Question Everything

What's the hurry?

Where are we going? How fast do we need to get there?

 

I remember in the 1950's a sense of destiny for mankind. We were on a journey of development. Rocketry was big. Promises of a future when mankind would conquer space. Nuclear energy would be so cheap we wouldn't need to meter electric utilization. The future was fantastic and bright. Many GIs from WWII had used their GI-Bill monies to go to college. IBM and other companies were putting electronic brains into commerce. TV was a smashing hit and gave us endless entertainment. These were just tastes of the future.

 

We couldn't wait to get to the future. So much cool stuff was going to be ours just for imagining it possible.

 

There were dark clouds as the 50's gave way to the 60's and then the 70's. Rachel Carson wrote an "interesting" book. The Soviets developed the atom bomb. They were first to put a satellite in orbit. Viet Nam soured some of us on the notion of US hegemony. And later, Watergate soured us on politics and government. But economics and technology - those were still on a high.

 

We had learned a lot of neat tricks for turning natural assets into human assets, including many more humans. And the rate of progress was accelerating. Furthermore, except for that pesky idea Rachel Carson had introduced, there were no limits to be seen. Or were there?

 

Carson wasn't the only person to ask pesky questions about the cost of progress. The Club of Rome commissioned a study leading to the publication of The Limits to Growth by Dennis and Donella Meadows. Using computer-based dynamic systems modeling methods introduced by Dennis' mentor Jay Forrester at MIT, they demonstrated the effects of exponential growth on world dynamics. Under every scenario involving the "Buisness as usual" strategies the world population crashed after reaching a peak. They varied all kinds of assumptions regarding things like resource abundance, etc. But all models produced the same basic result give or take a few decades.

 

Nor were the Meadows the first to talk about limits of growth. In 1956 M. King Hubbert revealed a theory on the rate of oil production (extraction and shipment) that showed it peaking when roughly half of the oil had been pumped out of the ground. His prediction, called peak oil for the USA production was that it would peak sometime in the early 70's. Subsequently he was proven right. Others have gone on to estimate the same phenomenon on a world-wide basis and most estimates peg it between 2005 and 2020 — a relatively narrow window considering the course of human events.

 

Today we have a constant barrage of news of one limit or another approaching. Fisheries are depleted. Potable water is running short. Even human-effort at growing grains appears to be falling short. Limits are now something that are increasingly realized. And it is funny that just a few short decades ago we thought there was no limit. Soon, we thought, we'd be mining ores on asteroids. Now we realize we can't afford the fuel bill to get anywhere near an asteroid with a manned crew.

 

We were hurrying to get to the future and ignoring the warning signs that such a rush might get us somewhere we really don't want to go. We were in a rush. Why?

 

The commercial model of doing some work, adding some value, and making a profit on sales did a lot to get us ramped up and churning out products and services. The profit motive is a strong force and seems, at least on the face of it, to stimulate creativity and innovation. After all, we now have all manner of toys and gadgets to entertain us. Of course we also have computers, like the one I'm writing this on right now, and medicines, and MRI machines, and lots of things that truly make life more comfortable and safer. So there are good things.

 

My question is, if we weren't in such a hurry to make a buck and rush to the next new thing, would we have had time to consider the consequences of what we were doing? Would we have done things any differently?

 

Here is a function that shows up frequently in nature — the logistic function. The curve depicted in the link shows an early exponential-like growth. It accelerates at first but eventually comes to decelerate. It levels off at some maximum and remains at that level (not shown). The logistic function can be seen in processes in which later negative feedback grows to counter earlier positive feedback mechanisms. This is a picture of balance.

 

The exponential function results when negative feedback mechanisms do not exist and the process explodes.

 

Which curve represents the human condition in reality? Economists have tended to believe the later (fewer do today!) but we are a part of nature and in nature negative effects of growth always build up to impose the former curve. The problem is that it is possible to temporarily overcome the negatives so that our growth curve looks like the exponential until a tipping point is reached. So unlike the smooth logistic curve where we get to the top and stay there, the over-extended exponential period of growth leads to overshoot and when the tipping point comes, there is a crash. This was exactly the message in the Limits to Growth report.

 

But we were in a hurry to reach some glorious state. Now we realize (too late?) that whatever we thought that state might be, what we have achieved is unsustainable. We overshot.

