Disinformation | Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Disinformation’

A denial diagram

July 8, 2020

I think this diagram is quite neat and useful… Hopefully I can say more about it tomorrow

From:

William F. Lamb, Giulio Mattioli, Sebastian Levi, J. Timmons Roberts 2020. “Discourses of climate delay”. Global Sustainability 3, e17, 1–5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2020.

The Diagram can help you avoid your own resistances, and forms of delay, by simply inverting it….

1) Take responsibility now – do what you can, don’t pretend its some one else’s job to go first. Going early will make transitions easier and quicker. Be generous – don’t expect rewards or praise
2) Human nature is pretty flexible. That something is hard does not mean it is impossible. If we act now we can at least stop it getting maximally bad, which is a really good thing.
3) We don’t have to be perfect, just act as best we can. Accept what you are offered by the politics and take it further. Fossil fuels are poisons, lets get healthy. Burn as little as you can. Climate chaos will affect everyone, but poor people much worse, so help them out. Just stop doing things which harm the environment directly. By stopping, you support all our lives.
4) While we support research, we need to solve the problem, as best we can, with the tools we have now. We can’t depend on fantasies that we will develop wonderful super-tech, or that everything will turn out ok, because Murdoch tells us so. We may need to penalise those who would destroy the lives of the rest of us, by continuing emissions. They might need warning, and gradually increasing penalties and costs, but that will help them change. Conversely we can reward those who do well.
5) Doing the right thing is not always easy, but we do it anyway.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, politics
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Jane Jacobs and the Dark Age Ahead.

July 7, 2020

In her book Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs explores the likelihood of a coming dark age. Not all collapses lead to ‘dark ages’, Sometimes empires collapse and something new is born. This blog post is just about Dark Ages.

Jacobs starts off by pointing out that cultural dark ages are not rare.
Historically we tend to think of The Dark Age between as occurring between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. As she says:

So much had been forgotten in the forgetful centuries: the Romans’ use of legumes in crop rotation to restore the soil; how to mine and smelt iron and make and transport picks for miners, and hammers and anvils for smiths; how to harvest honey from hollow-tile hives doubling as garden fences. In districts where even slaves had been well clothed, most people wore filthy rags.

Many historians have pointed out there were islands of civilisation and some technological advancement during this period, it was not all cultural loss, and quite possibly humans did not realise there was much decline while they were living through it. Nevertheless this was a time of wandering in ruins, loss of skills, loss of life span, plague and famine.

Similar events have occured all over the world, all through history. Many cultures have disappeared in the face of conquest, genocide and slavery, and enforced destruction of culture – we can easily think of indigenous cultures which have disappeared, or have had to be recreated and reborn. A dark age for one culture, does not have to be a dark age for another, even if the victors are barbarous to the losers. However, there are plenty of pre-historic civilisations which just appear to have more or less vanished over a short period of time: the cave painters of Lascaux, Norte Chico, Çatalhöyük, Easter Island, the Maya, and so on.

Mass amnesia, striking as it is and seemingly weird, is the least mysterious of Dark Age phenomena. We all understand the harsh principle Use it or lose it…. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?

Discovering the causes of loss of ability to transmit culture is an important research topic, and we may be on the verge of facing this loss as a problem. As with the Library of Alexandria the problem may not just be fatal blows, but an ongoing decay which removes resilience and value. The causes of such decay have to be uncovered so that we may possibly avoid them.

She points out that people may be blase about this happening in our current world because information is everywhere. But there are problems.

The first is that information is irrelevant if people do not try to find it, do not value it, do not know how to use it, have too much information to detect what information is the best, get confused by conflicting information, destroy knowledge of the information through social loyalties, or have a dominant group which opposes looking after the knowledge.

The second is that use of culture depends precisely on active use and emulation. As she says

[C]ultures live through word of mouth and example. That is why we have cooking classes and cooking demonstrations, as well as cookbooks. That is why we have apprenticeships, internships, student tours, and on-the-job training as well as manuals and textbooks.

Culture also works through exemplars, and through imitation of exemplars and through ‘mentoring’. If our cultural exemplars feel no need for our cultural riches then neither will those who imitate them, or classify themselves as belonging together with them. Information, awareness, and even wisdom will decline.

Thirdly culture comes through experience. If you don’t experience the culture then you will not understand it. If you haven’t been through the initiation rituals you loose experience. If you have not had an experience of the divine in the right circumstances, then social religion will probably not make sense.

Fourthly, culture depends on context, or on other aspects of culture, and behaviour. Not having the right cultural background, will make reading Aquinas, Shakespeare, Plato, Hume, Burke, Newton, Einstein, Freud, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Vedas, or even basic textbooks, too difficult. There will not be enough connection to other knowledges for the information to be decodeable, or even interesting. Imagine trying to read an engineering textbook with no knowledge of construction in the world, or attempting to learn computer programming without a computer.

If we do not have a society in which people habitually interact, and reinforce a togetherness which builds on the past, then we lose access to information in books.

Jacobs suggests that in the US, cars and roads build disconnection, as in many places it is impossible, or difficult, to walk and build ties or recognition with people in your neighbourhood. You are all, more or less, strangers, and strangers tend to be wary of each other.

Fifthly, culture always changes. In some situations it is possible to build a new culture which is destructive of connections with the past, or with elite knowledge, with exploration, or with ‘civility’. People may try and reconstruct past cultures but, as Jacobs argue, reconstruction is never the same as the original. Sometimes the divergence can be useful, sometimes not.

One point to be distinguished here is the forgetfulness of acute trauma, which tends to be gradually overcome as people move back into normal life, and the chronic forgetfulness, or loss, which gradually becomes permanent. The gradualness possibly leads to a sense that ‘greatness’ is still here, when it is being lost. We are not aware of what we are forgetting, or don’t care. Perhaps we feel we have more urgent concerns, like survival. Perhaps we are violently displaced, without connection to our past or to people with similar backgrounds.

We know that without the depths of culture and connection to the past and others, people can sink into meaninglessness. They ‘disappear’, they can sink into despair and hopelessness – the world makes no sense, their fragments of understanding make no sense. Life seems fragmented and pointless. People can try to move on and embrace another culture which does not accept them, and does not gel with their past. People don’t, or become unable to, support each other – perhaps they don’t know those who they are with?

In this kind of situation conservers of tradition, or makers of innovation get lost. The culture radically simplifies, gets stripped back, and all previously valued technical skills start to decline.

Authorities may try to fix this problem by decrees, by force, by taking administration away from the locals, compelling forms of behaviour – saying that the people are barbarous or uneducated, but all this makes the situation worse. The ‘natural’ culturally evolved controls and interactions of their previous functional society, get weakened further, the control, or education, is remote from their life. It is rare for top down organisation to work, unless it aims at eradication (it is much easier to destroy than to build), or the leaders have a direct connection with people’s lives, or the reform removes some true obstacle from people’s lives like crippling disease.

The historical stories people tell may devolve to them being losers, or sinners, or somehow deficient. Resentment or lack of care may become the governing culture, leading to more fragmentation.

Encounters with more militarily succesful cultures is not the only cause of decay. As Toynbee recognised years ago, all cultures face new challenges as the world changes, and the societies themselves change. Sometimes the societies fail these challenges internally. The dominant groups are unable to respond, or they are so ingrained in their response they cannot do something new as that could threaten their culture, their world view, or the power they exert, or the habits they have gained.

People can have the most favourable conditions for life and destroy them. Jacobs examples the ‘fertile crescent’ which was the fount of world civilisation, yet lost it’s lead completely, and is now no longer fertile. They appear to have cut down their forests faster than they could regenerate, domesticated goats which ate new growth, and soil was lost, salt accumulated, water flowed through too quickly, drought got worse. The problems compounded and the ecology changed for good. This has happened to many cultures. Not being in a relatively harmonious relationship with their ecology, is probably a primary cause of collapse.

Leaders of cultures can retreat from the world, to try and preserve themselves from challenge, rather than face the challenge, this only leads to deadening. China had vast fleets exploring the world, but gave it all up and destroyed or diminished the knowledge they had of the non-Chinese world, as they had the supreme culture. The culture retreated and ossified, and was forcibly incapable of dealing with problems, such as the Europeans, when they arrived. They deliberately knew little about what they were facing.

Losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant and are dropped.

This is what is happening today. We can see it throughout the world. Climate change and ecological destruction are ignored, or denied (maintaining the economy and corporate power is more important), or enmeshed in fantasy solutions. The serious problems are not faced, or are to be faced at some time in a relatively distant future. The Coronavirus is dismissed, people deny it is serious, people assert the economy is more important, and that all will be ok, quite magically. In the US, people on either side of politics cannot discuss things, they just abuse each other and fear each other. A growing Republican meme asserts that if Joe Biden wins he will kill them all. This meme is possibly reinforced by attempts to ignore the pandemic.

Education is often divorced from life and tradition, people cannot see the importance of the past or, if they do, refuse to accept that anything modern and critical of that past, can be of value. Education is nowadays about providing credentials for jobs and being ‘job relevant’, not about wisdom or meaning. Even at university people are pressured into teaching for work, not for discovery or life proficiency. Indeed, this is what many students seem to want. They have no time for ‘high culture.’ Culture and the learning of the past is jettisoned to continue corporate profit and wage labour. Sometimes this arises because the past of science and technology is seen as irrelevant to the current day. As one conservative blog, which is kind of reviewing Jacobs, remarks:

Many middle-class or wealthy people don’t consider themselves barbarians at all. But if they see the passing on of wisdom and knowledge of higher culture not as the heart of education, but rather as a useless appendage, then they are barbarians, no matter how nice their lawn looks.
American Conservative

Commercialisation of culture may also be a problem. This may encourage cultural production, but it also can lead to a loss of the past, because it is not referenced, or it is not successfully profit generating. Much of this new art is to be consumed and thrown away, rather than act as places of reflection. Or it may select the lives of the wealthy, the vulgar, or sports people, as being the lives to emulate – the supposedly ‘self made.’

We can also see organised politicisation of knowledge. ‘Science’ is identified with a particular politics and then dismissed, irrespective of the evidence. People can come to see knowledgeable people as part of their oppression, part of what holds them back from success, and thus to be overthrown – and sometimes they can be correct, as with neoliberal economics, but it is in the interests of the leaders to only encourage certain ‘ directed skepticisms‘ [1] which correspond with retreat from disruptive problems, and thus lowers the chance of solving them. Once a ruling elite gets separated from the people, say by massive divergence of wealth, they will have no hesitation in going for the ‘noble lie’ and attempting to dismiss and suppress the most knowledgeable people around. They may well declare them enemies of the state or enemies of the people. This way knowledge gets lost in fantasy, or in people attempting to avoid being denounced.

Politics itself is now an elite occupation with people largely not drawn from those who experience people’s daily lives. They seem largely committed to maintaining the destruction of their culture. Taxes tend to be used to subsidise the wealthy, or stripped away from productive areas. Infrastructure, important for daily life (such as roads, bridges, rail, sewage), is allowed to decay, increasing the expense of operating and leading to technical failures. Supervision of the powerful is stripped back, or allowed to decline, so they get away with fraud and deceit, and social trust decays. People may come to think there is nothing professionals can teach that is worth learning, or moral to learn. Neoliberal politicians tend to argue that wealth is the primary virtue and that if something cannot make a profit, it should die, unless it is a wealthy influential business which should be bailed out by taxpayers. Neoliberalism easily becomes rapacious and ready to sacrifice everything to money.

In the US, President Trump seems committed not just to maintaining the destruction, but to increasing it, putting tools of the dominant elites in all important positions, increasing elite power and wealth, increasing ecological destruction and poisoning, stacking or ignoring courts, decreasing supervision of the corporate sector, and increasing the fractures between his supporters and everyone else, even to the point of civil war, or furthering distrust of the whole US system. Trump is a personified vector of collapse.

There is possibly a sense that Trump could only be defended by people who fundamentally had lost touch with their guiding culture, or a sense of responsibility. In this world, interference with justice, suppression of evidence, corruption, pandering to enemies, and so on, are simply said to be something everyone does. Consequently, there are only immoral exemplars or extremely good liars.

There is often an easy optimism that the pendulum will swing the other way, but that only happens in a functional culture. In a dysfunctional culture this rebalance may not occur. This seems especially so, when the dominant groups seem to see their solutions in terms of preventing a rebalance, or engage in pretending that the pendulum is actually swinging the other way from which it is, so as to keep it swinging in their direction.

[P]owerful persons or groups… have many ways of thwarting self-organising stabilisers – through deliberately contrived subsidies and monopolies for example. Or circumstances may have allowed cultural destruction to drift to the point where the jolts of correction, seem more menacing than the downwards drift.

Different factions attempting to secure their own sense of wellbeing may sabotage the well being of others, or even themselves. They can prevent the ending of ecological destruction for example. In the Fertile Crescent, there would have been those who opposed tree conservation because of needs for fuel, others could have opposed limits on the use of goats. China quickly lost the knowledge of ship building, the ways of financing the fleet, and ceased to allow the expression of curiosity about the rest of the world.

