Correlation is Not Causation, BUT…

Posted on May 18, 2023 by Dave Pollard


cartoon by xkcd, of course

It’s often been said that the truth is the first casualty of war, and perhaps that could be said of culture wars as well. Right-wingers, libertarians and others who are wildly distrustful of government, regulation and anything they don’t completely understand (which includes anything to do with complexity or science), quickly glommed onto disgruntled “experts” and charlatans who seeded doubt about every finding and recommendation of public health experts during CoVid-19, for example, essentially sabotaging disease management, and likely causing untold millions of unnecessary deaths and shortening the healthy lives of millions more.

The challenge of trying to keep ahead of luddite misinformation is compounded by two factors: The fact that sciences and scientific knowledge are never static, exact or certain; and the fact that the hubris of claims in some pseudosciences (which include all of the so-called ‘social sciences’) has led people to be suspicious of all scientific findings.

We should never mistake the ever-changing popular consensus of opinion of ‘social science’ professionals, whether that be in papers by historians, books by philosophers, legal arguments and supporting evidence in courts, ‘race science’ claims by eugenicists, or psychiatrists in the constantly-rewritten DSM, with actual science, such as that established in the table of elements or surgical manuals. As we used to know when we read op-eds, but seem to have forgotten, opinions are not facts.

The art of medicine uncomfortably straddles these two domains. Some things about the body and disease we know reliably well, while other things (such as the role and impact of viruses) we are only just beginning to get a handle on. So it was not hard for skeptics to instil doubts about whether public health experts knew what we were facing, and therefore could be trusted with their recommendations, when CoVid-19 exploded onto the scene.

Even three years later, facts that were well-established early-on in the pandemic (such as that the disease was spread primarily by airborne transmission and hence masks were a more effective preventative than surface cleaning or ‘social distancing’), are still being challenged.

Some of these challenges even come from inside the public health community: Both the CDC and WHO, for example, perhaps due to severe understaffing, incompetent management and/or internal ego battles, were criminally slow to acknowledge its airborne transmissibility. Other challenges have come from career denialists who simply can’t absorb how a disease could quite naturally defeat our best efforts to control it at every turn. And still other challenges to evidence-based regulation have come from ‘militias’, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and other extremist anti-government groups who refuse to accept any restrictions on their ‘personal’ freedoms, even at the cost of inflicting massive collective suffering.

One of the arguments that’s often trotted out by those challenging evidence-based information is that “correlation is not causation”. That observation is correct: Just because there is a strong statistical correlation between two variables doesn’t necessarily mean that one ’caused’ the other. The more complex the system, moreover, the less likely that there is a causal connection, since the number of variables that could also explain the correlation can be infinitely high.

But that is why in science we use the term “the preponderance of available evidence”. That is why we use the scientific method, which begins with a hypothesis that is disprovable and then applies a rigorous process to see if evidence can be found that supports or disproves it. Only if sufficient evidence has been examined to support the hypothesis, and none has been found that disproves it, and even then only when it has been subjected to an unbiased and un-politicized peer review, can it then be considered a valid theory — until some further evidence is revealed to disprove it, requiring a new hypothesis to be tested and a new theory to be promulgated.

No such process is or will ever be possible when it comes to the pseudosciences and ‘social sciences’, where theories are of necessity just unprovable opinions on which little or no reliance should ever be placed. Witch-burnings, state executions, eugenics experiments, and lobotomies are four of the more ghastly results of placing such unwarranted reliance on these opinions.

But when it comes to the airborne transmission of CoVid-19, for example, while there may be opinions denying it, it has never been factually disproven with real evidence, and there are mountains of data and studies that support it. In other words, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence supports it, and hence supports the wearing of masks to mitigate the risks of its transmission.

Of course we cannot apply the scientific method with complete rigour to this very complex situation, and that’s all the leeway that absolutists and malcontents need, especially when social media give them access to a befuddled and badly-educated citizenry conditioned to be skeptical of anything from a ‘government’ source.

And yes, many public health organizations screwed up badly in their CoVid-19 disease management work. That doesn’t mean we should disregard them. It means we should equip them with the resources, and competent management, to do their jobs better.

I’ve used CoVid-19 as the example in this article, but I could just have easily used the climate catastrophe, or the viability and risks of vaccines, or flat earth theory for that matter.

So, yes, correlation is not causation. But when the overwhelming preponderance of evidence supports a theory that mandates urgent and drastic action to avert a disaster — such the wearing of masks during a virulent pandemic, or getting vaccines to reduce the risk and severity of disease, or bringing about the rapid de-growth of industrial civilization to prevent its disastrous collapse — it is not reasonable skepticism, but sheer folly, to do otherwise.

Tragically, it is not human nature to accept theories or evidence that run counter to what we want to believe. We have all been conditioned to believe certain things about ourselves, our culture, human nature, and our world.

Our zeal to deny ‘inconvenient’ truths supported by overwhelming evidence, when those truths challenge and undermine our conditioning, is perfectly understandable.

And so is the accelerating, commensurate global collapse of our ecological, economic, political and social systems that is, uh, “strongly correlated with” this collective disbelief and denial.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 13 Comments

Speechless

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney’s take on “a disengaged office worker”; not my prompt

Last week I was privileged to participate in one of David Gurteen’s long-standing Knowledge Cafés, this one on the subject of “Silence and Unheard Voices”. It began with a presentation by Mark Cole and John Higgins, authors of a new book on the subject called The Great Unheard at Work.

While the focus of the book is on workplace silence — how it is used and abused, how it can hurt and help organizations, and what to do about it — the conversation ranged wider, to all aspects of work and non-work life where people, for one reason or another, don’t speak, or aren’t listened to or heard.

And in a couple of conversations we broadened it further to explore all kinds of situations where people opt out of, refrain from, or disengage from normal healthy human social activities — conversing, sharing, collaborating, challenging, and innovating — or don’t do so in an honest and open way. And why they do so. And what that means for our society.

Not surprisingly, if you follow my writing, it immediately occurred to me that, in almost any social context, offering attention and intention to listen implies that the offeror has the free will to do so or not. And that the offeree has any free will over whether or how to respond to that offer. How much leeway, in other words, do we actually have to improve malfunctioning social processes?

We are conditioned creatures, after all, and that conditioning includes inattention, prejudgement, and often abuse of power. That conditioning also includes disengagement, leaving one’s head and heart at the door when starting (or returning home from) work. And it also includes secret-keeping, knowledge hoarding, complacent or complicit silences, and self-censorship, and the use of silence as a source of power. It includes any form of opting out of conversational opportunities, and any situation where we are conditioned (coerced, rewarded or self-conditioned) to say or do nothing instead of something.

The authors identified seven “shades” of silence, and in our conversation suggested the addition of an eighth:

  1. Silence that looks to include or recruit new voices to a conversation
  2. Silence that intends to exclude voices from a conversation
  3. Silence that is chosen, as an alternative to speaking up
  4. Silence that is imposed, where speaking up is not a (safe) alternative
  5. Silence that invites participation in and holds the space for conversation
  6. Silence that manipulates (eg the “silent treatment”, and ambiguous body language that stands in for speaking openly)
  7. Silence that punctuates, like a comma or em-dash — for a pause or emphasis
  8. Silence that reflects specific cultural conditioning that may not be understood by those from other cultures

These forms and shades of silence would seem to apply to all relationships, not just workplace ones — including relationships with family, community, polity, and society at large. And the stronger the hierarchy and imbalance of power and attention, the more silence and its analogues — disengagement, secret-keeping, knowledge hoarding, complacency, and self-censoring — may play a role. These are all acts of refraining from what might be considered normal, healthy human behaviour. My sense is that usually a betrayal (or lack of establishment) of trust underlies this reticence, and hence conditions us to behave in ways that, in evolutionary terms, are unhealthy.

To make matters worse, many corporations, politicians and other organizations with great power are increasingly using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as a means to “buy the silence” of the less powerful. It shows how far trust has fallen in our society.

