As a geek couple, I can say after 12 + years there are certain real pitfalls.
This may vary for you, but here's a few key items:
Your intellect can be very clever at making up lies, hiding what you really feel, and it basically just gets in the way. This hiding and dissociation from your feelings can take different forms. If you're the kind of guy who tries to be nice and tries to be a good partner, then you may find that you hide your natural anger and hide your resentments. Eventually these will bite you hard. If on the other hand you or your partner are basically quite selfish, lack empathy, and lack a basic goodness, then she or you can do the most outrageously selfish things but rationalize them away using your clever intellect. (I know one woman who would cry "sexist" if you said she was behaving badly, on the basis that had she been a man, you'd have complemented him for being "strong" (some people are educated beyond their intelligence)).
So feeling is very important. But what's also important, and this is beyond therapy now... what is also becoming more important for modern couples is that, once you both accept each other as equals (you're not stereotypical gender roles from the 50s), once you accept each other as equals, doesn't mean you are the same. You still have to be a man and she still has to be a woman, otherwise there is no difference between you, and there is no polarity of attraction, and sex and romance will disappear completely. See David Deida's books for a challenging and difficult slap in the face on this subject. Your woman may often act crazy--she is testing you and she wants to feel your masculine ability to be a solidly dependable rock who can stand there and still love her. Once she knows she can trust you to be a rock, she can relax into her feminine side and blossom and be sexy. And this little drama will repeat itself over and over. If you don't want that, get a best friend and forget about romantic partners.
So here's what he says: A system, such as the health care or legal system, will not be shutdown by one person. In fact, it probably won't even be shutdown by 10 people, maybe 100. And hence, the system is vastly more intelligent than a human, intrinsically since we worked in numbers to evolve this system.
In philosophy (couple of books) there is a discussion about how various fields confuse individuals and systems. Like, Nature is a huge complex system, and man wouldn't survive without Nature, therefore Nature and the ecosystem are more important than Man. Therefore man is just another species, and man must learn his place and minimize his impact. Well, there is some truth to that, but the underlying confusion is that they're comparing an individual organism with a massive complex system, under the guise that the organism is just another complex system anyway. Similar confusions come up when people talk about whether society or the individual is more important. I had one Marxist tell me that I am "nothing" without society. Well, again there is some truth to that, but it is only partially true.
It is not just that we don't like comparing ourselves to other more complex things, and feel uncomfortable about it. It is that these different things have some very different properties. An individual organism like a person has sentience and self-directed intentionality. Society doesn't have sentience (at most it exhibits "flocking" type behaviors) and an ecosystem doesn't have sentience (despite what some new agers claim about the planet being "conscious").
And meanwhile, society has properties that can't be reduced to individual consciousness. We have the English Language, and you have to be born into or join a society of English speakers in order to learn it. We have ethical codes, which again are about social interactions. If I was the only person on the planet, the only being, there would be no need for ethics. They wouldn't exist without some sort of collective to bounce good and bad off of. And these social structures do indeed "last longer" than individuals, and can't be torn down by individuals, not because they are more intelligent, but simply because they exist in a different domain to the individual. They are a different side of the coin. They are distinct but related to the individual.
But also notice, that without individual minds interacting with each other, there would be no social system, no legal frameworks, no ethical codes. Just like you can't have an ecosystem without organisms interacting. And as everyone here is saying, if you start to mis-assign a quality that belongs to one domain (sentience, intentionality, intelligence) to a different domain (ecosystems, legal systems) you end up in weird and wrong places (but its research so who knows what might come of it).
But it does end up looking like, because modeling human intelligence is so hard, we'll just change fields and start modeling systems instead, and you know, maybe we'll get somewhere with that, and nobody will notice we just changed our research area.
Personally I don't get it. Why is it so hard to accept? Reliance on academic authories has its pitfalls of course, but a certain point you need the humility to accept that there is no debate over this particular point among experts.
There are two aspects to all this. One is the scientific method, and the other is the culture of the people practicing as scientists. First and foremost, there needs to be a simple summary of the experiments and data, and that summary needs to make sense. This is where skeptics object to computer model runs being called "experiments", and computer model runs being called "scenarios" whilst being used as if they were projections and predictions. It just does not make sense. (So then we have to repeat the question, where is the evidence, please show us. I personally have swung both ways in this depending on what new evidence is presented.) There is a difference between being "expert" and being a good "judge", and many people are experts in the details of a field, whist lacking the "step back and evaluate the whole picture" judgement. That is where qualifications and job titles stop being useful.
The second aspect is the culture of the people practicing as scientists. People always forget that they are embedded in a culture and part of what they see in the world is through the filter of culture. Now that does not mean that the scientific method is suspect, because the scientific method bypasses cultural bias, when applied rigorously. But when you get into the messy everyday quality issues of grants, funding, professional egos, and just the sheer limits of time, brains, and manpower, then cultural bias will most certainly have an effect. We hope the culture enforces a good bias (like knowing when to ignore pointless exercises that will waste money) but there are no guarantees. And the bigger the culture, the stronger the social cohesion, the harder it becomes to resists the bias when it is in error. So 97% of scientists agree on something, just means the culture is aligned, and forceful, and disagreement is culturally very difficult.
And lastly, the problem being studied it at once very hard as it has many social implications, which is to say, it is of great cultural significance, and so the cultural biases and culture wars are going to have a lot of power. When people and scientists say we must reduce consumption, there is nothing in the scientific method that says we have to deal with the problem by reducing consumption--that is a purely moral judgement. Ask a racist about climate change in Africa and they'll probably think it is a good thing to get rid of all those people. Ask a Christian about climate change and they'll talk about the sanctity of "creation" and preserving God's gift to us. See? It is all cultural judgements. Even the question of "sustainability" is culturally and ethically specific. People (and people employed as scientists) come at this from the point of view that we have to all care for humanity and the environment and find a balance. Well a hundred years ago, the culture would simply have seen it as a matter of competition for resources, and using climate change to bolster one's own position in the world. Of course, trying to care for the world is a better stance morally, but here's the interesting quirk: most of the world's population and leaders are still in that old-world mentality and culture, and some African leaders openly use droughts and famine as a means to exterminate competing tribes. And the educated in the West are horrified by this, and we want the whole world to adopt a higher moral stance, one where we all work together and help each other, not go to war and kill each other--and several UN related organisations are openly calling for the use of Climate Change as the issue to unite the world politically. So even if the science was not settled, culturally there is a movement to make it so and use it to unify the world's people in a new ethics and morality. For myself, the scientific metho
The general view is that science equals rationality and religion equals dogma. When people say they dislike religion, they usually mean they dislike dogma. And that's generally fair because most of religion is dogma, as religion was born thousands of years ago, long before we learned to think for ourselves, so most of it was formed amongst dogmatic culture. But some questions still remain, like, what is the meaning of life? Whether you are a tribesman sitting on a rock overlooking great planes ten thousand years ago, or a techy in New York city tapping on your browser on your mobile, that question still remains, because it has to do with our basic original human existence. What is the meaning of your life? And for want of a better word, that is a religious question. (And if you say there is no meaning, it is just about having fun and doing cool stuff and succeeding... well that's your religious answer.)
you're just making the same tired old excuses that those with some vice *always make*. You claim that your body is somehow special and refuses to burn the energy that you put in well guess what
Yeah but what's going out in your pooh?