So dark ages come about, in part, because:

The ruling groups fail the challenges the culture is faced with.
Powerful interest groups demand that destructive behaviour continues.
Rulers withdraw from interacting with the world into self-obsession, obsession with religious, or cultural, purity, or military expansion against their neighbours.
The culture and people are displaced by massively superior and indifferent force.
Continuing environmental destruction, no matter how good the reason
Change happens too quickly to adapt to in meaningful ways.
Local community interaction and integration declines, so there is no community resilience, bounceback or mutual support. People do not know their neighbours.
Education moves away from life, moving away from the contemporary to the past, or focuses too intently on a particular domain of life, excluding all others, including tradition.
Government’s cease to spend on the people, or protect the people, and only work for the power elites. Taxes are not spent on public goods, or keeping roads, bridges, sewers, cables, knowledge, etc functioning, but on protecting those dominant elites who are the supposed source of general wealth.
People who are models for emulation appear overtly corrupt, immoral or deceitful.
Acceptable knowledge becomes dependent on profit, or on sticking to the religious or party line.
People, previously of the same culture, are separated into mutually non-communicating, and likely warring, factions
Loss of knowledge and culture, and loss of the supports of knowledge and culture.
Increasing gaps between the elites and the people. In power, wealth, military proficiency, education etc. which in turn increases the power, wealth etc of a smaller and smaller number of people.

Tags:Disinformation, disorder, politics
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Hypothetical outline of the decline of the library of Alexandria, and the decay of knowledge.

July 6, 2020

The decline of the famous Library of Alexandria in the Ancient World, could tell us something about civilisational and cultural decline, and the loss of knowledge. Many contemporary scholars mourn the loss of the library, because so much of our knowledge of the Mediterranean world and its philosophy and literature has been lost. We have only a tiny fraction of what was supposedly stored in the Library, and much of that in fragments. It’s loss seems heavy.

However, even a cursory glance at the historical materials will show that dating the famous destruction of the Library of Alexandria is not easy…. There are multiple dates and much dispute as to what date it was finally over.

But then, most of what we ‘know’ about the library, seems to be informed guesswork. We don’t even know when the library was built. Most people guess somewhere between between 320 to 270 BC. Neither do we know how many texts it stored during its height – estimates vary wildly, and I mean wildly I’ve seen figures from 40,000 scrolls (not whole works) to 500,000 works!

Neither do we know how many rooms stored scrolls; if we did, then this might allow some kind of real limits to the scroll estimates. We do know that they liked to have different versions of the poems of Homer. So much of the content may have been duplications of famous texts, and perhaps not as varied, or complete, as we might hope.

From a rather cursory investigation, I suspect there was not final date for the library… I’m not a historian so what follows is all conjecture, but it’s possibly something like what happened. Its ‘plausible’.

Sociology and physics of decay

Importantly, libraries require money to preserve buildings, acquire new texts, salvage old texts and pay staff. Even with sealed buildings you get pests, and in places like Alexandria, with no possibility of sealing buildings, there would have been problems with rats, mice, cockroaches, insect larvae, fungus and so on. (I’ve been told that birds can be a problem once they get in, and start shitting on everything, which then brings more vermin). One source I read suggests that ventilation to reduce fungus probably helped fires spread. So scrolls decay, and we need constant financing of copying to keep the scrolls intact. That could well involve the gradual accumulation of error in texts.

I don’t know much about ancient libraries, but I’d imagine the cataloging system required the memory of librarians. (There is some evidence texts were grouped by first letter of the author’s name and, at some time, Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, a 120-book catalogue of various authors, using various subdivisions – this as usual is lost other than a few fragments. There is a story that Aristophanes of Byzantium managed to remember where some texts were stored and this was so impressive he was awarded the head librarian’s job). This arrangement might also mean that texts were moved around and did not have a permanent order.

Keeping everything together would require constant labour and finance.

The larger the library the more money is required to just keep it going, and the less likely they are to be able to support themselves through user fees, or selling scrolls – they have to support the copiers, and books would be truly expensive without printing – a small market at best.

So libraries require constant bequests or taxpayer subsidies. Given the irregularities of investment in the Ancient world, you are basically needing taxpayer subsidies – which means those who pay tax have to value what is being subsidised. I’d suggest that scholarship is amongst the least valued of occupations. Bread and circuses and military subsidy are far more necessary. I suspect that cuts in monies for the library were easily made, and the more decrepit the library became the easier it was to make cuts, not do roof repairs, not clear out the vermin, sack the staff, lose texts or even sell scrolls to raise monies.

This of course decreases the value of the library and its stock. So the library could easily have been reduced long before it ‘vanished’.

Reading and so on, is an easily lost social skill, especially if only relevant to a learned class, and if Alexandria decayed as a society, which seems likely, then the level of interest in preserving the library and out of date archaic literature may have declined rapidly.

History of Accident

On top of that we have such things as the purge of philosophers by Ptolemy VIII Physcon in 145 BCE, because he thought they supported the previous ruler. The head librarian, Aristarchus of Samothrace, fled to Cyprus. Other scholars fled elsewhere. That would probably leave the library to decay even faster. If few people use it, it apparently needs fewer staff to support it, and decay does not stop.

I don’t know if scholars returned, although there is some evidence they did not for a long while; there were other libraries in the Ancient world, and places temporarily more hospitable.

In a way, just focusing on the Library of Alexandria, distracts us from wondering what happened to all these other libraries. It was not as if “all our eggs where in one basket.” We are looking at a general set of events here – a sociology of decay, not a single catastrophic event.

Anyway, as time went on, the rulers of Alexandria became much more interested in suppressing unrest and dealing with other problems than with the libraries. At one time a palace guard was appointed head librarian.

One hundred years after Ptolemy VIII, Julius Caesar probably burnt the library down by accident, along with the docks, although it is hard to tell how damaged it was by the fires. Plutarch says it was destroyed, others (more dependent on the Caesars), play the damage down. Strabo visited the building which housed the library complex but did not mention the library. It is possible, given the way things work, that surviving stones from the library would have been used to help rebuild the docks.

Later on Alexandria become more of a provincial town of the Roman Empire, and membership of the library may have become ceremonial. The known later members did not show much interest in books, and we can guess more decay, more lack of interest.

Another battle in Alexandria in the 270sAD is also thought to have damaged the library, as Emperor Aurelian is said to have destroyed the quarter of the city in which it was housed. Diocletian also put the city to seige in 297, which may well have damaged the libraries still further.

The Library’s offshoot, the Serapeum, was destroyed or cleared out, along with many other pagan buildings, after a battle between Pagans and Christians in the time of Pope Theophilius of Alexandria. This Pope is also reptuted to have killed 10,000 monks who disagreed with him. We don’t know if the Serapeum had any books at this time, it probably had a few as pagan philosophers lived there, but they may well have been more interested in oral tradition and dialectic than texts. The nature of this Pope and the Christians at this time, does not lead us to expect they would respect any texts remaining in the Library proper.

There is also talk that Muslim conquerors burnt the books in the library again, but we don’t know how much extra damage this would have done, or what number of scrolls were stored there. The library may well have been largely lost long before this, or the whole thing maybe a story.

Conclusion

Cumulative decay, lack of interest, low funds, wear, accident and war probably reduced the library, much more than any single calamitous event. There were other libraries in the Ancient world, so if it were just a matter of us not having the texts because of the Destruction of Alexandria, we should still have books from the other Libraries. That we do not, suggest that the problems were more widespread than just a few acts of violence. It is a whole collection of social events that are likely responsible.

Remember this is conjecture…. but it suggests that knowledge can fade even without deliberate attempts to purge it. If people cannot read it, replicate it, or get hold of it, or be taught it as relevant to their lives, it will be lost.

Tags:Disinformation, disorder
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Contemporary Politics and the role of disinformation

July 5, 2020

1) The first point is to really identify the power elites, and not to be diverted into attacking scapegoats.

2) In corporate neoliberalism, the power elites and the wealth elites (and those dependent on them), are pretty much the same.

3) Neoliberal media, politicians and ideologues usually pretend the elites are not the power elites, but that they are relatively powerless people, such as ‘intellectuals’ or ‘cultural marxists’. For example, in this view, Trump’s family is not an elite, neither are the owners of major corporations, nor the intellectuals who support ‘free market’ neoliberalism, or occupy roles in corporate sponsored think tanks, and help justify the real power elites… A moment’s reflection will show this is misdirection. How many people pay attention to cultural marxists or even know whether they really exist, and what power do such intellectuals have other than persuasion?; they do not command armed police for example, they cannot buy legislation or regulation.

4) For the last forty years, in the US, the Republicans have been dedicated to furthering the success of the wealth and power elites. The part of the party which is not dedicated to completely supporting the power elites is devoted to furthering the power of pro-corporate and authoritarian Christians. In either case, deliberate democracy is not high on the list of priorities, neither is improving general prosperity, other than via ‘trickle down’, which is nearly always the favoured policy of the wealthy elites (aristocratic or corporate).

5) The Republican elites, or supporters of the wealth elites, are no longer conservatives; they are dangerous radicals who wish to strip away all traditional checks, balances and restraints on the corporate sector’s wealth and power. They appear to act as if they wish society to become a monoculture of rulers and ruled.

6) The same is generally true of the Conservative party in the UK and the Coalition in Australia. With the possible exception that the Conservative party still has some conservatives in it.

7) While the Republican elites are 90% pro-corporate, the Democrat/Labor elites are about 60% pro-corporate, but generally agree that most people should not be sacrificed for corporate power. They also tend to think that people should not be suppressed because of their race, gender, sexuality or religion. They are more humanistic pro-corporates. This is not great, but it’s all we have to work with.

8) As nearly all media is owned and controlled by the corporate sector or by billionaire families, it tends to support the corporate establishment. There is no left-wing media in the US, just media that is denounced by the hard line pro-corporate authoritarian media as ‘left’. If some media do not like Trump that does not mean he is upsetting all of the ruling elites, just some of them.

9) There are factions in the corporate elite. There are for example those who are happy that Trump is delivering tax cuts to them, removing regulations that give the people any control over the corporate section, allowing them to poison people, allowing them to despoil the environment, spending heaps of money on the military, destroying public health and so on. There are others who think an impoverished population is dangerous, or who realise that climate change and ecological destruction could be a problem. Neither factor is to be thought of as enough of a problem to challenge corporate power and economics, but they can be recognised as problems. They may also fear war with US trading partners, as if you are not in the arms business then you are likely to lose out. There are also occasional genuine believers in free markets, who notice that Trump is destroying such markets, and they think this will lead to disaster.

10) The main aim of elite propaganda is to get people to either support corporate power, or to ignore corporate power.

11) The best way to achieve this, is to intensify already existing hatreds and discriminations. Thus its good to blame baby boomers for being selfish, black people for being racist and not knowing their place, women for suppressing men and so on. This helps people who’s power has been stripped away, feel that they are better because they are young, white, male or whatever. It gives them an enemy to hate which they can despise, and which is not more powerful than they are. They can pretend Trump is not one of the elite, and is trying to help ordinary people, even though it is clear he is supporting the corporate elite, and stirring hatred, or practicing ‘divide and conquer’. Encouraging these hatreds also tends to separate people from more humanistic, mildly anti-corporate politics. The media can also try to pretend that any anti-corporate movement is treacherous, violent, or authoritarian, even as the movement calls for people to be liberated. They can easily misrepresent the claims of movements and slip them into their preferred patterns of support for the corporate elites, or ignore corporate elites. They can pretend Joe Biden is as bad as Trump, when he might be just a little better. They can pretend recognising climate change and the ill effects of eco-destruction stems from socialist conspiracy. They can even pretend that thinking that humans are not part of the earth, or cannot disrupt ecologies, is radical thinking, when it is another pre-copernican set of of ideas….. However, their main step is simply to ignore ‘left wing’ protests for as long as possible, unless they can be reported as violent, while highlighting right wing protests even if they attract tiny numbers in support. Given that the media is right wing, this is to be expected.

12) That something is a media channel on youtube, does not mean it is not pro-corporate, or corporately sponsored, even if it pretends otherwise. It can claim to be leftish, while spending most of its time ignoring the actions of the right elites or the President, and focus on criticising those challenging that power, or attempting to moderate that power. This is one way of helping to destroy the opposition to corporate power.

13) As many people have argued before, thinking, and information acceptance is social. It is not, completely, about understanding the world, but about gaining an orientation to that world, and the world includes social and group processes, and belonging. Information acceptance can be based in issues of identity – of what other people we identify with, and identify against, both in terms of conflict and culture. If people we value, also value some information we like, or seems essential to our identity, we are more likely to count that information as true. If people we don’t value, value information that we (or our groups) don’t like, the easier it is to dismiss that information as false. In other words, knowledge can function primarily as a marker of identity, and as a way of fitting in to a group. So one way of reinforcing acceptance of information is to intensify social differences, or social contempt, or social fear. This is what the right elites have been trying to do for forty years, it is why their ‘news’ tends to be so angry, rude and dismissive of opposition. It is why they insist that they, and their supporters, are the real folk of the nation. They want to create a situation in which opposed groups just abuse each other, or fear each other, rather than talk. This process now seems entrenched, as the left is now almost as rude and intolerant as the right. The process may no longer be able to be challenged.