 

Had we not been in such a hurry, would we have been smart enough to avoid this?

Speaking of politicians and wisdom...

Can anyone provide me with good examples of wisdom exercised by any of the candidates in either party (make that any party)? As I survey the rapidly narrowing options I get more cynical about the capabilities of democracy in a market-driven, profit-motivated society like the USA to raise the wisest to leadership. In my opinion we have already seen the exact opposite with the ascension of George W. Bush and company.

Is it wise to perpetuate an addiction?

All of the current talk about stimulus packages for our ailing economy have me thinking about how this is a perfect example of how the general population lack sufficient sapience. In spite of considerable cleverness and lots of history to learn from, the conventional wisdom remains that a growing economy is a healthy one and therefore if our economy is stagnating or, horror of horrors, contracting, then we need to do something to get it moving in the right direction.

There is so much here it is hard to know where to start. The conventional wisdom says that growth is good. But why? And for that matter, what is growing that makes it so good? Economists will point to a number called the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is claimed to be a measure of economic activity in constant dollars (to account for inflation). The period-to-period (e.g. quarter to quarter) change in GDP is a measure of growth expressed as a percentage rate. A 3% to 5% average annual rate is generally considered good. But the GDP as a measure of anything has serious flaws (acknowledged by economists as it turns out) that bring into question its usefulness in this context. No one considers there to be a causal relationship between rate of change of GDP and economic health (whatever that is).

What economists do claim is that when GDP growth has been in this range people are generally better off. Unemployment tends to be down (< 5%). Wage growth appears to be positive so as long as inflation isn't a problem people are better off income-wise. And so on. They can make this claim because they have correlational data going back quite a ways (the GDP replaced the Gross National Product some years ago, but the conceptual measurement is the same, so with adjustments one can track back to when such statistics were first recorded).

So a growing economy is a healthy economy. Healthy, that is, in the sense that we're all better off. Some may be 'more' better off than others, but since the pie is growing in absolute size so must each piece of the pie grow. Sounds about right, doesn't it.

The problem with the standard view of the economy is that it doesn't take into account exactly what is growing and at what cost. We now realize, too late, that for the human-built world to grow in a finite world, the natural world must shrink. The economy is a vast engine for using energy to convert material from some ecological form into human desired assets, including human bodies. In addition, every conversion process creates waste products that have to go back into the ecos. As long as the human population was relatively small these waste products might have been absorbed by the ecos. And the removal of material from the ecos would not have been detrimental. But as human populations increase and technology makes it feasible to extract and waste at higher rates, the ecos can no longer handle the rate of flows without something detrimental happening.

Well here we are today. We've been growing steadily for the past several hundred years and our technologies have increased the per capita consumption rate exponentially. And we're all really really happy, right?

One of the more insidious aspects of this devotion to growth of the economy has been the fact that to really keep things moving (money churning) you need to have consumers spending more money and buying more stuff. It really doesn't matter what the stuff is as long as consumers keep buying it. The more stuff is thrown away the more churn there is and this is essentially what GDP measures. Ergo, to get a healthy economy, by the above description, you need people constantly buying more stuff from period to period. In order to do that they need to essentially throw away the old stuff to make room for the new. Or they have to acquire more space to hold more stuff. It really doesn't matter as long as we're all wildly happy because the GDP is increasing. We create jobs for people to make the stuff that others buy, then they can use their wages to buy stuff that someone else made. It is a self-perpetuating circle.

And just buying stuff based on wages earned currently, it turns out, isn't enough. To really make this all seem to continue to work it is necessary to borrow against the future. If we believe that this cycle will just keep going and GDP will keep growing, then it is reasonable (even clever) to think that we could use some of the wages we make tomorrow to acquire stuff to enjoy today. Why not? Buying even more stuff today than we could have using just our current income means that the GDP looks better still. It makes for an even more healthy economy.

And some people honestly believe this can go on forever.

Amazingly in this most depressing political season all of the politicians agree - we need to stimulate the economy to get it growing again. We need to cut taxes, put cash in people's hands, and so on, to get them out into the malls again because our economy is based on spending and consuming. It is NOT based on producing value and saving (another blog post I think).

