I dont know if they teach the Theory of Bounded Rationality anymore but it helped me when I was younger and got thrown into similar complex no win situations.
The tendency is to think ALL complex problems can be solved if I just have the right info, the right skill, the right people, the right resources, enough time etc etc. But for some problems the stars will not align. In those cases what do you do?
You have 2 option - 1. pick a Simpler problem where u do have the info, skill, resources, people, time to ensure the outcome is going to be positive
2. pick the complex problem but accept you are not going to solve it completely.
I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.
As a very HN-y analogy: there's a reason programmers don't debug purely by static analysis. They don't just stare at the code. They do step-throughs. They look at logs. They tweak things and see what happens. They experiment and learn from their experimentation. A program is about as controlled and isolated an environment as you will ever have in the real world, and even in that domain, pure analysis is rarely sufficient.
> I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.
Amen to this. Doing is a strong teacher, sometimes the only teacher.
I've grown a ton as a person from my work, and one of the biggest things I've learned is how easy it is to have confident, empirically-supported, well-argued, and totally wrong opinions. There's no better way to test your views than to bet on them and put them out into the world - even if they don't work, you'll learn something.
Of course, that can go too far in the other direction, because empirical results are often driven by factors outside your control too. So you do need to be doing analysis and not just looking at results. But analysis alone doesn't get you there, even if you're extraordinarily brilliant (and, statistically, you probably aren't).
Yup, but what I see so often happening is that people will look at the situation and automatically affix responsibility to whatever side has the most power, they obviously are being derelict in not working hard enough to solve the problem. Any attempt to point out other factors is treated as supporting the abuse by the side with the power. They have "solved" it by finding someone to blame.
Or you just can fight that tendency, fight this “solutionism” worldview, not everything is solvable, things may not turn out all right, but that’s ok, too. I.e. one should embrace the fatalism, the “it is what it is” worldview.
> Now I'm an adult, watching this kind of thing play out on a global scale every single day with the collapse of public health, the collapse of our democracies, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and the collapse of our ecosystems.
I must have missed the memo on this situation.
But more seriously, there’s such a thing as constructive criticism, and there’s such a thing as fatalism. And there are people who burn their own reputation by complaining more than is useful.
Sure, it's wrong to shoot the messenger. But sometimes the messenger is wrong.
I think that real solutions to complex problems only arise from analysis and thinking carefully. They don't come from application of simple heuristics.
1. the only way a messanger is wrong is if they send the wrong message. Hence the adage.
2. It's all an interpretation of a complex situation, it may not be "right", but it's nearly impossible to find the objective truth. In the abscence of truth, no subjective take can truly be "wrong".
>I think that real solutions to complex problems only arise from analysis and thinking carefully.
And the fatalism comes from the realization that modern societies in an alarming number of sectors simply aren't even trying to solve the problem. they are playing a prisoners dilemma and they are more than happy to defect.
> the only way a messanger is wrong is if they send the wrong message.
Well, if a messenger carries a message that he or she knows or should know is incorrect, illegal, or lacks crucial context or qualification, there's a problem there.
The message might be "correct" in that it is an accurate word-for-word transmission of what the message's author said, but the message could still "wrong" in other senses of the word.
Sometimes we just want accurate transmission of content, e.g., with a phone call. In other contexts (scientific, legal, journalistic, political) we expect broadcasters of messages to exercise some responsibility over what and how they say things.
> no subjective take can truly be "wrong"
No one wants to live in a world where everyone believes this. Have you ever been mugged? I have. Being tackled and having my wallet stolen was "truly wrong." I am not interested in political or sociological arguments to the contrary.
Degrading public institutions is not the conclusion of the article, it's an objective fact. The conclusion of the article is that public don't want to do anything about it because people don't like bad news and prefer to shoot all the messengers.
So, that commenter was just wrong, and his wrong assumptions are perfectly explained by the article.
Except it's not an objective fact. It's a widely held opinion, with a fair amount of strong evidence behind it, but there's nothing objective about measuring the strength of public institutions.
There's folks who profit off panic, and prophets of doom should be treated skeptically like anyone else.
Half of my country is destroyed and showered with hundreds of thousands of dead humans and who knows of how many dead animals, while half of US politicum support the invaders and destroyers.
Everything may look as an "opinion" to you, but only until facts start hitting you literally.
>prophets of doom should be treated skeptically like anyone else.
the only difference between a cold truth and a prophet of doom is the lens you view it in. In other words, the opinions of the ones receiving the news.
Skepticism is good to have, but this article wasn't about an anthology of 2000's to 2020's unfettered capitalism. The audience of such an article needs to have some awareness of the modern economic situation to get the most out of this.
yeah, after explaining the whole psychology and telling story of her mom's schizophrenia, then BAM she hits you with a huge dose of, as you said, fatalism.
there's a very odd similarity between her mothers' delusion about cat 4 hurricanes and her own example of people being "blown out of their apartments by typhoon-strength winds". having disasters like that thrown in your face constantly by every conceivable media source probably doesn't help.
fwiw, other essays: "Panic. It's Good For You.", "They Want Us All To Die", etc.