14) The main aim is to confuse and fragment ‘the people’ so that they are more easily persuaded that the real problem is somewhere else, or that they are busy fighting someone else, and the corporate elites can keep on with their power grab.

Tags:Disinformation, politics, social category theory
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Imaginary Technology and Climate Change

May 27, 2020

This blog article is largely a summary and brief discussion of a short paper published in Nature Climate Change. “The co-evolution of technological promises, modelling, policies and climate change targets” by Duncan McLaren & Nils Markusson. I mesh some of the summary with a blog article written by McLaren, as this appears to give extra information and more clarity to the general argument. Unless specified, quotations come from the article.

The paper discusses “technologies of prevarication” which form part of an “an ongoing cycle that repeatedly avoids transformative social and economic change” (p.392).

The ‘gentle’ argument is that the international goals of avoiding climate change have been reinterpreted in the light of new technological and modelling methods, and the promises these new ‘devices’ have allowed. These technological promises, in general, allow the sidelining of social transformation, and the delay of any real cut back in emissions.

In the terms I’ve deployed elsewhere, these fantasies about technologies act as defense mechanisms against change and political challenge.

The article proposes five different stages in the global climate policy process. These stages overlap, but policy debates about targets in these stages “was noticeably framed primarily in [certain] terms while previous formulations retreated from the public eye” (p.392).

The stages they argue for are:
1) Stabilizsation c.Rio 1992
2) Percentage emissions reductions c.Kyoto 1997
3) Atmospheric concentrations c.Copenhagen 2009
4) Cumulative budgets c.Durban 2011, Doha 2012
5) Outcome temperatures c.Paris 2015

I should add that I don’t think these stages are proven and fully documented (the article is short), but they are plausible, and I’m sure the authors will document them more rigorously later.

Stage 1: at Rio, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was negotiated,

the UN settled on a goal of ‘stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of GHGs [Green House Gases] at a level commensurate with avoiding dangerous anthropogenic climate change’…
p.392

This was associated with coupled ‘general circulation models‘ [1] and ‘integrated assessment models‘ [2] which allowed the exploration of emissions reductions techniques and their economic costs. As the authors say in a blog post:

assessing specific policy interventions with these early models was difficult, and responses were often discussed in very broad-brush terms.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

Policy responses included: energy efficiency, promotion of forest carbon sinks (the blog adds ocean iron fertilisation), and finally nuclear energy. Nuclear energy stalled largely because of costs and public concerns about risks, and voters not wanting to live near one.

Stage 2: The debate around Kyoto was largely over speed of emissions reductions, usually with percentage reductions of emissions by target dates.

Models enabled people to relate emmissions cuts to concentrations of GHGs, but not to outcome temperatures.

Policy and promises focused on emissions reductions from fossil fuels, through the technologies of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) (promising up to 90% reductions from fossil fuels) and fuel switching, and on energy efficiency. Trading schemes were proposed, [although were often so slackly developed, in order to reduce costs to business, that they had little result.] The IPCC issued a report on CCS. The blog mentions that in some parts of the world there was talk of building new “capture ready” coal power stations, with licenses being granted before the term was even defined. The blog states:

CCS was selected preferentially by the model algorithms because the simulated costs of continued expansion and use of fossil-fuel power – linked to retrofitting with CCS – were lower than those associated with phasing out electricity generation using coal and gas.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

However,

practical development of CCS got little further than research facilities, while the promise of ‘CCS readiness’ even facilitated continued construction of new fossil power plants.
p.394

Fuel also switching did not live up to its promise.

Modelling

continued to become more sophisticated. It moved on to establish direct links between economic activity and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

Stage 3: Atmospheric concentrations c.Copenhagen 2009

The blog asserts that in the lead up to the Copenhagen COP, there was intense debate over setting a goal for atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Initially 550 ppm was considered adequate but the debate saw that lowered to 450 ppm.

There had been little progress, in reducing emissions. Bioenergy came to the fore as a promise, especially Bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) which implied a lowering of GHG concentrations at a future date. At the time BECCS was more or less completely conceptual, but it merged two apparently known technologies so was considered practicable.

Like CCS before it, BECCS promised ways to cut the costs of meeting a particular target, slowing the transition even more by its promise to effectively reverse emissions at a future date.
p.394

The blog phrases this more strongly. BECCS “allow[ed] the justification of a slower transition by its promise to effectively reverse emissions at a future date.”

Computer modelling became more complicated, with many 450 ppm of CO2 scenarios using the postulate of imagined CCS. The fact that this target appeared, to some, nowhere near adequate to prevent destructive climate change led to 350.org being founded.

There was less talk of emissions cuts and more talk of concentrations, and some possible confusion over the connection to temperature outcomes, even if the Copenhagen was officially focused on keeping the increase in temperature at about 2 degrees.

Yet again, CCS, or BECCS, had failed to be deployed, or we might add, even researched, to any useful extent.

Stage 4: Cumulative budgets Durban 2011, Doha 2012

some negotiators argued… for the pursuit of ‘a clear limit on GHG concentrations, and consequently a scientifically calculated carbon budget’…
p.394

A Carbon Budget attempts to set a total limit on the CO2 that can be emitted by States, to keep global temperature rise below a certain level. According to the blog “the UK began setting periodic five-year carbon budgets under its Climate Change Act in 2008″.

At around the same time:

the development of a simple inversion tool in the MAGICC model enabled not only the development of RCPs [Representative Concentration Pathways], but also more sophisticated global carbon budgeting models.
p.394

The idea of limiting cumulative emissions seemed to be more robust than previous methods, but opened the idea of imagined ‘negative emissions technologies’, which again reinforced the fantasy of underdeveloped BECCS. Indeed these imagined technologies became the only way forward, even if they largely remained imaginary.

As the blog states:

In addition, [these negative emissions technologies] enabled promises of future carbon removal as a means to reverse any “overshoot” of the budget…. And there is a fine line between inadvertent and planned overshoot
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

Stage 5: Outcome Temperatures. The carbon budgets idea never really got put into play – possibly because they were too empirical and demanded emissions cutbacks, and the non-use of fossil fuel reserves. So the Paris COP shifted to a focus on temperature increase – officially 2 degrees, but possibly 1.5 – as the boundary around dangerous climate change. This further boosted talk of negative emissions technology.

Looking ahead, although [Negative Emissions Technologies] might retrospectively balance carbon budgets, delayed action would still make a temperature overshoot more likely.
p.395

This helps construct “a space for an imaginary technology that can act directly to reduce temperatures”, such as Geoengineering. This, in turn, makes the use of geoengineering, and attempts to control the ecology of the whole world, more likely to be factored into models.

However, it is extremely difficult to accurately model the ecological consequences of geoengineering (especially without large scale testing), so the likely undesired effects become a cost left out of the models.

The blog remarks:

Many national and business targets are now framed as “net-zero” carbon, explicitly – or implicitly – achieved through substantial future deployment of carbon removal.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

Conclusion

Policy change looks like to be a co-evolutionary process involving implicit policy, politics, models, and imagined technologies.

In this process, the ‘evolutionary fitness’ of each technological promise is less a product of its (potential) climate impact than a measure of how well it can be modelled, and how well it matches the extant framings of climate policy.
p.395

These imagined techs then become embedded in the models and in the policy projects even if they do not exist at sufficient scale, after years of opportunity. The blog argues that the problem is magnified because the “integrated assessment models” focus on:

cost optimisation with time discounting. This means they favour future promises of action over plausible, but potentially costly, near-term interventions.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

The delays make the policies look cheaper to deliver, and cheapness is, in neoliberalism, a virtue; but over time little has been delivered – for example it appears that during the first decade of the twenty-first century, world coal production almost doubled, and it has not declined back to dangerous 1990s levels, yet.

Critically, in this process, each technological promise has enabled a continued politics of prevarication and inadequate action by raising expectations of more effective policy options becoming available in the future, in turn justifying existing limited and gradualist policy choices and thus diminishing the perceived urgency of deploying costly and unpopular, but better understood and tested, options for policy in the short term.
p.395

These technologies of prevarication have rarely delivered on their promises, or been as cheap as expected, and have rarely been embraced by governments or business in practice as opposed to imaginal rhetoric.

Often the problems, or unintended consequences, of the imagined technologies were not seen until people started to implement them. BECCS for example can result in deforestation, impingement on food production, require large amounts of energy input, and the extracted CO2 can be used to help push oil out of wells to be burnt to produce more CO2. At the best talk of CCS and carbon extraction merely slows down transition.

There is a possibility that:

each promise has, to some degree, fed systemic ‘moral corruption’ in which current elites are enabled to pursue self-serving pathways while passing off risk to vulnerable people in the future and in the Global South.
p.395

The technological promises, promise to save neoliberalism and market based developmentalism, and “promised future action, rather than immediate sacrifice.”

Carbon sinks may have perhaps gone backwards. Nuclear power has almost ceased being built, even though the promise remains to allow people to imagine future cuts in emissions. Efficiency gains have enabled growth in consumption and energy expectations have expanded. Often technologies etc have allowed additional energy capacity rather than reduced emissions. We can add that it appears that many countries (particularly China and the US) have encouraged poorer countries to lock-in to coal dependency to keep the exporters coal mines running, as emissions are counted on a per country basis. This increases the cost of conversion to renewables – all the money which could have been spent getting the countries self sufficient in renewables has been wasted in fossil fuels. While cheaper renewables make a change apparently more practicable, it is an extra expense and destruction of invested capital that poorer countries, and some wealthier ones, cannot afford easily – they have more immediate expenses, and few powerful people like to admit they have wasted money for nothing.

The whole process has downplayed urgency and helped defer deadlines for action.

We have played into the imagined technological fix, rather than the social change we need. There is no suggestion that the people who have invented and worked on this technology are to blame, the problem is the way their imaginings have been used to in policy and modelling to maintain small scale action. It has been more important for politicians to maintain neoliberalism, and development, than to act on climate.

[L]ayers of past unredeemed technological promises have become sedimented in climate pathway models. Contemporary imaginaries may prove just as unrealizable as the previous generations of promises,and there is no logical end to the set of possible technological promises that could be added to ‘resolve’ the models.
p.396

This ‘sedimentation’ of failed technological promises is now so standard that risks of technology disappointment and failure should be incorporated into models and policy discussions, and research.

Thirty years of failure, should show that we cannot continue our society working as it does, and expect to solve problems of climate change. We have to, as the blog states, “deliver behavioural, cultural and economic transformations.”

Comment

Assuming the figures used to make this graph are accurate, the image shows how well we have reduced energy production from fossil fuels, and how much we have increased renewable energy in the last 40 years.

source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-prod-source?time=1980..2018

We have failed. We have had years of climate action, discussion between nations, and targets have been set, yet the actions taken have ignored the problem and made the situation worse. The idea that technologies are largely defense mechanisms or modes of prevarication, is graphically illustrated. If we keep the same social organisation, and the same development processes going, then we are committing suicide. Whatever the appearance our States are failed States, when it comes to dealing with this problem.

We cannot rely on the State or big business to save us, or even to try to save us. We have been doing that, and this faith has not been repaid. We may need to get to work outside the State and outside big business…

This is where ideas of degrowth and community energy democracy come in. Degrowth will almost certainly not be a popular response to politicians, but it does allow us to ask questions which are otherwise not being asked. These questions have the potential to open the unconscious of our social dynamic towards destruction.

What, for example, if we tried to reduce burning fossil fuels without replacing them? This would be world changing, it would also start debates about wealth distribution, and energy distribution. What do we really need the energy for? How do we need the energy production distributed, to make these cuts possible? How can we levelise consumption to give everyone what they need to survive comfortably and freely? Can communities build and manage their own energy supplies? Can any of this be achieved along with the maintenance of rivalrous military based nation states? Will those in power who love the maintenance of violence-based hierarchies fight with all they can muster to go to destruction before surrendering their power?

I doubt such questions will be asked, but they are essential, otherwise technology is likely to primarily remain either a prevarication or a defense mechanism, which maintains our self-destruction.

Tags:carbon capture, climate change, degrowth, depth psychology, Disinformation, social action
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Directed Skepticism II

May 25, 2020

Previously I have suggested that there is a common form of skepticism, which is not a real skepticism as it is directed. It is only skeptical of particular positions, and because of this tends to be politically active, or result from politics. It is the kind of skepticism that is skeptical of the motives of climate scientists, but unskeptical of the motives of climate denialists. It appears to be motivated, although it is not always the user who is motivated; they main gain their motivation through the one sided skepticism of their exemplars. Sometimes the direction comes from what is socially accepted as common sense, and is thus not challenged, or from common defense against the possibilities of forthcoming pain. There is also a kind of cache in information society about being skeptical, even while you are apparently believing rubbish – directed skepticism is particularly useful in that situation.

In this piece I consider a skeptical argument, based on one proposed to me by a very smart guy, and attempt to show this skepticism is directed rather than general.

