George Rebane
The reader joining this dialogue thread in the middle may want to first read Evan Jones’ piece ‘Who Decides?’ on communicating climate change to the masses (published on Watts Up With That) to which I responded in ‘Who Indeed Decides?’ on Ruminations that drew a thoughtful reply from Evan Jones. This piece seeks to address the remaining open issues in a more comprehensible manner that extends the scope of the original guest post on Anthony Watts blog.
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What a wonderful and thorough response – thank you Evan! It appears that we may be in an even wider violent agreement than I had initially thought. I’d like to address more completely your very hopeful and uplifting ‘postcard pedagogy project’ (PPP) and start by wishing you every success. I hope that we can stay in touch enough so that I may see the fruits of this project and contribute to it in any way I can. In the following I will try to 1) lay out a basis for the difficulties that all communications to broad audiences have encountered, 2) connect these difficulties to the global warming debate, and 3) generalize the same to the greater problem of a sustaining a democratic republic in the 21st century.
It Was Hard to Communicate Complex Ideas, Now It’s Nigh Impossible
In my detours as a college professor and lecturer I have always preached the importance of having one’s knowledgebase in some structured form in order to allow easy access, have ‘natural places’ into which new bits of knowledge can quickly be inserted, and yield readily-constructed high level views of the resulting landscape from which new and interesting patterns/connections can be teased. (I use ‘knowledge’ in a formal sense summarized in ‘It’s ALL in the Algorithm’.)
My favorite analog has been to see a person’s knowledgebase as an archipelago with a large island surrounded by smaller islands. The landmasses represent collections of self-coherent knowledge which are firmly inter-connected by logic, reason, experience, …. The islands represent distinct knowledge sets which, while real and useful, cannot yet be connected to the main landmass and therefore have conditional legitimacy. Most religions are such islands. The knower’s job is always to build and widen causeways to these islands or abandon them from the archipelago. A more comfortable and continuous expansion of knowledge occurs by extending the shoreline of the main island.
Finally, the sum total of human knowledge can be viewed in the same manner where the shores are the sites of research, philosophizing, and development – places where people peer into the misty sea of the unknown. Those of us who have been blessed with playing on the beaches of human knowledge know the thrill of extending that shoreline, at first tentatively with some apprehension, and then rejoicing when it does not wash away and eventually solidifies to support further expansion.
Personally I also attempt to visualize (taxonomize?) my own knowledgebase in the form of a multiply connected graph where the strength of each added bit (and belief in its verity) grows by the number of direct connections I can make to other bits that are already there. And as needed, from such a graph I can readily abstract (graphical) trees and polytrees having layers of increasing detail such as you describe in your postcards. But enough of such philosophizing and generalizing – sensing a kindred spirit, I got carried away.
So, even though I will accept your postcard paradigm for educating the education-resistant throngs, I argue that there are some very natural limits to the utility of such or any other paradigm. In this arena of debate I reach for the teachings of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis corroborated by my own and my colleagues’ experience over the years. S-W teaches us that a person’s ability to think is limited by the languages in which he is conversant. Simply summarized, a person cannot even think thoughts that his language does not support. To illustrate, I am not capable of thinking about winter, snow, ice, and inclement weather in the manner and rich operational detail of the northernmost natives.
As perhaps the penultimate example of S-W, the ready expandability of mathematics as a language continues to propel the expansion of human knowledge in ever encompassing domains – chemistry, biology, genetics, neurology, … . However, those not or barely conversant in mathematics will have a hard time understanding ideas which find their seminal expression (and therefore understanding) in that language or, for that matter, in any language that does not have direct semantic maps into a person’s resident language(s).
Finally, it is extremely difficult to communicate ideas from such ‘strange language’ domains because the recipient has no mental place in which to store the new notion let alone build upon it. The people who claim to have made progress in such (relatively arcane) communications are almost always afterwards discovered to have included first teaching the elements of the new language in their extended effort. Along with S-W, I readily admit that if I can learn ‘its’ language, I can know ‘it’, and then be able to think (for me) brand new thoughts about ‘it’ and possibly even come up with new stuff. No single language known today can support all possible thoughts of which humans are capable.
On to Climate Change and Anthropogenic Global Warming
The climate change question is complex in more than one dimension. ‘Do you believe in GW (or AGW)?’ is today number one on the hit parade of widely asked dumb questions, this for the simple reason that a yes/no query about the topic is almost as nonsensical as a yes/no answer. One dimension of its complexity is that reasonable thought about AGW is a process that requires reasoning through a deeply nested series of sub-queries. Another dimension of complexity here is that even attempting to understand the sub-queries requires that the lay person stand still for learning some language elements of the systems sciences. With limited success, I have attempted to lay this out in a series of responses that started with this piece – ‘The Question of Anthropogenic Global Warming’, - and subsequently scaled via ‘Climate Change Revisited’ into the foggy highlands in this piece – 'Climate Change – A Format for Reasoned Dialogue’ where it now resides. For the latter effort I received kudos from respondents versed in the system sciences and deserved criticism from others. I am now in the process of expanding the initial exposition into a step-wise procedure that could perhaps be translated into your PPP approach or its historical analog of B.F. Skinner’s programmed learning. Not that such a sequential exposition hasn’t been tried already, but I have not seen this treatment of the AGW issue, so I thought to throw it into the frothy mix. I welcome your thoughts on this. In the interval, Fred Singer’s piece on the growing hysteria is a reasoned and accessible summary of what I seek to expand for the reader able to walk the extra mile to understand the shortcomings of that put forth by the battalion of IPCC Nobelists.
