Seeing The Signal In The Noise

I am retiring the Sunday post. This will be the last one. Many DOTE regular readers check in on Sunday, so this one's for you. This article has two parts. In the first one, I will go through some typical human bullshit. In the second part, I will talk generally about how to do what I do.

Reader Lucas W. from Hawaii sent me an email recently which directed me to Building a Better World for All: The Power of Narrative and Cooperation by Suzanne York, a senior writer for the overpopulation site HowMany.org. Before I get into it, I want to say that I am not singling her out for special treatment; she is no more or less clueless than thousands of other people who write about the Big Issues.

Interconnectedness.  Community.  Cooperation. Creating narratives.  Social justice.  Sustainability for all.  These are just some of the themes that came up over and over again at the recent U.S. Society for Ecological Economics 7^th Biennial Conference.

Lots of "feel good" words there.

The official theme was “Building Local, Scaling Global: Implementing Solutions for Sustainability.”  For the most part, speakers and participants had a positive outlook for the future, yet the fear of “societal collapse” was often lurking.

Yes, general optimism or "collapse soon" pessimism. Why are these the only choices? I explained that in DOTE Has No Natural Constituency.

There was no disagreement that humanity is at a junction: do we continue with business as usual, or finally take the bull by the horns and create an environmentally-sound and socially just world?  And looming over the path to a better world is the concern of whether or not we can we get there fast enough.

Changing the Narrative

Many presenters believed that creating a narrative could help people confront our dire environmental and social problems.  Marta Ceroni, of the Donella Meadows Institute, stated that “Stories help us determine what we see and what we believe is possible.”  The power of narrative was a recurring theme throughout the three-day meeting.

Even William Rees, an ecologist and ecological economist – and also a realist [???] when it comes to discussing the state of our world – noted, “Our challenge is to deliberately construct a new, more adaptive cultural narrative” (one that takes into account science and human behavior).

Rees, a co-creator of the ecological footprint, emphasized that no species in nature grows continuously, and said that people are in denial of societal collapse. It’s hard to argue that he’s wrong.  The United Nations just released revised population growth predictions, projecting a world of 9.6 billion by 2050.  And as the USSEE conference disbanded, early season fires were raging in Colorado, a tornado threatened Washington, DC, and protests continued to erupt in Turkey.

We need to create a new narrative? We've already got narratives out the yin-yang. The problem with these narratives is that they are all bullshit. Thus these happy ecological economists concluded that if only we create a new brand of bullshit just like all the other optimistic bullshit we've already got, humanity will be saved.

I also note that raging fires in Colorado, tornadoes around Washington D.C. and protests in Turkey do not a societal collapse make.

Taking Action, Creating Hope

It’s easy to think that the problems confronting us are insurmountable, and that it’s too late.  Yet assuming the worst may lead to a “why bother” mentality and inaction. We know what we need to do, and have the skills to solve even overwhelming issues.  Josh Farley, with the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, noted, along with many others, that the problems we face require cooperation to solve.

So the question boils down to can we overcome political, social, and environmental obstacles and act fast enough?  That remains to be seen, but in the meantime

we can create the narrative that there is time – and hope – to get to that environmentally-sound and socially just world.

Sigh. This is some very weak bullshit, the non-solution solution. Yet, this is the kind of "thinking" that humans pin their hopes on. Those of us who know that the worst is coming—based on a good enough view of Human Nature and the observable trends which inform it—see nothing wrong with a "why bother" mentality and inaction.

Seeing The Signal In The Noise

Reader Lucas W. said some good things about this bullshit, including this—

Ms. York is real heavy on the self-delusion as is usual for those who talk of "the power of narrative".  She simply lacks the self-awareness to realize, that all she is doing, is pouring the old wine of eternal unchanging human nature into a new narrative skin.  I cannot think of a more fruitless activity.

It is always gratifying to me when DOTE readers see through the kind of bullshit Ms. York was offering up. Pouring the old wine of eternal unchanging human nature into a new narrative skin—I like that! That's exactly what Ms. York did.

