of agriculture. Almost everything in anthropology, esp. of behavior, is educated guess. In that response I provide a few references that have contributed to my speculations.

Or you could take some time to read my fuller treatment in a set of working papers to be found at: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Background/seriesIndex.html

You may see that this isn't idle speculation.

The most recent James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, has as it's underlying "driver of the action" the theme of resource depletion, though not in your face. Awareness of peak oil and other resources (PO/PR) is gradually becoming public knowledge.

I remember a film about the persecution of Galileo Galilei by the catholic hierarchy where one senior cleric says to GG, after looking through a telescope for a few nights, that "these things have to brought to public attention in a slow and carefully controlled manner to avoid public shock and panic." (They were talking about GG's discovery that Jupiter has moons which orbit it - implying that The Earth was not the centre of The Universe, as was official church doctrine at that time.)

How various administrations are handling PO/PR, financial collapse, the coming age of austerity et al, is standard modus operandi for those in power. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

TE I think you are generalising about triggers for shopping. For me, shopping is an evil necessity, premeditated and done under great duress. I find supermarkets, hypermarkets and shopping malls disturbing. I am sure there are others here that feel the same.

hi tex, you say:
"The real reason I bought it though was that it was just cool."
i wonder would there be other underlying reasons?
- to be cool?
- to fill something inside?
- to satisfy the "golden arrow of consumption"? ;-)

I'm fascinated by the whole i guess, emotional reasoning behind purchasing which you talk about in your post.
What is that funny sense of satisfaction we feel when we get our new purchase and tear off the packaging? get to talk about it to other people, the sense of importance, etc and then the inevitable downfall as it loses it's newness..
it seems like the endless progress of the economy is right there on a micro scale on day to day purchases of gadgets we feel we need...
dissatisfaction runs the world, if only we could use it as an energy source ;-)
If you took away status away from new purchases, how would that effect consumption?
I like the story of stuff http://www.storyofstuff.com/ for a great intro into this...

XKCD has it about right on this one ;-)

I'm starting to wonder if the current economic situation is 'it', i.e. growth has stopped, bankrupsies will continue, people will feel constrained to consume less on an individual level and the Machine will lumber on.
If change happens slowly enough, it can go unnoticed, the worstening situation just becomes the norm.

Then again, it could just be We're at the top of the rollercoaster ride where things seem to have stopped moving, time is drawn out and the view is wonderful for a few glorious fleeting moments.

My thought as well and am also wondering if this isn't the offical plan. I read an article in the last week that indicated that the current reduced income would be the norm for the next 10 years (sorry, no idea where to find the article again) so households should just get use to it. If they can roll out the down grading in lifestyle for long enough people wouldn't have such a hard time with smaller drop after drop. While not necessaryly the right/ethical approach it would avoid a large number of issues for quite sometime. Certainly if I was in command it would be an option that would have to be seriously considered. The slow slide and acceptance of a lowering standard of living may be far better than an immediate understanding and the panic and negative opportunity that would follow.

1. they can't!!!
but...though getting to know- there is that word- ourselves thru others we tame our inner elephants[ oh & the word Know has to do with love].

a scientific approach helps sort the perception/info; well sort of.

.."before any meaningful mitigation towards energy, environmental and social challenges occurs, facts will become secondary and accessing raw emotions will be required for change."
true, very true; & those emotions will have to be painful!

this society has to de- construct unfortunately.

u'r relationship with u'r aunt is what brought u'r [& her]'partial' insight.

2. wait for the recipe to 'come together'.
be aware, & ready to help provide hope, comfort,....;maybe a few facts & direction.

we are the fringe. mainstream does not pay attention to the fringe. there is no money there.

in about 10/15 years this oil question will be proved one way or another.

i can wait that long easily. i hope it doesnt get solved sooner. i wont have time to get
my s#@% together.

"Once the inner elephants of a large majority are engaged, anger, fear and resentment are going to matter more than facts, and more than science. I hope that trust, love, pride, and kindness will eventually play roles as well."

Anger, fear, and resentment are notoriously unstable emotions, as likely (perhaps more likely) to respond to a clever demagogue as to a weeping Indian. Trust, love, pride, and kindness would be welcome, but I am suspect that "hoping" for them aligns with Derrick Jensen's definition of hope: the desire for a future over which you have no control.

"There are 2 thresholds occurring in resource depletion space. 1) the shifting but low odds on steering the societal Titanic (turbo-capitalism) away from the iceberg (energy decline) and 2) what individuals are doing to increase their own odds of success of navigating the coming transition. Progress on one is probably uncorrelated to progress on the other."

This is a crucial distinction. My experience with spreading the word in my college courses is that progress is possible on the individual level. Whether or not enough people like my students and your aunt generate enough momentum to affect state- or national-level actions, the individual-level changes may sow seeds that bear fruit for some tiny fraction of humanity down the road. That's what keeps driving me.

Me too. Personally I think state/national level pre-crisis change is pretty low odds. I suspect the payoff of what we write about here is in forming a mental framework in the minds of folk who will be present and vocal at the town halls and city council meetings of the future - hopefully have a better understanding of both our constraints and opportunities. Roadmap of sorts. Perhaps all these efforts will amount to a 1% repelling of the drill baby drill crowd at a particular time in the future - who knows? We can only do what we perceive to be both right and possible at the moment. I guess to change what is perceived to be right would be the big kahuna.

The discussions on The Oil Drum have already done this in my little corner.

I recently gave a presentation to members of city council on peak oil and climate change as part of getting the city involved in our local Transition Town initiative. They (TPTB) ARE listening. It is a start.

The mental framework, and ideas for presentation material and my key points in subsequent discussion came from the online discussions here. This online community and its sifting and sorting of facts, ideas about energy and the economy *really does* help change the future by spreading knowledge and changing perceptions one mind at a time.

This took place over the weekend in my back yard.

These are the folks who know how to engage the elephant, the problem is they will steer it in exactly the wrong direction.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/palm-beach/fl-al-gore-boca-20091114,0,5...

The protesters carried drums, bullhorns and posters. One read "Practice what you preach," accusing Gore of not living a green lifestyle. Another poster read "The masses follow the asses," depicting the protesters' opinion that Gore's message is not backed by scientific evidence.

Ironically I took these pictures of the 350.org rally on the same beach just last month. So I'm not sure if the elephant is listening to them or not.

350 org

Al Gore is well-set up to profit from a global carbon tax or cap and trade scheme. Because he plans to get mega (or is it giga?)-rich from the carbon tax, he will undoubtedly be not living a 'green' lifestyle with that much money. He does the environmental movement no good because he associates cap and trade or CO2 reduction as yet another scheme to make the elite richer and everyone else poorer.

To focus on Al Gore is to completely miss the point and to believe that CO2 reduction is a scheme to make the rich richer and everyone else poor is just plain delusional. Anyways I was just using this as an example of how our inner elephants could be directed, I wasn't at all interested in arguing about AGW.

However, suppose it were a know scientific fact that there was an asteroid heading towards earth that would annihilate human civilization. And Al Gore was the one who came out in public with that message and he just happened to be privy to an idea that would ultimately save humanity. Let's say he also was a partner in the company that had the expertise in rockets to blast the asteroid out of harms way. So what if it would also make him fabulously wealthy? I guess you would say that a plan to move the asteroid into a different path was just a conspiracy to make rocket scientists and Al Gore richer and everyone else poorer. Right?

That was a rhetorical question by the way...

That isn't rhetorical, it is delusional. The analogy is the asteroid is heading towards Earth-there is actually no desire to alter its path at all (you talk as if China doesn't even exist) but grifters are promoting the idea that even symbolic gestures are necessary and these symbolic measures stand to make these same grifters lots of money at the expense of the common good. If you have evidence that the asteroid is going to be blasted out of the way then present it or quit talking such stupid B/S.

Look at the primate getting all puffy and aggressive. "STFU," he hoots. Primates, one and all.

The focus on Al Gore is a political attempt to ostracize him and stigmatize everyone who disseminates AGW theory.

The asteroid example is not the best because the asteroid outcome is binary - it hits or it does't.

AGW is not binary. Additional accumulations of CO2 cause additional harm to the environment. And you can chose actions to add to that harm or actions to subtract from or mitigate that harm.

The asteroid example is not the best because the asteroid outcome is binary - it hits or it does't.

Ok I'll accept that it isn't, in this case my point was that even if the messenger is the slimiest creepiest politician on the planet but he or she is telling you that it is going to hit the fan, it doesn't logically follow that it absolutely can't be true just because he or she might even profit personally from the solution.

Yes. And it is related to logical fallacies, such as strawmen arguments, and argumentum ad hominem. These essentially find a very unsympathetic charcter who is arguing something -or something vaguely related to it, and knock it down because of a character flaw, or the fact that this vaguely similar sounding idea is nuts. Now given a statement from a messenger who we have some degree of distrust of, how do we handle that? The source is not proof of its falsity, although it is a warning that it might be suspect. That might effect our probability of giving serious attention to it. But if there are other reasons to think it might be true -and valuable, we ought to investigate it in greater detail.

Your elephant is running around lashing out and angrily bashing tree trunks. I suggest it take a moment to smell the flowers and take a deep breath.

Your statement was that anyone who believes that Cap and Trade is fundamentally a scheme to enrich connected parties is delusional. Both you and the other guy feel that anyone who points out the reality that your statement is total B/S is "angry". Many climate change proponents accept that Cap and Trade is a scheme/scam that will do almost nothing to alter climate change-I am surprised you guys didn't mention "denialists" in your ridiculous rants.

Brian, this is what I said:

To focus on Al Gore is to completely miss the point and to believe that CO2 reduction is a scheme to make the rich richer and everyone else poor is just plain delusional.

I did not mention cap and trade in any way. I specifically said that to focus on AL Gore in reference to the point I was making was to miss it. I did say that believing that CO2 reduction was a scheme to make someone rich was a delusion. Perhaps the misunderstanding stems from the fact that you assumed that I was equating cap and trade with CO2 reduction. I was not. By CO2 reduction, I mean real physical reduction. If you think that somehow implies some sort of scam, that's your view not mine.

I wish I had picked some other example because I was just trying to make the point that a small group of people with bull horns were able to get their message to the inner elephants of a larger group.

The fact that the message getting through was one I didn't personally care for was secondary to the main point.

Is that clear now?

believe that CO2 reduction is a scheme to make the rich richer and everyone else poor

Given the plan seems to be a forced exchange and players include Goldman Sachs there sure does seem to be a reason to come to that conclusion.

APX, a Silicon Valley company that certifies carbon and emissions offset certificates, and which is well-placed to support carbon-trading markets when they emerge, has gotten backing from Goldman Sachs in a $14 million investment, VentureBeat has learned.

is just plain delusional.

I see. Is that a delusion only because the reality is SOME of the rich will get richer and anyone not aligned with the Government will get poorer?

Stuff about an asteroid

With the planet at stake, perhaps they should not be worried about profit.

I don't think we will be on the fringe much longer, check this out:

http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_burtynsky_photographs_the_landscape_of_o...

I think if nothing else, we should be engaging TED to have Nate or someone else from TOD to get up there and preach!

Yep, I forwarded that link to my friends and family with this attached message:

Think about this the next time you turn the ignition key to start the engine of your car.

To get 1 liter of gasoline you need 23 metric tons of carbon in the form of plants and organic material. It takes 500 years of photosynthesis to produce the 30 billion barrels of oil that we use every year...

Now start your engines!

3 tons of biomass to get only one liter!!!

Gasification methods can yield dozens of gallons of gasoline per ton which is hundreds of times the rate which your quote claims.

I'm not sure how he arrived at that figure but I guess it comes from all the living organic matter that was originally necessary to be transformed into the oil, that is eventually processed into 1 liter of gasoline.

If you want to be picky I guess we could also question the 500 years of photosynthesis required to produce a year's worth of our oil consumption.

The take away point is that our civilization is based on oil and we are consuming it at an extraordinarily accelerated rate and there is no chance we will see it replenished.

If you want to be picky I guess we could also question the 500 years of photosynthesis required to produce a year's worth of our oil consumption.

I understood it to mean in the natural process of oil brewing only a small fraction of the products of photosynthesis end up as recoverable oil, the rest is unrecoverable or enters the CO2 cycle.

I understood it to mean in the natural process of oil brewing only a small fraction of the products of photosynthesis end up as recoverable oil, the rest is unrecoverable or enters the CO2 cycle.

Without wishing to attempt to figure out what the proper figure should be, that explanation makes perfect sense. The earth is not a bioreactor designed by an engineer for turning sunlight plus CO2 into drillable oil wells. By accident only a small part of the organic matter generated gets buried. Most of what gets buried deeply enough to be cooked into oil and/or gas then slowly migrates. Again it is only an accident of geology that some of it is trapped and not lost to the system. Thusly a very low net efficiency should not be unexpected.

deleted double post

1. How can science, facts and analysis overcome 'our inner elephant'?

This is a confusing question and I would try to ask a different one. This question implies that we understand the problem, but others don't, and so the question arises, how do we convince them?

This question is misleading at two levels. First, it implies that we want to know about individual consciousness and individual change. Second, it implies that we have the correct analysis about peak oil and the only problem we have is convincing others of this analysis.

Neither of these is true. We really want to know about social consciousness and social change. The whole "elephant / rider" metaphor applies nicely to the individual, but changing society is really a different game; try to explain the French Revolution, for example, using this metaphor -- you could do it, but it's a stretch, and it's just not helpful. We do NOT yet have the correct analysis of peak oil -- we've got the problem, but not the correct approach. We do not yet have anything approaching a consensus on the needed approach to peak oil.

Your own presentation at the end of the ASPO-USA conference explored the very different schools of thought about how best to approach peak oil. Some say "crash program of alternative energy," others say, "steady-state economics," still others say, "the system will collapse no matter what we do." That's what we need to address, before worrying about how to get control of this pesky elephant.

2. What to do, if anything?

Address the subject of your concluding presentation at the end of the ASPO-USA conference -- "Chicken Little at the crossroads."

Keith

thanks Keith- I modified the questions.

It's bedtime so a quickie - although I disliked Greer's The Long Descent, he made a point that seems to have been lost. And, this is the difference between a predicament (really unsolvable) and problem (solvable). What society faces are a number of predicaments and I think it's best to approach it from that perspective.

Todd

YES

Thinking about the questions brings to my mind my experience in Marine Corps boot camp in 1954. Our platoon of misfits from the slums of Dallas, Denver, and Chicago were broken physically (fatigue) and emotionally during the first three or four weeks. The remainder of the time was spent building a cohesive team.

I still marvel at the change that was achieved by this brutal process.

We will not see significant change until the effects of peak oil and a failed international economy beat us into submission. By that time, only those who are already taking specific preparatory actions will have a chance of survival.

Facts and analysis are not enough. They then have to be presented/marketed in the right way, to enough people, to influence a large portion of everyone's lives.

I've been thinking along these lines occasionally myself. I have a few little thoughts written down, from my days of thinking I could do something about all this (I've also given up on the idea I can really make a difference, or even that we should - fast crash saves more of the current natural environment*). Though not always the psychological approach. Sometimes just trying to figure out how to redefine an industry or social paradigm.

...From reworking the, now less trusted by me, health industries; "How to make natural remedies profitable/desired/trusted, as opposed to pharmaceutical molecules?", to the marketing of conservation and power-down; "Stuff that lasts a long time has got to be considered cool." - Marketing is what we need. Good marketing with a huge budget for production and distribution (airing it).

Would somebody like Soros or Gates or Turner give a few hundred million to marketing a new social paradigm of simple living? And would the large media corporations even show the spots? Seeing as it would destroy the current economy on which they are (all) dependent.

I don't know how it would be possible to influence enough people to really make a useful difference without going through the mass media channels that so many are hooked on.

"One of the goals in life is overcoming your instincts."
(- me)

Thanks Nate.
- Enzwell:

*OT, but: Been thinking recently that we are seriously toughening up the lifeforms and microbes on this planet. Creating yet another bottle neck, but also building up their strength and resistance to, now artificially created, anti-biotics, pesticides, etc. The next eon's re-evolution will be with some extra strong species it seems.

Marketing is what we need

My email box is filled with content from people who think that.

I don't know how it would be possible to influence enough people to really make a useful difference without going through the mass media channels that so many are hooked on.

The 'mass media' is dying. Used to be only so many radio stations or TV channels. Today you have many, many times the 'radio channels' - podcasts. And TV - you can get the interesting bits pre-digested via the You-Tube. Others who'd never been on the old 3 TV stations in your market of late 1900's can now their own 'channel' of MP4's.

The world Marshall McLuhan had spoke of is gone.

(and if anyone knows of where this can be found Libraries Without Shelves (Hardcover) ~ Marshall McLuhan - I'd like to know)

Well, as usual with me, it's more of a conceptual thing. You've taken it too literally. (Though I should have implied that I guess.)

Email spam? Not even close to what I was thinking.

Mass media? Yes, it's dying, but still watched by/influential to a large couch potato percentage. The younger generation of web-media geeks are more aware of the changes coming (at least from what I see in my west coast world).

And, although there's a "Marketing is what we need." sentence in there, there's also a "not sure we should bother" sentiment.

2. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?
3. What to do, if anything?
Accelerating cultural change - i.e. a paradigm shift, I think this is a consequence of a series of events and their consequences - including what people say after the events more than what people say before the events and before the consequences, hence the Cassandra effect.

