Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

Politics of narrow nationalist interest miss the underlying national interest in survival

This Canadian news article about political opposition to carbon taxes does a good job of summarizing the barriers to stronger greenhouse gas mitigation policy that people like Doug McAdam and Stephen Gardiner have articulated:

“Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, would be a hard enough sell on its own. But a tax in aid of a vast international plan to save the earth from a scourge that remains imperceptible to most voters, to which Canada has contributed little and against which Canada can have little impact, while countries whose actions would be decisive remain inert? Good luck”

To me it seems like a nice demonstration about Gardiner’s 4th proposition, about the “problematic paradigm” in climate change politics:

“In the environmental discourse, the presence of the perfect moral storm is obscured by the dominance and pervasiveness of an alternative, narrower analysis. According to this account, climate change is a paradigmatically global problem best understood as a prisoner’s dilemma or tragedy of the commons played out between nation states who adequately represent the interests of their citizens in perpetuity. However, such models assume away many of the main issues, and especially the intergenerational aspect of the climate problem. Hence, they are inadequate in this case, and perhaps many others. This point has theoretical as well as practical implications.”

This is the logic of Andrew Coyne’s newspaper article, that citizens in democratic states will use the inaction of others around the world to justify their own limited efforts to reduce domestic fossil fuel consumption, fuel production, and exports. As long as someone else is behaving unethically, we have license to do so too. As George Monbiot and others have explained eloquently, that logic is a suicide pact in the case of climate change. We need to establish an international order where continued fossil fuel dependence is discouraged and even punished, and the emergence of that order likely depends on some good faith first steps from the rich countries like Canada who now say their dirty path to prosperity can’t be followed by the rest of the world. It’s actually true that rising living standards in places including India and China can’t be fossil-fuel-driven as they have been in North America, Japan, and Europe for the most part. Convincing developing countries to take the less tested path of development based on carbon safe energy depends on countries that have already quite counterproductively invested enormously in fossil fuel energy to show that they too will move away from it for the sake of all the human generations that will follow us, and all the species whose welfare depends on how much climate change we cause.

Climate deniers in a world of fantasy

In an ideal world, politicians would rely on high quality sources of information to determine what they should consider to be true factually about the world. They could then apply their political philosophies and ideologies to the question of what public policy ought to exist.

It’s not only conservatives who invert or pervert this process, beginning with their desired political conclusions and working back to facts from there, but the conservative tendency to do so is a noteworthy feature of contemporary politics. It’s not all post-Trump either. Conservatives have disliked the implications of everything from the study of human anatomy in the context of sexual differentiation to climate change, and have often assuaged their discomfort by just refusing to accept features of the universe they dislike.

Hence ‘People’s Party of Canada’ founder Maxime Bernier’s tweet about how “CO2 is NOT pollution. It’s what comes out of your mouth when you breathe and what nourishes plants.”

While the claim has the appearance of a scientific assertion, I think it’s a clear case of working back from policy preference to fact. Even for experts like Canadian conservatives it’s hard to deny chemically that when you burn coal, oil, and gas you generate CO2. If the policy priority is to keep expanding those industries as much as possible, it becomes necessary to recast that consequence as benign or even desirable. It doesn’t seem to matter much if that’s done in a way that contradicts other claims (like there being no need to curtail supply because we should focus on limiting demand, or saying that Canadian action to curb CO2 emissions would be pointless because China produces so much more).

To an extent we all suffer from motivated reasoning along the lines of ‘when the facts don’t seem to support my beliefs, find some new facts’. The importance of understanding the climate problem, however, means we need to demand more from ourselves and our leaders in this area. Not only are people who make these sorts of climate denier comments showing they cannot be trusted to be put in charge of climate and energy policy, they are proving that they aren’t competent to lead at all.

one of the great fears is that worsening climate conditions will make people fight instead of cooperate

There’s some hope perhaps that experiences like extreme weather events and wildfires will boost the salience of climate change in the population and shift atittudes toward more robust controls on carbon emissions.

Anecdotally: In North Carolina, hurricanes did what scientists could not: Convince Republicans that climate change is real

Our appalling legacy

There’s another dire warning from the IPCC: Final call to save the world from ‘climate catastrophe’

There seems little reason to hope that people will react differently to this one than to the 1990, 1996, 2001, 2007, and 2014 reports.

Our collective future is a massive ethical blindspot. People who wouldn’t think about missing a pension contribution or not enrolling their kids in an enriched learning program are collectively deciding by default to ravage the planet which we all depend on, and our political and economic institutions are acting almost exclusively to encourage that outcome.

