3 ms·

Impact of reading about climate science goes away almost instantly

anigbrowl 4y ago
Science is hard, most people are not that smart, and lies travel faster than truth - presumably because they have lower cognitive price tags for acceptance and retransmission. In my youth I held the naive belief that the discourse and decision-making in a networked society would be elevated toward its highest common factors; instead it seems to sink towards its lowest common denominator. Cognitive echo chambers are a huge part of this problem. not for particular views or attitudes, but for quality. It's fairly easy to cultivate and maintain a personal network of knowledgeable peers (on any topic) which then serves as a moat to protect the network from time/energy-wasting distractions. This doesn't mean there's uniformity of thought within the network; there could be deep and lasting disagreements, but they take place between relatively homogenous groups of experts and affiliates, whether of a scientific discipline, a profession, a fandom etc. This assortativity is a natural characteristic of social animals, but historically individuals' preferences had to be balanced with considerations of sustainability for the group as a whole. As the cost of locating and interacting with peers falls in a heavily networked society, it's easier to stay inside one's social moat than engage with declining conditions in the shared exterior. Those within the moat may be well aware of such conditions, but thanks to their relative homogeneity will find it easier to come to consensus (or a stable dissensus which oscillates between different points of view with relative predictability), and this internal communication process substitutes for the tedious and unpleasant business of engagement with non-peers. The upshot is widespread agreement that Something Should Be Done, but also that bad things are Someone Else's Fault, which is sort of true insofar as most networked peer groups don't exert any sort of significant influence over environmental quality, and thus don't feel incentivized to redirect their attention away from their distinctive specialty toward collaboration with other groups to an end where none of the groups have specific expertise. At the national level, the organs of governance only tend to activate the entire social body under conditions of extreme urgency, and the tighter the coupling between peers in a networked society the less urgent external problems appear; one could say that hyperconnectivity has an analgesic effect across the social body. The upshot of this is that trying to get change to come about by informing the public in hopes of creating a democratic consensus is a non-starter. Environmental problems are too big, amorphous, and temporally distant from most people for the emergence of a sufficiently broad consensus. Informing policy makers is somewhat better, but since political power is transferable and action comes with costs, power is likely to flow away from policymakers who advocate taking on higher costs and toward those who dispute the existence or priority of a looming problem. Scientists might do well to identify the largest systemic drivers of climate degradation and concentrate their efforts on identifying and disrupting those drivers' internal processes.

Science is hard, most people are not that smart, and lies travel faster than truth - presumably because they have lower cognitive price tags for acceptance and retransmission. In my youth I held the naive belief that the discourse and decision-making in a networked society would be elevated toward its highest common factors; instead it seems to sink towards its lowest common denominator. Cognitive echo chambers are a huge part of this problem. not for particular views or attitudes, but for quality. It's fairly easy to cultivate and maintain a personal network of knowledgeable peers (on any topic) which then serves as a moat to protect the network from time/energy-wasting distractions. This doesn't mean there's uniformity of thought within the network; there could be deep and lasting disagreements, but they take place between relatively homogenous groups of experts and affiliates, whether of a scientific discipline, a profession, a fandom etc. This assortativity is a natural characteristic of social animals, but historically individuals' preferences had to be balanced with considerations of sustainability for the group as a whole. As the cost of locating and interacting with peers falls in a heavily networked society, it's easier to stay inside one's social moat than engage with declining conditions in the shared exterior. Those within the moat may be well aware of such conditions, but thanks to their relative homogeneity will find it easier to come to consensus (or a stable dissensus which oscillates between different points of view with relative predictability), and this internal communication process substitutes for the tedious and unpleasant business of engagement with non-peers. The upshot is widespread agreement that Something Should Be Done, but also that bad things are Someone Else's Fault, which is sort of true insofar as most networked peer groups don't exert any sort of significant influence over environmental quality, and thus don't feel incentivized to redirect their attention away from their distinctive specialty toward collaboration with other groups to an end where none of the groups have specific expertise. At the national level, the organs of governance only tend to activate the entire social body under conditions of extreme urgency, and the tighter the coupling between peers in a networked society the less urgent external problems appear; one could say that hyperconnectivity has an analgesic effect across the social body. The upshot of this is that trying to get change to come about by informing the public in hopes of creating a democratic consensus is a non-starter. Environmental problems are too big, amorphous, and temporally distant from most people for the emergence of a sufficiently broad consensus. Informing policy makers is somewhat better, but since political power is transferable and action comes with costs, power is likely to flow away from policymakers who advocate taking on higher costs and toward those who dispute the existence or priority of a looming problem. Scientists might do well to identify the largest systemic drivers of climate degradation and concentrate their efforts on identifying and disrupting those drivers' internal processes.