The book devotes a full chapter to the process of dialogue (including Bohmian and other forms) which I’ve written at length about before. The following principles of dialogue are presented in the book:

  1. It is a philosophy first, a skill second — it’s about our attitude to learning and relationship, not a process to follow to ‘extract’ knowledge.
  2. It is incompatible with competitive individualism — collaboration and most community-based activities are not zero-sum games.
  3. It is incompatible with goal-driven instrumentalism — it’s not an analytical process to a predetermined end, and is about awareness of what we don’t know rather than the usual “performative knowing”.
  4. It privileges the quality of relationship over individual technical skills — Its quality depends heavily on the nature of the relationships of the participants — trust, appreciation, context, history, knowing where ‘they are coming from’.
  5. It assumes knowledge and insight are social, emergent phenomena — not just things learned in a book or from individual ideation.
  6. Its ethics are as good or bad as the culture within which it is practised — when done well, for example, it leaves agency about what should be done up to the participants, rather than creating consequent “who will do what by when” lists.
  7. Dialogue on the terms of the established elite is not dialogue (it’s a PR stunt and/or power play).
  8. Co-production and co-design are at the heart of any living dialogic practice — and a key part of that practice entails surfacing and challenging our assumptions, biases and judgements.

I thought these were interesting insights, but I kept returning, both during the Café conversation and while reading the book, to the two aforementioned questions: Why does our conditioning lead to such silences? and What do the resultant silences mean for what we face in the decades ahead?

Here are my thoughts so far on these questions. I’m hoping to have a few dialogues to explore them further!

Why does our conditioning lead to such silences and other “opting-out” behaviours? (strictly my own speculations):

  1. Because we don’t really want to hear ideas or knowledge or answers or perspectives that run counter to what we already believe. It complicates and slows things down. And as a species, we really don’t like complexity or change.
  2. Because it’s safer, less risky, and often more rewarded to shut up and say nothing. Whistle-blowers are punished, not rewarded. As a species, we are mostly risk-averse.
  3. Because we conflate silence with agreement and consent, and when we think it may be difficult to get agreement or consent, it’s more effective to just impose silence. The boss’ tacit threat of repercussions is analogous to the abusive husband’s yelling or the potential rapist’s knife. Patronizing public “engagement” and “consultation” processes that leave no space for dissent, come from the same manipulative place. So does political action that represses dissent and imposes self-censorship, both from within and from without, like what the US Democrats and UK Labour have done to their crushed left “wings”. Our conditioning rewards overcoming resistance more than it rewards paying attention to it.
  4. Because most verbal and written exchanges of language are not dialogues or even conversations, but arguments — statements and defences of beliefs. For many of us, such adversarial, combative “debating” activities are both counter-cultural and a waste of time. Coerced, manipulative “agreement” is no agreement at all.
  5. Because the scale and pace of our society are now such that there is no room or time for actually listening, thinking deeply or understanding; doing so would grind its functioning to a halt. (Such a halt would probably be a good thing, but our growth-obsessed culture mostly doesn’t see it that way.) Much of the dysfunction of large complex systems, I think, is a result of not having the time to listen, think and understand what the options are and what really is the best thing to do.

What do the resultant silences and social “opting out” mean for what we will face in the decades ahead? (again, strictly my own speculations):

  1. Lack of essential skills needed for dealing with collapse, and lack of practice using and seeing those skills demonstrated and modelled, will mean there will have to be a lot of flailing about before we relearn them. Learning and practicing dialogue, mentoring and facilitation might be a good start to address this.
  2. Our struggles to deal with collapse will likely be highly adversarial and combative, rather than collaborative and cooperative. It’s going to take us time to realize that, when it comes to collapse, we’re all in this together.
  3. As the value of most paper wealth disappears when economic collapse deepens, that shift in wealth will produce a major shift in power and in power dynamics. As anyone familiar with hyper-local politics can tell you, that doesn’t mean there will be any reduction in abuses of that power. Sadly, for many of us, zero-sum game thinking and using power coercively is all we know how to do. We’re going to have to patiently teach the tin hats in our communities how to listen and work collaboratively.
  4. On the positive side, collapse is likely to bring a massive relocalization of economic activities, and the disappearance of the whole idea of hierarchical ’employment’. That will expose us to new (and ancient) ways of relating to each other, and more time to practice it. And instead of having to refer to the ‘mission statement’ or the ‘strategic plan’, we are going to know directly, first-hand, what’s important to do, and listening carefully, learning and practicing new skills, and working cooperatively to do it, won’t be an option.

I’m not sure there’s much we can do proactively to prepare for this. Our conditioning will inevitably shift to meet the needs of the moment and the new reality of living in a collapsing and then a post-collapse world. Of course, some of us are already conditioned to try to look ahead and think ahead about what that might entail.

Still, I think it’s useful to get a sense of how our conditioning around silence and social disengagement has arisen in our modern, fractured, ‘busy’ and dysfunctional culture. Silence and disengagement are two of the ways we cope with an insane world.

And I think we’re going to surprise ourselves as the crises deepen. Conditioned though we may be, there is within us a core of biophilia and a passion for connection. Our cultural conditioning may be to shut up, disengage and say nothing. But our biological conditioning is to converse, to share, to collaborate, to learn, and to care about each other. No doubt in my mind which will eventually win out.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Working Smarter | 2 Comments

Ready for Civilization’s Collapse

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Dave Pollard

An article about rehearsing alternative forms of governance


The late David Graeber talks with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, image from London Real (2015)

The idea of “government in exile” or “government in waiting” isn’t new. And opposition parties have “shadow governments” where their elected members rehearse for their roles for when their party comes into power. But their plan is just to replace the current cast of characters with their own, within the same system.

But the idea of rehearsing parallel alternative forms of governance — completely separate systems — to be ready for when current governments go bankrupt and their political systems collapse, is new.

During the Occupy protests, an alternative form of governance was employed to help organize and coordinate actions. Here, verbatim according to ChatGPT, are the key elements of this alternative system:

  1. General Assemblies: The movement organized regular General Assemblies, which were open meetings where participants gathered to discuss and make decisions. These assemblies provided a platform for anyone to voice their opinions, proposals, and concerns.
  2. Facilitation and Working Groups: Facilitators were responsible for moderating the General Assemblies, ensuring that everyone had an opportunity to speak, and guiding the decision-making process. Working groups focused on specific areas of concern, such as logistics, outreach, or media. These groups allowed participants to collaborate and work on specific tasks.
  3. Consensus Decision Making: Occupy Wall Street aimed to make decisions through consensus. This meant that proposals were discussed until a general agreement was reached, rather than relying on traditional voting systems. The modified consensus model allowed for decisions to be made without requiring unanimous consent but instead used a threshold of broad agreement.
  4. Hand Signals: Occupy Wall Street participants used a system of hand signals to facilitate communication during meetings. For example, participants would raise their hands with fingers pointing upward to show agreement, horizontally to signal confusion or a request for clarification, or downward to indicate disagreement.
  5. Working Group Autonomy: Each working group had a level of autonomy to make decisions within its area of focus. This allowed participants to engage in activities that aligned with their interests and skills.

This system is a form of what has been called “direct democracy”, as opposed to “representative democracy” where the decision-makers are often distant from constituents and subject to bribes and other forms of non-democratic coercion.

Attempts to mash direct and representative democracy together have generally failed. Referenda questions and debates are very often distorted by moneyed political interests and pressure groups, and recall campaigns often deteriorate into ideological witch hunts. But what are we to do when direct democracy scales badly and representative democracy seems hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional?

If you believe, as I do, that we are entering a period of rapid and permanent economic and ecological collapse, which will produce political, social and ultimately civilizational collapse, there is a temptation to shrug off the failures of the current systems and just wait for them to fall.

But rather than just waiting, and hoping that the systems that will replace the dysfunctional systems won’t be even worse, what if we tried setting up parallel alternative governance systems, and worked to get the bugs out of them so that, as the current systems collapse, they are ready to offer to the citizenry as an alternative to either chaos or the reinvention of the broken systems?

Roger Hallam, one of the founders of XR, who has largely left that movement behind as it’s being slowly coopted in some places into a traditional passive justice movement, has been talking about this. Roger’s belief is that we have to twin the development of alternative governance systems rooted in citizens’ assemblies, with persistent, disruptive, direct action — take it, break it, block it activities. The latter illuminates how destructive and un-reformable the current systems are, and the former offers an alternative vision, to give the movement credibility and proffer proven, practical replacements.