The post, also touches on interconnection and complexity; we can be skeptical of these views, but we should also be skeptical of views which do not take interconnection and complexity seriously. In a pandemic, everyone’s actions have the possibility of affecting many others, and many others through those others. An individual act has the potential to move outwards through society – a ‘humorous’ cough in someone’s face could spread the disease, even if the cougher does not feel sick.

1) I am skeptical that the current restrictions placed on the people of the world, which amount to a draconian dictatorship, are connected to the virus.

Response: I’m skeptical the restrictions amount to a draconian dictatorship, or that they have a specific aim other than lowering the disease.

Physical separation is the standard and historic mode of dealing with contagious diseases which are lethal. We try and keep healthy people away from sources of infection. We try and stop infected people passing on their infection. There is little that seems overtly odd about this. Diseases spread through social interconnection. We might be skeptical as to whether the proposed “social distancing” will work by itself, or that the consequences of this distancing are entirely predictable, but there seems little reason to think the rather diverse set of distancing regulations we observe are not primarily connected to a response to the virus. With the internet they certainly do not keep people socially isolated.

The death rate and the infection rate in Australia is way, way less than in the US, and the main difference is the speed and effectiveness with which the governments imposed distancing. So the better the isolation, it seems the better the result – at the moment.

As a rather trivial remark, I don’t know of people being executed for breaking restrictions which was the hallmark of Draco’s laws… And there is nothing I’ve seen to indicate the laws are coherent across the world. I’m skeptical that the relatively mild lock-downs in Europe, the US or Australia, are an indication of harsh dictatorship – certainly without considerably more evidence than is being offered. At the moment, these allegations seem over-emphasised.

It is true, that rather than making attempts to make distancing compulsory, it might be nice if we could persuade people to volunteer to cooperate in distancing, or for employers to decide everyone could work at home, out of the goodness of their heart, but I’m skeptical this would always happen. We appear to live in a society which does not always recognise a general good. However, there is always the factor of time. It appears that reaction to a pandemic must be reasonably quick to have effects.

However, the plausibility of distancing, does not mean we may not be able to find better solutions.

I am also skeptical that all those opposed to lock-down are necessarily proponents of freedom and liberty. Indeed, the organisations which seem devoted to diminishing human freedom and cultivating subservience to the corporate sector or State, such as US Republicans, British Tories, Australian Coalition, Putin, Modi, Bolsonaro, etc are generally trying to pretend there is no, to little, problem.

I’m skeptical of the idea that they do not anticipate benefit from encouraging skepticism about the disease and getting people to risk their lives on their behalf.

On the other hand, I don’t see who is benefiting politically from quarantine, other than ordinary people – if they get income support. The only underhand things that seem to be happening while the disease provides distraction, are the channeling of recovery money to wealthy people and established companies, and lessening restrictions on pollution and environmental destruction. That seems like business as usual, and apparently illustrates the idea that capitalist development requires ecological destruction.

2) Given that Governments are not dealing with severe problems, I’m skeptical that this is a serious problem.

Response: I’m skeptical of the idea that because governments do not deal with some major problems, they may never attempt to deal with major problems.

It does seem correct that governments are not dealing with severe problems such as climate change, ecological destruction, rising wealth inequality, or the growing dominance of the corporate sector etc. but it could be that the dominant classes think they can make money out of ecological destruction with no personal risk, while COVID-19 is potentially dangerous to them.

However the more COVID-19 effects the economy, and the more it does start to affect their wealth, then the more they appear to want to do nothing about it. They are also able to practice self-isolation to keep safe.

In this situation, I am skeptical that we will continue to deal with this problem. I suspect we will revert to the ways that we deal with other severe problems, by pretending they are not real or significant.

3) I am skeptical of anything in the mainstream media. The mainstream media is obviously fully behind the agenda of control. I place a question mark over everything I encounter in the media on both sides. I don’t trust any of the world’s government’s left or right.

Response: I’m skeptical of the idea the media speaks with one voice, or that what is reported by some media is always absolutely wrong.

If you don’t trust any of the world’s governments, then you should also be skeptical of the reasons given by those governments who oppose lock-down as well.

While saying “the media is arguing in favour of something” is always supposed to indicate that what those various sources are arguing for is suspect, it is possible they argue for things because they believe them to be true or strategically beneficial, even if they are not.

I am skeptical that because youtube channels, Q-Anon, or other mainstream news like Brietbart, may have ‘odd’ or different news, they are necessarily correct, or a voice of truth.

It also seems to be the case that not all media is fully behind lock-down, even if they were behind control. The Murdoch Empire for example, often argues in favor of whatever Trump’s position is at the moment, and generally of the disease being trivial. It is as mainstream and corporate as it gets.

I’m skeptical that people know about the world independently of media. Where else do they get their ideas about the wider world from? I am skeptical of the degrees of co-ordination required to fake a disease, across the world. I am skeptical of my own knowledge that would enable me to say the media is always wrong, even if it was uniform, which it isn’t.

There is lots of conflicting information but none of it, that I have seen, is able to imply that there is any logical ulterior motive in the way lock-down has been applied.

Lock-down may not be effective. That is a different question.

4) Even going by the highest statistics, the death rate is very small. I’m skeptical about this disease being harmful.

Response: I’m skeptical we know much about the disease as it is relatively new, and organisms and their interactions, and spread are complex. It may be deadly and destructive. It may not. It may be destructive enough. We will find out eventually.

Going on previous experience we can probably assume that humans will not have great defenses against a new disease, if this is a new disease.

My understanding is that the current medical understanding states that COVID-19 is more contagious than flu, and can be contagious before people exhibit notable symptoms. It is therefore likely to be fairly contagious. And, the closer together people are, the more likely contagion is. Which is not to say that we cannot do stuff to boost our immune systems, and cut down contagion, but we should be skeptical of claims this is enough.

At the moment the US CDC is estimating that in the 2018–2019 flu season there were 34,200 deaths from flu in the US . In 2017-18 there were 61,000 deaths, and in 2016-2017 there were 38,000 deaths

As of today, the current estimate of deaths in the US from COVID-19 is
98,004 and rising every day. There is little sign of a decline.

I admit these figures could be wrong, and COVID may turn out not to be as harmful as flu, but it seems unlikely at the moment…

Contagion rates and death rates do not have to be related. A disease can be highly contagious with an extremely low death rate, and it can have a high death rate but be mildly contagious.

Testing is difficult and often inaccurate with a new disease as well. So we would expect false positives and negatives, we do not know if these will cancel each other out.

The death rate certainly does not seem to be as high as originally expected.

However, some figures I’ve seen suggest that in many places people are dying at a far greater rate than last year, even after covid deaths are removed. Surprisingly this does not seem to be the case in Australia

There have been stories of significant undercounting of deaths, [2], [3], mistakes and of people being asked to revise figures downwards so as to get people back to work, and in the US until April 14 COVID-19 deaths had to be confirmed in a laboratory test while testing was not generally available, so where almost certainly undercounted.

We also now know that the doctors who were dying of heart attacks and strokes (which I was hearing about quite early on) were in fact dying of complications from corona virus, and were not counted.

There are now reports that children are getting rare inflammatory diseases, and that some people are remaining sick for a long time after infection [2]. So incapacity has to be counted as well as death rate.

At the moment some people seem to get the illness more than once. WHO has stated:

“There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection,”

This is not unusual with diseases probably because they mutate, but there may be other reasons. I’ve seen reports suggesting Covid mutates quickly and mutates slowly, which suggest large degrees of uncertainty.

What looks like small death rates can mount up. If 60% of Australians get the disease, and the death rate is 1% that is still in the region of 156,000 dead people, and if we add incapacity to that disease consequences could well be significantly disruptive in many ways. If the disease continues for years, then of course it will likely mutate and the healthy people will get it as well. So the total death rate is unpredictable in the extreme.

We will probably never know, the true death rates in countries in which isolation is more or less impossible for ordinary people, India, Indonesia etc., as they won’t be able to test the bodies.

Getting vaguely accurate figures will take a while. But if we don’t act when we don’t have certainty we could kill a lot more people.

5) In Sweden, where there has been little done about the virus, conflicting reports are being given about the infection rate there.

Response: Yes, it could appear that information about Sweden has been politicised, because they may have gone for ‘herd immunity’. That means we should not just be skeptical about reports saying it has a high death rate, we should also be skeptical of reports that its doing well.

However I find the Murdoch Empire reports… 21 May that “Sweden is suffering the highest COVID-19 death rate in Europe”

“Nearly 4,000 people have died from the virus in Sweden, a figure many times higher per capita than those of its Nordic neighbours Denmark, Norway, and Finland, which all imposed strict lockdown measures.”

Stefan Lofven the Prime Minister, has faith their system will work in the long run, and there will not be a second wave of illness. The strategy is also relying on the Swedish sense of self-discipline, and not suprisingly the government can say “We get figures now that people are actually increasing their adherence to our advice [about distancing], not decreasing.”

We could be skeptical about his faith. He is making a prediction in a complex system… it is not guarranteed to be correct, and it is not cautious or conservative.

Other reports suggest that it was not working that well. “Just 7.3% of Stockholm’s inhabitants had developed Covid-19 antibodies by the end of April.” This is well below what seems to be required, to make a population relatively safe. Annika Linde who was the Swedish state epidemiologist from 2005 to 2013, has also expressed doubts as to whether the strategy is working.

Sweden is an experiment, which is useful as it gives information, but which because of what Sweden is like as a nation, may not be replicable elsewhere. I am skeptical of sigificant real confusion in the reported death rates.

6) Hospitals in the US are being paid more to diagnose patients as having the virus. I saw an article on this which had been “fact-checked” by a snopes-type crowd and they had to reluctantly admit it was true. This might be justified in that they may need more money if it is the case, but it also opens the system up to the inevitable over-diagnosing for the cash-strapped institutions to gain more resources in general. So who knows what the real numbers are?

Response: Payments to US hospitals are complicated matters. For example I read

“There isn’t a Medicare diagnostic code specifically for COVID-19.” The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that “the average Medicare payment [is] $13,297 for a less severe hospitalization and $40,218 for hospitalization in which a patient is treated with a ventilator for at least 96 hours.”

And

“A COVID patient on a ventilator will need more services and more complicated services, not just the ventilator,” said Joseph Antos, scholar in health care at the American Enterprise Institute. “It is reasonable that a patient who is on a ventilator would cost three times one who isn’t that sick.”

There also do appear to be special bonuses for COVID patients, which were instigated to protect US hospitals from loss of their normal business.

As suggested previously, there also seem to be pressures leading to undercounting – such as the initial dismissal of heart attacks and strokes, and people dying outside hospital or in old people’s homes, or people wanting other people to go to work.

As I have said previously, I am skeptical that we know the exact figures, and I am skeptical that there is any reason to think deaths are significantly overcounted as opposed to undercounted.

It is also probable that if hospitals are over-counting then insurance companies and government auditors will likely sort this out, at some cost to the hospital and its reputation.

7) I’m skeptical that what ‘they’ are doing is necessary. Some professional doctors are criticizing the the idea of wearing masks and social isolation.

Response: I’m skeptical of all doctors, including those who say isolation is pointless. However, wearing badly designed or useless masks badly is probably useless.

Isolation may not be necessary, but as remarked earlier we have less dead in Australia per head of population than in the US, where the regime is more uncertain. A lot depends on what you think human life is worth, under various circumstances, as with old people, poor people, black people etc. This is a value judgement. I’m skeptical we will have agreement on this issue.

Another problem we face is that medicine is an empirical science of complex systems. As a consequence, there will often be disagreement about best procedure and likely results.

Most medical pronouncements are based on deductions from theory. We cannot know if the pronouncements are correct until after the event. However, unlike neoliberalism, they will likely be modified by failure.

Physical isolation is generally thought to be the best way of preventing transmission. Ideally if the disease dies in a person, or adapts to being harmless, without being transmitted to another person, then the problem is ended

8) What about Madagascar and WHO?

I’m skeptical of the relevance of this.

I read that WHO commends Madagascar’s fight against COVID. I also read that they are prepared to test a local herbal remedy.

I would be skeptical of assumptions such medicines work, before proper testing. If there is a remedy which works and is traditional, then wonderful, and even better if it becomes a source of income for the locals.

WHO did apparently say, in this context, that use of untested medicines: “can put people in danger, giving a false sense of security and distracting them from hand washing and physical distancing which are cardinal in COVID-19 prevention.”

Yes WHO are skeptical, but why not?

There only seems to be a problem if the supposed remedy is proven, and then outlawed, or we cannot make enough of it, or corporations won’t distribute it without the patent or something. And that has not happened, yet. It is freely being consumed by those who can get it.

9) I’m skeptical Bill Gates would be involved if there was nothing in it for him. It is highly suspect that all of a sudden he has started giving WHO advice. I’m skeptical he is a philanthropist of any kind. His organization is motivated solely for profit.

Response: I’m skeptical Bill Gates is particularly evil or incompetent. I’m skeptical he is more evil or incompetent than those politicians who disagree with him.

