Posts Tagged ‘Disinformation’

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More Information Mess: “This is generally bad, but this is an exception – and the exceptions do not add up…..”

May 27, 2022

The issue:

Just something obvious I’ve noticed recently – which suspect others will have noticed before me

People seem to be using a formulation of a rule which seems designed to discredit the rule it is supposed to be protecting. The formulation is of the form: “X is terrible and should be stopped. But any particular incidence of X can always be dismissed or excused.” These supposedly excusable cases are then claimed to not reinforce the problem of X.

The Heard Depp Dispute

I first noticed this as a regular thing, in a discussion about the Heard Depp trial. I’m not that interested in this trial, but I have noticed that it seems to be caught in a massive propaganda war, and that the ‘reporting’ I’ve seen seems to be overtly trying to influence my opinion on the subject and promote particular agendas and emotional reactions in its audience. Reporting seems to coagulate around two poles

  • a) women are hysterical liars who try to frame men by accusing them of rape and cruelty, when really the problem was the woman. Believe the man, castigate the woman. This is the position I have come across most often.

OR

  • b) Men are inherently violent and untrustworthy and women are constantly in danger all the time. Believe the woman, castigate the man.

I suspect that the divisions are likely to be based on gender and on Democrat and Republican political allegiance. It is also not surprising given the apparent aims of some of the reporting, that Heard claims she has received a torrent of abuse and death threats. The reporting would often seem to be aiming for that level of anger and interaction – perhaps apolitically, just to get eyeballs for advertising as the phrase goes.

To get back to the subject. In this charged atmosphere, I met someone who appeared to argue that he was opposed to Heard because she was ruining #Metoo for other women.

[I am not alleging anything about this particular person, this is a social phenomenon, not necessarily anything to do with individuals or their intentions.]

Anyway, in this case, the proposition mentioned above, appears to go:

“#Metoo is right for pointing out that women get beaten and raped by men regularly and that they then have their protests and charges casually and demeaningly dismissed as falsehoods, hysteria or malevolence.

“However in this particular case Heard is clearly hysterically and malevolently claiming to have suffered from threats and violence, and so her claims should be dismissed.

“This quick dismissal does not reinforce the difficulties that women face in coming forward.”

Given this dismissal, the death threats etc, she has likely received, can be ignored. It appears likely to me that after seeing what Heard has been through, even if she is proven to have lied, other women will feel inhibited about coming forward. Why, if they have been assaulted, should they suffer twice from the violence of the attack, and the violence of the manipulated (?) audience?

I have no idea of Heard or Depp’s real motives of course, or the real events that each interprets differently, or why it is obvious she (or he) is lying. I do know that a British judge thought that “the great majority of alleged assaults” on Heard by Depp had been “proved to the civil standard”. But this is largely ignored. The argument that the person is defending #Metoo does not seem to be neutral or encouraging women to stand up to violence and intimidation, but discouraging it.

This discouragement may be the argument’s intention, but it would seem to be its function.

In using the argument, the person can claim to be virtuous and recognising that violence against women is bad, at the same time as encouraging people to dismiss claims of violence by any particular woman, especially against men they like.

BLM

This argument strikes me as similar to many US based arguments I’ve heard over Black Lives Matter, in this case the formulation appears to be:

“Of course it is bad that so many people get shot by police (avoiding the race issue). We should protest against this and stop it. But in this particular case (whatever it is) when a black person was shot in a confrontation with police they were: a known criminal (even if they were not making threats or engaged in violence); they could have been on drugs; they are unsavory; the police thought they went for a weapon; they were not obeying the police; they were running away in terror; they shouted at the cops threatening them; they acted surprised and guilty when the police knocked down their door by mistake, and so on.”

Again while the person can concede that police shooting people is supposed to be bad, in practice they say this black person deserved it, or it was a sad mistake. The formulation suggests that there is nothing to worry about really. With each particular murder a person excuses, they can still claim to they are virtuous and opposing police violence. In reality, the formulation excuses the police violence it is supposed to be against.

Climate Change

This is a slight variant. The Australian government admits that climate change is bad, and that emissions are bad – but in any particular case of mining fossil fuels, the emissions or burning that result should be ignored, because one case cannot make any difference and is beneficial for someone (usually the mining company). No matter how much the ‘single cases’ add up to produce harm that is supposedly recognised by the arguer, any single case is fine, which eventually means no case should be stopped. Again the person can claim to be virtuous and recognise climate change is a problem, while still doing everything they can to make it worse.

Conclusion

The point of the formulation is that it is a way, the person seeks to establish their moral credibility on the issue (violence against women, police shooting unarmed or unresisting people, or avoiding climate change), while actually excusing the crime they are supposed to be condemning.

A constant use of special cases, undermines getting rid of the evil we are supposed to be condemning, and yet there may be occasions in which the exception is real: the woman is lying or the police responded appropriately. This is the deadly paradox, and its certainly possible and needs to be factored into trials.

However, in climate the special exception is probably more rarely justifiable, because the cumulative bad is inevitable, no matter the virtue of any particular mine or power station.

If the formulation is common, then we can be reasonably sure that people are using it to reassert the established ways of dismissing and denying the problem, while pretending to virtue. Becoming aware of this standard formulation, may help us become aware of it, so we can try and escape it, or argue against it – and remain more neutral during the trial whatever politics gathers around it.

If we were to identify something as “virtue signaling” then this would be a fine candidate. It signals virtue to the audience while allowing the condition to continue, and using the person’s signaled virtue to excuse the crime in this case, and possibly in every case. The exception functions to break the rule completely.

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Brandolini’s Law

May 19, 2022

The original

Brandolini’s Law, or the “bullshit asymmetry” principle is a really neat summation of things that are well-known, but hard to express simply

the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Alberton Brandolini, twitter 11 Jan 2013

I’m going to slightly rephrase this as:

the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is much greater than needed to produce it.