The general assemblies used by Occupy were a form of direct democracy. Those proposed by Roger and others (like Democracy Without Elections) for larger-scale use, are a special form of representative democracy, but one that doesn’t involve voting or elections. Instead, a group of citizens is randomly selected from the population by lot, adjusted to ensure they fairly map to the demographics of the citizens they’re drawn from. Those citizens are then briefed on one or more issues, and also encouraged to do their own research. They then meet, and using a process to ensure all viewpoints are heard and understood, they discuss the issue until a consensus arises and a decision is made.

One of the original ideas of XR was that the decisions of such citizens’ assemblies would prevail over any decisions made by elected governments on issues in critical policy areas such as climate collapse. Elected governments have shown over the past five decades that they are simply and utterly incapable of addressing such issues, and are in fact impediments to action in these areas.

Attempts to subject the decisions of assemblies to overrule, by elected officials or referenda, have undermined the whole purpose of these assemblies. If neither the politicians nor the citizens are willing or able to trust the assemblies to have the final word, they become just another layer of bureaucracy.

But of course, those with a vested interest in sustaining the current systems and power structures have frequently used their wealth and power to propagandize the citizens into believing such assemblies are dangerous and undemocratic.

So, for example, in Canada, every citizens’ assembly charged with studying the current dysfunctional “first past the post” electoral system has recommended replacing it with a specifically-identified better system, and every time their recommendation has been rejected by citizens after massive scare-mongering by politicians with a vested interest in the current system. This happened even though before the propaganda effort was launched, Canadians had been overwhelmingly in favour of an alternative system. The current abysmal PM even solemnly promised his last election would be the last under the old system, and then, once elected, he completely reneged on that promise.

So one of the challenges we will have to deal with, if we replace large centralized governments directed by elected, compromised politicians, with decentralized systems governed by citizens’ assembly decision-making, is how to take away the power of the moneyed and powerful to propagandize citizens’ assemblies as dangerous and untrustworthy. That will not be easy.

The Healthy Democracy movement has been piloting Citizens’ Initiative Reviews as one step in this direction. They organize citizens’ assemblies, by lot, to review major ballot initiatives in Oregon and Arizona, and the state then prominently features their recommendations on the ballots for such initiatives. In Oregon, the assemblies’ recommendations were approved in 11 of 12 initiatives to date.

These assemblies are usually (and best) not standing governance groups. Different assemblies are selected, by lot, for each critical issue. Non-critical issues are delegated to autonomous working groups (another idea used in the Occupy movement) where decision-making is made, apolitically, by those with the experience and expertise best suited to exercise it.

My sense is that collapse will inevitably lead to a massive devolution of power from large, inflexible, dysfunctional, expensive centralized systems to community-based systems that will eventually ‘flop up’ everywhere to fill the power vacuum and to meet citizens’ needs. And so I like the idea of focusing these alternative governance systems at the community level.

The problem we face right now, though, is that, particularly in the west, we have almost no real communities. We live in atomized, disconnected cities where we often don’t even know our neighbours.

So, as is happening with the experiments in Oregon and elsewhere, we have to, for now, rehearse these alternative governance forms at the regional or national level. That should be fine, since it is far easier to scale down successful experiments to the community level than to scale them up.

If a citizens’ assembly based governance system is a possible replacement for our broken political systems, is there some similar experiment we could be doing with our economic, educational, health care, and social systems?

My sense is that the answer to this question will most likely be found by studying communities that, mostly by necessity (collapse is well-advanced in some parts of the world) but in some cases because it’s in their historical culture, are already successfully modelling effective radically local economic, educational, health care and social systems.

So, for example, many cultures still embrace a gift economy, based on our collective responsibility to provide the necessities of life to all in our community, to develop local self-sufficiency, and to gift our knowledge and our surplus goods and skills and time to others. With currency collapse being a likely consequence of economic collapse, we have a lot to learn from studying these alternative economic systems that are neither capitalist nor socialist, but instead responsible, and based on generosity. Such systems actually exist, and they work.

A community-based educational system that is based on self-directed learning nurtured by a community-based mentoring network that allows us to learn continuously through hands-on practice, trial and error, demonstration and dialogue, would almost have to be better than one that isolates learners in expensive, inflexible institutions with fixed curricula. Many home-schooling and unschooling networks can show us how this is done.

The idea of small community health clinics with a diversity of providers, caring for the whole person, instead of huge hospitals and disconnected ‘specialists’, is used in much of the Global South. Combine that with better self-diagnostic and self-treatment systems, which could be online and accessible anywhere, and we might actually start to see healthy lifespans increasing again.

And, of course, single-tier health care should be funded by the community, and hence free for all.

Social collapse is much harder to predict and rehearse for, since it’s so unpredictable and will vary enormously by community. What some communities are doing, replacing police with teams of multi-skilled crisis respondents, will inevitably be part of whatever emerges, and these pilots are worth studying. As with all our other systems, we are going to have to learn to deal with social issues without using large, expensive, and usually dysfunctional institutions, such as prisons. I’ve visited communities that have neither police nor jails, and at a small scale, where everyone knows each other, they work quite well. We humans are better at self-managing things at the community level than we might think.

So what do we do to string all these new radically relocalized community-based systems together as collapse deepens? We know for sure that some communities will fare much better than others, for all kinds of reasons.

It is possible that, as city, regional, and larger-scale governments go bankrupt as a consequence of deepening economic collapse, we might replace them with federations of autonomous communities, with each community ‘governed’ by citizens’ assemblies focused on their community’s unique situation and needs.

The federation would of necessity be loose, much as many First Nations federations were in North America before the Europeans arrived and destroyed them. Such a federation could share and trade excess resources, and knowledge, ideas and technologies between communities. But it would probably, and hopefully, not be able to reinstitute neoliberalism’s worship of ideological homogeneity and centralization, with their commensurate diseconomies of scale. Many, perhaps most post-collapse communities will fail. That’s a tragedy, but collapse is not a problem that any political, economic or social system can “fix”.

I’m not sure I agree with Roger that direct action will significantly advance public acceptance of the need to scrap and replace our current dysfunctional systems, though I hope he, and other activists, are correct about this.

But I do like the idea of having viable, tested alternatives handy as these systems go down. And while we should be studying and learning about possible proven relocalized replacements for all of our existing, crumbling systems, political/governance systems seem to be as good a place as any to start.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Links of the Month: May 2023

Posted on May 12, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney’s take on the quote below; my own prompt

I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her. Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

— William Shatner, 2022, excerpted in Variety

COLLAPSE WATCH


A new UNESCO report identifies (red/orange) the areas already facing severe water ‘stress’ (shortages from overuse). These areas will likely be uninhabitable within a few decades.

A long way down: The Honest Sorcerer reminds us about what happens to a society that relies upon indefinitely living beyond its means, and what a slow but complete economic collapse, spread out over decades, is likely to look like.

And what the accompanying social collapse might look like: Rhyd Wildermuth identifies some of the symptoms of accelerating social collapse that we’re already starting to see throughout the world.

A ‘modified consensus’: Politicians, media and economists can’t tell the truth — that we’ve reached the limits to growth — because it would crash the markets and collapse the economy, which depends on continued growth. “We are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP” as Paul Hawken puts it. So, Tim Morgan reports, this gang has now developed a ‘modified consensus’ to lower economic expectations gradually. “Yes, we’re at the top of the roller coaster, but there’s no indication at this time we’re going down.” Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

He’s baaaack!: El Niño is officially on the way, now that La Niña has left the building. Get ready for a hot summer this year and a record-breaking >1.5ºC above historic normal 2024. And the oceans are already hotter than ever.

Falling with grace: How to talk about the inevitability of collapse with the people you know and care about.

War and the environment: On top of the horrific emissions that accompanied Biden’s bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, anti-Russian sanctions are causing Europe to backslide into greater reliance on fracked fossil fuel energy (mostly from the US) at a time it had been moving toward renewables.

LIVING BETTER


Midjourney’s take on the Eric Whitacre song The Seal Lullaby (words by Rudyard Kipling); my own prompt

“We have to do something“: Aurélien brilliantly deconstructs the psychology behind governments’, corporations’ and NGOs’ endless posturing and lame actions and virtue signalling, that accomplish nothing. Anything is better than admitting (a) we’re fucked and (b) we haven’t the foggiest idea how to respond, if we even could. A great analysis of our state of utter dysfunction.