The application of this psychobabble to current events lacks support. People aren’t getting mad at climate protesters because they think the protesters caused climate change. Likewise, people aren’t getting mad at college protesters because they think the caused the problems in the Middle East. Those are actually examples of value disagreements. I.e. when you prominently put your values on display, you invite reaction from people with different values. That has nothing to do with the “blaming the messenger” problem discussed earlier in the article.
Protesters are not only bringing a message, but almost always proposing a solution. And in both cases you mention they are vigorously pointing out the frying pan while being willfully blind to the fact that they're trying to get us to jump in the fire.
It's possible to have a protest movement over somebody protecting an ox, but most protests are about issues that aren't solved because there is no good solution. If there is an answer why hasn't it been done?
this article started out so strongly too--found it pretty interesting. and then just deteriorated. like, within a few sentences in the later half you already know the leftist stance with little nuance on any of the topics being brushed with broad boring strokes
Indeed. I think that another way to look at it would be that protestors are not simply messengers, they are people who have specific goals which they would like to effect.
The war reporters, scientists, or perhaps the journalists reporting on the protests are the messengers here, and whilst I think they do receive a fair amount of cynicism, usually that's linked to the perceived attempt at influence.
i.e. Okay, you want me to change what I'm doing for you. I don't know you, and my natural tendency is to decline such requests until I determine that you're trustworthy, because otherwise I'd simply be under a constant DoS attack.
At the same time, I feel like most everybody feels that they themself are a good, kind, caring person. I could imagine even the schizophrenic mother the author mentions describing her motivations in terms of good, kind, and caring intentions, e.g. to protect her family from the various space aliens and demonic possessions and so on.
If there’s room for a “bad guys” construct to be useful at all, I’m not sure it’s to draw moral validation from the degree of your pessimism and fatalism, the degree to which people characterize you as a downer or a “bad guy.”
Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?
>Of course the conclusion does make sense: that people respond better to the same facts and tensions presented from a place of constructive effort, optimism, good faith, and good spirits—the old thing about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?
I feel this is the difference between "protest" and "persuasion." Protest is simply stating what I believe in. Persuasion is communicating what I believe in in terms consistent with the target audience's values. The latter requires understanding different value systems well enough that you can speak to them credibly. I thought the book "Strangers in Their Own Land" [1] is a great example of that, where a self-described hippie Berkeley professor finds common cause about environmental destruction with people in blood-red Louisiana.
Strangers in Their Own Land is an odd citation here - it doesn't really talk about convincing people so much as understanding their concerns.
It's not uncommon for folks to have real problems in their everyday lives caused by the changing world, but be unwilling to grapple with the actual causes and potential solutions, which require hard decisions and time and sacrifice, rather than blaming it all on communists and trans people who they can persecute right here right now and feel good about it.
You probably don’t like it any more than I do, but the people who, for example, are fighting every day to remove rights from minority groups do, in large part, believe that they are kind.
Brainwashing is a helluva drug.
They do not view the systematic attack of minority groups as “evil” because they have been brainwashed in to believing that the groups they are attacking are evil, so, to them, their hypocrisy is justified as righteous.
a good example is the work of daryl davis who managed to convince people to leave and denounce the kkk. i believe that the reason his approach worked is because those people believed that they were good people, and they left the kkk once they realized that they were actually wrong and prejudiced. if they had seen themselves as evil they would not have left, because doing so would have meant to stop being evil. but they left because they realized that being in the kkk was a contradiction to how they saw themselves.
My understanding of Davis’s work is that some key parts of it also include finding common ground with the other person, treating them as a decent and reasonable person, and letting them come to their own conclusions. There is a respect and humanity baked in to his method
yes, exactly, he treated them like they saw themselves.
it wouldn't work if that understanding wasn't there on both sides.
from my own experience i find it most frustrating when i try to tell someone that their actions are hurtful, and they respond "nah, i am just like that, i can't change", because they have a negative image of themselves.
"“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Going on a huge tangent here, but this mindset is part of why I can barely stand Reddit, but simultaneously can tolerate 4chan. Stuff is barely taken seriously but at the same time many there are aware of that and will simply take off once satisfied for that period. Some reddit dwellers seem to feel like it's the life mission to "fight X" and they genuinely believe they are making the world a better place.
The Author lists many psych studies. Most fail to replicate or have terrible statistical reasoning underlying them.
There’s 3 psych findings that do, but he’s not listing those.
I appreciate he’s up front with his doom. I’d likely be a doomer too if I was in my 20s-30s with a schizophrenic mom and reading psych abstracts.
I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground.
Also reading history will give you more context, strange to be a doomer when you know the full history humans.
> I say the quiet part out loud: psychology as a field and the papers they produce is 90% charlatans and people who didn’t have the intellect for math or science. There’s some good ones, but it’s tough to stand in field with shaky ground.
While I share some of your sentiment here (truly), I think 90% is way too high a number for the field as a whole, and also believe you're likely discounting "emotional intelligence" and the boots-on-ground work that non-academic psychology specialists are doing for public health and mental health in general. IOW, I am *equally* skeptical of armchair psychology people who are so dismissive about "real" psychology people.
