Why We Can't Stop Destroying Our Planet
Here’s a wonderful article that begins with a question: Since it’s so clear that our civilization faces several different types of existential threats due to its overconsumption of finite and increasingly scarce resources, why is essentially nothing being done about it? The answer is implied in the name of the group that the author (Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University) has formed to deal with these issues: The Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. I.e., he claims that aberrant human behavior is the culprit, and cites the need to educate the public about the threats that uncontrolled human activities pose to the environment.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with an economics professor at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, Dr. Jason Scorse, who took a few minutes and explained the basics of “behavioral economics” to me. The subject is based on the work of two psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who studied deviations from rationality, i.e., why people make decisions that do harm – both to themselves and to others; they developed a kind of architecture for how people think and act in the real world. Scorse believes that using this work to inform public policy can make a huge difference in the choices people make regarding the preservation of the environment.
Let’s hope he’s right.
The World really doesn’t have an Environmental problem, it is a behavior problem is my story for years. Oddly enough the “Anti Environmentalists are correct in the assessment but they are wrong about what to do. They say nothing but more raping and pillaging, I say grow up and act respectful to everyone and everything including the Air we need and the Water we pee in. People are a complex selfish bunch with a short vision and getting shorter daily.
What if instead of termlimits, we mandated a lifelong commitment if someone wanted to be a Policy maker. This way the policies would haunt them, if bad results are outcome they lose the Pension! Or they are publicly Fired and the mistakes are itemized publicly. If undeclared conflicts of interest are discovered, assesments to their assesets could be levied.
Why do some brain damaged patients recover while others with the same brain damage do not? Metastudies by Kurt Fischer, Christina Hinton et al. shows that the key is tolerant environments. This agrees with Francisco Lacerda’s theory that the reason why children learn language easily is because they do not fear being wrong, just like non-prejudiced scientists. The fact that the tolerant environment factor works even way past the end of all supposed “learning windows” also shows that there is no such thing as an immutable “shame instinct” either. There is evidence, especially from domestication research, showing that evolution can very rapidly select on individual variation and turn it into group differences. Thus there is a contradiction between nature explanations of individual psychiatry and nurture explanations of ethnic differences. There must be some missing methodological factor. Since racist discrimination is a form of intolerance often associated with other forms of intolerance, studies of ethnic differences effectively takes the tolerant environment factor into account, explaining why nurture explanations prevailed in studies of ethnic differences. But studies of individual psychiatry have, at least before Kurt Fischer’s and Christina Hinton’s metastudy, not taken the tolerant environment factor into account, explaining why nature explanations prevailed there. It is well-established that there was/is anomalies from the nature model of individual psychiatry, but people ignorant of the metastudy lumps everything into one statistic and dismiss the minority of cases as “anecdotical”. Real science is about finding the pattern behind the anomalies to de-anecdotize them, just like Kurt Fischer and Christina Hinton did. And considering how stupid behavior is destroying the world (just look at pollution and deforestation!), this research about possibilities to change behavior to a rational form is invaluable. The fact that the plasticity only applies if the environment is tolerant means that there is no reason to fear that dictators will abuse the plasticity whatsoever.
Holy cow, Martin. That’s a very scholarly response. Thanks.