The body is not a closed system. A friend of mine says I eat like a pig. I have always been fairly thin. Meanwhile he has gained considerable weight and is now diabetic. The energy balance idea is one part of the system. Yeah, eat more, and there is more available to store as fat, but the body's genetics and hormones and so on decide what to store when, and what to eliminate as waste. That's not to say that people who are fat shouldn't do something about it, the problem is the medical advice for the past 25 years has been for the most part wrong. But instead of revising the science, they've just blamed the patients for being "lazy". It is interesting how the low fat advice/consensus kicked in just as obesity rates started to go up, and meanwhile I can very easily do a low carb lifestyle, but still eat as much as I want, and end up losing weight. To lose this much weight I should have been eating nothing but broccoli and going to the gym every day. I did neither.
Don't expect a serious discussion in response to your post. Although most people on Slashdot are smart and keep up with the latest technology, many have rather medieval attitudes when it comes to medicine.
Blaming the patient for the condition is one of those attitudes. Illness is like a "sin" to them, so the solution has to have some penance involved. "No pain, No gain" is one mantra of this religious belief.
Even the medical community has been guilty of this. Ulcers used to be all about stress and lifestyle until one doctor discovered the bacteria that was actually the cause. A simple triple antibiotic "no pain" solution worked while the "painful" lifestyle changes didn't.
Personally I think it is very true. Gary Taubes makes this point also, that according to his reading, the medical research community has known for years that the low-fat + exercise mantra hasn't worked, and that people don't do well on it, but rather than revise the science, even when alternatives are out there like low carb, and people are using those and having success (like me on Paleo), the doctors and scientists just blame people for lacking the will power.
The moralising "no pain no gain" and "everybody is lazy" is used as an excuse for why the advice isn't working. Well I am an very lazy person physically, and my energy and weight improved significantly (I wouldn't go back to my old habits ever) once I adopted the Paleo lifestyle. And it was effortless. And I enjoy food much more now. If someone says that pasta, in any quantity, is part of a "healthy complex carb balance", I just laugh.
It is odd. Many geeks pride themselves on the power of having the right information. And yet when it comes to diet, the notion that the info might be suspect is unacceptable, and instead they say it is about "pain" and "discipline".
The truth is many people who are overweight have never been thin for most of their life and got fat fairly young and developed a victim psychology because of bullying/social prejudice.
Well, be careful there. I lost weight recently, and kept it off, and feel much better for it, but I didn't follow conventional wisdom, ie. the food pyramid + low fat + exercise. I followed the Paleo diet/lifestyle. And it was effortless. And most people would dismiss it as being a "fad" or being contrary to established dietary advice... but so what, it worked very well for me. Not just weight, but energy and mental clarity and mood. If it is a bad diet, after a year and a half, I'll be surprised that my body is fooling me so well.
Anyway, the point is, it makes conventional advice very suspect if not downright wrong. If you tell people to eat low fat and exercise more, and then they are still fat, then what do you do? Blame people for lack of will power? Or maybe perhaps the advice you gave them was wrong? Maybe it is more about the kinds of food that you eat than the amount, and maybe the carbs, even in small quantities like in a small bowl of "healthy-carb" pasta, are actually doing serious damage to the body's hormone balance which would otherwise be regulating fat better?
People think it is simple laws of physics, like the energy balance equation. Well what's the equation for what ends up in excrement? Your body is not a closed system. It is a highly complex system. And hormones play a big part in its regulation. If the kinds of food you're telling people are "healthy" are actually upsetting the hormone system in ways it was never designed to deal with, then yeah, your advice is bad, even wrong, and people can't be blamed.
I'm well aware of the victim mentality. In the case of food though, we need to redo the science before we blame people because our own theories didn't work.
Well, the idea that low fat is good for you is a recent fad--only 30 years or so.
Before that people thought differently. And if you go waaaay back, what were our hunter gatherer ancestors eating? They had no access to bread, pasta, rice, cornflakes. They had access to meat, and fish, and some fruit and veg.
The only couple of times I have lost weight in my life I lived on salad and lean meat/chicken in tiny portions and did AT LEAST 2 hours of heavy excercise a day. Anything short of that doesn't cut it. What's worse is when I've stopped it's taken a couple of months of eating reasonable portions and not excercising as much to put on all the weight I've lost over 6-8 months AND add some more kilos as the body overcompensates.
I don't know if you've tried the Paleo lifestyle. Basically is says that processed carbs are not a natural food for humans (they've only existed since agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago, a mere blink of an eye as far as our bodies are concerned). The processed carbs, that's pasta, bread, rice, cereals, etc. just mess with our hormone and insulin levels and bloat our guts. Our guts are small, suggesting anyway that they are meant for meat. Eat as much meat and fish, and natural carbs in the form of vegetables and fruit (but not potatoes) as you want to feel satisfied.
Because it is not a starvation diet, you can just continue doing it as a lifestyle, and gradually your weight normalizes. And because it is not starvation, or restriction, you can keep doing it indefinitely. The trick is to stay off those processed carbs, and let your body return to normal.
Also, it is the carbs that increase appetite, whilst meat and fat are very satisfying. You may end up eating fewer calories or more, but who cares that's not the point. The point is that the high insulin messes with your body and causes fat accumulation. Insulin is a hormone and as such its job is to control bodily processes. There was one study quoted by Gary Taubes where they put a certain animal on a starvation diet. The animal was at a point in its life where it was programmed to put on fat before hibernating, but here it was being fed way too little, so what the animals' body did was it became fat whilst on a starvation diet.... by eating up its internal organs. The animal died fat and of organ failure/starved.