Everybody has an opinion, and peer reviews etc. are how we root out "intuition" from clinically proven phenomena. EMDR is a great example of a recent-ish innovation that is still being tested clinically on its efficacy, but shows some promising signs thus far AFAICT. I'm certainly glad somebody is testing it etc. so that we can incorporate it into folks' care, and would not consider the people doing so "90% charlatans" nor would I find them exclusively in some alleged 10% of "non-charlatans"
I agree I’m probably a loon too. I would say 90% is not the number that aren’t ‘up to something interesting’ but 90% cannot do good statistics? I feel pretty good about that number ;)
Odd to dismiss someone as a doomer using the argument of "all psychologists are hacks anyway". The mind is the most complex part of humanity to study and you simply cast those wanting to try and understand this nearly unsolvable topic a "failed mathematicians" (a relatively easy, objective discipline).
>reading history will give you more context, strange to be a doomer when you know the full history humans.
nothing will make you more fatalist than seeing all the slow progress made and how modern society actively works backwards and dismantles so many of these facilities by the request of the financial elite.
From the article: Social workers started .. asked me if I felt safe in my home. They asked if I was okay.
I lied because I'd been taught a valuable lesson ... When you complain, people judge you.
It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing.
It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake.
Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker.
My longish life repeatedly taught me the above is absolutely true.
It also taught me a corollary:
No one, anywhere, wants to clean up their own house.
Political parties. Gov agencies. NGOs. 501c3. Worldwide religion. Local meeting house. Think tank. Grassroots org.
When someone identifies dysfunction, entropy and corruption - when someone works out a legitimately better way and wants to be part of the solution: They can expect suspicion, accusation and being labeled.
It's often couched at first. It's increasingly open if the 'troublemaker' persists.
Size matters, in my experience. Large orgs can have lots of pragmatic folks who get reality. They try to not overly focus on how they contribute. Which I get.
In Smaller/Local orgs, it's common for members to deny they'd ever discourage improvement - even while they actively marginalize 'troublemakers'. Which I have never understood.
None of this is absolute and unvarying but it's common to the point of being the rule.
> the collapse of public health, the collapse of our democracies, the collapse of global industrial civilization, and the collapse of our ecosystems.
Her mother was schizophrenic. OK, we get that. People like to deny problems and sweep them under the rug. We get that, too.
However, generalizing her mother's illness to the "collapse of global industrial civilization" is a bridge too far. People can reasonably differ about that, in general, and specifically about what should be done about it if it IS true.
Would intentional restraint of civilization be a better descriptor? How about neutering by design?
My wife needs long term, in-patient treatment and therapy. After centuries we can finally do it fairly well. And then we put a moat around it that very few can cross.
My wife is not in the small, privileged class that can cross that moat. After a lot of damage, she eventually left us to become homeless. The last I heard she's 2k miles away. Her sister died unexpectedly yesterday. I sent word but it's not likely to reach her.
I don’t think you understood. The mother’s illness was not generalized to the collapse of global civilization. The author’s experience with the former is being generalized to the experience of others as it relates to the “collapse” of global civilization.
Your loved one's decline is something you have superior insight into. "Global decline": no, you probably do not.
The former is something that an outsider can't argue with you about, unless they know the person. The latter: yes, they can. Their facts and opinions might well be better than yours.
Though this article does point out what I think is a real effect in human psychology, it bothers me that the author ends up using the whole narrative to inject her own opinions on world affairs in a context where we should feel guilty for questioning them, as though we're just as bad as her father or the police that wouldn't intervene to mitigate her mother's schizophrenia. That's a really rotten trick.
The article becomes ironic because it's an example of the very thing she is complaining about. All the decent, kind, caring people are vastly outnumbered by people like the writer who apparently tread the exact mainstream line on things like climate change, the Gaza conflict and "Trump is bad" (she writes: "The last threads of democracy are unraveling right in front of us"). One of her covid articles mentions how "we were waiting on the FDA to approve vaccines for children under five". She couldn't be more mainstream if she tried, I couldn't find a meat=bad article but maybe that's still coming. How she can feel alone when the entire US mainstream is on her side is an achievement in self absorption.
>How she can feel alone when the entire US mainstream is on her side is an achievement in self absorption.
because as we saw with the 2016 US elections, majorities don't always make for the path forward. Numbers may be bigger, but invested parties put a lot more care, time, and money into pushing their cause.
And a cornered rat bites back. "the mainstream" got too comfortable and the counter culture is biting back hard. his can lead to just as many regresssions are there are progressions in humanity.
> Someone's first instinct is to suspect you. It's to accuse you of lying. It's to label you a troublemaker.
I used to assume the expression "Kill The Messenger" meant that the receiver of the message was angry about the message, and simply lashed out unfairly at the person who said it, though they knew the messenger was innocent.
But more recently, I've realized that the receiver of the bad news often seems to genuinely feel suspicion towards the messenger -- not merely lashing out at the nearest convenient punching bag.
I'll distinguish two variants of suspicion towards messenger:
* Only the receiver's beliefs are threatened (e.g., doesn't want to believe they made a mistake, or that things aren't so rosy, or that so-and-so did something terrible).
* The receiver is more concretely threatened (e.g., could lose their job/bonus/promotion, or could be tainted by bad PR, or could be implicated in past enabling).
For things like the abuse case to which the article alludes, the kind could vary by person involved involved in a case.
The latter kind, concretely threatened, obviously there is also a concrete, rational, reason to lash out at the messenger, but not to genuinely suspect them, yet AFAICT they might genuinely suspect the messenger anyway.