Products in search of a market: A new study reveals a paradox of untrammelled capitalism — incentives for producing stuff no one really needs or wants, while billions do without essentials. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

Taking the profit out of housing: How the use of community land trusts are being used to address the affordable housing crisis in London, and could do so elsewhere. Thanks to Adam Greenfield for the link.

Rhetorical questions: Chad Mulligan scathingly pretends to be a foreigner puzzled about how things work in the US. A fun read. Thanks to Paul Heft for the links.

What we have to lose: A moving essay by the late Harry Belafonte, from 2016, about the crushing of the American dream. Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

Saving the last 3%: A gut-wrenching short documentary about the brutality of police (RCMP) and government repression of First Nations peoples’ attempts to protect Canada’s last old growth forests. Thanks to Sharon Goldberg for the invite to watch it.

Refusing to align: Yanis Varoufakis explains his vision to end the scourge of global imperial capitalism, through a growing non-aligned movement that refuses to take sides and instead insists on peace, cooperation and solidarity.

Please eat in the library: Could libraries provide us all with an affordable, nourishing (intellectually and nutritionally) “third place” to hang out?

The value of a wealth tax: A new Canadian study reveals what a 1-3% excess wealth tax would generate in revenues, and what those revenues could buy.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


from the memebrary 

Who ‘ya gonna believe? department: Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, with the massive cognitive dissonance surrounding the Ukraine (and coming Taiwan) proxy wars, the Nord Stream bombing, and the re-emergence of the anti-mask fanatics. Some of the people who have espoused the most preposterous and credibility-destroying positions have been, at least on occasion of late, sounding extremely sober and rational, more than the usual suspects have been, anyway. Two cases in point:

  • RFK Jr, who even his family admits has become a dangerous anti-vaxxer and 5G conspiracy theorist, is running against Biden for the Democratic party presidential nomination. But read this Kennedy platform statement; he’s daring to say (and quite eloquently) what even Bernie Sanders and AOC have been unwilling to say. A platform for “unwinding empire”?! I’m gobsmacked.
  • Tulsi Gabbard, Iraq war vet, gun rights fanatic, Jordan Peterson fan and cult member, ran for the Democratic nomination in 2020, got pilloried for her anti-LGBT+ statements (later retracted, then partly reinstated in respect of the trans community), and finally quit the party altogether. Hilary Clinton despises her and has had her supporters and media attack her relentlessly for years, and she’s now regularly labeled a “Putin apologist”. But listen to this chat with the execrable Tucker Carlson about Nord Stream and the Ukraine War. They may not believe what they’re saying, and may change their tune tomorrow, but damn, what they say on this video makes sense to me!

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):


cartoon by Michael Leunig from his fans’ FB page

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

CoVid-19: The Gift That Keeps On Giving: Short takes:

FUN AND INSPIRATION


also from the memebrary

A pleasure to watch them play: Lyz Lenz waxes rhapsodic on the aesthetic and strategic superiority of women’s sports, compared to the violent gladiator spectacle of many male sports.

A more beautiful voice: New technology is enabling even crappy singers to sound good. It’s complicated, though, not for luddites like me, at least until AI advances to do it for me. And speaking of AI, Rick Beato explains how AI is being used to create ‘clone’ versions of famous voices, and the battles that’s entailed.

A peek at the Midjourney hype: Here’s a daily-updated glance at some of the most upvoted images produced by this AI tool, along with the precise prompts that produced them. From the sublime to the ridiculous, including far too much that looks like incel fantasy fodder.

Moonstruck: Nahre Sol explains, phrase by phrase, why Debussy’s most famous work has such appeal.

Totally shredded: The astonishing Brasilian electric guitar maker and composer Lari Basilio tries one of her recent compositions on a newly-made guitar. Mark Knopfler, move over.

Fecal transplants go mainstream: For everything from crippling bowel diseases to depression, there’s more and more data suggesting that this bizarre procedure can actually cure diseases in people diagnosed as incurable.

Where do they all belong?: A stunning version of Eleanor Rigby orchestrated by Cody Fry and sung by schoolkids.

20-to-1: A survey indicates that for every civilian killed by police, police kill 20 civilians, and that police officer isn’t even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs (while garbage collector, farmer, and truck driver are).

Better at some things, and…: A Google AI pioneer explains the crucial differences between biological and digital intelligence. And Sabine Hossenfelder speculates on what’s next in AI, including personalized AI attuned to your own voice, style, beliefs and preferences, providing an ‘assistant’ for talking things through to understand them better, and in facilitating research by finding, scanning and analyzing existing research papers.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


Midjourney’s take on the poem below; my own prompt

From Emily Fragos:

The Sadness of Clothes

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived
their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.
You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back

as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid jacket
and had that beautiful smile on and you’d talk.
You’d go to get something and come back and he’d be gone.

You explain death to the clothes like that dream.
You tell them how much you miss the spouse
and how much you miss the pet with its little winter sweater.

You tell the worn raincoat that if you talk about it,
you will finally let grief out. The ancients etched the words
for battle and victory onto their shields and then they went out

and fought to the last breath. Words have that kind of power
you remind the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly
folded across the chest, or slung across the backs of chairs,

or hanging inside the dark closet. Do with us what you will,
they faintly sigh, as you close the door on them.
He is gone and no one can tell us where.

From Arthur Guiterman: What one approves, another scorns:

What one approves,
another scorns,
and thus
his nature each discloses.
You find the rosebush
full of thorns,
I find the
thornbush full of roses.

From Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt:

If you take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; ‘life’, something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that’s the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it’s yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we’re not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn’t read well.

From Brian Eno: Culture is “everything we do that we don’t have to do”.

From Lyz Lenz on right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder:

Crowder [recently] said on his podcast, “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore and in the state of Texas, that is completely permitted.” His wife, he said, “simply wanted out and the law says that that’s how it works.”… Sir, complaining that a woman has agency under the law and that she’s exercising that agency to yeet herself out of her union with you isn’t making the point you think you are making.

From Mel Dee Dzelda:

Having a terminal illness is like a blazing flame to the ‘pity party moths’. There’s nothing they love more than to wallow in your illness, so that in turn, you will wallow in their unhappiness.

From *me: “It is all poetry.”

* no, I’m not the first to say this, but I mean it in a different way from what others have meant by it; the word “poetry”, after all, comes from the Greek poiētēs, meaning “made up”

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on Links of the Month: May 2023

Two Billion More Coming

Posted on May 9, 2023 by Dave Pollard

A-Syrian-refugee-holding-009-640x384
This image above and the poem below are from the blog SeekersClub; Photo credit above: Daniet Etter/New York Times/Redux /eyevine. “Syrian refugee Laith Majid cries tears of joy and relief that he and his children have made it to Europe.”

“Home”   by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body.
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
mean something more than a journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one’s skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hungry
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Throughout human history, climate change, war and economic collapse have been the largest drivers of mass human migrations. There is evidence that we left our ‘natural’ home in the tropical rainforests due to massive fires caused by devastating cosmic radiation, about six million years ago, when we had barely emerged as a separate species from bonobos and chimps. And that during the most recent ice age as many as 25-30% of all humans migrated long distances southward to find land suitable for human life.

Economic refugees fleeing abject poverty and starvation have been recorded from the earliest times of human civilizations.

We are now well down the road toward both global economic collapse and global ecological collapse, and massive migrations and permanent displacements of humans have again become commonplace.

In the US, at least 3.6M people now ‘attempt’ to enter the US each year (ie have ‘encounters’ with border officials). Net immigration is about 1.2M people per year, accounting for about 80% of total population growth, which is a rate of about 0.5% per year. About 6M people apply annually for permanent residence (“green cards”) from outside the country alone; about 70% of actual green cards issued are issued to people inside the country, mostly due to having spouses and family members who are already permanent residents.

By contrast, in Canada, net immigration is about 1.0M people per year, accounting for about 96% of population growth, which is a rate of about 2.7% per year. The difference is partly due to Canada’s much more generous immigration policies, especially for temporary workers and students, which account for 60% of the annual Canadian increase. And it’s partly due to the US, thanks largely to the Hollywood myths, being perceived as the most desirable country in the world in which to live a comfortable or affluent life. And it’s partly due to the fact that the US is just closer geographically to a lot of countries facing early-stage collapse.