To accelerate the change would require acutal events and consequences - actions that would appear to most as against the common good - so perceived - so while the good intentions are there - I fear that the doer would suffer and therefore would not recommend that course of action. This leads to the second question 2 in the original posting and my relabling the perceived typo as question 3.

What to do? Promote the common good. Know where you food comes from. Build relationships in your community. Know your neighbors and their predilections so if and when the TSHTF, you know who you can depend on and who to ask for what and likewise. Prepare as much as you dare.

Dear Nathan

1. Arthur Schopenhauer revealed the nature of human beings of all ages most overtly and honestly: the intellect is helplessly subservient to the will. Our science and technology give us multiple means to accomplish the same old ancient ends; they do not give us new ends to aim for. As we walk into deepening crisis, our science will merely be used in like manner as in the past. Most human beings will not allow the verdicts of the various physical sciences to depose the authority of their desires and instincts. And when they sense that science and tech will no longer come to their rescue, they may well regress into more primitive behavior which ensured their survival in the past.

2. I believe that there can be no wisdom without pain. The populations of the world will have to feel the pain first before they will respond. Perhaps foresight will be more valuable in later years, but for now, we are still stuck in a chaotic shortsighted capitalist system. This system must first break apart before people are compelled to change their way of life.

3. We need to immediately take massive steps to catch up to the mass extinctions of species around the world. We need a massive "Operation Noah's Ark Part 2". We MUST carefully catalogue all living species, and either build artificial habitats for them which climate change or human encroachments will not obliterate, or perhaps we freeze their reproductive cells for a few decades or centuries until conditions are suitable for their revival. We must do this not just for tigers, leopards, polar bears and other cute-cuddly creatures which capture our imagination, but especially for the insects, the bugs, the fungi, the microbes, bacteria and the many others which are being wiped out each day without our noticing it. We need ALL species, not just a select few. We must carefully study ecosystems which are likely to be wiped out and we must draw up blueprints of them for future generations to use when they revive the natural world.

In the human world, we need to undertake a massive operation to save as much of the human intellectual and cultural heritage as possible. We know now that an accelerated population reduction is inevitable, and so it would be for the good of the human species if we took control of that situation. We either educate the entire human race to practice strict birth control, or we ensure that selected groups of humans and their offspring do not die off in the chaos. Ultimately, the idea is to pave the way for a much wiser future generation of human beings. We must spare no expense in ensuring that they have all they will need to create a new world, complete with as great a diversity in the natural world as exists today.

Yours most seriously

ShoX

Hey Shox,

We MUST carefully catalogue all living species, and either build artificial habitats for them which climate change or human encroachments will not obliterate, or perhaps we freeze their reproductive cells for a few decades or centuries until conditions are suitable for their revival. We must do this not just for tigers, leopards, polar bears and other cute-cuddly creatures which capture our imagination, but especially for the insects, the bugs, the fungi, the microbes, bacteria and the many others which are being wiped out each day without our noticing it.

You might like this: E.O. Wilson: TED Prize wish: Help build the Encyclopedia of Life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-txR1WSPBs

Ironically I've posted this before in a previous discussion and was told how boring and useless it was by a cornucopian free market capitalist who explicitly told me that deforestation was good for the economy and humanity. I'm not sure how to answer people like that other than to take a two by four and smack them really hard upside the head. I guess that's my elephant reacting ;-)

Ironically I've posted this before in a previous discussion and was told how boring and useless it was by a cornucopian free market capitalist who explicitly told me that deforestation was good for the economy and humanity.

Hey FMagyar

Thanks for replying. If I wielded absolute power, I would ship these cornucopians to a barren planet such as mars, where they can plunder and pillage the natural world as much as they want.

I share your opinion exactly, but I am firmly convinced that when people are hurting badly - when they're losing their jobs, becoming destitute, going hungry, barely surviving - the last thing they'll think about is saving the environment and the species. I view this upcoming episode in the human story as a period in which planet earth's most priceless treasures - its vast array of plantlife and animal-life - are about to be raided, torn down, killed and turned into food, fuel and human necessities. I think humans will get to them long before global warming wipes them out.

An episode from history which is comparable to this is when a highly complex, sophisticated, evolved entity such as the Roman or Egyptian empire is raided and looted by barbarians. All the treasures are stolen, all the priceless and unappreciated works of art and literature trampled over, and little is left for posterity. Nature is like that Roman Empire. We humans are like the coarse barbarians who, unappreciative of its incredible complexity and unaware of the countless secrets which lie undiscovered in its realm, nevertheless ache to destroy it in order to satiate our selfish needs. We really are a race of parasites. Viewed from space, our cities and urban sprawls look like planetary eczemas, which will probably cure themselves.

Truth be told, I've given up on the human race. This stupid race, which now prides itself on having killed off the old God, cannot even be convinced by science - the very thing with which it has destroyed religion and other faiths, and installed as the new faith. I no longer believe in democracy. I want Plato's Philosopher Kings to rule, and to have scientists and biologists as their most trusted advisors. This democracy drifts aimlessly, trampling everything in its path, driving the race to the abyss. It isn't even a democracy. It is a well disguised oligarchy of the rich, or perhaps simply a giant mediocracy.

There simply isn't time enough to try to convince the human race about why the natural world is important. Their selfish instincts are too deeply imbedded. All the animals and plants must be saved NOW and stored for posterity because they have many secrets to reveal, and because, unlike us, they have been law-abiding tenants of this planet. It is the natural world, our accummulated cultural heritage and a few select members of our race that are the most priceless treasures to be preserved. Once they are preserved, perhaps kept in restricted habitats or frozen as cells/DNA, then it is simply a waiting game - we wait for the remainder of the human race to be cooked to death.

After that, we are told, an ice age will ensue, and a few hundred years later, balance will be restored. It is then that the remaining lot, far wiser than their predecessors, will inherit the earth together with their friends from the forests and the oceans.

This is my hope.

ShoX

I tend to think the same way. Down with H sapiens!

But, but, but, I have to admit that some mightily impossible things HAVE happened right in the face of all those forces against them. People here have listed them many times, and we should not ignore the fact that impossible changes DO come about. Might be useful to study the how of that.

Women voting? Ridiculous!
Black people voting in little southern towns like the one I grew up in? Don't make me laugh.
No smoking in airplanes? Hey, I got my rights, don't I?
A 50% black man president of US? Crazy! Never, never never gonna happen.

Hopeful note. I have found that kids 10- 12 get all the energy/environment/population things RIGHT NOW. Fact is, they get bored by my lecture- way ahead of me.

Kids grow up --and vote, Old people die, Things that are "just the way it is", change. Happens. No Elephant.

OK, OK, Probably not fast enough. Down with H-s.

Now back to the fun part- solar thermal to save the world.

Wimbi
Had a similar thought about the younger generation. Possibly a sesame st. type mixed w/ a little Mr. Rogers.
Or the "movie version" (as mentioned above) aimed at that younger crowd. They will (hopefully) age & vote in larger #'s than the older problem makers.
Given the message of societal conscience early and maintaining it into adulthood could be a game changer.
Of course given we have the time & we can halt the intentional dumbing down process needed to keep BAU.

Women voting? Ridiculous!
Black people voting in little southern towns like the one I grew up in? Don't make me laugh.
No smoking in airplanes? Hey, I got my rights, don't I?
A 50% black man president of US? Crazy! Never, never never gonna happen.

You're exactly right, wimbi. But those were small steps for a few members of the human race trying to make their way within their own troubled groups.

What we are asking for now is a lot of giant leaps from all of mankind. We are asking men and women everywhere to essentially abandon their day-to-day lives and sacrifice themselves wholly to the cause of repairing a natural world which they neither care for nor understand. This is rather too much to ask of a democracy. It's one thing gathering up the courage to resist your oppressors; it's a totally different thing to undo all selfish instincts and save your fellow men and animals, without reward or praise.

We need strong willed characters who will break away from the rest and take charge, who will be the spinebone for a new movement, who will find ways to divert funds and resources to a seemingly strange cause even in the midst of worldwide economic meltdown and possible chaos. Let us not misplace our faith. Let us not wait for these ludicrous democracies all over to give their consent.

NO!! Rather than that, let us IMMEDIATELY press our most selfless lot, our finest minds and souls, and our strong willed, into service towards the planet.

I personally have been brooding over this matter for a long time now, and I am most certainly committed to the cause. I simply wish others understood the way I do about what is going on, and what the most priceless things are in life.

Well, shox, I knew somebody would make those points. What I listed sounds like small potatoes relative to changes we need now. Right. I was only suggesting the obvious- history shows that first we talk about it, next, the kids grow up to think what we talked about is just the way it is. That's how things change.

Note of optimism ( Why not? Feels better than pessimism). Strangely, ALL of my friends think the way I do, even tho they can't usually articulate any reasons, and they change the subject, etc. when I talk about it. But, they know they have to change, and in a big way, and they are in fact, looking for that leader to lead the way to that change, details of which they do not understand.

I can't think that I live in a tiny little deviant subset of otherwise thoughtlessly selfish humanity. Way too unlikely, no?

OK, messiah, time to show up.

Online in the Sunday Washington Post-an article about the growing social acceptance of pot use , boomer use, trend to legalization.

Change IS possible-probably not fast enough irt energy but with some luck...maybe.

Legalizing pot is a sign of social decay, not change for the better brought upon by growing consensus. I openly expressed my disdain for the democratic systems of governments we have going at the moment exactly for this reason: the populations can be coerced into anything by advertising and other means, but never by people whose voices most need to be heard. Whose voices do we most need to broadcast? Those of Climatologists, Biologists, Social Philosophers, and let's not forget, Geologists.

There is a huge difference between pot use and reducing energy consumption that should be obvious.
One implies a relaxation of self restraint the other demands more self restraint.

No wonder the activity that is associated with pleasure is the popular one.

This is what you mean by social decay and the trend toward more lax attitudes toward recreational drug use bodes poorly for reducing energy consumption through will power. That is unless everybody just gets stoned and sits around all day.

It may be a sign of the decay of an authotitarian order opposed to personal freedom but as I see it it is a sign of hope-we can occasionally quit digging deeper holes.

We can occasionally drop a failed policy and spend the resources devoted to it on other -hopefully more useful - things.

I don't know anybody anymore, excepting a couple of really old straight laced prudes, who is afraid of pot or who thinks it's worthwhile to lock up thier nieghbors and kids for using it.

Pot is here and it's not going away.Pretty soon the dam will break when a courageous politcian proposes legalization and a high tax on it.

It is just like alcohol and the storied history that goes with it.
Basically a lesser of two evils choice.
Look at the huge burden alcohol is on society but it undoubtable was and would be worse if it were illegal.

Legalizing pot is a sign of social decay, not change for the better...

@Shox

Wow. And I liked your other posts so much.

No recognition of how primitive societies have, for millenia+, used mind altering substances to heal and explore?

Though I alter my mind much less than I used to, I would not awoken without those few dozen mushroom trips. (And, granted, I know a couple people who took too much acid and never came back.)

Carl Sagan had a great posthumous "announcement" that he loved to get stoned and contemplate the universe...

Through the power of abundant energy we have tried to make every dream come true. Unfortunately, our dreams have no bounds, and until recently it seemed our energy and resources would feed our dreams forever.

After burning all of that energy, what have we really gained? We still suffer, die and find our way back to the soil as we've always done. We've given birth to a whole new dimension of life in our technologies, but one that disappoints as it panders to the whims of the undisciplined organisms that created it.

Have we really gained anything if the planet's biological habitats are destroyed? Are we hoping for the ascendancy of a replicating technological life that can continue without us?

None of what we have become has been because of unbiased rational decisions. It has all happened by thermodynamic processes that are older than life itself. The elephant and its rider are thermodynamic structures.

Any rationality that interferes with energy acquisition and reproduction must be vetoed by the elephant. Rationality is biased and absolutely useless if it does not meet the needs of its possessor. Convincing a bunch of survival machines that less is more and poorer is better is going to be quite a trick. I think overwhelming force and the fear it instills is more likely to curb human appetites than voluntary inhibition.

If the herd starts to stampede, just put the illusion of green shoots in front of them, confuse them. If they come after you, fabricate some other enemy for them to vent their anger upon and steer them in that direction. For a more positive outcome a fantasy herd must be seen moving in a particular adaptive direction even if it really is not. The phantom of herding towards desired goals could incite actual movement in the desired direction. No one wants to be left out on a good thing or be a non-conformist.

I see dozens and dozens of different statistics use to evaluate the capability of a professional baseball player, each of which any sports nut treats with reverence, yet we have a couple of cheap heuristics to describe oil depletion and people go MEGO.

I'm not knocking it because if I didn't voraciously study baseball stats and try to figure out if Rod Carew would make .400, I probably wouldn't have been as comfortable (read: non-bored) with math as I am. I just find it strange the disparity of interest in what are at best sideline hobbies.

Such is the nature of fat-tail statistics and the gray swan. If baseball were like oil depletion, you would find one player that would hit .900 and some pitcher that would complete 164 games a year. The predictability would all be lost, and that is not what people crave.

As Garth eloquently put it: "We fear change."

So oil depletion is all fat-tail statistics, and the people who study oil depletion are fat-tail "squared". I realize that if I could affect some sort of change, that it would be a huge black swan event. So for the same reason that a baseball fan wants to witness the thin-tail but exceedingly rare unassisted triple-play, a distinct minority might also want to witness that completely unexpected paradigm shift in understanding.

In other words, whatever black swan event that may face us is accompanied by an exceedingly rare person or group that would even think to pursue the quixotic quest of predicting the unpredictable. The ONE fact or packet of knowledge that will change people's behavior is in fact just another Black Swan event. Nobody is that stupid to do something with no payoff; in contrast with baseball there is always next year.

Wht, who is Garth?

Wayne's best friend.

1. How can science, facts and analysis overcome 'our inner elephant?'

In my view, the first thing to do is educate people that they have an inner elephant. Most people think that what they think is true. Trying to introduce new ideas to someone who things that "the truth" exists is very difficult and often impossible — that's why we have arguments. Both sides think that what they think is reality. At best, it's a filter on reality that will show some things but will by definition hide others. Easy people to talk to and work with are those who "holds their views lightly."

Until everyone is educated that there is no such thing as "the truth" we will waste much energy and time speaking to people who think they know the truth and consequently make very slow progress. But what a job! How many religions claim they have the truth? How many political movements think their way is the one and true way?

It's not just a nicety that some of us keep inserting "in my view" or "consider this point of view" in our writing — it's a recognition of the fundamental limits of how humans gather and process knowledge.

I was watching Ron Paul on a video today. There is simply no way to collaborate with him when he is being his usual dogmatic self. "Being dogmatic" is just another way of saying that he believes his view is "the truth" — which makes everyone else wrong. To him, it really is true that government is the problem and his filters only let in evidence that supports that view. There is no room to work with someone when they are being that way.

2. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?

Sure but what then? No one has found a way to go from this system to whatever is next (a steady state economy, for instance) without going through collapse first. Can we convince every CEO to stop growing his/her company? Every pension fund to stop trying to grow their holdings? Neither of those are going to happen, so let's just embrace collapse and continue to get ready for it and be there for people as the whole things winds down.

I think there will still be occasions of fun and laughter...especially for those people who figure out that beyond the basics of food and a bit of shelter, the joy in life doesn't come necessarily from things. Of course, in my view ;-)

3. What to do, if anything?

Well, I would say 'do whatever inspires you.' If you are inspired by trying to turn the ship around like Alex Steffen at WorldChanging or Rob Hopkins at Transition Towns, do that. If you are inspired by having people get ready for collapse, do that. If you are inspired by working with national leaders to making sweeping changes, do that.

(Note that I do not say transformations, just changes, even through transformations are better. Transformations are fundamental alterations of the system itself. Changes are merely modifications to the existing system. Systems fight back against attempts to transform them even more than against attempts to change them because transformation strikes at their identity. In some cases, it means extinguishing the system entirely — and the people who depend on that system don't like that one bit.

As far as I can tell, mostly we make just changes (or 'fixes') without ever transforming the system itself....that's why it appears to me that the destiny of man was set thousands of years ago. Without transformation, we never had a chance. Most environmental/sustainability groups think their work will make a significant difference when actually they are merely applying band-aids ('changes') to runaway systems.)

I wrote this on Greer's blog a few days back...a good reminder not to take the human predicament too seriously!

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
- Billy Shakespeare

Nate really good post. And a pretty enlightening discussion.

In terms of taming -or at least gaining a bit more control of the elephant. Firstly I think the biggest part of the problem is that people are only dimly aware of riding that elephant. Trying to get them to think about thinking is important, although I doubt there is enough time for more than a few to be reached this way. One attempt to start this process was Richard Brodie's Virus of the Mind, which is essentially about memetics, and how we can learn to choose the memes that will help us, rather than those that have implanted themselves in our brains because they are good at spreading. I think memetics is only a partial part of our thinking, but at least it is a start.

Secondly I really fear an arosed population. It seems far more likely to me that skilled psychological manipulators will stampede the herd in directions that suit their own narrow minded agendas -or perhaps the agendas of their paymasters. I'd feel much safer if we could cool the emotions, and promote a bit more introspection, rather than simply trying to inject yet more emotional energy into the mix.

