Two things happened in the last few weeks that even the most tin foil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist will find hard to link.
Elon Musk caused an alien invasion panic after launching 60 mini satellites to give us better access to porn. Sorry, I mean the internet. And I finished reading Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
Kahneman's book is not new, and elements have been well covered elsewhere; various pop science documentaries spring to mind. But, even so, you really should read it if you haven't already. It covers a great deal of ground in breadth and depth, and shouldn't be mistaken for a Malcolm Gladwell-style thinking person's beach read. It's denser than that, and a modicum drier as a result. Which makes it sound overbaked Dundee cake. Without marzipan and icing. Or a plastic reindeer on top.
But it isn't like that at all. Think more of a quality bakewell, or a cheesecake, but not one of those foamy ones. A real cheesecake, with some density to it. Raspberries. Maybe clotted cream on the side.
I may have wandered off topic. Sorry.
One of Kahneman's opening plays is the idea of your brain having a System 1 and a System 2. These aren't separate parallel processing units, like the petrol and electric motors in a hybrid car; this is your brain employing two separate strategies simultaneously on the same wetware.
(His book also covers loss aversion, which tallies with what I was stumbling towards in my proposal for an anti-bezzle, but enough of that).
Don't think these are options at your disposal; they're not. You can't help triggering System 1, it's innate; whereas System 2 is the 'If you think about it' bit of your brain. And you need both. System 1 is constantly seeing a tiger in the shadows, because one day there will be one, and only by seeing the tiger all the time do you get to live to tell the tale. System 2 plays chess, but it's System 1 that jumps when a spider drops from the ceiling and lands on the board.
It's System 1 that people are employing when they see aliens in the, admittedly alien, sight of SpaceX's 60 Starlink satellite's entering orbit. (Except in the case of those with the tin foil hats, who verify it to themselves through complex conspiracies involving the lizard people who really rule us, who have also employed System 2 in their thinking. I'm not going to take the piss too much; may turn out that they've been right all along).
My point is this. The idea of alien invasion is relatively new, at least in evolutionary time. We're well past the point of seeing tigers in the shadows. We've tamed the world. System 1 should have become redundant, the information-processing equivalent of the appendix. But, no: we're simply applying System 1 to new paradigms. It's hardwired in.
We're bright enough to design the world we want, but not to spot the unintended consequences. We're bright enough to invent plastics and the internal combustion engine and derivatives, but not to map out the rabbit holes down which they could take us before it's too late and we're falling down them.
This is one of the ignored aspects of Mankind's re-engineering of the world, that threats are no longer predominantly blink-and-you-miss-it. Our influence is long term and strategic. And, with it, the risks, personal and species-wide, move from here-and-now, claws-out and screaming, to silent, creeping and glacial in pace. Yes, there are still in-the-moment threats against which System 1 protects us. They still get us as individuals. But it'll be the biggies that we need System 2 to combat that'll get us as a species in the end.
The greatest threat to humanity (let's stop saying 'to the planet'; the planet will recover) is global warming and the various flavours of eco-disaster that'll come with it. That's not news, but it was never newsworthy, because it's System 1 that decrees newsworthyness. It's not a spider dropping from the ceiling or a tiger in the shadows - or, it's modern equivalent, aliens in the sky. We don't jump. And, because we don't jump, we think the biggest threat to humanity is the Chinese, or the Americans, or Islam, or terrorism, or the stock market crashing.
And because it doesn't make us jump, we won't do anything until Attenborough tells us that the bees have all gone. And, even then, what we'll consider first is the lack of bloody honey for breakfast.
Most days I think this is everybody's fault. But, today, with Kahneman's ideas front and centre in my mind, I'm inclined to think the whole thing is inevitable. We've simply evolved to a point at which our physiology cannot keep up. We're trying to run Grand Theft Auto 6 on an Apollo Guidance Computer, blindsided to the fact that we're sub-optimal by all the smart things we can do (like land on the Moon in the case of the AGC, or, for us, invent plastics and the internal combustion engine and derivatives). We don't know the level we're failing to operate at, because if we could think in those terms we wouldn't be failing.
This may be the end point of evolution. We've hit our limit. And it's our operating system that makes it a self-limiting point. What protected us from tigers in the shadows will bring our ultimate destruction, because we're watching the skies for aliens instead of recognising the scale of the real threat.
Time to give the insects a chance, methinks. In the meantime, could I suggest a book to read?