So we have to go with our natural body's system and what it does and doesn't need. Carbs are looking more and more like the culprit. Unfortunately there's been a 30-year anti-fat consensus, and when the data shows that people don't lose weight despite the "best advice", instead of questioning the theory, the consensus blames people for lack of will-power. It is pretty sickening really.
The carbs jack up insulin, and the insulin tells your fat cells to store fat. Eventually people become diabetic, and obese. If you simply cut the carbs out, you can stop counting calories. Appetite normalizes, wight normalizes, and people report other things like their minds become clearer, their emotions become more even. Speaking for myself I always had a vague depression and I usually woke up in the morning foggy and groggy. That lifted as soon as I cut carbs and ate lots of meat and fish and veg. No rice, no pasta, no bread, no cornflakes. Fruit is OK but avoid fruit juice.
Uhh... I'm pretty sure if you can burn more calories than you consume, while still gaining/maintaining weight, then you could quite comfortably claim the Randi Challenge prize. And then you could sell your body to science for billions.
The point is that the energy balance equation is way oversimplified for a human biological open system. It leads people to the wrong conclusion. A study found that schoolchildren given less exercise at school, ended up doing more at home. Other studies find that when people eat less, they move less. So you have to look at the whole system, and understand what's going on. The restricted carbohydrate hypothesis is basically that before the invention of agriculture just 10,000 years ago, our bodies were not subjected to huge quantities of carbs like bread, pasta, cereals, rice, and so on. All that stuff is not a natural diet for human type bodies in the last million years. And what they do is they massively increase the amount of sugar in our bodies (carbs turn to sugar) and the hypothesis is that the high sugar raises our insulin and raises the rate at which we put on fat. It is a hormonal control system, like, because your body's hormones are a control system for what your body should be doing, and the carbs increase sugar which send your hormone insulin way out of whack, and your fat cells get told to open up and store more. I call it a hypothesis but since I started using it, I have lost 10% of my weight, and I wasn't fat to start with, just a bit of belly fat. My stomach is flat, my waist has shrunk, and all without making any effort to exercise. The energy balance equation puts too much emphasis on exercise--you don't need any, you just need to not eat processed carbs, and stick to meat and veg and fruit and as it is a more natural diet, the body does well on it.
How many such people actually exist? With every slashdot article mentioning the moon landings, there is a great uproar about these heretics. I'm sure they exist, but I've never met one, nor do I recall even reading a post from one on slashdot. It makes me wonder why these people (whoever they are) get under people's skin so much.
I've met one in the street. He was a Hare Krishna and wanted me to buy a few of his books. I'm a nice guy so I listen for a while. He gets on to the subject of the moon landings, and he tells me that the moon landings were faked, because the Gita declares "man cannot walk on other worlds". He was quite exited about this confirmation from the Gita. I pointed out that when the Gita was written, they hadn't invented the space suit.
We will send out robots. With our brains uploaded into them.
Can we really do something so weird or is it just that we know so little about the brain?
I'd sooner believe that we'll invent a space warp, than be able to "upload" our consciousness. We're not just a set of abstract information, floating in abstract conceptual space, independent of some lower level transport. Rather, our consciousness is our body.
Believing we can upload our brains... that's like believing in Reincarnation and astral projection. I think that's a subtle point well made by Galactica...
The problem is increased efficiency demands increased complexity.
Kudos to you Sir, for mentioning "complexity". Complexity is a word that is just not heard enough when anybody talks about the environment, the economy, society, and any sort of change. Your model may or may not be worthless.... but at least you talk about complexity, about those weird counterintuitive effects in complex systems, and that is what anyone serious about human society and other species' survival should be talking about.
if everybody did it, we could easily halve the power consumed by households!
I agree with you if you look at it that way. But our world is far more varied and complex, and not everyone is like you. My carbon footprint happens to be tiny (one room apartment, never owned a car, work locally, haven't flown anywhere in 10 years, no kids.) But all those things are for other reasons. Try to change people so that they make a real noticeable savings in energy, like we can start turning off power stations, and it becomes very very tricky. It is like we think we are the first generation to ever think about conservation, when actually every generation has had to deal with supply problems for resources, and the world we have today is the best that they could achieve. Turning off a few things is obviously to a lot of people just a symbolic gesture. Like now they charge for carrier bags at the supermarket to encourage people to reuse the bags. I was already re-using the bags for trash and now that they charge for them, I have to buy trash bags instead. Actual saving: zero. Except the supermarket gets to waffle on about the environment and their "green" image. I was taught in Building Science that yeah, you could send people all round the county installing insulation, but the energy used sending all those trucks around, and the cost, would not be regained for 50 years (or something on that order) given what the insulation actually saved. Technological progress is what has taken us forward, and that's not going to change. We need technology more than ever now, in order to lighten our footprint. Reducing consumption simply leads in the end back to more primitive technologies, which are more environmentally harmful. In the meantime please do enjoy your savings on the electricity bill as I do mine.
but some of those laptops try too hard with silly designs because they have no eye for detail.
That's exactly it. So many times I see bad designs and I think, oh please why did you have to try so hard? I'd sooner settle for a dull plain box. A plain box is a far better thing than causing the user to barf.
On the other hand, the famous Fermi Paradox tells us that we're alone in the galaxy. And considering that's a direct piece of data, I tend to believe this view.
From a human point of view I find the Prime Directive has some basic sense behind it. Arguably we Westerners shouldn't have interfered in Africa, for example, and introduced stuff that disrupted their own culture and put a spanner in the works of them developing in their own time. Of course our planet is small and we couldn't help but interfere. Interstellar space is another matter. To take the argument further, before we could see planets in deep space, we thought this was evidence that they were rare. Before we learnt to fly, we thought it was impossible. There is always some reason why something is absent. Maybe we lack the tech. Maybe aliens are choosing not to land in Central Park. Maybe they are conservationists and they want to minimise their impact. All these are already reasons perfectly evident to humans; we practice this stuff. Why is it so hard to believe that aliens might not have similar reasons?
And now for my favorite Futurama quotation:
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
If your house was designed properly, it wouldn't even need a huge-assed A/C.
