Just a little more…just a little more…

Is there anything going wrong that isn’t aided and abetted by the “Shifting Baseline Syndrome” described so well in the essay below? I can’t think of anything, can you? If it isn’t an official Law of the Universe, it must be at least one of those useful and descriptive “meta rules” that gives, prior to the articulation of a rigorous theory, a bird’s eye view of how things really work (kind of like Kepler’s laws of planetary motion before Newton).

Some examples. We have overfishing already. We can add the following:

1. Overpopulation
2. Resource depletion
3. Nuclear weapon proliferation
4. Alarmingly rapid increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels happening at the same time as alarmingly rapid melting of glaciers.
5. or, as bold and opinionated theorists might say in place of no. 4–anthropogenic global warming
6. Species extinction
7. Depletion of slowly regenerating groundwater resources (e. g. the  Ogallala Aquifer in the midwestern U.S.)
8. Loss of topsoil
9. The financial crisis
10. …and so on…

Each of these troubles proceeds along a continuum of perception from “no problem at all, really” to “really big problem that may kill us all” Often, the unpleasant and inevitable ending is visible from a point very early on the trail. For example, many people seem to think that “Peak Oil” is a relatively new insight. But, it was knowable to Drake, the putative driller of the first oil well, for, no matter how much oil there is or how slowly it is used, if it isn’t created faster than it is consumed, it will one day run scarce just before it runs, for all practical purposes, completely out. A similar cold, hard, unpleasant mass balance applies to groundwater, topsoil, and even species, or any other stuff that takes eons to form and only years to consume or destroy. For things that cause problems by their stubborn and consistent increase (bombs, humans, carbon dioxide, debt etc.) it is also knowable early on that  a grim reckoning lies somewhere out there.

Knowledge of these inevitabilities is a very unpleasant and demanding kind of knowing because it suggests that the prudent way forward might not be along the easiest path. What to do?

Shift the baseline. It isn’t that much worse this year than last. Besides, remember how worried everyone was about this stuff 10 years ago? Well, we’re still fine.  There will always be something left and one just has to be strong enough to take it from weaker hands. Or there could be a miracle of some kind–a breakthrough– that will make the problem disappear.

Just a Little More…

Paul Kedrosky has a fine essay up at the Edge World Question Center titled Shifting Baseline Syndrome. It is a one of many responses to the question: “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?”.  Here is the (short) essay in full:

When John Cabot came to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in 1497 he was astonished at what he saw. Fish, so many fish — fish in numbers he could hardly comprehend. According to Farley Mowat, Cabot wrote that the waters were so “swarming with fish [that they] could be taken not only with a net but in baskets let down and [weighted] with a stone.” The fisheries boomed for five hundred years, but by 1992 it was all over. The Grand Banks cod fishery was destroyed, and the Canadian government was forced to close it entirely, putting 30,000 fishers out of work. It has never recovered. What went wrong? Many things, from factory fishing to inadequate oversight, but much of it was aided and abetted by treating each step toward disaster as normal. The entire path, from plenitude to collapse, was taken as the status quo, right up until the fishery was essentially wiped out. In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly coined a phrase for this troubling ecological obliviousness — he called it “shifting baseline syndrome”. Here is how Pauly first described the syndrome: “Each generation of fisheries scientist accepts as baseline the stock situation that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species…” It is blindness, stupidity, intergeneration data obliviousness. Most scientific disciplines have long timelines of data, but many ecological disciplines don’t. We are forced to rely on second-hand and anecdotal information — we don’t have enough data to know what is normal, so we convince ourselves that this is normal. But it often isn’t normal. Instead, it is a steadily and insidiously shifting baseline, no different than convincing ourselves that winters have always been this warm, or this snowy. Or convincing ourselves that there have always been this many deer in the forests of eastern North America. Or that current levels of energy consumption per capita in the developed world are normal. All of these are shifting baselines, where our data inadequacy, whether personal or scientific, provides dangerous cover for missing important longer-term changes in the world around us. When you understand shifting baseline syndrome it forces you to continually ask what is normal. Is this? Was that? And, at least as importantly, it asks how we “know” that it’s normal. Because, if it isn’t, we need to stop shifting the baselines and do something about it before it’s too late.

How Much? A LOT! A Million Bazillion Gazillion!

It’s all over the news that the government is spending billions and billions, and we owe China almost a trillion, and the national debt is $10 trillion, and Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is now at $2.5 trillion thanks to bailouts and quantitative easing. And, everyone knows that there are a lot more millionaires and billionaires than there used to be. So, one question from the new Vanity Fair/CBS poll of Americans’ knowledge and attitudes with respect to large-number-finance is interesting:

Our country is trillions of dollars in debt, and the number increases every day. Which denomination comes after a trillion?
	TOTAL	LESS THAN COLLEGE	COLLEGE GRADUATES	18–29	30-44	45-64	64+
Quadrillion	40%	34%	56%	46%	46%	37%	26%
Gazillion	12	14	7	16	13	13	5
Bazillion	7	8	3	6	6	9	7
Quintillion	4	3	9	7	4	4	2
Decillion	1	1	2	3	1	1	1
Don’t know	36	40	23	23	30	37	59

© Image Source/Corbis.