If the US were to allow the same proportion of new immigrants as Canada, its immigrant (and total) population would be growing by about 10M people per year.

In fact, it’s likely that actual immigration to the US, including ‘unauthorized’ immigration, is vastly higher than the official reported numbers, mostly for political reasons. A recent study suggests that the latest (Trump) US census omitted 2.3% of American residents, about eight million people, almost entirely “non-citizens”, many of them living in unlisted accommodations or afraid of harassment and expulsion by the immigration cops.

Given the bleak prospects for curtailing climate collapse, and with the additional burden of global economic collapse which is already spreading to much of the Global South, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that the same 25% proportion of humans uprooted after the last climate collapse, will soon be forced to emigrate, mostly northwards, long distances in search of a habitable human climate and functioning economy.

That would be two billion people. Historically the US and Canada have been the sanctuary countries for 20% and 4% respectively of emigrants — that’s 400M additional Americans (10M/year every year over the next four decades) and 80M additional Canadians (2M/year every year over the next four decades). That’s a doubling of the US population and a tripling of the Canadian population.

And the numbers for the ‘Old World’ are comparable. Large parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East will be utterly devastated by climate change. Economic collapse there is accelerating. An exodus of 1.4B people from those regions to Europe would almost triple Europe’s population.

Those massive population increases will be occurring at the same time significant swaths of North America (much of the central and western US states and parts of the south) and of Europe (most of the Mediterranean lands) will also become uninhabitable due to climate collapse, and their citizens will likewise be moving north.

Of course, we don’t want to think about this. There is a large and growing racist and xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment in much of North America and Europe, and it’s not limited to right-wingers. Biden has restarted the construction of Trump’s wall, has retained most of the anti-immigrant laws and policies of his predecessor, and is about to face a huge surge in asylum claims when Trump’s draconian CoVid-19 Title 42 refugee restrictions (which the US Supreme Court blocked Biden from revoking) expire this Thursday (May 11th). Over 2M asylum applicants have been rejected each year under Title 42 since it came into effect. Biden has called in the army to “help maintain order” at the border on Thursday. And he has proposed a new rule which essentially reinstates Title 42.

These millions, the first trickle of hundreds of millions, are knowingly going through hell, selling everything and suffering from disease, injury, dehydration, heat stroke, snakebite, theft, kidnapping, ransom, extortion, and violence from ruthless smugglers, corrupt Mexican cops and American vigilantes, because they’re desperate — as Warsan’s poem so eloquently explains, anything is better than staying in their current hopeless situation. And thousands have been murdered or disappeared.

If they make it, they risk almost certain deportation back to their home countries, usually penniless. While they’re in the US, they face further dangers from xenophobic mass murderers and government-authorized vigilante gangs: Under a new law in Texas, for example, government-deputized squads of anti-immigrant citizens will be able to accost anyone in public places, demand to see papers, and arrest anyone who can’t produce them. And in Texas, anyone can ‘open carry’ guns of any size, including military weaponry, without the need for license or registration, training of any kind, or a background check. Domestic terrorist acts against immigrants are becoming more common, notably in Texas. (EDIT MAY 12: I removed reference to the Brownsville incident with the car that ran into Venezuelan asylum seekers, since it appears this case is much more complicated than anyone thought.)

More struggle, suffer or die trying to access the Canada-US border to make asylum claims or escape capture on either side. But a new deal between Biden and the obsequious Trudeau is tightening up that border as well.

Laws, wars, walls, cops and vigilantes aren’t going to solve this problem. We are seeing the early signs of what is likely to become the largest humanitarian disaster in the history of our planet, and an accelerant to political, social and economic collapse. This is going to swell to become a human flood of massive proportions, and given the desperation of the people caught up in it, the border will either become the largest killing field in history or it will be unable to hold back the hordes, producing national chaos. It may not happen this year, or next, but as collapse deepens, a confrontation is inevitable. And no one is even working on an answer that acknowledges the inevitable — that in times of collapse, we’re all in the same boat, and people must ultimately be free to move to and live wherever they want.

Yet another inconvenient truth no politician will touch with a ten-foot pole.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 3 Comments

Radical Non-Duality: In a Nutshell

Posted on May 6, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney’s take on cats and peace, because… well, because there’s a cat. My own prompt.

Recently, Indrajit Samarajiva wrote a post about the illusion of the self and the absurdity of the ‘self-help’ industry. In it he said:

The whole self-help industry is founded around the concept of the self, which is completely unfounded. I have studied western philosophy and there is no coherent definition of the self in there, just a bunch of thought experiments that all fail. I’ve studied neuroscience and you can’t see it. You can look at the self with microscopes or MRIs or books or any which way. However you look at it, there’s no there there. It’s like the border between India and Pakistan. Definitely something to fight and die over, but if you walk right up to it and look it’s just the same old trees and plants and a bunch of apes acting agitated about nothing. It’s just an idea, and, given all the fighting and dying, not an especially good one.

Indrajit’s idea of what exists in the absence of self is warmer and more humanistic than mine. It’s about relationship, community, belonging to something larger than self.

Nevertheless, his article inspired me to write him a note about radical non-duality, just because… well, I don’t really know. Perhaps just to get clear about the distinction between his way of seeing not-self and mine.

After I wrote it, I realized it was probably the most succinct and, in a way, the most personal and least bloodless summarizing of the admittedly rather bloodless message of radical non-duality that I’d come up with.

So here, for no reason, is what I wrote:

Lovely writing, Indrajit — thanks.

I have in recent years been drawn to the message of so-called radical non-duality, that goes even further and asserts that not only is there not-self, but there is no one, nothing separate, that everything is just an appearance out of nothing. It is a hopeless message, and not at all a ‘teaching’, a theory, a belief, or an -ism of any kind. There is no ‘path’ to seeing it — ‘I’ will never ‘get’ it, and there is nothing ‘I’ can do.

Nevertheless, when I hear this message, it intuitively and intellectually resonates in a way I can’t explain. I can’t help feeling it is correct. Those speakers who have inexplicably lost their sense of self, report that it was immediately obvious (but to ‘no one’) that there never was anyone or anything separate.

For seven years I have been quietly arguing to myself that believing this is absurd, but still, I have found nothing that seems a more plausible description of reality, of what is and is not, and of what is happening and is not happening — apparently. There have been ‘glimpses’ here, when suddenly ‘I’ disappeared and it was briefly obvious that there was only ‘this’ everything.

Perhaps it’s a crutch because I can’t bear to face the brutality of the reality I have been conditioned to think of as real. ‘I’ will never know. Until/unless there is no longer a ‘me’, in which case, of course, there will be no ‘me’ to know it. I can only hope, even though there is no point in hoping.

Cheers,
Dave

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | Comments Off on Radical Non-Duality: In a Nutshell

What Are They Thinking?!

Posted on May 4, 2023 by Dave Pollard

The cognitive bias codex from wikipedia; if you want to print it out so it’s legible and useful, print the original over four letter-sized pages and paste them together (my printout is taped, tellingly perhaps, over my rarely-used TV). The model was developed by John Manoogian III and refined by Buster Benson; the SVG version includes active links by TillmanR to the wikipedia articles explaining each bias.

A lot of ‘leftie’ writers have been expressing dismay lately not only about what right-wingers are saying and doing, but about what a large proportion of other lefties have been saying. And the concern is not so much about what they’re saying as about how they could possibly have come to believe what they’re saying. In other words, What were they thinking?

I’m increasingly persuaded that much of what we all say and do is simply conditioned behaviour. Our biological ‘wiring’, combined with (because we are social creatures) our cultural conditioning, compels us to believe certain things, and to act accordingly.

Our cultural conditioning — what we believe because of what others in our circles of trust and affinity say or do — often falls afoul of cognitive biases, such as the 180 biases depicted above.

If we really want to understand the prevailing behaviour of any group, particularly one we thought shared our worldview, it helps to try to understand how that cultural conditioning, with its inherent cognitive biases, works. So here is a little thought experiment to explore that.

The issue I am trying to understand is: How can bright, informed people support the continuation and escalation of the Ukraine War, believe that someone other than the Biden administration authorized and carried out the Nord Stream pipeline bombings, believe that China plans to take over the world militarily, and believe that the public health response to CoVid-19 was largely an overreaction or an excuse to curtail, surveil, and control individual citizens?