Yes, after he got away with it for 40 years. Also, it appears that he was released on compassionate grounds after a year of a 15 year term as they imprisoned him when he was almost 90. He’s back to enjoying his retirement at home.
And no, nobody with power can be trusted. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don’t even trust myself with power, and so recuse myself.
Find me a single system on earth that is fit for purpose, and doesn’t primarily serve the interests of those who control it. In my work I’ve peeled back the skin of enough charities, good causes, and entities that purport to exist for the public good to have a truly dreary view of any institution.
If "you have to trick people into doing the right thing"; you might have to take the news with a grain of salt: other may be doing the same to you. Perhaps the doom isn't so imminent?
I weighed 300 pounds at one point, and I lived - was there any imminent need to change? I've got a buddy who's smoked since he was 14 and he's fine today - I guess all those critics who told him to quit were just shrill doomers.
Perhaps, or perhaps we don't know what the fall of civilization looks like? I remember watching a talk by Jonathan Blow where he poses that question. Did the Egyptians who built the pyramids realize when their civilization fell or did it just look like business as usual until it suddenly didn't?
The world, and our monkey brains, are not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change.
A wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth pulls the strings that control half the population of the world's largest democracy. Because he understands and cynically exploits the human impulses described in this article.
I was thinking of lately to the people holding power these days and their responsibility and involvements into the current state of affairs (politics, large corporations, climate/energy crisis, etc.)
I was wondering if having people over 60-70 or even 80yo running most of the things that matter in this world, was missing the radical optimism of youth.
That is why I like students protesting, even if misguided or not well expressed. It shakes the carefully assembled (and sometimes also misguided) world order we are living in.
Sometimes complex problems need to be revisited from fresh perspective, and have the "wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth" to fuck off.
We still have plenty of problems we can solve but don’t. The concept of food insecurity should not exist as a problem in 20th century, but we still have it around.
Well you’re framing it as a problem that can’t be solved. My point was food insecurity is a problem that CAN be solved, but we don’t.
And the issue I take with the framing of “it encompasses solving conflicts between groups of people as a sub problem” is that if you use that excuse, a lot of things can be framed as unsolvable, including the ones that have been already solved. Going to the moon is a solved problem. But if you say we can no longer go to the moon because it would mean solving the conflict between people don’t want to spend on the project and people who do, then going to the moon becomes an unsolvable problem.
expertise and funding to build a rocket, years of training to sustain and adjust to the lack of atmosphere,and the priveledge of being chosen to man these machines which only house maybe a few dozen astronauts at most. All solvable problems, though there's a huge policial/social slant which may obstruct your goal. Maybe you get filtered out for not having a degree, or simply because a director's son got dibs over you. Maybe NASA got defunded and no one gets to go.
I don't really know what the point here is. These are all solvable problems. Not by an individual, but it doesn't take as many key individuals to influence as you'd expect. Likewise, forming a treaty doesn't take as many key individuals as you'd think, but the political roadblocks and other internal incentives block a lot of this progress.
It sounds like social/political problems as well as funding are indeed problems in the causal chain of going to the moon that are not solved.
From what I'm gathering, people consider a problem solved if the engineering problems are solvable. The point that I'm making is that social, political, and financial problems, if impediments, remain unsolved, because in fact one cannot "go to the moon" without solving them.
Only considering a problem real if it's in the engineering path is counterproductive to accomplishing the goal.
sadly there's at least a few more decades minimum, pending sudden turns of health or an abrupt event. 20 years is a lot of time to destabilize a nation.
> not evolved to deal with threats like modern media and climate change.
I see what the author suggests play out routinely on a smaller scale though.
If you grew up with a narcissist, you can spot it in other people, when you see them taking over organizations if you speak up about it you're always the bad guy. Nobody wants to listen to it. Then everyone is surprised when it turns out badly in the end.
Most of the evil done in the world comes from people with the best of intentions. The trouble comes from thinking that their ideas are so right they are entitled to force them on everyone else.
A judge, hearing witnesses and mental health professionals under oath, decides who is unable to behave peacefully. It's usually a last-resort measure, so when it comes to this, it's very clear cut.
Locking up can mean a number of things, but for really bad cases it's just that.
It solves the problem of people out of their mind hurting others because they forget or just refuse to take their medication. And it's a better problem to solve than dealing with dead bodies.
You can still set as many controls as you deem reasonable, but sometimes families are put in impossible situations, just like in the article.
I have been close to people in that kind of situation and I am happy to answer.
We tend to see those questions from the nightmarish movie plot perspective in which someone is wrongfully institutionalized. Cuckcoo's Nest and all that.
Also many families want to have their mentally ill members with them. With proper medication they can live a happy life.
But there are terrible situations when they don't take the medication or there's an addiction problem.
There's very little nuance in these cases, really.
>We tend to see those questions from the nightmarish movie plot perspective in which someone is wrongfully institutionalized. Cuckcoo's Nest and all that.
No, these are happpening in real time. Look at how many people on death row get off and you see that the justice system is far from objective.
That's exactly why many US states took down asylums. The idea was good, isolate problematic individuals and get them back on heir feet. Then the system abused it to treat people who needed help badly, and put disproportately marginalized groups in there.