Can somebody explain to me how this is wisdom? I know that based on our long history of building up this house of cards that if we do go into a recession or especially if we go into a depression, many people — maybe even me — will be hurt. I know that it would mean much pain and agony for most people. But how is that different than withdrawal symptoms for drug addicts? Who here would not think that such symptoms for an addict might be horrible in the short run but good for the person in the long run? If you see that, then why isn't the same logic applied to our economic situation? We are addicted to consumption and growth as a society. I don't see this as a good thing in recognizing that eventually (and probably pretty soon by the looks of things) we are going to hit the wall on this. Sudden and total removal of the drug generates the worst kind of withdrawal reaction in the addict. There are treatment programs that attempt to bring the addict down with medical support to lessen the pain. If I'm right on this analogy, then which would you prefer, a controlled withdrawal (weaning from growth) or slamming into the wall?

What is sapience?

And, what is wisdom? In several prior-to-last installments of curiosity, I raised the question of what is wrong with humanity that could explain our current set of predicaments. I have suggested that wisdom is lacking. That is, a level of wisdom, among the common individual, that would allow for good judgment to be the rule rather than the exception seems to be missing. I mentioned several forms that wisdom takes in the psychological studies done to date. It is recognized as a valid psychological construct but one that has not received anywhere near the attention that has been given, first, to intelligence and then to creativity. But that seems to be changing as more and more psychologists (and educators, thankfully) are recognizing wisdom's role in social life.

But what is wisdom actually? When I asked that question I found myself mired in too much anecdotal and religiously-motivated stories — the attributes of wise people through the ages. I don't discount this collection of ideas as having value, especially as examples of wisdom at work. But it isn't explanatory. Just saying that certain people acted thus and so and everyone lived happily ever after doesn't get at the real questions: Where does wisdom come from in the mind? And why don't more people achieve this mental state?

A critical problem with the wisdom concept is that it really consists of two major components. The first is the tacit, life knowledge that is needed to make holistic judgments about complex social problems. One has to live a long time, be exposed to many similar (yet different) life situations, and have internalized the results of various decisions and actions in order to have a rich knowledge base of experience.  One must have become an expert in LIFE by living through many aspects of it. The second component is the brain power that enables both the acquisition of this life knowledge and the processing of current situations, applying sound moral judgements to resolve the problems. The latter may be confused with intelligence, but this is a huge mistake. Processing power for both acquisition and use of knowledge is definitely dependent on normal intelligence (vice genius-level intelligence); learning, organizing memories, and recall of relationships is a normal function of intelligence. But judgment is much more than this.

We now recognize that the limbic system (affect) of the brain plays a crucial role in decision making. We do not make decisions strictly on the basis of rational choice. Rather, the affective centers of our brains, the emotional centers, exercise considerable influence on choices we make. Indeed, much of intelligence is mobilized to rationalize our decisions after our feelings have forced us toward our choices! But affect is not the only subconscious mechanism guiding our decision processes. The problem with affective-based choice is that it is literally mindless. We may react emotionally to many aspects of life, but we do have an ability to exercise second thoughts and override pure emotion. We can exercise some rationality in guiding decisions if we have life experiences that provide better guidance. That is what judgment is.

More advanced mammals evolved brains that include a 'second thought' control center (believed to reside in the anterior cingulate cortex in early mammals) that can at least inhibit our first, emotionally-guided reactions in order to allow the thinking part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) to assess the situation more thoroughly and possibly direct different behavior than might have occurred based on the limbic (e.g. the amygdala) trigger. In other words, mammals have two guidance systems to direct and assist the decision processes going on in the rest of the cortex. The limbic response control is based on evolutionary (what is called phyletic) memory; thin wiggly things on the forest floor are probably dangerous. The judgment control is based on life-time acquired experience. Limbic control has come to be more of a fall-back default response in the event life hasn't given you the experiences needed to make a good judgment. But judgment is going to produce the more optimal behavior if it is backed up with knowledge.

In human evolution this capacity to allow life experience-based judgment to guide or shape decision processing (and this includes the role of creativity along with intelligence) has expanded especially in the realm of social interactions. I think it may have found an especially strong selection pressure in the advent of grand parents in which better judgments were used to better ensure the reproductive successes of early Homo. Older people, past reproductive age, still had a group-selection effect on evolution.