Popular Democracy, Quo Vadis?
Thomas Jefferson taught us that, ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’ Without much success we have been doing our best to disprove this since the mid-sixties. As recognized by everyone to the right of the die-hard socialists, our freedoms have contracted enormously and continue to do so abetted by accelerating technology that is now growing a workforce not suitable for jobs anywhere but in the corridors of state and state mandated institutions.
The climate change issue has today become the consummate test case to see if a democratic republic can survive when led by morally-malleable, poll-driven politicians seeking to gain or stay in office at all costs. Today it is clear that at least three-fourths of the electorate do not have a working understanding of the climate change issue and are simply emoting to stay socially acceptable in their circle. Even worse is that at least two out of five adults don’t have the capacity to understand AGW in order to cast a reasoned vote. And finally, the coup de grace for our system may be in that 19 out 20 adults cannot reliably identify the intended subject of a short paragraph that appears in the printed press. (cf. National Assessment of Adult Literacy) Unfortunately, about the same percentage is innumerate, so we must forego attempting to persuade through numbers, logic, and the graphical display of information. In my small way I have tried to raise awareness of the dangers of an innumerate electorate through local programs of lectures and a growing compendium of online 'Numeracy Nuggets'.
With these notions under our belt we can understand the devastating conclusion reached by Bryan Caplan in his recent essay, ‘The Myth of the Rational Voter’. For the better part of our republic its stability as a broadly franchised democracy has been based on the functioning of what is called the Miracle of Aggregation. This ‘miracle’ or principle says that the overwhelming fraction of voters do not base their vote on a reasoned consideration of the issues/candidates. Some because they won’t and others because they can’t. Instead they emote their vote in a fairly random fashion winding up contributing equally to both/all sides. This leaves the small residual of intelligent and reasoning voters to cast the ballots that seat the most worthy candidates and properly promote the issues. In short, this tiny cohort of, say, at most 5% of the electorate will preserve the republic time and again because they can tip the scale in the presence of the evenly divided masses.
Well, as Caplan documents from academic studies of the matter, these days are now gone. The soundbite masses no longer vote randomly but exhibit an overwhelming bias toward what they get over the media (cf. campaign financing) and, perhaps, being even more persuaded by the politicians that promise them manna from heaven – aka the redistribution of wealth via transfer payments. This strong voter asymmetry has been overwhelming the small reasoning minority and now carries the day. And one can see that as technology (abetted by globalization) marginalizes more and more of their labor, the urge to get their ‘fair share’ in order to maintain their standard of living becomes stronger with every passing election. The evidence for this pours forth in the daily pronouncements of the politicians and their media cohorts. I don’t want to take the space here to labor the obvious conclusion as to which ideologies and policies will prevail when starting in such a pluralistic democracy.
It seems the leaderships of all stripes now agree that in the short-term we can only avoid blood in the gutters by increasing the power of the state to control resources and the individual. And in a democracy this transition must be pulled off gradually and with the seemingly willing co-operation of the new serfs to be. The people must perceive a greater common threat – invasion from space, mindless war on mindless terror, civilization threatening climate change, … - for the defense of which they willingly lay down more and more of their freedoms. Capitalism is no savior here, because it no longer seems to have a strategic thrust of its own, but instead bows to the passing waves of demand (another ‘greedy’ solution) that issue from markets responding to a combination of mercurial consumer emotions and political distortions. No one knows what the real longer term solution is at these world population levels, but with the approaching Singularity, spending your (Second?) life in a cacoon (a la ‘Matrix’) may not be a bad alternative – that would sure as hell reduce your carbon footprint.
It is into the perfect storm of this social/economic/political blizzard that you will be casting your carefully composed postcards in order to halt the herd heading for the cliff. Nevertheless, take nothing that I have said to dissuade you from your proposed labors. Education is the only necessary component to a solution sufficient to present us with agreeable alternatives. In one way or another I have already joined you since I can offer no better counsel or smoother road into that future.
Wow! Very impressive. I've been gone for a couple of days, but I'm back now. I will drink all this in, slosh it around a bit, and be back on it, probably tomorrow.
Posted by: Evan Jones | 18 March 2008 at 09:22 PM