Category: Grid-Group

Adrian Lambert says neurodivergent people are early recognisers of civilisational collapse because they are predisposed to pattern matching. 

[Why some people see collapse earlier]

I’d be interested to see some empirical research about this claim. It should be straightforward to come by since both ‘neurodivergence’ and ‘collapse awareness’ (or ‘acceptance’) are in principle measurable and can be correlated (or not).

My own neurodivergent take is that the main differences between those who recognise collapse, those who deny it, and everyone in between is not about neurodivergence or neurotypicality. I’m already pattern-matching, but the important pattern here is grid-group cultural theory. This proposes there are four distinct worldviews which see the prospect of collapse very differently from one another.

The egalitarian worldview is already primed for collapse because it sees resources as perpetually scarce.

The Individualist worldview scoffs at this negativity and claims we live in a utopia of opportunity, fuelled by human ingenuity as much as by physical resources.

And there are two more worldviews with different perspectives still. The Hierarchical worldview assumes the main problem is management, which can be resolved with more management. Lastly, the Fatalist worldview has no idea about the collapse of civilisation but trusts to luck and keeping your head down, as ever.

These worldviews, the ‘four cultures’ of the theory, argue strongly about the prospect of civilisational collapse. And this has little to do with neurodiversity. As I say, though, it would be interesting to see some actual research on the matter.

As Richard Fardon says in the introduction to his edited collection of articles by Mary Douglas, the social anthropologist who first developed the theory of four cultures:

“Values are made real through dangers that can be unleashed in the guise of properties of the social and natural orders within which we live”

Richard Fardon, in Mary Douglas, A Very Personal Method. Sage, 2013, p.7.

In other words, the question of civilisational collapse is perpetually marshalled differently by the four cultures to promote their respective positions and denigrate those of the others. ‘Acceptance’, ‘denial’ or any other principled position is conditioned by this prior commitment.

Meanwhile, a scholarly but very accessible discussion of how this framework can inform our understanding is available in Mike Hume’s book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change, and in his subsequent ‘climates and cultures’ work.

[Why We Disagree About Climate Change | Wikipedia]

See also:

[On the science and politics of climate change]

Four ways to assemble the evidence on climate change

How it is possible to persuade people who just don’t want to be persuaded?

The answer, from a Cultural Theory perspective, is fairly straightforward. People and institutions with different cultural biases create, fund, support and pay attention to four very different types of evidence. What matters then, if you want to persuade large numbers of people, is to produce and shape a variety of evidence. Here are some suggestions for what climate change might look like, viewed four different ways.

Just before we begin, note that science communicators seem to be ridiculously bad at doing this. Their so-called evidence and so-called solutions are almost always heavily weighted towards the Egalitarian version of climate change alone, which is why their views are contested. As we’re about to show, there’s much more to life than egalitarianism, but since that’s how much of the climate discourse is presented, that’s where we’ll start.

Egalitarian Climate Change:

On this view you should demonstrate with science and/or emotive rhetoric (whichever appeals best to hearts and minds, the Elephant and the rider as Jonathan Haidt would say) that our very civilization is in danger unless we change our profligate ways. Changing our energy sources is to be depicted as only a preliminary step to changing our values. Peter Preston said we need an ‘eco-prophet’ to show us how to believe but this is emphatically wrong. Such Egalitarian eco-prophets as have arisen – Al Gore in the US, George Monbiot in the UK, and many others – have been shot down in flames, derided as extremists.

Egalitarian authority comes most authentically not from prophets but from the masses. Common sense, what everyone knows, is what is true. That’s why ‘scientific consensus’ is so much more important to Egalitarians than it is to scientists themselves (scientists themselves rather like arguing and starting feuds).

The reason science communicators shouldn’t just bang on about deadly threats and fragility and about changing our values is that most people don’t warm to these egalitarian signals. For example, many people are more in tune with an Individualist worldview, which is quite different.

Individualist Climate Change:

From an Individualist perspective you should provide information and examples on how to make a profit from climate change, appealing all the while to visceral self-interest. If it turns out you actually can make a profit from climate change, and do so better than your competitors, then climate change must surely exist.

Alternatively, and inversely, demonstrate concrete (not hypothetical or future) impacts on the bottom line of those institutions that have ignored Climate Change.

