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.

balanced imperfection

Any society that perfects reproduction of molecular or idea codes, to the point where it is accurate, may be in deep trouble. This is because tradition, most likely, will always need to evolve. As a result (along with accurate replication) communities may also benefit from a healthy amount of diversity, in both genes and in ways to think!

tech vs. manners & skill

Technology, writ large, opens new doors for good and for bad.  Concentrating on the latter here, technology can make us weak and ill-behaved, so that we may want to work to correct for these effects. For example, rely on automatic parking and GPS directions and our population's spatial awareness and spatial management skills may suffer.

Ethics and manners also suffer. For instance, in the first half of the 20th century, it was by & large good manners not to bring a stick to a fist fight, not to bring a knife to a stick fight, not to bring a gun to a knife fight, etc. This ethic was there to correct for the opportunity that technology provided for devaluing fitness and bypassing time-honored skills. Respect for these levels of engagement, as well as our obligation to have manners and to respect skills, is today strangely absent from popular narratives.

Laws themselves are a form of technology that can in turn prompt us to ignore our cultural obligation to be ethical as well. Reliance on any one technology, including laws, smartphones, or guns, can in this way nurture a population that gives short shrift to spatial and social awareness, fails to reward physical fitness, and selects against cultural and professional morality. Dropping free-energy per capita may eventually lead to the decline of our social systems, but we may want to try to keep new technologies from helping expedite that decline.

highlighting o-centricity

What are a list of places where our preference for focusing on "organism agents as the cause of everything" shows up, for the better and for the worse?

Examples might include:

• The Olympics, and the enjoyment we take in thinking about sports heroes in general,
• Our blindness to "the medium as the message", highlighted in that specific context by Marshall McLuhan,
• The media's obsession with treating whole countries and corporations as organisms, personified by a single leader,
• Madame Curie's comment that we should "be less curious about people and more curious about ideas".
• The way our "public relations module" often caters to a homunculus theory of the way that our own minds work,

and what else?