I want to explore the conditioning process and understand how we came to this point. I am not interested in laying blame for it happening, since that gets us nowhere, and I don’t believe there is anything anyone can do to change most people’s beliefs, unless they are already inclined to change them themselves. What are the cognitive biases that have given rise to what, to me, are frightening misunderstandings? (Of course, my beliefs are the product of my conditioning as well, which is clearly very different from that of those who hold the above beliefs; and I am also subject to cognitive biases.)

So here’s a table I came up with, wading through all 180 biases in the above codex, and focusing on the 32 groups of biases that seem to directly affect our beliefs, to try to make sense of it all:

Bias Description: The human tendency to: Examples
Confirmation / Belief / Backfire effect believe only facts and accept only arguments that conform to our existing beliefs “All my life I’ve been told Russia and China are evil, authoritarian, repressive regimes that seek world domination. Navalny, Xinjiang, corrupt oligarchs, lab leak, etc. Your protestations just make me believe it even more.”
Attentional, Illusory Truth, Mere-Exposure believe and remember things that capture more of our attention, or that we hear repeatedly, or that are familiar to us “All the media I read are saying the same thing; they can’t all be wrong.”
Self-reference believe things only when we can relate them to our own personal story “It can’t be that bad. No one would tolerate that.” 
 Naive realism believe we are more objective and rational than most people   “That just doesn’t ring true. I’m not an idiot, and the people who buy that can’t be thinking straight.”
 Illusory correlation  see relationships where they don’t really exist  “Look at all these people that wore masks and got the vaccine and then got sicker than those who didn’t.”
 Attribution  attribute “our” failures to bad luck and our actions to good motives, but “their” failures to bad character and their actions to bad motives “We won’t talk peace because they’d just lie and take advantage; they won’t talk peace because they actually don’t want it.”
 Stereotyping / Prejudice  attribute characteristics to a whole swath of people  “If the Russians didn’t support Putin they’d overthrow him, and the Chinese are just docile mindless Communists; sanction them all.”
 Authority  believe wealthier, more powerful people more than others  “He’s got the best minds in the country advising him; they must know what they’re doing.”
Just-world  believe people eventually get what they deserve “We’re the good guys, so we’ll ultimately win the war for the hearts and minds of the world.”
 Bandwagon/
groupthink		  believe what most, or increasing numbers, of those around us believe  “I don’t know anyone who thinks the US would be foolish enough to blow up those pipelines.”
 Halo effect/ in-group favouritism ascribe exclusively positive qualities to “our” people and those we admire  “He saved us from Trump; in my eyes the guy can pretty much do no wrong.”
 Simplification/ Latching / Ambiguity  believe simple, easy explanations over the more complex, difficult, ambiguous, and uncertain   “He’s just insane and evil, that’s all; there was no ‘provocation’. Freedom and democracy must prevail.”
 Moral licensing  justify an act of bad behaviour from someone who we usually agree with  “He must have had a good reason.”
 Affinity  evaluate others who are “like us” more positively  “I just don’t trust ‘those people’.”
 Exceptionalism  consider our situation and motives to be unique  “We have God and right on our side. Others don’t, so they have to be bound by rules.”
 Dunning-Krueger/ Lake Wobegon believe we and our in-group re more competent than they are  “They’re just too stupid to figure it out. And our leaders wouldn’t have got where they are if they weren’t the best and the brightest.” 
 Transparency  think we know what others think and believe, and why they do so “That’s surely a false flag operation, intended to distract us from the truth.”
 Projection  think that past events accurately predict future events  “We’ve had nukes for decades. Thanks to MAD, they’ll never be used on any scale.”
 Optimism, Pessimism  think that some ideas are failure-proof and others could never work “If we/everyone just did this (eg bomb x), it would change everything; problem solved. Appeasement always fails.”
 Declinism / Nostalgia  believe things were better in the “old days” and are now getting worse  “They used to know their place, and there was never any problem. We need to restore x.”
 Outcome / Hindsight mistake correlation for causation, and mistake hindsight for insight  “That strategy worked then; it should work now. Anyone could have told you that wouldn’t work.”
 Risk compensation/ Moral hazard/ Learned helplessness/ Effort justification  misjudge the degree of risk in actions we take “Only old sick people need to wear masks. We’re all going to get it anyway. We’re so invested in this action, we need to double down, not back down.” 
 False consensus believe most (smart, informed) people agree with us  “It’s the only sensible position to take. You’d have to be insane to think otherwise. What were they thinking?!“
 Third party  believe social/mass media influence others more than they influence us “Russiagate swung the election. Suppression of Hunter Biden’s wrongdoings swung the election. Propaganda has made us all mad.”
 Overconfidence  be surer of ourselves and our actions that the facts warrant  “I’m absolutely sure. We’ve never failed. We can’t fail. We won’t fail.”
 Identifiable victim / Power of story  buy into anecdotes about specific individuals but not stories or data about whole groups “Let me tell you about Ivan & Anna. It will change your mind about the whole war.” 
 Escalation of commitment / Sunk cost continue to pursue failed actions if we have invested a lot in them   “We can’t have spent $100B just for nothing. We need to authorize another $20B.”
 Status quo  perpetuate current behaviours and beliefs even if they’re irrational  “We have to continue NATO, even though its original purpose no longer applies.”
 Reactance  overreact to an action that makes us feel cornered or restricted  “These people are spreading misinformation. They need to be censored, banned, and jailed.”
Triviality / Bike-shedding focus on simpler, more controllable aspects of large complex problems “Pledge the fighter jets. Let them worry about how to staff them, use them, and maintain them.”
 Recency / Misinformation  give more credibility to, and recall, newer information, opinions and ideas, even if they’re false  “I don’t care what happened in 2014. Ancient history.”
 Negativity  react more and give more attention to negative stories and facts  “What does it matter if China traced, globally shared and sequenced CoVid-19 within a month of discovering it? Lab leak, lab leak!”

I’m sure someone could reword the third column of this table to try to make sense of my (to them) seemingly irrational beliefs about Ukraine, Nord Stream, China, and CoVid-19, by attributing them to my admitted cognitive biases. That would be an interesting exploration!

So what’s going on here? I think we’re all doing our best to make sense of the firehose of information and mis- and disinformation and propaganda out there. These cognitive biases, for the most part, aren’t character flaws — They’re ways of dealing with large amounts of information that evolved to make our ancestors more functional, and to enable them to act faster and to survive better. The fact that our overwhelmed (intellectually and emotionally) brains aren’t up to the task with today’s information overload is a tragedy, perhaps, but it’s not anyone’s fault.

The purpose of this exercise is to answer the question posted by the title of this exercise. Not the exclamation mark part, but the question mark part. While part of me seethes at the power of the post-WW2 US presidents and most of their senior ‘advisors’, and the destruction I believe they have wrought, I can kind of understand what has driven them to think, believe, and do what they have done. And I think it would be arrogant to presume that, if I were in their position, I would have done differently.

And that has to be enough. The world, as much as we wish it weren’t, is on autopilot, and no one is in control. The sum total of the cognitively-biased and variously-informed eight billion of us are going to do our best, and the outcome looks both inevitable and troublesome.

While it doesn’t and can’t change anything (at least that’s how I see it from my own cognitively-biased perspective), I have found it immensely comforting to at least be able to guess: What are they thinking? And now, each time I ask the question, I ask it without the exclamation mark.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

All We Are Saying

Posted on May 2, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney’s take on Joe Biden planning a war against China, and on ChatGPT as a peacenik; my own prompts

For those of you worried about the explosive growth of AI and its consequences: I would be the first to admit the dangers of this new technology, especially in the hands of the deranged, the military, propagandists, and the security state.

But consider this:

I asked ChatGPT:

What single action could a US president take that would be most effective in bringing about world peace?

And its answer was:

As an AI language model, I do not have personal beliefs or opinions, and I cannot predict the future. However, I can suggest that promoting diplomacy and peaceful conflict resolution through negotiations and dialogue with other countries could be one of the most effective actions a US President could take to contribute to world peace. This could involve engaging with international organizations, encouraging disarmament, reducing military involvement in global conflicts, and fostering mutual respect and understanding among nations. Additionally, supporting economic development, humanitarian aid, and environmental sustainability initiatives worldwide could also contribute to stability and peace. Ultimately, achieving world peace is a complex and multifaceted challenge that requires the collective efforts of individuals, communities, and governments around the world.

