Psychology – Page 24 – a sibilant intake of breath

Confronting ineffectiveness as an activist

Conversing with my friend Nada about in-group dynamics, the psychological property of agreeableness, and group cohesion, she raised the matter of the difficult psychological disjoint between the change which activists desperately desire in the world and the practical realization that they generally aren’t achieving it. There have been moments of triumph for some social justice campaigns (enfranchisement of women, gay marriage, banning leaded gasoline) but most activists at most times have not experienced major policy change of the sort they are seeking.

When confronted with this ineffectiveness, people are provoked to respond emotionally and also (somewhat separately) to consider their situation analytically. Emotionally, frustration, anger, and self-righteousness may be the inputs from which defence mechanisms emerge or are maintained. Analytically, an activist in an ineffective campaign may be driven to consider how their movement or situation differs from others that seem more capable of affecting policy outcomes. Activist organizations tend to be informal, volunteer driven, with high turnover in people involved, few accountability mechanisms, and with modes of democratic decision-making which may seem to both produce poor decisions and leave people feeling unhappy. They are often up against status quo opponents with paid professional staffs, more formal decision-making structures which are more often seen as legitimate by insiders, money, and privileged contact with policy makers. The contrast can leave activists both dispirited and despairing about their odds of success.

These unpleasant feelings arguably flow from a faulty assumption which is nonetheless tied to the very idea of being an activist: the belief, or at least the hope, that you can actually make a difference. For a problem as massive as climate change, there is no necessary reason to think that non-violent grassroots organizing can change enough behaviour globally to avoid the outcomes which we most fear. Similarly, there is no reason to think that a hierarchy-based or violent approach would necessarily be effective.

Psychologically, this also seems tied to cognitive dissonance, which I think is most meaningfully defined as a situation in which a person’s beliefs and behaviours are contradictory, and where the tendency is most often for them to adjust their beliefs to match their behaviours than to do the converse. If the behaviour is ‘doing activism’ and the belief is that this will change the world, at least a little bit, we can ponder the psychological response to being shown that your belief isn’t presently well supported. It may be rational to try something else (go and join the civil service, run for political office, try to influence people through your writing, become a charismatic leader in a new organization), and at least some of the time people do these things. More often, perhaps, the response is to find a way to believe that you are making a difference, perhaps by ‘raising awareness’ or something equally woolly and intractable. Another option is either a secular or theological faith that somehow in the long term the success you seek will be achieved (“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”). It’s clear why this works as a psychological defence mechanism, since it mitigates the despair of seeing the threat that motivates you alongside little or even negative progress away from disaster. What’s less clear is whether such psychological defence mechanisms are effective in terms of maximizing the odds that your campaign actually succeeds by encouraging smart choices, effective teamwork, and other practical inputs to success.

I don’t think the question of how activists should confront ineffectiveness has a clear answer. Personally, I think ‘the power of positive thinking’ is dangerous nonsense that probably reduces most people’s odds of success in most situations (though it is likely better than utter despair, if that’s your only other option). Perhaps something like an emotionally-aware version of the rational ideal is possible: a hybrid mode of self-consideration in which you both recognize the psychological bases which are necessary to keep going as an activist, while also remaining capable of dispassionate consideration of which options for behaviour are actually open to you and whether any of them can advance your cause. As mentioned already, it’s totally logically possible that no political movement can prevent absolute climate change catastrophe at this point. Whether or not that’s true, however, for those who are determined to fight on, some sort of psychologically-aware strategic planning seems like a not-entirely-impossible objective.

A further challenge is applying any such model of personal reflection in the social context of an activist organization. For example, presenting totally valid and well-justified points made about strategy may undermine social cohesion to the extent that the group becomes ineffective or falls apart. At the root, activists collectively involved in a campaign are allies rather than friends and must somehow maintain healthy relations as a route to collective effectiveness. Pulling this off while everyone is erecting and reinforcing personal defence mechanisms, and while huge uncertainties about which courses of action offer the best chances of success, is a challenge of such a magnitude that it may itself contribute to how rarely activists achieve meaningful and durable progress.

