48 comments on Umbrella View of Resource Depletion and Human Behaviour
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Rembrandt asked me to give a 'grand finale' presentation of a weekend conference on depletion, offering up a framework for how to view the supply/demand intersection. Many in audience were my friends/colleagues so there were quite a few inside jokes. I was also trying to squeeze a heck of alot into 60 minutes. There are several errata after a first listen:
1. Earth is 4.5 billion years old (sounded like I said trillion)
2. Brains began in simple organisms, I said 'single cell'.
3. 50% of obese children will grow up to be obese, (not 50% are obese)
4. Avg height difference between men and women in human cultures is range of 4-7 inches, not 7 inches.
5. Wages rose for 15 decades (not centuries...though that too is possible but data is only for certain countries)
The general thrust of lateral thinking...generalist vs specialist is what I was aiming at - i.e. it is a mistake to a)focus on one limiting resource and b)ignore who we are as evolved organisms and all that entails. Out of all topics I discussed, I would only consider myself an 'expert' on finance (which means I'm an expert on none...;-)
If you watched it, I hope you enjoyed/learned something. I was happy, given my severe lack of sleep, that I fit it all into 1 hour. There are no easy answers to these issues, and maybe no hard ones either - it is my hope that others at higher levels in business/government/academia can bring these concepts closer together...
**Some selected references that were not indicated on slides:
Life as a Manifestation of Second Law of Thermodynamics Schneider, E.D, Kay, J.J., 1994, Mathematical and Computer Modelling, Vol 19, No. 6-8, pp.25-48
The Continuing Importance of Maximum Power Charles Hall, Ecological Modelling
Volume 178, Issues 1-2, 15 October 2004, Pages 107-113
Cultural Objects Modulate Reward Circuitry, Erk, S. et al. Neuroreport Dec 2002.
Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Hurts the Middle Class Robert Frank Jan 2008
Humans Prefer Cockiness To Expertise New Scientist Jun 2009
Often in Error, Rarely in Doubt Don Moore, Association For Psychological Science Conference, May 25 2009.
The Elements of a Scientific Theory of Self-deception Robert Trivers, Annals of NY Academy of Science, 2000
Availability Cascade and Risk RegulationKuran, T., Sunstein, S., Stanford Law Review Vol. 51, No.4 1999
Biological Basis of the Stress Response James P. Henry, Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science, January-March, 1992, volume 27, Number 1, pages 66-83.
The 'bible' on Sexual Selection: Mating Systems and Strategies Stephen Schuster, Mike Wade, 2003
Nate, it's unclear what you mean by brains evolving from simple organisms, not cells. Doesn't Allman in Evolving Brains discuss how bacteria like E. coli exhibit brain-like function, pursuing nutrients and avoiding threats?
Also, Nate, forget hope for a moment and take a hard look at academia, government, and industry. Government is about policy and implementation, academia is about theory, and industry is about finding a way to profit on the other two. Virtually no-one tied to any one of these social institutions really has a clue how the other two work, and that kind of common ground would be necessary for a coming together.
Forgetting also that government, academia, and industry are all fundamentally flawed social institutions.
People are not inherently flawed, the social environments to which they belong are inherently flawed. If you are looking for solutions, you are looking for your lost keys under the street lamp of government, industry, and academia, but you lost your keys in the dark alley of common and individual human experience.
1)I have Allman's book somewhere in the basement - I'm not sure whether quorum sensing activity in single celled organisms was origin of reptilian brain or not-clearly single celled organisms were the 'precursor' of brains- in any case I intended to say 'simple'.
2)I agree with you about our flawed institutions, but institutions can be derived and changed by groups of individuals that see behind the curtain. To compete, to value present over future, to enjoy (and have potential to be hijacked by) available novelty is not a 'flaw', to be inherently optimistic and believe in ones own viewpoint over that of others - these are constraints. Depending on ones vantage point they could be considered opportunities.
And we need institutions in our society, just rational, forward thinking ones. Institutions are only way to dampen/direct the impulses of the 'elephant'...
As to quantifying hope etc., there are many different timelines for hope. What gives me hope is sharing ideas and lateral thinking with like minded people.
"Forgetting also that government, academia, and industry are all fundamentally flawed social institutions."