Now, I want to talk about seeing the true signal (patterns) in the human noise. For example, we see what Suzanna York said, and we see that it is the same old hopeful bullshit we've grown accustomed to. That's the signal, and what she says otherwise is the noise. I have pointed out many such patterns on DOTE, including but not limited to the following—

1. the innate urge to growth in populations and/or consumption. (Birth rates decrease as wealth & consumption grow.)

2. the usual optimistic narrative and Obligatory Hope in the face of overwhelming contradictory empirical evidence which precludes hope and optimism (as in today's example). Also my post Dear Dr. Kelemen — You're The Problem.

3. the "technnological fix" which I described in Psychotherapy For Homo Sapiens. Also see The De-Extinction Fantasy or any of my climate geo-engineering posts, including Saving Marine Ecosystems With Alka-Seltzer.

4. the "too little, too late" behavior in which humans finally attempt to fix a problem when it's already so far gone that little can be done about it. For example, see my recent post The Experiment That Hasn't Been Tried about the oysters of Chesapeake Bay, or A Conservation "Success" Story about the Huemul, a species of endangered deer native to Patagonia.

5. the "politics makes you stupid" phenomenon in which pending planetary catastrophes are viewed a run-of-the-mill political issues and thus subject to the same gamesmanship which determines who will get tax breaks and who won't. This is one method by which humans avoid action on the climate, the oceans, etc.

These are the signals in the noise, and there are many others. DOTE has evolved, and more and more the idea has been to point out these characteristic behavior patterns so as to

• demonstrate them by example, thereby teaching others to see them, or

• provide a place to go for people who had already noticed these behavior patterns.

To see the signal in the noise, it is necessary to arrive at a place where you can apply conscious filtering of the constant waves of bullshit humans throw up around any subject. You've got to see through the usual smokescreen. The article cited above is a good example because Suzanna York attempts to blow a lot of smoke up your ass about the importance of creating new narratives as if there is something new in doing that.

As Lucas W. pointed out, Ms. York doesn't have the self-awareness required to see through her own bullshit, to see that she's offering up more of the same nonsense which prevents rather than promotes effective action to fix the enormous problems we humans have created. Humans are story-telling animals, and that's not good. They need to stop bullshitting themselves and each other, and start dealing with the awful truth about themselves. That's the only key to effective action, if there is one. See my post Authentic Versus False Hope.

The required filtering is nothing like confirmation bias in which a person (unconsciously) selects (cherry-picks) only that information which supports his or her pre-existing beliefs. Such bias is ubiquitous in human narratives, and naturally can only lead to more noise (bullshit). This cognitive bias affects optimists and pessimists alike, but optimistic narratives dominate almost all human discussions. Stick with the current facts and the historical trends, especially when optimists start spinning Tall Tales.

Your job, which is a lot like Mission Impossible, is to become aware of confirmation bias and disgard it.  This is not easily done, but it is possible. You need to filter all the noise, not just some of it. It took me most of my 60 years on this planet to achieve this.

I've looked in vain for true exceptions to the behavior patterns I have described on DOTE. I'm convinced that true exceptions don't exist, or are so rare that they might as well not exist—they are the exceptions that prove the rule. In short, human behavior (discounting unimportant details) is utterly predictable.

Thus we see that human beings live in a deluded state. They generate endless quantities of bullshit, and at any given moment, they believe the bullshit they are purveying. Figuring out what is noise and identifying the underlying signal the noise obscures is the key to understanding human behavior, and thus the key to understanding the human future on this planet.

Comments

[Mark H. Burnham]

Thanks for the Sunday postings.

Whenever I read something that contains the words "sustainability" or "resilience" now my brain skips ahead to the next paragraph and alarms ring in my head. Bullshit buzz words only good at this point for drawing flies.

My other verbal turn off are sentences like this one you quote: ,"Our challenge is to deliberately construct a new, more adaptive cultural narrative” (one that takes into account science and human behavior). Anytime two or three or more words like "adaptive cultural narrative" are strung together, words that are so vague they need their own definitional paragraph, I sense the presence of bullshit.

Looking forward to your continued weekday posts.