Since the death of my father, I’ve been straining under the weight of my depression...the dreaded black dog. With the oowsnn (orange one who shall not be named) ranting destructive impulses into the body politic, and climate change ringing the bell, announcing its presence and import, I’ve been struggling to find a reason to get out of bed.
It’s why my pain meds are in the kitchen. I have to get out of bed to get them, and no matter how heavy the dog, or how firmly it has my neck in it’s jaws, the pain makes that decision unavoidable, eventually. It works, but isn’t very pleasant. I’m working on pleasant next year.
Luckily, with the liberation of the house of representatives from the grasp of the powers that strive to pull us apart, I’ve even been able to see a glimmer of hope on the horizon! It’s sort of a a dull purple, and not very bright - but hey, so are sunrises!
We ‘person’ things have long past the place where a single mind can carry the whole of human knowledge. We are even farther away from the point that a single mind can determine the interactions and cross connections implied by that knowledge. We need to specialise and cooperate to get the most out of what mankind knows already, let alone the new stuff we keep figuring out. We have become an organism, and need to keep fighting ‘uncooperative disease’.
Throughout post sapient history, the societies that cooperated better than the societies around them, dominated. Those that had strong unifying principles and pulled in the same direction outperformed the ones who had relatively weaker unifying factors. With the greater efficiency of using the written word to transfer knowledge over oral histories, that accelerated.
In the world of today, we have huge access to huge databases with huge tons of knowledge, and explanations of how things interconnect. Electrons aren’t very heavy, so a ton of knowledge in electronic format holds an awful lot. A society’s international influence will come to the polity that mobilises the largest number of minds to organise and exploit that knowledge. They will dominate the development of new ideas and science the way the American Hegemon has dominated the last while.
It is looking like we have a once in a few decades/centuries exchange of that dominant influence title. Despite its democratic base, and huge inertia, the American Hegemon is no longer outperforming. It is no longer cooperating that well, and is arguing over the colour of the siding, as the house burns down (intentional California reference - Paradise has burnt down - Reality has a black sense of humour).
The emerging Chinese hegemon, despite their dictatorial basis, are providing steadily improving standards of living for huge numbers of people, so despite subjugating groups more populous than most countries, they are becoming more ‘successful’ than the Euro/North American block. They are cooperating better, and moving up from a lower base of material wealth. (What! Like the Americans haven’t subjugated internal populations and still had success? Please.)
People are way better at cooperating when things are getting ‘better’ - when their material existence is improving and life is becoming less of a Hassle (see glossary). As the Asian populations were coming from a lower level of material existence, their rapid catch-up is making for content populations. Not much fighting over siding colours, more a ‘Wait, what’s siding? Cool! I’ll have some of that!’.
Successful is weighed across many variables, but the ones that seem the most important for a societies ‘advancement/success/contentment/whatevs’ are physical safety, having leisure time to think about/pursue self directed ‘stuff’, lower levels of Hassle, and a unifying set of principles or beliefs that are collectively and widely pursued.
Chinese patriotism/nationalism has become stronger than American patriotism/nationalism as that uniting principle in international succeedingness. Increasing success of the many is more powerful than pockets containing huge individual successes. The same was true of American patriotism/nationalism over the monarchical-religious systems of Europe in the proceeding centuries.
Aside:
Patriotism is used here more as ‘pride/Yay us!’ reveling in a group’s successes, and nationalism with a ‘superiority hubris’ over being ‘better (on whatever axis of measure)’ than others. Either can fill the purpose, but patriotism is less corrosive to societies and international relations. Religion is frequently stuck inelegantly into that mix.
End Aside:
As the American hegemon fractures into haves and have nots, and worships the hyper success of individual Zuckerbergs and Bezos, the plight of the ‘regular folk’ has gotten worse.
When it was only the few percent of the American population, mostly in the Black, Indigenous or other minority communities, that were excluded, there was a broad push to drive the economy forward, and increase American influence. As those not sharing in the fruits of society have become a larger and larger percentage, the society is fracturing into smaller units, less likely to cooperate - less likely to evolve new technologies and new answers to new problems.
