Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

The "other" ERE. Societal aspects of the ERE philosophy. Emergent change-making, scale-effects,...
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7Wannabe5
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Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

It was my recollection that somebody had previously posted link to a video by Michael Dowd, but I couldn't find it. I recently watched these two recent additions to his impressive collection; "Collapse in a Nutshell" and "Overshoot in a Nutshell."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6FcNgOHYoo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPMPINPcrdk

I've read at least half the books he references in the videos, so not a lot of new information for me, but one thing I found interesting is that at some junction in one of the videos, he mentions that thinking humans might be able to escape this predicament by improvement to human consciousness is simply last phase of optimism/denial.

Anyways, I am also currently reading "Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation" by Paul Hawken which is considerably more optimistic. My own personal take at this juncture is somewhere in between and swinging a bit free out in left field. The thing that disappoints me is the extent to which there seem to be micro-echo chambers and closed referential loops even within the community that is taking the situation seriously. Like everybody is trying to sell something (maybe just their version of truth ) rather than trying to create best general model.

sky
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by sky »

How do you cope with the knowledge of overshoot?

7Wannabe5
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@sky:

The same way Nate Silver copes with elections. I guess I distract myself from the overall consequences by continually sorting for signal in the noise. For instance, I like Michael Dowd, but there are some obviously glaring crimes of omission in his descriptions of changes in human welfare in recent decades.

I also obviously have attempted (sometimes quite poorly) to construct my own little functional example model which might serve if scaled. But, I know that this is a variety of wishful thinking. William Catton, who wrote “Overshoot” in 1980 almost goes out of his way in his later book “Bottleneck” to let the reader know that while writing the book he was taking multiple airplane journeys across the globe to visit his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Like he was trying to communicate “Hey, I’m just another affluent industrial era human causing this succession to post-collapse order just like you.”

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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by jacob »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sat Nov 27, 2021 9:17 am
... at some junction in one of the videos, he mentions that thinking humans might be able to escape this predicament by improvement to human consciousness is simply last phase of optimism/denial.
It's the first video at the ~20m mark. It falls into the category of "we can fix it if only [we all apply my specialization]", the evolution of consciousness being one of these specializations.

The problem always being "we all apply".

I currently have my foot in another echo-chamber (and possibly also my mouth) and am I ever encountering heavy resistance. "This is the way we do it. This is the way we have always done it, and so this is how it's gonna be. It works [for us]." I can't really say I'm not doing the same with ERE/FIRE. The immune reaction to other memes is very strong.

Technically the internet has done a lot to break the monopoly on information. It's allowed all these echo-chambers to exist [for the first time] w/o being confined to cafes or university departments. They are even somewhat connected in the sense that echo-chambers tend to know of the existence of other echo-chambers. Previously ideas would develop completely independently for years or decades.

A fundamental problem with an information based approach (which almost all of these are) is that users won't divide their attention span too much. They'll find a favorite chamber. From the content-generator's perspective, though, one can't just let everybody generate content because that will increase the noise/signal level too much and users will leave. The generators also can't spend too much time on meetings because that takes away from generating actual content.

As such the sites tend to have the size they're capable of. The more complex the problem, the smaller the chamber.

"Evolution of consciousness" certainly helps both in terms of the ability to manage, generate content, and users understanding it. This would make the chambers bigger and able to process more complexity (the predicament is a failure to solve a complex issue---fortunately, failure will eventually result in chaotic issues and humans do tend to be good at those). However, raising consciousness would be the equivalent of hoping to raise average IQ by 10 points for the purpose of creating better complications. Yet complexity is not something that's done with a magic product, app, or service. But products and services is the only way we frame this. Even the language above is framed in the language of production and consumption.

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Lemur
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by Lemur »

For those being educated on climate change for the first time or internalizing just how bad the situation is, it is quite a devastating experience. One that throws most into a great depression. Denialism is the first defense of this realization. Most will find their own echo-chambers to cope. For intelligent individuals, almost like an artform, they will develop 4D maps to rationalize the situation.

I think I see Michael Dowd's purpose at least from my interpretation. I can personally attest that going through Dowd's videos and even occasionally chatting with him in the YouTube comments helped with my own psychological journey here on this topic (my 2020 climate depression stage). I feel like his purpose here is to not only to educate those about climate change and civilization collapses but to help guide his viewers through this denial & depression stages. Getting humans through these stages is tough but it is paramount to get an end result of collective action.

I can't recall any practical solutions from this videos but after having reached acceptance, there is still this sense of "okay, now what?". Seeing more clear now, I find that this sort of climate doom in general just leads some (maybe most of us) to inaction. I can appreciate the more positive climate narratives lately even if deep down I know that doom is upon us :o . At least these are more practical...perhaps may lead to less inaction. But I can also appreciate going through the depression stage as this will ultimately help develop your why and personal growth after you get out from the other end.

There are multiple solutions to the climate change problem. But the problem is very simple. Like David Archer would say, in "The Long Thaw" it is quite evident that we just need to stop pumping C02 into the atmosphere. I'll add we need to take C02 out of the atmosphere as well through whatever method and bring us back down to pre-industrial levels to limit the warming to 1.5-2.0C this century. And we need to pick up some of this plastic while we're at it :lol: .