I have called the brain/mental capacity to achieve wisdom (good moral judgment) as sapience (I suspect strongly that the seat of this capacity is in an area called Brodmann Area 10 — the polar-most frontal patch of prefrontal cortex, right behind the eyebrows!). Like intelligence and creativity, sapience is a capacity rather than a realization. Individuals with greater propensities for any of these three capacities may or may not ever achieve their level of competency based on purely historical accident.

Here is a diagram of what I think the human condition amounts to at this point in evolution.

Each oval represents, roughly, a domain of cognition or affect. They overlap because they all work together in some respects to produce the unitary mind of phenomenal experience. Note that affect is still a predominant feature of the mind in this representation. I think, based on observations of human nature, that that is a safe claim. Next in influence is the intelligence that most people think of in characterizing human mentation. This is the capacity — general problem solving ability — that expanded most rapidly over the last 250,000 years of hominid evolution. Creativity is of modest influence in most peoples lives. We are all creative to some degree but except for in the lives of artists and such it is not terribly dominant in the thinking process. Finally we see the influence of sapience - judgment processing capability.

There is reason to believe (and I will cover this in a future blog) that sapience, in being the most "recent" development in the evolution of cognition, is not as well developed as, say, intelligence. But moreover, it is not distributed normally (like the normal distribution of intelligence, say). There is reason to believe that sapience is generally weak in the majority of the population with only a few individuals having higher sapience capacity. This would explain why wisdom is so rare. I should point out that the level of sapience needed to manage one's life in a family or tribe is about what we should expect to have evolved up to, say, 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. In other words, about what we have today as the norm.

The real problem is that in our cleverness we have created a world, the cognitive scope of which is far beyond family and tribe, that would seem to demand tremendously more wisdom than the average human can muster. Even our so-called leaders cannot seem to exercise good judgment when it comes to world affairs.

So are we screwed? Is there no sufficient wisdom in this world to provide guidance out of our follies? I wish I knew! One thing for sure: Wisdom cannot rise unless it is recognized as wisdom by the followers. Therein lies the rub. If the masses are incapable of recognizing wisdom (they'd rather have a beer with George W. Bush) how will they accede to following the guidance? Now that is really the question.

How is the economy like a saucepan of water?

I thought of a simple example that conveys the physical reality of our economic situation as we go through the peak of oil production and start heading down the slope toward decreasing energy supplies.

To start we have to realize that everything in this world has a physical basis. Everything. If you are a Cartesian dualist and insist the mind is not a result of the brain's activity you need read no further — you wouldn't be able to believe this example. But as I said, everything, from all the stuff we have, all the work we do, all the thoughts we ever think, has a physical basis. So here is a simple physical experiment you can do at home. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil. Start the heat slowly at first, just warm the water until you see the roiling as hot water rises to the top and colder water falls to the bottom. This roiling is activity driven by the heat flow from the source underneath the pan to the air above the water where the heat is dissipated.

Now turn up the heat a bit. You will see an increase in the roiling activity and you will see tiny bubbles forming on the pan bottom. Some of these will break free and start to rise. At the right temperature range many of these will be reabsorbed into the water before making it to the surface.

After a while start increasing the heat even more (those with a gas range will be able to do this more gradually than those with an electric range with discrete temperature settings). Keep running it up to max and watch the increase in roiling and bubbling until finally, in a very short time, the water is boiling furiously and steam is rising.

Now, gradually at first, reverse the process. Start reducing the temperature and watch the activity. At first the water will continue to boil for a while because of stored heat in the water and the pan. But soon it will start to reduce and eventually, of course, it will cease boiling and with the heat off entirely it will cease roiling. What just happened and why is it like the economy?

This isn't just an analogy. All real systems (meaning physical) respond to the flow of energy in exactly this fashion. Complex systems, like the biosphere, don't boil, of course. They convert sunlight into complex molecules that are able to do interesting work - like life. They roil with activity, both mechanical and chemical, and evolve to higher levels of organization, which includes human society. And humans discover that some of that ancient biological activity got trapped in the ground meaning that they can recover all that sequestered energy for current roiling activity. They can make more food for themselves; they are able to confiscate larger portions of the current solar energy flow to their own devices. Their numbers increase way beyond the real-time capacity of the planet to support. The system is bubbling like crazy.

And then the effort needed to get the formerly sequestered energy out of the ground starts to grow so that the net energy gain is reduced. This is effectively turning down the energy flow. You know what happened in the boiling water example. Reduce the energy flow and you reduce the supportable activity. It really is that simple, at least in principle.