Mix into that pot a problem that needs urgent global attention, and the fragmenting of the global leadership is badly timed. Climate change is happening, and aspects of it are progressing along trajectories closer to worst case, than best case. Large areas of the world are not going to be able to support their present human (or animal, or plant or…) populations going forward.
This, of course, doesn’t respect political borders. We know the international community will tolerate huge numbers of deaths in foreign lands and be resistant to the kind of large population migrations needed to save them. This can be seen presently with Syria, Chad, Yemen, and Central America etc. Mass migrations away from war or disease or climatic changes have happened to literally hundreds of civilisations throughout time.
Some number of lucky ones migrate, but as many or more perish, either fighting to hold onto what they had, conscripted into armies of the powerful fighting over the scraps, or dying in their multitudes through starvation and/or disease. Breaking form, I’ll give you a reference for that assertion. All of human history. Pick any century ever, and there will be plenty of examples...usually in the footnotes.
So here we are. Seven billion of us have reached a place where the interlinked complexity of the biosphere that sustains the planetary ecosystem is breaking. Monod kinetics. We have expanded to the limits the environment will sustain, and now we need to die off...and we’re taking a lot of the capacity of that environment to sustain itself with us.
We know enough to prevent this, but are we so fragmented, on a sociological level, to focus the resources we need to, to stop the impending apocalyptic end? Are we too primitive, to let the intellect override the tribal enough, to get the whole of mankind working to the same end?
Probably. Hey, there is some bad stuff already baked in the cake, get over it. The time to pursue serious solutions about this was during President Carter’s reign, or at least President Gore, but no. America has stuffed the world onto this timeline, and now we are stuck with it. If you’re going to become the world leader, you get responsibility for the bad stuff too. The triumph of breaking up the USSR and ending up with Putin and a climate crisis makes Saint Reagan look a little less shiny, maybe?
Luckily (less unluckily?) we can put limits on the apocalypse we end up with. We are laying the foundational principles of those limits in science and industrial advancements, but we need to organise on a more global basis, and not waste resources fighting each other over the scraps. Here’s where the glimmer of optimism twinkles in the distance! Thought I had forgotten about that, didn’t you!
For most of the evolution of the species, ‘manly’ traits were useful for the development and survival of populations. Domination of others, maximising the spread of your seed, eliminating competitors and the weak. Not that woman don’t have those same drivers, they are just more associated with ‘maleness’.
Evolution is a horrible ruthless thing, that doesn’t abide virtue - except by accident. Somewhere we gained sapience, and, with the ability to reason, the ‘manly’ traits became less useful. Once we passed the threshold where there was too much knowledge to carry in a single mind, they became a hinderance.
Suddenly, the societies that cooperated best began to out perform those that tried to force their way through. The Mongols and the Vikings might have won most of their battles, and made large stamps on history, but they didn’t end up governing large populations. Hannibal's elephants kicked the Roman’s butts, but it was Carthage that was flattened, and their fields that were salted. Militant nations mostly assimilated into other cultures, leaving marks of their influence, but broadly absorbing others cultures.
Sapience initially let us come up with more efficient ways of killing off other tribes, and dominating other peoples. It lets us focus on out producing other groups and limiting available resources for other groups to grow and thrive. Unfortunately, we’ve been holding onto the ‘manly’ traits while we’ve been developing societies with less and less reason for them.
Sapience now gives us the ability to get one over on evolution, and chose our future. We’re not very good at it, and let emotion, in it’s tribalist incarnation, make a lot of key decisions. Do we really think all the honduran refugees are muslim members of MS13 and are coming to take your daughters? Emotional bullshit. Luckily, emotional bullshit that got a lot fewer votes.
Right, optimism. A funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse. The oowsnn was given the middle finger (or the two fingers, for the person in the UK that reads these things) by large sections of the American population. The biggest shift was with women. ‘Womanly’ traits, like cooperation, and nurturing, and tolerating ‘manly’ traits, and other fairy and butterfly stuff are useful in getting past our little apocalyptic problem.