I have mixed opinions about how the population would handle a declining level of wealth. I'm only 85% convinced it is necessary (i.e. we could solve energy via a combination of conservation and aggressive buildout of sustainables, if only...). But many countries have gone through some very substantial declines, and mass mob violence has not been the result. The example that most pops into my mind was Russia, where the free market ideology we tried to impose on them resulted in short term living standard loses of perhaps 50%. Other than a lost decade, and a surely longterm mistrust toward the US and international institutions it looks like they can make it out the other end. Of course they don't have the massively entrenched sense of entitlement that has been bred into ourselves, so out reactions may well be less controlled.

I suspect the future is going to be chaotic. That implies that small perturbations applied at the right time and place can lead to a huge difference in the future system trajectory. The difficulty is that that trajectory is virtually impossible to pin down, so these pressure points may not be easy to identify, and there exists the very real possiblity that the response to your well intentioned perturbation may not be as intended.

That implies that small perturbations applied at the right time and place can lead to a huge difference in the future system trajectory.

I just saw a butterfly.

Secondly I really fear an aroused population. It seems far more likely to me that skilled psychological manipulators will stampede the herd in directions that suit their own narrow minded agendas -or perhaps the agendas of their paymasters. I'd feel much safer if we could cool the emotions, and promote a bit more introspection, rather than simply trying to inject yet more emotional energy into the mix.

The companion insight to this essay (and I alluded to it once) is that I had, been rooting for the government/leaders to acknowledge the real problem and the sooner the better so we can use more of our available resources towards a new/better trajectory. I've change my mind on that - for people to have awareness AND not be in a position to act (either no political choices or no resources locally to effect change) we might really undo social cohesion. Ergo, targeted awareness of community leaders to accelerate resilience, redundancy and systems science while everything else muddles through is probably a more benign path than mass enlightenment.

Yes, an odd perspective from an editor of this site who has tried very hard to generate awareness in the population...

Good luck with targeting community leaders,Nate.It has been my observation that the majority of these "leaders" actually follow the herd whilst maintaining the illusion of leadership.

Like it or not, change,for better or worse,will come from the herd.

Somebody recently commented on TOD that leaders wait see where the herd is going and then jump out in front and say "follow me!".

That is called politics.

This harks back to the observation that the young generation accepts facts like resource depletion (whereas their parents are unaware/in denial) and carry that belief through time to enact some intelligent response when they become the "power" generation.

My limited experience is that trying to engage transition idease with those who control governance at even the most local level is fighting an unwinnable war, and suspect that it is only the passing of time that will effect change via political means.

That ONE fact we seek remains as elusive as the stuff of an atom. Logical and reasoned memes—peak everything, the second law, physical constraints—have not sold, and why not? The answer is as empirically correct as night following day: humans with base instincts are more in number than the good. Academic discussions sway few of us, and few academics or politicians. Media truth is manufactured product, whether it is an ad conveying the delight of morning coffee or a full-blown sporting extravaganza celebrating the game competition—“Winning is the only thing”—as metaphor of American culture. Within the make believe, producers foist upon viewers the absurdities of the American style of life—neo-plastic, high-tech gadgets stuffed into kitchens; garages filled with the all-essential automobile; food that is yummy. It is good to consider that there are ways of living that do not require processed foods or talking automobiles having electric-motored rear view mirrors, but only a minority of us are doing so. Television is a vast wasteland that purports to uncover a world of possibilities but actually withholds truth. Manufactured lies displace truth. Nate, if you want to get the word out before the four horsemen thunder in, you’ll have to do it one aunt at a time because clever ogres have taken over the media.

Well, here is what I think of as an ad for a different paradigm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1SLl0YfOyU

It is trying to sell a POV contrary to the prevailing one. The question remains if it is effective in transmitting the underlying meme and then if the meme is successful in becoming viral. Last but not least is the question as to whether or not the new paradigm that it begets is adaptive and will create an advantage for survival of the poulation as a whole?

What are the odds of it being successful?
I personally think they are infinitesimally small but still greater than zero.

Unscientific poll question? As a potential consumer of ideas such as the one portrayed here are you willing to purchase?

A) Now!

B) I might if the price is right. (or the consequences of BAU become too high)

C) Not a chance in Hell!

D) I'm going to report you to the thought police for subversion.

E) You need a new marketing campaign...

Interesting analogy.
Maybe this is what we can look forward to?
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/4278/masterblaster.jpg

Nate, I think you are asking the wrong question. You are looking at how our paradigms shape the world. The question then is how to adapt those paradigms to produce a world we would like to live in given the present situation.

I think the more useful question is how the world shapes our paradigms. Then the question is how can we modify the world to produce positive change given the present human.

Before I lose anyone, what I mean are projects like transition towns. Simple initiatives that produce tangible change in society that fundamentally alter people's relation to the situation and result in paradigm changes.

Pre transition town: concerned, intelligent, informed, individuals that 'get it' are burnt out and disenfranchised.

Paradigm spectrum: from uninformed BAU to well informed frustrated doomer

She claimed that she has understood our resource/population/environmental problems for some time, but eventually got frustrated and gave up talking about them to friends and neighbors because there was nothing that one or a few could do. Increasingly I hear this from people that get it - they are willing to do something, perhaps even out of the box and risky, in order to effect change - they just don't know what such a thing is. More analysis and better presentations just aren't strong enough to battle the momentum of entrenched popular dissonance.

Post transition town: concerned, intelligent, informed, individuals that 'get it' as well as marginally informed people that 'get' some of the picture have something that they can work on at a local level that produces meaningful results. And because of that change in how the world works, paradigms change.

Paradigm spectrum: from uninformed BAU to well informed empowered doer.

What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”

What you are looking for is a way to package the message and that is a mistake. The message is horrible. It won't sell no matter how it is packaged. It's a universal truth that nobody ever wants to hear bad news.

but it seems like if I could just get a little bit more info and synthesis, that I could convey such to others and the tumblers of the 'solution' lock combination could be made clear. A concise well written expose in the major newspapers etc. and people would start to change their behavior in the significant magnitude that will needed.

I have come to see this as delusional thinking. As I wrote about in 'Whither TheOildrum?'

What we need are game changers. Clever solutions that do an end run around the entrenched status quo to produce a fundamental change. They need to out compete BAU and spread virally. Producing tangible results and changing people's view of the world. I believe this is where The Oil Drum should go. We have a large community of systems thinkers from diverse backgrounds that thoroughly understand the problems we are facing. We should mobilize this community to work on crafting game changers.

Crafting a game changer:

1) Understanding the system. What's the problem and why is it happening?

2) Engineer a solution. What change can we make to the system that solves the problem?

3) Making it viral. How can we make this new system pervasive?

Transition towns are a great example:

1) Problem: National governments aren't dealing with peak oil because running on the peak oil ticket is a sure way to lose an election.

2) Solution: Address peak oil on a local level.

3) Make it viral: Write a method that engages the citizenry rather than a platform of specifics.

Here is an example that I have come up with.

The appalling quality of MSM journalism:

1) Problem: News media used to be funded by subscriptions which incentivized quality, but now they are funded by advertising which incentivizes sensationalism. People want quality news, they just aren't willing to pay a premium for it.

2) Solution: Link popularity to quality so that news media companies are incentivized to produce high quality news. News portals like Google news, Yahoo news, AOL, etc. are driven by algorithms that rank popularity. Create a news portal that is driven by a peer reviewed algorithm.

3) Make it viral: Leverage social networking technology, in this case LinkedIn. If you want news about climate change then you configure your portal to feed you articles vetted by the scientists in the IPCC. Peak oil, ASPO, etc.

There are still two problems with this model that I am working on. One, the echo chamber effect. If you only select authorities from the religious right then you will only hear about news the religious right approves of. Two, you can't select for issues that you are unaware of, if you don't know about peak oil then you can't select the ASPO to review your news. Suggestions are welcome.

Overall, the problem is that in our present situation being greedy, lazy, or apathetic is an appropriate response to the system that we live in. If we want to see different attitudes and behavior then we have to create a system where being active, community oriented, and long term is an appropriate response.

So how do we deal with the echo chamber?

The history of Willi Münzenberg is what you are fighting.

One of the modern masters of such media control was the German Communist from whom Joseph Goebbels learned his trade, Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg was not only the inventor of spin, he was also the first person who perfected the art of creating a network of opinion-forming journalists who propagated views which were germane to the needs of the Communist Party in Germany and to the Soviet Union. He also made a huge fortune in the process, since he amassed a considerable media empire from which he creamed off the profits.

Hi Nate,

the report here;

http://www.apa.org/science/climate-change/ (Full Report PDF)

goes into many details on the psycology of climate change. One point in there relevant to this discussion is they say that analytical reasoning is a product of education not a natural function of the brain. If this is true then there is no chance of getting enough people on board to mitigate the effects of resource depletion and environmental degradation. We just cant educate enough people in time and to the right level to have an effect.

In which case most people wont react until its too late.

And don't forget, the scales are not balancing "facts" vs. "emotions," at least they are not labeled that way. They are balancing "our facts," vs. "their facts," and many more "experts" are telling the general population that our side is wrong. Ever since I read Gail's post about changing the focus of the Oil Drum, I've wondered whether the editors have come to believe that the facts are so self-evident now that there is nothing more to be said about them. That may be true - to us - but it is certainly not true for the majority.

What makes sense to me is that old feminist term "raising consciousness." And that means asking people to first put into words and then question their own basic assumptions. (Socrates used this technique.) But there's just not one basic assumption that we can counter with one basic fact. (Well, maybe there is one basic assumption - I was able to put it into words years ago, and I find that the majority of people absolutely believe it:

"Somebody will think of something. They always do."

You can see the difficulty - it's going to take a mountain of facts to counter that assumption, which is easy to understand, has the ring of truth, and is comforting to boot.

The "environmental movement" as a whole IS raising consciousness. I am continually impressed by how many people have simplified their lives, turned away from consumption, and have learned to value the natural world. That is the approach that makes sense to me. As the capstone species here on this planet, what is, ideally, our role: I think that it is to celebrate and defend the variety of life on this planet. Lots of "facts" then flow from that assumption, chief among them that we need to start voluntarily reducing our numbers.

Actually, Nate, writing the above helped me clarify something:

What ONE fact (or assumption) do we need to challenge in order to get people to change their behavior?

For me, I suppose, it is the assumption I posted above, though I wish it were something more broad, more consciousness-raising, more cosmic.

If you alter Nate's question #1 to...

Is there any one IDEA that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?

...then Pellice probably has identified it with his statement:
"Somebody will think of something. They always do."

Though it needs re-wording to incorporate the difference between a problem and a predicament, and to state that somebody WILL NOT think of something to solve the problem of oil depletion.

Otherwise we can stick with the original wording of question #1...

Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?

...and wait around for that fact to be as follows:
Oil production peaked years ago in 20XX. It had been declining ever since and will keep declining.
(That will definitely darken the social mood, i.e., stir up the inner pachyderms)

Taoism would teach us to not try to change, do everything by doing nothing.

My studies of thermodynamics and life (the excellent book Into the Cool) says that life`s purpose is gradient reduction. The energy in oil has been one hell of a gradient to reduce, we`ve almost done ourselves and our beloved planet in in the process of laboriously dissipating this energy. At least we did it our way....
I think there are surely regrets, half of humanity is heartbroken about what`s occurred.

Yet time presses on, and there are so many gradients left to reduce, despite the mandates by governments to continue BAU, the mandate of life is quite different and more compelling for us.

So the gradient that makes an undeveloped country look so different from the US will be reduced. The US will look more like Bangladesh or Thailand and vice versa.

The huge cities and suburbs form another gradient, they are just too different from rural tranquility, so it`s probably the case that the huge cities will see people leaving.

People have known about the problem of man`s infinite greed for a long long time. Read "The Fisherman`s Wife", it is a fairy tale so it must be hundreds of years old. Basically it sums up our situation. The husband keeps warning his wife, but she can`t listen (mounted on her elephant in your metaphor here) and demands more and more until she loses everything. Ironically she`s perfectly content back in her lowly hut at the end.

This is a problem that goes way beyond oil. You need to turn to religion probably for a solution. Morality, wisdom from great thinkers from the past, etc. I find that renouncing things just in order to renounce them can be satisfying---could that idea ever be a popular movement? Or how about a religion of nature worship like the person who is an Archdruid? Why not try to appeal to the deepest part of the brain and start solstice ceremonies, moon festivals.....

But try that and maybe everything just gets more complicated with people who will find so called "paganism" wrong somehow. You need a prophet, Nate! Someone who can bring this basically environmental message in a simple straightforward way with mass appeal.

Are there any volunteers out there???

This was my take on the subject from a few days ago:

...economic collapse, energy depletion and climate change would combine to seriously impact food production. Our primitive reptilian brains would then fully appreciate the immediate threat it presents, whereas it ignores the more abstract threats such as climate change, etc. The point being that once the cerebellum (lizard brain) takes control of our actions, no amount of calls to our neocortex for calm will prevail and destabilising chaos will follow. Deeply scared people will be quick to action and sceptical of assurances, leaving politicians with little to control populations with other than force.

People will be scared by a visibly deteriorating situation, governments will be scared by the people, the ruling elite will be scared at their loss of power and control over events. The prevailing environment of fear will make for poor decisions and reactionary policies leading to societal upheaval.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5943/557792

The chips are going to lie as they fall, it will not be an organised affair. What works will be what most people will cling to and give their primary loyalty to, whether it be the state, drug cartel, corporation, local community, trade union or religious sect. The State will still exist, although hollowed out and increasingly lacking legitimacy, people will be drawn to the system that meets their immediate needs.

I don't believe attempting to educate people to the problem makes any difference, except perhaps to send them off at a tangent into the arms of hope (ie. BAU by other means). If they're not prepared to divorce themselves from their existing lifestyle and do what is necessary, which probably means physically moving location at least, then there is no point wasting time on them.

The thing to keep in mind I guess is that what we envision as collapse is only the short end phase of a long process. We're currently in collapse and likely have been for several years and will be for many years or possibly decades to come. During the whole period social reorganising/self organising will be ongoing based upon peoples own perceptions. Over time people will become aware of the situation and what others are doing, which will guide their own actions.

Nate,

Just for the sake of research, I searched for how many times the word "brain" appears in this thread.
Amazingly, only a handful of times.

You ask if there is something to be done to better manage the elephants inside each of us.

Well D'oh, yes. Hold classes in elephant physiology and elephant behavior.

I don't hold myself out as some expert in neurobiology. At best I am a tinkering rank amateur. Half the time I'm not sure if I'm even correctly spelling words like dopamine, serotonin or amygdala. But the point is that in grade school they forced us to learn the 4 chambers of the heart and all these details about the structures of cells in plants and animals. I don't recall any lectures on the parts of the human brain, how they work, how they interact, how we can learn to control some of our primitive behavioral responses.

I agree. And the below graph is a big barrier (though we can learn and understand about brain/behavior without believing in evolution - its just not as rich of understanding)


Reference is, Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, and Shinji Okamoto (2006) "Public Acceptance of Evolution" Science Aug 11 2006: 765-766.

Education in this sense is critically important - because it would serve as a bridge between the man and the elephant. If people knew their neural foibles, they could use science better to incorporate that. I consistently lost money trading until 1997 when I learned and developed trend following trading algorithms. This would take my emotions out of the moment and allow me to 'pay my intelligence forward' in the sense that I KNEW I was too emotional in responding to real time information and designed something that would bypass this trait. Something similar would only be likely in society if many/most understood more of how our great ape brains function. This is happening quickly but only in a small subset of society.

I wonder if the Icelanders would trade all that vast intelligence for a few more sheckels. I know it is a constant theme that stupid Americans are the problem, but extremely intelligent, extremely driven, extremely ruthless and powerful Americans (or Icelanders) have the ability to burn down the house and nobody wants to take away the gasoline and matches (least of all Obama). Intelligence without integrity will not advance a society at all. Kunstler often rails against NASCAR morons, but who among us would choose a Wall Street titan over a NASCAR moron in a handshake deal with our life on the line?

Nate,

Someone who does not (or refuses to) understand the phrase:

ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny **

has no chance of understanding why the human brain is as it is.

(** See also, Haeckel's Fraud here.)

While the image of the man riding atop the elephant is an enchanting one,

The more correct one would be of an ALMOST-blind man hanging on to the tail of, and following the elephant in what direction the elephant leads him/her (and perhaps tugging on the elephant's tail once in a while to change direction)

Global warming denial is one thing but to bring up Haeckel as a Fraud is really sad.

Try this instead.

Embryonic similarities in the structure of vertebrate brains

Category: Creationism • Development • Evolution • Neurobiology • Science
Posted on: May 9, 2009 3:30 PM, by PZ Myers
Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

I've been doing it wrong. I was looking over creationist responses to my arguments that Haeckel's embryos are being misused by the ID cretins, and I realized something: they don't give a damn about Haeckel. They don't know a thing about the history of embryology. They are utterly ignorant of modern developmental biology. Let me reduce it down for you, showing you the logic of science and creationism in the order they developed.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/05/embryonic_similarities_in_the...

"Creation Science 101" by Roy Zimmerman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIwiPsgRrOs

The guitar is out of tune, G or D string is a bit flat.