Architects have known about these techniques for decades, and there is one problem: in the UK, for example, the housing stock is replaced at about 1% per year. So we will be stuck with housing that can't use this tech for many decades to come. I wish it wasn't so, and that's the state of things. All the homes I have lived in in the UK would have to have been demolished and rebuilt from the ground up, including the local neighborhood, to really become an autonomous, off the grid, facility. The avoidance of doing the numbers has created a generation of eco-conscious people just switching off chargers, but they don't hesitate to take a job where they will have to travel more, or go forth and have more kids. Environmentalism needs to be more than feeling, it has to be a bottom line, and that means looking at the cold hard numbers. People who promote solutions that will take 50 or 100 or 150 years to implement are not going to win any credibility.
Sorry, but that's stupid... and the thesis that the rest of your argument is based on.
Drugs regularly change people and their associations, from folks that get drunk together and end up married, to hippies with peace, love, dope and bad personal hygene. Psychedelics often provide "insight" that alters the way that one percieves when not under the influence of that drug in precisely the way that transcendental religious experience informs the ordinary life of practitioners. In both cases a (to varying extents) dogmatic community offers some interpretation of that experience (i.e. "there is a God") and builds some dogma around it which may be socially useful (i.e. "love your neighbor") or not-so-much (i.e. "thinking about boobies is bad").
Generally speaking they don't create long lasting change on the same level that a deep spiritual practice may do. Drugs do change the person in the moment, for the duration of the trip, and sure enough, their lifestyle may change... but it's just not as profound nor extensive. A rough analogy is that an adranalin rush can give you temporary ability to perform some physical feat, but if you truly want your muscles to grow you need to exercise and work at it for a long time. You don't have to belong to a church of exercise, but the exercise itself is necessary for structural changes. It's not a coincidence that a number of people who use drugs saying it's spiritual, meanwhile have their lives falling apart.
Just because you can replicate the sensory experience of something by "poking" at the brain doesn't mean that a real outside stimulus is false. For instance, I think you could probably make the brain experience the sensory perception of color by "poking" at the visual cortex. That doesn't change the fact that there are real world stimuli that evoke this experience as well. In short, showing that the brain is capable of experiencing something because of a different, artificial stimulus does not predict or rule out the primary "natural" source of that experience. Although it does present an interesting question for evolutionary theory - why does this perception ability exist?
Putting aside whatever abhorrence we may have to religion in general, this point is really really key. If I see an apple some neurons are being excited. When I dream some neurons are being excited. Exciting neurons, isn't that different to taking drugs, in that the brain is physically being affected. But religious and spiritual practice differers in that the person becomes able to enter altered states of percaption at will, and is more akin to learning a skill. Certain drugs are said to give similar experiences to some religious experiences, but the drugs don't tend to change the person. When the drugs wear off so do the experiences, and maybe you're just left with a substance addictions. Meanwhile the spiritual practitioner may genuinely become a kinder and more open minded person over 20 years of concerted and willed effort. I'm not talking about fundamentalist religion which is just about myths and beliefs, but about long term meditation, yoga, etc. Practices that require training. The tricky thing is that there is this view that only the physical realm of experience is "real", and anything mental isn't and is just a hallucination. But ideas, mathematics, concepts, are all mental phenomena, and yet ideas and mathematics obviously do disclose real and useful truths. Concepts may be considered to be "derved" from the real world, but that's a naive notion. Mental phenomena really do exist as a distinct "realm" not directly derived from the physical world.
I was very worried about AGW, but statements like, "neuremberg style trials for denialists" made me think something's not right. Add in character assasination, the way any "contrarian evidence" is assumed to be funded by oil companies, and debating tactics that throw the principle of falsifiability out of the window, made me distrust the whole damnded thing.
The science needs to be free to operate carefully and efficiently, regardless of whether it's finding evidence for or against AGW. The business of science is to discover the truth of the matter, regardless of whether that truth happens to agree with our beliefs and values.
I suspect that the notion of what "good science" is has changed subtly. Good science is science that finds the truth. But scientists who want to be good people, may come to believe that being a good person means creating science that "does good things", such as save the planet. If you want to save the planet because saving the planet is a good thing to do, then there may be a bias towards only studying subjects that offer an opportunity to become an important scientist who makes discoveries about dangers and remedies for the planet.
Good science is purely about the truth. What you do with that knowledge is a different affair altogether. Good science is simply being dispassionately interested in facts. It's not the scientist's job to be a good person. Just give us the facts. We, the people, will worry about the rest.
But the question is for what? In general, they are still working in the interest of their original ideals, the betterment of the planet and its inhabitants, and not for money, not for profit, not for any bottom line or increase in stock price. I am sure that an exception can be found here and there, but in my experience as a volunteer for many environmental organizations over the years, this is the case. So, there is no contradiction between being powerful and influential and being an environmentalist. It is how you become an effective environmentalist.
Well, there's at least two issues to include. For those people who don't call themselves environmentalists, and who rarely think about the environment--for these people their needs and outlook perhaps don't extend very far beyond their jobs and family. It's not that they aren't able to care, it's just that what they care about is limited to a smaller circle. They feel for their family, and identify with their family and their jobs, and that's what they act to defend. The cost of living, material comforts, promotion, etc. So we can see that, to be an environmentalist requires a greater circle, a wider outlook, and you need to feel for the whole ecosystem, and not just a small handful of creatures related by blood ties and professional acquaintance.
To be an environmentalist requires a high cognitive and emotional outlook, and together these are an identity and a way of life. Indeed, for it to work, we need people to make environmentalism a way of life, as all our lifestyle choices have some environmental impact. So the first issue is that environmentalism is about identity and identity is another word for ego. By identifying with the environment we are transforming our sense of selfhood, our sense of identity, and our core values. And the interesting thing about this process is that it's a major shift--and this is one reason why it's so hard to persuade the world to shift--and it's a major shift on a personal level, and major shifts on a personal level are hard and take a long time (literally years if not decades). Now we can see that once the shift has taken place, against the prior resistance to making the shift--it involves some growth and some pain to "expand" into the new broader sense of care--once the shift has taken place it has to consolidate it's cognitive and emotional grounding within a person--it has to become fixed and in a sense rigid. It has to become the focus and the core concern, around which everything else is organised and judged by.
