How to save the world by Sabine Hossenfelder

Thanks for your insights. I think your essay will score high.

"No, the major challenge, the mother of all problems, is to convert these ideas into courses of action." Agree. Yet, most of the essays leave out the "how" of the topic.

"The root of the problems that humanity faces today is that our adaptation as a species has fallen behind the changes we have induced ourselves. " Yes. Therefore, any suggestion that begins with change our attitudes or morals is bound to fail. The time required for a morals change is too long. For example, the morals of marriage are still hampered by promiscuity of the stone age.

"We have no intuitive grasp on the collective behavior of large groups ..." and "...the adaptation of our systems by trial and error is too slow ..." because we depend on the nation the do it one trial at a time. This system can be faster if there are many trials at the same time competing. This has been the history of science development as a result of better communication in the last 200 years. With no intuitive grasp and poor predictability what method is available other than luck?

Part of the problem of humanity going forward is how we address the relative weight of problems. For example, ecology vs. industry (economic). Certainly, everybody wants to solve all our problems. But that is not going to happen. Some problems should be solved before others. Many times some want to solve problems using means that worsen other problems. Most socially addressed problems today are done through taxation. High taxes are a problem, also. What is the optimun mix?

I would have liked to see your essay before I finished mine.

Your essay reflects ideas that I used to think about and voice. I was an organizer of the Green Party. I use the past tense, used not use, as an average. I occasionally say things similar. However, in the last decade I have become a bit jaded about these things. The problem as I see it is that we humans are stone aged creatures that by their ability to learn new ways to exploit their environment have constructed a world we may simply not be well adapted to.

I find it irritating when I see trash lying around, and the standard thought still happens, "How can people be such pigs?" I then step back and realize that this is how we evolved. Our ancestors ate fruit, grains, later meat and took food from the natural world. When they ate a fruit they thought nothing of throwing the core or peel onto the ground. Once the product is consumed it is second nature to cast off the inedible parts. It takes additional thought or training to hold on to that aluminium can and put it later in a recycle bin. In addition our view of the world is local. It is still hard to get people to recycle basic stuff. How many times have I put such material in a recycle bin to see that people discarded their unsorted trash into it?

We evolved in small bands that later, about 30 thousand years ago, became larger tribes and only in the last 5,000 years or so did we start to settle into large sedentary groups or cities. Our species spent 125 thousand years in small bands of a few dozen members and a total world population of a few million. Our perspective was intensely local with very intimate relationships with people. Bands would exchange members, often through marriage, and so outsiders were a presence and such encounters could be peaceful or they could be violent. The tendency is then to act on the basis of very immediate concerns and sensory input. These often involve people in their community and concerns about the "others" on the outside, or what they will eat tomorrow, or in the modern world whether they will have their job next year. We are creatures that no matter how smart we are, or think we are, we still have a stone aged brain that tries to manage in a world that is interconnected across continents, populated by over 7 billion of us and in mega-cities with ten of millions of people.

It is clear that you can motivate people into action if the problem involves people who are identified in some way other than you. This can cover a range of things, from religion, language, skin tone, their flag and so forth. In 2002-3 I found it almost frightening to witness the war fever in the US as it geared up for the invasion of Iraq. This nation spent $3trillion to engage in that adventure. It is far more difficult to get people similarly motivated over the CO_2 molecule and our uncontrolled experiment with the planetary climate by producing about a trillion tons of the stuff. This is far more of an abstract problem. It requires a different way of thinking. It might be the case that education will persuade some people to give some concern over this. However, I have known a number of physicists who regard global warming as a pseudo-problem. There is a certain (I keep unnamed) physicist who is advanced in knowledge of string theory, an inexhaustible bogger and who holds to far right winged (almost fascist) ideology as a higher truth that somehow negates any matter of global warming. Along those lines, 25% of the Nazi SS held graduate degrees. So education may not be the magic bullet we think it is.