On this view scientists who make photovoltaics competitive with coal fired power stations are doing more to combat climate change than any amount of hand-wringing by the likes of James Hanson, who is simply discounted as a crypto-religious or crypto-communist ‘fanatical environmentalist’. A figurehead Individualist expert would be someone like Shi Zhengrong, China’s first solar billionaire. Money doesn’t lie.

Hierarchical Climate Change

Paying attention to the Hierarchical perspective you should develop and promote management theories of climate change. If you can reconfigure governance to take account of climate change in ways that enhance management functions, and if it makes evident sense to have a Minister for Climate Change, then climate change must certainly exist.

Alternatively, demonstrate (perhaps by means of case study) real and damaging governance failures of those institutions that have ignored Climate Change in their management structure. What risks demonstrably increase when you don’t have a Minister for Climate Change or a framework for global climate change governance? Ideal Hierarchical experts will be at or near the top of the tree. It will be their status that speaks loudest. If Prince Charles and the Pope both worry about climate change, who are we to argue? Failing the biggest guns, the Head of the Royal Society will do at a pinch, unless you can find someone more senior.

Fatalist Climate Change

With reference to the Fatalist perspective you should demonstrate the randomizing impact of climate change on the status quo. Fatalism thrives by enhancing and systematizing the luck of the draw and turning it into policy (explicit or, more often than not, tacit), or reward (the lottery). Fatalists tend to say ‘climates change!’ with the twin implications that it was always like this and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Fatalist institutions tend to make a virtue of doing nothing about it, and try to make sure no one else does anything about it either.

What not to do

If you keep using only one of the four perspectives described by Cultural Theory, your message will appeal to some people but deeply antagonise many others. It will be welcomed in some social settings but shunned in others. Don’t keep doing this, because so far it hasn’t worked.

There is nothing wrong with professing the view that in light of dangerous climate change problems what the world needs now is global governance. But to expect that this will not be seen as politically inflammatory is to be naive in the extreme. The global governance line works well before Hierarchical audiences (bureaucrats and some heads of state, for instance), but really badly before audiences with the other three cultural biases.

Simply put, any media release about a new piece of climate research could do with not one but four different versions, each targeted at a different cultural bias. A more sophisticated version of this would be to develop a communications strategy which includes interaction with all four cultural world views, not just with one or two, as at present.

A little help from Aristotle

But that’s not quite enough. Prof Dan Kahn at the Cultural Cognition Project has suggested that any message about science really has two channels: the content itself, and the cultural meaning attached to that content. He rightly suggests communicators need to be aware of both. But his model reminded me of Aristotle, who thought there were three, not just two, channels of communication.

In presenting an argument, Aristotle’s classic rhetorical concepts of ethos, pathos and logos still have a great deal to contribute (Gottweis in Fisher, Miller and Sidney, 2007: 237-250). Too many presentations rely almost exclusively on logos, the actual ideas and concepts, the contents of the presentation. This is certainly important but in some ways overshadowed by the other two. Pathos refers to the emotions evoked and ethos refers to the character of the person delivering the message. These are both highly important but often underused. The implication of Cultural Theory is that all three, ethos, pathos and logos, are configured according to the main cultural biases. An egalitarian logos, for example, may work best when it is supported by Egalitarian pathos and Egalitarian ethos. On the other hand, a speaker trying to appeal to an Individualist audience may keep some of the Egalitarian logos, while appealing to an Individualist pathos and using an Individualist ethos.

More reading:

The dark side of Cultural Theory

Edit: changed the title of this post from ‘make up’ to ‘assemble’. See the discussion in the comments. And edited 16th October 2023 to link the egalitarian and individualist sections a bit more clearly.

A two-bit theory of social reality

English: Publicity photo from the game show Tw...
Image via Wikipedia

It is not obvious whether the world is analogue or binary, continuous or discrete. It’s a live question and the subject of a recent essay contest set up by the Foundational Questions Institute.

That said it seems clear that much or our social lives revolves around the assumption that the world is indeed binary. Male or female, black or white, left or right – simple binary oppositions structure our social relationships through and through. Moreover, we live in an era when developments in technology make it abundantly clear that the bifurcation of the universe into one and zero brings great leaps forward. Why do we do this to ourselves? What possible benefit can it confer?

One answer might be that it makes things simpler, thus allowing us to make faster decisions.

The reason Twenty Questions pretty much works as a parlour game is that twenty yes/no answers are all it takes to distinguish between 1,048,576 (220) discrete subjects. This seems to be roughly the high end of a practical taxonomy for personal use. By way of comparison, note that if one was to play the game using English Wikipedia articles it would need to be renamed Twenty-Two Questions to cover the 3,673,861 articles in existence in mid-2011 (222 = 4,194,304).

