January 12 2017
And what has begun?? There have been a few editorials I've read this year that were all - "2016 was a horrible year, good riddance...2017 will be worse" - which is a bit negative really. That led to me thinking about human "optimism bias"which these articles were clearly not engaged in.
Optimism bias is defined as a 'cognitive bias' where people irrationally think bad things are less likely to happen to themselves than those bad things are, or that better things will happen to them then the probabilities state. It's part of why statistics often leads to un-intuitive results. And part of why statistics can be useful.
I have enough personal experience that 'sometimes it does happen to you' that it is not a natural fit for me, any more. Add to that the whole black dog thing (black dog = depression for new readers - go back and read the 2nd and 3rd posted blogs if you're new, it will help clarify what comes next. And yes they're long, if that's a problem you might be in the wrong place :)) and I need to push a bit to get there...thus the "at least it won't be boring" thing I repeat to myself even more often than I use it here.
So Optimism bias is a 'cognitive bias'. Because pretty much everybody does the cognitive bias to some extent, it is just a 'way people think' thing. It actually helps the species survive, as it encourages people to do things that are risky, and helps along progress. It's sort of built into the whole 'positive thinking' thing. In order to function, moving ahead and keeping going throughout it all, it is a bias I actively cultivate as a mental heath helper.
It is interesting, that in our society that fetishes 'rational agents' in economics and rational behavior in general, this known cognitive bias (ie. not a rational thing) is recognized as a virtue...positive thinking.
And I'm getting there...it takes me a while to set the context of a point before you make one. There is one just around the corner...stay on target. Anyway, according to the editorial writers above and patterns of human history, it's pretty likely that the future has lots of icebergs floating around...wait, it's pretty likely the future has absolutely no icebergs floating about...but lots during the approaching transition period to an ice free world...the damn language is even taking a hit from climate change...
And with that segue I'll roll into an aside.
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That 'optimism bias' is a part of climate change denial. "Climates change, there's been more CO2 before", "it won't be any big thing and is an overblown conspiracy by the Chinese", and "my life's work at a coal generating power plant didn't make the world worse for my children, it's all just silly", are all expressions of that bias...the last one packs in some other cognitive tricks, for good effect.
end aside
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Anyway, depression is a 'mental illness', unjustified optimism is a 'cognitive bias'. I am certainly not one to raise depression up, as it sorta sucks and stuff, but the unjustified optimism that prompts populations to discount likely bad conclusions from...political decisions, say, as a totally random example, have a much larger potential for catastrophic outcomes then depressional withdrawal does.
Amongst all the "there are 2 types of people" things, there are a few population based ones. So, there are 2 types of societies, one is where most of the population is scared/worried/stressed and where human nature, and our tribal history tend to lead that population towards "protect the tribe" behaviorial outcomes. The other exhibits abundance/optimistic/risk taking, "work and share with others and try to do cool stuff" behavioral outcomes. There are people and groups within any society that are at different places on that continuum at any one time, and where the ruling class sits, usually, historically, has governed the societal outcomes.
The "share stuff" mode can be thought of in terms of the ruling class of the people getting to the top couple of tiers of Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs'. Definitely do the google thing on that if you're not familiar with it - useful concept. It was where most of the western world was at for much of the post-WW2 period.
It was one of the magical parts of that period that for the Western European and much of North American populations, the majority of the population was into the "share stuff" mode of behavior, not just a ruling class. That lead to an increase in acceptance of different life styles and immigration and live and let live political realities and a huge economic boom driven by that mode combining with the optimism bias built into our species at it's base.
What we seem to be seeing in the world today, as discussed in those editorials, with the fascistic tendencies of present gov'ts in Hungary and Poland and others in Europe, along with America's new group and the Brexit vote, are examples of populations falling into the 'protect the tribe" mode of thinking. This is the first era in recorded history that an entire populations place on the share or protect continuum and not just the ruling classes are driving the political change.
The pre-WW2 period was one in the "protect the tribe" realm, with the Great Depression and all that, and there were stated and practical limits on voting for most of that period and greater deference to authority than now. The future never repeats, but it does rhyme. Before you freak out, the rhyme to the mid-30's is not great here, for a number of reasons.
The Trump/Hitler comparisons are quite overblown. Hitler wasn't that old when he came to power and it took him a decade to collapse the German institutions. Even were Trump a driven, true believer in Fascism (unlikely, he appears to only be a true believer in himself), he isn't going to live long enough to sink America.
He may weaken the institutions enough that the next sociopathic demagogue, of whatever political persuasion, has an easier time of it, but America will probably survive him at his worst. If he manages to blow up the world, it would be by accident - not an unlikely enough accident, unfortunately, but an accident.
Another place the rhyme is poor, is in large parts of the world, specifically in China and India, the "share stuff" mode is, the way it did in Western Europe and 'not Mexico' North America post WW2, becoming the population wide, majority view. There have been several of periods where the majority of the ruling classes may have been to that view in that part of the world, but not the population in general.
In the Western European and 'not Mexico' North American realities, that "share stuff" mode may no longer be dominant, and so political behaviors may be becoming less open to others/change/not my tribe stuff. On the other side, on the global level, there have been more people moving up the chain of the hierarchy of needs, faster than at any other time ever in all of history.
For the world, this uncomfortable global equalization period may have some hiccups, but those hiccups may be short lived enough, and the negative aspects resisted enough, that in 20 years there is a dawning of a new age of global optimism that leads the whole planet forward into the future, with the optimism bias and widely shared prosperity driving us on. Or somebody may accidentally push the wrong button at the wrong time and we'll blow ourselves into the zombie apocalypse. Whatev...
And that 20 year timescale would be totally great, because the broad based political support for real action, to mitigate the climate change thing, will be unavoidable by then - with continuing denial overwhelmed by the empirical reality. The totally cool part is that, with a bunch more warming baked in, we'll have no option but to build HUGE machines to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere, and end up with a somewhat functional climate control capability out of the deal! Scrubbing out CO2 is easy, moving a meaningful fraction of the atmosphere is hard.
Heck, after a couple of massive oopses while we figure out what that capability can practically allow us to achieve, it may teach us important aspects of terraforming other planets, and help us take wing to the stars where our mistakes can only wipe out one of many human planets instead of the only one!! or not...whatev...