Anyone can give WHO advice, the question is whether they listen. The wealthier and more prone to be involved in global medical projects the person is and the more funding they can provide, the more likely such an organisation is to listen to them. I don’t know whether WHO has changed any policies based on what he has said, and I personally know very little about Bill Gates and his motives at the moment.

He does not seem to be an issue in this part of the world, except to people who think he is trying to mind control them through 5G.

It is one thing to be skeptical that 5G is absolutely healthy, but another to hold that it transmits viruses. If the latter is true, then we have had a major set of scientific breakthroughs which no one seems to know anything about… I’m skeptical enough of these propositions to wonder who is encouraging them and why?

Gates has been trying to support vaccination, and he likes orthodox medical science, that seems to be enough to make him suspicious to many. Especially to the active financial class.

It could be that wealthy people who don’t obey the party line and who might show another way is possible, get attacked, and lied about, by those who support the current order of power and wealth.

I’d also ask what’s in it for Trump and Boris Johnson, Alex Jones and all the other right wing media players, claiming there is little to no problem… they actually have a direct stake in the power game.

Bill Gates does not have to play power games anymore, but it does seem he has been worried about pandemics for a while, like many other people, and has warned against them. I’m skeptical that this is evidence he actively wants a pandemic.

10) If it is an emergency then where are all the requisitioned football stadiums being turned into temp hospitals? The whole “crisis” is being handled by the existing infrastructure.

Response: I’m skeptical health emergencies always overwhelm the existing infrastructure.

As far as I can tell hospital wards were stretched in the US, and Trump was boasting about the military erecting temporary wards, but I am pleased that minimal activity has saved the US from a true crisis.

I have read that hospitals in Northern Italy were overwhelmed, and doctors were discussing who should receive treatment and who should be left….

There were crises of body disposal, and it was clear that systems were overwhelmed. President Trump seemed troubled by this at one stage.

I would however add, that I am skeptical that the crisis is over, or has necessarily reached its peak.

Because the pandemic is an issue involving complexity, we may be able to say things like “without isolation, or without successful vaccination it is likely the disease will continue to spread,” but we don’t know how badly countries will be affected for some while, or even after the event. We do not know all the variables, or even the properties of the virus, as yet. So prediction is messy.

To only be skeptical that the disease is serious, is not real skepticism, it seems to be directed, possibly at continuing current life and fantasising ‘all is well’, when this may not be the case.

Tags:complexity, coronavirus, Disinformation, pandemic, skepticism
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Directed Skepticism and COVID-19

May 15, 2020

There seems to be a form of skepticism that seems politically alligned rather than general. It effectively says:

“I am skeptical of claims ‘this group’ is doing particularly badly.”

“I am skeptical that there is, or was, a way of doing better, or thinking better about the problems, than ‘this group’ is doing.”

When this position is consistent, it seems directed and perhaps even partisan – ‘this group’ often becomes ‘my side’, or ‘the group I like’.

We can see it in discussions about climate change, with people making statements that seem to translate as follows:

“I am skeptical that climate change is real, I am skeptical of the data, and I am skeptical of the motivations of climate scientists.”

Which might be fair enough, but these statements often seem coupled with another ‘undoing’ skepticism, which translates as:

“I am skeptical that those denying climate change could be faking, or cherry picking, data, or that they could be funded by the fossil fuel industry, or that this funding could have any consequence whatsoever. I am skeptical of claims that nearly all climate scientists are not socialist conspirators…”

Or in other contexts, we can see statements like:

“I am skeptical of government intervention in the economy. And I am skeptical of claims that free markets do not always deliver the best results, and of claims that free markets do not work the ways they are claimed to, or of claims there is no consensus in economic theory that allows us to categorically state that free markets are ‘best’ for most people….”

We can also see this style of skepticism in claims about the covid pandemic. for example in this New York Times article:

It opens claiming:

“In our actual pandemic, most of the institutions that we associate with public health expertise and trusted medical authority have failed more catastrophically than Trump has.”

I think that, while this claim could be seen as skeptical, it is also open to skepticism. It seems more probable to me that if anyone actually looks at Trump Administration’s behaviour and statements they would find the levels of failure and the refusal to listen to medical advice, pretty exceptional. This administration even pretended the previous administration did not have a plan for early response to emerging infectious disease threats. But then preparation for government was not apparently high on their list of priorities.

It is also not the public health authorities who issue or apply policy and rules, that is the government.

But we can suspend initial disbelief, as it is possible that the article might present lots of evidence, or be uniformly skeptical in more than just bursts….

However, as evidence of the idea that medical authorities have failed more than Trump, we are told that the world health organisation “followed its own political imperatives”

Well yes, what do we expect here? The World Health Organisation is a political body. It is part of the UN. Unless there is a specific reason for distrusting a member government it is probably generally going to accept what it is told, until the situation is overtly desperate, or the government is clearly wrong, otherwise it risks alienating support – a problem apparently demonstrated by the behaviour of Trump administration in attacking the organisation and cutting off US funding.

We are told WHO’s behaviour is corrupt in passing (“Less corruptly but no less disastrously…”) without any apparent skepticism, which is odd because making a mistake, in a constantly shifting new situation, is not always corruption – indeed we are later told (correctly I think) that mistakes are unavoidable. We could, however, be reminded that a certain world leader is busy blaming WHO for his own insistence that there was no problem although he often insists he did not insist that there was no problem.

Casually suggesting WHO is “corrupt” effectively operates to support this leader’s allegations, without any skepticism. Let’s not be skeptical of that leader’s claims, or competence…. let’s take him as truthful….

After all, on the 2nd of February, two days after WHO declared a global emergency, President Trump said:

“We pretty much shut it down coming in from China, We have a tremendous relationship with China, which is a very positive thing. Getting along with China, getting along with Russia, getting along with these countries…… But we can’t have thousands of people coming in who may have this problem, the coronavirus. We’re going to see what happens, but we did shut it down, yes.”
Fox News 3rd Feb ‘Coronavirus: President Trump said US authorities ‘shut it down.’ Here’s what that means’ and
https://factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-interview-sean-hannity-part-1-february-2-2020

On February 24th President Trump praises WHO, tweeting:

The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!
Twitter

On the 14th April, he says:

“Today I am instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization’s role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus,”
Remarks by President Trump in Press Briefing 14 May

Sure we can suggest that President Trump made a mistake, but he seems to avoid promoting that position altogether. Likewise, in a perfect world WHO would have behaved better, but it hardly seems to have failed more catastrophically than Trump.

One relevant question is how does it appear that an organisation behaves after it is clear it has not done the best job? If it attempts to get on with doing a better job then probably that is good. If it wastes time seeking to portray itself as blameless by blaming others, or pretending it never made a mistake, then this is probably not so good. That latter kind of organisation may be engaged in the processes we can describe as defense mechanisms, which means it pays more attention to soothing itself than to events.

Anyway, the article proceeds:

“But there is no definite pattern of outsiders being wrong and dangerous and insiders being trustworthy and good”

This somewhat dogmatic position (how is the author determining ‘dangerous’ and ‘good’) is arrived at with only two examples (outside WHO), with no consideration of the number of times that governments ignored medical warnings about the virus, which does seem heavily documented.

This is odd, for a real skepticism…

We then get given the “both sides are equally bad” argument.

This nowadays seems to be a popular argument when the supporters of a side which has done spectacularly badly wishes to diminish the effects of their performance.

In climate change we can occasionally get it in allegations that “both sides have blocked climate change action”. This is news to most people who are in favour of action. It is more correct to say, neither side seems interested in the kind of action which seems necessary, but only one side seems to be actively blocking any action at all. We often get a similar format in Republican claims to Democrats that the Democrats are as neoliberal as the Republicans – a claim not repeated to Republicans. So we get the next statement.

If one Medium post foolishly lowballs the disease’s contagiousness, another will make a cogent case for masking long before the C.D.C. did.

There is no mention that the CDC has been effectively muzzled, marginalised and defunded by the Government, and no mention of how the government’s leaders actively promote not wearing masks, or of how the mask reserves where run down and medical authorities were alarmed at the end of January, when this was realised….

This form of skepticism seems consistently directed rather than universal.

“all of the rules we’re implementing are just rough and ready guesstimates.”

Well I’m not sure some of these rules have not grown out of appearances and experiences – but the suggestion is that we should be more skeptical of all of them, than of those who would dismiss them….

Lets look at how this works again….

“Yes, you should trust Anthony Fauci more than Donald Trump when it comes to the potential benefits of hydroxychloroquine.”

but we negate this immediately…

“if you’re a doctor on the front lines trying to keep your patients from ending up on a ventilator, Dr. Fauci’s level of caution can’t be yours, and you shouldn’t be waiting for the double-blind control trial to experiment with off-label drugs that Spanish and Chinese doctors claim are helping patients.”

So people should really listen to the President before they listen to the medical stories and testings that the drug can harm people…? Let’s be skeptical of Fauci but, in an emergency, not skeptical of Trump.

The article continues:

“Every single reopening will be its own unique experiment, with confounding variables of climate, density, age and genetics that are nearly impossible to model, and the advice of epidemiologists will only go so far. Governors and mayors will have to act like scientists themselves, acting and re-acting, adapting and experimenting, with expert advisers at their shoulders but no sure answers till the experiment begins.”

This is correct – but we are not asked to be skeptical of those officials who say that we should open anyway, or that the disease is going away, when the numbers are increasing. We are not asked to be skeptical that openers will follow this procedure.. Again the skeptical proceedure is directed.

Again we have the issue about ‘opening the economy.’ This is not mentioned in the article, but the political struggle over the opening, and how many people dying is acceptable, is a significant part of the article’s background.

Let us look at Fauci’s responses to questions from the Senate (long sorry):

I get concerned if you have a situation where the dynamics of an outbreak in an area are such that you are not seeing that gradual over 14-day decrease that would allow you to go to phase one. Then if you pass the checkpoints of phase one, go to phase two and phase three. What I’ve expressed then, and again, is my concern that if some areas, city, states, or what have you, jump over those various checkpoints and prematurely open up without having the capability of being able to respond effectively and efficiently, my concern is that we will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks…..
most of us feel that the number of deaths are likely higher than [the reported] number because given the situation, particularly in New York city, when they were really strapped with a very serious challenge to their healthcare system, that there may have been people who died at home who did have COVID, who were not counted as COVID because they never really got to the hospital….
My concern is that as states or cities or regions, their attempt, understandable, to get back to some form of normality, disregard, to a greater or lesser degree, the checkpoints that we put in our guidelines about when it is safe to proceed in pulling back on mitigation. Because I feel if that occurs, there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control. Which, in fact, paradoxically, will set you back, not only leading to some suffering and death that could be avoided, but could even set you back on the road to trying to get economic recovery….
I have never made myself out to be the end all and only voice in this. I’m a scientist, a physician, and a public health official. I give advice, according to the best scientific evidence. There are a number of other people who come into that and give advice that are more related to the things that you spoke about, about the need to get the country back open again, and economically. I don’t give advice about economic things. I don’t get advice about anything other than public health. So I wanted to respond to that….
we should be humble about what we don’t know. And I think that falls under the fact that we don’t know everything about this virus, and we really better be very careful, particularly when it comes to children. Because the more and more we learn, we’re seeing things about what this virus can do that we didn’t see from the studies in China, or in Europe….
I think we better be careful if we are not cavalier in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects….
If you think that we have it completely under control, we don’t. I mean, if you look at the dynamics of the outbreak, we are seeing a diminution of hospitalizations and infections in some places such as in New York City, which has plateaued and started to come down, New Orleans. But in other parts of the country, we are seeing spikes. So when you look at the dynamics of new cases, even though some are coming down, the curve looks flat with some slight coming down. So I think we’re going in the right direction, but the right direction does not mean we have, by any means, total control of this outbreak….
it would seem that if you want to keep things like packing plants open, that you really got to provide the optimum degree of protection for the workers involved, the ability to allow them to go to work safely, and if and when individuals get infected to immediately be able to get them out and give her the proper care. So I would think when you’re calling upon people to perform essential services, you really have almost a moral responsibility to make sure they’re well taken care of and well-protected. And again, that’s not an official proclamation. That’s just me speaking as a physician and as a human being.
Dr. Anthony Fauci & CDC Director Senate Testimony Transcript May 12

This was President Trump’s response

Q   Dr. Fauci yesterday was a little cautious on reopening the economy too soon. Do you share his concerns?
THE PRESIDENT: About reopening what?
Q    Reopening the economy too soon, some states.
THE PRESIDENT: Look, he wants to play all sides of the equation. I think we’re going to have a tremendous fourth quarter, I think we’re going to have a transitional third quarter, and I think we’re going to have a phenomenal next year. I feel that we are going to have a country that’s ready to absolutely have one of its best years……
Q    Sir, when you say Dr. Fauci is playing both sides, are you suggesting that the advice he’s giving to you is different?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I was surprised — I was surprised by his answer, actually, because, you know, it’s just — to me, it’s not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools
May 13, 2020 Remarks by President Trump in a Meeting with Governor Polis of Colorado and Governor Burgum of North Dakota

And

And I just want to make something clear. It’s very important: Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back. And we’re starting the process. And in many cases, they don’t have vaccines, and a virus or a flu comes, and you fight through it. We haven’t seen anything like this in 100-and-some-odd years — 1917. But you fight through it. And people sometimes, I guess — we don’t know exactly yet, but it looks like they become immune, or at least for a short while, and maybe for life. But you fight through it….
And if we don’t, we’re going to be like so many other cases, where you had a problem come in, it’ll go away — at some point, it’ll go away. It may flare up, and it may not flare up. We’ll have to see what happens. But if it does flare up, we’re going to put out the fire, and we’ll put it out quickly and efficiently. We’ve learned a lot….
But again, you know, it’s not solely vaccine-based. Other things have never had a vaccine and they go away. So I don’t want people to think that this is all dependent on vaccine, but a vaccine would be a tremendous thing.
May 15: Remarks by President Trump on Vaccine Development

So I ask you which of these positions sounds more dogmatic and less open to unexpected consequences and feedback from the world?

