shared adaptations

Thanks to our evolutionary history over the last million years (and then some), we share:

• recognition of our family as different from "non-family", although known as "nepotism" when overdone, as "subsystem correlations that look inward from our genetic code pool"  is a key element of our social structure,
• recognition of our culture as different from "other culture", although known as "discriminant racism" when overdone, as "subsystem correlations that look inward from our idea code pool" is also a key element of our social structure.
• obsession with organism-centric anecdotes (especially about folks who are either "super bad" or "super good") as distinct from statistically significant data (Zzz...) on processes that are key to our individual and community health in the world around.

Although we share these things, we might also want to recognize the need for balance with the bewildering array of unique tasks that each of faces in buffering correlations that look in and out from our boundaries of self, family, and culture. Electronic media that panders to one or another unbalanced aspect of these paleolithic traits is a fast path to social systems with no community at all, something that I for one would prefer not to hurry.

Balance narratives...

...but be cautious, because the opposite of an unbalanced narrative is automatically also unbalanced.

anecdotes & o-centricity

Modern electronic communications give audio-visual anecdotes new power, but their appeal to our paleolithic adaptions (like organism centricity in general and our attraction to leader worship in particular) can also decrease our awareness of quantitative developments in the larger processes that affect community-level health. What are some ways to help out with this problem?

verbal diarrhea

Try resisting the temptation to pass it around.

yellow reporting

New roles for technology historically give rise to often unexpected consequences, that stem from the fact that our paleolithic adaptations did not take them into account. The list includes tools for transportation, housing, and fighting. It also includes communication technologies. Invention of the printing press for books and newspapers, of radio, of television, and of the internet are some of the more memorable examples.

Yellow journalism historically is associated with communications that are rewarded by their consumers not for their usefulness but for their sensationalism, or for the fear and/or xenophobia that they trigger, etc. Yellow reporting in that sense is of course now born again in new ways with modern social media, and that rebirth includes not only reporting about policy issues and matters of belief, but also about science. The worst examples of this are linked to the personal injury suit industry, but empty sensationalism in routine scientific reporting is also all over the place. Might in that context a more sophisticated approach to balanced narratives be helpful for the general public, as well as for journalism professionals?

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.