Not as neat, and its not going to supersede Brandolini’s formulation, but its a bit clearer for those without a science background.

Brandolini’s law is implied in a lot of the material I’ve written on disinformation and the mess of information, but I now have a phrase that summarises the problem, and sets out areas for future research, much better than anything I’ve written.

It is much easier to invent ‘facts’ that appeal to people’s biases, fears and already accepted truths, than it is to make a reasonably accurate statement about reality. An explanation for why someone is wrong is often lengthy, and sometimes impossible.

As an example of impossibility, say for example someone asserts that the President of Agleroa engages in the slave trade of children, and uses his power to hide this.

No one can disprove this. A disproof can simply be another example of his power in action, or “fake news”. How can I show an absence of children being traded etc? To make a disproof requires vast amounts of energy. If for example the bullshitter had made a claim that the President had traded kids on a particular date, and I could find no evidence for that, it does not disprove all the dates that such trades could have occurred, and it might be argued that I could not find anything because I’m operating in bad faith or that the data is hidden beyond my capacities to find it. Even if I succeed in convincing one person that the President is not trading children then, if there is a group of people devoted to slandering the President of Agleroa who find it profitable to spread this accusation, it will still keep surfacing. People may even disbelieve me if I try and show Agleroa is not a real place.

In a similar case a real President was repeatedly said to be fighting organised pedophilia. There was no evidence for this, and it was similarly hard to disprove, because we were told he was working in secret. He apparently didn’t even talk about it, so as not to alarm pedophiles, and this silence could be taken as proof. Those who could be bothered to disprove it, were probably trying to defend pedophiles and therefore not trustworthy.

These situations are like disproving climate change denial.

If a person assumes nearly all climate scientists are lying or conspiring so as to harm them, then there can be no disproof. A person who tries to participate in the disproving by pointing out ‘facts’, is either part of the conspiracy, or a dupe repeating these scientist’s false information. How do you disprove the assertion that nearly all climate change scientists are lying, to a person who accepts that proposition as more probable than they are not lying?

This energy needed to maintain a “true position” means that what I’ve called “information groups” that filter out information rejected by the group, condemn those outsiders who disagree, and which propagate the misinformation the group lives by, and identifies with, become even more important.

Other Formulations

My earliest formulation of a similar position was what I called Gresham’s law of information “Bad information drives out good”. This is partly because bad information is plentiful [is easy to manufacture], but people may want to hoard and hide good information to give themselves an advantage, or it gets lost in the ether [Entropy]. But this is nowhere near as elegant, or as explanatory, as Brandolini’s Law.

Earlier formulations include this from Jonathan Swift:

Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…

Quote investigator: ‘A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes”

The obvious point here being that human energy use always involves time. Information takes time to discover and test, and it needs to be present at the time it is needed. Misinformation can have its intended effect, and by the time it is satisfactorily refuted, it is too late. Again we can see this with climate change denial claims in which it now seems too late to do anything effective about climate change, so let’s not bother.

Slightly later we have George Holmes:

Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question.

Holmes “Letters on Infidelity” Leter VIII p146-7

Holmes points out another problem, which is even more common in the information age, disinformation never dies. The disinformation can be reprised with ease, in perhaps a slightly different form if necessary. And, in the unlikely even that the person who revitalises the disinformation wants to find something more accurate, it will take them a lot longer to locate and read the refutation (assuming the refutation is good in the first place :). The short punchy lie is much easier to grasp than the lengthy refutation, at any time.

Conclusions

Brandolini’s Law is a succinct and explanatory formulation that has great relevance for modern information society.

There are two big questions it raises:

  1. Given the huge (and probably increasing) amounts of energy that it takes to maintain a shared sense of the universe in a large society and keep people well informed about reality and responsive to events in reality, is it inevitable that such societies will fragment into factions pushing their own truths and ignoring what is happening, until they collapse? [this is a bit like
  2. What can we do to lessen the law’s effects, so we can resurface from being buried under disinformation and misinformation?

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More on Climate Denial and Defence

April 24, 2022

This is to some extent a simplification, or recasting of this piece, reducing the main number of defenses to four.

1) Climate change is real but we only need to do one or two things to solve it

This is a standard position amongst the supposedly concerned.

  • We just need to put renewable energy in place.
  • We just need to curb population
  • We just need to follow the sustainable development goals

These points generally forget the massive, widespread and systemic, nature of the ecological decline we are facing, and the almost certain arrival of tipping points, such as methane release from those frozen ‘wastelands’ which are heating up and melting. The position minimises the problems and we may need to bother about all of these factors at once, and more. We cannot keep destroying ecologies through over-extraction, we cannot keep polluting and poisoning. We need to change the economic system which only flourishes through destruction and siphoning wealth up to a relatively small group of people – who probably think they can buy survival. Population will eventually become a problem if it does not plateau and decrease, but at the moment, the main problem is over-use of resources and destruction by the hyper-wealthy and powerful.

The crisis calls for almost a change of everything. Sure, this is difficult, and let us go one step at a time, as long as we take those steps. But just changing to renewables will not solve the problem. Culling population will not solve the problem (and how do we do this?). How do we attain the sustainable development goals, in the current system, without increasing use of energy and pollution?

2) Climate change is real but not that bad, we have no urgency to do anything. Everything is ok. We are already doing enough

This is the classic set of moves by those who don’t want to risk social change or disruption to the power and wealth arrangements. But ecological destruction and upheaval of the magnitude expected, will cause social change and social upheaval. The only way to preserve a destructive regime when the destruction bites back hard is through violence and enforced stability. This can only hold change back for a while until it becomes unavoidable for most people.

