Decline of the Empire

The Best Kept Secret On Earth

I was thinking about the pointlessness of writing a series of posts illustrating a "good enough" model of human behavior which few people have read and even fewer have understood. So I won't do it. I have a few other things to talk about which follow from the model (for example, religious behaviors), but that's about it. I'm done.

The flatland model implies that important human behaviors at their root are predictable and therefore meaningless in anything other than an evolutionary (Live & Grow) sense. That is literally the last thing humans want to be believe about themselves.

Adventures In Flatland — Part IV

The first three Adventures In Flatland essays were written in 2014 and appeared on this blog (DOTE).

Adventures In Flatland

Adventures In Flatland — Part II

Adventures In Flatland — Part III

This essay presupposes that you have read the original, but it would be helpful to read all three. This fourth and final long essay does not review those earlier essays. You've got to read them.

I use the term "flatland" in different ways. As a hypothesis, the flatland model posits a set of unconscious core instincts which drive our most important characteristic behaviors. I also use the term as an adjective (e.g. describing those characteristic behaviors as "flatland nonsense"). Flatland as a metaphor implies a 2-dimensional world, where the missing 3rd dimension is human nature itself (all those unconscious processes). Otherwise, the term simply refers to the human condition itself. These various usages will usually be clear enough in context.

Commute To Work By Boat

File Under:  we do not make this stuff up

I have nearly completed the 4th Flatland essay. After that, I will send it to a few early reviewers for comments, make the final changes and publish it late next week. Or so I hope.

Anyway, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson makes a brief appearance in the essay's conclusion. And if you read this article, I think you'll see why (Bloomberg, March 8, 2017). I saw this after I had used Robinson as a Flatland example. I may have to change the text (or link to this).

... His 18th novel, due out on March 14, bases its plot on something more typically down-to-earth: New York real estate. In New York 2140, unstoppable glacial melt has caused a 50-foot rise in global sea levels, flooding the city. Everything below Midtown has become a tidal zone where menacing green waters flow around the ground floors of skyscrapers.

Wall Streeters commute to work by boat; the super rich live on high ground, above 125th Street; and speculators have started moving in on downtown, an underwater Bohemia where artists and middle-class strivers struggle to get by. A winter freeze locks the city in ice. And, spoiler alert, billions of gallons of standing water don’t help with the smell in summer.

But life goes on much as it does today. New Yorkers adapt. “Most people are treating climate change as the disaster that is going to end civilization,” says Gerry Canavan, an English professor at Marquette University who co-edited a book of essays on ecology and sci-fi with Robinson. By contrast, he says, Robinson shows a “process of improvisation and innovation that will allow us to continue living.” People living their lives, only wetter, may not produce the same vicarious thrills as more dystopian visions—John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape From New York imagined the city in 1997 as a walled maximum-security prison—but books such as 2140 feel more relevant and essential as startling reports of climate change mount. The year 2140 isn’t exactly around the corner, but we did just have the hottest year on record. How far off will rowing to work seem even in 2040?

Climate change has long been Robinson’s preoccupation. His Science in the Capital trilogy, whose first installment was published in 2004, stars National Science Foundation employees who, having failed to stem the consequences of global warming, launch “terraforming” projects, pumping melted glacial ice into the Sahara and trying to restart a stalled Gulf Stream. His 2312, published 300 years before the title date, predicted that we’d figure out how to live on Mercury and the moons of Jupiter but not how to prevent our planet from becoming too hot. Stephanie LeMenager, a professor at the University of Oregon who studies climate change fiction, recommends 1992’s Red Mars, the first book in a trilogy by the same name, which explores that planet’s colonization. Robinson “tends to be a utopianist,” she says, explaining that he’s “a person who finds solutions in the most wicked problems—problems that would seem unsolvable.”

The utopian streak running through 2140 has its roots in what would seem a particularly intractable problem. Robinson believes that the free-market financial system, the cause of a great deal of ruin in recent years, could yet become something better...

There you go.

Spicey And Bruce Hood

Still writing the 4th essay, which is coming along nicely. I'm pleased with it, although some you may not be (it's getting a little technical).

Pertaining to that essay we have Bruce Hood talking about the socially constructed self (2nd video).

But first, and this is really far more pertinent and important here in America in 2017, we have Spicey briefing the White House press corps.

Carry on.

Elizabeth Kolbert Discovers Flatland (Sort Of)

In an article called Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds which appears in The New Yorker this month, Elizabeth Kolbert discovered Flatland (sort of).

Did she actually read my Flatland essays, especially the 3rd one, which directly addresses the issues she writes about? Hell, no! That would be way to much to expect.

However, in reviewing three books on predictable human irrationality, Kolbert actually discovers (or at least writes about) the salient Flatland point, which is emphasized in the reprint below.

I will reference and quote this article in the 4th essay. I'm not going to express false humility here. I'm way, way ahead of Kolbert and the researchers she quotes. I daresay it will stay that way because they live in Flatland and that's what Flatland dictates.

— Dave

In “Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us” (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what’s hazardous is not being vaccinated; that’s why vaccines were created in the first place. “Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine,” the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there’s no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side—sort of—Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs. “It feels good to ‘stick to our guns’ even if we are wrong,” they observe.