The article continues…

“So if you’re going to find your way out and up to health and safety, you have to be prepared to grope, to stumble, to make your own light, and sometimes to move by feel or instinct through the dark.”

This apparently is similar to the WHO pronouncement on 15 April:

“In the first weeks of January WHO was very, very clear; we alerted the world on January 5th. Systems around the world, including in the US, began to activate their emergency management systems on January 6th and through the next number of weeks we’ve produced multiple updates to countries including briefing multiple governments, multiple scientists around the world on the developing situation – and that is what it was; a developing situation.
The virus was identified on January 7th, the sequence was shared, I think on 12th with the world.”
WHO COVID-19 virtual press conference – 15 April, 2020

When we are in a new situation, or facing a new challenge, we cannot say we know the best path for sure. However it is going beyond evidence to assert that past experience and knowledge of similar challenges is as useful as, or less useful than, ignorance and apparent incompetence. Or that experts and non-experts are showing equal levels of catastrophic failure.

So we might also try to be skeptical of skepticism that is so consistently directed.

Tags:coronavirus, Disinformation, pandemic, skepticism
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Planet of the Humans: some comments

May 1, 2020

This is a movie which is probably worth seeing, but while it makes some important points it is also so obviously out of date, it can’t be recommended completely.

Another reason for not recommending it is that it is blithely depressing. The film gives no way forward, other than the useless fantasy of population reduction…

So onto the Bad Things.

All the data on real renewable energy is at least six years out of date, some of it is 10 or more years out of date. One of his main sources, Ozzie Zehner, published his book on the subject in 2012 and, going by his website, has not published anything else since 2014. Anthropologist Nina Jablonski is a physical anthropologist interested in the development of skin colours or pigmentation, not an energy expert or a student of technology.

No decent solar panels nowadays will be 8% efficient, or decay in 10 years. If you get panels like that now you have been defrauded. The Cedar Street Solar Array he instances for these figures and for being able to power 10 homes, was apparently built in 2008. Not the most recent farm and far smaller than more recent solar farms owned by the same organisation, which can supposedly power far more homes.

It is true that Renewable Energy (RE) technology does not last forever, but neither do coal or nuclear energy stations. Machines break down, wear out and in the case of nuclear become dangerous. The question is about life cycle emissions.

A study in Nature Energy in 2017 found that over the lifetime of the technology, the carbon footprints of solar, wind, and nuclear power are about one-twentieth of those of coal and natural gas, even if CCS worked. Another study from 2014 argued that:

a wind turbine with a working life of 20 years will offer a net benefit within five to eight months of being brought online…. It is likely that even in a worst case scenario, lifetime energy requirements for each turbine will be subsumed by the first year of active use.

The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory concluded (in an ongoing study probably started in 2012?) from a study of many publications on emissions life cycles that “The central tendencies of all renewable technologies are between 400 and 1,000 g CO₂eq/kWh lower than their fossil-fueled counterparts without carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).”

So, all this is not recent, obscure, or pathbreaking research, its been out there for some while. The obvious point is that there is plenty of reason to replace coal and gas with Renewable Energy (RE) – and gas emissions are usually underestimated because fugitive (escaped) emissions often seem much higher than recognised – largely because gas pipe systems, especially in cities, are old and complicated and hard to police.

While I personally am uncomfortable with the ways that the grid works, it is usually the case that companies who are claiming to be 100% renewable buy renewable energy, but do not have it connect directly to their places of work. They buy the power from renewable sources, which put it into the grid where it gets mixed up with other energy and the companies get their power from the grid. In other words, this is simply the way it works. It is not hypocritical to pay for renewable energy and take the energy from the grid, as long as the renewable supplier, and the system, is working.

The film does not interview any people about contemporary renewables, their costs or their consumption of materials. Its a bit like saying “with 64K memory, personal computers will never let you do anything like write a book,” and refusing to talk to anyone in computing to find things have moved on.

Not surprisingly the film’s discussion of electric vehicles seems to be set at the launch of the General Motors Chevy Volt in 2010. It is now no longer made. Not a Tesla, or anything else, in sight.

Generally people seem to agree that Electric cars, even if powered by electricity provided by coal, are now less polluting (particularly in terms of particulates) than petrol cars when being driven, and over the life cycle. [1], [2], [3], [4]. Even the US Department of Energy seems to agree. And it could be argued that you have to start somewhere to get better. However, as many have suggested, it would probably be better to work on a radical revision of the transport system to remove the need for millions of cars and the road systems that ruin cities.

Mining is not just a bad problem when it involves renewables. Coal mining, fracking, and oil and gas drilling are all deeply problematic and destructive of land, but this is not mentioned, perhaps just to make renewables look worse – with speeded up film no less. Another problem is that over the last 30 years the amount of coal and oil being burned has massively increased – partly this is because it has been encouraged and subsidised by Governments all over the planet. It takes a lot to replace that increase. Again there is no exploration of this, just an attack on renewables.

Despite the implied claims of the film, there is no evidence solar panels create deserts, or “solar dead zones”. Indeed there are suggestions that the shade of panels might be useful for farm animals and for growing plants, etc and the place were he made this point is now apparently generating electricity again.

Recent renewable developments tend to have storage, so they don’t need coal generators on all the time. Storage is being improved and researched. We may not need batteries; the New South Wales government suggests that by 2040, NSW could get 89% of its local power from solar and wind, backed by pumped hydro storage. Others suggest there are “22,000 potential pumped hydro energy storage (PHES) sites across all states and territories of Australia.” And, apparently surprisingly, back up coal, or gas, generators do not produce anywhere near the amounts of pollution produced by fully active generators – a point left unmade.

While it is absolutely correct that we are not replacing dirty energy with really clean energy at anything like the rates we need to survive, it now seems fully possible for Australia to get up to 75% renewable, or more, by 2025 if we wanted to, without huge amounts of trauma, and even cost savings to ordinary consumers. Even in 2017 some people (Andrew Blakers, Bin Lu and Matthew Stocks) from the ANU argued that it would be cheaper to replace Australia’s entire aging coal generation with renewable energy, than to build new coal.

Without massive government support, coal is largely collapsing. In Australia, coal stations are aging and uneconomic to run. It is only the Coalition parties who are interested in building coal energy stations, and no power company will do this without subsidy.

There is nothing obviously inherent in renewables which is stopping them from replacing gas or coal. That largely seems to a matter of established convention, politics, financial support from States, and regulations which expect the system to have the characteristics of coal supply. Consequently, we probably need a change in the economic system, and its power relations, to do this. We certainly need a change in government, and a willingness to stand up to well funded fossil fuel companies and their scare campaigns, and to films like this. However, it is not surprising that to build a new energy system, that initially we have to use the old one.

One of the problems that remains undiscussed by the film, is that the more renewables we have, the less economic fossil fuels become, and the more subsidy or price hiking they need to survive. And the more likely they are to try and kill off renewables.

The percentage of energy which is currently generated by real renewables across the world is tiny, but increasing in many countries with considerable apparent success. For example, in the third quarter of 2019, the UK’s renewables generated more electricity than their coal, oil and gas plants combined. Researchers at Stanford say they were:

surprised by how many countries we found had sufficient resources to power themselves with 100 percent wind, water, and solar power….
The entire renewable energy footprint [. . .] is on order of 1.15 to 1.2 percent of the world’s land. … In the United States, if you just look at oil and gas, there are 1.7 million active oil and gas wells and 2.3 million inactive wells. Collectively they take up somewhere between one to two percent of the U.S. land area. And that’s not counting the refineries, the pipelines, or coal and nuclear infrastructure.

Another study suggests that Europe’s untapped wind energy potential amounts to approximately 52.5 terawatts, or about 1 million watts for every 16 European citizens.

We are learning from the forerunners in the transition. Again you have to start somewhere, and the first in line will be the clumsiest.

The film does not make any useful comparison of renewables with coal, just vague assertions that it is as bad as coal and oil for climate, which is frankly no longer true, if it ever was. The points could have been made that renewables will not save us by themselves, or that there is a lot of capital sunk into opposing energy transition. It also could have clearly stated that not doing renewables will not save us either; indeed staying with fossil fuels will speed the destruction.

Good points in the film

The film is absolutely right that bio-fuel, woodchip burning, or waste burning is not renewable or green. It is frequently counted as renewable as you might eventually regrow trees or whatever, but this is now clearly false. Most people advocating non-algal biofuels are not interested in solutions to the problems we have. Current biofuels are net greenhouse gas emitters, displace people from land, produce deforestation or lower agricultural production; they are a complete waste of time. Alligator fat is an obvious waste of money and research, which I guess is why it was mentioned….

Biofuels are a problem in Germany, and the UK has “become the largest importer of wood pellets in the world in just five years,” and it is using biofuels to claim growth in renewable energy. However, according to the US Energy Information Administration in 2019, biomass apparently provided about 1.4% of US electricity. This is just less than solar which provides 1.8% and wind which provides 7.3%. So there is too much biofuel in comparison. However, if you wanted to complain surely we should complain that gas still provides 38.4% and coal 23.5% of the electricity, and that no green energy challenges these fossil fuels which are leading the world to disaster?

Those green organisations which supported biofuel and woodchipping were mislead, or distracted. As the film shows, this was not a popular ‘solution’ with ordinary members, who rightly saw it as not green. The odd thing is that this section alone, implies that if the film is making the argument that the environmental movement has been bought out, then that argument is probably incorrect.

While Bill McKibben did once support biofuel, he has not supported it for quite a while – another example that the film is out of date. He was not interviewed for the film other than in passing, or asked to address the question properly or recently. This looks like character assassination.

The film obviously did not bother to investigate those green groups who do not think renewables are the complete answer. In the words of another review

They too wish to ignore the groundswell of radical resistance building all over the world against cancerous capitalism…. this failure played right into the hands of those who don’t give a damn about the planet.

They don’t even look at the Drawdown people. Why did they behave like this? This refusal leaves the film with nowhere constructive to go.

The film points out that businesses lie continually. Absolutely correct. You can make the best ideas in the world totally destructive and false if the profit motive and psychopathic billionaires run everything. They destroy places and then move on, as a matter of course.

As a consequence, this is not a film which gives much leeway for the righteous to self-praise, even if that is what they are trying to use the film to do. However, the critique of business and markets is so low key, and so unintegrated into the argument the right can ignore them completely, or just pretend that environmentalists are corrupt.

Elsewhere the film makers mention the contemporary extinction crisis, and make the obvious point that green tech will not bring them back. But they do not discuss this in the film. And the reason that the extinction crisis exists is not primarily because we are starting to use Renewables.

The main real point of the film is that it is impossible to continue as we are doing. This is undeniable.

The Film’s Proposed Solutions

Degrowth and shut down of economic expansion. The film does not present any way of achieving this, except to imply it requires some kind of change in our life and values. We probably need to try and reduce energy consumption. This is not easy, but it is well worth discussing, and an extra five minutes of the film on this could have been useful. These cutbacks will take planning and research, but even that is not advocated. As a footnote the much maligned Bill McKibben writes:

I’ve written books and given endless talks challenging the prevailing ideas about economic growth, and I’ve run campaigns designed entirely to cut consumption.

But they could not be bothered to discuss this. In reality, the film raises the issue in passing to quickly move on to the second fantasy option – and this is possibly how people manage to ignore the film’s main useful message: infinitely accelerating growth on a finite planet is just not possible.

The film moves into fantasy, and its fantasy solution is:

Lowering population. This gets more discussion than any other solution, which is not much. However, if population decrease is the answer, in the time we have left, who are you going to kill? Without such discussion the “solution” is just words that absolve us of action.

Given that people in Australia and the US consume more resources per head than most other countries, we should probably start culling there…. but I don’t see him volunteering. Neither will I.

Yes, if every Indian and Chinese person comes to consumes like the average Australian we are all dead. But we cannot expect them to stop heading that way, if we won’t stop. Why on earth should people outside our countries take all the burden?

So lets start learning to consume less and work less, to try and prevent culling from happening through climate and disease.