In this ‘relaxed’ set up, corporations who benefit from pollution simply lie about what they are doing to reassure people all is well. Carbon Capture and Storage is nowhere near being able to reduce emissions either significantly, or to zero, anywhere in the world. If they claim they are moving into renewables while actually increasing gas and coal production, they are not helping. If people are engaged in large amounts of destructive mining, deforestation or pollution, they are not helping, they are making the situation worse.

3) We can do nothing about Climate Change as it is natural. “The climate is always changing.”

The argument is that humans have done nothing to cause climate change and can do nothing to stop it. This is silly, humans have done lots to survive events they did not cause. They have not always given up immediately a ‘natural problem’ arises. Even if we did not know what human actions make climate change worse (pollution, greenhouse gases, ecological destruction) we could still start preparing for adaptation to the problem and surviving it, if this acknowledgment of Climate change was sincere. We could still ask: How are we going to deal with increased intense flooding, increased intense fires, increased intense storms, increased intense droughts, changes in weather generally, decrease of Ocean life, decrease in water supplies and dying rivers? etc… If we don’t act then many people will die and wars will be fought. The problem here is that the position surrenders to a fatalism which seems unnatural and overly defensive. The position is again from people who don’t want to do anything or recognise the problem.

4) Climate change is a complete falsehood

This is still relatively popular, with those embedded in the old system, who seem system change as fatal or massively uncertain. They are right. System change is fatal to the old system, and the results of conscious change are incredibly uncertain. However we are as certain as can be that ignoring the problem will not make it go away. It will just get worse and harder and more expensive and disruptive to deal with. We need to start acting now, even if we don’t completely know the effects of what we are doing.

Conclusion

The main obstacles to action are defensive political formations, not technology.

The system of destruction has grown up in a world of relative plenty, and we don’t know, for sure, how to get prosperity without it and this arouses fear.

The fact that society can grow around technology and particular forms of extraction and pollution, means the technology, extraction and pollution become ingrained into regulation and custom. Everything in the system tends to be geared to reinforce each other. Regulations assume centralised fossil fuel energy and need to be changed to support localised community energy, because they stop social change. This is not always visible until lots of people try to change and run into social, political and regulatory problems – which can discourage them if they don’t know what is happening.

Survival means:

  • Renewable energy
  • Electrification of most energy uses
  • Stopping new fossil fuel mines.
  • Reducing all pollution – even from renewable construction.
  • Reducing the damage of extraction in general.
  • New ways of large scale and small scale agriculture.
  • Conservation of fish stocks, and other natural bio-worlds.
  • Reducing the ecological footprint of populations.
  • Not exceeding the capacity of the planet to supply our lives.
  • Political change and experimental and exploratory policies.
  • Social and economic change, so destruction and pollution no longer look sensible.
  • Collapse of distant concern, so that pollution and destruction events which happen elsewhere, cannot be ignored.
  • Recognising, discovering and tending to planetary boundaries.

Non of this is impossible, and the main obstructions are political.

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The ecological death spiral

March 26, 2022

Wealth and power inequality, seem to be increasing all the time. Inequality in wealth equals inequality of power. Due to the power inequalities, wealthy people continue to get tax breaks in times of crisis, they get legislation which suits them, they get special privileges and subsidies. So the inequality of wealth keeps growing without limit, when we all need to pull together. This is one of the aims of neoliberalism. The other is to protect corporations from democracy. We can summarise this by saying, neoliberalism supports the proposition, that only big business and big profit is good. Nothing else counts.

It appears that through right wing parties and media ownership, the wealth elites are setting up oligarchies through out the world, and carrying out disinformation campaigns, to support their power and distract people from the real causes of inequality and crises in living.

Inequalities of wealth, in capitalism, also equal inequalities of pollution. The wealthy are responsible for most of the world’s pollution through their earning, ownerships and lifestyles. They get to freeload pollution and ecological destruction onto poorer areas. They drive ecological breakdown and its side-effect of climate change. Wealthy companies continue to manage to get taxpayer subsidies for new fossil fuel fields, destroying agricultural areas, while dispossessing and poisoning local people. In Australia, they get all this and most pay more or less no tax.

It is likely that eco-system tipping points have started, such as release of methane from beneath permafrost, rapid temperature rises at the poles, and bleaching death of major coral reefs. Should the tipping points become established, then there is no going back. Systems out of equilibriium and heading for new equilibrium, or chaotic states, are hard, if not impossible, to return to normal.

Inequalities of wealth also distribute inequalities of resilience and capacity to avoid, or deal with floods, bushfires, droughts, pandemics and pollution. Poorer people suffer more substantially and for longer from ecological disasters, and appear to get less governmental help.

Inequalities of wealth and power, also mean that potential solutions to problems are corrupted. Corporations do Renewable Energy installations, ignore the needs of locals, and do not even power local communities. They fence off, perhaps destroy and privatise lands, and create inequalities when they pay royalties and rents to some, but not to others. This prevents any social transformation, lowers hope, and lowers the legitimacy of Renewables.

The Covid pandemic is not over. Where I live, in NSW, Australia, there have been 1485 deaths from Covid this year (March), according to my arithmetic. This is more deaths than for the whole of Australia last year. However, there is no longer any interest in reporting the trends – hence my arithmetic. There is no interest in reducing the deaths through simple public health measures, even less interest in preventing long Covid amongst working people, and there seem to be no fear about what could happen with new variants which defeat vaccines. In Australia we are no longer requiring people to have Covid tests to enter the country, so the new variants will spread. The trend seems to be that most wealthy people can work from home, and avoid some dangers, while poorer people (including hospital doctors) take the risks. Furthermore pandemics will not end with Covid. The possibility is high that worse pandemics will be transferred around the world by aeroplane, as we destroy more forests, and viruses which normally affect small mammals cross species and escape into the wider world.