In another context I have argued that we need to give people the owners manual for their brains. You are right that our educational system by and large just assumes that optimal operation is self-evident and leaves it to chance. The real problem IMO is that the people most motivated to study the emotional brain, are those that work for moneyed interests with agendas. So we have political parties, think tanks, media empires all studying and making use of the science of persuasion, and the people who haven't paid attention to how the brain works become more rather than less vulnerable to manipulation.

Hi Nate and all. A voice in the wilderness from S.E Asia. I have always thought when I read discussion topics like this that an angry revolution is the only way. But I always talked myself down (the man) and said that this was irrational (the elephant). And I am angry, have been for a long time. I feel it every day. Every time I turn on the idiot box, every time I read the news online. Every time I see trees taken down, everytime I see moronic and ignorant behaviour towards life on this planet. And piece by piece they take the community I live in apart....death by a thousand cuts......Like I have quoted before 'A hungry man is an angry man'. Take a few of those rich, greedy mother#@!:>

Nate :
One thing to be aware of, in searching for ways to reach the elephant, is that by doing so, you're putting yourself on the level of Fox News, or all those other people who talk so expertly to people's limbic systems without making complicated detours through their intelligence.

But I'm sure you already know that.

Another thing is that the nature of resource scarcity is not tangible to the average consumer. There is no way to make an emotional pitch based on oil depletion, as such.

In my opinion, the sea change that will bring about, indirectly, an acknowledgement of "peak everything", is climate change. Everyone has a direct experience of climate, albeit in its trivial form of weather. The danger of losing what is known, the climate one grew up with, is something that speaks to everyone. All over the planet, people are getting angry about it, angry enough to demand changes.

Paradoxically (or not), American public opinion seems stuck in a time warp over climate change. The whole world is concerned, questioning its economic models, searching for concessions to bring to the table at Copenhagen... and in the USA, it's f**k the climate, we're in a recession here.

What Fox does is ask misleading questions over and over again such as those about Obama's birthplace. The idea is to keep enough folks distracted from the facts of life so they don't rebel against the filthy rich who are at the root of the inequities they perceive.

People will put up with all manner of deprivation if they believe the burdens are being equitably shared. The right wing media never point out that the troops who are sacrificing their lives in wars which only the filthy rich want are not the children of the filthy rich. Mostly there are from working class families who either couldn't find a decent paying job after high school or joined the National Guard to supplement their low paying jobs. Question the validity of these wars and you are accused of dishonoring the troops instead of answering the facts of the situation.

Since those of us who read TOD cannot afford to buy the foreigner owned Fox News or any other major news network then we are in the dire situation described in the title of Nader's last book "Only the Super-Rich can save us".

There is another elephant in the room, one that is not talked about very much, but that has huge implications.

I am speaking, of course, of human intelligence, or rather, the lack thereof in a large percentage of the population.

By definition, 50% of the population is below average in intelligence.

Stop and let that statement sink in. You never, ever see that obvious, self-evident fact mentioned anywhere. Many people would be scandalized to hear it. Yet it clearly must be true.

For those that I have taken to calling the “double digits”, reasoning hardly ever governs their behavior at all. I don’t know how much reasoning ability they might be capable of, but even that little bit is often largely undeveloped, or to the extent it is developed, is actively encouraged by peer groups, employers, advertisers and mass media to lie unused.

Even “average” human intelligence is rather underwhelming, and even among people with average and somewhat above-average intelligence, those same influences by peer groups, employers, advertisers, and media conspire to limit and discourage its use.

It is only when you get up to those with an intelligence level well above the average, say 115-120 or so and up into the rarified “genius” level of 140+, that you encounter people who really do have strong capacities for reasoning and actually do deploy their capacity as a primary influence on their behavior. With only a few exceptions, it is only amongst people with above average intelligence that you are likely to see those who are so independent of thought that they will “march to a different drummer”, not just against “society” in some generalized manner, but even against their peer group (which is very hard to do for humans). We humans are “hard wired” to stick together in the group, and it takes a lot of will power to override that wiring; it can be done, but only by those with strong reasons for doing so – and reason is the operative word. Mere anti-social rebellion, however, is not the same thing. That is driven pretty much by the same impulses that cause any captured animal to thrash about in its cage; more often that not it is behavior that is reinforced by the peer group, which counts for a lot more than “society” in the typical “double digit” mind.

Reasoning and all that are very much necessary when it comes to changing the thinking and behavior of the elites who actually control our society and economy. That is most of what the discourse here on TOD is all about. However, we must understand that such reasoning is unlikely to be very effective in eliciting changes of behavior amongst the masses of average and below-average people.

To some extent, such behavior may be changed through the manipulation of the media – advertising and propaganda. The trouble is that unless the message is absolutely true, those of above average intelligence will see through it and reject it, and then the fact that the message has been discredited amongst the opinion leaders will filter down to the masses. The masses don’t know why they should disbelieve advertising and propaganda, they just know that they should, because that’s what the smart people do. The problem with the truth is that it is complicated, and does not lend itself to being packaged into neat little thirty-second sound bites.

Nate also mentioned circumstances as a forcing mechanism for behavioral change. That certainly does happen, and actually could be considered the “default” strategy: let things take their course, and when things become bad enough, people will adjust. That works, but the question is whether it actually works well enough. Could we not do better?

Another tried and true strategy that has been employed off and on for most of the history of human civilization is some form of government control. If the masses are not behaving the way the government things they should, then force them to behave differently. Enact laws and decrees, raise an army of soldiers, police, spies and bureaucrats, and enforce the rulings by whatever means necessary to elicit sufficient compliance. Every single civilization that has ever existed on earth has employed this strategy to at least some extent. I don’t know if it is even possible for a civilization to operate without employing such coercion to at least some minimal extent. Of course, we don’t like this – again, largely for that same reason why animals don’t like to be caged. Maybe it is for our own good – except that (at least amongst those of us with above average intelligence) we know all too well that all too often it is not. The dustbin of history is full of societies that were coerced all the way into collapse and extinction by ruling elites who cared for nothing but maintaining their own power and privilege over the short-term. That last sentence is sounding uncomfortably, disturbingly familiar. Can we really count upon the ruling elites to come up with the right type of coercion to elicit the right behaviors amongst the masses? The track record up to now has not been good, which gives those with the ability to actually reason about these things considerable pause.

What’s left as a strategy that might actually elicit some constructive behavioral changes amongst the unintelligent masses? The only thing I can think of might be characterized as a “viral” strategy, or what the Christian gospels frequently refer to as “yeast leavening the entire dough”. A vanguard of “change agents”, strategically positioning themselves within society, and through personal example and activism, gradually transform the beliefs and behaviors of those around them; this then spreads in a chain-reaction effect until all of society has been transformed. This needs to happen both amongst the common people, and simultaneously amongst the upper levels of the power elites and influential opinion leaders. Such an approach has some affinities with Gramsci’s thought of transforming cultural hegemony as a prelude to a more thorough transformation of governance and the economy. The main drawback to such an approach is that it requires quite a few people who are all “on the same page” and dedicated to the cause, and it takes a lot of time – more time than we have, unfortunately.

What will actually happen? Most likely a muddle of all four approaches, I suspect.

WNC speaks of the low intelligence of humans. I suspect he speaks primarily of Amurkhans then.

I have noted this quite often and IMO the way a youngster is raised and his environment can have a huge impact on his future 'intelligence'.

Myself being farm raised and also rather 'lazy' in High School I had no inkling of what is known of IQ. Yet years and years later I decided to check into it and found that IQ was tested in my High School and I was about 124 or so.

Afterwards I went into the Navy and at boot camp was also given IQ tests..in the form of GCT and ARI,etc. I scored 133..enough to qualify for training as a officer pilot at Pensacola.Out of my company of about 70 men I was chosen. I declined.

When going to work for IBM I was later given a Programmers Aptitude Test in the form of an IQ test. I scored 143 or so.

A few years back I took another IQ test and scored some where around 150..I think 152.

Ok on that. So whats with the dopamine? And the 'inner elephant'? I suppose its how our brain handles information and how we respond to that flow. This is how my is responding at this point in time.

I 'got it' long ago about the crisis and shifting to a sustainable life. I am still striving in that regard but due to many recent observations I am not sure of the future of a sustainable livelihood nor of possibly any reason to act further on it.

Why? To me its becoming valid that there is already far too much ecological damage to hope for an ability to live sustainably. The massive destruction of our environment. Water polluted. Vast woodlands cut down such that only junk timber now grows. The huge die off in animal life. The destruction of our precious soils.

Take fishing as a means of food gathering. Today most all waters around here, the oxbow lakes,the ponds, the rivers and the huge dammed lakes are full of Asian Carp. Such that fishing has become almost a waste of time and effort. These are imported fish. They are voracious eaters. They breed rapidly and the consume all that other fish need to survive. This is just ONE example of what is happening.

Extreme weather would be the other. Our woodlands are decimated here. Right now there is much downed timber. Yet many many more trees are becoming diseased and with little growth will die. I think it will spell the end of our forests for certain and therefore all the animal life that needs it to flourish.

Already many animals are not seen anymore. They are going elsewhere or dying off.

So I am about to the point given my age of 71 to no longer even attempt much in the way of survival.
I can see aught but hunkering down with firearms. Maybe a lot of time out of my residence to keep from being burned out or attacked while within. Sitting with a shotgun to protect my garden, IF I can supply enough nutrients to even make it produce.

As we slowly wind down I fear that what even what little we have left will be taken by one means or the others. Waters become more polluted. Soils more depleted. Crime more rampant.

Even as I write this my life has been threatened of late by a nefarious creature who my estranged wife had a recent affair with. Had to change my cellphone number. Have to carry a sidearm much of the time. Have notified law enforcement of possible crimes against my person. Afraid to leave for extended periods of time for to come back to a burned out shell and my dogs murdered.

Times for me are very iffy. For those who have lost their incomes I think they are about where I am currently. I don't lack too much for enough to live on but that could change drastically if my pension were eliminated.

I also received a collection agency phone call that they were going to put a lien on my property due to my wifes(estranged) unpaid bills. This lowlife hoodlum from Chicago has opened my eyes.
I now see the future more clearly as a result and reinforced by other events as well.

My inner elephant? Dunno about that. Dopamine? Not sure. Future? Bad and getting far worse faster.

Here in the outback we have what are pretty low intelligence scum. They seem to drift here for welfare, cheap trailer living and low paying agricultural jobs. They poach game and steal as well as do a lot of dope. They will rip you off on a whim. They will steal what is unprotected and with jobs becoming more and more scarce here they will turn to outlaws if not already so. Many have criminal records already and have spent time in jail or prison. Broken and black teeth from meth usage. They surely can find no jobs in the cities or suburbs or factories.

The good farm country people are becoming a myth I find. Yes there are some and I count many of those as my kinfolks but they are not even capable of protecting what they have. Even some of their youth have gone astray.

Silver linings have peaked and are disappearing rapidly. We live in a soon to come hell in this country IMO of course. Only those who stand and fight vigorously for what they have will have even the slightest chance of survival. Those who do not will have no chance at all.

Airdale

airdale:

I happen to be very sceptical when it comes to the measurement of intelligence. As you point out, the same person can end up with different numbers on different tests. I do think that the basic concept of intelligence is valid, though, and that the testing is good enough so that it can give a rough indication of rank ordering amongst the population. Your test scores might fall in a range as wide as 124-152, but it is unlikely that you would score under 100 (unless you were having a really bad day). Similarly, I doubt that someone who usually scores between 75-100 is going to suddenly score 150 unless there is a huge mistake somewhere. I personally don't think it is useful to even think of anything more fine-tuned than qunitiles - top 20% and so on down to bottom 20%. That, IMHO, is about as accurate as we can truly get right now, and in any case there really isn't anything useful we can do with anything scaled finer than that.

There is lots to be discouraged about, as you write. So much so that I think it is a waste of time to try and spin out idealistic theories of what a future utopia might look like. Pipe dreams, those are, it isn't going to happen. We - both globally and nationally - are facing serious, deep, long-term decline, and that's the best case scenario. Nobody even wants to hear the worst case scenario, and I don't dwell on it myself because I just don't see the point. I don't know if we can manage to avoid that worst case black hole or not. I do think it is worth at least trying. Not for my sake or any of our individual sakes. You are 71, I'm about 13 years behind you, but the point is that the actuarial charts tell both of us that the number of years we have left are getting fewer all the time. The question is: what are we going to leave behind, what is going to outlive us? I can't solve all the world's problems before I go, nor can I guarantee the perpetual survival of humankind. I might just possibly be able to leave my little part of the world a little better than it was before. That is about all that most individuals can ever aspire to, so we might as well be content with that.

Well maybe the IQ tests only show that one is proficient at taking them.

However one learns in the country or even the city that there are an enormous number of really stupid folks about. Try to speak of say electronics and computers. Their eyes glaze over immediately. They appear to only exist for the moment and can't see much beyond that. So how does one then rate them as to intelligence? Way down on the food chain.

They may be 'good ole boys' but their dumber than shoe leather. I can find only a few folks in this county who I can play a good game of chess with. Some I tried to teach the game and just gave up.

IMO a good chess player is usually quite intelligent. This is when the reality comes about.

Someone who can write a good program and not have to have others debug it until is just about rewritten in total? Knew a lot of those in IBM. People who were treated as icons were hardly ever able to write clean code. I spent most of my 30 years finding defects and working in the depths of our mainframe program products. I saw despicable employees who somehow were thought to be very talented. They were not. They were just manipulators and suckups.

And further I suspect that those who post on TOD are way way beyond the average in intelligence.
Why I just can't seem to leave TOD for very long. The very high level of discourse.

As far as influencing those around me? A huge wasted effort I find.

I have therefore become far more pessimistic on survival in such an environment and future when all those without will rape, burn , pillage and steal everything nailed down while the honest person will be hard pressed to pull the trigger on those bent on lawlessness. I would find it hard to discover in those times any one I could trust.

Airdale

Well maybe the IQ tests only show that one is proficient at taking them.

Say, mostly off-topic, but have you (or anyone else reading here) noted a significant subjective/objective change in your "IQ" in relation to stress/adrenaline?

Whatever the definition of "intelligence" is (and as one who has done cross-species cognitive research, I'm skeptical of most of the popular ones), I've always been a bit surprised that people consider it a more or less static metric, like shoe size. That isn't how I have experienced it.

A lot of semi-mutant intellects on this list, so it occurs to me to ask...

On IQ tests.

I know it is frowned upon to reproduce large amounts of text from other sources however I rarely do such but in this case I think its important to the topic of this Campfire since it deals with the inner man and the outer man(elephant and rider) and I believe that what the PDF states is valid.

Here is the beginning of that article that someone posted the link to earlier.

1. Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason,plan,solve problems,think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning,a narrow academic skill, or test taking smarts.
Rather it reflects a broader and deeper capabilty for comprehending our surroundings-"catching on",
"making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.

2. Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate(in technical terms,reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments. They do not measure creativity, character, personality, or other important differences among individuals, nor are they intended to.

It fits in with my own beliefs and experiences. Speaking well IMO ,which is organizing or writing one's thoughts is sometimes difficult and may be misleading as to a persons mental capability and therefore I judge most people rather a bit more on their 'actions'. Playing chess is a great insight into those actions , IMO.

Not to beat a dead elephant or horse but I have long tried to listen closely to those who exhibit great intelligence. Living in the country there are some with "wisdom", mainly via experience. I find that oftimes what appears as wise behavior by those with 'wisdom' many times is unwise. Farming is such. I know NO farmers who are really aware of the great damage they are causing nor really care about it. Good intelligence should tell them otherwise.

Note to me 'homesteading' is not the same as 'farming'. Raising good fruit trees. Planting berry bushes. Protecting your soil and planning wisely are to me 'homesteading. Using the land wisely and sustainabily as well. Most farmers I know do very little 'real ' farming as it was once practiced in some areas before the advent of chemicals and genetics(no seed stock to carry over).

Airdale

Greenish,

Changes in IQ? Yes mine has increased over the years.

I put it down to the huge amount of reading I immerse myself in. Also I work still in complex systems. Still fix folks computers. Integrate farm combines which use far far more electronic computer controlled modules. Even address the MAC modules in the several Mack trucks my friend owns. Lately I helped bring up a new business band repeater and setup all his mobile two-ways as well.

So I have kept my skillset active as well as having to learn the newer programming and hardware of all the above.

Like said previously. At Hight School 125, then Navy 133, then IBM 145 and so on. This IMO was due to my advancing further and further into complex areas.

Today I started on a 52" large screen HD projection TV by RCA(Thompson). Sitting right behind my chair. Won't power on. One crt is exhibiting arcing. There is some burned spots on the pluggable chassis modules. Lucky I still have my old Textronix dual sweep oscilloscope as well as many other pieces of test equipment.
It may be unfixable but I will tear into its innards and see. Likely too costly to repair and so I will inherit it and fix it anyway for my self as a huge PC monitor if naught else.

Actually I find it easier to work in this areas than I did previously. I also have quite a few Ham Radio pieces of gear that I am usually modifying.

Stress or adrenaline related? Not that I have observed.

I think a lot of intelligence is born of being an entirely different type of person. I have always refused to follow the 'herd'. I always 'plow my own furrow' so to speak. Regarded here abouts as 'weird' to a degree and a renegade. For instance I always ride my Harley alone. Never with a group.

