Is our “explanation world” how the “natural world” works by itself?

I commented yesterday on a Brian Lehrer radio show with Francis Fukuyama, discussing his recent book on The origins of political order.  You may recall Fukuyama’s previous book from 2006,”The end of History”, which caused some stir. though history continued in any case.

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Francis Fukuyama seems to do a good job of tracing the implications of modern social science theory back toward the origins of society.  He represents the natural process of human cultural evolution as a cultural historian naturally might, in terms of the history of cultural explanations.

That describes the evolution of “the explanatory world” of our attempts to represent history in terms of our cultural values.  It doesn’t seem to reflect any consideration how the “the natural world” would have evolved to create the features we then attempt to explain. Continue reading Is our “explanation world” how the “natural world” works by itself?

Missing information – feeling, reasoning & sleeping on it

We need humility to live with a world that works mostly by missing information.

Responding to John McCreery’s recent comment on Open Anthropology – Arguing From Limits (also quoted below mine here) discussing the hazard of raising doubt about people’s faith in using efficiency to reduce environmental impacts, as I had called it “a mirage”. The problem is that the visible energy uses people focus attention on are much smaller that the hidden ones we act as if quite unaware of. For the full exchange you You might start from my first comment in reply to John.

The scientific evidence (from Systems Energy Assessment) is that the visible energy demands of technology that people focus on are nominally 20% of the total, and the hidden energy demands of the commerce that uses technology is nominally 80%. That makes the effort to reduce energy use with technology efficiency, while expanding commerce to make money, quite self-defeating as a way to reduce energy use. This seems to be one of the more direct ways to explain the problem.

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John, There is certainly a moral quandary, if taking away a hopeful but mistaken belief causes people to give up and quit! That’s the kind of dilemma that get’s worse if you don’t acknowledge and find the right response to. To me that also involves looking at the apparent “easy” solutions, and asking if they really solve the right thing or not.

You might assume you’re talking to one part of an audience and really needing to shift attention to another. That “worst case” example is indeed one I’ve repeatedly run into.

I’ve also found that no amount of “icing” on the cake changed the flavor of the message those people were getting. To me it says I needed to find other people or other ways to address the greater faith and intelligence that everyone sometimes displays, that people yearn to have more respect for.

I may not know quite how to say it, but I think a society needs to be led by people who would see the problem as “career change” rather than “emergencies”, a need for more truthful and communicative models. If the “mirage of efficiency” is caused by people believing that it’s the energy uses they see that control events, when in fact it’s the energy uses they don’t see, the error is a kind of arrogance of information.

Our information is then serving to blind us to what we might well have understood anyway, from how money works. So to develop a “new career” as conscious beings, and be more alert to what’s missing from our information, would involve watching for what some story teller may be hiding from us with it.

It’s great that you suggest Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings fable as a model to discuss this from. I ask whether the fable leads the protagonist to a more practical or a more fatalistic view of life in the end.

Sure, striving for the truth is arduous and dangerous, but don’t all those great selling books and movies on the “heroic journey” theme seem to end in “the great truth” being a magic spell? That might not always be false, but is at least false for the successes your efforts are responsible for earning. It may well feel like “pure magic” when you see the skeleton walls of your new house capped by a roof for the first time, giving you your first glimpse of the end product. It’s not magic that got you there, though, and not magic that’s needed for the career change in our mental habits for people to learn to look beyond their information to understand the realities of the natural world.

How people change how they think seems to be by learning experiences with their feelings passing new questions to their reasoning, and reasoning passing back new propositions to feel the meaning of, and then sleeping on it and mulling things over with friends, as a way of exploring. A lot of what I don’t know is what ideas will awaken that kind of curiosity and hunger for learning in other people.

Looking for it, though, is much of why I try to use the vernacular, and associate common experiences with uncommon points of view that came from a more scientific curiosity. The idea of calling our cultural faith in efficiency “a mirage” came from John Fullerton as his way of condensing some of my scientific models.

I think that image does just what is needed, as far as connecting reasoning and feeling on the subject. It still needs to be handled in an emotionally supportive way for people who have not really considered it yet. So, that’s a model, connecting reason and feeling for new challenges, and giving people emotional support as they struggle with them.

In that article of mine on “A decisive moment for Investing in Sustainability” I try to combine raising the challenge of new kinds of learning with the emotional support people need to make it their own. The subject there is our belated discovery of our emerging global resource crisis, with demand now exceeding supply systemically and world markets responding by raising prices in a panic.

For sustainability professionals being called in “to fix the problem” and needing to invent new models at the same time, demands more from them in wits and courage than anyone can ask of them. Because this crisis is now upon us, it’s also just too late to “hurry up” to avoid it. The question seems more one of choosing to fully engage in learning how our world is changing and making that a new part of our lives.