The promise of information theory, on some accounts, is that we can sort everything in binary terms. In John Wheeler’s well-known formulation, ‘it from bit’:

“It is not unreasonable to imagine that information sits at the core of physics, just as it sits at the core of a computer.

It from bit. Otherwise put, every ‘it’—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.” (John Archibald Wheeler 1990: 5)

In physics perhaps (more generally, in the ‘ontological basement’, as Paul Davies puts it). But as any one who has ever heard of racism or sexism will recognise, splitting the social world into opposed pairs often makes us get things very, very wrong. Our fondness for quick and dirty social heuristics has a habit of misleading us. Simpler does not by any means equate to more correct. Reality is more complex than a game of Twenty Questions and it takes more than yes/no answers to parse the social.

So it is not surprising that when faced with various kinds of binary sorting mechanism we experience a sense of disappointment. What may have seemed like a good idea – to simplify by means of bifurcation – turns out to produce less than useful information. The left/right dichotomy in politics turns out to be forced and to obscure almost as much as it reveals. Similarly it turns out that gender is a poor indicator of ability to own property or many of the other issues it has historically been used to indicate. And as for skin colour, this seems to produce far more noise than signal…. It is as though the usefulness of binary sorting has got the better of us and instead of recognising its limits we have tried to sort everything in binary terms. The reward is conservation of energy. The cost is accuracy.

What if the cost is too high? A recent example is a paper claiming to provide insights into differences between national cultures on the basis of a distinction between ‘tight’ and ‘loose’ cultures. This is a fairly well-rehearsed but contentious pair of categories that derives from anthropology.

The problem is that the ranking of nations on this basis doesn’t appear to shed much light on the national characteristics in question. Again, what is claimed to be signal looks suspiciously like noise.

I remain to be convinced but in the meantime I want to propose an interim alternative.

Instead of simplifying by means of one bit of information (tight/loose, black/white, male/female, left/right) we should do so by means of at least two bits of information.

It seems to me that a binary choice, between yes and no or between 1 and 0 always implies a set of Boolean operands just waiting to be used. Yes or no always begs the question: Yes and no?

One way of depicting this expanded set of choices is to frame each binary single bit choice as a two bit choice:

YES                 Yes and not No                      Yes and No

NOT YES       Not Yes and not No              No and not Yes

                          NOT NO                                           NO

This is not to suggest that reality actually is made up of two bits, or any other number of bits for that matter, information theorists notwithstanding. Rather, my claim is that if, in seeking to understand the social world, there is indeed a sweet spot somewhere between energy conservation and accuracy, then a two bit heuristic process is closer to that sweet spot than our current dominant but misleading fondness for single bit, yes/no thinking.

It from two bits.

References:

Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study

Michele J. Gelfand, Jana L. Raver, Lisa Nishii, Lisa M. Leslie, Janetta Lun, Beng Chong Lim, Lili Duan, Assaf Almaliach, Soon Ang, Jakobina Arnadottir, Zeynep Aycan, Klaus Boehnke, Pawel Boski, Rosa Cabecinhas, Darius Chan, Jagdeep Chhokar, Alessia D’Amato, Montse Ferrer, Iris C. Fischlmayr, Ronald Fischer, Marta Fülöp, James Georgas, Emiko S. Kashima, Yoshishima Kashima, Kibum Kim, Alain Lempereur, Patricia Marquez, Rozhan Othman, Bert Overlaet, Penny Panagiotopoulou, Karl Peltzer, Lorena R. Perez-Florizno, Larisa Ponomarenko, Anu Realo, Vidar Schei, Manfred Schmitt, Peter B. Smith, Nazar Soomro, Erna Szabo, Nalinee Taveesin, Midori Toyama, Evert Van de Vliert, Naharika Vohra, Colleen Ward, and Susumu Yamaguchi

Science 27 May 2011: 332 (6033), 1100-1104. [DOI:10.1126/science.1197754]

Why do People play the Lottery?

Question mark
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Well, why do they? It’s the kind of question only those who don’t do it would bother asking. I admit I’m one of them. The lottery is a mystery to me – self-evidently daft,  like a slow-motion version of taking a pile of cash and setting fire to it. Why would anyone do it?

One way of answering this kind of question is presented by science journalist Jonah Lehrer: let’s ask some behavioural economists!