And that really is what is happening to our society, to civilization, to the economy. But our system is many orders of magnitude more complex than the water in a saucepan. Hence seeing the play out of this phenomenon is not easy to do. The effects are complex and take a long time (relative to a human life span) to propagate through the system. But it really is the same phenomenon.

In the economy, in the US right now, the biggest sign of how this is playing out is in the debt crisis that threatens to shake the consumptive lifestyles of Americans to the roots. A large and growing number of economists recognize this coming recession as fundamentally different from earlier ones. We've overspent and did it largely on debt we (that is too many of us) had no real way to pay back. If it is true that we have passed the peak of oil production (already the case in the continental US) world-wide, then the same phenomenon will start to topple the world economy as well. China may carry on in it's growth for a while, especially if it relies on its coal reserves. But that will come to an end too. And, besides, with America in the tank, who will China sell its goods to?

Boil some water and watch it. Then think about energy flow through the economy. Ask yourself, what stuff do I have that didn't rely on energy to get made? What services do I rely on that don't require any energy or human labor (food is energy!)? Dumb questions, right? But too many serious people, economists and politicians, but (wo)man-in-the-street types as well, act as if what we do and what we consume is essentially energy-free. That is, they do until the dollar cost of gasoline or heating oil goes above a pain threshold.

Then think about history. The big run up in wealth production, including food from the Green Revolution, came about after the oil and coal industries were in high gear. After WWII energy production grew exponentially. And so did the growth in wealth that most of my generation and my kids' take for granted.

Very many of these serious people are now scratching their heads wondering what the hell is going on. They should do the experiment. As the energy flow turns down, the boiling will stop. Then the roiling will stop.

Wisdom and will to act

Andrew Staroscik's comment on my prior blog got me to thinking. Andrew said: "I think our inability to find lasting solutions to many of our problems is due as much to a lack of will as it is to a lack of wisdom."

I certainly agree that there is indeed a seeming lack of will, especially political will, when it comes to addressing the great challenges, e.g. global warming. But this begs a follow-on question. Why do we lack the will?

I'm old enough to remember the stories my grandparents told me about the Great Depression. My mother's father had the gumption to scrounge materials to build his house (he fortunately had just purchased the property). He traded labor for materials. This was a man who had had some prominence in the community (as the story was told) and had to completely change his attitudes and ways of life to meet the challenge. He, and my grandmother, had the will to carry on and build something positive even in the face of that kind of adversity. I grew to the age of 5 in that house, upstairs where my parents got their start after WWII.

Speaking of which, WWII is said to have produced the Greatest Generation. And judging by what I see today the moniker is probably apt.

Why do we seem to be caught in a malaise in the face of the current situation? We see denial at one end of the spectrum and words of hope at the other. But the hope I've heard expressed is that we will somehow find a magic bullet technology that will make all this badness go away so we can get on with our consumption-based lives. The new economic boom will come from development of new technologies. If you listen to the messages of the current crop of Democratic candidates and Huckabee (who waffles on the issue of AGW) or John McCain you hear the same empty promise that if we just put our minds to it we can cap the CO₂ emissions and voila problem solved. Oh yes we need to develop alternative energy sources, but I will wager none of them has a clue about the physical energetics involved in that claim. No one has the guts to tell the story like it is. I frankly doubt any of the candidates actually understand the true story. We are beginning to hear some of the dramatic worries of the climate scientists themselves who have gotten tired of waiting for the policy wonks to get it. Additionally, we are finally hearing the admissions of oil execs that the end of oil is in sight. Who among the politicians thinks systemically and has enough scientific knowledge to connect these dots?

I'd suggest that this lack of will that Andrew points out is actually a reflection of the lack of wisdom. Will is related to confidence, both in one's self and in a path of action. The will to act in advance of merely reacting to a crises comes from understanding the nature of the problem you face and recognizing your ability to solve it. In the Great Depression and in WWII people clearly understood the nature of the threat even if they didn't completely understand the causes. With global warming and peak oil and overpopulation I think it is a different matter. People see themselves as helpless in the face of a global, slowly building threat. They don't understand the nature of these threats (hence some go into denial). And they don't grasp that it was a lack of true wisdom that led us into this mess in the first place.