I argue in my essay that intelligent life in the universe faces certain limits due to cosmology, and in addition face problems maybe not too different from what we face. I argue in a funny way that this might in fact be a good thing. You will have to read it to see how that is the case. We appear to be engineering the next mass extinction. Our impact on the environment will persist for up to 100,000 years and could count as severe as the KT or maybe even the Permian extinctions. Our current situation may be just a high energy and high resource consumption period that on a timeline is a narrow Gaussian curve (almost delta function) between two stone ages. We came out of the Pleistocene stone age in a world of great abundance and after this we will be in the second stone age on a planet severely depleted and biologically reduced. Our species may in time be snuffed out as a result.

I will of course continue to hope for the better angels of our nature. I though question whether that can hold.

Cheers LC

Thanks for a great essay and for your effort to tackle the "how" question about shaping human behavior in ways that will support better long term decision-making. I think this can help, but I'm not sure how much the proposed solution will be able to accomplish. Priority maps and personal preferences are not, at least not yet, based on hard science - as I understand it they can be measured through surveys relative to community norms, but I'm not sure they are useful in shaping community norms. As I discuss in my essay the Tip of the Spear, a community (networked as an institution) needs to sustain shared moral values and cooperative behaviors....

On a different note, how do we protect individual data from being "mined" for commercial purposes rather than social ones? The internet started as an academic initiative - but is not longer subject to those community norms. Moreover, immense volumes of data on social media, personal preferences in entertainment and purchasing practices are being collected and used to tailor what we see (or buy) without our knowledge or informed consent. How could the very valuable data from priority maps be collected and shared without becoming additional commercial fodder?

Sabine,

It seems you start out with trying to save the world and conclude by arguing for better scientific networking. At the dawn of western civilization, with the story of Adam and Eve, it was recognized that knowledge is a double edged sword. Will expediting the increase of knowledge save the world, or speed up the rate of its consumption? Complexity tends to increase until it becomes unstable, then it resets to a more stable state. Just look at atomic structure. What if rather than creating ever more feedback loops, we were to examine the ones which already existed, to find ways to make them more environmentally friendly? Right now the most monumental and powerful feedback loop on earth, short of the convection cycle, is the financial/monetary system. My argument is that the major conceptual flaw build into it, which turns it from an effective economic circulation system into a monstrous tumor, is that we imagine money to be a form of commodity, rather than a contract. Now if you had such a magical property which could, in sufficient quantities, provide you with just about anything available to anyone, you would want as much of it as possible and so would every living human on the planet; Right? Then the people in charge of this system would have monumental power over the rest of society, just so long as they continue producing these magical promises. Yet on the other hand, if you understood those pieces of paper were simply notational chits from the broader community and any value assigned them was entirely dependent on the economic well-being and general long term health of said community, you might be happy with just having enough to get by, knowing there is some flexibility in the system and if you come up short on occasion, you'll probably be able to slide by and anyone caught hoarding these promises would likely have the opposite occur, that the community might just turn its collective shoulder and ignore that person's pile of chits. Then there wouldn't be any tendency to draw value out of the community and environment to store as chits, because the greatest store of value would logically be a strong community and healthy environment, not a financial system bloated with far more promises than an increasingly burdened economy can ever possibly hope to fulfill. Would that make sense to you?

Regards,

John M

I was struck by this sentence at the bottom of your abstract:

`Only then, when we can make informed decisions by feeling rather than thinking, will we be able to act and respond to the challenges we face.`

Yes, we are lazy, at least relative to the huge and growing amount of information that we would like to be able to digest daily (and, ehm, I still have to read your essay :-) You seem to imply that `feeling` is faster, more efficient, less costly, and transparent to laziness, than `thinking`: feeling and intuition at the basis of decision making, in place of `traditional` thinking. I suspect that that feeling and intuition may play a stronger role than thinking in several contexts, for example in educating children, or even in scientific investigation, but always at the level of a single person's individual decision. When cooperation is necessary, for handling problems at a more global level, then you need to communicate, and thinking / speaking / writing (increasingly slow and laziness-vulnerable processes) become necessary. Or not?