So initially, for the first decade of this fixing into place, other aspects of life literally fall out of the picture. One aspect that's lost is the regard for competition and commerce as vitally important functions in society. The reason for that is that, and this is often overlooked, only affluent people care about the environment, once they have achieved a modest level of affluence (secure home, some smattering of luxury goods, general middle class lifestyle, educated, etc.) Much of the rest of the world is simply too poor to be able to extend their level of care beyond their immediate daily needs. So the affluence is an essential stage which a society must reach, so that it's population as a whole can begin to accept and think about wider planetary issues. The poor, the oppressed, those living in war zones, are simply and essentially concerned with their immediate suffering. It's no accident that environmentalism flourished as a movement in the affluent West, even through the East has had a long tradition of spiritual teachings that, regardless of their metaphysical baggage, emphasised practicing care and compassion. Meanwhile rich middle class hippies in America were expanding their cognitive horizons to view the planet as a whole.
The affluence is essential to saving the planet, because if you take that away, the following generations will simply not care about anything environmental. And that's the delicate balance that needs to be negotiated -- that in ord
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As a geek couple, I can say after 12 + years there are certain real pitfalls.
This may vary for you, but here's a few key items:
Your intellect can be very clever at making up lies, hiding what you really feel, and it basically just gets in the way. This hiding and dissociation from your feelings can take different forms. If you're the kind of guy who tries to be nice and tries to be a good partner, then you may find that you hide your natural anger and hide your resentments. Eventually these will bite you hard. If on the other hand you or your partner are basically quite selfish, lack empathy, and lack a basic goodness, then she or you can do the most outrageously selfish things but rationalize them away using your clever intellect. (I know one woman who would cry "sexist" if you said she was behaving badly, on the basis that had she been a man, you'd have complemented him for being "strong" (some people are educated beyond their intelligence)).
So feeling is very important. But what's also important, and this is beyond therapy now... what is also becoming more important for modern couples is that, once you both accept each other as equals (you're not stereotypical gender roles from the 50s), once you accept each other as equals, doesn't mean you are the same. You still have to be a man and she still has to be a woman, otherwise there is no difference between you, and there is no polarity of attraction, and sex and romance will disappear completely. See David Deida's books for a challenging and difficult slap in the face on this subject. Your woman may often act crazy--she is testing you and she wants to feel your masculine ability to be a solidly dependable rock who can stand there and still love her. Once she knows she can trust you to be a rock, she can relax into her feminine side and blossom and be sexy. And this little drama will repeat itself over and over. If you don't want that, get a best friend and forget about romantic partners.
So here's what he says: A system, such as the health care or legal system, will not be shutdown by one person. In fact, it probably won't even be shutdown by 10 people, maybe 100. And hence, the system is vastly more intelligent than a human, intrinsically since we worked in numbers to evolve this system.
In philosophy (couple of books) there is a discussion about how various fields confuse individuals and systems. Like, Nature is a huge complex system, and man wouldn't survive without Nature, therefore Nature and the ecosystem are more important than Man. Therefore man is just another species, and man must learn his place and minimize his impact. Well, there is some truth to that, but the underlying confusion is that they're comparing an individual organism with a massive complex system, under the guise that the organism is just another complex system anyway. Similar confusions come up when people talk about whether society or the individual is more important. I had one Marxist tell me that I am "nothing" without society. Well, again there is some truth to that, but it is only partially true.
It is not just that we don't like comparing ourselves to other more complex things, and feel uncomfortable about it. It is that these different things have some very different properties. An individual organism like a person has sentience and self-directed intentionality. Society doesn't have sentience (at most it exhibits "flocking" type behaviors) and an ecosystem doesn't have sentience (despite what some new agers claim about the planet being "conscious").
And meanwhile, society has properties that can't be reduced to individual consciousness. We have the English Language, and you have to be born into or join a society of English speakers in order to learn it. We have ethical codes, which again are about social interactions. If I was the only person on the planet, the only being, there would be no need for ethics. They wouldn't exist without some sort of collective to bounce good and bad off of. And these social structures do indeed "last longer" than individuals, and can't be torn down by individuals, not because they are more intelligent, but simply because they exist in a different domain to the individual. They are a different side of the coin. They are distinct but related to the individual.
But also notice, that without individual minds interacting with each other, there would be no social system, no legal frameworks, no ethical codes. Just like you can't have an ecosystem without organisms interacting. And as everyone here is saying, if you start to mis-assign a quality that belongs to one domain (sentience, intentionality, intelligence) to a different domain (ecosystems, legal systems) you end up in weird and wrong places (but its research so who knows what might come of it).
But it does end up looking like, because modeling human intelligence is so hard, we'll just change fields and start modeling systems instead, and you know, maybe we'll get somewhere with that, and nobody will notice we just changed our research area.
Personally I don't get it. Why is it so hard to accept? Reliance on academic authories has its pitfalls of course, but a certain point you need the humility to accept that there is no debate over this particular point among experts.
There are two aspects to all this. One is the scientific method, and the other is the culture of the people practicing as scientists. First and foremost, there needs to be a simple summary of the experiments and data, and that summary needs to make sense. This is where skeptics object to computer model runs being called "experiments", and computer model runs being called "scenarios" whilst being used as if they were projections and predictions. It just does not make sense. (So then we have to repeat the question, where is the evidence, please show us. I personally have swung both ways in this depending on what new evidence is presented.) There is a difference between being "expert" and being a good "judge", and many people are experts in the details of a field, whist lacking the "step back and evaluate the whole picture" judgement. That is where qualifications and job titles stop being useful.
The second aspect is the culture of the people practicing as scientists. People always forget that they are embedded in a culture and part of what they see in the world is through the filter of culture. Now that does not mean that the scientific method is suspect, because the scientific method bypasses cultural bias, when applied rigorously. But when you get into the messy everyday quality issues of grants, funding, professional egos, and just the sheer limits of time, brains, and manpower, then cultural bias will most certainly have an effect. We hope the culture enforces a good bias (like knowing when to ignore pointless exercises that will waste money) but there are no guarantees. And the bigger the culture, the stronger the social cohesion, the harder it becomes to resists the bias when it is in error. So 97% of scientists agree on something, just means the culture is aligned, and forceful, and disagreement is culturally very difficult.
And lastly, the problem being studied it at once very hard as it has many social implications, which is to say, it is of great cultural significance, and so the cultural biases and culture wars are going to have a lot of power. When people and scientists say we must reduce consumption, there is nothing in the scientific method that says we have to deal with the problem by reducing consumption--that is a purely moral judgement. Ask a racist about climate change in Africa and they'll probably think it is a good thing to get rid of all those people. Ask a Christian about climate change and they'll talk about the sanctity of "creation" and preserving God's gift to us. See? It is all cultural judgements.