One of the attributes of wisdom is understanding the world sufficiently so as to have confidence in what one can and cannot do. It takes wisdom to have the will to act when action is appropriate. Back when the threat of global warming was first brought to light our failure of wisdom caused us to fail to act. Back when Hubbert first determined that oil production world-wide would one day peak and then decline -forever- was the time to wisely husband our energy resources. When Malthus first warned that population growth was geometric while resource production was arithmetic (actually food production is what he focused on, unfortunately) we were not wise enough to think the consequences through and project what a stable population should be.

The linkages between all the global issues — the fact that these are systemic problems, all connected and mutually influencing — is clear to the wise mind, I believe. But the majority of people are not sufficiently wise to see them. Certainly none of our current leaders or wannabe leaders is wise enough to see that they will need to tell different stories to save humanity because their main interest is simply to get elected.

So, in my view, the will to act is directly linked to the wisdom to see one's own power and to grasp the nature of the problem sufficiently that one can see what needs to be done. And then to have confidence in that.

Thanks Andrew for making me ask a question!

Who do you trust?

In my prior post I re-framed the question, "If we were so smart...", to introduce a larger problem about humanity's nature, namely that what we lack is sufficient wisdom to deal with complex social issues. I would like to continue that exploration in this post using a question generated by another psychologist.

Howard Gardner, of multiple intelligences fame, has asked a very cogent question. Who would you trust to make important societal decisions? He wonders who we, the general public, consider to be wise enough to make decisions on our behalf. Isn't that really what the current political campaign is about? Who will we elect to be the next president? And, of course, this is always the case in elections. Who do we trust to represent us in Congress?

Judging by the track record of GWB and the majority of the current congress, especially the party leaders on both sides of both aisles, it appears a large number of people put their trust into untrustworthy people. At least that is one interpretation of the polls showing low confidence in both the executive and legislative branches.

What is happening? We bemoan: where are real leaders? Where are the people we can truly trust to make the social decisions?

National governance isn't the only area affected by misplaced trust. The business world is rife with misguided judgments by people you really thought had our best interests in mind. Who doesn't remember the Enron pair, Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay (who had a PhD in economics, so no dummy he). Once judged as two of America's wisest businessmen (cover of Time or Newsweek, if memory serves), look at what we found out after the damage was done.

I see the same questionable process at work in academia. History is replete with disciplinary luminaries rising to high administrative roles only to make incredibly unwise decisions (or speak unwise words).

In fact I can't help but wonder; is there any institution that does not suffer from lack of wisdom shown by its trustees? Gardner, in an e-mail a little over a year ago, remarked that it seemed very hard for people to identify others they thought were good representatives of social trustees. Is it the case that there are none who can deal with the complexities of a global-scale society, considering what is the maximum good for all of humanity, and for generations to come? What world-stage leader would you nominate as an Earth trustee?

Is the human condition caught in a trap of its own making? Were we so clever that we created such a world that it could not be managed by wise trustees simply because no one seems wise enough to deal with the issues?

If we're so smart, how come...

If you've read my prior posts regarding the problems with education, you will recall my question: If we were doing such a good job in education, then why is GWB president? That question addresses the capacity of the average citizen to think critically about important civic issues. I include science-based issues, like global warming (is it real?) in this since policy must be based on reality not wishes.

But there is a follow-on question (every question leads to more questions!). Why has our education system gotten into such a bad state? If we, as a society, are so smart, then why have we let things get this bad? Is it the fault of educators? Is it the fault of politicians? Or should we be looking in the mirror?

In my 12/17 blog I suggested that a major problem in higher education is that teachers frequently do not practice what they preach about critical thinking. I alluded to the notion that you can't teach effectively what you don't demonstrate in your own life. It isn't just that teachers are failing to exercise critical thinking. That is just another symptom. If our society were really smart and diligent, poor teaching would not be tolerated.

The question really comes down to are we really smart enough to manage our own affairs.