I have friends of course but I am more or less a loner by nature. Yet I have been going thru a huge problem with my wife for the last several years. In and out of divorce courts and many legal areas.
Lost about $200,000.00 due to just that. Yet I don't regret it too much. My life is full and the cancer has not as yet metastasized and I feel decent most of the time for my 71 years.

I do cherish of late my privacy more and more than I used to. My wife has left her gangster boyfriend but I refuse to even give her my new cellphone number.

One of my great joys was in the early 90s was building single handedly my 4500 sq ft loghome. Took me three years and I was never happier. Pure Western Red Cedar(unobatium now) and did all the stone masonry myself afterwards on the areas around the basement foundation etc. Installed a Geo Thermal Heat Pump myself. Did all the ducwork as well.

I think really that a persons outlook, inner man, and he approaches areas of life determines his mental acuity and results in a growing Intelligent Quotient. How he deals with life and its differing areas. I find that raising a family did very little for me in that areas BTW. Too much wasted time perhaps dealing with normal areas and unable to strick out marching to the tune of a far and different drummer(Thoreau).."So let him step to the beat of that different drummer......"

Best regards,
Airdale

Changes in IQ? Yes mine has increased over the years.

I think the people who designed IQ tests, had in mind some capacity which baring accident or illness is fixed for life. But it didn't work out that way. People with a great interest in intellectual stuff who feed that interst tend to get smarter with time. People who don't ought to be moving downscale.

My IQ varies sgnificantly with my mental state.When highly stressed emotionally and feeling depressed I can't even do basic arithmetic very well.Fortunately that's rare.

But if the stress is the result of an ape type problem-sonething to be dealt with physically My thought processes actually seem to speed up. I have seen an accident situation develop out of thin air so to speak and been able to warn others more experienced in that environment in time to run like hell.

Iq tests can't prove that you are stupid but they can prove that you are intelligent.That's pretty much the bottom line on iq testing.

Try to speak of say electronics and computers. Their eyes glaze over immediately.

Yet that only measures one (or a few aspects of human ability/interest). If someone tries to show me a legal argument my eyes glaze over within a couple of seconds. Yet if we were given a math or physics type problem I could kick any lawyers butt. Some people are naturally good at some things and terrible at others. A big part has to do with what we find fascinating versus what turns us off, and that too varies all over the map. Then some peculiar abilities must require hardwired neural circuitry. As an example take aural understanding. There's a component of that that I'm convinced that requires a brain circuit I don't have! Take a simple test of accents: a list of one hundred three syllable words. I'll get roughly 33% right! I even experimented in lanquage lab, spent hours listening to a tape and pronouncing the words, and still I score no higher than if I had rolled dice. So if I were to be judged on a task that requires that skill, people would conclude I was several sigma below average. Yet I had a career as a top supercomputer guru!

I knew a guy who had a PhD in Linguistics from Harvard, one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, who could not make accurate or consistent judgments of syllable accent to save his life. I wonder if its like color blindness?

On the IQ and intelligence thing in general, we should keep in mind that most of those most centrally involved in the creation of the modern industrialized world--that is in the process of destroying most living communities on earth--were many of the most highly intelligent and well educated people around.

A central task for educators today, in my view, is to identify what kind of intelligence is most useful for the future survival of the planet and start fostering THAT kind of smarts rather than the kind that got us into this mess. (Who is it that said that the same kind of thinking that gets you into a mess is not likely to get you out of it?)

This--what should be its highest priority--is not, unfortunately, the main (or even a remotely considered, minor) priority for the vast majority of the educational system.

Airdale,

It seems to me that your situation clearly illustrates the difference between a predicament and a problem. There are no answers/solutions to your situation. I wish people who see what is coming as a "problem" to be solved would step back, take a breath and recognize that it is a predicament with no magic silver BBs much less bullets. At the very least it saves time to allow one to pick the best of a bad bunch of choices.

The idea that there will be societal change before collapse is nonsense.

Todd

it's a predicament for all but a problem for some...

Nate, I agree to a point. But, my gut feeling is that the "solutions" will prove to be transitory and that they will become predicaments.

I'll use myself as an example. I have a lot of options to produce electricity if the grid goes down (3.6kW PV system, a 2.2kW gas generator, an 8kW gas generator and a 23kW diesel generator). Eventually each of these will fail for one reason or another. Now, they might not fail in my lifetime but that's a cop out.

Once they all fail, my "solution" transmutes into a predicament. So, did I really have a solution in the first place? Might I have been better off to simply forgo electricity and return to the life of the Indians who once lived here? Unfortunately, that leads to another predicament; although I have a lot of outdoor skills I certainly don't have the skills they had. Interesting topic.

Todd

Todd,
and I don't think you could return to the ways of the Native Americans. I would believe that the environment has sustained so much change and damage that it would be almost impossible.

They had to find salt. They had to use nut trees to produce an oil. They depended on steams and such that ran clean and pure water. They used many types of animals for clothing and shelter. They had to find sources of flint and such to create weapons and certain types of trees.

Most of what they had then I am certain has vanished. I looked thru my Euell Gibbons book on 'Stalking the Wild Asparagus' recently. Sadly what he proposes for usage is no longer to be found in many cases. It has been sprayed to oblivion or due to pollution.

In my area I can no longer find any wild mushrooms. Not a single one except a very few oyster mushrooms. No more morels for sure.

Airdale

My yearly morel haul has been slowly decreasing since the early 80's.

and I don't think you could return to the ways of the Native Americans. I would believe that the environment has sustained so much change and damage that it would be almost impossible.

I don't believe that. Primitive humans survived in some environments that are far more hostile than an environmentally ravaged midwest. That doesn't mean the carry capacity (or density that humans could live sustainably) would be nearly as high as it was five hundred years ago. Of course the transition would involve a huge dieoff. Both to get down to that low population density, and because the process of learning to live off of what nature is left would be pretty hazrdous itself.

Enemy, I tend to agree with you about the ability of humans to survive-I think the problem has more to do with the loss of the kbowledge and skills than depleted resources also.But the New local population of Native Americans -whatever thier origins-will probably be far less numerous than the population of the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

But if tshtf and we die off without a nuclear war there will be a few pockets here and there where a small population can sustain itself imo.

The mountains of the south eastern US seem likely to me-never too cold, hopefully never too hot or too dry.Lots of creek bottoms that can be farmed for a few years, abandoned to nature , reclaimed again in a generation or two, woods that can be burned off to keep grasslands open.Ample water from streams that do not pass thru towns or cities, at least in the upper reaches in the hills.

If the deer and buffalo don't rebound maybe wild domestic cattle will take thier place.

Anybody who thinks a milk cow running loose cant survive on her own has never lived in the southern backwoods.In a few generations her offspring would be as wild as deer.

That's a very interesting comment, oldfarmermac, and I agree with you that life does (barring nuclear war) spring eternal. Wild hogs are everywhere, and they came from domestic pigs that got loose. I'm curious if you see any other areas of the US being habitable using ecologically sustainable agriculture?

While I'm assuming a worst-case scenario for the sake of debate, the question is still an important one even if the post-peak reality is not so harsh as a 90% dieoff.

IMO, i think climate change will make the mountainous areas of PA and NY even more moderate and livable. I also see the Pacific Northwest (OR, WA and BC) being a good place to make a post-peak life.

The Desert Southwest is out, for obvious reasons. I think most of CA south of the SF bay will not be a habitable place for large populations (beyond a million or so) due to decreased mountain snow runoff. Some of the valleys in the Rockies will remain habitable, but only at VERY low population density.

The question in my mind is: what happens to all the land between the Rockies and the Appalachians? (I'm including the the Deep South) Will small agricultural and limited manufacturing towns spring up, or will the die off render any attempt at civilization impossible due to the scavenging hordes airdale has eluded to?

life does (barring nuclear war) spring eternal.

Why does it have to be war? A biological agent, endocrine disruptors, or run away global warming/cooling could do in "life as we know it".

Man doesn't have to be the agent of destruction however. A 'smack from space' via a mass ejection from the Sun, some other star delivering a gamma ray burst, or an asteroid could be a game ender.

Hi Buddy,

Well, there are a lot of monographs about native diets here...but it really is area specific. Interestingly, our local tribe (the Cahto) has had an outreach effort to the schools about native foods for at least 35 years. I have a number of friends among them. And, BTW, they refer to themselves as Indians with me. Maybe it's like blacks using the N word among themselves. I don't know. For me, they are friends who are Indian. Not Indians who are friends.

Salt was no problem since it was at most a two day hike to the Pacific Ocean. They went over not only to gather kelp (which was fried and a good source of iodine plus salt) but also for "surf fish" which can be netted on the beach in-rush and rock fish.

Acorns were a major source of protein and fat and they (oaks) are still here. I make some acorn meal every year. Game was not as big a deal as we see it although all the tribes burned off the forests now and then to provide browse. There were also salmon runs which have been pretty wiped out thanks to us white guys. And, if it hits the fan, are probably dead meat.

So, all isn't lost. But, it sure as hell is changed.

Todd

I am speaking, of course, of human intelligence, or rather, the lack thereof in a large percentage of the population.

By definition, 50% of the population is below average in intelligence.

I find that overly pessimistic. I firmly believe that even the tenth percentile (90% is smarter) is capable of applying logical thinking methodology. It is much more a matter of training and attitude, then of the possesion of brute wetware. I saw a paper a couple of weeks back (I've forget where, and didn't save the url) that proposed an adhunct test to compliment IQ tests. The main finding was that most smart people, just haven't applied much effort into getting control of their thinking methods, and fall for various emotional thinking traps. They wanted to use this test to predict success (high IQ plus well trained thinking process equals success). But of course the real opportunity is not so much in measurement, but in improving peoples abilities.

The mistake we keep making is to conflate intelligence (and its companion psychological construct, creativity) with wisdom. The latter is judgment-based guidance of intelligence (+creativity = cleverness) in decision processing. This is as opposed to emotion-based influence over decision processing. The later was shown by Antonio Damasio to be essential for normal functioning (no Vulcans like Spock could realistically work). But it is also the case that emotion-based biases, good for surviving in the wild, perhaps, produce spectacular errors in decisions we humans make in our modern world. Nate has written at length about the problems with our reward system hijacking our reasoning system.

Wisdom is a higher-order, tacit knowledge-based influence on decision processing as well as having modulating influence over limbic (emotions) processes. By down modulating or blocking the latter and bringing a lifetime's wealth of experience-based tacit knowledge to bear on decisions, wisdom was, from an evolutionary standpoint, a more successful means of increasing the inclusive fitness of a family and tribe. But it is based on newly evolved brain structures (e.g. Brodmann area 10 is implicated) and is probably not as strong as it needs to be for modern humans living in this complex, global-scale social system. Also, there is reason to believe that the distribution of sapience strength is not the nice bell curve that we associate with intelligence and other, older evolved traits. It could be more like a continuous Poisson (highly skewed toward the low, left tail, end with a rapid dip toward the high end and very few individuals out in the right tail). Given enough time and genetic mixing, presumably the distribution would tend toward a more bell shape. But there hasn't been enough time yet and it's looking like there won't be enough time in the future.

Our best hope is that there are enough folks in the right tail who are young and can get together AND are prepared to survive what looks to be the coming turmoil of population crash. In the meantime there is very little purpose in complaining that we humans are not rational or intelligent enough. We are plenty clever when it comes to invention and problem solving. But that is the issue. It was our intelligence that got us into this mess in the first place.

Question Everything
George

I don't know what the actual capabilities for logical thinking are of those toward the bottom of the intelligence distribution. When I look at actual behaviors, though, I see little evidence that logical thinking is applied in a consistent and dominant manner across the entire population. I do see evidence for it amongst that segment that is most obviously in the upper end of the distribution, but otherwise, no. What passes for "logical thinking" amongst even people of average intelligence really isn't; it isn't so much reason as rationalization, which sounds similar but is not at all the same thing. As you move down toward the bottom, even rationalization seems to disappear, and you are increasing left with people whose behavior is driven entirely by emotion and base instinct, or by conformity to their peer group (which itself is driven entirely by emotion and base instinct), and by conformity to authority only to the extent that they cannot get away with non-conformity.

I don't know what the actual capabilities for logical thinking are of those toward the bottom of the intelligence distribution.

I suspect a major amplifier of incompetence is simply giving up because one isn't good at something. Then the natural reaction to whatever valued skill one doesn't posses it to diss it, and the people who have it. Then the person with the low skill level (or simply the bad luck to fall behind his peer group) actively will avoid developing that skill. With a really really good education system, I suspect many of these folks could be at least somewhat competent.

If you could isolate each youngster 24/7/365 and really work with them on a one:one basis, you could undoubtedly accomplish amazing things with their intellect. Of course, then the child would be deprived of proper "socialization". Plus, such a scheme would cost a fortune. Plus, you would undoubtedly end up with a few pervs abusing their charges, and the resulting uproar would quickly doom such a system.

Okay, so we Oil Drummers are Mensa eligible, and more. Great! We have at least our first-degree black belt, then. There are few more levels to work at in getting to become Philosopher Kings without selling out our moral integrity by settling for Machiavellian Power. I find it painfully frustrating conveying the seriousness of the coming cliff fall to so-called “double digits” and even to high “triple digits” with moral weaknesses, such as inability to listen to logical discourse based on hard-won facts. All the bright lights, with solutions to our pre-impact terror, however, seem to sum to zero, like diffuse radiation. A movement like a laser, all of us little wave-particles in phase and direction, would present quite a formidable force for good in the world, but I have not seen it yet. I think the Oil Drum has potential for forming something worthwhile, politically, but we are way off the mark, still fumbling about.

By the way, on IQ: http://www.aei.org/docLib/20060131_GottfredsonMainstreamScience.pdf

To be mathematically precise: 50%-(1/e)% of the population are below average intelligence, where e is a number tending toward infinity, (or in the limit as e tends to infinity).

Just thought I'd throw in a bit of the typical pedantic rubbish that floats around TOD at times, it's like a food fight.

I Never knew I was a genius. Thanks WNC, you've made my day.

I know there are some true geniuses here, but most others posting on TOD - including me - are merely smart and well educated but don't quite make the Mensa cut. There probably are very few here that don't fall within that top quintile of intelligence.

You hit the nail on the head and pose important questions. In some ways, my trajectory has been somewhat similar: technical expertise, position to influence positions of power, advising decision-makers, etc. Early on, maybe because I was working on nuclear power plant economics (more accurately dis-economics), it became clear that utility (utilitarianism) was the underlying analytical driver and strange attractor. It was 'strange' in that two things were happening:

- consequential risk of uncalculable risk factors were discounted to zero. That is, the financial analysis was done as though certain known risk factors did not exist because their probability of occurrence was unknowable (or, conversely their probabilities were assumed to be so low as to make their consideration irrelevant). In practice, what that meant is that decision-makers were using a Gaussian distribution curve in a linear world and pretending that the world was not dynamical and complex where a Cauchy-Lorenz distribution with its fat tails was a more rational description of reality;

-because, the obvious (at least to me) systemic risk of the project (e.g. the U.S. economy is a project of the global economy) was not being priced into market transactions, there was no way to actually make a ‘profit’ (i.e. defined as real economic wealth creation) over any period that comprised the long term (i.e. a period defined as the holding period for a long-term investor. That is, someone couldn’t make a transaction and immediately leave the system).

Once I figured out the decision-space, I just did an analysis that showed that the electric utility would loose money for its shareholders if it bought another nuke. It took 10-years, but the utility’s management finally agreed w/ me and cancelled the order. As market-economics is just a game (e.g. if markets were really efficient, there would be not anthropogenic climate change as prices would reflect the cost of global warming, etc.), the game is continually evolving and new strategies are needed because the decision-space is constantly changing to provide new rationales for discounting systemic risk to zero so that quick accounting ‘profits’ can be made, even as no economic wealth is created.

I guess where I am going w/ all of this is maybe a helpful focus is on the capital allocation process: how do we influence the decision-process that allocates capital. For, at some basic level, either capital is been spent to produce sustainable economic growth , or it is spent to hasten collapse. In some respects it is a binary choice. That is what I am working on - how to price systemic risk in market transactions, so that decision-makers (those who are making choices for spending capital in the economy) have better data and know for certain that real economic profits can no longer be made with more of the same. Proceeding along the present trajectory is just too risky and the cost of that risk is greater than any short-term accounting profits that might be skimmed from the system.

I've attempted to write down some of my thoughts about pricing systemic risk at http://www.scribd.com/doc/22163392/. I would welcome any suggestions for improving upon my arguments.

It took 10-years, but the utility’s management finally agreed w/ me and cancelled the order.

Sometimes is doing the correct thing not the right thing to do. :-(

If you had failed you would have made more good for the environment and the fossil fuel availability then almost all ToD readers. But it might have hurt the shareholders.

What is needed to spur people into action is a "Compelling Event".

What is a "Compelling Event" ? Some occurrence which makes people act sooner, rather than later, and/or by a fixed deadline. There is a strongly painful (literally or figuratively) consequence to not acting.