Doldrums of August

Life has suddenly become exceptionally lonely. August is always a trying time in a PhD program. The lack of any real income since spring is naturally biting, and I have always had trouble dealing with the heat. There’s a breakdown of social structure and support, with no classes to teach or take, and friends and colleagues absent or unavailable. Early in the summer, the absence of termtime obligations can feel like an empowering opportunity to make progress on research but, by these late summer days, enthusiasm and intellectual focus have faded.

It’s especially exacerbated for me right now, with close friends on the far side of the country, or newly and permanently outside the city, or otherwise distant. I have no way to use my Hive tiles. On the climate activism front, not only has there been a major personal setback, but the precise nature of it remains unresolved and unknown. This has been a very bad week.

I spent most of today reading. First, Oliver Sacks’ excellent memoir On the Move, which was given to me by a generous friend. I haven’t previously read any of his work, but having devoured half the longish book today I feel like it’s one of the most accessible and interesting autobiographies I have read. Sacks is a great narrator, and has a thoroughly colourful and conceptually provocative life to relate, from thoughts about medicine and drug addiction to motorcycle adventures; the complexities of sex, psychology, and family; sudden death; and the science of the thinking brain. Sacks has an impressive vocabulary, and I have marked down 50+ words to look up in the OED. Charmingly, the hardcover set of the same was how Sacks chose to spend most of the money from a prestigious exam contest which he won at Oxford, half-drunk and only choosing to answer one of the seven questions posed.

In a pile of unwanted goods on the sidewalk of Markham Street, I found Peter Singer’s The President of Good & Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W. Bush, which I also half-read. I enjoy the argumentative style of philosophers discussing matters of ethics and much of the book is convincing. At the same time, it seems a bit of a strange undertaking. For one thing, it probably attributes more policy-making power to Bush than he really possessed as president, ignoring forces that were pressuring him to make one decision or another. In the broadest sense, there are broad ideological boundaries which all politically sensitive people perceive; accepting the political program of your supporters and colleagues is driven more by social pressure than logic. Singer’s discussion about whether Bush’s statements were honest also doesn’t account for how U.S. presidents can generally only get things done in cooperation with other American politicians. In the main area where they can act alone – military conflict – Singer is convincingly excoriating.

Reading Sacks has given me a strong desire to write a book (much less plausibly, also to tour North America by motorcycle). Conveniently, that is the purpose and major task remaining in my PhD. The spiritless and solitary days of final August should permit continuing incremental progress, and I am hopeful about a burst of discussion and decision in September. I’m also looking forward hugely to meeting the incoming crop of Massey junior fellows.

Ethics and discount rates

The discount rate is a basic tool of accounting and economics: people and institutions often need to deal with costs and benefits which will arise in the future, and it doesn’t usually make sense to simply value them as if they were happening today. A person expecting pension payments of $1,000 per month in thirty years probably shouldn’t value them as though they had the money in hand today, and neither should the organization that will be making the payouts.

To adjust for the time difference, people doing accounting choose an annual discount rate by which to reduce the value of things expected in the future.

Problematically, however, the compounding effects of this across long periods of time can make the specific rate you choose into the most important feature of the calculation. This has an extreme effect in climate change economics.

In the context of pensions, a recent Economist article explained:

The higher the discount rate, the less money has to be put aside now; American public plans tend to use a discount rate of around 7.5%, based on the investment return they expect to achieve…

A promise to pay a stream of pension payments in the future resembles a commitment to make interest payments on a bond. A bond yield is thus the most appropriate discount rate. But given how low bond yields are, pension deficits would look larger (and required contributions would be much higher) if such a discount rate were used. A discount rate of 4%, for example, would mean the average public pension plan would have a funding ratio of only 45%, not 72%, according to the CRR.

That last bit means that American institutions which owe pensions to employees in the future may have only 45% of the money which is necessary for that purpose, rather than the 72% which they currently believe themselves to possess.

While there is an intellectual and even a moral case for discounting the future, it seems clear that it’s a practice with considerable moral risks associated. We are in a situation where simply by making optimistic assumptions we can reduce the burden which we owe to future generations. If we get things wrong, especially in the multi-century case of climate change, they will have no way to hold us to account.

