It’s even worse than that; we actually make decisions based upon affective responses below the supposedly ‘conscious’ mind, and then create post hoc rationalizations for why we did so. This is well accepted within the congitive neuroscience community (see Wegner, Daniel M., and Thalia Wheatley. “Apparent Mental Causation: Sources of the Experience of Will.”, American Psychologist Vol 54(7) (July 1999), pgs 480-92) and has profound implications on everything from the reliability of eyewitness testimony to the way in which disciplinary action (including imprisonment) should be conducted to obtain a desired result of minimizing recidivism and criminal behavior.
There is also the way in which perceptual and cultural bias feeds directly into how the brain may process information, particularly in a threatening situation, e.g. it confirms the perception of a threat even when one may not exist. The net result is that without proper conditioning to desensitize or distinguish between perceived and real threats, police or military personnel who believe themselves to be under constant threat will respond as if a threat exists even if the objective evidence shows this not to be the case. As decision-making machines, we are fundamentally a collection of action potentials which are driven by affective responses (“instinct” in the casual parlance) which evolved for social interaction and conflicts within and between small tribal groups of people, and we fundamentally lack the ability to perceive of the idea of a world much broader than what we are exposed to on a daily basis, or think through the complex results of a rapid decision.
Another pervasive problem is the logistics of taking care of a contracting, aging population: although it is well understood that the contraction of the labor force and a growing pool of retirees who are either unwilling or unable to work will create an economic stressors, there is the more prosaic problem of who will actually take care of people who need assistance or cannot take care of themselves. Even the presumption of automation to increase per capita productivity in order to offset the reducing size of the working populatino doesn’t apply because elder care is an area that is one of the least amenable to automation; even if it were possible to automate many of the tasks of handling elderly people it would not be desirable to do so because of the social need for physical contact and support by caregivers. It is a compelling reason why immigration is actually necessary for the vitality of developed nations—not only for the inexpensive labor it provides, but because developing nations are still mostly producing in excess of replacement capacity.
Well it is true that there are few topics off-limits; there are many truths and topics that there is no political will or incentive to address.
These issues range from what research shows about effective education and class size; cyber security; oligopolies; assumptions about national debt being unconcerning; the US gun control debate; the amount of money needed to prevent environmental change; the modest efficacy of alternative energies… you could go on for pages. Not that no one has discussed these things, just that there is no real appetite for the type of broad debate that would lead to sensible changes.
Here’s my suggestion: the Western world (led by the United States, but it wasn’t just the US) really fucked up in the 1990s, and that has led to most of the bad shit that’s been happening pretty much since 9/11.
We had won the Cold War, and instead of admitting that we’d done some nasty stuff over the course of 50 years or so to do that, and doing the work needed to fix some of those problems, we just laid back, enjoyed the feeling of victory, and proclaimed “The End of History!”. All the while, that history we were ignoring was festering in the background, and blew up in our faces in the 2000s.
I don’t disagree, but I would substitute “20th century” for 1990s, and the 20th century is easily seen as the result of colonialism and imperialism that predates the USA. The past is a clusterfuck and history is partially rational analysis of trends, partially rationalization of chaos.
Well I mean pretty much all the problems of today can be blamed on the British going colony crazy in the 1800’s and early 1900’s and deliberately broke apart stable areas so they could get colonies. The land-grab after the fall of the Ottoman Empire is one of the biggest examples.
Sure, thinkers like David Benatar who question the ethics of procreation. Just do a search on SDMB and you will see that whenever he’s brought up most people can’t quite wrap their minds around the idea begin to grapple with it. And it’s even more alien to the average person who is probably more likely to jump into the notion of having kids with less diligence than the average Doper.
There are also numerous weighty issues adjacent and peripheral to this that are under the radar, sometimes taboo. For a decade I was in agreement with Benatar’s conclusions, though I’ve always found his approach and presentation devoid of persuasiveness. He gets there through intuition whereas I could never get there without the qualitative experiences he does not use to fortify his theses. Now I have moved on to reading Brian Tomasik.
The rights and welfare of non-human animals*. Progress in this area has been pathetic, especially (among developed nations) in the United States. I think future generations will look back with horror on our callous disregard for the quality of life of animals, in just the same way that we look back with horror on the era of human slavery.
Using the OPs definition of “things society doesn’t want to talk about”:
The 800 lb. gorilla (or elephant) in the room:
The staggering pension debts at the state and city level. I see a few scare articles about baby boomer retirement in financial sites, but not a whole lot about the completely unpayable and unrecoverable debt levels of states and cities. Illinois probably wins the prize in this, but a close look at CalPers should have everyone there chewing their nails. ISTR Kentucky and Connecticut are close runners-up. This is going to end very badly, no matter how it plays out (inflating our way out of it, severely reduced payouts, and/or means testing). A staggeringly large number of folks aren’t going to get their money. It isn’t there, and there’s no imaginable scenario where it will be.