That would be pretty much like saying "society is a flawed social institution", or to use the advice that the psychiatrist gave to the brothers Niles and Frasier Crane on a very funny episode of the TV show "Frasier", "your best bet is to stay the hell away from each other!"
Of course, the question would be to name, in all of history, one, just one "non-flawed" social institution. Humans are flawed so of course our institutions are flawed. The measure of a social institution is whether it magnifies the positives of the individuals so that the institution is better as a group than the individuals would be on their own, or if it magnifies the negatives of the individuals so that the group is worse than the individuals would be on their own. It's really not that complicated, but it is very hard for an institution to accomplish to bring out the best consistantly and not the worst. (Brief aside: We have to assume that more social institutions have benefitted humans in the big picture of evolutionary competitiveness than have not or there would not be so many of us on the planet)
RC
When I said fundamentally flawed, I meant flawed from a design standpoint as opposed to an implementation standpoint.
"Would you classify that as a launch problem or a design problem?" -- Chris Knight, "Real Genius"
If you design a screwdriver to hammer a nail, the best implementation in the world will still fall short. You need to design a hammer. What we have designed as government, academia, and business are not suitable for human needs for structure, experience transfer, and meaningful ways of life.
Religion, also fundamentally flawed for failing to deal with human needs to cope with "spirituality", or wonder, awe, and the unknown.
Now, as for social institutions that aren't flawed from a design standpoint, you wanted one? Pick which one you agree with from among these five:
1. Reciprocity
2. Language and storytelling
3. Technology
4. Teamwork
5. Rearing of our young
Each one of these is a necessary institutional part of all human societies, and all problems resulting from engaging them are implementation problems. Eating, not specifically a social institution, is also not a flawed design for ingesting nutrients and energy, but the implementation is flawed when we eat HFCS and other processed crap, or eat too much and become overweight.
I used to lean heavily toward the side of thinking that humans are inherently flawed. But then I realized that to say humans are inherently flawed, is to say that life is inherently flawed, which is to say that the laws of reality are inherently flawed. If we are inherently flawed, then everything is inherently flawed. We didn't spring forth here from another dimension, we are a product of this reality.
It could instead be that our collective understandings and assumptions need further tweaking and percolation. Just saying.
So Mom was wrong when she said nobody is perfect, i.e. flawless.
It's actually an interesting philosophical position, sort of "the best of all possible worlds" idea.
I have my problems with it, but it's a hell of a sight better than some of the misanthropic stuff I see around here! :-)
RC
Thanks. We're not on the same page yet, but maybe we're standing in the same library.
This position is based on the idea that billions of years ago, life on Earth was all single-celled, but eventually became multicellular. At one point in the evolution of life, it was unmanageably complex to coordinate multiple cells toward sustainable action. Today, all the life we can readily see with the naked eye, including ourselves, are manageably complex colonies of billions to trillions of individual living cells.
From our experience, the only sustainable social arrangements for human societies are tribal. But larger-scale sustainable societies could be possible if the right social building blocks were used.
The ideas and experience we used in our very first attempt at building a large society, which were all we knew how to do at the time, resulted in flawed designs for social structure (government and law), and spirituality (religion). Later came educational systems and industry, both, essentially, first attempts at solving problems of experience transfer and physical resource support.
How many times in human history have we attempted to solve a problem at any scale, from small to large, and gotten it right on the first try? As small examples, what's the version number of the operating system you're using right now? How often do you correct typos or re-word your posts?
We have been chiseling away at the square, not round, stone wheels of government, industry, and education, trying to make them go under water, fly, and clean our windows. They aren't designed to work that way, and they're not even very suitable for what we had intended hundreds and thousands of years ago.
Yes, you can call the stone wheels an "airplane" and attach a jet engine to it and make it fly. And this is where most of the energy waste goes, forcing more poor societal designs into a poorly understood society. The problems aren't fast cars, it's why we need speed. It's not iPods, it's why we continually need distraction. It's not crime, it's why people for thousands of years have been continually and repeatedly forced into self-destructive behaviors.
It's a lack of appropriate options, and a lack of appropriate understanding. It's these options and understandings that at one end help bind and at the other help enable a society.
Maybe Godel Incompleteness Theorems fit here...