 

 

 

“Quadrillion” is not a part of the mandatory mathematical vocabulary for finance. But it is a useful word for worrying about energy since the US uses about 100 quadrillion BTU/year to keep everything warm and running smoothly.

Choosing “gazillion” or “bazillion” to answer the multiple choice question …?  Please.

Football Time

From The Big Picture:

Football and the 30 Second Advance Button

By Barry Ritholtz – January 16th, 2011, 5:08PM

I like watching football, but I cannot stand the way the games are televised.

On the clock, you have 60 minutes per game, of which there is maybe thirty 14 minutes of actual football played. In real time, that 14 minutes occurs over the course of 3 and ½ hours.

Who the hell has time for that 15 weeks a year, plus the playoffs?

 

Barry Ritholtz is talking about the frustration of trying to find the Football nuggets within the Televised-Pro-Football slag heap. With the fast advance functionality of Tivo and the the right strategy, one can watch a whole game in under an hour and still see the last 10 minutes live.

Accepting that therearelimits, limits of attention and time-on-earth for one thing, the TIVO (or something like it) is a necessity. It makes it possible to watch less TV and still pass the water-cooler sanity-test-questions such as Who is the President of the Land? and Who do you think will win the playoffs?

Unfortunately, there is no TIVO for the 3space physical world….yet. So, all the stadium-goers are in for the 3 or 4 hour duration.  When conjuring new football (Pro or College) into existence, is it worth considering the 100,000 or so person hours that will be dedicated to each well-attended game?

Opportunity cost?

Lizard Loaves and Fantasy Fishes

“…The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work … enough for all.”

The Radiant City by Le Corbusier (1935)

We here at therearelimits  like this way of thinking and the lifestyle it predicts. We grew up as the prediction became reality and enjoyed the ever-expanding possibilities of travel that fuel and motors, tires and roads, planes and airports made possible. Only during the childhood years wer gasoline powered personal vehicles out of reach and we had to make do with toy cars, “souped up” bicycles, and home-built racers. Our older brothers had the real thing and were, therefore, kings.

We lived in a suburban town near Chicago and had access to large area of forest preserved nearby. We could get to the city by bus or commuter rail. Post WWII affluence had given us some fine schools and the streets were safe for walking and bicycling over much longer distances than are considered acceptable for unsupervised children now. A busy day might involve bicycling to school, then to a friend’s house after, then to a tree-fort construction site a mile away, then to a hamburger joint, then to a park, and then home as late as possible. Of course, if we could get away with it we would like to spend hours watching cartoons on TV, but the were fewer sets and fewer adults that would permit it. The wandering life was good and we wanted more of it–we wanted to see all the things we read about and heard about from our books and teachers and parents and older siblings.

The 50’s and 60’s were heady days for speedy and convenient travel spanning distances long and short. Fuel was plentiful and cheap and most of it came from within our borders. Highways were always being built and the Interstate Highway system promised rapid travel between distant cities as well as access to the natural wonders of our land. Car manufacturers were profitable businesses, objects of national admiration, and provided good paying jobs for workers who were proud of the fruits of their labor and felt secure within the social contract that industry and their unions provided them.  Highways were financed out of tax revenues that did not seem unduly burdensome. Sports teams and other mass entertainments proliferated as easy transportation and abundant leisure time provided ever growing live audiences. Disney led the way in building fantastic theme parks that could be visited by the many families who could now afford long-distance travel.

Economists and sociologists began to measure this wondrous growth and improvement and produced many graphs sloping upward and to the right–with dotted line extensions suggesting continued trending progress out toward Utopia. As those elders who had experienced the sacrifices of WWII and the austerities of the Great Depression of the 1930’s died off or were no longer listened to, the societal memory of hard times and of limits grew dim.

A Lizard that can roam from sunny rock to leafy branch to buggy swamp is a happy Lizard. That world rests easy on such a satisfied mind and imprints a world-view that is not easily perturbed.

One inkling of trouble-in-paradise came with the “oil shocks” of the 1970’s when OPEC (Oil Kings) balked and shut the spigot for a spell.  At that time, there was a real, albeit brief, conversation about resource limits. At that time, the President of the land warned of over-dependence on foreign oil (as have all Presidents since). At that time, the Star Trek character, Spock, had entered the stable of characters in the national mythology, and modeled the use of logic and unbiased observation to enable the triumph of rationality over wishes and hopes. Spock was much admired.