Psychologist Robert J. Sternberg edited a book aptly titled "Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid"¹. He and other authors point out that some really clever (intelligent and creative) people like Bill Clinton can and frequently do get into a lot of trouble of their own making. It isn't a question of adequate intelligence (taken generally to mean a capacity to learn and solve problems) or smartness as we normally think of it. It is a lack of wisdom. Wisdom, Sternberg and others have pointed out, is not just more or 'higher' intelligence. It involves high capacity to make good moral judgments that then condition or guide the decision making process. Another psychologist who has done extensive research in the area of judgment is Robin Hogarth who has investigated some of the foibles of human decision making due to biased judgments². He has demonstrated that human judgment is limited to rather small scope kinds of problems such as personal social and family issues. But in most individuals it fails in terms of large-scale social issues (like running a country) and capacity to make realistic judgements about socio-technical issues, like global warming. The reason, he and many other researchers in the field of evolutionary cognitive psychology contend, is that humans evolved into essentially their current mental capabilities in a much simpler, more constrained world of experience in the Pleistocene. That world did not strongly select for larger-scale wisdom in humans. At least not the kind that is needed to understand our new global-scale complex world of today.

The vast majority of people have just enough wisdom to get by in their communities, families, and jobs. And then, only if they have gained sufficient life experiences as tacit knowledge (background) to supply their judgment processing center in the brain. Very few people have really developed judgment based on thinking styles that naturally contribute to global wisdom.

In future posts I will delve into those cognitive styles of thinking that are so rare but contribute to wise leaders making good decisions for the majority of society and for the longest time scales. I will be posing questions about what wisdom really means and who has it.

But back to the question I started with. The answer, I think, has a lot to do with the lack of wisdom. Wisdom, judgment, is a necessary part of critical thinking. If the vast majority of people have never developed their wisdom then we can't expect them to be making critical judgments about what education should be or how to do it. Instead we have focused almost entirely on intelligence and short-term problem solving. We revere the person who has the ability to solve an immediate problem even if that solution could lead to a longer-term greater problem. Think about the solution of technical issues involved in getting oil out of the ground faster. We applaud the engineers and oil companies that put it to use and get us cheap gasoline faster, no? But little did anyone think about the long-term consequences. Here we are today with an atmospheric level of CO₂ sufficient to warm up the planet and diminished amounts of oil in the ground such that pumping it out is getting much harder. Gasoline prices go up and we would all hail the engineer who invents a method to extract more, more cheaply. There is no wisdom in that thinking.

Thus consider: The reason George W. Bush got to be president is the same reason that education is broken. We, collectively, lack sufficient wisdom to make the kinds of critical judgments needed to prevent stupidity coming out of our smartness!

But then it gets worse. We may be collectively unwise, but what happens when those who would aspire to be our leaders are also unwise? Stay tuned for more.

1. Sternberg, Robert J. (ed. 2002). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
2. Hogarth, Robin (1988). Judgement and Choice (second ed.), John Wiley & Sons, New York.

[I'm still working on my next question issue, but noticed my reader numbers are going way up (even though comments are short!), so thought I'd at least share this little nugget with you just to keep the conversation going. This is something I posted at Andy Rivken's blog, Dot Earth, the January 4 entry "Alarming Weather and Global Warming". The discussions about the relationship between weather anomalies and global warming are some of the best evidence showing the lack of adequate education (read failure of the education system) in the American populace. These rather mindless arguments wouldn't even take place if people understood the nature of statistical analysis. See my last paragraph below to get the gist of it. Regards George]

This whole issue of the use of weather extremes to argue either side misses something that is crucial to understand but rarely learned in high school or college unless you major in a science that emphasizes statistical analysis. Namely you cannot use a single data point to argue anything. It is the statistical trend that we're interested in, not specific weather events.

In a stable (stationary in statistics-speak) climate we expect there to be mean or average values associated with any given weather parameter. The average annual temperature for a region, the average annual precipitation, and so on will, over many years tend toward a narrow range or a computed number. And that number will hold over many, many years. The same is basically true for a given daily or monthly average except that we do see larger excursions from the average (deviations). So weather people like to report things like daily highs, lows, averages (from year to year for that day) and historical extremes for highs and lows. Even so, if the climate is stable the ranges of the extremes will tend to be confined to what we would call a normal deviation from the average. So while new records might be set from time to time, they will tend to be very small incremental advances over the previous record and they will tend to be very rare in occurrence.

However, when the climate is not stable (non-stationary) and some particular parameter were increasing -- oh say like temperature -- then the picture shifts on the statistical properties of all the other parameters of interest (like average hurricane wind speed or frequency of tornadoes) start to change as well. The ranges of deviation get larger. New records aren't just incremental, they can be unpredictably large. The frequency of new records is higher, they happen more often and more places. The signature of an unstable climate is the long term statistical properties of the various measures we're interested in.