Its as if we have decided that if we cannot suicide through ecological destruction and climate change, we should suicide through avoidable public health failures, and ignoring what is happening.

Warfare is another present danger which could escalate. Putin is threatening nuclear war. this means all other nuclear systems will now be on stand by, and ready to go. I suspect Putin is the kind of person that should he feel he is losing or under threat will be happy to take others with him.

Climate change plus the disruption of gas and oil supplies caused by the war, while possibly helping energy transition (although giving others excuses to boost fossil fuel production) has already put food prices up. Ukraine is one of the world’s great sources of food, and it will take years to put back together, and climate change and biofuel production seems to be affecting food anyway. Increasing food prices will render poorer people even less resilient and capable of surviving eco-destruction.

All of these interactions generate an existential crisis for most people. This is a crisis of meaning and meaning making. People’s worlds are falling apart, yet they have no idea what is going wrong, or what to do about it. They do their best and still fall behind. They work endlessly to survive and get completely exhausted This makes them more vulnerable to misinformation and distraction and unable to resist their losses, so the situation is likely to get worse.

There seem to be few working negative feedback loops which could encourage stability, or a return to equilibrium – and those which might exist are being destroyed.

This means every day is essential….

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“Behavioural Realism: Neoliberal ‘Human Nature’ and Climate action

March 14, 2022

Steve Westlake on twitter points to an ideological hypothesis about human nature which is used to justify not doing anything about climate change. He calls it “behavioural realism” based on Mark Fisher’s idea of ‘Capitalist Realism.’ I’m not keen on this term, as it implies the idea about human behaviour, which it is criticising, is real. I’d prefer something like “neoliberal realism”, because putting the emphasis on the social part of the expression suggests that the problem is social and political rather than behavioural, but let’s stay with what we have, as it nicely clarifies and names an identifiable issue.

Westlake defines behavioural realism as:

the doctrine that people won’t change their behaviour to tackle the climate crisis, so existing activities must be swapped with low-carbon duplicates, eg. EVs, flying.

This ideology about human nature “props up power structures and protects high-emitters and elites” who don’t want to change, or whose profits, status or power, would be threatened by change; such as the fossil fuel industry or the standard automobile industry.

As seems clear: the major polluters are the wealth elites. So, if we were to be fair, then they should change first – which would also set a good example that people could follow. But neoliberalism’s view of human nature also assures us people are selfish, and thus the neoliberal elites seem unlikely to change.

Obviously the ideology works by suggesting that significant, profit affecting, behavioural change is impossible, and should not even be considered – “nobody wants to change”. What’s more by suggesting that change is unnatural and impossible, the ideology allows people in favour of change to be dismissed as “virtue signallers,” “politically correct” “wanting us all to live in caves,” “communists” or whatever the corporate establishment’s call for silence is dressed up as this month.

However, as another reader of the thread points out, almost all the behaviours which require massive pollution and energy usage are recent behaviours. They are not native to humanity, as such. Furthermore, continuing with the present day “behavioural realism” will eventually deliver a crisis that will disrupt that “realism”, because the climate will not allow it to happen, and will force behavioural change on all of us except, perhaps, for the real wealth elites who can stay safe.

Even ideas of change can be caught in this paradox, as sometimes the idea of change refers to behaving in a way which keeps contemporary life and social structure functioning for a bit longer.

Westlake remarks: “maybe [it] just needs pointing out when [the idea of change is] not really referring to actual change, or [is referring] to counterproductive change.”

I would say behavioural change not only requires a vision of something better to strive towards, but a change in social patterns and organisation, which requires civil disobedience and political participation.

So perhaps the first behavioural/conceptual change is to convince people they can and should participate in local politics to make things better, and then increase that participation to the national and world stage, however much the elites try and convince you that politics should be left to them as it is dirty and corrupt.

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Technologies and struggles over use

February 21, 2022

None of this is original.

There is a long standing argument, going back at least to the early 19th Century, that complicated technologies intrinsically distance, or alienate, people from the natural world. Rather than interacting with the world face to face, as it were, complicated tech separates us from reality. It does most of the thinking and interaction and transformative work. It is like the difference between swords and missiles. They are both designed to kill. One gives you responsibility and the presence of death and what it means, while the other distances you from the mass death you are causing.

To some extent I think this argument might be correct. For example, the idea of overlaying reality with virtual images, could be the absolute instance of separation from the real world and its dynamics. We could, in theory, choose only to see days without pollution, destruction, misery or poverty, and thus cease to recognise that these problems exist. We could choose to make the world more interesting in fantastic ways, to also distract us from the accumulation of real problems which might require political action, rather than heroic questing for virtual items.

However, there is another argument that the problem is not so much technologies themselves, or the development of new technologies, but that technologies can be used and designed for oppressive or alienating purposes. For instance, industrial technology, throughout the 20th Century and now was generally not used to boost the craft, creativity or involvement of the workers in production and work, but to deskill them, control them second by second, and render them as replaceable as possible so as to increase the profit and power of another class of people who owned the tech.

Similarly with the media. We have the capacity for a ‘democratic’ and mass participatory media, but we do not have this – we have billionaire owned and controlled huge media corporations which are primarily devoted towards gaining an audience for advertising and to promote the media owner’s power and influence. We have online ghettoization into conflicting ‘information groups’ which reinforce bias and unreality (of other people of course!), which is encouraged by the algorithms set up by facebook and twitter etc. Youtube shows just tend to reuse the mainstream politicised material and exaggerate the views of the audience they want to attract – also for subscriptions and advertising purposes.

This is quite natural. Systems of social power and organisation generally aim at perpetuating those systems of power and organisaton, or increasing the rigour and effectiveness of that power, so as to benefit the dominant groups, and technology can be designed to be one of the tools in that process.