Even the question of "sustainability" is culturally and ethically specific. People (and people employed as scientists) come at this from the point of view that we have to all care for humanity and the environment and find a balance. Well a hundred years ago, the culture would simply have seen it as a matter of competition for resources, and using climate change to bolster one's own position in the world. Of course, trying to care for the world is a better stance morally, but here's the interesting quirk: most of the world's population and leaders are still in that old-world mentality and culture, and some African leaders openly use droughts and famine as a means to exterminate competing tribes. And the educated in the West are horrified by this, and we want the whole world to adopt a higher moral stance, one where we all work together and help each other, not go to war and kill each other--and several UN related organisations are openly calling for the use of Climate Change as the issue to unite the world politically. So even if the science was not settled, culturally there is a movement to make it so and use it to unify the world's people in a new ethics and morality.
For myself, the scientific metho
The general view is that science equals rationality and religion equals dogma. When people say they dislike religion, they usually mean they dislike dogma. And that's generally fair because most of religion is dogma, as religion was born thousands of years ago, long before we learned to think for ourselves, so most of it was formed amongst dogmatic culture. But some questions still remain, like, what is the meaning of life? Whether you are a tribesman sitting on a rock overlooking great planes ten thousand years ago, or a techy in New York city tapping on your browser on your mobile, that question still remains, because it has to do with our basic original human existence. What is the meaning of your life? And for want of a better word, that is a religious question. (And if you say there is no meaning, it is just about having fun and doing cool stuff and succeeding... well that's your religious answer.)
you're just making the same tired old excuses that those with some vice *always make*. You claim that your body is somehow special and refuses to burn the energy that you put in well guess what
Yeah but what's going out in your pooh?
The body is not a closed system. A friend of mine says I eat like a pig. I have always been fairly thin. Meanwhile he has gained considerable weight and is now diabetic. The energy balance idea is one part of the system. Yeah, eat more, and there is more available to store as fat, but the body's genetics and hormones and so on decide what to store when, and what to eliminate as waste. That's not to say that people who are fat shouldn't do something about it, the problem is the medical advice for the past 25 years has been for the most part wrong. But instead of revising the science, they've just blamed the patients for being "lazy". It is interesting how the low fat advice/consensus kicked in just as obesity rates started to go up, and meanwhile I can very easily do a low carb lifestyle, but still eat as much as I want, and end up losing weight. To lose this much weight I should have been eating nothing but broccoli and going to the gym every day. I did neither.
Don't expect a serious discussion in response to your post. Although most people on Slashdot are smart and keep up with the latest technology, many have rather medieval attitudes when it comes to medicine.
Blaming the patient for the condition is one of those attitudes. Illness is like a "sin" to them, so the solution has to have some penance involved. "No pain, No gain" is one mantra of this religious belief.
Even the medical community has been guilty of this. Ulcers used to be all about stress and lifestyle until one doctor discovered the bacteria that was actually the cause. A simple triple antibiotic "no pain" solution worked while the "painful" lifestyle changes didn't.
Personally I think it is very true. Gary Taubes makes this point also, that according to his reading, the medical research community has known for years that the low-fat + exercise mantra hasn't worked, and that people don't do well on it, but rather than revise the science, even when alternatives are out there like low carb, and people are using those and having success (like me on Paleo), the doctors and scientists just blame people for lacking the will power.
The moralising "no pain no gain" and "everybody is lazy" is used as an excuse for why the advice isn't working. Well I am an very lazy person physically, and my energy and weight improved significantly (I wouldn't go back to my old habits ever) once I adopted the Paleo lifestyle. And it was effortless. And I enjoy food much more now. If someone says that pasta, in any quantity, is part of a "healthy complex carb balance", I just laugh.
It is odd. Many geeks pride themselves on the power of having the right information. And yet when it comes to diet, the notion that the info might be suspect is unacceptable, and instead they say it is about "pain" and "discipline".
The truth is many people who are overweight have never been thin for most of their life and got fat fairly young and developed a victim psychology because of bullying/social prejudice.
Well, be careful there. I lost weight recently, and kept it off, and feel much better for it, but I didn't follow conventional wisdom, ie. the food pyramid + low fat + exercise. I followed the Paleo diet/lifestyle. And it was effortless. And most people would dismiss it as being a "fad" or being contrary to established dietary advice... but so what, it worked very well for me. Not just weight, but energy and mental clarity and mood. If it is a bad diet, after a year and a half, I'll be surprised that my body is fooling me so well.
Anyway, the point is, it makes conventional advice very suspect if not downright wrong. If you tell people to eat low fat and exercise more, and then they are still fat, then what do you do? Blame people for lack of will power? Or maybe perhaps the advice you gave them was wrong? Maybe it is more about the kinds of food that you eat than the amount, and maybe the carbs, even in small quantities like in a small bowl of "healthy-carb" pasta, are actually doing serious damage to the body's hormone balance which would otherwise be regulating fat better?
People think it is simple laws of physics, like the energy balance equation. Well what's the equation for what ends up in excrement? Your body is not a closed system. It is a highly complex system. And hormones play a big part in its regulation. If the kinds of food you're telling people are "healthy" are actually upsetting the hormone system in ways it was never designed to deal with, then yeah, your advice is bad, even wrong, and people can't be blamed.
I'm well aware of the victim mentality. In the case of food though, we need to redo the science before we blame people because our own theories didn't work.
Well, the idea that low fat is good for you is a recent fad--only 30 years or so.
Before that people thought differently. And if you go waaaay back, what were our hunter gatherer ancestors eating? They had no access to bread, pasta, rice, cornflakes. They had access to meat, and fish, and some fruit and veg.
The only couple of times I have lost weight in my life I lived on salad and lean meat/chicken in tiny portions and did AT LEAST 2 hours of heavy excercise a day. Anything short of that doesn't cut it. What's worse is when I've stopped it's taken a couple of months of eating reasonable portions and not excercising as much to put on all the weight I've lost over 6-8 months AND add some more kilos as the body overcompensates.
I don't know if you've tried the Paleo lifestyle. Basically is says that processed carbs are not a natural food for humans (they've only existed since agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago, a mere blink of an eye as far as our bodies are concerned). The processed carbs, that's pasta, bread, rice, cereals, etc. just mess with our hormone and insulin levels and bloat our guts. Our guts are small, suggesting anyway that they are meant for meat. Eat as much meat and fish, and natural carbs in the form of vegetables and fruit (but not potatoes) as you want to feel satisfied.