Psychologically, this may also lead to us ‘discounting the future’ in other ways. If people expect corporate and government pension plans to be broke by the time they retire, it may inspire a super-cautious response of independent personal pension saving, or it may lead to people writing off any hope of financial stability in old age and simply ignoring the risk. Such temptations may be even greater for those who see the massively inadequate response the world is undertaking in relation to climate change and ask whether – even if governments, firms, and individuals did set aside adequate retirement savings in the near future – the world will still be intact enough in the second half of the 21st century for those funds to be meaningful.

Orange goggles to combat insomnia

In an effort to control my insomnia, I bought some protective goggles which exclude blue light.

On the first night, when I put them on at 9pm, the psychological effect is profound. Suddenly, it seems obvious everywhere that I should be asleep or preparing for sleep.

I will try putting them on sometime between 9pm and midnight for a month or so and report back on the results.

The danger of reading the news too often

I have been listening to an audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s: Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. It’s full of interesting concepts and engaging writing.

In one passage, Taleb describes the anxiety of the investor who feels the need to constantly check on how well an investment is doing. Has the value risen or fallen over the last month? Day? Minute? Second?

He describes a number of statistical and psychological features of such situations, but one seems possible to apply to estimating the ideal frequency of news-checking.

Taleb argues that with the investment, we generally see smaller jitters in value when we choose to look up the current value more often. Furthermore, and critically, we are likely to suffer more every time we see a drop in value than we are to celebrate when we see a gain — one of the ways in which people are demonstrably not ‘rational’ in the sense of valuing mathematically identical outcomes differently for emotional reasons.

Something similar may accompany the temptation to open a browser window to check Google News, open Twitter on your phone, glance at Facebook, or otherwise deliberately seek a new set of general updates about the broader state of the world. Given additional biases in the media, the odds are probably under 50% that any news story you have not seen before will be ‘positive’, at least for people who prefer a minimum amount of violence and suffering in the world. In particular, because violence is so emotionally salient to us, it tends to both dominate media coverage and draw the most attention when mixed in with other types of news stories.

If we feel the ‘losses’ in human welfare more acutely than the gains, checking for updates too frequently may lead us to develop and maintain an overly discouraged perspective on the world. This becomes even more likely when we take into account the seemingly irrational way in which our brains excessively prioritize what seems to be happening right now. Reading about the ongoing active shooter situation, with new updates coming in all the time, may be fundamentally more traumatizing than reading about the whole incident once it has been resolved (or at least moved to the next stage — the arrest, the trial, the post-massacre political analysis).

Perhaps it makes sense to intentionally curtail time spent following current news in favour (at least) of waiting for the summary (if any) in a weekly news magazine or, even better, working through the pages of a dusty book that has influenced the thinking of many people.

Second term US defense secretaries

Finally, and very subjectively, there is an inauspicious storyline surrounding second-term secretaries of defense: none has ever finished his second term, each having been asked by the president to leave before his term was over. I believe that this is not coincidence; that there is something about this particular job that causes it to go sour before eight years elapse. Perhaps it is the pressure of signing the deployment orders that send our military personnel on dangerous missions from which they might not return. (I always approached this signing in a highly personal way, trying to understand how things could go wrong, and how military families would be affected; to keep a close personal tie to this awesome decision, I insisted on using my real signature – no auto-signing.) Perhaps it is the highly emotional meetings with families of soldiers killed while performing a mission at your direction. Or perhaps it is the tendency to catch “Potomac fever” – the affliction that, in time, leads defense secretaries to believe that all the attention they are getting is because of who they are, rather than the position they hold, and sometimes fostering an inability to maintain a sense of proportion while dealing with the enormous power they exercise. Whichever of these reasons – or combinations of reasons – is the culprit, the history is compelling.

Perry, William. My Journey at the Nuclear Brink. Stanford Security Studies. 2015. p. 142 (paperback)

Working on managing hatred toward drivers

I think perhaps I need to undertake a befriending exercise with drivers.