The 8,000,000 ton flaming death comet about to crash into the room:
The US southwestern drought. Lake Mead is being emptied, Lake Powell is being used to backfill it. Both are below 50 percent of normal water volume, and IIRC both are at emergency states now. The Colorado river, as I understand it, doesn’t even reach the ocean any more. There is literally no more water that can be removed from it. Since the aquifers are also being drained, we are facing a scenario (imo) of tens of millions of uninhabitable homes and the loss of something like 12-15% of the nation’s agriculture supply. I’m not sure how to predict when this will start to be felt, but every estimate I’ve read puts it inside a human lifespan. It’s not something centuries or generations away.
Yeah, I’m going to go with racial differences. There seems to be a current – how do I put this? People don’t want to say anything negative about any racial group (except whites), other than to say that minorities aren’t given the same opportunities white people are and they’re unfairly prosecuted. Not arguing that, BUT … there are cultural differences between races. Suicide is more prominent in some races than others, as is alcoholism, drug use, gang violence, etc. Some cultures have more financial success than others, in spite of past oppression; some cultures value education more than others; some cultures place a higher value on family; some cultures have lower rates of depression, etc.
I think taking the time to study differences between cultures, including values and behavioral patterns that may be harming or helping these cultures, could lead to improvements in the quality of life for everyone. But as long as there’s a taboo about pointing out anything inherently bad about a minority community (as opposed to something bad inflicted upon them), this remains mostly untalked about.
This one’s hard to disentangle. What does “inherently” mean in this context? Nobody would be surprised if people who grew up in crime-infested neighborhoods without legitimate job opportunities turned out to be statistically more likely to be criminals as adults, and there’s no need to indict different races or cultures to provide an explanation if that turns out to be true.
We could do a grand social experiment where we level all the playing fields, and then see if differences remain, and if so we could start wondering about races or cultures then. Mind you this experiment needs to be thorough and span dozens of generations, to erase the dozens of generations’ worth of disenfranchisement. It’d be a good thing to do anyway, for the sake of fairness.
But if we don’t go through that step first, how in the world do we act on your statement that there are cultural differences between races? What do we do with it?
Behavioral sciences folks find it useful (perhaps even necessary) to conceptualize their subjects as lacking free will, but they also find it useful and necessary to discuss what they should do in order to “obtain a desired result”. Or make recommendations to policy makers that such things be done. Their language doesn’t imply any lack of autonomy on the part of the desirable-results-obtainers, you’ll notice.
Whatever free will is or isn’t, it would appear that our experience of ourselves is always the experience of being choice-makers, of determining our behavior. From the outside, it may make more sense to consider the individual’s context as if it were the cause of those choices, but the efficacy of the latter perspective doesn’t make the former perspective an illusion or “wrong”. There’s an artificial division here of self and context as if they weren’t each causing the other and being caused by it in return, and because we tend to posit consciousness as located in the individual, we first hypothesize “free will” as “the individual being able to make choices instead of the choices being caused by the context in which the individual operates” and then note that, as thusly defined, that isn’t what’s happening. But conscious choosing is indeed taking place somewhere, albeit the consciousness involved is an array phenomenon, involving individuals in interaction with other individuals (who comprise part of each other’s context of course) and all of them in interaction with the surrounding physical environment as well.
I’m going to argue that there are plenty of elephants in the room. What they are depends on what room you are in. I will say that at least in the last century, whatever your “elephant” is, there was someone talking about it. The “elephant in the room” is just that - in the room. One room, with one group of people. In this time frame, I don’t think there has been a truly society-wide elephant.
This. People maintain all sorts of excuses for why they don’t even want to think about change. Over time, one comes to recognize how congruent those excuses are to the ones used to defend and perpetuate human slavery.
A reason African society is languishing is because of lower genetic levels of intelligence.
The national debt. Medical costs and pensions are expensive and nobody wants to pay taxes. Everyone wants a tax cut. People do not have mature or intelligent attitudes about taxes. Our tax rate probably needs to be 5-10% of gdp higher than it is now.
Treason and anti democracy beliefs have invaded American politics.
The civil war never ended, it just became a 200 year long cold war. Identity politics based on Race and class define American politics. Not economics or policy. Those are secondary to race and class.
The required separation of church and state, and the obligatory showing of piety that elected officials must present if they stand a snowball’s chance of being electable.
The elephant is that it is very tough to get a job after age 50 due to age discrimination. It’s not that someone doesn’t want to work, it’s that few will hire them.
One I would say that few people tackle is that fighting climate change and fighting poverty are at odds with each other. Pricing carbon inevitably makes fossil fuels more expensive, which disproportionately hurts the poor. The flip side is that allowing climate change to continue at its current pace will also disproportionately affect the poor, who are unable to relocate out of areas which will be negatively impacted by climate change.
I don’t know if there are any outcomes related to climate change that don’t result in poor people getting the shaft - either we curb emissions and today’s poor people lose out on the benefits of cheap energy, or we don’t and the future poor suffer.
I’d say the fact that you have to be born in the United States to be able to run for President is an issue that should be discussed more than it is. My kids were born in Korea, but adopted as babies and automatically became US citizens when we picked them up. They are banned for running for President and even though they never would, it seems oddly prejudiced to not allow them to.