The nuance is that we historically failed to be nuanced, and let biases get in the way.
I think it is good to bear in mind that the distinction between perception, cognition and action/behaviour is in reality a reduction. There is more to these categories about the way we communicate and organise our society rather than mapping to a corresponding reality.
We cannot really handle incogruencies between these domains. The meanings we give to things, situations, people are not merely thoughts, they are stuff we enact on them. We can perceive something as unfair or destructive, but if nothing can be done to change it (or what can be done has too high a cost so it is practically inaccessible) we will tend to seek whatever sort of congruence we can. It is hard to think one way and act another, because that requires more energy which we are evolved to try to minimise. Hard realisations are that hard because they imply a sharp change in behaviour and way of living that we may not want, and because the implications span many domains that need to change. Author's family realising the reality of the mother would require changes in the perception of the family situation that was too uncomfortable. It is easier to hide things under the carpet to preserve the facade of a normal family life, than enact all the changes required. This is why such situations are so common when it is about families.
So, I do not quite agree with the premise and conclusion of the article, in the sense that I do not think that there is anything ingrained in our primate brains regarding how we judge incoming negative information, but rather something ingrained in our cultural institutions and social reality, which is what makes them both stable and dysfunctional. Seemingly irrational behaviours make perfect sense once one can understand how to contextualise them.
That anecdote at the beginning brought to mind a personal event recently that I keep meaning to write a proper blog about.
A friend of mine, who is much younger than I am and to whom I've acted as something of a mentor for many years, has her first proper job in a long time. It's a blue-collar job for an understaffed place, and she's been working her ass off to keep things moving along smoothly. And she likes that! She likes holding things together, overcoming the challenges that workplace puts on her, being the one standing between them and the whole place falling apart. She likes doing a good job, and finds personal value in it.
She asked me whether or not that was okay.
Because, she reasoned, the harder she worked, the more her employers would just use that as an excuse not to hire the people they need. Every time she plugs a leak, she's removing pressure from the owners to fix it. Her hard work, she reasoned, isn't rewarded, it's exploited, and it paves the way for further exploitation of both my friend and her coworkers.
That's horrifying! It's way beyond alienation from your product, it's punishment for pursuing virtue and excellence.
Work is a good thing! It's a natural part of who we are, it can be a massive source of self-worth and self-esteem, it's a core defining part of human life to the point that a lot of our very names come from the labor of our ancestors. For me, it proved to be the cure to many of my mental health ills almost all by itself. Working hard at a job I liked turned my entire life around piece by piece, and not working for a bit afterward turned out to be poison to my well-being. I was so stressed about my current work I couldn't sleep last night, and it's still better than I felt not working, because work is that important to my stability and self-esteem.
I ended up telling my friend that yeah, she should feel okay about it and try to better herself, because she can take every way she grows with her when she leaves. But it's hard to argue that she's wrong about the adversarial calculus, and I get why people check out. It's a painful thing to see.
When we feel bad in our jobs, we tend to put blame on coworkers, managers, or the organization's structure. But often the situation is not as bad as we think, we just feel bad and want to find a cause.
As long as we feel good on the other hand, we tend to think, where's the catch?
So indeed as long as she likes the job, she just should keep doing it and get personal growth out of it.
I would be interested in reading mentioned personal blog.
Neither of the psychological tendencies noted by the author are “bugs” or failings of the human psyche. They are adaptations to primarily social environments. They are useful heuristics that are right more often than wrong. Neither of them is an explanation for the author’s perceived vilification of his worldview. Tendencies like these don’t rule absolutely over human thought, they influence it but any amount of examination or second thought is enough to balance their contribution. If we want to psychologize then I would add that the author seems to be in the throes of a persecution complex typical of certain stages of life. Generally this will resolve with more experience and interaction with a broader range of ideas and people. It stems from an erroneous belief in both the certitude of one’s own conclusions and the impossibility of anyone coming to a contrary opinion based on sound reasoning.
> they influence it but any amount of examination or second thought is enough to balance their contribution.
That's sadly in short supply these days. distractions from entertainment or wearing down from unsustanable workloads to survive. Take your pick.
>Generally this will resolve with more experience and interaction with a broader range of ideas and people.
funnily enough it only makes me more cynical. It does make me realize a lot of people are living normally. It also makes me realize a lot of people are being crushed by society through no fault of their own.
Dear lord, there are many people missing the point of the article but this entire comment is egregious.
> Neither of the psychological tendencies noted by the author are “bugs” or failings of the human psyche.
They can be, and those situations were what was described. The author never claimed that these failings are not sometimes or even often a useful heuristic - in fact, they linked to a research article which shows that these processes are even separate from our evaluations of people (the evil bananas study).
> They are useful heuristics that are right more often than wrong
Maybe - but knowing they're there so you can understand and prevent the wrongness is important, not just in your life but to the future of our species.
> Tendencies like these don’t rule absolutely over human thought
Author never claimed they do.
> If we want to psychologize
What?
> the author seems to be in the throes of a persecution complex typical of certain stages of life.
What the fuck?
> It stems from an erroneous belief in both the certitude of one’s own conclusions and the impossibility of anyone coming to a contrary opinion based on sound reasoning.
The author linked to important and interesting research, and wrote about it in a very engaging way. At no point anywhere did they make logical leaps, or insist that one conclusion or another was the only right way to think.