The chief conclusion is as follows:

In two experiments conducted with low-income participants, we examine how implicit comparisons with other income classes increase low-income individuals’ desire to play the lottery. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to purchase lottery tickets when they were primed to perceive that their own income was low relative to an implicit standard. In Experiment 2, participants purchased more tickets when they considered situations in which rich people or poor people receive advantages, implicitly highlighting the fact that everyone has an equal chance of winning the lottery.

An Unsafe Bet

Jim Orford has a book out entitled An Unsafe Bet? The Dangerous Expansion of Gambling and the Debate we should be having. In it he identifies eleven commonly used discourses of gambling. Of these six discourses broadly support the liberalisation of gambling and five support the increase of restrictions on gambling. Orford is fairly relaxed about this typology and even says: ‘Other people would no doubt produce a different list’ (123).

This to Fourcultures is as a red rag to a bull, so here goes.

Source: Orford 2011:124

For my money, Orford’s typology lacks explanatory power. Why do some people want to restrict gambling? Because they see it as ‘a destroyer’. But why do they see it as a destroyer? Because it is, of course (at least to them)! So why do other people want to liberalize gambling? Because they see it as ‘freedom to choose’. But why do they see it this way? Because it is of course (to them, at least).

The elements of gambling discourse identified by Orford can be usefully organised around the framework of Cultural Theory’s four cultural biases. These actually explain where these kinds of basic commitment (‘it just is!’) come from and how they coalesce with other basic commitments.

Fatalist Gambling

For Fatalism the luck of the draw is how the world works. So gambling is ‘normal business’ and ‘harmless entertainment’. But more than that, it’s a ritual enactment of a very deep seated insight into the nature of the universe. Blind chance rules all and we’re fools if we think otherwise. Gambling enables us to become more exposed to the elemental forces of the universe. Anti-gambling messages that point out how pernicious gambling is will fail dismally here. Of course the world is pernicious. Tell us something we didn’t know.

Individualist Gambling

For the Individualist cultural bias, gambling is a legitimate means of making money from people who choose freely to gamble. It’s certainly a means of ‘cultural and economic enhancement’ and it would be irresponsible to let the opportunity to profit go to waste. Anti-gambling messages risk failure here too unless they appeal to the financial benefits of restricting gambling (in other words, how can businesses make a profit if they don’t invest in gambling?) Further, they need to reckon with the reality that Individualism sees risk not as a problem but as an opportunity. The greater the stakes, the greater the reward. An ‘unsafe bet’ is the only kind worth making.

Egalitarian Gambling

For the Egalitarian cultural bias, gambling is immoral, destructive exploitation. Worse, it is an affront to the Egalitarian ideal of equality of outcome. Gambling should not need to be regulated. Instead people should have a turn of heart, a change in values, which would help them see for themselves that it’s just ‘tawdry’. Anti-gambling messages are often explicitly egalitarian in tone, which is very off-putting in institutional contexts that are not Egalitarian. The trick, as you probably realise by now, is to match the message as much as possible to the cultural bias of the hearers.

Hierarchical gambling

The Hierarchical cultural bias sees gambling as an opportunity for striking the correct balance between destruction and harm, exploitation and profit, restriction and permission. The more bureaucracy the better. Gambling itself may or may not be rational behaviour. What matters is that the regulations surrounding it are rational. Gambling is not intrinsically responsible, since nothing is, but it can be made responsible, normal business by following the rules [note that without the rules in place, gambling becomes irresponsible and abnormal]. In a hierarchical context the anti-gambling message is heard as a marvelous opportunity to increase regulation, and therefore to increase the prestige of the entity doing the regulating. Gambling reformers should note that whereas they themselves may want social change, they will find themselves –  if they’re not careful –  being offered more red tape instead.

In summary, gambling discourses are not simply polarised: pro and con, liberalisation versus restriction. Instead, gambling is a social field in which the claims of the four cultural biases identified above are contested. This well-established typology can help us to answer the question I started with: why do people gamble? In short they do it in ways that tend to confirm their cultural worldview. But more than that, it can help us make sense of the subtle ways in which society organises itself around the practice of gambling.

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False Signal?

Two people on the shore of the Pacific Ocean
Image via Wikipedia

“My father told me the oceans were limitless, but that was a false signal.”

NYT on collapsing fish stocks in the South Pacific.

In Mackerel’s Plunder, Hints of Epic Fish Collapse

 

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