My universal doctrine is not to hate anybody, but I do hate people who drive cars, pickup trucks, military vehicles rebranded as family transport, motorcycles, and taxis (I would prefer an all-taxi world to one where people have private cars, but taxi drivers are the most impatient and reckless drivers in many circumstances).

I hate drivers for smashing their way around the world in their smog-producing, climate-wrecking machines, routinely killing pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers. I hate them for feeling entitled to do these things because it’s normal and because they pay something toward the costs their cars impose on people and nature.

I love cycling and it was a major part of my life from childhood until I moved to Toronto, but the combination of snow and ice, terrible bike infrastructure, and a desire to keep my skull intact made me give my bike away when I moved here, cursing drivers for making the city a death factory.

These feelings may be morally justified, but they are probably also unhealthy. I see and hear cars every hour of every day and walking around filled with resentment doesn’t contribute to any dream scenario where people stop speeding around with insufficient care and attention in toxic smashing machines.

If I could, I would undo every car ever made and turn it back into iron-bearing rock which we didn’t need to mine and oil which we didn’t need to dig up.

I have tried to follow my father’s example and use hitchhiking as a means of befriending drivers, but nobody in Toronto ever ever picks me up, unlike in Vancouver, Ottawa, and Oxford.

Hence this Litany for Enemies, derived with respect from mindfulness meditation proponents who have done credible research:

“No matter how we appear on the outside, all of us can feel fearful, sad, or lonely on the inside…

May they be safe, and free from suffering.

May they be as happy and healthy as it is possible for them to be.

May they have ease of being.”

I don’t know who narrated this particular meditation, but it has helped me a great deal.

Every single time, however, it is also an uncomfortable confrontation of reflexes which suggest that anyone who is in conflict with me is necessarily wrong. That’s probably the main reason why I esteem it so highly as a spoken word performance.

Greenpeace causing harm by opposing GMOs?

When making decisions about technology, both false positive and false negative errors are possible. By that, I mean it’s possible for us to miss or ignore how a technology has unacceptable consequences for people and the rest of nature. DDT or the drug thalidomide were such false negatives: wrongly considered to be acceptable for use until shown to be otherwise. A false positive, by contrast, would be a case where unjustified fears have limited the use of a technology unnecessarily. Silly examples include the idea that women couldn’t ride trains over 50 miles per hour and many other such misapprehensions about the consequences of technology. People who tend to support new technologies emphasize the times when critics have been wrong, and the benefits technology has brought, while those who favour caution tend to emphasize cases where serious consequences have only emerged after time, as with substances that deplete the ozone layer and those that change the climate.

All this can be tough to reconcile with the notion of the precautionary principle. Expressed weakly, the principle can be seen as simply an appeal to caution: even if there is no evidence about whether a technology is safe or dangerous, we should err on the side of treating new technologies with skepticism. In the strongest expression, the principle may call for any new technology to be restricted to research only until ‘proved’ safe.

Along with opposition to nuclear power – which may also be a false positive where the benefits of a technology are under-stated while risks are over-stated – groups like Greenpeace have strongly resisted the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture, claiming that they will harm human health, harm natural ecosystems, or have other potentially unknown risks.

Recently, 107 Nobel laureates (about 1/3 of all those alive) signed a public letter criticizing Greenpeace for its stance. The Nobel winners say:

There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity.

And:

WE CALL UPON GOVERNMENTS OF THE WORLD to reject Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general; and to do everything in their power to oppose Greenpeace’s actions and accelerate the access of farmers to all the tools of modern biology, especially seeds improved through biotechnology. Opposition based on emotion and dogma contradicted by data must be stopped.

They strongly emphasize the potential of genetically modified crops including “golden rice” to combat vitamin A deficiency, which they say causes “a total of one to two million preventable deaths occur annually”.

This is a highly visible development in a long-running debate in which it seems clear that the tangible benefits associated with GMOs seem to outweigh risks which have not been convincingly demonstrated. That said, I would personally feel more comfortable if genetic modification of organisms for agriculture was undertaken by public institutions which are subject to appropriate scrutiny rather than profit-maximizing corporations.