But getting humans in mass organization and solving this problem from A --> B. Yeah that is where we need a general collective model...this is where you really smart people come in haha. Hence Spiral Dynamics? Its the humans that are making this thing complicated.

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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by jacob »

Lemur wrote:
Sun Nov 28, 2021 11:11 am
I can't recall any practical solutions from this videos but after having reached acceptance, there is still this sense of "okay, now what?". Seeing more clear now, I find that this sort of climate doom in general just leads some (maybe most of us) to inaction.
I recognize this as a real problem. This is what I'm fighting to change. The predicament used to be this highly nerdy subculture. Kubler-Ross used to be something people went through on their own before they started on practical solutions. Now "grief-processing" has become "a thing", which is often sold (usually for free) as both the beginning and end. That is, "you have to start by processing grief" and "that is the only thing you need to do short of finding a circle for mutual help with emotional coping".

I'm not sure why there has been this massive shift towards the psychological. Perhaps it's because it's reaching a lot more people (NF, SJ, SP) and not just hard scientists, ecologists, and relevant engineers (mostly NT's with domain knowledge)? Perhaps it's just how the times are now. Twenty years ago the psychological aspect wasn't even acknowledged beyond "this is depressing but you'll get over it". Now it's as if nothing else is acknowledged beyond a few token efforts like "grow a tomato plant if you feel like it".

Trying to influence a "movement of movements" is even harder than influencing a "movement of individuals".

sky
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by sky »

Psychological help for overshoot-aware people will become a big industry. Lots of money to be made.

Probably the most money to be made is by telling people what they want to hear, not the truth.

I would critique my own behavior as ballroom dancing on the Titanic, partying like its 1979. Because my personal behavior and choices won't change anything, the ship is going down.

But that is not really true, it is important that some people start a change and become an example for how to live.

What is needed:
Psychological advice for dealing with civilization crash
How to live a climate friendly lifestyle
How to prepare one's personal life for collapse
How to live well and with meaning as things start going wrong

chenda
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by chenda »

1979?

J_
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by J_ »

sky wrote:
Sun Nov 28, 2021 2:52 pm

What is needed:
Psychological advice for dealing with civilization crash
How to live a climate friendly lifestyle
How to prepare one's personal life for collapse
How to live well and with meaning as things start going wrong
With customized texts for Red, Blue, Green and Yellow evolved people?

sky
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by sky »

The year 1979 that I mentioned is not significant, it just refers to a time when the known problems were solvable. A more innocent time.

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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by jacob »

J_ wrote:
Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:20 pm
With customized texts for Red, Blue, Green and Yellow evolved people?
Texts, methods, ... various ways to put this together, see viewtopic.php?t=12102 but different people will definitely want to process this in different ways, e.g. green will prefer conversational circles, orange will turn it into a finite game, blue will seek answers in higher powers, ... and so on.

the_platypus
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by the_platypus »

Maybe this is useful and on topic?

The grief of collapse is just the grief of death but you also can expect your kids/grandkids could be toast and your culture will be buried in the dust. The scale of these problems puts them essentially in the category of religious problems. Thus, the problem calls for a religious solution; or at least, those same religious drives need to be activated, whether they are called and organized as such.

Robert Sapolsky finds it fascinating that humans: "[Gain] the strength and will to do X from the irrefutable evidence that X cannot be." If it can be framed as a religious kind of challenge, people will be motivated. They will be willing to make sacrifices or bite the bullet to live simply or sustainably or resiliently when they otherwise wouldn't be. Getting people to do that is a religious question, one of faith. Make waste, inefficiency "icky." Get wired to feel "good" and "clean" about how you haven't run the heat in a month, or about having bought from the bulk bin and thus avoided waste, or sourced all your food organically and within 100 miles, or what have you. Pretending like our sustainability actions matter/are effective despite the evidence is no different than pretending our life matters/accomplishes anything even though it doesn't. I think with the right motivation, questions of efficacy cease.

The other angle for motivation is social status, ie sex appeal. You need the men to do this and not just the nerds but the most chisel jawed, self-centered of men who are absolutely fueled by social status (ie testosterone). These men run much of the world and are the cause of much of the problem. They do what they do because they are rewarded with status and power and sex and so on. But if women won't fuck you, do you have status? Do you really have power? So, women, only fuck men who live sustainably, because if you're not, you're screwing over your babies. And men, increase your chances of getting laid by making it evident that you live sustainably, and any woman concerned about her babies should be able to see the merit of your ways.

Make sustainable sexy and make sustainable sacred and I see that as covering both the thrusting force and the nurturing force of human nature.

How to do that? Advertisements, education, setting an example (being sustainable AND having big biceps), etc.

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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by jacob »

@the_platypus - I like that framing. Plotkin defined faith as "your most important concern" turning identification into a duck test. For many parents their most important concern is their children. For some it may be who wins the superbowl and for others their most important concern may be to avoid losing their fortune. In the big religions the most important concern should be the salvation of the soul... but not many act like it anymore. The most important concern in the developed world seems to be material consumption.