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Responding John McCreery’s comment on the thread “Arguing from The Limits”

The problem with presenting efficiency as a mirage is that the result may not be the one you anticipate. If the dream of a simpler, more sustainable life comes to be seen as fundamentally fallacious, you may well have more people simply giving up, going fatalistic, leaving it up to God, or choosing “eat, drink and be merry, for the end is nigh.”

A better approach might begin with praise for personal steps toward a simpler, less energy-intensive life (people like being flattered), followed by the observation that, in large part, we have simply shifted the energy burden somewhere else, where the monster grows stronger until it is ready to devour us. We have won a battle, but it’s only a skirmish.

The war will be long and hard. Instead of pissing on the buds of what could become a major change in attitude, treat them as heroic first steps in the long march to the ultimate goal. Consider the narrative arc in The Lord of the Rings. If Tolkien had introduced the Hobbits as a bunch of deluded idiots, who would care if Frodo managed to destroy the ring.

Also, thinking about what’s going on now in Japan, a catastrophe might help. With the horrible news from Northeast Japan still fresh in everyone’s mind and emotions, the Fukushima reactors offline, and a lot of the power grid still in a mess, people here have reacted positively to government calls to save electricity.

Train schedules have been reduced, half the escalators are stopped, stores are closing early, and the neon has been turned off all over town. The government has announced a policy under which industry will be required to lower power consumption by 25%. The last time this happened, during the 1973 oil shock, Japan became the most energy-efficient country on the planet.

I recall a conversation with a friend. We agreed that planning to avoid catastrophe is important. That said, the really critical issue may be whether we are prepared to respond effectively when catastrophe strikes. I was reminded of one of Robert Parker’s Spencer novels, whose protagonist is a hardboiled Boston detective.

In this particular tale, Spencer has rescued a kid whose parents are threatened by the mob and is driving him up to a cabin in Maine, where Spencer and the kid will hide out and keep the kid safe from becoming a hostage. The kid asks Spencer if he’s worried that the mob might track them to the cabin.

Spencer replies that he doesn’t worry about that. All he thinks about is how he will respond if they do. As ugly and manipulative as it may sound, I wonder if the same principle doesn’t apply to what you are trying to do.

By all means keep plugging away and spreading the word about the problem you have identified. But think seriously about how to turn the next, inevitable catastrophe into a springboard for getting the message out to people who are briefly more likely to accept and move on it.

 

 

The economic meaning of “steady state”

Herman Daly offers his view of what a “steady state economy” is and how to use the term in a guest blog post on the Capital Institute website. I agree that understanding the meaning is more important than exactly what name you use, but there are important types if “steady states” not yet being discussed.

My comment, posted there and below, is for helping distinguish between the “lively” and “lifeless” forms of steady states that are possible for economies in nature. Of course, I raise the curiously overlooked concise meaning that Keynes would have given the type of lively and conflict free stable state of healthy economies too, as he discussed in “The General Theory…” but was misunderstood.

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Finding the Fitting Name

I’d agree with Daly that ultimately what you call the ideal kind of steady state for an economy matters less than whether what you achieve is something close to an ideal steady state. I study the physics of “open systems”, a.k.a. natural economies, and there are clearly discernible “ideal” steady states one might seek to achieve.

There are the ecosystems that while relatively stable and full of competing populations also display such deep and diverse complementary relationships between populations that the whole system operates with a relatively low level of internal conflict. Continue reading The economic meaning of “steady state”

Four comments “the world” liked… Mar 2011

I get Google alerts to popular comments I’ve made on other blogs. Following are the most recent 4:

  1. The inequality of wealth as a natural process II – Brian Lehrer on WNYC
  2. The inequality of wealth as a natural process I – Brian Lehrer on WNYC
  3. Efforts to “monetize” nature for financial trading – Open Anthropology
  4. How natural systems diverge from models – John Baez’s Azimuth blog

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Nurturing “cash cows” or “crash cows”?

Note: this is a draft concept for the Apr 2011 article on “what to do” aimed at a wider business audience “A decisive moment for investing in sustainability

For other discussions of “what to do” from an environmental systems science view, see also the 6/10/11 notes for Alex Jakulin’s Foo Camp talk on my work and my various discussions of the natural limit for money that Keynes identified which comes down to one thing. That’s the subject for slides #5-8, for for Aleks’ talk. or search my site for “what to do”.

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All natural systems start with growth like economies, using a “seeding mechanism” for planting seeds to multiply the “start-up” system. That mechanism, which for money is the use of investment to grow investments, has to change form to become a “steering mechanism” [switching from being a “Crash Cow to a Cash Cow” so the “end-up” system can transition from growth to becoming sustainable, if it is to survive beyond its start-up period.

