I love reading about logical fallacies and bias. I don’t know why it matters to me, but I find the ins and outs of logic deeply entertaining. I am not the kind of person to point out to my boss, coworkers, wife, friends, etc, when they are being irrational and/or illogical (not the same thing). But I will point out when I “feel” someone is wrong, and make a case as to why, just like any other human being would. To know that there is a system of wiring in our heads that prevents fallacies and biases from being recognized when they are occurring makes the logic of many problems all the more entertaining in hindsight. Because at a base level, we are just animals.
Roaring at each other.
So there is a logic as to why we should not rule ourselves. We will ultimately fail. The short term gain is always sought over the long term, and the short term drivers for economics, society, and law generally overpower the what many consider the “right thing to do”. A perfect example is our economic debt. Another is the rampant corruption in most government systems around the world. Obviously, as a race of complex individuals in a complex system, we find ways to autocorrect the sway and pitch of our collective societies, but it usually involves mass amounts of bloodshed, and a significant amount of time, suffering, and discord. And human beings, God love us, are so short sighted, biased creatures, that we are truly effed in any effort that requires more than 3 people to accomplish (and sometimes 3 is too many).
We are creatures of the now, so we are ruled by the now. And if that means lining the rulers against a wall and executing them, most of the time the greater good (ie the masses) is ok with it. We have seen it over and over throughout history, and we continue to see it now. Such evolved beings we are. We still kill what we want to remove.
What we should be focused on long term strategies beyond any one of our limited lifetimes… because ultimately, we have finite resources on a finite planet with seemingly infinite chances for unlimited population growth. We are 7 billion strong, growing exponentially… and we all have to live on this rock… because you may not have noticed, but space hates us. It is dark and cold, and full of things that will kill us in seconds.
The best way to understand long term strategies is via statistics and probabilities. But again, it is cognitive bias that we all suffer from to prevents us from understanding the very basis of such an argument. Neglect of probability prevents us on the whole to understand how the past, the future, and the chances of an event occurring at any point along that path would effect us individually. Violent crime exists. It happens to a subset of people. They are murdered. Will this happen to you or me or someone else we know? Perhaps. Is the probability high enough to warrant that we take actions to protect ourselves? Not even close. I think I am more scared of being hit by car than I am of being shot. But people will still buy guns, still carry them, and probably end up shooting a loved one before they ever actually defend themselves from someone trying to hurt them. Now think about this: Our reaction to 9/11 is a similar event on a much greater scale. The US has spent 1.3 trillion on the wars stemming from our reaction to 9/11. The event itself was horrible. Yes, unbelievably tragic. Beyond words. But that works out to about 90 million dollars per life lost. Was it a reasonable response? And some more food for thought: the short term goals of the US back in the late 1970′s/early 1980′s is what created the Taliban. They used to be our ALLIES. Against the Russians. We armed them, trained them, and helped make the Afghanistan that we are still embroiled with today.
Will our grandchildren saddled with 1.3+ trillion dollars of debt still think it is worth it? We have hindsight on Afghanistan of 30 years… and we can see the results on CNN still. Can you imagine what will be said of all this in 100 years?
Again, I propose the response is the difference between long term vs short term thinking. What if we had taken that 1.3 trillion dollars and dumped it into Cancer research? (The equivalent of two hundred 9/11s a year, die from cancer.) What if we took that 1.3 trillion dollars and dumped into infrastructure (power, roads, civil projects) or directly into education and research? I know the military is an employer for thousands and thousands of Americans, but do we need to be soooo focused on Defense? These are obvious questions that have been asked countless times by countless others. Obviously, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
I know that most of us have thought about this time to time. I can be fairly certain that every single politician, committee, individual, thinktank, author, person etc has asked this very question to themselves. So if we have asked it, and discussed it, and been terrorized by pundits and the media about it, why has nothing changed? Why do we continue to let the short term dominate our minds?
Because we are animals, roaring at each other. Right now I am wondering when I should heat up my lunch. Rowr.
Why don’t we have a master system deciding this stuff for us? I know AI is pipe dream at this point. But it would sure be nice if we could find a method to abstract animal-selves away from our methods for ruling ourselves. In science fiction, you see this very trope all over the place. In some of my favorite books by Neal Asher, the human race is subsumed by a race of AIs that are self governing. The Polity is seen as the next step in human evolution, but realize that their governorship is the only way the human race will survive itself. The AIs take over in what is known as the Quiet War, with no lives lost, and the human race is better for it. (The books are all awesome, start with Gridlinked).
But my point is, there has to be a better way for governing our long term goals in this country, barring any usage of an AI. Imagine the ultimate presidential advisor… an open source program that takes all the inputs, studies, actuarial tables, probabilities, statistics that it can consume from government/private sources, leverage that with weights based on accuracies, and then output when something should start, continue, or end. Make it a transparent system. Such an undertaking would be monumental. But can you imagine the results?
Many authors have… and will continue to do so. It just a bummer that we will, as a society, continue to self manage so ineffectively, so inefficiently, that we will continue to blunder to our own eventual destruction. I would think this is the real problem driving the Tea Party and the 99%. Opposing sides on the same question. What do we do with our future? But since we are animals, it all devolves into incoherent noise, like a shouted slogan heard from blocks away. You know something is being said, but it is coming through as just a dull reverb on the windows.
I read a pair of articles about the future of the space program (here) and an elegy for the future of space exploration (here). Both are great reads about the very fact of our problem with long term goals… and about what our future “should” be. And both are really about our inability to see ourselves as we should see ourselves.
I really think that our society is suffering from a loss of hope about the future… we are mired in the now more so than ever. We really need to find the next thing that will propel us into the next age of being human. Because right now… we are stagnant. And we are so tied up in the now, that we are ruining it for our race in the long run. And again, how many countless times has others said this very thing?
We should have something audacious to be “American” about. Something huge. And that should help form and dictate policy. We are too busy arguing semantics that we can’t see what is about to happen. And yet, individually, we ALL SEE IT HAPPENING. That is the ultimate what-the-fuck question.
Just one more thought: Wouldn’t it have been cool if we had taken all the money spent on the drug war and put it into energy research? Think about the drug war… been on since the late 70′s/early 80′s (ie my whole life), and the gas crunch of the 70′s put energy at the forefront of the public mind, and yet has the drug war done anything great for our society? Nope. Will the war on terror do anything great for our society? Probably not.
Did the space race do anything great for our society? Unbelievably fucking yes.
So the obvious answer is…