In my experience, Greenpeace tends to be stronger on spectacle than on research, and environmental groups in general have a worrisome tendency to maintain opposition to certain technologies as dogma, specifically nuclear energy and genetic modification. Whenever I find that a Greenpeace website or report is the source of a scientific claim, I search to find a credible source that agrees. They seem especially vulnerable to the general human tendency (ask Tony Blair) to apply less scrutiny to information that supports pre-existing positions and thus use weak or questionable evidence to support strongly-held beliefs.

People may be bad at remembering it (or simply unwilling to tell the truth about it to themselves), but humanity has placed itself precariously. We are running vast uncontrolled simultaneous global experiments: destroying habitat, changing the climate, depleting the seas of life, and changing the chemistry of everything. Only the most optimistic or naive think all these problems will resolve favourably for human beings without active intervention. At the same time, we are left contemplating how to use tools which we don’t fully understand (from genetic modification to geoengineering) to further intervene in physical and biological systems which we also don’t understand. When you factor in questions of distributive justice (Do GMOs currently favour developed over developing countries? If so, is such bias inevitable, or a consequence of the specific modifications we have made?), the appropriate approach to managing risk becomes even more obscure.

Rhodes on the nature of nuclear war

So much confusion, so much paranoia, so many good intentions, so much hard work, technical genius, cynicism, manipulation, buckpassing, buckpocketing, argument, grandstanding, risk-taking, calculation, theorizing, goodwill and bad, rhetoric and hypocrisy, so much desperation, all point to something intractable behind the problem of how to deploy sufficient and appropriate nuclear arms to protect one’s nation from a nuclear-armed opponent. There was such a beast. It was quite simply the fundamental physical fact of nuclear energy: that such power is relatively cheap to generate and essentially illimitable. Nuclear warheads cost the United States about $250,000 each: less than a fighter-bomber, less than a missile, less than a patrol boat, less than a tank. Each one can destroy a city and kill hundreds of thousands of people. “You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower concluded. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.” It followed, and follows, that there is no military solution to safety in the nuclear age: There are only political solutions. As the Danish physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr summarized the dilemma succinctly for a friend in 1948, “We are in an entirely new situation that cannot be resolved by war.” The impossibility of resolving militarily the new situation that knowledge of how to release nuclear energy imposes on the world is the reason the efforts on both sides look so desperate and irrational: They are built on what philosophers call a category mistake, an assumption that nuclear explosives are military weapons in any meaningful sense of the term, and that a sufficient quantity of such weapons can make us secure. They are not, and they cannot.

Rhodes, Richard. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. p. 101 (hardcover, italics in original)

Life streams

As an undergraduate, as a mechanism for managing emotional instability, I developed a doctrine in which I would try to maintain five independent streams of activity in life: each important to me, and capable of going well or badly.

A typical undergraduate set might include academic coursework; the debate society; photography; perhaps a romantic relationship; and work with the International Relations Student Association. In Oxford, it might have been coursework, cycling, the Strategic Studies Group, Wadham College, and research for my M.Phil thesis. In Ottawa, perhaps my government job, climate writing, cycling, photography, and career development programs / applying for other jobs. In Toronto, PhD coursework and research, Toronto350.org, photography, Massey College, and teaching.

The motivation behind the doctrine is to try to better maintain perspective and reduce the odds that things will be going badly in all areas of life simultaneously. There have been times — including recently — when five streams have not been enough to yield one that is going well, but that’s not really a flaw in the concept. It’s merely a reflection of the statistical reality that sometimes you will roll five ‘ones’ in a row (to say nothing of how disappointment or frustration in one stream cannot be entirely prevented from affecting others).

Generally speaking, splitting things up and dealing with them individually has been a theme in my life. It has considerable advantages in terms of general resilience and being able to carry on in one sense or another even when there are severe problems in one place or another. One downside is that this fragmented approach comes across accurately to other people, who correctly intuit that they aren’t part of your whole life and that your relationship is being mediated through a context which can be rather narrow.