Because it is not a starvation diet, you can just continue doing it as a lifestyle, and gradually your weight normalizes. And because it is not starvation, or restriction, you can keep doing it indefinitely. The trick is to stay off those processed carbs, and let your body return to normal.
Also, it is the carbs that increase appetite, whilst meat and fat are very satisfying. You may end up eating fewer calories or more, but who cares that's not the point. The point is that the high insulin messes with your body and causes fat accumulation. Insulin is a hormone and as such its job is to control bodily processes. There was one study quoted by Gary Taubes where they put a certain animal on a starvation diet. The animal was at a point in its life where it was programmed to put on fat before hibernating, but here it was being fed way too little, so what the animals' body did was it became fat whilst on a starvation diet.... by eating up its internal organs. The animal died fat and of organ failure/starved.
So we have to go with our natural body's system and what it does and doesn't need. Carbs are looking more and more like the culprit. Unfortunately there's been a 30-year anti-fat consensus, and when the data shows that people don't lose weight despite the "best advice", instead of questioning the theory, the consensus blames people for lack of will-power. It is pretty sickening really.
The carbs jack up insulin, and the insulin tells your fat cells to store fat. Eventually people become diabetic, and obese. If you simply cut the carbs out, you can stop counting calories. Appetite normalizes, wight normalizes, and people report other things like their minds become clearer, their emotions become more even. Speaking for myself I always had a vague depression and I usually woke up in the morning foggy and groggy. That lifted as soon as I cut carbs and ate lots of meat and fish and veg. No rice, no pasta, no bread, no cornflakes. Fruit is OK but avoid fruit juice.
Uhh... I'm pretty sure if you can burn more calories than you consume, while still gaining/maintaining weight, then you could quite comfortably claim the Randi Challenge prize. And then you could sell your body to science for billions.
The point is that the energy balance equation is way oversimplified for a human biological open system. It leads people to the wrong conclusion. A study found that schoolchildren given less exercise at school, ended up doing more at home. Other studies find that when people eat less, they move less. So you have to look at the whole system, and understand what's going on. The restricted carbohydrate hypothesis is basically that before the invention of agriculture just 10,000 years ago, our bodies were not subjected to huge quantities of carbs like bread, pasta, cereals, rice, and so on. All that stuff is not a natural diet for human type bodies in the last million years. And what they do is they massively increase the amount of sugar in our bodies (carbs turn to sugar) and the hypothesis is that the high sugar raises our insulin and raises the rate at which we put on fat. It is a hormonal control system, like, because your body's hormones are a control system for what your body should be doing, and the carbs increase sugar which send your hormone insulin way out of whack, and your fat cells get told to open up and store more. I call it a hypothesis but since I started using it, I have lost 10% of my weight, and I wasn't fat to start with, just a bit of belly fat. My stomach is flat, my waist has shrunk, and all without making any effort to exercise. The energy balance equation puts too much emphasis on exercise--you don't need any, you just need to not eat processed carbs, and stick to meat and veg and fruit and as it is a more natural diet, the body does well on it.
How many such people actually exist? With every slashdot article mentioning the moon landings, there is a great uproar about these heretics. I'm sure they exist, but I've never met one, nor do I recall even reading a post from one on slashdot. It makes me wonder why these people (whoever they are) get under people's skin so much.
I've met one in the street. He was a Hare Krishna and wanted me to buy a few of his books. I'm a nice guy so I listen for a while. He gets on to the subject of the moon landings, and he tells me that the moon landings were faked, because the Gita declares "man cannot walk on other worlds". He was quite exited about this confirmation from the Gita. I pointed out that when the Gita was written, they hadn't invented the space suit.
We will send out robots. With our brains uploaded into them.
Can we really do something so weird or is it just that we know so little about the brain?
I'd sooner believe that we'll invent a space warp, than be able to "upload" our consciousness. We're not just a set of abstract information, floating in abstract conceptual space, independent of some lower level transport. Rather, our consciousness is our body.
Believing we can upload our brains... that's like believing in Reincarnation and astral projection. I think that's a subtle point well made by Galactica...
Why should the human race survive?
Why should Nature survive?
Kudos to you Sir, for mentioning "complexity". Complexity is a word that is just not heard enough when anybody talks about the environment, the economy, society, and any sort of change. Your model may or may not be worthless.... but at least you talk about complexity, about those weird counterintuitive effects in complex systems, and that is what anyone serious about human society and other species' survival should be talking about.
if everybody did it, we could easily halve the power consumed by households!
I agree with you if you look at it that way. But our world is far more varied and complex, and not everyone is like you. My carbon footprint happens to be tiny (one room apartment, never owned a car, work locally, haven't flown anywhere in 10 years, no kids.) But all those things are for other reasons. Try to change people so that they make a real noticeable savings in energy, like we can start turning off power stations, and it becomes very very tricky. It is like we think we are the first generation to ever think about conservation, when actually every generation has had to deal with supply problems for resources, and the world we have today is the best that they could achieve. Turning off a few things is obviously to a lot of people just a symbolic gesture. Like now they charge for carrier bags at the supermarket to encourage people to reuse the bags. I was already re-using the bags for trash and now that they charge for them, I have to buy trash bags instead. Actual saving: zero. Except the supermarket gets to waffle on about the environment and their "green" image.
I was taught in Building Science that yeah, you could send people all round the county installing insulation, but the energy used sending all those trucks around, and the cost, would not be regained for 50 years (or something on that order) given what the insulation actually saved.
Technological progress is what has taken us forward, and that's not going to change. We need technology more than ever now, in order to lighten our footprint. Reducing consumption simply leads in the end back to more primitive technologies, which are more environmentally harmful. In the meantime please do enjoy your savings on the electricity bill as I do mine.
The Queller Drive!
The aliens will want revenge!!
Not even Martin Landau could sweet talk them out of it!
Thank you.
Very much agree.
but some of those laptops try too hard with silly designs because they have no eye for detail.
That's exactly it. So many times I see bad designs and I think, oh please why did you have to try so hard? I'd sooner settle for a dull plain box. A plain box is a far better thing than causing the user to barf.
On the other hand, the famous Fermi Paradox tells us that we're alone in the galaxy. And considering that's a direct piece of data, I tend to believe this view.