The stone cold fact is that this phenomenon, which shows up in multiple studies, explains a lot about our biggest current problems, from corrupt politicians to alarming climate research. Attacking the messenger and even pathologizing them is completely unwarranted, actively unhelpful, and a perfect example of the author's point.
This is a great article, it made me realize it's better to say (write) nothing. Personal opinion doesn't matter, it only silos you.
Personal feedback doesn't matter, you hurt someone.
No one really is interested in how you are, it's just generic speech.
It is the reason why I don't partcipiate in many conversations anymore. It's just easier to not reply, or worse, if I have to, reply with what the person wants to hear.
Glad to know it isn't just me. Sad to know that it's easier to go along then really be a maverick and be different.
Unlike The World Is Ending Doomerism, Cognitive Bias Doomerism transcends generations; the viewpoint that the brain is wholly defined by a list of biases.
And I don’t trust that the author is able to constructively and positively deal with all of the idiots (their words), in part because (according to them) they also have such a faulty brain.
Thinking that you alone know "the right thing", that you are surrounded by "idiots", that people "call you rude or disrespectful, simply because you don't smile when you talk" and not because they (correctly) feel that you have no respect for them is simply hubris. Maybe this is the "dry humor" the author mentioned, but a) in my experience, people who hide behind the "it's just a joke" defense are rarely actually joking, and b) if your goal is to influence people then how your humor lands is in fact your problem. As they say, if you meet an asshole in the morning, you met at an asshole. If you meet assholes all day, you're the asshole.
> It comes down to this:
> You have to find a way to be the smart, positive, compassionate, mature, respectful, charming one. You have to do that even if everyone around you is acting like a complete idiot.
> You have to achieve a fine balance between sugar coating and blunt honesty. Above all, you have to anticipate that all of your hard work won't achieve the results you want in the short term. It takes a long time. A lot of people won't listen at first.
> You often have to trick people into doing the right thing.
> It's exhausting.
> It takes a lot out of you to be respectful to idiots all day long, especially when many of them go out of their way to do you harm. Despite the audacious tone of my writing (my dry humor is often mistaken for bitterness or anger), I try to remain calm and compassionate when dealing with people right in front of me.
> And of course, a lot of people will call you rude or disrespectful, simply because you don't smile when you talk.
Yeah, the author comes across as being incredibly sanctimonious.
The three "featured" articles on their blog are headlined "Panic. It's Good For You.", "They Want Us All To Die", and "A Matter of When, Not If".
They have a family history of schizophrenia but they seem to lack the humility to realise that they don't seem to be engaging with people with a view to understanding them.
With that context, trying to convince people that they're simply attacking the messenger feels disingenuous.
His comparison to global warming and hurricanes was on point. The issues with his mom and global warming seemed equally difficult to resolve. With the obvious issue that there does not seem to be an adult in the room that solves the issue.
I think this is really interesting and and I think it would have been stronger without digressing into current political events. It becomes a self-affirmation - "everyone who agrees with me is clear-eyed rational thinker, everyone who disagrees with me is laboring under from psychological shortcomings."
We all sometimes fail to do a "good job of distinguishing between a threat and someone trying to warn" us. Pretending it only happens to people who disagree with us is just another delusion
> It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future.
The public tend to get annoyed at these protestors because their protests are ineffective and disrupt everyday working people. If the protestors brought their protests to the oil executives, I expect they'd be much more widely accepted.
> It explains how university students have somehow wound up as the villains in so many people's eyes, instead of the governments sponsoring and committing genocide.
If this is referring to Gaza, not everyone holds the view that Israel is committing genocide. Many see it as a justified response to a large-scale terrorist attack by Hamas. And either way, the students' protests aren't effective either. It does nothing to affect the actual conflict, just annoys students who are there to study.
N=1, but I disagree with these protests simply because I disagree with their aims.
I'm not religious. If I had to live in a world with either Israel or Palestine in it, which seems to be the implicit choice Hamas are presenting, I'd choose Israel.
I think that people of the Jewish faith are on the whole far more tolerant and accepting than followers of Islam are. Even the militants are more reasonable.
Protest groups with titles like "Queers for Palestine" I find to be not villanous but rather simply misguided. Of course I'm going to distrust someone who seems to be borderline suicidal, the normal incentives I assume of my fellow man don't apply to them.
> It explains why the public gets angry at climate protestors instead of the oil executives who've ruined their future.
Oil companies aren't the cause of climate change. The people who burn the oil are.
P.S. Oil replaced the slaughter of the whales and saved them from extinction. Oil also produces much less pollution than coal, which oil replaced. Coal saved the forests from extinction.
And coal/oil marked (mostly) the end of slavery and other forms of indentured labour.
But Jevons' paradox means that the efficiency of oil leads to its consumption at huge levels. You want the strength of 150 horses just to go to the shop and back? No problem, Average Guy, just pop the key in and off you go.
Now imagine how rich you'd have to be in 1800 to have one hundred and fifty horses at your disposal. The expense and labour involved in keeping them fed and watered, and the labourers themselves fed and watered.
And that's just a small truck. For a passenger airliner, you're looking at eight hundred horses per passenger that's typical of a long-haul jet aircraft.
