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"Gopnik is saying, in effect, that complex ‘problems’ like crime, poverty, climate change, peak oil, corruption, pandemics, and unsustainable growth economies, are not ‘problems’ that can be ‘solved’ at all, but rather, as philosopher Abraham Kaplan explained, predicaments that must be “chipped away at” and adapted to. Our species tends to loathe complexity, and prefers to oversimplify everything, and the politicians, lawyers, corporations and media play on that loathing by always proposing analytic (“A or B”) dichotomies and simplistic “answers” — which cannot possibly work. “Three-strikes” laws, “trickle-down” economics, emissions trading schemes, subsidies, religious taboos and inquisitions, austerity programs, prohibitions, bailouts, military invasions and “quantitative easing” — these are all massively expensive complicated “solutions” to complex “problems”, and they have all failed spectacularly.
“The intercession of a thousand small sanities”, as Gopnik so elegantly puts it, will never be a popular approach to coping with complex predicaments, especially as they grow, through the indifference and incompetence of leaders and vested interests and the sheer size and scale of the systems creating them, into crises and then into chaos and collapse. Yet it is the only approach which has a chance of making things better."
The important point is to learn to recognize the situations where you're confronting a difficult problem, and your mind gives you an answer right away. If you don't have extensive expertise with the problem – or even if you do – it's likely that the answer you got wasn't actually the answer to the question you asked. So before you act, stop to consider what heuristic question your brain might actually have used, and whether it makes sense given the situation that you're thinking about.
This involves three skills: first recognizing a problem as a difficult one, then figuring out what heuristic you might have used, and finally coming up with a better solution
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If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. (Kahneman, p. 97)
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Let me reword that previous generalization: As soon as I set a goal, my brain asked itself how that goal might be achieved, realized that this was a difficult question, and substituted it with an easier one. So ”how could I advance X” became ”what are the kinds of behaviors that are commonly associated with advancing X”. That my brain happened to pick the most prestigious ways of advancing X might be simply because prestige is often correlated with achieving a lot.
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A System of Influence determines accepted practices and patterns of behavior; it sets the criteria for what's important and what's not. Over time, those who fail to conform to these requirements get labeled as deviant and pushed to the fringes. A System of Influence, like a culture, sets the values, norms, expectations, beliefs and assumptions. It determines where resources go, what practices to use, which behaviors to reward. To understand how these powerful, determining systems of influence arise, we have to look into the dynamics of emergence. Once we understand these dynamics, we can work with emergence to create a new system of influence that better serves our intentions.
These are very valid human responses-I'd worry if we weren't feeling them. However, rage and despair fuel another strong emotion, especially for us activists: urgency. We must do something now! We must fix this now! This must never happen again!
There's a big problem with urgency-it's always toxic. Like the black plumes of oil moving underwater through the Gulf, urgency blinds us. It pollutes our thinking, making it impossible to see clearly or to choose wise actions.
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These are very valid human responses—I’d worry if we weren’t feeling them. However, rage and despair fuel another strong emotion, especially for us activists: urgency. We must do something now! We must fix this now! This must never happen again!
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Everything I’ve learned about the power of community comes from working through the Berkana Institute in the Global South. Communities in many different cultures have taught us that, in spite of the worst external circumstances—war, famine, abuse, societal collapse, ecological devastation—human beings can get through anything as long as we’re together. People with little or no material resources get through desperate and difficult circumstances by uncovering the resources they really need—each other’s companionship, each other’s knowledge and wisdom.
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Sometimes people in these communities forget their collective strength, sometimes they get seduced by the lures of modern materialism. But time after time, when they reconnect with each other they find again their capacity to persevere.
Where does 'liking' versus 'wanting' fit into this model of who we are? Things we like (such as being in love, being in nature, listening to music, play, learning and helping others), according to the Less Wrong article, are different from things we want (such as sex, addictive foods and other substances, attention, appreciation, and acquisition of shiny objects - all things that in our modern culture are usually scarce). When we do or get things we like, we are happy. When we do or get things we want, we are often not happy - just (for a time) satisfied.