And remember that takes working at changing social relations as well…. We didn’t end up where we are because neoliberals were scared of social engineering, whatever they said to the contrary.

A film like this could have tried to help us deal with the crisis. But it doesn’t. Indeed it feeds apathy, retreat and a sense that the problem is all too much. This is why I think people are so upset by the film. We don’t expect this deadendness from Michael Moore.

So what do we need to do, when we face destruction? How do we act, if our best attempts so far are not working?

That’s probably a topic for another post.

However, a steadily increasing carbon price with the money raised distributed back to the population so they lose little income, is an obvious policy which would incentivise lower emissions and allow business planning. Carbon trading is not so good, as it subjects the price to the vagaries of the market and price fixing.

It is essential to stop:

Using fossil fuels
Emitting pollution of all kinds (gas, chemical, particulate etc)
Having unprocesseable wastes
Deforestation
Over fishing
Poisoning of water supplies
Denaturing land through bad agricultural practices
Destroying fertile land for housing

[Another venture in a helpful direction:

Zachary King: Unconventional Optimism: Lessons from Climate Change Scholars and Activists ]

Tags:coal, Disinformation, renewable energy
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Solving the Black Elephant? Part 1

April 19, 2020

In the previous article I explored “Black Elephants” which are what arises when the ‘Elephant in the Room’ is mated with a ‘Black Swan’, and a politics gets built around not acknowledging an oncoming problem as a problem.

When the Black Elephant, that people have been avoiding, arrives people will announce “no one could have expected this!” and it now may be too late to solve the problem anyway, so the consequences are worse than if it had been recognised earlier. This process of avoidance is tied into power dynamics and what is acceptable to the group. We could call this process ‘the social construction of ignorance’, as opposed to ‘the social construction of knowledge’.

Obvious examples of Black Elephants include most of the world’s ecological problems, which we hope are not going to be that big, and the possibility of pandemics, which we should have been prepared for. Similarly, that we going through one pandemic at the moment, does not mean we cannot have another at the same time, or that this one will not return.

Can we engage with Black Elephants?

The main problem is that a Black Elephant is not just an officially unrecognised problem, but a denied problem. Dominant people don’t want to talk about it. There is a tacit agreement not to talk about it. Its a bit of random chaos or not that important. There may even be penalties for trying to find out about it, or talking about it. You may get snubbed, or abused, by your groups if you mention it, and everyone will be relieved when the subject is dropped. No one has any acceptable model for dealing with it. Social organisation and its values could even be built around this denial, just as there are no servants in Jane Austen novels, although ‘everyone important’ depends upon them and their subservience. The Black Elephant maybe something most people know something about, but they probably do not know that much, as there is no incentive to find out about it. Some people may go out of their way to explain there is no Black Elephant, or it is not as bad as the evil idiots have made it out to be.

Given that it is a socially denied problem and there is social reinforcement of that denial, then openly recognising the problem is difficult, and so solving the problem is difficult. Any solution-process that does not recognise the fundamentally social nature of the problem, its denial and the difficulty of acknowledging the Black Elephant, is probably going to fail.

This means we have to study the rather undeveloped field of the sociology of ignorance (which is sometimes known as agnotology) .

Some pointers to the sociology of ignorance

Problems of hierarchy: such as:

Celine’s Law- (“good communication is only possible between equals”), in which people get punished for being bearers of bad news, or the high-ups cannot admit mistakes or vulnerability for fear of loss of face, status, power or wealth.
The Peter Principle in which people get promoted to their level of incompetence, and destroy competence around them and beneath them, partly because of
Dunning-Kruger effects, they don’t recognise competence when they see it, or do not want to be challenged.
Internal focus in which ‘managers’ get more status, power or wealth focusing on gathering internal rewards (office furniture, windows, golf games with important people, funding, more staff etc) than from focusing on external problems.
Deniability when the leaders are not be aware of the dirty, illegal or stupid tactics that underlings deploy, in order to carry out the leader’s instructions, or the underlings’ idea of the leader’s instructions.

Sometimes we can hear the argument that flatter hierarchies negate some of these problems, but that is not always the case.

The fewer the steps between the centre and the periphery, the more a hyper-dominant centre can overwhelm the periphery, and render it unable to adapt. The hyper-dominance may lessen ‘unofficial’ information flow still further – even if they can record every key stroke made the periphery. Flat organisations may only work in the long term, if the power differential, or inequality, between the levels is not that great.

Other Oganisational factors

Siloing in which different groups in the same organisation are walled off from each other, cannot talk to each other, replicate similar work, or are overridden as of minor importance when they are central.
Parkinson’s Law “work expands to fill the time available” or, as a corollary, managers make work for others to show that they are important and in control. This extra work then distracts the organisation’s members from dealing with problems of reality. They don’t have time.
Haga’s Law or organisation reduces anxiety and increases the ease of doing things, but there comes a point when the payoffs become less and the organising takes more and more energy for less and less results, which produces anxiety which leads to further organising, and less time for thinking or doing useful work, or recognising future problems.
Standardised Lack of Responsibility. Quite frequently organisations and high-ups have standardised ways of avoiding responsibility for their actions and policies. It may be a form of ‘distributed governance’, in which there is always someone else to blame, or channels of authority are not clear. Or it may be forms of attack – there are identifiable “bad people” who can be blamed for any events. Habitual ambiguity of instructions, or contradictory commands can be another form. This latter technique can also function to give those lower-down more freedom to act appropriately, and for the higher-up to take credit for whatever works, and condemn whatever doesn’t.
Information structures which hide information from various people.
Data is collected because it can be. The more data can be collected, the more time is wasted collecting it and analysing it in the hope it will be useful. If there is too much data, important events can get lost.
Disinformation society. In information society there is so much information that almost any argument can be justified in the short term. So without a real desire to explore the Black Elephant, the Elephant can be recognised and downplayed. For example, Bjorn Lomborg can always find some reputable organisation which says, or which produces figures which show, that climate change, while a problem, is not a serious or urgent problem. As a result, all the figures which show it is likely to be truly serious can be ignored. If people don’t want to find out that there is a problem. then they don’t ever have to look for those figures and see what Mr Lomborg is doing. Now he may be acting like this, because if he didn’t then there are groups of people who would not see climate change at all. And it is possibly better that they see it, and think about doing something useful, in other ways, than not to see it at all.
Knowledge and Status in ‘knowledge societies’, people are supposedly graded by knowledge and ability. Those higher up can be expected to know everything, and thus refuse to listen to those below, when those below may know things not known by those above. For higher-ups admitting they were wrong can be impossible as it appears to admit their position is not legitimate, yet everyone is wrong occasionally, and failure is one of the ways we learn.
Organisational roles, which make the Black Elephants someone else’s problem or indeed create particular Black Elephants by not having a recognised position to deal with those kinds of problems.

Problems of Language and Culture

Language

This is a complicated factor, and much has been written about it, but we can reasonably uncontroversially say that language draws attention to particular features of the world. Different languages may classify the world in different ways – they have different colour terms for example. Languages do not translate exactly because they have different world models. By directing attention to particular features of the world language directs attention away from other features. Thus the language you use may help create Black Elephants, through this direction or through its categories.

Organisations sometimes develop specialist languages and models for work, which again show parts of the world and hide or ignore others. An organisation, for example, might see things entirely in terms of good and evil, where good, means agrees with them, and evil means disagrees with them, and so they become unable to see the ‘evil’ (as classified by them) they do themselves. A language arises as a culture makes a world and deals with a world.

One of the problems with any example of language is that meaning depends on interpretation, and the context of the ‘sentences’, writing or utterance, helps influence their meaning for the interpreter, and this happens in many different ways. We can never guarantee that what we have written will be interpreted in the way we intended. This is why great poems or novels can never be exhausted, they are seen in different contexts by different interpreters. This is also why scientists tend to use mathematics, and frames of objectivity to limit context variability. Culture is one way of trying to give similar contexts, shared contexts with other people. But it is not the only way, and when used to interpret sentences from another culture, or subculture, can frequently be misleading. Violence can be deployed to reduce apparent misunderstanding. This just suppresses obvious variation.

If you write, or announce, a programme, expect that people will read what it differently, or sometimes with difficulty. Communication involves misunderstanding as much as understanding.

Culture

I’m only going to mention one factor here, common in the English speaking world, and that is the positive thinking ‘bundle’ (a collection of destructive reinforcing patterns).

Positive Thinking

Many contemporary people and organisations praise positive thinking. This can become a unofficial but compulsory positivity bundle. These positivity people may say that someone who finds problems is negative or unmotivated, or bad in some other way, and deserves to be silenced or let go. That events are sure to get better. We are marvelous and will deal with the Black Elephants easily when they become prominent enough to cause passing trouble. Problems are unreal and so on. Such an organisation is probably avoiding many Black Elephants. It is also probably good at spreading disinformation, because it only allows the information which suggests it is doing very well, and dismisses all criticism. People may again, be frightened of saying anything negative, or pointing out anything negative, as they think that will make the negative event happen, or that others will judge them as weak.

This positivity bundle is harmful. It is not the same as being able to recognise problems and not let them get you down; recognise that you can either solve them easily or with effort, take advantage of them, need to call in an expert to fix them, or need to evacuate now.

The Elephant Paradoxes

There are many other factors in the dynamics of ignorance, but we do seem to have a specific set of paradoxes about Black Elephants.

First Black Elephant Paradox. People who are doing the problem solving, particularly those people who are dominant or high status, have to want to explore and recognise the Black Elephants – and if we had that, we probably would not have the Black Elephants to begin with.

Second Black Elephant Paradox. The organisations tools of knowledge, like language, culture and technology, may direct attention away from the things the organisation needs to know about.

Third Black Elephant Paradox. Facing Black Elephants takes effort and risks disturbance. It may mean organisational change, which then occupies people’s attention so much, that they go back to ignoring the Black Elephants.

Fourth Black Elephant Paradox The problem space must be open, yet the more open the problem space is to recognising Black Elephants, the more unending the process, and the easier it is to avoid Black Elephants because of finding other more acceptable, easier to deal with, problems – especially such problems the organisation, or certain factions of the organisation, already acknowledge.

Fifth Black Elephant Paradox. To survive in one system, we may need to act in a certain way which threatens survival in another system. To see the threat to our survival in one system may create a threat to our survival in the other system. This paradox creates Black Elephants, as well as providing an incentive to ignore them.

Sixth Black Elephant Paradox.This is not really a paradox, but its close. The organisation may be so busy avoiding the big Black Elephant that they get eaten by termites. Avoiding a Black Elephant may lead to more immediate and recognisable threats being ignored as well. A Black Elephant can be sheltered by other Black Elephants.

With this in mind let us look at some potential ways of solving for Black Elephants. No guarantee is provided that these will work. This is a blog post.

Methods

One fundamental feature of dealing with Black Elephants is that there must be as much equity and open communication as possible, with no penalties for pointing to an unpopular problem. It must be possible to challenge the hierarchy. If this is not allowed then Black Elephants will not be faced.

Open communication is polite and non-threatening. People can say that communication which allows threatening-communication is real open communication, but the point of threats is shut people down. So this demonstrates another paradox: open communication involves restraints, but restraints can curtail communication.

Perhaps the inquiry can be conducted at a particular level in the organisation, in order to free the upper levels from potential inclusion. However the upper levels have to consider and take seriously the results of the inquiries, which is unusual. Every year some organisations find out that workers are unhappy with upper level management, and every year these results can be ignored, downplayed, or seen as purely political. Management has to be able to take criticism as important and meaningful feedback. This is difficult, even if open communication is promised. Criticism can also be political.

Seeking blocks

The first step is to find the blocks to Black Elephant recognition. We firstly have to assume there are Black Elephants. Without that assumption we probably will not find them.

This process involves a negative set of questions, such as: What the processes of ignorance and unconsciousness in our organisation? How can these processes be lessened, or undermined? What will be effective? We can look at some of the factors listed above to start with.

If a Black Elephant is suggested, what would it mean? If it means the organisation should not exist, this is a major block to its recognition. Very few people will destroy an organisation which gives them power, status, and income, to save the world from a Black Elephant. Some will, but that might not be enough.

If such an elephant appears then what can be done to keep recognition of the Elephant and transform the organisation without it expanding the elephant, or attempting to deny the elephant?

Is it possible to change the organisation but keep some of its focus and purpose? Say a fossil fuel company decides to become an energy company. How is this to be done? What relevant expertise and material capital do they already have? For instance an oil company might know how to build floating platforms which can be used for wind power. They may know how to transmit power, or oil, via undersea cables etc….

Blocks need to be made conscious, in order to progress.

Seeking destruction

Another fundamental question for exploration is – what kind of processes does our organisation engage in, which are destructive of its aims?

As a general heuristic, we could propose that: “Most forms of order, create disorder as unintended consequences of their modes of ordering.” If the blocks to perception and information are removed then we might be more able to see what these unintended consequences are and avoid them or deal with them.