What do you prefer? Short lives, famines, etc.? That was ended by the industrial revolution.
I suggest touring Washington's Mt Vernon estate. He was probably the richest man in America at the time. I wouldn't trade my current standard of living for his.
I'd prefer a culture with a little self-discipline and self-control. Not using 150 horses where five, or none, will do.
Let's use the oil, sure, but treat it like we need it to last 200 years, not 20.
If you take an audit view, you can see that some of what we burn - perhaps a third - is essential to modern quality of life. Making sure people have access to enough nutritious food, and access to semiconductors, satellites and antibiotics. Very hard to replace this stuff, and we're screwed if and when it runs out.
Another third or so is used valuably but inefficiently. Transport and food choices where you'd need to get the job done, but could get it done on a lot less. Heating/cooling large and poorly insulated buildings. People with desk jobs driving trucks for a commute which a hatchback or light motorcycle could do. Beef, so much beef. Can't substitute any of these to zero, but some pretty significant reductions are possible with little more than self-discipline.
And then there's a third that's just sheer waste. The majority of long-haul flights taken add a negligible amount to quality of life or human experience relative to what they burn. Basically everything the super-rich does, their lives are no happier, wiser, longer or better than the just plain rich (or even the upper reaches of the middle-class, in well-off social democratic countries), but their consumption footprints are proportionally huge.
Sure they are. They're victims of the entities which killed public transport so they could profit more, and the oil companies who lied and funded disinformation about climate change.
> As for oil company research, anybody could do research.
Many have? Even long before the 70s.
That does not absolve oil companies of their crimes. They've spent untold millions promoting doubt for 50+ years, lobbied politicians for subsidies, infiltrated regulatory agencies, targeted activists, smeared alternatives, etc etc, all in full knowledge that they were putting us on a catastrophic course.
> You can also blame the activists for preventing nuclear power generation.
"Activists" are not a monolithic entity. Nuclear isn't perfect either - there's only so much fuel in the world.
Also, I would instantly bet you my life savings that Big Oil money promoted the anti-nuclear campaign.
I think you need to think much, much deeper on this.
And if the oil companies shut down in 1960, what would our economy have run on?
In WW2, the main target of the USAF bombing campaign was the Reich's fuel supply. They were successful, the German war machine ground to a halt from fuel shortages. They did use a lot of horses, but there weren't remotely enough.
The German U-Boot campaign was aimed at cutting Britain off from fuel.
A better question would be if they had remained at the scale they were at in the 60's (or 70's) while their parent energy companies transitioned into better alternative energy technology earlier one.
The option was there, the dangers were known and the choice was made by executives to FUD their way out of any action other than funding thinks to counter the early climate change findings, to actively work against better public transport in the US, to promote larger and larger vehicles, etc.
Like building roads where traffic expands to fill capacity, society expands to consume available energy .. and those profiting from fossil fuel extraction expanded production rather than pivot towards better sources.
That's pure unfettered capitalism for you - dumb as an ox and making poor decisions at scale for the masses much of the time.
You keep asking what the alternatives to covering up imminent planetary destruction with a decades long coordinated campaign are...
The alternative was to come out and say, this is what we found, let's put money into alternatives - solar, hydro, nuclear etc.
How is that not incredibly obvious?
And why is your immediate reaction to being informed of oil companies global atrocity scale actions to defend them, as if you couldn't possibly imagine a single thing they might have done differently?
> What do you think the USSR ran on?
Are you one of those binary thinkers, who think the only alternative to unfettered predatory crony criminal capitalism is full on gulag-style communism? How fascinating.
Remember, we're talking the 1960s. Solar panel technology was not very good. Hydro is nice, but it is economically destructive (which is why in the PNW the dams are being removed). There is also not remotely enough hydro power even if all the rivers were dammed. Nuclear power was not stopped by oil companies, it was stopped by activists.
The Haber-Bosch process converts air to fertilizer, and results in about 1% of global emissions. Eliminating that would quickly cut the population by several billions.
Removing oil (and coal) from the economy in 1960 would have necessitated the population being reduced to 1800 levels. Such a decline would inevitably result in absolutely massive wars, and we all know how environmentally destructive wars are.
As for government run agriculture, the USSR is hardly the only example of its massive failure. Government run agriculture always results in famine.
The idea that our oil reliance is all because of evil oil companies is simply absurd.
P.S. I remember, back in the 1970s oil crisis, there was a lot of talk about the oil companies buying up patents for 200mpg carburetors, and keeping them off the market. I ask my dad about that (career military) and he bust out laughing. He said the military runs on oil (recall my remarks about crippling enemy oil being a goal of all the major combatants). There was no way in hell the military would eschew use of 200mpg patents regardless of any silly patent laws.
Your insistent avoidance of the point* would be alarming and surprising if I expected better.
But I've read your previous four comments, and I don't.
* One more time, just in case it gets through: oil companies covered up their own research and deliberately set the entire planet on a course to self destruction for profit. This is profoundly evil, and if you don't see why there's not much I can do about that.
Hearing isn't the same as understanding. When someone responds with points that don't really connect to the original argument, it's sensible to repeat yourself in case the other person didn't understand.
You really don't understand how systematically lying about fossil fuel's role in climate change for 50 years makes big oil *directly* responsible? Yikes dude.