The incoming group of new democratic representatives in the House of Representatives is a multicoloured, multisexed, multisexual, multitudinal representation of the planet’s variety of tribes. There is a lesbian, indigenous, former MMA fighter in the House. A Democrat. From Kansas. Check your assumptions at the door.
The incoming group of Republicans in the house are universally white, and have a lone woman hidden in the corner of the photo. Dinosaurs. The woman vote went solidly to the Democrats, while men broke slightly for Republicans. Nevertheless, she persisted (some races were still undecided at time of writing. What’s with Americans not being able to count very quickly?).
Once we get to the point the vote is restricted to woman, we’ll be way better off. It also lets men leave the responsibility to clean up this mess of a planet to woman! Whew. They’ve had an eternity of practice of cleaning up after men at least.
Do we have a race between cooperative, improving quality of life Asians and cooperative, letting woman get on with stuff, Western Governments to save mankind from the future it is sliding into, on its present trajectory? If they cooperate, there is a chance!
The dictatorships in the east may have some issues it needs to sort out on the cooperation front, but it has a lot of people, and their present position is based on change. The powerful are less resistant to new things, because new things are how they have pulled more people out of abject poverty in the last couple decades than previously achieved in human history.
I mean, part of that is because there are so many people now, that lots of ‘total population to have done (whatever thing)’ are true right now, but even as a percentage it’s an impressive achievement. Now that they have saddled that horse, they need to keep on it, and a healthy climate is accepted as a big part of the powerful’s future ability to stay in that saddle.
So there we have it! Hope! Women in the West turning to the big strong men around them, and telling them to apologise for calling their neighbour dishonest and weak, and to make up and play nice, and work together and clean up the yard - working with Asian governments that have given their populations a taste of ‘more’ and now have to appease the mob. Stranger alliances have happened. I mean I don’t know of any, but there is lots of stuff I don’t know!
People in the East have already accepted that unlimited consumption isn’t something mass/energy balances permit, and understand the need to tone it down, and think about sustainability. Women in the East have some time before they need to seize control with this problem, and we just have to hope the manly asian’s don’t kill us all while our woman are trying to cooperate.
Does all this lead to a future that is less fun than our present? Maybe, for some powerful people - but at least it’s a future, and we can work on fun from there. There are lots of resources in the virtual world, so if we need to, we could just hang out there more - and fighting over those virtual resources doesn’t tend to be as bloody (it’s frequently, totally over the top, with virtual blood, but that doesn’t hurt as much).
Once we get spaceships and populate planets throughout space, we can crank it up and go all evolution on each other again, but in the meantime, we need to play nice in the sandbox. Hey, it’s optimism-ish! Best I can do right now.
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A major problem in moving the world’s population to a trajectory that isn’t all ‘bad stuff’, is people are stupid and ignorant, in the context of our influence on complex systems. We can’t hold anything like the entirety of the knowledge we’ve accumulated in one head, and yet we continue to learn new stuff all the time.
Despite that, random voices on the internet (like mine) claim to have some answers to big questions, and there is insufficient curation. We need librarians as much as scientists...and sociologists more than chemists. ESM is overrated. We need to learn how to organise people that wield the ESM knowledge we have.
Most people don’t like being told that they are stupid and ignorant, and that, even in the areas they are experts, they have a bunch of stuff wrong. So how does a person convince others that they are stupid and ignorant, and should learn more stuff before taking action, and listen to the experts some, cus they might have a point.
We’re not bad at listening to experts in sports and the arts (not necessarily believing - but listening), but as we get closer to anything with a power relationship, we don’t listen very well. With complex systems, in ESM, where the answer is kicked out of an equation, we argue about the assumptions applicability, and whether that’s the right equation. With human relationships, we haven’t work out much useful math and have an outrageously complex system, so even with lifetimes of practice, we suck.