“A Compelling Event occurs when the cost of the status quo exceeds the cost of change“

Examples :
Why did the US enter WW2 ? Compelling Event : Bombing of Pearl Harbor
Why do you pay your utility bill ? Compelling Event : the due date on the bill (and they can cut you off)
Why did so many companies buy software in the 1990's? : Compelling Event : Y2K

$147 a barrel oil and $4 gasoline was a Compelling Event, but, unfortunately, it didn't last. A permanent shortage might do it, or a complete failure of the harvest, or a collapse of the dollar. It has to be strong enough to elicit real, meaningful action (probably accompanied by a lot of anger) and there has to be a strong consequence to not acting.

Unfortunately, when people are angry enough to be motivated to action, they are in the hands of leaders who may channel it in the right direction or the wrong direction. The results, therefore, are uncertain.

PostScript: Sometimes Compelling Events can be created, if one isn't apparent. This is pretty difficult, but think about insurance. Maybe we haven't pushed hard enough on an "in case of" scenario. Doing things on the basis of National Security would fall into this category.

As a 25 year politician, I found your statements on compelling events to be one of the most interesting in this profound discussion. Dick Lamb, the ex Gov. of Colorado recently made a statement, ASPO I believe, that democracy was a crisis driven system. What I have found through the years of dealing with public issues is that it is very difficult to get much done until there is an “Incident”, a crisis, or as you say a compelling event. I watched what happened when a multinational company proposed a monstrous landfill in the county I served. All hell broke loose and at a meeting of some 1500 souls the bank of lawyers from the corporation were told, “You bring one of them damn trucks past my place and the tire are gonna be taken out.” The dump for Denver never arrived. It was our Pearl Harbor.

1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?

I can tell you this. I do not believe it is possible to affect change rapidly by using a presentation of facts, profound intellectualizations and rational thought. It is simply too slow at this point. There must be a Compelling Event. FDR needed a compelling event, The Cheney administration needed a compelling event to secure long term energy supplies even if the event had nothing to do with their action. The populous was emotionally enraged. They were ready to fight.

The use of anger, of emotion, the elephant part, to manipulate the citizenry has long been known. Hitler riled up the ignorant masses during a time of stress much like Beck and Limbaugh are doing now. If the contributors of this site want change you will need emotion and not a bunch a fancy talk and accurate figures. The big danger here is that Becks of the world already have a big jump on things and if the crisis or “Compelling Event” should arise, and it can come in many forms be it oil depletion, GW or an idiotic economic system, it will all be blamed on the new administration and the whackos will be out.

The purpose of this site is to try to sound the alarm, to put the information in front of the politicians so that when the compelling event shows its ugly face the rational minds might prevail. Stay with it Nate. Frankly, there seems to be few individuals and few groups that are really trying hard enough. Somehow we need to have the deep intellectual thoughts among ourselves but strive to bring out the emotions of more than just your aunt.

Re: the elephant/rider metaphor for the human nervous system:

This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite books, "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson. It articulates a model for our brain circuitry, how this manifests in personalities and societies, and how we can take charge of it. Of course, you would probably find it in the "occult" section of your local bookstore, so I'm afraid that most readers of this site will dismiss it out of hand. In my opinion, that's too bad. First, because I don't think it's accurate to lump Wilson in with plebeian meta-physics. Second, because the "occult" is essentially the record of humanity's attempts to deal with much of the focus of Nate's writings.

I'm curious: have TOD readers read Robert Anton Wilson? What are their thoughts on the application of the "occult" (for lack of a better term) to, and intersection with, peak oil?

Thanks for the tip-sounds interesting.

I liked some of Wilson. I once attended a all day encounter group with him in Venice, and was less impressed.
Like Terence McKenna, most of it was just creative delusion, mixed with brilliant insight.
But "Prometheus Rising" was great.

"Quantum Psychology" and "Drugs, Sex, and Magick" are my other RAW favorites. His schtick was using the ridiculousness of conspiracy theories, coupled with the possibility that the are true, to illustrate aspects of human psychology--I found the Cosmic Trigger series entertaining but I preferred when he took a more direct approach. I only had one conversation with the man, about "the map is not the territory" and my experiences teaching geography to trainee intelligence analysts, and found him to be very sharp. However, he had a techno-optimism that I don't share, probably more a symptom of the generation gap between (or two) between us...

Another book that TOD readers may find interesting along these lines in "The Evolution of Consciousness" by Robert Ornstein.

application of the "occult"

If you're willing to blow a heap of personal fuses, then the only limitations on the potential uses use of occultism are you're imagination and your willingness to act, perhaps faith in the impossible being possible.

(Serious occultism should probably be seperated out from populist occultism. Have not read RAW so can't comment there)

Come to think of it, there comes a point on the occult path when you gotta start inventing it yourself. You won't find complete recipies in books, just some of the ingredients.

"The Occult", whilst definitely occupied with the same material as Nate often writes about, goes a lot further and wider also.

I know, I've gone way beyond your point into a region that you most probably call delusion or even plebian (see my comments downthread for the closest you will probably ever get to LSD).

In effect, exit the man, enter the elephant.

Well, "enter the elephant" at least.
In America at the moment, "exit the man" seems premature.

SUV Sideswipes Elephant Crossing Oklahoma Highway

It's not unusual to see a deer or a cow crossing Oklahoma's rural highways. But an elephant?

An Oklahoma couple driving home from church nearly slammed into a giant pachyderm that had escaped from a nearby circus late Wednesday.

"Didn't have time to hit the brakes. The elephant blended in with the road," driver Bill Carpenter said Thursday. "At the very last second I said 'elephant!"'

Carpenter, 68, said he swerved his SUV at the last second and ended up sideswiping the 29-year-old female Asian elephant on U.S. 81 in Enid, about 80 miles north of Oklahoma City.

"So help me Hanna, had I hit that elephant, not swerved, it would have knocked it off its legs, and it would have landed right on top of us," he said. "We'd have been history."

The couple, who own a wheat farm, weren't injured. But the 8-foot, 4,500-pound elephant was being examined Thursday for a broken tusk and a leg wound. A local veterinarian said it appeared to have escaped major injury. ...

http://cbs2.com/watercooler/Elephant.SUV.Oklahoma.2.1294451.html

More to the point, I was able to use the 'peak gold' story as a teaching moment. I guess I'll put that in a follow on comment.

I think your use (Nate) of the analogy of 'gold in the backyard' is one way to talk to the elephant. Add that to the 'peak gold' story out of Barrick and you have a powerful real life example. Now you aren't talking about models and predictions, but about something that has actually happened. That's always going to carry more weight with the elephant.

On another board, a poster who leans cornucopian posted a single comment: Peak gold has hit.

Which let me respond with all "anti-peak-oil" arguments used over the last two years ...

But we don't know how much gold is in the ground ...
And we are improving our extraction technology ...
And there's millions of tons of the stuff in the sea ...
And its just political above the ground factors preventing mining ...
And with the right technology, you can transform lead into gold ...
And God loves us and wouldn't want us to go without ...

Which prompted a response that peak-gold was really about "price points"

Which let me respond with this comment about price-points:

Dollars are a marker for 'productive energy.' If you do your job well (are more productive), you get paid well. If you do it poorly (less productive), you get paid less. Production is the transformation of inputs into outputs by applying knowledge and energy.

To say that 'remaining gold sources are not profitable to extract' is in effect (in the real world) saying 'improving extraction technology' is not keeping pace with 'increasing energy costs' in the case of gold ore.

But it is not just gold ore. Every metal on earth is subject to declining ore grades. And technological improvements are not keeping pace with the rising cost of energy.

Fossil fuels made possible a huge expansion in population and technology. (Feedback cycles at work, technology was required to make use of fossil fuels). That expansion has been exponential. But the earth cannot support exponential extraction of its resources. Limits to growth. We've been warned of Malthusian limits before. Since those warnings don't seem to be realized, we continue on our merry-way assuming that exponential growth will continue to be possible, forever.

Without extra-terrestrial resources, our civilization will hit those limits. We just hit one with peak gold. We will hit the oil peak in our lifetime (current conventional crude peak is 2005). Exponential growth forever is not possible on this planet. And anyone talking about 3% growth in GDP or 1% growth in population is talking about exponential growth.

In other words, (1) if our economy, our civilization, is dependent on a constant growth rate and (2) if our economy remains earth bound, then it will collapse. Not if. Not maybe. Will. Will collapse. This year. Next year. 10 years. 100 years. 200 years. Who knows. But it will have to collapse if the two conditions above are valid.

So what's the point of this comment? ...

I think it's important to be able to find some shared space, a common narrative, to exchange some ideas. Many people are resistant to ideas like 'limit to growths' and 'peak oil' because they have literally lived through those arguments once before - back in the 70s and 80s. And the 'limited growth' guys lost that one - not in some theoretical sense but in their own recent political and economic experience.

So your use of the analogy of 'gold in the backyard' or my use of 'peak gold' let us find common ground to talk about these things with people with a differing background. Analogy is one way to speak with elephants.

As conscious entities, people operate inside of 'narrative tunnels.' These tunnels are formed from the common knowledge of the people you are in constant communication with and the knowledge you acquired from society as you were raised: public schooling, church, playground talk, television and radio.

Consciousness is basically a form of constant story telling occurring in a babbling brain. The man trying to make sense - to create a narrative - out of the elephant's actions. The conscious brain operates a beat or two behind the elephant. It is rationalizing experience. More often than not, it is along for the ride. I'm not sure that the 'conscious self' is ever actually sitting in the driver's seat.

One issue is that in comparison to the number of conversations going on in society, we tend to limit ourselves to relatively few of them. Part of that is self-preservation: How many story-lines can you simultaneously entertain? So we drift into relatively simple, dualistic narratives for most things: life/death, good/bad, good/evil, right/wrong, right/left, growth/contraction, ...

So part of what I think Nate is asking for is: how do we get this story, 'our' story, into more of these narrative branches, into a broader audience.

One answer to that question isn't to consider Home Sapiens as a rational animal. But to rather consider him as just another member of Primates. And what makes Primates band together, react together? A perceived threat from The Other. A tiger in the woods. Another band intruding on their territory. A stranger among them. Once they perceive a threat, they will react! Shouting and hooting to make sure the whole band shares the same story line.

Humans under threat react in very predictable ways: Scape-goating. Hoarding. Pushing others into threats to save themselves. Militarism and increased aggression. But also in the same troops: Altruism, Sharing, Protecting the weak. In general, a more distinctive sense of who is 'us' and who is 'them.' And, in general, a more narrow sense of who is 'us' and who is 'them.'

How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant' with the man riding on top?

I see this question from a different perspective. It represents a longstanding faultline in academic philosophy, which Leo Strauss (love him or hate him) described as the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem — Reason and Revelation — the two pillars of Western civilization. Moreover, Strauss contended that Athens had beat out Jerusalem in the Western imagination, giving rise to philosophers like Nietzsche who unleashed on the culture such undesirable things as relativism, nihilism, and the like.

On a more fundamental level "Athens" and "Jerusalem" represent competing narratives — stories, mythologies, call them what you will — regarding the place of human beings within the universe. And while Strauss leaves a bad taste in most peoples' mouths, I think his points about the primacy of reason vs. revelation in Western culture is spot-on and relevant to this conversation.

Depletion facts and figures are inherently Athenian but when presenting these to most people, they get drowned out by the mythology of Athens — that is, the mythology of progress through intellect. Potentially Malthusian and Tainter-esque consequences simply do not fit the narrative. They are a curious sidebar at best, because the cultural narrative that brought Western civilization to the point of measuring such facts and figures permeates everything, and has an incredibly vast array of accomplishments to show for itself. The Athenian narrative is the water in which we swim.

Do fish know about water? Imagine trying to tell a fish that is unaware of the water in which it lives that the water is depleting. No wonder facts and figures fall on deaf ears.

Depletion facts and figures DO fit, however, with the cultural narrative that traces its roots to Jerusalem. Of course everyone recognizes this as the apocalypse. This is quite literally the only framework through which Western individuals can filter depletion facts and figures. Anyone who is more influenced by the Athenian narrative than the Jerusalem narrative will simply reject apocalyptic visions out of hand. Add to those the number who adhere to the popular political narrative which states that any facts and figures related to Earth are a hoax intended to expand government control, and the remainder is very small indeed.

Integrating the "inner elephant" and the "man riding on top" is no less a project than integrating Athens and Jerusalem. It has never happened in all of Western civilization, and I personally don't expect it to happen now. Any new ideas that might integrate these will almost certainly be either misinterpreted or simply invisible to vast majority of the population. Policy based on new narratives, or on novel interpretations/integrations of the Athens and Jerusalem narratives, is not possible.

Pursuing policy and cultural change is, in my opinion, utterly futile. Widespread change can still happen; however, everything I've seen and learned indicates that it has to happen at the individual level. Form emerges from chaos, and whatever actions individuals take that can be adopted and adapted for both survival and pleasure by one's neighbors is what will grow into the structures of post-petroleum society.

My further views on developing and disseminating useful actions are deeply unwelcome at TOD, so I'll stop there. But for whatever they're worth, those are my thoughts on this matter.

My further views on developing and disseminating useful actions are deeply unwelcome at TOD, so I'll stop there. But for whatever they're worth, those are my thoughts on this matter.

I've come to realize that the more common a view the less likely it is to hold promise, in general. I would say that my own views on developing useful actions are not welcome either but I have to walk my own path in any case.

I haven't seen you here in a while - I remember some disagreement we had but forget the details. No civil, and reasonably insightful view here is unwelcome. Unpopular maybe, but the intent of Campfire was to be a forum for free discussion, learning, and community on things that have no clear answers.

I've come to realize that the more common a view the less likely it is to hold promise, in general.

True, that. Quite the dilemma.

I would say that my own views on developing useful actions are not welcome either but I have to walk my own path in any case.

True that too, it's the best anyone can manage in these unprecedented times.

I haven't seen you here in a while - I remember some disagreement we had but forget the details. No civil, and reasonably insightful view here is unwelcome.

Disagreement was never the issue for me, it was more the downright inhospitable response of some of the other posters. I've pretty much given up on joining with anyone from the "doom community" (for lack of a more accurate term) in either discussion or action. You are one of only about 3 or 4 bloggers I still read on occasion.

Unpopular maybe, but the intent of Campfire was to be a forum for free discussion, learning, and community on things that have no clear answers.

Sure, I understand the intent. But that was not my experience... cest la vie.

Rabbit,

I find a few people who hang out here rather obnoxious myself.

Just follow my example and IGNORE THEM.

"I will die poor but I will have at least enjoyed reading a lion's share of the worlds best books! " oldfarmermac

Based on the above comment, i think you have a couple more to go. Think about it. Ignoring is a very destructive thing. Some folks are really reaching out. They might not be a smart as you, but they are trying. Lend a hand, if it not too much trouble. They may be confused and searching. A kind, clarifying word may help them get through the night. think about it. Just saying....... I know, who has time for...........? Very few trolls here. Please Forgive.

Karma........ if you subscribe to that sort of thing.

Wouldn't Leo Strauss, the father of the neoconservatives, likely have encouraged the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Regarding approaches to thought, I like the straightforward breakdown by the Polish philosopher Feliks Koneczny. His books have not been translated into English, though.

"Reality," he explains, pertains to five categories: truth, goodness, beauty, properity and health. He considered his native, Catholic Poland a product of the "Latin" Civilization, which seeks personalism over collectivism; emanicipation of the family over clan; inductive reasoning from observation over a priori deduction from revelation; an historical consciousness over negation of the past; unity in diversity over uniformity; an organic instead of a mechanical approach to problem solving; public and private law versus just one or the other; self government versus totalitarianism.

The existing civilizations on the planet have unique combinations of approaches to the five categories. Your "Jerusalem" makes me think "Jewish" Civilization, which is quite different from the Latin, which has given us, ostensibly, the so-called West--calculus, modern physics, the steam engine. The existing civilizations today, and the Jewish civilization is a chameleon civilization, have differing approaches to truth, goodness, beauty, prosperity and health. A big problem is that civilizations today--Chinese, Brahmin, Jewish, Tibetan, Numidian, Turanian, Byzantine, Latin--conflict.

Ergo: perpetual war, the strongest survive, which was Strauss's trivial observation. The challenge is finding unity and peace in a dirty world.

I believe this is relevant to the discussion at hand because it points out even "truth" can be a moving target.

Even a cursory understanding of Strauss — which is all I can claim — puts to rest the idea that he was in favor of war for its own sake. In my opinion, the whole neoconservative thingamajig misses Strauss's points entirely. If they'd understood, we'd all be enjoying bread and circuses aplenty, the trains would be running on time, and we wouldn't have to bother ourselves with handling the truth. I think you may be confusing Strauss with Thomas Hobbes.

Truth is indeed a moving target. That's the whole problem. That's why policy and mass cultural change are impossible. Change will start at the granular level and crystallize through the economy as necessity forces it. My great fear is that the window of opportunity for seeding that crystallization is closing very rapidly; and in place of constructive vectors we're going to end up seeing a lot of JHK's "cornpone nazi" responses.

Rabbit,

I detect a goodly measure of fox and owl genes in your comments.

You most definitely need not keep yourself hidden in the deep briars- you have intellectual teeth and claws.

Why thank you kind sir, I appreciate that vote of confidence :)

3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?

That will probably be the starting gun for the majority of the global middle class. Some are acting before this, others will be left behind.

4. What to do, if anything?

I am writing a book that describes the problems, suggests solutions and can act as a bride between the doomers, the disillusionised optimists and the optimists to get them to do constructive stuff. I have never before done anything like it and the 0.9 verion is readble and is getting intresting reviews from my first readers. I think I now got what I need to finish it and make make it follow the kind of line I have followd on ToD.