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In times of stress or scarcity, however, wild creatures snap into “Clock Time” (the instantaneous time-sensitive state that most humans spend their entire lives in), and hormones are produced to equip the body for fight-or-flight. They are driven then to satisfy immediate needs and wants (safety, food, victory over a predator or enemy etc.), and their body chemistry in this state is driven by dopamine — which immediately flushes the body when a craving for one of these needs or wants is satisfied. Not the same thing as happiness at all. When the crisis has passed, the creature returns quickly to Now Time, and the endomorphins and enkephalins again take charge of the body, seeking happiness.
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we humans spend all our lives charged up and seeking the satisfaction of our endless needs and wants, the dopamine “rush”. And our industrial civilization culture, which now depends on a constant growth of consumption, encourages this by creating additional “needs” and anxiety about scarcity and inadequacy. We’re never really happy, only temporarily satisfied.
As Matt Taibbi brilliantly points out today, we don't know what we want. We just want the rest of the world to know that we're outraged, and fed up with the 1% controlling our lives and our government and our economy and our media, and we want to urge the 99% to join us as we begin to begin to figure out what to do about it, now that we know the existing power structure is not going to do anything for us.
We don't want to be led. We don't want anyone in control. We don't want anyone to speak to the media or governments for us or to represent us or make decisions for us. We've tried that system and it doesn't work, at least not for the 99%. We want to create something new, together. We have absolutely no idea what it is, or what it will look like, or how long it will take. We don't need anyone's advice as we figure it out. If you want to help, come and join us, but speak with us and not to us. And most of all, listen and help us get organized. And be patient. It takes time to co-create something new, together, as equals.
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Argentina, however, provides a compelling refutation of this theory. Argentina's financial crisis by the end of 2001, and into 2002, was the mother of all financial crises. The banking system practically collapsed. But after Argentina defaulted on its debt at the end of 2001, there was only one quarter of economic contraction before the economy embarked on its remarkable recovery. Within three years, the country was back to its pre-recession level of national income.
If we look at the weaker eurozone economies (Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland), for example, it is difficult to see when they will ever return to normal levels of employment - especially if they continue to follow the pro-cyclical policies demanded by the European authorities (the European Commission, European Central Bank and the IMF). Argentina recovered quickly because it freed itself not only from an unsustainable debt burden, but also from the destructive policies imposed by creditors and their allies.
in list: questioning
Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives
The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us is known in social science as "homophily", and it shapes our views, and our lives, in ways we're barely aware of. It explains why, if you know the political pos
"Money only exists as an agreement. We agree on a value and then act as if it were true. There is no absolute value of anything, it is just an agreement of what we will pay for something. What is happening now is not that the foreclosed houses or the stoc
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Money only exists as an agreement. We agree on a value and then act as if it were true. There is no absolute value of anything, it is just an agreement of what we will pay for something. What is happening now is not that the foreclosed houses or the stocks or the banks have no value, it is that we cannot figure out what the value is; we cannot come to an agreement. Money is the mythology of our time — on every single level of our existence — including this very basic physical level of exchange rate, valuation etc. Value is a shared story.
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Mythology/shared story is the basis of group formation. Human beings must have each other for survival.
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"Wharton's Cappelli says the key is to consider and pursue alternative arrangements first. It is difficult to believe that any company is really good at this process if they aren't also doing some other creative arrangements for cutting labor costs (wage
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Experts at Wharton and elsewhere argue that what companies are experiencing now is neither an indication of a transformation nor a blanket prognosis for the rest of the economy. Instead, they say, the job announcements highlight operational weaknesses and strategic issues that have been lurking under the surface for years. In the past, these were effectively concealed in the same way that weakness and instability in the capital system were hidden by the apparent boom in asset values. Now, the downturn has brought them to the forefront.
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the crisis is forcing many managers to focus only on the short term. "At least in the U.S., companies don't seem to be thinking about much beside the immediate impact. To some extent, this could be because of the pressure to manage operations to conform to quarterly performance expectations. It could also result from the fact that the negative effects of layoffs -- such as the long-term costs associated with hiring again in upturns; delays in getting performance back up; and morale [issues] -- are hard to track. And it also may result from the implicit assumption that the workforce is really a just-in-time resource -- that it will be easy to bring in new workers when business picks up.'
Nevertheless, the track record of companies that have gone through job cuts is terrible. "Virtually all studies show a decline in performance associated with layoffs,' Cappelli notes. "But the caveat is that layoffs are a proxy for the fact that companies which decide to do them are already in trouble. It is hard to sort the effect of the layoffs, per se, from the proxy effect.'
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