In that sense the Predicament has created a crisis in most modern faiths.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

More cheerfulness.

If any substantial fraction of the more colossal (in terms of energy/resource usage) segments of humanity did conscientiously give up part of their resource-devouring extensions out of humane concern for their less colossal brethren, there is no guarantee that this would avert die-off. it might only postpone it, permitting human numbers to continue to increase a bit longer, or less colossal people to become a bit more colossal, before we crash all the more resoundedly.
- William Catton "Overshoot"- 1980.

So much for ERE.
The cumulative biotic potential of any species exceeds the carrying capacity of its habitat.
William Catton "Overshoot" in reference to similar statements by Malthus and Darwin.

Biotic potential refers to the total number of offspring a parental pair would be theoretically capable of producing.

Now, I am going to argue from the perspective of something like a Rational Optimist (or Cargoist.) the_platypus suggests that women should only fuck men who live sustainably. I would note that this has already been happening at an increasing rate, especially in the decades since 1980. Women who have sex with men who have higher incomes/higher spending rates (on global scale) have fewer children than women who fuck poor men who don't/can't spend much. In fact, this is such a predominant trend, the number one way in which my theoretical great-grandchildren of 1980 (when I was 15) will be effected by upward mobility/maintenance smacking against resource depletion is that they now will never be born. It could even be argued that what once was a predicament (human population increase without bound besides crash) is now more unto a problem, because conservative estimate is topping out at 10.9 billion some time this century followed by decline as decline in birth rates over takes increase in longevity. So, that's one stopper in place in the overflowing tub problem.

Okay, that leaves the problem that reduction in birth rate is correlated with affluence. So, maybe you need some factors correlated with a household income of around X before birth rates drop off. Obviously, you also need affluence at level Y before humans are well able to afford to give a fuck about the environment and leisure towards self-actualization etc. So, you are still stuck with maybe something like $20,000 X 10 billion per year consumption level at theoretical "happy peak." And the only way this could be achieved is through EXTREME dematerialization of the economy. IOW, the substitution of services for stuff. This is actually what ERE does too, because you are providing yourself with more of your own skilled services rather than buying stuff. Purchasing the services of other humans does not contribute to resource depletion beyond the rate of human metabolic burn unless you assume that service provider is spending money you transferred in current stuff-heavy economy -give or take for depreciation of cost of training/education of service provider.

Also, I'm not attempting to nit-pick or try-to-prove-false-by-picking-on-one-error, but one item that really struck me in my recent re-read of "Collapse" was Catton's 1980 skewering of the 1954 towards 2054 predictions of Harrison Brown in "The Challenge of Man's Future." Brown predicted that by 2054, solar energy could provide 7 billion humans with 1/4 of the average energy usage of 1954 American. Catton makes this seem like a ridiculous and dangerous notion, but my back of the envelope calculations indicate that Brown's prediction was remarkably accurate. even conservative. However, the average energy usage of an American in 2021 is many multiples of 1954, so (sigh...)

The argument against technological optimism is that it is reliant on simple observation that humans always seem to come up with something, which is a form of modern magical thinking. OTOH, humans have both advanced rational abilities and advanced tool-making abilities. Sometimes , as with Einstein, the full concept comes before the tools, but sometimes our tools are developed well before our ability to fully understand why they work. So, maybe we will pull it off again without having to be able to know beforehand why we would be able to do it.

Jin+Guice
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by Jin+Guice »

the_platypus wrote:
Mon Nov 29, 2021 11:27 am
Make sustainable sexy
Deal.

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

A woman from Uganda confirms that the reason the birth rate in Africa is so high is because an elephant or lion may come upon and eat one of the children, so the high birth rates of subsaharan Africa are attributable to the fact that infant and child mortality is expected.

Similarly, educated women aren’t having children because of the time and money cost of education and career, and a higher COL in developed world, not because they are selecting for more sustainable partners.

In the developed world, birth rates are high for those in poverty, and dip below replacement rate for the middle class. Once there is enough income/wealth, the birth rate picks up above replacement rate again.

https://news.sfsu.edu/bold-thinkers/stu ... inequality

If I give money to a woman from Uganda, she sends some of it home to relatives. I doubt she would care whether my carbon footprint was low or not, because she can’t feed her relatives with virtue.

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Re: Doom Beyond Spiral Dynamics?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@MI:

Yes, I’ve seen the statistics for fertility uptick for most wealthy, that’s why I qualified “on global scale.” Given the high number of women who now remain single, the wealthiest 10% of married women is not a huge group, and even within that group, they might just be nudging beyond replacement rate.

Obviously, women aren’t doing anything remotely like punishing men for their lack of sustainable living by not having their children. Completely different cause and effect, but correlation holds “at global scale” as opposed to “romance novel fantasy” scale, where there is a Duke for every heroine, whom she happily provides with an heir, a spare, and a daughter (to be featured in sequel.)

There are many other reasons why birth rates are higher in impoverished regions besides farsighted planning for elder care through survival of offspring. Many of them boil down to lack of options and power for girls and women.

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