Hi Sabine,

Your essay contains contains very similar diagnoses of the problems to mine (so, naturally, I liked it a lot!). Especially:

"We reached this gridlock because the human brain did not evolve to understand the consequences of individual actions in networks of billions of people. We are bad in making good long-term decisions and do not care much what happens in other parts of the planet to people we have not and will most likely never meet. We have no intuitive grasp on the collective behavior of large groups and their impact on our environment, and what little grasp we have is prone to cognitive biases and statistical errors, many of which are now subject of new scientific areas like game theory, behavioral economics and decision science."

and "We solve them by bringing close that what is far away."

My essay focuses exactly on what to do to close the gap when what is far away is in the future: http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2030.

Best,

Dean

Sabine,

Unfortunately the way the monetary system functions, it naturally accumulates and coalesces these obligations in fewer hands, almost as a gravitational process and historically there have been a variety of ways this build up is resolved; inflation, debt jubilees, social break downs, war, etc. Our mathematical and information technology resources are being put to the purpose of creating history's largest such creation of financial obligations. So I can understand why any reasonable person would want to just stay away from it and frankly I usually do. That's why I frequent the science blogs and forums, such as yours on occasion, and only read economic ones, but the topic of this contest asks how to best steer the future of humanity. In which case, trying to figure out how to unravel the financial conundrum seems unavoidable.

Regards,

John M

Ps,

In your essay, you do go into how best to link scientific ideas and that does go to how we categorize and process ideas and concepts, so basically what I'm saying is that money needs to go from the commodity category, to the contract category. If someone gives you a piece of paper that says, 'IOU one ounce of gold,' is that really a commodity, in itself, or is it a contract? This system certainly treats such obligations as commodities and goes out of its way to manufacture as many as possible. Right now there are something like 900 trillion dollars worth of derivatives contracts alone, which amount to a form of parimutual wagering, based on a 60 trillion dollar world economy. Obviously those most able to pull the strings in this world would prefer most people not bother themselves thinking about these things and none of us, even those actually riding this wave, can really do anything about it. Eventually though, this wave will crash up on the shores of a larger reality and those of us left to pick up the pieces will need to ask themselves if they really want to repeat the process, with far fewer resources, or is there a lesson to be learned.

Regards,

JM

I think the critical set of events surround the timing of what might be called the "oh shits" report. I think that in another decade the climate problem will become too big to ignore and the denialists will be swept from the public forum. That will be good news of course, but then the question is one of comprehensiveness of the response and timing. The response will be best if it takes a whole systems approach, which means the entire question of our energy/entropy situation on Earth is addressed. This means wrapping the issue into everything from energy development to the ecological distress of oceans. Timing is also another problem, for it could be that by the time we address this issue it is too late. Methane release from permafrost melt and methane hydrate release is thought to trigger a runaway process. There are now indications this process is now rapidly starting to take place. I suspect that geo-engineering will be forced upon us. I would prefer to think we would not have to take such measures, but we might have no choice.

I happen to think the socio-economic problem is that our future will by necessity require a different mode of operation. The standard system of nation-states with representative governments most responsive to corporations and an economy powered by financial power will have to be seriously modified or changed out with something else. Of course in the United States this brings forth howling charges of communism and so forth. I have for the last year been living in Texas, and as the state advert says, "A whole different state" is not far off the mark. This place is borderline insane. I think changing the socio-economic modality of the world is maybe not so much a problem for Europe, but I fear it could mean the "Second American Civil War."

The progressive movements in the US, which are folded to a degree into the Democratic Party, tend to choke if they deviate at all much from centrism. The Democratic Party is really a centrist party with a neoliberal agenda that promotes corporate power. The progressive wings of the party are a combination of window dressing and leftovers from the main economic banquet taken by financial power. Clinton and Obama are cases in point, for while they are preferable to the defective twerp we have in 2001-9 they are pretty much operators who curry favor to financial power. From an environmental perspective that translates into support for energy business as usual.

Cheers LC

Sabine

Thank you so much for your note. Now I see your comment "No, the major challenge,..., is to convert these ideas into action."