If the organisation has a strong authoritarian hierarchy or a culture of fear (which leaders will probably not be able to recognise, or the culture of fear would not exist), it may be possible to ask people to put in anonymous submissions. It may also be useful to explain that destructive ordering is normal, and then appoint a group to explore what kinds of destructive ordering exist in the organisations relations to its ‘ecology’ (business, social, political, technological, religious, environmental, resources, educational etc). As we shall suggest in part two, exploring different contexts in which Black Elephants and self-undermining behaviour, can appear is vital to finding these problems.

An Official Elephant Hunter

Create a high-level semi-tenured position that looks for Black Elephants and informs the organisation as a whole. The only way of removing the person is if they don’t find any Elephants. They have a place in all high level deliberations. They have the ability to produce a ‘committee,’ ‘workshop’ or whatever, that considers the issue of the Elephant and how the organisation deals with it.

Problem. If the other high-ups still don’t want to see it, or do anything about it, they won’t. They can also try to undermine the Elephant hunter. But that is always the case. By being able to communicate with all levels of the organisation, it is possible independent ways of dealing with the problem will emerge anyway, or that the Black Elephant will slip into organisational conversation.

Consultants are supposed to be Black Elephant Hunters, but they are often aware that they have been brought in to recommend particular procedures for which those hiring them do not want to take full responsibility, or who want evidence to justify what they want to do. They are sensitive to the wishes of those who pay the bills. If they get a reputation as unsatisfactory with the dominant management of this organisation, then they may lose work elsewhere, as these managers have ties across organisations. This is why the Black Elephant hunter is semi-tenured.

Expand consciousness

This step is relatively innocuous and does not involve drugs. It simply means, once the blocks are uncovered, how do we expand organisational awareness? The Elephant Hunter is an overt method, but to some extent identification of, and removal of as many blocks as possible will help the identification of what the organisation does not recognise in general, what the organisation does not want to know, and what we personally benefit from (in the short term) by not knowing? (how do we help build the fictive world of the organisation?).

Let us describe a simple management technique which can be employed by any new manager, but is almost never applied. Walk the floor. Talk to the staff you are responsible for, but without being critical or surveilling them (Really!). Catch people doing what seem to be good things and complement them. When there is some level of trust, ask people what could be improved? What procedures do not work? What are the blocks to them doing their job? Take them seriously, check with others, do something about it. Talk with people. Remove the blocks to performance before you do massive change or restructuring. Things may almost be working now. Indeed they probably do work to some extent, or the organisation would have already collapsed completely. Then ask people what the major problems are, especially the problems the organisation does not deal with well. These may be harder to fix. They may be Black Elephants. Try not to get captured by a particular faction, because your underlings will recognise this and information will be tailored to this, or politicised.

The workers, the people on the ‘coal face’ or in the ‘interface’ between organisations or between organisations and those they serve, are much more likely to see some sets of problems than people in management, who are insulated from daily practice, but who attempt to structure that practise. This is both a form of consciousness expansion and Black Elephant detection.

This is long enough…. Part II later…

Tags:Disinformation, disorder
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The Black Elephant

April 17, 2020

This is largely just a collection of quotes:

The Black Elephant is an unholy union of two boardroom clichés: the Elephant in the Room, the thing which everyone knows is important, but no one will talk about; and the Black Swan, the hard-to-predict event which is outside the realm of normal expectations, but has enormous impact. The Black Elephant is an event which was quite foreseeable, which was in fact an Elephant in the Room, but which after it happens, everyone will try to pass off as a Black Swan.
A: D ougald Hine | Black Elephants and Skull Jackets | A Conversation with Vinay Gupta

“There are a herd of environmental black elephants gathering out there” — global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, mass extinction and massive fresh water pollution. “When they hit, we’ll claim they were black swans no one could have predicted, but, in fact, they are black elephants, very visible right now…. We’re just not dealing with them at the scale necessary. If they all stampede at once, watch out.”
B: N YT Herd of Stampeding Black Elephants

So to be clear: a black elephant is a known, or suspected, highly dangerous but not yet overtly current problem, which many people, especially powerful ones, do not want to see, or which they downplay hoping it is trivial, exaggerated, improbable or going to occur after it’s not their responsibility.

“In terms of sustainability, there are two questions. Sustain what? And then, can we sustain those things? Right now, more or less the whole of the debate focuses on whether we can sustain hyper-consumption – and the answer is no, of course not. Something is going to give: oil, climate,topsoil, some other factor we’re not even paying attention to. You can’t just burn the earth’s natural resources like a gasflare on an oil rig forever…. climate is just the first of a long list of things that can and eventually will go wrong.”
A:

These ecological, production and consumption problems make up a horde of black elephants, but powerful people appear to lose out if we do anything about them, and we are helped to be comfortable ourselves by ignoring them, or by pretending they are not looming. The powerful do not have to push us that hard to get us to pretend there is no problem or to act half-heartedly about all these problems.

“the power that financiers and corrupt politicians still hold in setting the limits on what we can and cannot destroy in nature — as opposed to the scientists and biologists — remains the bad news.”
B:

And again this is a black elephant. It is pretty obviously not sensible to have the world run by financiers or business, when what they finance destroys the land we are standing on.

Sometimes black elephants were possibly quite normal things or processes which have just grown up with us, and many people have not caught up to realise that the normal has become abnormal. Nearly everyone says, “oh Elephants are only 2 ft tall… and there is only one of them, and its really cute.”

Perhaps black elephants are created by human cognitive and social processes. One writer remarks that science is full of black elephants:

The scientific world is a sprawling and untidy place whose inhabitants practise their craft in myriad ways. Attempts are periodically made to bring order to this world by building model homes in it, so to speak, and declaring that what’s inside is what science is really like – all the activities outside being imperfect versions. That way, we can easily teach it and tell outsiders what it’s about.
Two such homes are particularly attention-grabbing. The first is orderly, its atmosphere logical, and its disputes calmly resolved by proposing theories and taking data. Experiments are good when they get the true result, wrong when they don’t. This house does not have normal people inside – the inhabitants are so exacting and rule-abiding that they live and act quite differently from the rest of us. Discoveries made inside this house are universal, reflecting truths about nature outside. This house was built by traditional philosophy of science.
Another house was erected in reaction to the first. Its inhabitants behave exactly as non-scientists do, motivated by the same social and psychological forces. Experiments are good when they get a result everyone accepts. What’s found in the room is not universal but local – arising from what’s happening in that room. Obtaining consensus about a result is a matter of swapping interests, like the work of diplomats. This home, built by “social constructivists”, has real people inside but no real nature.
The [models] differ in what they include and omit. The first, to oversimplify, gets rid of human beings, who disrupt the rationality inside the house. The second gets rid of nature, which would resist, define and frustrate the negotiations.
Physics World: Black Elephants

Either model diminishes ‘science’ by creating dangerous black elephants. The first by making science objective, inhuman, valueless or ‘unspiritual’ when we know it is human and made by humans and hence limited and slightly weird, and the second by disconnecting it from reality and making a matter of enforced consensus and desire, when we know the reactions of reality are vital to that consensus (or it cannot be called science) – and you will hear both positions taken by those attempting to discredit some science they don’t like….

Historically it has been quite difficult to speak of science as human and riddled with personal politics, and bias without appearing to discredit the ideals of science, its power, and relatively accurate truth. This inability now reinforces the arguments of those who would listen to nothing but their own short-term interests.

We also know that science is nearly always better when it is not played according to government or commercial policy. That is when people say “We would like this. Make it it so, for us.” Then you get a whole load of finance for projects like turning lead into gold, and pressure to push scientists to pronounce certainty when not enough research has been done, especially to get the product into consumption and make a profit.

This dynamic is another black elephant we hope our world can survive, when it comes to things like genetic modification, biotech and so on (which literally have a life and evolution of their own).

Science also sometimes generates black elephants in that there are non-solvable problems, weird occurrences, or theoretical incoherencies, which scientists ignore, in the hope that they are not significant problems, or that they will somehow turn out to be explicable by the current theory. And sometimes they realise things like an atom bomb could cause the world to ignite or that a hadron collider could produce black holes, but “hey let’s do it anyway!”

One writer points to the consequences of an obvious political Black Elephant that was pretty clearly present, but which it is probable hope got in the way of analysis…

Last year, many of us would have been astonished to learn that the Treasury in the United Kingdom had made no contingency plans for Brexit, despite the fact that the polls showed that the outcome of the referendum would be a close call. The British military – which I presume is like most armed forces and makes contingency plans at the drop of the hat – also reportedly did nothing.
The black elephant challenge for governments
Peter Ho

That author points to another “obvious problem”

governments often ignore the complexity of their operating environment. They typically deal with complexity as if it is amenable to simple and deterministic, even linear, policy prescriptions. In a sense, the crux of public policy has been to apply – if not impose – orderly solutions to the myriad of complex problems that afflict our societies, our politics and our lived everyday experiences, in largely vain attempts to make what is complex merely complicated.
We see this in legal systems that are based on uniform punishments for complex and varied crimes, in public health enterprises that treat patients as largely homogenous, and education systems and pedagogies that assume that all children develop uniformly, or ought to.

We also see the same problem in business, for a similar reason: standardisation makes things appear simple, and allows the illusion of command and control. For some reason people rarely seem to want to admit this problem in business. Perhaps business is now where we put the search for perfection? Anyhow, the idea that business (big business in particular) does not face similar problems to government, is another Black Elephant, and possibly an extremely dangerous one, given how much of government we hand over to business.

The author goes on to ask:

What can governments do to improve the way they manage complexity, and at the same time mitigate the effects of the various cognitive biases that afflict them?
We can start by accepting that complexity creates uncertainty. Prediction is not possible.The right approach is an orientation towards thinking about the future in a systematic way.

We have to be careful here, because we can use unpredictability to hide black elephants from ourselves and others. “The climate change elephant may not come, we cannot be certain about it, it might go away, we might find a technology that can chain it up, if it was a problem people would be doing something about it before us – if we act first then we will be taken advantage of… We can’t be sure, let’s just ignore it.”

Ultimately this author recommends scenario planning, but does not say why this should overcome the social bias of avoiding the elephant.

Just in case you think the idea of the Black Elephant is simple:

Black Elephants capture the postnormal dynamic of the Extended Present, and they are decidedly contextual and ought to be situated and/or articulated from more than one perspective, if only to capture the contradictions inherent to their emergence. Finally, Black Elephants indicate that PNL is present, and perhaps dominant, within a particular system.
https://postnormaltim.es/black-elephant

I have no idea what PNL is either.

You may remember the famous and quite common-sensical lines from Donald Rusmfeld

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Black elephants are those knowns and probables we don’t want to know, don’t want to acknowledge, don’t want to acknowledge as important, or don’t know we know, and which will effect us. Zizek has a nice essay on this going back to the Bush Jr. Admin and the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in which the army knew what was going on, and decided to ignore the reports. [I wonder if this elephant has almost been forgotten, nowadays?]

In the past several months, the International Committee of the Red Cross regularly bombarded the Pentagon with reports about the abuses [of Iraqis by US troops] in Iraqi military prisons, and the reports were systematically ignored….
To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture – say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard….
In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated case but part of a widespread practice….
What [Rumsfeld] forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know – which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.
If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.
What we get when we see the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life.
What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib

In this context, we might also think of this comment:

Republican Rep. Trey Hollingsworth asserted that, while he appreciated the science behind the [corona]virus’ spread, “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”
“It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils. It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils and we intend to move forward that direction. That is our responsibility and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.”
CNN 15 April: GOP congressman says letting more Americans die of coronavirus is lesser of two evils

In other words, he is making a rare acknowledgement that the American way of life, both requires and demands the early death of Americans.

Sartre had a point about this kind of unconsciousness, that we have to know what it is we don’t want to know, in order to ignore it – so we are writing of actively unknown knowns. Or things that are made ignorable matters of chaos when they are actually part of the order of everyday life and acknowledging them would somehow undermine that life, or its (moral) validity.

This is not ignorance but effort. The more upsetting the black elephant the more effort is put into ignoring it, and the less we will be prepared.

Perhaps all cognitive and social life requires us to create a social unconscious, which includes Black Elephants. Things that everyone knows are likely to become a problem, or generate problems, but which they believe would cause them problems were they to mention it. And besides the future is uncertain, perhaps the elephant will wander off, or prove to be a mouse in disguise. “Why should I upset my life for this? Nobody will thank me, and they might even hurt me.”

The other problem is that people tend to think that if it really was a problem then other people (especially people they respect) would be dealing with it. The fact that no one worthwhile is dealing with it, shows it is not a problem. And if everyone worthwhile thinks it is not a problem, then it probably isn’t – it’s certainly not my business. Again this formulation adds to the “Why should I upset my life by screaming about Black Elephants? Couldn’t I be deluded? And it looks tame now. Its not yet trampled anything important underfoot. Other people are not going to thank me, for going on about it”.

This is how a social unconscious is constructed, and it can become personal. Because if something is not acknowledged by people a person respects and desires to emulate, then they to have to suppress awareness of it, to emulate the admired ones. If you are lucky, you may never have your attention drawn to the black elephant, before it kills you. So you can relax – up until that moment.

Tags:complexity, depth psychology, Disinformation, disorder
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