How to save the world by Sabine Hossenfelder

I decided to respond to your reply above here.

The argument by those in economic power is that we must grow the economy further in order to have the economic capacity to work on environmental problems. "Tomorrow we will address the environment," and of course tomorrow we will be saying the same. The climate issue as a social debate, propped up to look like a scientific debate, will transition into a political and policy issue of whether the economic cost warrants solutions to the problem. It will again be "Tomorrow we will ...," and there is always tomorrow where the problems of today, debts, pollution, population and so forth, can be swept into. Largely if you think about it, the big problems of the 1960s such as drug addition, pollution, nuclear weapons and so forth, are still with us. We have in fact over the years solved very little with respect to these types of problems.

As I say in my essay the MWI of quantum mechanics tells us there are a myriad number of worlds with various outcomes. In our past there are worlds where Napoleon won, Hitler won, General Lee got the better of Meade at Gettysburg and so forth. The same holds for the future. I thought about writing an essay on whether we actually steer anything, or whether our conscious decisions alter either the probability distributions in the MWI branching of the world, or by some means weight the selection of these worlds. Maybe consciousness is just an illusion whereby we observe a certain eigenbranching of the world. Of course then again MWI as an interpretation may not be testable and all of this amounts to metaphysics.

Everything is easy to predict except the future --- Yogi Berra

LC

Dear Sabine,

I found several of the ideas expressed in your text quite interesting and original.

We humans are smart in changing the rules of adaptation: we quickly adapt the environment to ourselves, rather than waiting for darwinian evolution to slowly adapt us to the environment, as it did with the rest of the biosphere. But now our adaptation as a species has fallen behind the changes we have induced ourselves.

So your solution to this problem concentrates on the way the scattered, distant, costly information about the consequences of individual actions (or, more generally, information about how to solve big societal problems) should be turned into close, easily grasped, intuitive, possibly visual messages, thus wiring back into the circuits that our brain is used to work with.

But packing that information in an effective, intuitive way, and moving it close to the individual, or to the initiators of change, is only half of the problem: before converting that information, one has to build it, i.e., to find or compute a correct solution to the addressed problem.

There are certainly cases (e.g. that of a person throwing an empty plastic bottle in a river) in which it is quite simple to figure out what is the information to be made available to the guy (e.g., showing him a big island of plastic bottles in the ocean). But in many cases the correct action to be taken for solving a societal problem is not knowable, because we are dealing with a complex, layered system, in which emergent phenomena occur.

You write:

We reached this gridlock because the human brain did not evolve to understand the consequences of individual actions in networks of billions of people.

Your reaction to this correct observation is essentially: let us reformulate the information about those consequences so that the human brain can better grasp them.

My reaction would rather be: in general, the human brain cannot understand those consequences because we are talking about two distinct levels in an architecture of emergence. Networks of billions of people create emergent phenomena that follow their own dynamics, and cannot be under the control of individuals, by the very definition of emergent phenomenon.

The political, economic, social systems that govern our present day world represent the emergent entities at the next level above that of individual humans. Metaphorically, we are the ants, they are the upper level functions of the anthill. What is the effective power that an individual ant has to steer those upper level functions? Can there be effective interaction and mutual influence between the consciousness and creativity of the super-organism at the upper level, and the supposedly smaller consciousness and creativity of the lower level entities (us)?

If we believe in the beauty and strong explicative power of the notion of emergence (I certainly do), and we rule out the idea of an anthropocentric universe, then shouldn t we conclude that something is happening above our heads that does not care too much about us as individuals?

For example, when you write that these political, economic and social systems are too slow to adapt to our needs as individuals, I occurred to me that one can reverse the reasoning and take the point of view, and time scales, of these upper level entities: maybe the problem (our problem, not their problem) is that we humans are too fast in appearing and passing away.

I would be curious to know whether you share some healthy and moderate skepticism about the possibility for us to take the elevator and go talk to the super-organisms at the upper floor.

Best regards

Tommaso

As I said, I WISH it were true that you can't make people behave against their nature. But that's just not the way humans work. We have the ability to consciously choose to not breathe, or eat, for example, and that's just the very beginning of what we tend to do that is unnatural and against our body's needs.

Though I understand that you might want to include everything we choose to do as "natural". (Which is reasonable in a certain way, but sort of meaningless from a discussion point of view!) My point is that people are often given terrible information about what they should do to be happy and healthy, and it makes them make poor choices that harm everyone. The quality of information needs to change if we are to attain a healthy system that moves us forward in evolution (more adaptability).

And how to start a movement? Well, as with all movements, it starts with a small group of committed folks! As my essay suggests, we can start by telling people that they have a right to invest the time and energy in coming to some understanding about what is truly meaningful in their lives, and asking them what they believe they need, in order to be able to reach their highest goals of what they want to contribute to the world (and beyond!).

Also, of course, change always starts within, so asking ourselves what we find most meaningful in our lives, and looking to understand what we need, in order to accomplish our ideals of what we want to contribute to our lives, is where it all really starts. I've done that for myself (and it is the basis for much of my work already, including my blogs and books and artwork and workshops). Perhaps you also have explored what you most want to contribute to the world, and what you are most in need of, for that to happen most effectively?

Dear Prof,

I observe you have not commented on my post. I will be glad you comments and also try to read my article and possibly leave a comment- Perhaps some statement were not clearly stated in my previous post. There was electricity failure (power cut) in my area and the PC battery was almost empty and so the post was sent in hurry!