However sometimes technology can have unintended effects which may undermine dominance, produce destruction or which can be exploited by those who have to use it. This may undermine power and organisation. Thus fossil fuel use while responsible for many societies success, is likely to produce the conditions for their failure. Computers and internet, allowed the boom of new companies and new business models which have disrupted the corporate sector, and allowed new groups to participate, but the technologies have become reintegrated into that sector, transforming it in some ways and extending its power in others.

In all of these senses, technology is often a site of political struggle between dominant and exploited or oppressed groups, to use the tech as either a mode of control or a mode of ‘humanisation’.

It is for example, possible to see a struggle in energy transition. To simplify. There are those who struggle to retain: the established modes of energy production; the value of the capital invested in that technology; and the social dominance, and market influence, control over that technology gives them. There are those who seek to replace the established powers with massive wind or solar farms which retain the centralised energy and power structures of the old system, and those who seek to use renewable energy to boost the social power, independence, resilience and control of local communities who share and distribute the energy generated.

At the moment, it is not clear who will win the energy technology struggle, but governments tend to side with the first two positions. This should change. People into community energy usually now realise that they don’t just face technical problems, but the political and organisational problems of possibly deliberate resistance.

Hence the importance of the recognition that the problem may not always be the technology but the way it is used, and the power relations embedded in it.

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Modes of Denial and Defense

January 30, 2022

People often indignantly say they do not deny climate change, but it sometimes seems they might as well.

There are a variety of ways of defending oneself and politics from the prospects of climate change.

  1. Climate change is unreal or is not happening.
  2. Climate change is unreal and it’s all just the result of a vast conspiracy of scientists from all over the world. This is somehow much more likely than that there is a conspiracy of fossil fuel companies, who would like us to continue fossil fuel burning. These two points are a little rarer than they used to be, and the people who used to take these positions now often take one of the following.
  3. Climate change is real, but its no big deal. People who think it might be a big deal, are to be dismissed as ‘alarmists’, ‘chicken littles’ etc.
  4. Climate change is real, but it’s not humanly generated and, as it’s not humanly generated, humans can do little about it. Clearly this denies the human cause of climate change, so it promotes continuing as normal, usually without even thinking about adaptation. Fossil Fuels Corporations and more fossil fuels are fine. This merges with…
  5. Climate change is real, but it happens all the time. While recognising the existence of climate change, the person defuses it, and implies that there is nothing special about this particular lot of Climate Change. This change is normal – even though it seems to be rapid and non-localised. Again the result is to protect the person and the social establishment from having to change, or even think about the problems. Climate change is something humans have faced locally before, but we haven’t experience as a planet for a long, long, while before recorded history.
  6. Climate change is real, but it is so economically costly to do anything about it, that we should not do anything about it. People need the forms of development we have developed over the last 120 years, and recognising the consequences of human action will keep people poor. Climate change is less threatening to our well being than the economy, which will destroy us if we change.
  7. Climate change is real, but the consequences of dealing with it are politically costly. Dealing with it might involve governments making requests of corporations, or imposing taxes on corporations, so we should do nothing, so as to avoid complete tyranny.
  8. Climate change could be real, or is real, but the models climatologists use are inherently implausible, so we will just use our common sense and abandon all these models and assert that everything will be ok. We will assert the world cannot change hugely, and ignorance is our great defense.
  9. Climate change is just one of many problems. So let’s do nothing about all of them.
  10. If climate change is real it will be fixed by the Free Market and magic. If people want to buy products that cause their death and the death of others, that is their fault, and they will evolve out.

I’m sure there are more, and I’ll add them when I remember them…

But real understandings of climate change make several points:

  1. Climate change is happening. It is happening quickly, and the speed of change seems to be increasing, as we go along. It gets more dangerous the longer we delay attempting to fix it.
  2. Climate change is caused by human industry producing greenhouse gases. Human production of greenhouse gasses usually comes from modes of energy consumption and production, agriculture, transport, building, mining for fossil fuels, leaks, deforestation and so on. We need to change the ways we do these things.
  3. Climate change already seems to be costly in terms of natural disasters, and the cost will likely increase.
  4. Climate change, along with other human activities, will increasingly disrupt the known patterns of the weather system, and disrupt necessary ecological processes for some while. This will almost certainly have detrimental effects on everyone’s lives and the international political process will likely become unstable.
  5. Surviving climate change involves curtailing greenhouse gas production, and adaptation to the changes in weather and ecology.
  6. How we decide to make, or not make, these changes will result in political struggles.

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Jordan Peterson: Poverty and climate change

January 29, 2022

There is a relationship between poverty and climate change. No question. However it might not be the one that Jordan Peterson is claiming.

The usual position is that poorer people are generally forced to live in areas nobody who can afford to get out of would live. Not always true, because poor areas can also be quite communal, supportive and looking out for each other – co-operation helps survival. The land they occupy tends to be less fertile or vulnerable to seizure if it suddenly proves useful as the laws are not written to protect or benefit them. They tend to be in areas subject to flood, subject to heat, subject to drought, subject to disease, subject to heavier pollution, poisoning and rubbish dumping. In the cliché, the rich live at the top of the hill and the poor get the sewerage run down – they literally get pissed on. Corporations come in, use up, or destroy, the land and move on, out of reach of recompense; their promises of local prosperity for the poor never being fulfilled.

The poor are vulnerable to climate change, generally because of the areas they live in. However, as I have said previously the ‘ecological footprint’ of poorer people tends to be small. The ecological footprint (or pollution and destruction total) of wealthier people tends to be huge. For example, the Center for Global Development states that the average Briton produces 200 times the climate emissions of the average Congolese person, the average people in the US producing 585 times as much. I’ve mentioned the idea of the ‘polluter elite‘ [1], as an essential part of capitalism, before.