The Gormans don’t just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they’d like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.)

Here is the point, which we might call Flatland futility.

But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

“The Enigma of Reason,” “The Knowledge Illusion,” and “Denying to the Grave” were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of “alternative facts.” These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring.

No, it's not

Hans Rosling, Rest In Peace

Some time ago I wrote a short post called What Are We Up Against. The post featured a video by Hans Rosling, who passed away last week. Hans was very popular among the humans. And if you watch the new video below, you'll see why. This obituary is from the New York Times.

Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor who transformed himself into a pop-star statistician by converting dry numbers into dynamic graphics that challenged preconceptions about global health and gloomy prospects for population growth, died on Tuesday in Uppsala, Sweden. He was 68...

Even before “post-truth” entered the lexicon, Dr. Rosling was echoing former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s maxim that everyone is entitled to his own opinions but not to his own facts.

“He challenged the whole world’s view of development with his amazing teaching skills,” Isabella Lovin, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, said in a statement.

On Twitter, Bill Gates remembered Dr. Rosling as a “great friend, educator and true inspiration.”

A self-described “edutainer,” Dr. Rosling captivated vast audiences in TED Talks — beginning a decade ago in front of live audiences and later viewed online by millions — and on television documentaries like the BBC’s “The Joy of Stats” in 2010...

“I produce a road map for the modern world,” he told The Economist in 2010. “Where people want to drive is up to them. But I have the idea that if they have a proper road map and know what the global realities are, they’ll make better decisions.”

In Dr. Rosling’s version of those realities, the traditional divide between third-world and industrialized nations had become anachronistic, since so many countries were undergoing development, with some in Asia improving faster than some in Europe. He considered that five billion people continued to head toward healthier lives while one billion remained mired in poverty and disease; that progress toward health and wealth had contributed to climate change; and that the world was so poorly governed that possibilities to improve it abounded.

“I’m not an optimist,” Dr. Rosling once said. “I’m a very serious possibilist.”

Not an optimist?

He predicted that the United Nations’ goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 was attainable because the tools to do so had been identified and the share of people living in that condition had already declined by more than half in 25 years.

He also argued vigorously that overpopulation would no longer be problematic as the world grew wealthier and fertility rates declined.

“There are so many who think that death keeps control of population growth,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2013. “That’s just wrong!”

He told The Economist: “The only way to reach sustainable population levels is to improve public health. Child survival is the new green.”

But wait, didn't he also believe that progress toward health and wealth contributes to climate change? And it does!

Rest in peace, Hans. 

In the middle of the video below, Hans says his happy scenario will occur "if [and] only if" certain conditions are met. Listen for it. He only says it once. Then he seems to forget that he said it.

March For Science?

Still working on the 4th essay. Trying hard to get it right.

An article in Vox explores the pros and cons of the March For Science, which is scheduled for Earth Day 2017 (April 22). The idea is that lots of scientists will descend on our nations's capital to tell our leaders ... what? ... that science matters?

Ah, there's the rub. Once you march for science, science becomes political. And of course the Usual Suspects will be all over this one (from Twitter)—

colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues

— March for Science (@ScienceMarchDC) January 29, 2017

Ableism? Inter-sex phobia? I'm With Her?

Social scientist Dietram Scheufele foresees a problem that the march organizers can’t avoid: what messages the marchers bring with them. If marchers show up wearing “I’m With Her” T-shirts, or if large numbers come with signs advocating for abortion rights, for instance, conservatives who read news coverage about the march may be more inclined to dismiss it.

It won’t matter if there truly is a diversity of views on display during the march. All it takes is one photo to solidify an impression.

Really, the planet is heating up, science tells us why, the science is compelling ... end of story. In an ideal world, it shouldn't be necessary to march for science.

But this is not an ideal world, is it? What we've got here is a bunch of big-brained, highly social, story-telling monkeys.

Most scientists believe the hard line between research and activism should never be breached. They've got a point because once that line is blurred, for most of these monkeys, science and politics become indistinguishable.

Scientists also seek to protect their funding by staying out of the political fray. But science gets funded by the government, which makes it a political issue whether these scientists like it or not. 

On the other hand, maintaining the line between research and activism allows scientists to maintain the fiction that they are doing science to inform and guide policy-making. As if truth matters.

Not happening, sorry fellas. If you want to try to get something done, you've got to roll  around in the mud just like everybody else. Not that mud-rolling will accomplish anything other than making you dirty. And you know what? You were already covered with mud whether you know it or not.

What a mess. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Nothing unusual about that. Thanks for playing!

Have a nice weekend.

Inequality Is Normal Unless...

I'm still working on the 4th Flatland essay and will be for some time to come. So I thought I'd post something during the interim.

Two articles caught my eye recently. Both had a similar theme — inevitable inequality. I was startled to read this opening text in 700 years of Western inequality, in one chart (Vox, January 23, 2017).

We tend to think of rising income inequality as a 21st-century problem. A more equal distribution of wealth is normal, and the growing clout of the 1 percent is an anomaly.