I have "The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization" but have only scanned it. The same with his "Environment, Scarcity, and Violence". I omitted a reference to them because he makes things a bit more complex than they are, in my opinion. That is why I went with Tainter. For example, I agree with Friedman that the Federal Reserve was a big mistake. I suppose he would call me a "neo-Malthusisn". I did like his stages of denial, some of his income gap comments, and the chapter of "why don't we face reality". You can see examples of the latter in these essays.

All his tectonic stresses and conditions in Tainter are present today and have been for a long time. The limited space left me with commenting, "However, the collapse is a failure of the society's organization to adapt to nature and to the changing conditions." That is, he is only describing some of the natural conditions imposed on humanity all the time.

Let me take this opportunity to address another idea I think you are tending toward. Almost all the essays have suggestions with little chance of happening. My last comment "The barons are organizing." suggest the required action is already happening. Look at the conditions that forced the barons to action. They are all present in the US today. Many today are already taking action toward a thing like the Magna Carta that I suggest is a new constitution. The TEA party (they want a smaller Federal Government) is becoming stronger. The secession movement is small but growing. Many are writing books and article s suggesting constitutional amendments (Friedman, M. R. Levin, R. E. Barnet, etc.). The path toward the kind of constitutional change is already happening. I hope the leaders of today are as smart as the leaders in 1787.

Thanks, Sabine - Agreed, the market economy does work efficiently to satisfy individual wants but it does NOT take all priorities into account - including the priority of being left alone. Moreover, I some market interests are better than others at influencing the political process and the accepted "rules of the game" - in order to maximize the interests of certain individuals.

I think there is a larger issue here, one that I address in my essay "The Tip pif the Spear". The institutions that we are seeking to influence, including markets, governments, media, social movements, religions, and science itself), have evolved to the point of exhibiting autonomous behaviors. By analogy to the human body, the system (markets) bends the behaviors of component units (us) to its ends, not the other way around.

That said, universal priority maps would provide improved "signaling" between component units and increase efficiency in institutions - but this is not the same as shaping community norms and the shared moral framework they represent.

Thanks - George

Fellow Comrade,

Your article is an intellectual knowledge base. Special appreciation must be given to every author for creating time to share their thoughts. Many time it is not the reward that is attached to this contest that interest me but ability to reason out facts in solving problems. And this is one of my hobbies!

However, I will like to point out some point in your high capacity essay. I understand your point on the use of Gamification to balance people's priority. Researcher at the University of Hamburg Germany have criticized the use of Gamification as not being fun and creating an artificial sense of achievement. They concluded that gamification can encourage unintended behaviours may be misleading for those unfamiliar with gaming. Your model of priority map is also good but how will more than 1 billion people mostly in the developing countries who do not have access to basic education use the system and gamification? Some legal restrictions also apply for the following reasons criminals,fraudsters and money launderers

You have said it all. Human wants decision that suits him even though it against the social, economic and environmental issues. You are right. The nagging voice that say he should make better decision as you said. But at the end he end up doing contrary. I call this disobedience to the universal law. Man true heart condition is the true reflection of his heart. On Monday this week, a bomb exploded killing scores and injured hundreds of people in Nigeria capital, Abuja. After the incident, it is possible for the man responsible to come around and show cheap empathy. He caused emotional trauma to his fellow Nigerians because he did not keep the universal law. This is what I call upsetting the ecosystem's balance in my article. I make a lot of reference to 2008 economic downturn. Ben Bernanke in his time alluded to the fact that the banks and bankers did not keep the financial laws which was the cause of the mortgage in US and worldwide. Please refer to my article.

You suggested the use of questionnaire in making decision for right candidate during. This is the system of true democracy. But as I said earlier man's appearance is not the true state of his mind. Why do many politicians failed to manifest their manifesto. It is simple, they couldn't obey the universal law.

Summarily, I wish the whole world is enlightened to use gamification and also in the absence of criminals,fraudsters and money launderers! But if the criminals and fraudsters can keep the law, the global ecosystem will be in a dynamic and balance equilibrium as I asserted in my article

This is an exciting intellectual debate platform.

Stay lifted!

Gbenga