And I confess I am far more frightened of Joe Biden and his advisors right now, than I am about the future dangers of AI.

Posted in Creative Works, How the World Really Works | 5 Comments

What To Do About CoVid-19 Now

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Dave Pollard

The numbers on the above map are somewhat suspect, but are likely approximately correct. Canada, for example, actually has an unexplained excess death rate 70% higher than the Economist’s estimates on this map (I verified this using the latest Statistics Canada data), so it should be one shade darker on the map, and the same is probably true of a number of other western countries. On the other side, there is evidence that in a lot of African and Asian nations that have little or no reliable health and death data, their IFR is probably significantly lower than this map would suggest, due to their younger demographics and higher immune system health. Globally, these differences tend to balance out to an average excess death toll of 220/100,000 people.

Reminder: I am not a medical expert, but have worked with epidemiologists and have some expertise in research, data analysis and statistics. I am producing these articles in the belief that reasonably researched writing on this topic can’t help but be an improvement over some of what’s currently out there.

The hardest part of dealing with the pandemic now is that the politicians, caving in to the conservative hard-liners and the pandemic-fatigued, have stopped reporting the data, and even in some cases stopped collecting it. Causes of death are often unreported, misreported, inconsistently reported, or not reported until months after the death. In some cases there are multiple causes of, or contributors to, a death. You can look at serology or wastewater reports to get a rough idea of the level of infection, but that doesn’t help much since it changes so fast and so unpredictably. Scientific studies are replete with misinformation and disinformation from disgruntled and publicity-hungry theorists trying to settle professional scores, rescue reputations, make headlines, get grants, or land a guest spot on Faux News.

We still don’t know exactly how this virus evolved, though the overwhelming preponderance of evidence (from actual virologists, not security spooks or racist warmongers) is that it originated naturally in a bat cave in Hunnan and was transported station-to-station by high-speed train to Wuhan from there. We don’t know precisely how it spread to humans, nor do we know how many other equally or more dangerous viruses are out there just waiting to hitch a ride on some wild animal. We actually know very little about viruses, and how they mutate. And we’re still basically clueless on what percentage of the population will have Long CoVid symptoms, possibly for the rest of their lives — estimates differ by an order of magnitude.

So what do we know, with a reasonably high degree of confidence, based on actual, non-cherry-picked, evidence? A few things:

  1. Like many viruses, as this one mutated into more transmissible variants, those variants also became considerably less lethal. So had we not taken the (inadequate but still rather remarkable) measures we did, especially the use of masks, self-isolating, and vaccination, the death toll from the pandemic would have been many times (likely tens of millions of lost lives) higher. Most of us finally got the virus in its omicron variant, whose fatality rate was much lower (perhaps 75% lower) than the earlier variants.
  2. The disease has likely killed about 2,200 people per million worldwide, and twice as many in the US and some other countries. That’s about 17 million people worldwide, or one out of every 500 humans, and one out of every 250 Americans (and one out of every 50 Americans over age 65). It was the third leading cause of death in most countries in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
  3. The disease continues to kill between one and two people per million every day, and ten times that proportion of people over 65. If that continues for another year, 20% of the CoVid-19 deaths are still ahead of us. That’s despite everything we’ve learned about how to protect ourselves from it, and treat it.
  4. The disease is now endemic — almost everyone has caught it, most asymptomatically, and many have caught it more than once. Overall the IFR (infection fatality rate) has therefore been about 0.2% worldwide and 0.4% in the US and many other countries. The earlier variants had a much higher IFR, perhaps in the area of 1%, and the current variants have a much lower one — your chances now of dying from the disease in the next year are roughly one in 2,000 (and one in 200 if you’re over 65, or immunocompromised). Of course, if you wear a mask, avoid crowded and poorly-ventilated environments, and have your boosters up to date, the risk is much lower.
  5. Somewhere between 2-4% of the people you encounter each day are likely to be currently infected and infectious. Look at the number of people in the crowded bus with you, or the subway, the restaurant, the club, the classroom, the factory, the office, or the arena, and do the math.

There is not a lot more to say. I agree with the health experts and health journalists who continue to encourage us to use masks in higher-risk indoor and crowded spaces, to get tested when we show symptoms, to self-isolate and let others know when we test positive, and to get all recommended booster shots. And, if you test positive, and are over 60 or immunocompromised, to ask your doctor for antivirals (not monoclonal antibodies which are not effective against Omicron variants).

I also agree with them that we should be collecting and sharing a lot more data, doing much more basic scientific research on infectious diseases, and phasing out factory farms, the hunting and harvesting of exotic animals, and development of our last remaining wilderness areas. And that we should do everything we can to help enable our largely-dysfunctional public health systems to be much, much better prepared for the next pandemic.

Posted in How the World Really Works | Comments Off on What To Do About CoVid-19 Now

The Post-Game Show

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Dave Pollard

This is #17 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. 


both images in this post are by Midjourney; my own prompts — they do not depict nor are they based on photos of any real person

Many of the words we use to describe beauty imply that its effect is incapacitating: Stunning. Knockout. Blown away. Staggering. ‘Drop-dead’ gorgeous. The word pretty comes from the term ‘pratfall’.

When I see her walking toward me on the park path, it is not hard to understand why that is so. As soon as I see her, I start to second guess my reaction — the desire to stare, the quickening of the heartbeat, the aesthetic and, um, other appreciation. And then the cascade of mental cogitations and recriminations: self-opprobrium, embarrassment, shame, confusion, thoughts about what beauty does and does not confer, and its benefits and challenges, thoughts about the different forms of privilege and how they are used and misused, what constitutes civilized behaviour and why that is so, why we find most wild creatures beautiful but few of our own species so, and off into the bottomless introspective rabbit hole. You probably know the drill.

Of course, most importantly at that moment, I look away so as not to appear to stare. I am a polite Canadian, after all. But whatever I had been noticing or thinking about prior to that moment has been lost.

It occurs to me that we react to beauty in two very different ways, ways that we tend to conflate, and I wonder if what is happening is that my body and my self are warring over what response is and is not appropriate. Anyway, no matter — back to my contemplative, and hopefully observant, walk in the park.

.     .     .

So it seems that this (fit and healthy but increasingly inflexible and weary) body is taking me for a walk again. It’s been a long winter, and I imagine the warm sun must feel a bit strange and unfamiliar on its skin.

I say “I imagine” and “its skin” because it’s clear that ‘I’ am not this body. It — this body — has substance, apparently anyway: a water-filled bag of cells and organs that is, I am guessing, a complicity rather than an individual. It even has its own ‘atmosphere‘, its own surface thermal convection system, so in a way it’s more like a planet, an ecosystem, than a single ‘thing’.

I am trying, these days, not to attribute to my self the characteristics that are actually ‘its’. ‘I’ am, after all, just a process, and likely an illusory one at that — the process of trying to make sense of what is apparently happening. The body reacts — fearfully, angrily, sorrowfully, joyfully, lustfully, enthusiastically, equanimously, protectively, instinctively. And then this sense-making ephemera that is ‘me’ layers on reactions that are conceptual rather than perceptual — judgement, anxiety, hatred, grief, shame, envy, depression, love, appreciation (see? not all bad!). But ‘we’ confuse them together, as if ‘we’ were responsible for all of it.

.     .     .

I have left the park now, walking down a residential side street. There’s a little girl struggling to ride her small pink bicycle, as her father looks on encouragingly. “I’m never going to get this!” she says. Her father tries to reassure her: “Sure you will! In no time you’ll be riding that bike automatically, without even thinking about it.”

The girl does not look reassured. It is surely unimaginable to her that something that eludes her in these moments of total concentration and effort, will soon enough require no concentration or effort at all. How do we cross that seeming chasm of capacity, that shift from the conscious to the unconscious doing of things? And at what cost? What does it mean that we are not even aware of doing things that we once thought impossible?

Our selves are so un-self-aware that they conflate their sense-making with the body’s adaptive reactions, and think they are all our selves’ doing.