But, the Lizard prevailed in the attempt to sustain the unsustainable, to wish away problems, to ignore evidence, to make plans based on hopes, to extend and to pretend. The Lizard motto is: “There is always more on the endless shore.” The Lizard ethic is based on “It’s always free in the endless sea.” The Way of the Lizard turns out to be a very popular way of viewing the world, and one with momentum enough to carry for decades. Optimism is fun, energizing, youthful, empowering, fertile, bountiful, and creative. Pessimism is boring, depressing, tiresome, curmudgeonly, barren, oppressive and dull. Cornucopial optimism is even Biblical. See “Loaves and Fishes.”

Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

And how is it possible to ignore real limits and turn what is in reality a spherical world limited in volume and in extent in every direction and so, also, limited in what can be mined and harvested, extracted and pillaged, into an endlessly giving cornucopia? Technology and toolmaking have in bringing forth bounty from seemingly barren areas. Coercion and conquest have been means for extending resource bases past their limits.  But with modern times have come there new and exciting ways of getting more.

Transformation.

New economic paradigms, together with some well-crafted rationalizations and lies, have allowed the transfer of wealth and possibility not only from the poor to the rich–but from the future to the present.

A rational, Spock-like, assessment of fossilized fuelstuffs, like coal and oil, that were millions and millions of years in the making would conclude that their use today is a kind of borrowing from future earthlings–our descendants–who also have some claim on them and may even have a better use for them. At the very least, they should not be burned, essentially all-at-once and mainly-for-fun-and-excitement.

Such a logical view of food production might lead to the conclusion that an agriculture that causes the destruction of species and that wears out and erodes soil (soil that has taken thousands of years to form) is robbing future Peter to feed present Paul. And, if the fishes in the “Endless Sea” are fished to extinction, future fishers may view their over-fishing forefathers with some well-deserved disdain.

Even barter and trade which grew from the need to exchange necessities that came in finite quantities has been recently embellished with associations and instruments that allow the present population to write a Big IOU payable by their descendants so they might continue “living large”.

So, the greatest triumph of the evolving Lizard mind as it added the wonderful, enabling complexity of the cortex, is to invent new ways to pretend it is still with the Lizard. Is there another way to look at this?

‘Round Midnight on the Sphere

From Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/51/22356.abstract?sid=adda273f-6773-4b76-bb85-d812a94acae3

Consciousness of subjective time in the brain

Lars Nyberg^a,^b Alice S. N. Kim^c, Reza Habib^d, , Brian Levine^c, and Endel Tulving^c,¹

Departments of ^aIntegrative Medical Biology (Physiology) and ^bRadiation Sciences (Diagnostic Radiology), Umeå University, 90187 Umeå, Sweden;^cRotman Research Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M6A 2E1; and ^dDepartment of Psychology, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901

Contributed by Endel Tulving, November 9, 2010 (sent for review June 13, 2010)

Abstract

“Mental time travel” refers to conscious experience of remembering the personal past and imagining the personal future. Little is known about its neural correlates. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the hypothesis that mental time travel into “nonpresent” times (past and future) is enabled by a special conscious state (chronesthesia). Well-trained subjects repeatedly imagined taking one and the same short walk in a familiar environment, doing so either in the imagined past, present, or future. In an additional condition, they recollected an instance in which they actually performed the same short walk in the same familiar setting. This design allowed us to measure brain activity correlated with “pure” conscious states of different moments of subjective time. The results showed that the left lateral parietal cortex was differentially activated by nonpresent subjective times compared with the present (past and future > present). A similar pattern was observed in the left frontal cortex, cerebellum, and thalamus. There was no evidence that the hippocampal region is involved in subjective time travel. These findings provide support for theoretical ideas concerning chronesthesia and mental time travel.

Image Credit: Lars Nyberg, et. al.

 

Lizard Time

Lizard Time is ever Now. Or, at least Now within a rounding error–a slightly fuzzy now.

The lizard lives keenly in the moment. Reactions to present events are not inhibited by regrets over past errors or anxieties about the future. A near miss by a lunging predator will set off a reverberation within the lizard nerve and mind with an accompanying defensive maneuver and ensuing vigilance. But, the responsive mode will soon attenuate, like the sound from a plucked string. Thus is one short chapter of lizard history written.

For the hunting lizard, the trajectory of an incoming insect meal will create a brief period of tension and readiness, but it will end in soon after the insect is either captured, missed, or allowed to fly past. Another brief chapter ends. The lizard does not mind idle moments and does not spend them in rumination.

The sands of time do run through the narrow, short neck forming the now of the lizard hourglass at widely varying rates depending on the ambient temperature. Although there is little sense of past or future, the lizard does enjoy and perceive the passing of time as movement. In the cold, time slows since a cold lizard move slowly.  With warmth and light, the lizard moves rapidly and joyfully from an unremembered past to an unanticipated future.