From a human point of view I find the Prime Directive has some basic sense behind it. Arguably we Westerners shouldn't have interfered in Africa, for example, and introduced stuff that disrupted their own culture and put a spanner in the works of them developing in their own time. Of course our planet is small and we couldn't help but interfere. Interstellar space is another matter. To take the argument further, before we could see planets in deep space, we thought this was evidence that they were rare. Before we learnt to fly, we thought it was impossible. There is always some reason why something is absent. Maybe we lack the tech. Maybe aliens are choosing not to land in Central Park. Maybe they are conservationists and they want to minimise their impact. All these are already reasons perfectly evident to humans; we practice this stuff. Why is it so hard to believe that aliens might not have similar reasons?
And now for my favorite Futurama quotation:
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
my car keys.
If your house was designed properly, it wouldn't even need a huge-assed A/C.
Architects have known about these techniques for decades, and there is one problem: in the UK, for example, the housing stock is replaced at about 1% per year. So we will be stuck with housing that can't use this tech for many decades to come. I wish it wasn't so, and that's the state of things. All the homes I have lived in in the UK would have to have been demolished and rebuilt from the ground up, including the local neighborhood, to really become an autonomous, off the grid, facility. The avoidance of doing the numbers has created a generation of eco-conscious people just switching off chargers, but they don't hesitate to take a job where they will have to travel more, or go forth and have more kids. Environmentalism needs to be more than feeling, it has to be a bottom line, and that means looking at the cold hard numbers. People who promote solutions that will take 50 or 100 or 150 years to implement are not going to win any credibility.
Generally speaking they don't create long lasting change on the same level that a deep spiritual practice may do. Drugs do change the person in the moment, for the duration of the trip, and sure enough, their lifestyle may change... but it's just not as profound nor extensive. A rough analogy is that an adranalin rush can give you temporary ability to perform some physical feat, but if you truly want your muscles to grow you need to exercise and work at it for a long time. You don't have to belong to a church of exercise, but the exercise itself is necessary for structural changes. It's not a coincidence that a number of people who use drugs saying it's spiritual, meanwhile have their lives falling apart.
Putting aside whatever abhorrence we may have to religion in general, this point is really really key. If I see an apple some neurons are being excited. When I dream some neurons are being excited. Exciting neurons, isn't that different to taking drugs, in that the brain is physically being affected. But religious and spiritual practice differers in that the person becomes able to enter altered states of percaption at will, and is more akin to learning a skill. Certain drugs are said to give similar experiences to some religious experiences, but the drugs don't tend to change the person. When the drugs wear off so do the experiences, and maybe you're just left with a substance addictions. Meanwhile the spiritual practitioner may genuinely become a kinder and more open minded person over 20 years of concerted and willed effort. I'm not talking about fundamentalist religion which is just about myths and beliefs, but about long term meditation, yoga, etc. Practices that require training. The tricky thing is that there is this view that only the physical realm of experience is "real", and anything mental isn't and is just a hallucination. But ideas, mathematics, concepts, are all mental phenomena, and yet ideas and mathematics obviously do disclose real and useful truths. Concepts may be considered to be "derved" from the real world, but that's a naive notion. Mental phenomena really do exist as a distinct "realm" not directly derived from the physical world.
I was very worried about AGW, but statements like, "neuremberg style trials for denialists" made me think something's not right. Add in character assasination, the way any "contrarian evidence" is assumed to be funded by oil companies, and debating tactics that throw the principle of falsifiability out of the window, made me distrust the whole damnded thing.
The science needs to be free to operate carefully and efficiently, regardless of whether it's finding evidence for or against AGW. The business of science is to discover the truth of the matter, regardless of whether that truth happens to agree with our beliefs and values.
I suspect that the notion of what "good science" is has changed subtly. Good science is science that finds the truth. But scientists who want to be good people, may come to believe that being a good person means creating science that "does good things", such as save the planet. If you want to save the planet because saving the planet is a good thing to do, then there may be a bias towards only studying subjects that offer an opportunity to become an important scientist who makes discoveries about dangers and remedies for the planet.
Good science is purely about the truth. What you do with that knowledge is a different affair altogether. Good science is simply being dispassionately interested in facts. It's not the scientist's job to be a good person. Just give us the facts. We, the people, will worry about the rest.
Well, there's at least two issues to include. For those people who don't call themselves environmentalists, and who rarely think about the environment--for these people their needs and outlook perhaps don't extend very far beyond their jobs and family. It's not that they aren't able to care, it's just that what they care about is limited to a smaller circle. They feel for their family, and identify with their family and their jobs, and that's what they act to defend. The cost of living, material comforts, promotion, etc. So we can see that, to be an environmentalist requires a greater circle, a wider outlook, and you need to feel for the whole ecosystem, and not just a small handful of creatures related by blood ties and professional acquaintance.
To be an environmentalist requires a high cognitive and emotional outlook, and together these are an identity and a way of life. Indeed, for it to work, we need people to make environmentalism a way of life, as all our lifestyle choices have some environmental impact. So the first issue is that environmentalism is about identity and identity is another word for ego. By identifying with the environment we are transforming our sense of selfhood, our sense of identity, and our core values. And the interesting thing about this process is that it's a major shift--and this is one reason why it's so hard to persuade the world to shift--and it's a major shift on a personal level, and major shifts on a personal level are hard and take a long time (literally years if not decades). Now we can see that once the shift has taken place, against the prior resistance to making the shift--it involves some growth and some pain to "expand" into the new broader sense of care--once the shift has taken place it has to consolidate it's cognitive and emotional grounding within a person--it has to become fixed and in a sense rigid. It has to become the focus and the core concern, around which everything else is organised and judged by.
So initially, for the first decade of this fixing into place, other aspects of life literally fall out of the picture. One aspect that's lost is the regard for competition and commerce as vitally important functions in society. The reason for that is that, and this is often overlooked, only affluent people care about the environment, once they have achieved a modest level of affluence (secure home, some smattering of luxury goods, general middle class lifestyle, educated, etc.) Much of the rest of the world is simply too poor to be able to extend their level of care beyond their immediate daily needs. So the affluence is an essential stage which a society must reach, so that it's population as a whole can begin to accept and think about wider planetary issues. The poor, the oppressed, those living in war zones, are simply and essentially concerned with their immediate suffering. It's no accident that environmentalism flourished as a movement in the affluent West, even through the East has had a long tradition of spiritual teachings that, regardless of their metaphysical baggage, emphasised practicing care and compassion. Meanwhile rich middle class hippies in America were expanding their cognitive horizons to view the planet as a whole.
The affluence is essential to saving the planet, because if you take that away, the following generations will simply not care about anything environmental. And that's the delicate balance that needs to be negotiated -- that in ord