So what is Jordan Peterson’s attitude towards this?

He argues that:

The fastest way to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically viable is to make poor people as rich as possible as fast as we possibly can… poor people [are] not resource-efficient. They use a lot of resources to produce very little outcome, so that’s a problem… when you’re insecure on a day-to-day basis, you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you’re not paying attention to the broader environment around you

Taft. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve. Gizmodo

This more or less contradicts the data which suggests that rich people use huge amounts of resources. Naturally if they use huge amounts of resources they may well (by some measures) produce a big outcome, but it may not be all that efficient, but wasteful – and its easily possible to assume that when resources are easy to obtain, and produce no immediate suffering to the person obtaining them, that this person will not care how much they expend and waste, and pay little attention to the environmental consequences of that use. It is wealthy societies which are destructive. The logic works both ways, but let use assume that Peterson is right and people should be wealthier and this will produce green behaviour.

Peterson apparently says something to the effect that “Everything pollutes something – net-zero is nonsense“. This may be true (indeed I’ve argued that the mode of pollution is as socially important as the mode of production), but only a very wealthy person could assume that any amount of pollution somewhere else is ok.

My source is not clear on how Peterson wants to make people rich – indeed one source suggests Peterson criticises Corporate capitalism implying that companies “thrive at the disadvantage of the worker“. So he gives little hint of what we should do, as I presume he will not discuss the benefits of socialism or the mixed economy. My guess is that he is inconsistent and follows neoliberalism and handing everything over to the corporate market – this suspicion is boosted as he apparently argues that deregulation doesn’t create ecological disaster and that fracking is great. The problem here is that while we want to help people become as prosperous as possible, we don’t want everyone to have a huge ecological footprint. If the average Chinese or Congolese person gets to have the same ecological footprint as the average Australian does now, we are stuffed. We need prosperity with a smaller footprint. That means we need to learn to reduce Australia’s ecological footprint (or whatever your country’s footprint is, etc.). And we need to stop profiting from encouraging other countries to increase their footprints by buying our fossil fuels. We need to be able to generate wealth without pollution and destruction – partly because the costs of pollution and climate change are already high [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. This again points to the difference between ‘wealth’ and ‘illth‘.

As poor people usually survive with a very low ecological footprint, they are often amazingly resource efficient, whatever Peterson says. This is one reason we send our garbage overseas. People reuse it. They extract minerals and valuable materials from it. They are generally not that wasteful. I’ve talked to people from some developing countries and they have been amazed at what Australians habitually throw out. You can’t afford to be wasteful if you are poor. Everything counts. That is certainly how my parents were brought up. They were not endlessly disposing of stuff – they reused, they repaired and so on. I would guess this could be true of Jordan Peterson’s parents as well. Thrift is usually considered a virtue, but modern machinery is often quite difficult and expensive to repair by design – hence the idea of a right to repair [9], [10], [11], and the request for biodegradable plastics and other materials.

Peterson continues:

You can’t even really worry about your children’s future in some real sense because ‘No, no, you don’t understand. Lunch is the future. We don’t have lunch, we’re hungry and that goes on for like a month we’re dead.’ That’s the future.

Taft. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve. Gizmodo

Yes extreme poverty may not be good for future thinking, but then you need to ask what causes this kind of poverty, and it is often brought about by other people getting extremely rich; taking the land or forest the poor people have occupied and looked after for centuries, displacing them into cities (or other places where they have no land they know) where they cannot grow anything or look after themselves easily. Or perhaps poorer people suffered from taking perfectly legal loans which turned out to have unpayable interest rates, and they fled or a parental member of the family suicided for shame. Or they were forced into buying GM seeds which were infertile, or the water dried up because it was used for local industry or industrial farming, or climate change…. Riches and illth creation can involve destruction for some.

The problem here, apart from the likelihood that all this will get worse with continuing climate change, is differential of power. And again there is going to be little difference if getting people prosperous does not weaken the power differential and the force of unequal law.

What Peterson says is true:

The attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable — that comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere.

but this is usually prevented by the hierarchies that exist and seek for profit rather than sustainability. Corporations may have no tie to the land, and no care for it, at all. They are only a temporary resident exploiting resources, not planning to maintain things ecologically for all.

Now Peterson tries to get political saying:

“left-wing types” seem “willing to sacrifice the poor to their Utopian [visions]” by pushing green energy resources to make the world more sustainable.

Well that may be true, if you have seen the damage that massive coal mines, or fracking can do to the land to provide old unsustainable energy. The IEA has said since 2020 that

Solar PV and onshore wind are already the cheapest ways of adding new electricity-generating plants in most countries today….

Solar projects now offer some of the lowest-cost electricity in history.

IEA. Renewables 2020: Analysis and forecast to 2025. p12-13

Renewables are consistently cheaper than new coal or gas based electricity. Renewables not only have the potential to be cheaper, but they are modular – they can easily be expanded when locals have more money. Villagers can become self-reliant on renewables and control it. It may be awkward but is often better than what they have now. They don’t have to wait for power cables to be built to their village from some distant source, or serviced, and they don’t have to pay for the capital expense of that wiring. Once renewables are paid for, they are paid for, ongoing costs are minor.

Peterson develops his incorrect argument that renewable energy is more expensive, by saying:

What happens is that in any system that’s hierarchical—and left wingers know this because it drives their whole philosophy — when you stress the system, the disproportionate amount of that stress falls on the people who are in the lower rungs because they’re barely hanging on anyways.

This is true of hierarchies in general. The weird thing is that previously we have seen Peterson defending right wing established hierarchies and refusing to admit there was any problem at all. So he here may be changing his whole political opinion. Perhaps he objects to hierarchies he does not like and which may not exist, or perhaps he is opportunistic. This is why you need a whole transcript. Anyway, in this case, we might all be able to agree we should scrap the hierarchies, including the capitalist hierarchies, and hand choice back to the poor.

