narrative collapse

Layers of organization in our communities include those that look: (a) outward from the boundary of individual families including matters of social hierarchy i.e. politics, (b) inward from the boundary of culture including sports and religion, and (c) outward from the boundary of culture including the guidelines for many professions. In this context two effects on narrative, that reduce its effectiveness, may be expected to occur especially when resources are scare.

One of these effects is that narrative on levels (b) and (c) may be trivialized to level (a) thinking, i.e. politicized. This for example happens with different groups when the topics of inequality and climate-change come up, with the result that the structural problem and consequences underlying these things end up being ignored.

The second effect, that works hand in glove with the first, is our tendency to think of causes as organismic, i.e. to explain problems in terms of bad guys and good guys, rather than in terms of natural processes in a world which will always be sending us new challenges. As a result, we have a tendency to react to real effects in the world around by focusing on a personality soap opera that has little to do with the problem itself.

How can we fix that?

income & offspring

Eric Chaisson has argued that community-level health (e.g. as measured robustly by task layer multiplicity) is linked to free energy per capita. This is expected to peak (and perhaps has peaked in some places) as our environmental impact builds and as our population continues to grow.

Although wealth imbalance clearly hurts community-level health, arguments for blind redistribution are well-known to put incentives (i.e. natural selection pressures) in the wrong place. In steady-state, income should be linked with contributions to community-level health e.g. to the nurturing of subsystem correlations (especially one's own) that look in & out from the boundaries of skin, family and culture.

How to do this in the face of pressure from defectors (this is part of human nature) will always be a work in progress. But it does mean that sustainable-incentive based resource distribution, which limits population growth as well as sequestration of resources in a tiny fraction of the population, is part of our challenge now and in the future.

Opposites

The opposite of an unbalanced narrative is also an unbalanced narrative. We can do better than both.

quantifying risk

Use of probabilties p and surprisals k ln[1/p] in communicating and monitoring risks to medical patients could make patient decisions about actions with a small chance of dire outcomes as informed as possible. This could reduce the costs of medical malpractice in the long run by empowering patients with tools to make informed and responsible choices, making the need for legal redress less frequent. Thus the media could play a key role in reducing the costs of defensive medicine.

The same may be true of defensive practices e.g. in food and chemical distribution. Instead of all bakery goods saying "manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts" so that folks with a peanut allergy (not to mention teachers wanting to bring a treat to class) are thrown under the bus, instead teach the population to quantify risk (using surprisals or probabilities) and then develop guidelines for putting the risk into context based on real data. In this way, folks who use a product take ownership of the risk that it confers at the outset, taking personal injury-suit lawyers out of the loop except to the extent that they can contest the data used to report the risk to begin with.

The bad news is that every thing you do brings with it a finite risk of almost any dire outcome. The good news is that this risk is likely to be much smaller than you might guess, from the non-quantitative hype that the media brings to every problem that it decides to fan flames on today.