Elon Musk caused an alien invasion panic after launching 60 mini satellites to give us better access to porn. Sorry, I mean the internet. And I finished reading Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow.
Kahneman's book is not new, and elements have been well covered elsewhere; various pop science documentaries spring to mind. But, even so, you really should read it if you haven't already. It covers a great deal of ground in breadth and depth, and shouldn't be mistaken for a Malcolm Gladwell-style thinking person's beach read. It's denser than that, and a modicum drier as a result. Which makes it sound overbaked Dundee cake. Without marzipan and icing. Or a plastic reindeer on top.
But it isn't like that at all. Think more of a quality bakewell, or a cheesecake, but not one of those foamy ones. A real cheesecake, with some density to it. Raspberries. Maybe clotted cream on the side.
I may have wandered off topic. Sorry.
One of Kahneman's opening plays is the idea of your brain having a System 1 and a System 2. These aren't separate parallel processing units, like the petrol and electric motors in a hybrid car; this is your brain employing two separate strategies simultaneously on the same wetware.
(His book also covers loss aversion, which tallies with what I was stumbling towards in my proposal for an anti-bezzle, but enough of that).
Don't think these are options at your disposal; they're not. You can't help triggering System 1, it's innate; whereas System 2 is the 'If you think about it' bit of your brain. And you need both. System 1 is constantly seeing a tiger in the shadows, because one day there will be one, and only by seeing the tiger all the time do you get to live to tell the tale. System 2 plays chess, but it's System 1 that jumps when a spider drops from the ceiling and lands on the board.
It's System 1 that people are employing when they see aliens in the, admittedly alien, sight of SpaceX's 60 Starlink satellite's entering orbit. (Except in the case of those with the tin foil hats, who verify it to themselves through complex conspiracies involving the lizard people who really rule us, who have also employed System 2 in their thinking. I'm not going to take the piss too much; may turn out that they've been right all along).
My point is this. The idea of alien invasion is relatively new, at least in evolutionary time. We're well past the point of seeing tigers in the shadows. We've tamed the world. System 1 should have become redundant, the information-processing equivalent of the appendix. But, no: we're simply applying System 1 to new paradigms. It's hardwired in.
We're bright enough to design the world we want, but not to spot the unintended consequences. We're bright enough to invent plastics and the internal combustion engine and derivatives, but not to map out the rabbit holes down which they could take us before it's too late and we're falling down them.
This is one of the ignored aspects of Mankind's re-engineering of the world, that threats are no longer predominantly blink-and-you-miss-it. Our influence is long term and strategic. And, with it, the risks, personal and species-wide, move from here-and-now, claws-out and screaming, to silent, creeping and glacial in pace. Yes, there are still in-the-moment threats against which System 1 protects us. They still get us as individuals. But it'll be the biggies that we need System 2 to combat that'll get us as a species in the end.
The greatest threat to humanity (let's stop saying 'to the planet'; the planet will recover) is global warming and the various flavours of eco-disaster that'll come with it. That's not news, but it was never newsworthy, because it's System 1 that decrees newsworthyness. It's not a spider dropping from the ceiling or a tiger in the shadows - or, it's modern equivalent, aliens in the sky. We don't jump. And, because we don't jump, we think the biggest threat to humanity is the Chinese, or the Americans, or Islam, or terrorism, or the stock market crashing.
And because it doesn't make us jump, we won't do anything until Attenborough tells us that the bees have all gone. And, even then, what we'll consider first is the lack of bloody honey for breakfast.
Most days I think this is everybody's fault. But, today, with Kahneman's ideas front and centre in my mind, I'm inclined to think the whole thing is inevitable. We've simply evolved to a point at which our physiology cannot keep up. We're trying to run Grand Theft Auto 6 on an Apollo Guidance Computer, blindsided to the fact that we're sub-optimal by all the smart things we can do (like land on the Moon in the case of the AGC, or, for us, invent plastics and the internal combustion engine and derivatives). We don't know the level we're failing to operate at, because if we could think in those terms we wouldn't be failing.
This may be the end point of evolution. We've hit our limit. And it's our operating system that makes it a self-limiting point. What protected us from tigers in the shadows will bring our ultimate destruction, because we're watching the skies for aliens instead of recognising the scale of the real threat.
Time to give the insects a chance, methinks. In the meantime, could I suggest a book to read?
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