He continues:

There is the old saying, ‘When the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.’ So fine, increase energy costs. Well, what happens? A bunch of poor people fall off the map and the more you increase the energy cost, the more that happens.

True again, so you want cheap locally controlled and owned energy, which will have to be renewable. You don’t get cheap locally supplied fossil fuel energy, which does not harm the land. To support the poor, you want to scrap fossil fuel mines that displace people, you want people not to be forced away from the land that supports them, and that they know how to look after. Let’s get rid of extreme poverty without increasing ecological footprints – and lets try and reduce our own footprint as much as possible. That way we will be providing an example, and investing in ways of doing things that are less destructive, so the innovation will occur and spread.

Neoliberalism is not the only way forward, indeed it is a method to make things worse.

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Jordan Peterson, Climate and Complexity

January 27, 2022

This blog is written at a disadvantage, because I don’t have a full, or even a partially full transcript of the extremely long discussion between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. I’m relying on media articles which may be inaccurate or deficient. As soon as I can listen to enough or get a full transcript then I will update.

The main point of this blog is that Peterson is correct in some ways, but he is trivially correct and does not apply his criticisms to everyone, including himself. He also understands some aspects of complex systems, but does not understand enough… neither do I, but that is a different issue.

Complexity 1: Models are complex and probably inadequate for exact prediction

Peterson claims that climate is so complex, it can’t be accurately modelled.

This is partially true. The distinction I have emphasised repeatedly is that we can often model trends, but we cannot predict particular events accurately in the future. This seems to be correct. Saying we cannot model everything with 100% accuracy is not the same as saying we cannot model anything, including trends, for climate at all.

As Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler and senior adviser at Nasa, says:

Peterson has managed to absorb the first part of George Box’s famous dictum that ‘all models are wrong’ but appears to have not worked out the second part ‘but some are useful’

Readfern ‘Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models. The Guardian, 27 January 2022

Peterson apparently continues:

Another problem that bedevils climate modelling, too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically. And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model is in error.

And that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.

Readfern ‘Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models. The Guardian, 27 January 2022

Another account says he said that errors “compound over time,” which means, apparently, the models are “all errors.” He argues that trying to predict what’s going to happen with the climate, is like trying to “predict how your life goes.”

Let’s be clear, that if you delete our ability to predict trends, then climate is unpredictable, just like your life. However, the fact that your life is unpredictable in specific, does not mean that you cannot predict useful things about your life, and plan to build a better life. Indeed Peterson writes books about this, so we can presume he believes this is possible.

If you spend your life shopping online rather than doing your work, you will not get better at work. If you keep moving from one article to another you probably won’t retain that much. If you eat too many foods full of sugar, all the time, you will probably put on weight. If you take cocaine frequently it will not help your health or your thinking. If you repeatedly step in front of speeding cars you will probably be injured. If you keep your room tidy you might eventually gain a tidier mind. These things may not happen with everyone, but we can see the trends and make predictions based on those trends. That is the basis of his psychological advice, and it is true with climate as well.

However, Peterson does not transfer his insights about human life into climate, or his insights into climate modelling into his own modelling.

Thus he does not say climate change is real, and we know what bad habits it is based upon and we can correct those habits. He does not say we don’t know exactly what speed climate change will come, or how bad it will be in 20 years, but it will probably be bad, and its worth trying to avoid.

He appears to assume that because climate modelling is not 100% accurate, the climate will stay stable, or not change too much. What is his modelling for that? Why should we assume that his modelling, which seems to be based on hope and the assumption that the future will match the past, is more accurate than the climate scientists models? I don’t know, and I suspect neither does he.

He is banking a lot on his ‘common sense,’ and his untested models, being accurate – which they won’t be as they face all the problems the scientists models face, and they are not being improved, or compared to the fullest data sets we have. His models are not even being compared to the results that say the hottest years and days ever recorded tend to accumulate in the last 20 or so years.

Errors can compound over time Peterson is correct. This is why scientists repeatedly reconfigure and improve their models, so that past data is better ‘predicted’ in retrospect and future data is more expected, and models checked when data isn’t as expected. If we were still using the climate models from the 1970s then they might be wrong, although some were pretty accurate. I quote the abstract of one article:

Models are compared to observations based on both the change in [global mean surface temperature] GMST over time and the change in GMST over the change in external forcing. The latter approach accounts for mismatches in model forcings, a potential source of error in model projections independent of the accuracy of model physics. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.

Zeke Hausfather,Henri F. Drake,Tristan Abbott,Gavin A. Schmidt Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections. Geophysical Research Letters 47(1) e2019GL085378

Scientific models are being tested and improved, and made more complex, all the time.

Likewise, he should know that bad habits, such as continually polluting and destroying ecologies in search of bigger profits will probably not build better ecologies in the long term, that this destruction will almost certainly weaken human society, and that these habits will likely weaken human virtue and morality, and possibly personal functionality.

So Peterson is not consistent. He varies his implicit arguments when it suits his desire to support the status quo.

Complexity 2: Categories overlap

Peterson apparently claims that climate and environment do not exist, because they mean ‘everything’.

Peterson gets confused because he likes sharp distinct categories, and the world is not always like that. Human categories are not always 100% accurate and, in reality, systems often overlap with each other.

PETERSON: Well, that’s because there’s no such thing as climate. Right? “Climate” and “everything” are the same word, and that’s what bothers me about the climate change types. It’s like, this is something that bothers me about it, technically. It’s like, climate is about everything. Okay. But your models aren’t based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you’ve reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation, if it’s about everything? That’s not just a criticism, that’s like, if it’s about everything, your models aren’t right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything.

