And you were doing so well up to this point [not sarcasm].
The reason China is #1 in pollution is that the capitalist west• has outsourced millions of manufacturing jobs to make the PRC the world’s tech forge.
•For a lack of a better term.
Yeah, agreed. It was already mentioned above that intelligence is “overrated,” too. I think that’s worth further exploration and reinforcement, jumping off from your comment.
It’s true that humans have an intelligence that sets us apart in the biosphere. Look around, it’s undeniable. But basic evolutionary principles remind us that our intelligence doesn’t have to be vastly greater than other creatures’, and there’s no reason it should be expected to get better over time.
Rather — our intelligence is only good enough to have given us a reproductive advantage, and no better. That’s it. Flaws, gaps, weaknesses, all irrelevant to our success: the level of intelligence that was reached is sufficient to have provided a leg up, as it were. However, those flaws etc will become relevant if our material advancement begins to outweigh our intellectual capacity for adjusting to it, and the survival benefit evaporates.
The point is, in a discussion like this, it’s easy to say something like, “we’re smart, why can’t we adapt?” But this overlooks the basic fact that we are animals in a competitive ecosystem, our biology subject to the same rules as everything else. And it’s insufficient to say “we are smart.” The correct formulation is “we are just smart enough to have gotten ourselves to this point.” There’s zero evidence that we’re any smarter than that, and quite a bit of evidence that we’re not.
Agree with all this, but I’ll argue “smart enough” is not the problem. It’s “logical enough” or “ambitious enough” or “caring enough”. Or my personal favorite “unselfish enough”.
Many humans have the smarts and education to compute a do-able path forward from our predicaments. And did so enough years ago that the predicaments were much less intractable than they now are.
The problem is the number of lazy, unimaginative people who just want to be left alone to not think of anything beyond their immediate cares, and separately, the number of severely selfish / greedy people who care only that they get more, and more, and more, with no regard for the wreckage they leave in their wake.
These problematic folks together are a hefty majority of our headcount. And we collectively can only do things that meet with their approval.
Homo Sapiens are social predators. Outside of isolated cases , we don’t “sacrifice”. We have to be educated to the point where we see the worth, and THEN we buy into it. The key to that is education. That’s why those who hate things like climate change also support “private” (religious programming) schools and want to eliminate public education. Unless we can win the battle of education and truth in the news we watch, we are doomed to failure.
Besides all the other issues mentioned, humans aren’t ants; we aren’t good enough at self organization to achieve a large scale, long term coordinated goal, with or without self sacrifice. A mob deciding to mostly charge in the same direction is about as far as self organization goes. Even if a method of dealing with climate change and so on was discovered that had zero self sacrifice it would still need to be imposed from above or people would just ignore it and do their own thing.
You win the thread. We can close now.
Education is the only thing that separates 21st Century humans from (WAG) 50,000BC humans.
If we don’t place social education, not technical or business education, as a primary good of our society, we’ll all behave like the primitives did.
I see various mentions of education in terms of cooperation / the need to work together.
But before that, we need better education on skeptical reasoning and spotting dubious information. It’s the primary problem for pretty much everything right now.
The problems mentioned in the OP would be disputed by many Americans, probably the majority in fact. Before you can get people to work together to solve a problem they have to first acknowledge the problem.
I would say that our Intelligence has outrun our Wisdom and that this is not working out well at all.
We are really good at Figuring Out How To Do New Stuff. Most of us are not very good at all at Figuring Out When Not To Do (old or new) Stuff.
Isn’t it ironic that we live in the “Information Age” with nearly all the world’s knowledge in our pockets, yet the deluge of dubious and easily accessible information is drowning-out thought and reason? If the issue cannot be boiled-down to a bumper sticker or a sentence or two, then most people don’t care enough to learn beyond that.
Disagree. You know what separates us from them? Technology. Technology which at any given moment a very small fraction of the population can understand or even wants to understand. And that is it. We are the same tribal apes that ever we were.
If there is one lesson the internet has taught us, it’s that having access to knowledge is not the answer. It never was.
If we could only figure out how to change the climate, we could grow coffee in the Ozarks…
Are you conflating information with knowledge? The classic demonstration is that
To be or not to be
Has the same amount of information as
JJ45 GRS 09FR Q113
The tech you refer too has been made available through education and, yes, knowledge. There is a cornucopia of information on the Internet. Knowledge is much more rare.
As A. Einstein supposedly said: The point of studying is not to gather facts, but to learn how to think.
Oh, learning how to think is it?
I have a friend who grew up Oklahoma trailer trash (her description) – at least one of her half brothers is in permanent jail and other kin tend to spend time there as well as in even less savory places. She was the only one of her family to get out of there and go to college. She told me she thought that one thing that liberals don’t understand about people is how stupid they are.She said almost all the people she grew up with could not get out of the bottom feeder category because they simply were not bright enough. They were ignorant and incurious, and kept making the same lousy decisions over and over and never learned to not make them.
I see variations on this everywhere I look. Techno-nerds excited about how new tech is going to save us, progressives believing that the working classes are going to flock to their banner, the middle class believing they will somehow manage to attain to the prosperity that only happened in the US after WW2, for about 25 years.
I think the gap between a guy sitting on a junky porch drinking beer with his pals and imagining he’s going to make a killing in the chop shop business, and the above examples, is not a wide as we’d like to believe.
I think we could get most of the way there by simply teaching people how their short term interests are often in conflict with their long term interests.
When you’re a dick to people in the short term, you’ll have no friends or allies in the long term. When you ruin your workplace environment and product quality to prioritize short-term profits this quarter, next quarter you’ll lose experienced employees and loyal customers. If you vote for fascism to “own the libs” today, tomorrow you won’t have a country. Just education, no real sacrifices required.
I also think you’re mistaken about the “horrific” quality of life reductions necessary to combat climate change. While of course we’ve long passed the point of mere prevention, in most cases it’s a matter of investing as a society in literally anything else besides the wealthy donor class’s quarterly returns.
If instead of bribing billionaires, we’d invested our tax dollars in public transportation, education, nuclear energy, walkable (and livable) cities, etc, we wouldn’t have the climate problems we have today. The best time to start would be fifty years ago, but the second best time is now. No “horrific” quality of life reductions necessary. Just a change in priorities and a resulting slow drift towards more sustainable lifestyles.
You got me to wondering if there are any real-world examples of this. /s
Besides the comments about having a clear everyone agrees is a threat, asking people to live joyless and miserable lives for the collective good works out better when there’s a clear endpoint in sight. If the war wasn’t won in 1945 is would be in 1946, and we knew we could get back to eating as much food as we wanted to, put as much gas in our cars as we wanted to.
Your understanding of history is … suspect.
By early 1944 it was obvious the Allies would win … eventually. By mid 1945 it was '46 for sure. Unless it was gonna be '48.
But no such confidence existed in 1941 or early 1942 when the e.g. Brits and Americans were looking at endless privation leading to likely defeat.
I disagree. We do sacrifice—but for our families, and maybe the members of our community. It’s a hell of a lot harder to get us to sacrifice for “the world,” or for people we’ve never met who live in some other part of it.
IOW …
Monkeysphere is comfortably small; modern humanity is unimaginably big. We good; they not. End of debate.
What we have to realize is that we are part of “the world”, a global family if you will. I know its less personal, but no less vital in the long run.