There is a vast space of possible actions between BAU and "we are kind of doomed" scenarios where it is possible to do manny constructive things that makes the next day better or at least not as bad.

Magnus - I look forward to it.
But in writing it, please remember that the whole world doesn't have the same favorable relationship of opportunities vs. constraints as Sweden does.

IMO money has co-opted the whole driver/elephant process.

You must have some to survive.

Then once you tap into the flow of it...well, as they say “the worlds your oyster”.

So we slurp down the sweet, soft meat and toss the shell. Who could blame us.

All of the questions we wish people to be asking themselves are irrelevant when your only thoughts are on survival which means busting your hump to make enough money to live, or busting your hump to make enough money so you don't have to bust your hump forever, or busting your hump to make enough money so your children don't have to bust their little humps for ever...well, you get the idea.

Also this getting enough thing is a moving target, receding, unreachable horizon.

Address this issue and you go a long way in addressing the predicament the World faces.

Populations of some Socialist Countries that address the insecurities associated with lack of money such as health, education, old age, are much better at asking the right questions. Far from perfect to be sure but it certainly illustrates the point.

No money? Sorry but you DIE.

It's interesting that most of the people who ARE asking the right questions are those who are what we call "comfortable".

Good essay. You are wading in deep waters. These questions are as old as time, I think, just reframed for our current situation.

As such, my answers are also 'old' :)

1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood...

Proposal:

All systems go through a birth-growth-stall-decline-death cycle. All, no exceptions. Ever. Accept, adapt and live accordingly.

Or is the misunderstanding of that fact the reason why we are in this mess?

I get confused :)

>2. How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant'...

Ah, my favourite question and a topic of interest to me. It would take an essay to explain my position, but as a taster summary here goes nuttin':

The basic argument is this. We have two systems of thought (System 1 and System 2, maybe more, but that's a longer story). Here system 1 in equated roughly with a blanket category 'intuition'. Both systems are right/wrong. Both can err. Both can be inferior/superior in different situations. All of us use both. Getting through the daily life without one or the other is impossible (shown by functional brain damage patients).

Now, the trouble is: we are taught purely rational, analytic, deliberative thought, all while while meta-thought skills and intuition is mostly ignored, sometimes even belittled. Yet, c. half of our thinking is of the latter type (some argue much more than half).

However, our system 1 thinking forms a great deal of the basis of our belief structures. We may think and reason X, but if our belief structure states -X, we will act accordingly.

As such, learning as a transformative process resulting in profoundly changed action where thinking and action are aligned requires that the System 1 plays along. A rehabilitation of all knowledge at an inner level.

Why do we suck at system 1 thinking and reconcile our epistemic conflicts between Systems 1 & 2?

Because unlike the rational thinking, most of us are not trained, schooled, instructed, tested, rewarded, required to perform within system 1 (well, in fact we are, but at tacit level and that's another long-winded side-argument that misses the main point).

The people who practice a lot of system 1 related methods (say a buddhist monk) can show superior performance on this type of thinking.

A rare individual masters both systems well and can align actions based on them.

One solution: train it, just like the other type of thought, the rational system 2. More so, train meta-thought skills that require one to check for discrepancies between the systems, reconcile the disagreements and pick the one system for decision making that probabilistically gives the best results under different contexts.

This requires considerable inner strength, mental focus, awareness and ability to be aware of what one is aware of (meta-awareness).

The hard-stuff. Intellectual-emotional-sensory-awareness ruggedness.

Again, most of us are never taught these skills.

Now, the main rebuttal within our PO/Energy/resource/financial risk context: do we have the time, skill, systems, etc to teach these, wait for the changes to propagate into the society, and to avoid man-elephant discrepancy driving us into problems.

I don't know. I think it's fairly probable that using this system we now run our societies on, the answer would be no, based on the data I can operate with now. But that's a guess (a belief), not a fact.

As for analytical tools, there are too many to mention, but they all FAIL in the long run and on the mass scale, if system 1 is not taken along in the decision/belief making. And none of the analytical tools I know, try that (and by definition, they should not, they are after all - analytical).

3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart...

You already started with the obvious answer:

- Do we need to? Would an accelerated falling apart be a working solution. This of course assumes that falling apart is not 'final' or 'global' or somehow 'mega-scale', but just a series of bad cascading failures, the recovery from which takes different type of solutions.

I personally believe that societies (or man made social structures in general) change when they are forced, when absolutely nothing else works anymore. Quoting Hamel & Prahalad:

"For those who built the past, the temptation to preserve it can be overwhelming."

4. What to do, if anything?

Enjoy the ride, at least you are travelling first class! :)

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Personally I view it simply like this: I can offer information, people decide how to deal with it (ignore/reject/accept/act). I can offer support, but only in limited quantity. I can prepare myself for various contingencies, but should not sacrifice living in the present nor deluding myself, that I can escape the pain whatever the outcome. Just accept, without becoming pessimistic or dysfunctional.

Again, one could say that success if the best revenge. Start a community that is as self-reliant, resilient and long-term robust planning as possible. IF/ONCE things go sour, you can just give the "THE MANUAL" and let them copy your ideas. This is in fact what might happen, one way or the other, if/once things go sour. Even if we don't plan for it. Nature provides variance at all levels and this helps in adaptation. Time will tell which systems will fare the best.

There is a time for everything, and everything has its limited time.

Only time will tell, if this system has had its ride.

3 years ago I used to be 100% sure. Now I'm not, because I accept it's a belief, not a fact. The future is unknowable.

And to conclude with a comic relief... why not start a levered Collapse hedge-fund? I'm sure that there's enough brain-power and money floating around TOD and other sites. Game the system, as long as it's still "working" and exit in a timely manner.

Just because its broken, doesn't mean you can't get enjoyment/fitness/happiness/wealth/work/power/whatever out of it. And isn't that what life's purpose is ;>)

1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?

No there isn't. If all the facts we have available now aren't doing it, more won't help. The problem is not one of facts, the problem is one of beliefs. As Quinn said, it's our cultural story that keeps us asleep. That is what needs changing.

2. How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant' with the man riding on top?

Meditation is one thing I've found that works. There are personal development/transformational/"inner work" groups that combine Western psychology (usually of the humanist variety) with Eastern philosophical insights taken from Buddhist teachings. When combined with a meditation practice they can get the elephant and the mahout talking. Unfortunately most people don't realize there is a problem, so the appeal of such approaches is very low.

3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?

I would claim that the cultural change is already accelerating beyond anyone's wildest imaginings. Read Paul Hawken's book "Blessed Unrest" for a glimpse of it. The largest social movement in the history of the world has taken root under our very noses. Although it's utterly organic, unplanned and localized, the common goal of all the small groups that make it up seems to be to make the changes you're talking about, starting from the roots, one person at a time. The "movement" consists of over two million small, independent, local spontaneously occurring groups spread worldwide. They work on whatever environmental, ecological or social justice issues the local situation presents. The number of these groups is growing by 40% or more a year. "We" (the large, imperial "we") don't need to accelerate anything. "We" (the small, individual "we") are already accelerating.

4. What to do, if anything?

More of what we're already doing. Get out, get involved. Wake up, wake up a neighbour or a friend. Join a group or start one. Address local problems. Ignore proposals for top-down solutions, they usually miss the mark.

Again, I enjoy the wide range of insights and thoughtful comments. I often feel an outcast in my family and my small country community so finding like-minded people here, and quite intelligent although I am probably not qualified to make that judgment, is quite stimulating.

My opinion is that rather than learning to control the elephant, we're better off trying to work with it and going along for the ride. I don't see how we can ever control something that we are so largely unconscious of; people have been trying to raise consciousness through religion, yoga, meditation, etc. for several thousand years now. Collapse or not, we're still left to deal with our own thoughts, beliefs, emotions over lack of preparation, remorse over not doing more to "prevent" it, etc.

That said it is obvious to me that we, the U.S., are on a downward spiraling course. I have already reproduced so my function as a biological entity is largely over (although I wasn't very successful as my son refuses to have children due to overpopulation). Anyway, my plans for "surviving the collapse" really won't make much difference to me or any one else in the long run. My main focus now is enjoying my planning, enjoying my milk goats, honey bees, new solar system being installed, vege garden, etc.

I don't look forward to what I believe will be long-term suffering for many, but I believe all of our futures are the products of our choices today, individually as well as a society.

I don't see how we can ever control something that we are so largely unconscious of

Most people are not unconscious of their inner elephants, rather they are in active denial of it/them.

A similar conversation is HERE:

We have met the deniers, and they are us
Posted 4:59 PM on 10 Nov 2009
by Adam Sacks

James Inhofe.
Marc Morano.
Richard Lindzen.
Bjørn Lomborg.
George W. Bush.

Names of shame, ignominy, criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself. Agents of the lethal delays in our response to escalating, accelerating, catastrophic global warming.

Yet, as deniers of climate change, they’re amateurs compared to us. Us activists, environmentalists, scientists, and certainly Copenhagen politicians.

Even though we’re believers, not skeptics, our denial is far more insidious and subtle. So subtle, in fact, that we’ve managed to convince ourselves that we’re not in denial at all. Quite the opposite. Why, the thought is too absurd even to contemplate.

But it’s true.

We’re deniers every time we say “80 percent by 2050,” or even “80 percent by 2020”; every time we refer to tipping points in the future tense; every time we advocate substituting “clean” energy for “dirty” energy; every time we buy a squiggly light bulb or a hybrid vehicle; every time we advocate for cap-and-trade, or even a carbon tax; every time we countenance the mention of loopy geoengineering schemes; every time we invoke the future of our children and grandchildren and ignore the widespread suffering from global climate disruption today.

Every time we say these things and more, we’re promoting denial of dire climate reality, the reality that’s spinning out of our grasp so fast that we conduct our frenetic climate “solutions” efforts in a kind of stupor, obsessing with parts-per-million statistics, keeping desperately busy to ward off our own utter collapse borne of despair.

The reality we’re denying? We’re denying that we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere already that positive feedback loops are well on their way to amplification hell.[1] We’re denying that time lags between carbon emissions and their effects are frighteningly relevant, and that the disastrous effects we’re seeing now are from emissions of 30 years ago. We’re denying that non-linear responses of physical systems cannot be calculated and therefore are perilously ignored. We’re denying that our consumption and waste have far exceeded planetary capacity, possibly irreparably so.[2]

We’re denying reality because we’re not talking about it; we’re invoking fantasies and free lunches instead.

Just have to keep hammering away ...

"Enter the Elephant"

I see the campfire questions have changed a bit

1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?

There is probably no change in the mental landscape of individuals which will not alter the large-scale outcomes in some way. However, what the large-scale change would BE isn't really predictable beforehand just by knowing the input. I think that's a fallacy, albeit one that often catches me too.

2. How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant' with the man riding on top?

As individuals, we can train our elephants to some degree, as well as keeping close track of which decisions are made by the elephant and which by the 'rider', giving a very hairy eyeball to our own rationalizations.

However, in dealing with other elephant-rider systems, we can to a good first approximation ignore the riders. Elephant & rider is a great metaphor, but really the usual role of the inner neocortical philosopher-mahout is more like the US vice president breaking ties in the Senate - the niche exists but is really seldom used.

3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?

Culture is never static. So saying, any significant leverage for major change must exploit the reality of existing criticalities in the system. This is necessary since evolving phase-shift conditions from the ground up is very time-consuming. Thus, if you only have a decade or two, you need to see what parts of the system are already in a critical or near-critical state and figure out what happens if they are triggered (or damped) in a coordinated sequence. That's where the art comes in; analyzing it and pre-preparing a desired stable state for your subsystem to collapse into.

Things can absolutely be changed before they fall apart. And during. And to some degree after. And indeed they will be. Problem is, most of those trying it will, as things now stand, almost certainly not be acting for the long-term good of the species or planet.

So that's how its done! I always wondered....

Arghhhh! Enough with the elephant already!

Substituting the word "elephant" for primitive parts of the brain is making discussions increasingly bizarre. I might not be able to sleep due to all the unusual imagery this is creating as I read the comments :)

edit:
LoL! Just saw greenish's pic above. Kinda says it all :)

Well, it doesn't say it all... ;)

South African wildlife - Wait, that's not a trunk...

1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?

No

2. How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant' with the man riding on top?

Survival of the fittest - combining economic and scientific resources with these base behaviors

3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?

No to first question. We may ponder for many years who fired the first shot.

4. What to do, if anything?

Drinking helps. And write influential books.

4. What to do, if anything?

Maybe form a TOD-PO intentional community. What are your talents to contribute? Looking for acreage in a relatively climate stable location with reliable rainfall?

There are a lot of really smart and, from the sounds of some comments, very talented people in this group. It is going to be a community solution that works.

Hmm. Another TOD article that does not mention climate change or global warming. I take it people like Nate think oil depletion will solve that problem automagically. But that thought gives me "coal" comfort.

oil depletion will 'solve' no problem at all (at least nothing considered a problem). and if you actually read the article you would see climate change is mentioned twice.

Why should I write about climate change -I write about the general overconsumptive path we are on which encompasses all environmental externalities.

Oh, oil depletion will solve a lot of problems from my point of view! Noise (airplanes, leafblowers, cars), pollution, pointless travel, destructive tourism, burgeoning population ... the list is almost endless.

As for the article, I did read it but nothing about the disaster of climate change jumped out. Scanning the page for "climate" and "global warming" did not give a hit within your text.

Why should you write about climate change? Because it is a far, far bigger problem than overconsumption (which in itself can be quickly solved by diminishing resources, as is about to happen in the case of oil). But with a huge coal reservoir, we have the ability to make life unbearable for our grandchildren. I like to point people to podcasts that can help them understand why this is so urgent:
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/programme.php
http://www.ecoshock.org/green960am.shtml

Reduction in the use of carbon based fuels, either by depletion or replacement with sustainable alternatives, is the most obvious marriage I've ever seen, a way to address the problem of anthropogenic climate change, and energy resource limits.

It can be logically argued that population size is the more fundamental and essential issue.

Hi All,

This is my very first post on at oil-related site.

And I haven't been able to read all the comments for this great post by Greenish.

I work in the sustainability policy development world and understand (actually don't understand, but am very 'au fait' with) the 'normal' thinking of the masses, and also of vested interests. I spend at least a day a week wondering why people can't see what's happening, and why they are all steering us into a scary future.

The key is the lack of connection. Even my sustainability-trained boss couldn't see the effect on Australia that a melting north pole would have. The dots are so difficult to join up.

I have come to the belief that we are all programmed to function in a cyclical manner, as we are made up of a universe, at the macro to the quantum, where cycles are the 'way of things'. We are fundamentally designed to ensure our own destruction - and rebirth, this is the world that surrounds limits to growth, we will breach them at some point, just like the rabbits and foxes we were taught at school.

Because our cells die and regenerate, because atoms have decay, because the world spins round and round, because we are made of all that cyclical matter. We act in that manner, as we ARE that matter.

I'm toying with writing a book that tries to join the dots, that shows how the rapidly depleting water tables in China will push up prices in Iowa, how the reduced water tables will add to global warming, and how global warming has added to the reduction of the water tables.

As far as solutions go, I have had a couple of small moments of clarity. One of the cores of our destruction is the insane economic model we have. The reason it requires purpetual growth is to ensure that the shareholders don't go elsewhere, if they feel the company will under perform. Shareholders are the ones (i.e. the worlds gamblers) who are pushing us to this purpetual growth. Although there are too many powerful people making way too much money on 'the market' for this to work... I propose to stop any individual or organisational investment in companies at all. For those who like a gamble, there could be a virtual market, based on sales or something, but the money generated from this would go into a central fund, from where considered expansion requests could be funded, but most comapnies would just provide a service, and would not be under intense pressure to always show an ever increasing profit.

Sadly this only addresses one area, but it would have amazing knock-on effects, that might make finding solutions for the rest much easier.

But the depest problem is that we just don't understand that we are not part of nature, or intrinsically linked to nature, but we ARE nature, and therefore will be as influenced by nature's 'way of things' as any animal, atom or planet.

Blinkered reductionism applied to holistic problems is indeed the likely root of our troubles. All of human endeavour has now been reduced to the single metric of monetary profit and our economy and lives controlled by it. If we make the number, the thinking goes, everything's ok, even if the number is fudged and the system gamed. Like all innovations and systems it transitions through a simple life cycle from being a benefit to being a liability.

Nature destroys its own creations eventually, man must do the same or nature will do it for him. At the moment we're struggling under a system that has transitioned from a benefit to a liability and are waiting for nature to finish it off and tidy up the mess for us.

Sustainability means man destroying much of what he has achieved. Good luck with that.

Ron Paul? If Ron Paul is part of the answer, we are doomed.

Part of what Ron Paul has said will end up being the path chosen.

Ron Paul as a whole is an old man, soon to die of that condition.

"Part of what Ron Paul said?" Which part?

The most obvious part - bring the troops home.
The New Your times pointed out the cost per troop to put 'em in Afganinastan was $1 millon. That kind of spending is not sustainable.

The counterpoint argument is laid out in Chalmers Johnson's book Nemesis - 25+% of the US employment is in the Military and supporting the military. If the Ron Paul plan was invoked the unemployment rate would be, err, painful.