ROGAN: What do you mean by everything?

PETERSON: That’s what people who talk about the climate apocalypse claim, in some sense. We have to change everything! It’s like, everything, eh? The same with the word environment. That word means so much that it doesn’t mean anything. … What’s the difference between the environment and everything? There’s no difference….

Bachman Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson give their definition of Black and say “there’s no such thing as climate.” Salon, 26 January 2022

Let us be clear, a statement that implies the ideas of ‘climate’ connect to everything and the ideas of ‘environment’ connect to everything, is correct. However, none of his conclusions from this recognition are accurate, because he does not like that recognition, or shies away from it.

In reality, almost everything connects to everything. Jordon Peterson would not be online without the internet which involves the research of heaps of engineers and scientists, and continues because of maintenance people, and businesses, and people who build computers and cables, and the farmers who provide food for them, and the builders who provide buildings for them and their equipment, and the people who build roads the trucks can drive down, and drill the oil or build the electric engines. That all depends on the geological history of the planet, climate conditions and the weather that results, and that depends on the earth’s spin, densities of greenhouse gases, and cloud formations which depend on the sun and other things. The oxygen he breathes and the food he eats, depends on complex bio-systems and ecologies. His fame depends on a particular political patterning, which interacts with modes of celebrity and sales promotion and so on and so on. He presumably has learnt from books, and from other people. He shares an existing language with others. No one, and nothing, is an island of themselves. Everything depends on everything. It should be no surprise that from one point of view climate and environment involves everything. They are large scale contexts, and their background also forms a context – they are in two way interaction. For example, climate affects economic life, and economic life affects climate. Jordon may affect political life, and political life may affect his thought and popularity.

Models for anything are, as he states, based on a finite number of variables. They have to be. This is true of any understanding.

Absolutely accurate and all encompassing statements which are not definitional or trivial, are difficult and rare.

The intellectual models and understandings he promotes, by the same reasoning, are also incomplete. Does this mean they are worthless? Apparently not. They are apparently worth more than climate science. His skepticism is directed at statements he does not like, and is not directed to the statements he does like.

This also leads him to exaggeration. Most people don’t think we have to change everything to avoid ‘climate apocalypse’. Most people would insist that we need to stop changing the environment and the global ecology for one. Let us be clear these people may be wrong, but there is no evidence that people wanting to change everything are in the majority on the green side of politics. He is just panicking, because he appears to want nothing to change – and many things will change because of climate and ecological damage.

Conclusion to the first part

So. Peterson makes some valid statements, and uses them to come to invalid conclusions, probably brought about by his biases in favour of the current systems and its power domains.

Just in passing, Rogan appears to make a big fuss about how he wants to hear both sides. Climate denialism is pretty much the mainstream, as shown by lack of accurate reporting, lack of Government action and continuing support for fossil fuel companies. Has he ever had a climate scientist on his Show? Or is he part of the mainstream censorship apparatus?

The next blog will treat of Peterson’s reported comments on poverty, hierarchy and climate.

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Media messaging and information mess

January 3, 2022

I’m more or less copying this from a blog by Tom Murphy – Do the Math; the section called “Brainwashing Perfected.”

He is describing the “clever and effective” way that right-wing media outlets appear to manipulate their audience. They hammer the messages:

  1. The condescending elitists on the other side think you’re dumb. That they say you are dumb proves they are elitists who don’t live in the real world.
  2. [We all know these elitists who think you are stupid, are conspiring against you for their own elitist advantage. You are being held down and your real concerns dismissed.]
  3. However you are smart. You get through life. You know what’s what. We know that you’re smart and we trust that intelligence.
  4. We can trust you to understand the following insight ‘X’. The the elitists will dismiss and label this insight as stupid, or a lie, or as being conspiracy theory. However, being smart you will know it (in your bones, in your gut) to be true, because you understand how bad these people are. And it makes sense.
  5. [You know the intellectual elites hiding things by saying that what we are telling you is wrong, so it must be right to point out they are conspiring to deceive you].
  6. Only we can be trusted to be bold enough to tell you the real truth. Everyone else will deceive you deliberately. Don’t bother even looking at the pack of lies in “lamestream” media outlets, and warn your friends not to look either. These media are all oddly and independently consistent with each other, because they are conspiring to deceive you and leave you helpless against their conspiracy to strip you of rights and work.

The audience feels belonging, validation, purpose, and smart; they have the secret real knowledge that the morons on the other side do not have, or willfully ignore. 

Addenda

This works because of a prior creation of a sharp distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. That helps people to not ask the obvious question of whether the elite on their own side is conspiring against them.

Creating the distinction is easy if you can get at least one side to spit on the other and abuse it continually. That will then eventually cause the other side to behave similarly. This causes continual tension and the two sides cannot talk to each other, and the division becomes even stronger.

If someone is made into a good exemplar of ‘us’ then they are trustworthy, or you can believe them. If someone can be made into an exemplar of ‘them’, then they are untrustworthy liars…. You don’t have to listen or understand – you can accept.

They must be evil, mislead and lying. They have nothing that is worth hearing.

If they think something that contradicts what we say and feel, they must be wrong, by virtue of that disagreement.

However, it is true there are lots of people on the left, who do spend a lot of time accusing the opposition of being deluded, stupid, redneck, idiotic, etc. This is simply falling into the right media’s trap 🙂

However difficult it might be to face abuse with politeness, being polite costs nothing, and might help break down the barriers, and get real conversations starting.

As I have said before, people on the right may be completely correct about their feeling that living standards have declined, that jobs are precarious, that futures are constrained, that government ignores them, that some billionaires are suppressing them or profiteering from them, that their culture is dismissed and threatened by others. They may be wrong about the causes, and those they support may be committed to making everything they fear worse…. but that is a different matter.

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