Online romance

I have seen it argued in several places that among heterosexuals romance is a more egalitarian game for women than for men, with most women being able to find a partner, get married, and have children if they prioritize those things, while the least attractive men struggle to find anyone at all who wants them as a partner.

This is substantiated somewhat in a recent Economist briefing about online dating. They note:

Men on Tantan, he says, tend to like about 60% of all the female profiles they see, but women like just 6% of the male ones. The least attractive women receive similar levels of attention to the most attractive men, says Mr Wang; all can find someone reasonably attractive. Men at the bottom of the ladder end up completely matchless. This fits with the work by Ms Bruch and Mr Newman. In general, both men and women concentrate on people that the common opinion of the site rates as 25% more attractive than they are. Even for women not seen as desirable, that can work. For the least desirable men, nothing works. “I don’t expect that final 5% to be that easy to help,” says Mr Wang.

There’s bad news for women as well. Whereas men actually become more attractive as they age from 20 to about 45, women peak in attractiveness at the youngest end of the scale and decline gradually until about 65.

All told they make the case that online romance is a very good thing, giving everyone the opportunity to efficiently contact a wide range of partners, and being especially helpful for people who are looking for relatively rare characteristics. They note that 70% of same-sex relationships now begin online.

Resistance to World Health Organization Ebola efforts

Another case of conspiratorial thinking, selfish politicians, and conflict threatening to make a deadly serious threat into a dire global emergency:

Pockets of “reluctance, refusal and resistance” to accept Ebola vaccination were generating many of the new cases, Salama said.

“We also see a very concerning trend. That resistance, driven by quite natural fear of this terrifying disease, is starting to be exploited by local politicians, and we’re very concerned in the run up to elections, projected for December, that that exploitation… will gather momentum and make it very difficult to root out the last cases of Ebola.”

Some people were fleeing into the forest to escape Ebola follow-up treatment and checks, sometimes moving hundreds of kilometers, he said.

There was one such case to the south of Beni, and another to the north, close to the riverbanks of Lake Albert. Both were inaccessible for security reasons.

Neighboring Uganda was now facing an “imminent threat”, and social media posts were conflating Ebola with criticism of the DRC government and the United Nations and “a range of conspiracy theories”, which could put healthworkers at risk.

Ebola was a particular fear of mine in childhood, and it remains very worrisome and uncomfortable where we now live in a world where periodic outbreaks are now treated largely as business as usual.

Easier to blame people for their suffering than to perceive injustice

The researchers and trauma experts Bessel A. van der Kolk and Alexander C. McFarlane write, “Reason and objectivity are not the primary determinants of society’s reactions to traumatized people. Rather … society’s reactions seem to be primarily conservative impulses in the service of maintaining the beliefs that the world is fundamentally just, that people can be in charge of their lives, and that bad things only happen to people who deserve them.”

I have frequently seen such irrational and defensive “conservative impulses” applied to organizational systems over the years, but perhaps never more than when I have collaborated with child protective services (CPS) workers and firefighters. Both groups have gruelling, scary, demanding jobs, and yet the way people react to them is strikingly different. CPS workers carry a heavy burden of feeling that they are hated—by everyone. Firefighters, on the other hand, tend to have the benefit of an age-old image of them as saviors and heroes. This contrast speaks to every level we’re touched on: the personal, the organizational, and the societal.

van Dernoot Lipsey, Laura and Connie Burk. Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others. 2009. p. 30–31 (ellipses in original)

saganangst — fear of nuclear war, and particularly nuclear winter

We live under constant threat of sudden destruction via nuclear war. It wouldn’t take that many warheads falling on major cities to darken the atmosphere — making the consequences of even a regional exchange (or the payload of a single ‘boomer’ sub) global, and potentially a threat to the integrity of human civilization. The control systems carry a frightening risk of malfunction, particularly in a crisis when nuclear-armed forces may be out of communication with higher level command and at immediate risk of nuclear attack.

The only safe option is to disarm as a global community — spare everyone the costs of the nuclear arms complex, while greatly diminishing the total severity of potential wars.

Open thread: shadow solutions to climate change

In the absence of real political solutions to climate change, Stephen Gardiner argues that: “we are susceptible to proposals for action that do not respond to the real problem. This provides a good explanation of what has gone wrong in the last two decades of climate policy, from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen. However, the form of such “shadow solutions” is likely to evolve as a the situation deteriorates. Some recent arguments for pursuing geoengineering may represent such an evolution.”

One example from today: Build walls on seafloor to stop glaciers melting, scientists say

Another example was back when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggested we could adapt to climate change by altering our physiology.