We know with great confidence that the average annual temperature of the surface of the atmosphere and that of the surface waters of most oceanic sites is increasing in a trend. This is not in dispute anywhere. We also know that the frequency and range extremes of weather events world-wide, but particularly in the Arctic, are increasing. While there have always been records broken, there have never been so many broken by so much magnitude in the prior decades/centuries of recording. This is what we need to attend to. We need to know the sum effects of weather anomalies and their statistical trends. Only then can we say with confidence that the climate is changing sufficiently to be worried about.

Well people are doing this. This is standard climatological science. And they have concluded that the climate is shifting in dangerous directions. The effect is clear.

As to cause the question is a bit more open, but not that much. Adding sufficient quantities of a heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere is one sure way of driving the climate system out of a stable state. This is good hard science (thanks largely to James Hansen's pioneering work). Where the big uncertainty enters is the nature of a chaotic system when driven by a forcing function (e.g. raising temperature in a fluidics mass under conditions of energy flow - from the sun). Chaotic systems can be deterministic and yet unpredictable in their details. They can, however, be predictable in terms of their long-term behavior. That is what climate science is. But such systems are KNOWN to suddenly become unstable if the forcing function passes some unpredictable point (the famous tipping-point in recent discussions). They shift to completely new behavior patterns and then all of your historical data is worthless in trying to determine what the new behavior entails.

These arguments back and forth about climate, weather, meaning, and ultimately what to do about any of this are really naive, I'm sorry to say. Aside from the fact that we are in for a rough ride, I certainly hope that one lesson learned from these experiences is that the general public is incredibly undereducated with respect to the knowledge needed to critically assess the arguments. This isn't necessarily rocket science we're talking about, so most people could learn the significance of statistical analysis, even if they don't learn to do the math. But our education system is broken in that regard.

George Mobus
Assoc. Prof. U. of Washington Tacoma
Institute of Technology
http://faculty/washington.edu/gmobus/

Back from holiday!

Refreshed and ready to go. Unfortunately hit a brick wall (well it felt that way) when I got to work. The trials and tribulations of higher education. If you've read some of my prior postings you know that I am not exactly enamored with the way higher ed is done. So let's just say  I may be expressing some additional frustrations in the near future!

When I got to thinking about this blog I realized that I needed to expand the rational for its existence. I named it Question Everything, but for a very specific reason. I do want to generate questions, especially about the so-called conventional thinking and/or received wisdom. But the real purpose of asking these questions is to spur re-thinking. So I could have just as well named the blog Re-thinking Everything.

I think the conventional thinking/wisdom is failing us. We are facing a period in which we will need to develop revolutionary ways of looking at the world and our place in it. The time for conservatism is long past. We can't cling to the old ways simply because that's always been the way we've done it.

We need new thinking and new visions. But my strong belief is the only way we can develop useful new thinking is by asking the hard questions. We need to start with an attitude that is skeptical of the old ways and open to new ways. Of course we need to retain critical thinking and evaluate any new thinking according to rational criteria.  We can't just accept any new idea just because it is new.  My candidate for such criteria would of course be science. And by science I mean holistic science, not just isolated disciplines.  What we need is Systems Science writ large. Systems science provides a framework for applying all scientific knowledge to specific application areas for the simple reason that all things are systems and systems inside of systems.

The problems we currently face are systemic. They involve complex, dynamic, non-linear, stochastic sub-systems all interacting with one another. It will take a systems approach to even begin to understand them.

So, for the new year I plan to focus my questioning on conventional thinking (like economics and politics, especially governance models) and ask questions that require systems thinking. Many of these questions will directly challenge the conventional wisdom. But I hope they start people thinking about solving humanity's problems by looking at the truly BIG picture.

In response to a few e-mails from readers, I will be starting a companion web site on my academic server. This blog is for me to explore ideas and ask questions that are not, strictly speaking, scientific inquiry. Hence it is a personal blog. But my academic web site will provide some of the scientific background that is behind my questions and musing. I will provide a link as soon as I get that up and running.

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to all. May this year start us all thinking anew to find real solutions to the challenges that face us all.