The world seems to be at a particularly decisive moment, not quite being recognized. There’s a strong and creative professional sustainable investment advise community, emerging and being given paid positions and increasing influence, throughout the finance, business and government economic decision making communities. Continue reading Nurturing “cash cows” or “crash cows”?

The fit with Alexander – and clearer escape from our traps

Our oil addiction, like all addictions, became a physical trap, and shaped our ways of life to fit its temporary needs.

Needing to consume ever more of the remaining affordable oil supplies also has pollution effects that will permanently disrupt the earth’s climate.

We do it to achieve an evidently false image of “economic stability”.

The design of our environment, our spaces and uses, will change adaptively as some parts of what we built find new lasting uses and others don’t.  Christopher Alexander is an architect whose “Pattern Language” explores how the natural processes of reshaping the spaces we live in over time has created urban spaces perfectly fitting their use as a form of natural environmental design.

The patterns of space as an image of their uses

One can discover how we fell into the trap of dependence on an ever growing use of oil with no future.  That won’t quickly change the world we built around it though.  As we respond, the natural forces and our responsive thinking will reshape our space, likely leading us to follow nature’s paths to finding opportunity and harmony. Continue reading The fit with Alexander – and clearer escape from our traps

Simple facts… and hard memes, why greening doesn’t work

Dan Ariely gave a recent talk on some of his new “Predictably Irrational” research. It stimulated my thinking to ask, using his approach, “What beliefs do people not dare check?”.

Oops... my mistake!

The example below suggests that is a problem for the green movement, regarding why it has been ineffective in slowing the growth of economic impacts. Dan replied “force yourself to do a systematic analysis and listen to the analysis”.

That’s good advice, to “listen to the analysis”.  Aren’t we ALWAYS supposed to listen to your own analysis??   There seem to be regularly reoccurring ways in which we don’t, making a big difference in our impacts on the earth. Continue reading Simple facts… and hard memes, why greening doesn’t work

A new idea for Investment in Deep Ecology

Deep ecology is a natural philosophy that recognizes the nature and its parts as living systems that have their own worth, independent of the services they provide for humans. It was named by and perhaps best described in the work of Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss. As a practical approach to life it involves systems thinking, to understand healthy relationships and the roles between parts of living networks.

That’s more like understanding how characters create the themes of a play than “cause and effect”. Since all ecologies develop by building and maintaining their energy using processes there are also observable boundary conditions one can use to help understand the more complex relationships. That traditional paradigm of science would examine living systems as chains of deterministic effects, the way logic and computers work. So those metaphors are less useful even if they are the dominant way of explaining things in our culture.

How money can take care of our world

The idea grew out of conversations with John Fullerton, Hazel Henderson, Leland Lehrman and Kenneth Davies, looking for new ways to define ethical investing that could be defined and implemented as the world searches for what’s wrong with money. At a conference I had asked a question about how investors could avoid the main cause of our pressing environmental impact problems. Continue reading A new idea for Investment in Deep Ecology

The very same script pulled from the drawer

Leland, Thanks for forwarding Christine Harper’s (Bloomberg Jan 31) notes on “The lonliest man in Davos…” reporting from the meeting of the World Economic Forum.

It all sounds like the very same script pulled from the drawer at every stage of history, as the next greater ecological or financial bubble emerges,

people running about madly trying to patch the weak points in the containment,

…hoping against hope that each greater failure isn’t leading to the inevitable for financial systems designed to ‘stabilize’ growing expectations for results from physical systems not providing them.

When I first noticed that problem long ago I quickly narrowed it down to that deep error of intent, and then to how our accounting system keeps records of it on the faint hope that the impossible will someday be fulfilled. It treats the physical world as a “black box” of unknowns, relied on to multiply returns that can’t be confirmed or contested. So I say, why not “look in the box”, see what you really have!  Continue reading The very same script pulled from the drawer

“The big Crunch” natural limits and the food crisis

The published article that followed from this is A decisive moment for Investing in Sustainability, published in New European Economy in Apr 2011.   Back when I saw this particular event emerging I told people “We’ll definitely notice this one”.   There’s much more to come people still don’t expect at all.

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John, your new post on the food crisis, “As Goes Egypt”, is great. To me how to connect economic theory with the natural world starts with learning how to read the behaviors of the system as a whole, looking for things no one has any theory for.

the food crisis from 2010

That includes strains that are not supposed to be there, like hitting the hard global limits of affordable food, fuel and water, etc. My research method basically rests on emerging growth systems being invariably unstudied, because growth indicates nature doing something new. Continue reading “The big Crunch” natural limits and the food crisis