A less obvious part - the end of the Federal Reserve. I'm rather sure the Federal Reserve Note will as we know it today will come to an end. Ron's pimping of a gold standard I'm not in favor of but the present system *IS* broken. (regular readers will note I've mentioned eMergy and Technocracy proposals about making energy money. And more than a few times I've seen the people over in the personnel sidebar mention "living within a solar budget" - so perhaps some form of photon-from-the-sun to be an actual budget)

If you want to argue that Ron Paul was wrong on military spending levels or that the Money system is just fine and needs no reformation at all - then please argue that.

You are, however the one who claimed "Doom" WRT Ron Paul (as opposed to the Doom of Bush or the Doom of Clinton or the Doom of Obama or ...) being in charge. So what exactly did you mean? What was the Doom that Ron Paul would be able to bring VS any of the other people to have in that job? Temper that answer that Ron Paul can only sign laws so the changes would have to go through Congress.

Ron Paul is hardly the authoritative source for ending the wars, and his monetary ideas are lunatic, as is his overall worldview. As the anarchist Noam Chomsky says, we are going to need a phase of bigger government, not smaller. Leaving people to their own devices in the coming future, if that means no national and global collective reconstruction efforts, will be Mad Max time. We need a New New Deal, with huge green programs. Ron Paul wants to pretend like we could go back and live in Adam Smith's fantasies.

Need I mention his state-fascist views on immigration? Surely wasting vast amounts of energy and lives defending walled borders is hardly something that would contribute to snatching sustainable decency from the jaws of defeat.

Does Ron Paul object to automotive transportation? Not a word. He opposes alternative energy research and has no objections to letting Exxon keep all the money it can get.

It's damned absurd for the Oil Drum to be suggesting this dangerous clown is somehow a beacon of hope.

Ron Paul is hardly the authoritative source for ending the wars

Interesting. You do not address the issue that the military funding will come to an end due to the expense and instead claim that he "is not THE authoritative source".

Like there is ONE authoritative source.

his monetary ideas are lunatic,

I note you did not address my statement - that the Federal Reserve system is flawed and that it WILL stop existing as it is now at some point.

I've asked you to defend the Federal Reserve as it exists.

Noam Chomsky says, we are going to need a phase of bigger government, not smaller.

When Noam presents a way for preventing the corruption of a bigger government, by all means bring it.

(And when did Noam Chomsky become a correct authority on needing a bigger Government?)

Need I mention his state-fascist views on immigration?

That immigrants have an option codified in law and should use that? That it should be up to the states? I also asked how Ron Paul's POV would get implemented. Thus: How could this 'state-fascist' view get passed through Congress so he could sign a law?

I note you have a concern over 'fascist'. Great. If we are defining 'fascist' as a tie of government for the betterment of industry interests - what's your opinion about the present government/corporate system in the US of A? Or are you working on a different definition of 'fascist'?

He opposes alternative energy research

That Federal Goverment shouldn't be spending the money, not that research should not happen.

Do you have a problem with Federal Government research money resulting in patented by private corporations?

no objections to letting Exxon keep all the money it can get.

In a 'free market' - that is what is supposed to happen.

It's damned absurd for the Oil Drum to be suggesting this dangerous clown is somehow a beacon of hope.

And its a shame that your opposition is using terms like 'fascist'. But perhaps the key post author can jump in and explain what parts of what Dr. Paul's position are offering hope.

Ron Paul is hardly the authoritative source for ending the wars

Interesting. You do not address the issue that the military funding will come to an end due to the expense and instead claim that he "is not THE authoritative source".

Like there is ONE authoritative source.

his monetary ideas are lunatic,

I note you did not address my statement - that the Federal Reserve system is flawed and that it WILL stop existing as it is now at some point.

I've asked you to defend the Federal Reserve as it exists.

Noam Chomsky says, we are going to need a phase of bigger government, not smaller.

When Noam presents a way for preventing the corruption of a bigger government, by all means bring it.

(And when did Noam Chomsky become a correct authority on needing a bigger Government?)

Need I mention his state-fascist views on immigration?

That immigrants have an option codified in law and should use that? That it should be up to the states?

I note you have a concern over 'fascist'. Great. If we are defining 'fascist' as a tie of government for the betterment of industry interests - what's your opinion about the present government/corporate system in the US of A? Or are you working on a different definition of 'fascist'?

He opposes alternative energy research

That Federal Goverment shouldn't be spending the money, not that research should not happen.

Do you have a problem with Federal Government research money resulting in patented by private corporations?

no objections to letting Exxon keep all the money it can get.

In a 'free market' - that is what is supposed to happen.

It's damned absurd for the Oil Drum to be suggesting this dangerous clown is somehow a beacon of hope.

And its a shame that your opposition is using terms like 'fascist'. But perhaps the key post author can jump in and explain what parts of what Dr. Paul's position are offering hope.

Unless you really are named Eric Blair, you are sullying Orwell with your wild illogic.

To name just one aspect of that:

Me: He opposes alternative energy research

You: That Federal Goverment shouldn't be spending the money, not that research should not happen. Do you have a problem with Federal Government research money resulting in patented by private corporations?

Yes, I have a problem with governments giving away research results to big businesses. The way to stop doing that, however, is not to stop the research. It is to stop the give-aways.

Ron Paul is a danger to the human future.

1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?
2. How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant' with the man riding on top?
3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?
4. What to do, if anything?

Humans have the ability to react to conceptual warning signals about the future but when they shout warning of such huge magnitude, well you cant expect everyone to become subsistence farmers based on a few alarming graphs. In order to get people willingly to change there way of life towards less is very difficult. The drug addict metaphor is very accurate. The drug addict knows his way of life is unsustainable. It doesn't matter the cravings for the drug are on a much more primitive and powerful level he will knowingly follow his cravings to his own death, he is compelled. Is it possible for consciousness to short circuit this course? Yes but not easily and when most people don't consider their life style(drug use) the problem,highly unlikely.
We have been getting bad news about the future for decades(g.w ,ozone holes, extinction ext.) p.o. is just the latest, most are by now pretty numb to more news of our collective demise.To get them to react to information alone is not bloody likely.
I do however see education as valuable. If people have a strong grasp of the situation they are more apt to react in a constructive way when tshtf, though not necessarily, once that elephant gets agitated all bets are off.
What to do?
Remember p.o is good news, industrial society is very destructive in so many ways the fact that its running out of gas is great,it will force change. Game Over! So what! It was good for the few at the expense of the many. And most of you are the few as I am(middle class American).Good Riddance!! Destruction is part of life.Life isn't doomed only certain forms. We had it coming for our carelessness . Make some popcorn and watch the show.
Take up yoga so when the time comes you can kiss your ass good bye:)

Thank you Nate for another great post, you have a knack for getting to the crux.
Anyone out there live in Kauai?

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died

Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows

Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows

And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

Ex, thanks for those Leonard Cohen lyrics. Haven't listen to him in many years.

Delightfull essay Nate.

It is most interesting watching your changing understanding and thrust over the last 3 years. You be as nimble as a cat young fella.

Insightfull set of responses, from the board. Greenish's contributions being particularly enjoyable.

Thankyou all.

Whilst I am reluctant to give my "bend on things" due to previous abuse from some of the more rigid scientists here, well, FRACK them, I feel like having a rant today.

1. (&3). The ONE FACT will be the fact of COLLAPSE or SEVERE DECLINE, sadly. It's happening now.

2. Having worked on trying to integrate my Man / Elephant / Snake trinity somewhat for many years the only comment is "All the best of luck with that".

A very large percentage of our "world within" is inaccessable to conscious work, beyond what we
know of psychology and neuro-science. Most of my limited success with self integration of that
inner trinity has come after I have hit a concrete wall at light speed in some area of personal
life (CRISIS - BANG - Oh FRACK - MUST CHANGE)

Just as we individuals are a complex assortment of molecules, cells, electrochemical processes,
organs, emotions, thoughts AND the consciousness of those items in varying degrees, so is HUMANITY
a complex being composed of several billion cells (people), etc, that has a centralised consciousness (decision making centre) of it's own, to which individual humans have very little awareness. We, as individuals, generally, have virtually zero influence over the Soul of Humanity, it will make it's own decisions and upon those decisions will human individuals and society then change automatically. What is happening with those that are currently working on solutions (such as TOD) is that they are responding to HUMANITY'S meta-stimulus as IT attempts to formulate a new way of life for ITSELF, having realised that IT has gone off the rails with the cosmic equivalent of cannabis induced psychosis.

Our biggest problem is that we think we are superior to the universe that created us (from which we evolved if you prefer), you know "Man was created in the image of God" and all the other varieties of compulsive masturbation that we tend to indulge in.

Have been a bit puzzled by the buddhist concept anatta or "there is no self" lately, seems counter
intuitive. Then I realise, We think we are so good and so powerfull and so destined to rule the universe, 7 billion Dick Chaineys can't possibly be wrong, nor will they ever live in peace,
harmony and balance.

There is also, currently, an entrenchment in materialism. I never read you commenting that the mind
may be seperate from the brain/CNS/PNS/body complex for instance, Nate. Everything nowdays must be
grounded in materialism to be considered real. Great percieved loss of material support through collapse will be successful, if not pleasant, nedicine.

The most glaring example we have of the incompleteness of the materialistic viewpoint is very modern and developed by the USA government as a potential weapon of war: Remote Viewing, try explaining that within in the conventional scientific framework

http://www.learnrv.com/ (or google remote viewing torrent)

(That's not meant to be a criticism Nate)

We won't stop greed, war, starvation, deprivation etc if we believe that Gold is God.

Are thoughts actually a flow of some matter in a dimension that we have not discovered yet? That matter has had a name for several thousand years incidentally, chitta, and the dimension is called chidakasha.

4. What do we do? Exactly what we have been doing.

(a) Developing personal resilience through gardening and developing local freindships for
example.
(b) Bringing out the facts, discussing it amongst ourselves, bringing up the topic with
associates, joining local gardening and transition town groups, giving public talks.

However, NASA has found water on the moon so soon we'll all be up there in space suits putting up
solar arrays, making hydrogen by electroloysis, then open cut mine it. It's made of cheese you see and cheese contains lots of fat which we will convert to diesel. No one will notice, just add a few more craters, no atmosphere to pollute or biosphere to totally frack. Our leaders are working on the perfect solution. Resource depletion, BAH !

This is Hell, please enjoy your stay here.

Bah! What are you talking about?

Everyone knows that getting cheese back from the moon will give an EROI of less than 1.

:p

I approach this from a different angle. My background is quite varied: Industrial Design in college, working in advertising/public relations in the production of , among other things, multimedia presentations for the AGM's of large banks, and working on usability and interface design, with particular interest in its overlaps with Educational Psychology (Learnability). I have also taught night school.

The human brain can only work with a few new ideas at a time. Teaching enough statistics, geology, and economics to explain and convince someone of Peak Oil at a single sitting is tricky because of the volume of facts and the need to move them from working memory into mid and long-term memory so that you can introduce the next concept in the chain(hence the appeal of "one single idea"). All the required concepts cannot be carried and processed in short term memory by even the brightest of us. It is the equivalent of studying a new subject for half an hour and passing the final exam in the subject based on that knowledge.

I have edited out a long stretch in here about the symbolic content of speeches and press conferences (wardrobe, venue, playing to cultural stereotypes) and how they relate to the dual coding theory (that you take in visual and verbal information along different mental pathways, and that engaging both paths at the same time can improve learning.) I believe that we engage with symbolic content whether the communicator intends it or not. I do not believe this message can be communicated without a strong communicator and consistent, repeated message, and the use of symbols to condense the information.

I believe that some of the bedrock facts are starting to get out there. I see peak oil mentioned in the paper much more frequently. This has the effect of giving us Something That Everybody Knows, or a short form to one part of the problem. This allows you to add more information to a pitch, or to try to go deeper into an area because the debate has been pre-framed. We require more parts of the debate to be framed this way, so that we don't have to explain how the dinosaurs died and ended up in your gas tank at the start of each pitch.

Simplification of the message would help. Can the information be squeezed down to the point that a children's picture book could be made from it? It has to be made accessible to people with a wide range of learning abilities. Thursday was World Usability Day; they had a lecture at the University of Toronto on "Usable Climate Science". Making the graphs more accessible to a lay audience is important. Doubly so in this case, because the whole thing is about a specific graph. Visual metaphors, (actual pictures, not written descriptions) would help.

The last thing I'll mention is an advertising concept called "mindshare". This refers to consumer awareness of a product. As an earlier poster noted, peak oil is not a product. However, we are considering how we can increase our mindshare in public discourse. If we are able to get news coverage, but are unable to position ourselves, that is , to control the spin, the media will do it for us. With awareness comes the possibility of Fox news making us "those whacky peak oil guys". Sometimes the only thing worse than people not listening is people listening. Consider: We have no figurehead, no consistent message and no established binary choice (a call to action) to present to the public(important for TV). The information is dense, complex and inaccessible. Our conclusions are based on incomplete data and untestable assumptions(though I support and respect the work, make no mistake). We don't know which of the possible negative scenarios will get us, or when. We are in competition with climate science and Greenpeace for public attention in this area. The energy sector has millions of dollars to spend refuting us, if they actually considered it important.

In short, it's probably a good thing nobody is watching right now.

So. More books. More articles. More conferences. Peer reviewed science. Better and more accessible graphs. Refine the message. Reach consensus. Find a champion. Get parts of the story out so the whole narrative can be pieced together by the public and the media gradually. Establish symbols to condense the information. Write letters to the paper. Make a presentation to the local Rotary club.

We probably don't need all these things to go forward, and actual catastrophic events would probably speed public acceptance (pictures of gas lines around the block or $8.00 a gallon gas are more persuasive than even the nicest graph.) Lastly, if you do get noticed, it becomes a full-time job for somebody. Any fundraisers out there?

There are a few very high profile and credible people who are on board and vocal about Peak Oil.
T Boone Pickens immediately comes to mind.
I think it has at least as much to do with people not wanting to have to change as it does with awareness.

"Once the inner elephants of a large majority are engaged, anger, fear and resentment are going to matter more than facts, and more than science, at least for a while. I just hope that trust, love, pride, and kindness etc. will function as bridges..."

Kinda like the French Revolution?

It might improve the author's understanding if he spent more time with the unwashed masses.

1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?

clean energy + conservation + lifestyle change - babies - consumption = better future.

(ok, I realize that it is not this simple, but you get the point).

2. How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant' with the man riding on top?

This is a tough one. For number crunchers and data junkies (including myself), it can be hard to turn off our computers and close our books. There is always the seduction of new information.

We may see more success if we pick up our phones instead and call our elected officials, or start a transition initiative, or speak in our communities about the issues.

3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?

A revolution doesn't always come with a warning. We've seen the fall of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. I have to believe that our culture can change before things fall apart, however, we need to get serious about what strategies need to be mobilized.

4. What to do, if anything? We should prepare ourselves mentally, physically and emotionally so that we can be of value during the transition. Inner strength and resilience will matter more than knowing the depletion rates at Cantarell.

I can't say enough how I believe this type of article should be a major part of the new direction of TOD. Just knowing about a problem is still an important part of our mission. Having solutions are also important, but being able to realize those solutions is everything. So the understanding and skills it takes for us to 'bellweather' the herd at the neighborhood, community, state, national, and international level is crucial for us, to paraphrase Gandhi, to be the change we seek in the world.

Just like the topic of crude oil and predicted peaks in its production, the human brain and it operations are extremely complex. There is no 24 hour crash course for dummies. As with other complex topics, a little knowledge simply makes us "dangerous".

While the metaphor of the small man riding on the neck of a giant elephant is an interesting one, it is also misleading. There are many books out there on neurophysiology and the latest scientific understandings of the human brain. The reading won't be easy and the outcome may not be what you wished for. (There is no magic bullet for controlling the herd.) If you are truly interested in the topic then the best advice is for you to start reading and becoming more knowledgeable in the topic. As you do, you will understand why most people don't want to hear or learn about crude oil either. Too complicated. Too involved. Don't bother me, my elephant says I have more important things to focus my limited mental energies on.

My try for an answer:


1. Is there any ONE fact that if well understood and disseminated would change behavior at the global/national/state level?

NGO mostly want to change the behavior of people by by showing the pictures of melting arctic ice, starving children, catastrophic pictures (flooding of megacities in 2100) etc.
In my opinion this is not effective in changing the peoples behavior. Because this pictures have no direct link to the average life of western people. They are too far away in the terms of distance or time.

Instead i think it would be more efficient to convince people to a more energy conserving lifestyle, if they would communicate:
"Energy price will almost certainly rice dramatically in the (very) near future (months or few years)."
If people expect that petrol might be very expensive in maybe 2 years, they might tend to buy smaller cars now. They also might invest more in thermal insulation and energy efficiency.

2. How do we, in the scientific age, integrate 'our inner elephant' with the man riding on top?

- Let the personal elephant feel the pain & fear.

- If you want to steer a big community use the peoples wallet. For the majority, (feared) losses in money cause a lot of pain to the elephant.

3. Can we accelerate cultural change to occur before things fall apart, or will that be the starting gun?
On a government level you could use taxation policies to change peoples habits.

A single person can only try to inform others about the forthcoming changes.

4. What to do, if anything?
Let the elephants fear for his money.