> Show us any non-profit communist economy with a better environmental track record
The fact that they lied and committed unthinkable damage to us all for profit doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with communist economies. Your thinking is extraordinarily disjointed. It seems to be built of naughties AM radio talking points that don't all quite fit together.
Such confused thought is a sadly predictable consequence of how big oil's decades of FUD has poisoned the discourse, and warped vulnerable minds.
Buddy they put our species in massive harm's way, just so they could keep profits rolling in. If they weren't tight with our politicians and media they'd be in jail, or worse.
They're the cause of unimaginable suffering already, with far more to come. Stop defending them, for the sake of literally all life on the planet (excepting maybe cockroaches and tardigrades). We have very little time to fight back and save ourselves the worst of it - about 2 years according to most every climate scientist.
> It does nothing to affect the actual conflict, just annoys students who are there to study.
I somewhat agree but there is power in positioning the Overton window even if ultimately you do a poor job of bringing people to your side within it. If you don't have billionaires bankrolling a 24 hour network and can set the editorial themes for you, you have to take other paths.
I also think when people say this, they forget that "if you stuck to the proper channels I still wouldn't care about your issue but I would be less annoyed" isn't exactly a sales pitch.
People are really missing the point of the sick mom metaphor. When people were acknowledging the problem and the mom was getting treatment, things were better. When the author was pointing out there was a serious problem and people resented them for saying so and ignored it, that was bad.
If people acknowledge there are certain serious problems in the world and that something needs to be done, things will get better. If people keep shooting the messenger, that is bad.
I have no problem with disagreement when it's at least coherent and based on actual fact.
But I can't see any legitimate criticism in the entire post, just a load of people jumping to conclusions and even attacking the author. Misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and disturbing assumptions are all over the place. It's weird.
So many people very obviously missed the entire point, and are mad about stuff they invented entirely.
> When you complain, people judge you. It doesn't matter what you're complaining about. It doesn't matter what you're protesting or whistle-blowing. It doesn't matter if your life is at stake. It doesn't matter if thousands of lives are at stake. It doesn't matter if the fate of humanity is at stake.
Have to vehemently disagree there. It doesn't matter if you believe that thousands of lives are at stake. I will stipulate, readily, that being able to assert things about one's own life are within the easy realm. But thousands? Fate of humanity? Yeah, no, I am judging - because those seem like hyperbole/manipulative claims (even if made with the best intentions), and is the same conversation device as the use of 'they say' (who's the "they"? what, exactly, was said, and under what circumstances?)
Fair point. When there is proof (as there is with your example), it is a different story. But unsubstantiated claims? Still judging, by way of wanting proof.
> There are so many bugs and glitches in the human psyche to explain what's happening and why it takes so much patience, and so much effort, to ever get anyone to take threats seriously or to change their behavior, for any reason.
> "Bad news messengers may be prime candidates in recipients' search for antagonists to cast in accounts of unwanted outcomes." Bad news also motivates people to come up with "fallacious" causal explanations "often generated effortlessly, seemingly automatically." They generate these fallacious explanations through poor reasoning "characterized by shallow, unconscious thought."
===
I feel like it is much more productive to understand what is going on in people's minds when they say wrong things VS debunking and moralizing. It is a LOT of work though.
Over the years, I have come up with this framework. I label three possible responses when I, the messenger, bring bad news or contradicts someone:
(a) the RATIONAL RESPONDER believes the messenger is trying to be helpful by sharing their information and may re-formulate their position.
(b) the PATRONIZING PARENT believes the messenger is an ass, patronizes the messenger, and dismisses everything they say.
(c) the DANGEROUS DELUSIONAL believes they are always right and the messenger is a threat who needs to be silenced.
With patronizing parent, I try to be calm and hopefully by sheer persistence they will come around one day and listen to reason. With dangerous delusional, I mostly try to limit the amount of damage they can do to me. I don't have any better ideas.
Whistle-blowing is hard to distinguish from complaining about others and deflecting blame. These are staples of the narcissist's playbook. If you sound like a narcissist, people quite reasonably might suspect you of being one.
My take is this. If you need to give someone some bad or unsavory news, ease into it gently. Start with the gentlest form of the information. Have documentation and receipts to back up all your allegations. But don't reveal them unless questioned repeatedly.
Very cringe pep talk for self-appointed saviors of humanity. Stay strong in your futile struggles that make you feel like you're worth something, comrades! Topkek
This is happening because, for decades, the western intelligentsia has been telling people to abandon normality because normality is bad — and being abnormal, radical, extreme, an outlier is good.
This is how you destroy the social fabric, how you make everyone hate each other, how you ensure there can be no unity on anything other than grievances, and that unity can at best be tenuous and fleeting, and that the only constant that will remain is disunity.
The consequences of this is civilizational collapse, there is no stopping it any more, we are in the dying days of the west, of the Christian world order. What comes next will be antithetical to western values.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis
The tendency is to think ALL complex problems can be solved if I just have the right info, the right skill, the right people, the right resources, enough time etc etc. But for some problems the stars will not align. In those cases what do you do?
You have 2 option - 1. pick a Simpler problem where u do have the info, skill, resources, people, time to ensure the outcome is going to be positive 2. pick the complex problem but accept you are not going to solve it completely.
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