I Have Bad News About Humanity
Hint: We’re doomed (jk)
Updates
Our May 4 panel discussion on Grid Infrastructure is almost here! Please note that it’s at a new venue this month, so please sign up in advance if you would like to come, since we have to sign people in at the front.
The IPCC Challenge is Almost Over
We are a little over halfway to our $1000 fundraising goal for the IPCC challenge fundraiser, and I want to say how much it means to me that people have made small and large donations to help us continue running CTAN events. We only have a couple days left in April, and that means you are going to have to rally if you really want to hear me perform dramatic readings from the 87 page IPCC report. I am personally hoping that we come in at $999, so that I don’t have the whole 87 page report, but it’s up to you guys.
So, About Humanity
Last week, we discussed the pros and cons of carbon capture, and one of my readers particularly enjoyed this comment:
I have written a few times about the topic of human cooperation, and my thoughts on why technology is important for getting us to carbon neutral, and I wanted to expand a bit on that, starting with a story.
When I was about 9, there was a girl who lived on my block named Heather. Me and my twin sister and Heather and a few other kids used to play softball. And, one day, a group of kids turned on Heather and started making fun of her, seemingly for no reason at all. They were yelling mean things at her, and she was backing away and looked like she was about to start crying. I was a very nerdy kid (as I am a very nerdy adult), and being pretty a loner weirdo, I was used to being the one who kids would pick on. So when they started picking on Heather, I saw my chance to get in on the action, and I joined in, and repeated some of the things the other kids were saying. Heather ran away crying, and we all left the field of battle congratulating ourselves.
I have always regretted that moment, and Heather, I’m sorry, I was cruel, and I should have been kind and stood up for you, because I knew what it was like to be crapped on. But, in my defense, Heather, I was only 9.
Humans are highly evolved for cooperation, which is how we get things like shuttles and the internet and The Traveling Wilburys. We form communities and those communities protect and care for their members. And frequently, those communities fight with each other for resources. The human need for cooperation requires that we be able to identify who is in the in-group (One Of Us), and who is in the out-group (One Of Them). Communities compete for resources, so this need to classify people as One Of Us or One Of Them is highly evolved, and very persistent, because your community’s survival depends on it.
The problem with highly evolved and very persistent needs is that we expend a lot of energy looking for ways to satisfy them. Sex is a great example of this: the internet is, to a shockingly large extent, a Baroque and expensive mechanism for satisfying that need.
In the case of cooperation, we call it “tribalism”. Tribalism is an evolutionary need for humans, a need to be part of a community, to feel a sense of belonging, by knowing that there are others who don’t belong. There are lots of ways that this urge manifests.
A harmless outlet for tribalism is organized sports. I grew up on the North Side of Chicago, and if I were a sportsball person, I would have grown up cheering for the Cubs. On the South Side of Chicago, they root for the White Sox. These fans hate each other with a white hot passion, because they root for the wrong sportsball team.
A shitty outlet for tribalism is through systemic racism, which persists in spite of all available evidence that all humans are extremely similar, and that the genetic differences between groups are much smaller than the variation within groups. Aliens, visiting earth, would have absolutely no idea how to distinguish amongst us. But we’re highly evolved to classify people, so we find stupid reasons to do it.
Bringing it back around: The North Side of Chicago is largely White and affluent, and the South Side of Chicago is largely Black and less affluent. So the seemingly “arbitrary” animus between the fans is also actually just the usual racial and class hatred that is part of the human experience.
Fundamentally, the reason I believe in technology as a tool for improving the lives of others and averting the climate crisis is because I don’t believe in people. Specifically, I do not believe it is a good idea to bet on appealing to people to consume less, or to lower their standard of living so someone else in a different country with a different skin color can have a higher standard of living, or to cease to love their families more than they love their neighbors, and to love their neighbors more than they love their countrymen, and to love their countrymen more than they love foreigners. Even in the face of disaster.
A few weeks ago, the internet erupted because Tucker Carlson apparently admitted to actually hating Donald Trump’s guts in private emails to all his colleagues. This, I have to say, is probably the most unshocking thing I have ever heard.
It has always been abundantly clear that Tucker Carlson is a huckster, stuffing money into his socks as he directs the crowd’s attention at the bad dark people over there. It is also very funny, because the reason these documents were leaked was because these clowns at Fox defamed Dominion, the election machine maker, by claiming they were a cabal of Venezuelan mafiosos, and now all this stuff is getting dragged out in discovery, leading this week to Tucker Carlson being unceremoniously dumped by Fox, like a quarterback after after senior prom.
We will never be rid of the Tucker Carlsons and the Donald Trumps and the Elon Musks of this world, because there is a lot of profit in catering to peoples’ self-righteousness, the most corrosive of all human emotions, the one that makes you feel good for being an asshole to someone else. So, we’re gonna have to build our way out of this mess.
Agree? Disagree? Think I’m full of it? Let’s discuss!
My counter argument here is that there are a few historical cases of societies en masse choosing to lower their collective standard of living in favour of some other goal. Quebecois laws on French language driving out the finance industry is a great example, arguably brexit also.
The Moriori choosing collective extinction over giving up pacifism is also a very striking example, though it’s hard to know exactly what the social dynamics were like there given lack of records.
*however* in each of the cases I can think of it was in favour of something pretty core to societal self image. And honestly being wealthy and eating steak is pretty core to the American self image
"Fundamentally, the reason I believe in technology as a tool for improving the lives of others and averting the climate crisis is because I don’t believe in people. Specifically, I do not believe it is a good idea to bet on appealing to people to consume less, or to lower their standard of living so someone else in a different country with a different skin color can have a higher standard of living, or to cease to love their families more than they love their neighbors, and to love their neighbors more than they love their countrymen, and to love their countrymen more than they love foreigners. Even in the face of disaster."
True words. I add that I don’t believe in the power of political systems that are driven by short term electoral concerns to make the hard choices as a body politic.
My own diving into climate tech came from realizing that finding a high-leverage sub-problem to solve was the best use of effort if what you care about is actually making a difference.
(Which is why I'm chasing methane every day)