Democracy has utility in minimising corruption, and peacefully passing over political power, but it’s a long way from perfect. We undervalue an educated bureaucracy, (experts at running governments) and we overvalue experts at getting elected. Going to the ESM thing again - most of the jobs, in the future, might be in hard science, but most of the need is in human systems, and not just economic ones.
Back to getting people to admit they might not be correct about big chunks of what they believe is correct. The closer the conclusion is to the core of a person, the more it is part of their identity, the harder it is to accept it might not be correct. Getting LNAPL migration concepts wrong is a big deal to me, while I don’t much care about who is ahead in the Premier League. For most people, that have far more active lives than I do, the connection is the opposite.
Say you lived your life getting quite wealthy selling oil and gas. It turns out you don’t want to believe that has seriously impaired the environment your kids are going to live in, so you decide not to believe it, cus you sleep better that way. Otherwise intelligent beings just turn their rational brain off without a qualm, cus it’s not something they want to be true.
In addition, you have to accept that you have something wrong to consider relearning new stuff. The part of our brain that does learning new stuff is totally swamped, and doesn’t want to unlearn stuff so that it can learn new stuff in the same slot. Our brains are struggling enough to catch up to the new stuff it needs to learn all the time.
It turns out telling people that they are wrong about something, and that they should accept that and relearn what they thought they knew, is not a popular topic. It needs proof and stuff, and a captive enough audience that they need to listen. It helps if the proof is presented in a way that is easy for them to accept, but that’s hard.
It turns out that, say, showing periodicity on a multivariate frequency distribution isn’t a convincing argument to cyclicity for people that aren’t already inclined to believe the conclusion...even the three people that understand what that means...maybe especially the three people that understand what that means (I make no claim to be one of those three).
I guarantee writing long blogs in dusty corners of the internet is not a way to change people’s minds. That’s ok, because this is mostly just a place for me to play with thoughts, and writing thoughts down tends to drown out the most stupid thoughts. No, really. I have stupider thoughts than these that get eliminated by the backspace button as I go...really!
I’ve had some success with the ‘five times’ theory of learning. Introduce a subject and expect the learner to miss the detail, but get a teeny bit of a concept that there is an idea buried somewhere in there. The second time, they get some of the context and it begins to make sense, The third time, they tell you, “Ya, ya, ya, I know already - I get it.” Ask them to explain it back to you for try four, and when that fails, book a time to try again, and that’s number five, and they nail it. Yay! They actually get it! They can explain it, and take actions depending on that understanding, without ‘bad things’ happening.
Unfortunately that takes five separate occasions that the prospective learner needs to be willing to listen, or least be unable to avoid listening, to an expert. Sometimes, the expert realises the first time they try to explain it to someone else, that they should have thought it through five times themselves, and it’s all garbage. That gets them to go back and think some more before they try explain it to someone else, or more dangerously, commit to some action predicated on it being correct. Even in its failed iterations, this method is useful. I personally run into the failed iterations often.
One of the many problems in addressing the world’s condition, is we are mostly too busy to give an unknown concept a shot even once, let alone five times. While we’re in school, you sort of set your brain into that mode, and you spend a few years in the beginning of a career where you are open to mentoring, but once you decide you know stuff, you get worse at listening. No, I’m not thinking I don’t have this problem, and no I don’t have a clue how to make it better in the world at large.
In generational terms, stuff that is useful in understanding/predicting future states of being, tend to get accepted, cus they work - but that’s generational, and we might not have many of those left if we mess this up. We need somebody to figure out how to speed that up...Not ‘it’! I don’t have a clue, and I’m lazy. Tag someone else.
We could really use a God that was into helping us out through direct action at the moment. A big booming voice saying “Listen to Michael Mann on this one. Gore was right.” coming out of the sky might help focus effort. This whole ‘mostly leaving us to figure it out’ stuff isn’t working too well...at least if the continuation of large numbers of people is part of the prospective God’s plan. If the God is looking to reset evolution, and give it another go, the voice may say “Big block V12s are where it’s at.”...whatevs...optimism?
(1/12/18) Edit. Minor spelling stuff)