In my article, the hypothesis is hinged on "No natural disaster" which appears to be constant since humanity cannot interfere with this. As you know, certain assumptions could be made while conducting academic research; should we therefore put the "side criticisms and restrictions" on gamification has explained in my previous post as variables to be kept constant? I am a little familiar with your model of gamification that is why I have raised this point. Could you also check up with the researchers at the University of Hamburg Germany if possible? Thank you.

You wrote about human's action matching his reaction. Likewise his "intuitive feeling matches with decision". This is similar to some of my outlooks in my article and really be glad if you can read it. I based my philosophy of human's actions on Newton laws. Please kindly find time to read it and leave a comment behind.

Thank you.

Gbenga

Hello Sabine, I'd like to critique your essay a little. Would you be able to reciprocate?

Emotionen sind ein schlechter Ersatz für FleiB.

Sabine<

Your 5 step plan is like a science-aided process. Processes are something common in our corporate world, something that doesn't require thought, only action. Fortunately your steps don't involve just external actions but engaged brains as well.

Your "gamification" is a recognition of the short-term gratification enhancing long-term goals. Certainly it is a recognition of how short-term solutions run rampant in government and corporations, something contributing to long-term needs like climate change being ignored.

Great ideas for a daunting problem

Jim

Sabine,

A really well written essay which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. One question I have which I would appreciate your response to: you seem to be more focused on individual or social decision making, but don't really get into political decisionmaking. Isn't it in some sense the job of political institutions to take the long term view and structure society and incentives with that in mind? Of course, in many places they are failing miserably at this long view- is the reason for this the same as with the rest of us?

I would love your feedback and vote on my own essay- even if it might be negative Such is the only way we learn anything. Thanks again for your enjoyable piece.

Rick Searle

Sabine --

A very fine essay... like your blog, clear and sensible and fun to read. I think it should win, if only because it might be the only entry with a practical approach. I agree, it doesn't make sense to try to change people, but we can change the informational environment in which they operate. In fact, that environment is changing quite radically, now -- which is the theme of my essay on communications technology. And this is an evolution we might hope to "steer" in the manner you suggest.

I like very much that you focus on an everyday issue I can easily relate to -- that no matter how much I'd like to do the right thing and act responsibly, it's so hard to know what that means that I basically give up... just give a few dollars to a few organizations that I hope know what they're doing, and try not to think about it. But it's not just complexity that's my problem. It's also the feeling that whatever I do can make only the tiniest difference to what's happening at a global scale. I don't respond to phone surveys because it's too depressing that what I say won't matter, that it gets reduced to a checkbox answer.

In fact, I think you're wrong that complexity is the root of our problems now. Maybe things look different in the civilized world, but here in the US it seems clear that the free-market principle (which I certainly agree with) has become an ideological screen for the domination of markets by financial power and its political allies. It's a deep problem that so much power lies with institutions, private and public, that have their own very primitive priorities. That's the main obstacle to effective action on climate change, to take one example -- not the complexity of the science.

But the issue you address is very important, and the notion of priority maps feeding into a global information network gives me hope -- maybe we can find ways to shift the balance back toward a participatory democracy. But I wonder if there's something missing. I think many of us would have a hard time prioritizing our hopes and desires, or even putting them into words. I'm not sure passing out questionnaires will provide the needed input to your system, though if such a project got off the ground, it might help get us focused on what we really need and want. As to brain-scans, I'm happiest believing that no such technology will ever be feasible.

Yet you've already addressed this problem in your essay, suggesting we get the scientists to develop this system for us first, working with a limited range of priorities that might be more explicit and quantifiable. If it works for them, we can think about how to broaden the scope.

Thanks again for giving us such a clear-minded and inventive piece.

-- Conrad

It's posted now.

Igwe

I think you addressed the author as comrade. This salutation has some political connotations. That's just my thoughts.

Thanks for sharing this essay, Sabine. I think you're right that humanity's greatest challenge is social rather than technological. I think you're also right to say that we could do a lot--both technologically and institutionally--to improve our collective decision-making. If we made choices more rationally and on the basis of better information it would go a long way toward improving our future prospects.

But in my view better information-processing isn't enough. I don't believe most of our problems stem from an inability to reason through the consequences of our actions (although we could certainly do a better job of reasoning through the consequences of our actions!). In my view--this is what I argue in my own essay--the more profound issue is that there is no single neutral best course of action.

We're not fighting over the steering wheel just because we are stupid, but because we want to go to different places. This makes simply designing an impartial information processing framework a political problem as well as a technological problem. Not only do we have competing visions for the future--I doubt even individuals have stable, well-defined sets of priorities of the kind you seem to imagine--but we disagree over who should receive the benefits of and who should bear the costs of the choices we make. We disagree, in other words, over what's fair.

My own view is that we also need to create institutions that do more align the interests of individuals more directly with the interests of humanity as a whole. Otherwise we may be in danger of steering humanity off a cliff.

Best,

Robert de Neufville

This is still my favorite essay for its informality and straightforward realism. But I'm not seeing the five-step program to save the world. What is new about identifying goals, other than calling this "priority maps (TM)"? OK, everybody should get clear about what they want. And we should all be more efficient and consistent in ordering our priorities and pursuing them effectively. Maybe use some advertising and management techniques on ourselves to keep ourselves on track. What else? I'm seeing some big problems in this world, and maybe small thinking is the best we can do, but...