The problem is that in the long arc of history, none of that is really true. For centuries, rising inequality has been the norm in the West — and it’s the relative equality of the post–World War era that is the anomaly.

Right! Along these lines, you might review the last section of my essay Moral Failure In Liberalized Market States (DOTE, June 25, 2014). It starts off like this—

It is unfortunate in the United States that political liberals and progressives always take the post-World War II decades as illustrative and exemplary with respect to what they believe is possible in achieving their desired utopia. I have given considerable thought to that historical period, a time when a large, prosperous Middle Class arose in America, for it is in many respects exceptional in human history. I grew up during those decades but have learned since that yearning for their return is a form of progressive nostalgia. We are very unlikely to see the return of the more inclusive moral preferences of the 1950's and 1960's...

Inauguration Day

Just letting you know I'm still alive and kicking. Still working on the 4th essay. Getting down to business has focused my attention. Since this is the last essay, I want to get things right.

You know, to cement my soon-to-be-exalted place in human history 

It is a "special" day in Flatland — they're all special! — because today the "Insane Clown" begins his hostile take-over of the White House.

The Tweeter-In-Chief now speaks for the nation!

You would have thought, thinking counterfactually as you should always do in contemplating Flatland, that the irreducible absurdity of a former Reality-TV star leading the Earth's most powerful nation would have led to many voluntary retirements or suicides among the nation's political-types, elites and media as they came to realize with absolute finality that their lives have been and still are a cosmic joke.

That didn't happen. They will carry on. There will be business-as-usual and plenty of it!

Where are the space aliens when you need them?

Teflon Humans

Still working on the 4th Flatland essay. This is clearly going to take a while.

— Dave

---

Reader BJ wrote as follows in the comments section of Flatland Nihilism.

The thing that I see missing from the discussion is that happiness doesn't change for even good events, such as winning the lottery (studies done in both 70s and 00s). No matter what we experience good or bad, we return to baseline brain chemistry or programming or whatever you want to call it.

That is true nihilism.

Yes, it is.

I like the Teflon metaphor best because, with humans generally, it captures the idea that nothing sticks. Experience and knowledge basically count for nothing in the general case when something fucked-up happens. And of course humans fuck things up all the time. With rare exceptions, humans always return to their "baseline state". That baseline includes every Flatland instinct and bias I've ever discussed on this blog. It's not merely somebody's personal baseline.

This insight forms a subtle but powerful shift in my thinking about Homo sapiens, for the return to baseline—the nothing sticks adaptation—is the most basic and insurmountable form of existential threat filtering (see the first Flatland essay).

Filtering über alles. What's at stake is that humans acknowledge their own fucked-up nature. That will never happen. Their evolved psychological defenses are ironclad. Will never happen. What Flatland humans optimistically term "resilience" is nihilistic human inertia writ large.

This is easy to see once you grasp it, but it took me a long time to do just that. I alluded to this the other day in my authentic hope post.

For example, most everybody forgets all about that hopeful Ted Talk 5 minutes after its over. Everybody applauds, sings Kum-Ba-Yah and then goes home. Nothing much happens thereafter. In short, false hope amounts to yet another happy moment in the life of a social, story-telling species. These observations apply to Grinspoon's book as well.

And what applies to Ted Talks or books on Big Important Subjects also applies to nearly everything else when there's something important at stake. Every morning there is a talk show on NPR (now 1A, formerly the Diane Rehm Show). Everyday a panel of "experts" discusses some fucked up thing. Everyday. The discussion ends, the fucked up thing is still fucked up, and then they do it again tomorrow. No one ever notices that virtually everything (in America) is fucked up.

And why? Well, they do it everyday. Afterwards we forget about it, and they forget about it, and we listen in again tomorrow when another panel of "experts" discusses some other fucked-up thing. Wash, rinse and repeat. Nothing sticks.

This truly does apply to everything. Suppose Congress does some corrupt, fucked-up thing which screws lots of little people. (They do this all the time.) Some time afterwards, most everybody gets used to it, they adapt—only a precious few remember—and the circumstantial baseline is subtly reset.

More bad climate news? We need to act now! And quickly! Like water off a duck's back.

The deeper baseline, human nature itself, including the adaptive behavior I'm describing, can never be reset.

And if you complain about what Congress did, you will be told "life goes on" or "there's no point crying over spilled milk" or some similar adaptive nonsense. There are lots of such phrases, and they are deployed widely and liberally. There's a good reason for that.

I mean, this Teflon humans stuff has been pissing me off for as long as I can remember.

I think it's the temporal aspect of the return to baseline that makes this so hard to grasp. I've fought against this adaptation for many years now by maintaining extensive notes files. I update them everyday. So I don't forget. That's what allows me to write this blog.

In short, my baseline is always shifting. That's gotta be very, very rare. (Well, actually, it doesn't shift much anymore  )

If experience and knowledge basically count for nothing, there is only nihilism. Every time somebody tells you "life goes on" or "you'll get over it"—you are not dead yet—that person is telling you that human life generally, and your life in particular, is utterly meaningless.

That's totally absurd, of course, but how can evolved nihilism not be absurd?

In this sense the human condition could not be worse.

Have a nice weekend.