Still, it’s easy to get confused between what originates with this body, what is ‘its’, and what is ‘mine’, this self’s. Which of ‘us’, for example, this body or ‘me’, is the hedonist, striving in all things to maximize pleasure and minimize pain? Which is seeking to lie on beautiful tropical ocean beaches, to listen to exquisite, well-crafted music, to gaze at beautiful people and astonishing works of art? Which of ‘us’ is doing that seeking, and getting pleasure from it — this body, or this self, which is seemingly along for the ride?

Since other creatures seem to enjoy some of these pleasures — creatures that are not apparently afflicted with selves — ‘I’ can only surmise that it is this body that is the hedonist, not ‘me’. What is ‘my’ role then? Alas, I suspect it is just to try to make sense of it all — to try to explain why this body reacts as it does, and, absurdly, to take responsibility for that reaction. So there is embarrassment and shame at the body’s reaction to the stunning woman in the sports bra. And there is analysis of the music, to see what qualities might have evoked such pleasure. And there is love and appreciation of beauty, and of art.

No wonder, stripped of possession of this body’s unfathomable reactions, ‘we’ our ‘selves’ feel so incomplete, as if something is missing. Yet none of these cogitations, none of this ‘making sense’ is necessary, or really adds anything to the pure raw pleasure of this animal body’s life, or mitigates its moments of unmediated pain. This self, this ‘me’, is just a veil of confusion, a useless appendage. A post-game show, rehashing what is already whole and complete.

.     .     .

There is a commotion up ahead. A squirrel is frenziedly scampering and nattering angrily as it races up a tree. A young tabby cat follows in hot pursuit. By the time I reach the yard, a woman has emerged from the nearby house. She is standing on the landing of her front steps, alternately shouting at and consoling the cat, which is clinging to the trunk, with one paw draped over one of the tree’s forks. “Not again!”, the woman says, seemingly more to me than to the cat, which does not appear to be listening anyway. She is tapping on her cell phone, presumably calling for help.

One of the consequences of us taking kittens away from their mothers when they’re young is that they don’t learn the essentials of how to be a successful cat before they transfer their dependence to much less helpful humans. Knowing how to climb a tree is something biologically conditioned in cats. But knowing how to get down again is culturally conditioned — it has to be learned from its parents, by demonstration.

As with cats, human learning is a blend of the biological and the cultural. Though because human babies are dependent for so long compared to most other species, our biological know-how is both more limited than, and more quickly overlaid by, cultural learning, re-conditioning us. And human bodies’ cultural learning, unlike the cat’s, is obfuscated by ‘our’ insistence on it making sense, when it need not.

When Mary Oliver wrote “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”, she wisely implied that your body loves in a much different, more natural way than ‘you’ do. Its love is instinctive, undebatable, while yours (‘ours’) is conditional, fraught with judgement, anxious, guarded, disconnected, and endlessly needing reassurance.

‘We’ are not much good for anything, it seems, even love.

.     .     .

A few blocks on, I notice a crow furiously shaking a twig, about two feet long, in its beak, and hammering it against the ground. It is nesting season for crows and this is clearly serious business, not play. Nearby there is a large pile of branches left behind after some work crew’s spring trimming. So, curious to see how the crow might react, I sit by the pile and spend a few minutes breaking some of the thinner branches into small lengths of various sizes. I know from a bot query that their nests are around 45cm wide and 25cm high, framed by interwoven twigs 15-30cm long, so I’m aiming for pieces of that size. I also peel off some bark, which the bot told me is often used for lining the nest.

The crow is now nowhere to be seen, so I rise, dust myself off, and continue on my walk. And I wonder: was the crow’s display of twig-shaking a learned behaviour to condition humans like me to produce smaller twigs? It seems unlikely, but a quote from Melissa Holbrook Pierson about her beloved pets comes to mind:

This is the basis of my dogs’ storied love for me, their one and only. Only I know the real truth. It is not this Melissa they love. If they bark menacingly at someone who approaches, they are not doing it to ensure my safety. There is but one thought in their minds: do not harm this person, for she is my most valuable possession. My large Swiss army knife, the one with all the extra attachments.

.     .     .

Soon after, I reach the lake, which is the urbanized remains of an old gravel quarry, now stocked with fish and replete with a night-lit fountain. There is an old man shuffling toward one of the lakeside benches, looking kind of sad, haggard and arthritic, and carrying a small bag of what turns out be food for the ducks.

I look at him and think: I can imagine ending up like him, but I hope I don’t. He sits at one end of the bench and the words from the song Old Friends come to mind. With a smile, I resist the temptation to sit at the other end of the bench.

Instead, I find myself listening to the music playing quietly on the speaker system set up along the path around the lake. There’s an instrumental version of a song playing and I’m filling in the words in my head and realize it’s Cody Fry’s moving orchestral version of Eleanor Rigby. And the old man is staring at the speaker and shaking his head slowly as the song’s chorus plays. And then we suddenly catch each other’s eye as we both recognize the song, and its ever-appropriate meaning. We both look around at all the people nearby. And then we both look down. What is this feeling? This awkward, unbridgeable recognition of unspeakable truths?

And I realize: I could have been this guy. I could be this guy. We’re close to the same age. And yet, I know with absolute certainty, I do not want to hear his story. I don’t want to know how things might have been otherwise, how hard it is for others, how much suffering there is below the veneer of pretending we’re all OK and we know what we’re doing. After all, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

I laugh, dismayed at myself, as I turn away. I think of the stunning woman in the park. I want to hear her story, I realize, aghast.

There is, I think, no hope for ‘me’.

This body, on the other hand, doesn’t want to hear any stories. It is too wise for that. It knows stories are just fictions, make-believe, useless conjecture, making sense of what doesn’t make sense.

At least ‘I’ hope so.

.     .     .

This body is walking home, now. For several blocks, it walks behind a well-dressed middle-aged couple. To the extent I can see them, they have serious, rather aloof expressions on their faces. Or maybe I’m just projecting. I don’t want to hear their story, either.  They walk quickly, but don’t seem to be going anywhere in particular. They say nothing to each other. Maybe they’ve said everything there is to say. Maybe they’ve run out of things to say, and are just walking for the sake of walking because it’s what they’re used to, a habit, a ritual, something they think they should be doing.

Maybe they have been doing this for forty years. Maybe for them, this is a normal life. I think of the Peter Steiner cartoon of the bored old guy watching TV and the aproned woman in the adjacent kitchen washing dishes. The caption is: Life without parole.

I wonder — Is it hardship, is it suffering, if it’s the only life you’ve ever known?

.     .     .

Back at home, I work on some tracks for a new song I’m writing. It’s the usual tug-of-war: This body wants dance music, while ‘I’ want complex new-age-y sonatas.

Writing done, this body falls into a troubled, almost haunted sleep. Near morning, it has a vivid dream about attending a conference with a bunch of interesting strangers. In the dream, we’re all young, smart, curious. One woman in particular is especially intriguing, and while she’s always in the picture during the evening events during the conference, my character in the dream never has the chance to really talk with her. She looks nothing like the woman from the previous day’s walk, but she has the same… energy? My character’s infatuation grows. And then the conference is over and it’s time to drive people home, and suddenly there’s a sign from her, unspoken. No idea what it is. Something subliminal. My character’s heart soars.

This is entirely this body’s dream, not ‘mine’. As usual, ‘I’ am just there for the analysis, the making of sense and meaning. The post-game show.

When this body awakens, it is aglow. It remembers these feelings, this amazing concoction of chemicals. But once it realizes it was just a dream, it quickly refocuses on ‘real’ things. Game over.

‘I’, however, do not recover so quickly. In a few unconscious moments, it seems, ‘I’ have virtually fallen in love with an invention, a story. Back to sleep, please! ‘I’ want this feeling, the one that consumes you, so much that nothing else matters. Who cares if it’s real? The feeling of invincibility, where the self — me! — is utterly extinguished, where all that is left, even for an impossibly brief time, is… indescribable.

This body is not convinced. It’s in charge. That Hail Mary touchdown play, it’s been called back. Never happened. Stop thinking about it. Even better, stop thinking, period.

Probably just as well, ‘I’ tell my self. Would never have worked out anyway. Falling in love with characters you’ve just dreamt up is hopeless, destined to end badly.

This body shakes ‘me’ out of this reverie. It’s making a matcha latte, and somehow, absurdly, ‘I’ am convinced I need to direct the process. What would we do without each other?

Posted in Creative Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Month-End Reflections, Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment