Sticky priors

There are some constructs that I’m quite slow to update. Beliefs. Opinions. Estimates. Values. Morals. Stories. Scripts. Dreams. Strings of text that compile as true. Most of these connect and loop around into each other, reinforcing each other, causing them to be that much stickier, ever more locked-in. I suspect you might be the same way?

And there’s a curious relationship between priors and identity isn’t there?

For Example

I hold peculiar belief that carbon dioxide is more prone to be disturbed by microwave radiation than nitrogen.

I’ve never seen either molecule with my own eyes. They’re too small.

I’ve only had models to go by.

I’ve seen carbon dioxide represented almost like a triangle with the lower line omitted. You got a carbon atom and two oxygen atoms that, because the neighbourhoods that electrons like to hang out, they’re all kind of lock into place. The two oxygen atoms want to engage with each other, to create O2, but carbon is in there just barely holding them apart, at arms length. It takes a lot of energy to hold them there. I don’t have a good grip on whether it’s a static, or if it they oscillate around the axes as the electrons decide where they want to be next, causing them to tumble through space. While I’ve seen them represented as balls with sticks, I don’t think them as balls. I think of them as smears. That there is a high possibility that a collection of forces happen to be in one place at one time. Maybe. If you look at it and really believe. And that mental model isn’t even close to what is likely truly going on way down there.

I’ve seen N2 represented as hugging together super tightly. So tightly in fact that it took the desperation of a total war for a genius to come up with a way to use enough pressure and heat to break them apart. I’m still in awe of Haber-Bosch process.

Because carbon and oxygen are more conflicted than two nitrogen atoms, I imagine that carbon dioxide has more polarity, or a much stronger magnetic field than nitrogen. And on this, aside from being able to represent a field as a data structure in a computer program, my intuition on what a itself field is made of is severely incomplete. For instance, I don’t know how far a magnetic field around the electron field extends. Is it kind of like the magnetic field of Jupiter? Or is my mental model of fields completely wrong?

Because carbon dioxide is likely to be bigger than N2, and it has a much larger magnetic field because it is more polarized, it makes intuitive sense that energy is going to hit them differently. Carbon dioxide has more virtual surface area, longer field lines around it, like a kite in the wind, so it’s going to catch more energy than nitrogen. There is probably a much better way to understand the relationship between the possibility of different energies of light striking another set of fields that produces a matrix of outcomes.

But, logically, when I squint, it makes sense why, at room temperature, if I flash light at a box of pure carbon dioxide, a lot less of it is going to pass through the other side than if I flash a light at a box of pure Nitrogen. It’s the same intuition as to why when I put shepherds pie in the microwave that the wet gravy is always scorching hot but the potatoes, a mere centimetre in from the bowl, remain fridge cold. And imagine water and carbon dioxide share characteristics in their polarization so there’s some kind of analogy there.

It makes sense as to why carbon dioxide gets warmer than nitrogen when catching rays.

And it’s why winding down the battery under the Earth, aerosolizing hydrocarbons, has the effect of warming the atmosphere. See, because carbon dioxide catches so much energy than nitrogen, when you add more of it, the atmosphere is just going to capture more rays. More absorption means more heat.

It hangs together.

So my priors are quite sticky on this. I’d need to see some pretty compelling evidence that nitrogen and carbon dioxide have identical profiles change. But in general, I know that nitrogen and carbon dioxide are two different things because they’re called two different names.

I came pre-loaded with a lot of stickiness. I was born into vat of maple syrup. I imagine many of my American friends were born into vats of molasses. We’re all covered in some medium as social animals. Knowledge is defined by communities and communities are made of people.

So far, much of this blog post is a clumsy restatement of what the education community of Alberta in the late sixties thought was important. I don’t remember having much choice about the version of chemistry I learned. I knew that it if I wanted to pass an exam and be accepted into knowledge communities, I needed to be sufficiently receptive of what I was told. My future depended on my ability to not only recite facts about atomic weights and interactions, but to possess an intuition that could be applied to questions I hadn’t yet seen. I wasn’t consulted on this matter. I conformed because I wanted to fit in.

Older Albertans determined that children have to know chemistry. And so I learned organic chemistry in the 10th grade and later finding stoichometry to be a genuine joy in the 11th. They’d be horrified by this post.

“No! Not like that!” they’d cry.

Most of my priors about the social world are informed by the great mystery of Brownian motion and its interaction with lock-in. I probably rely too much on the underlying stuff of reality, something I vaguely understand as the Wiener (You’re a Wiener baby!) process. I’m bathed in it. You’re bathed in it. I experience it whenever I shuffle a deck of cards. And I can’t explain it in the same way I bumble through why carbon and nitrogen are different. Still, isn’t it incredible though that, with just our hands, and 52 slips of paper, we can create combinations of possibility that have never existed, and likely will never exist again, over and over again. What incredible power!

Why bother pouring maple syrup on anybody?

Well, life on this rock is damn hard, and it’s pretty much the main edge that physically fragile hairless bipedal primates have to often, literally, outrun the horror.

Almost everything, by sheer count of what everything is, is trying to kill you. A sneeze could eject millions of tiny collections that’ll kill you without a thought, all of them carried around by dynamics of trillions of decks of cards shuffled constantly. And, for each of us to keep on going, we consume huge volumes of biomass. Even the totally humble and reserved vegetarian consumes huge quantities of life. Life, persistence, can be, at the base, tough because it sure does seem to be inherently indifferent.

And so we’re born, and if you’re in Canada at the time, you’re dunked in Maple syrup, and sent on your way. Hopefully it’s enough for you to survive.

When we realized we had won the jackpot, that we got this massive battery under the Earth….millions of years of sun sweat, crystallized and hardened way down there, well…could you blame us for going wild? I can remember growing up…just being in awe of how much gasoline was used to move a single person in a single vehicle. That we were moving something that weighed 1200kg around just to move around 80kg of flesh. It’s fantastic just how wasteful we are with the battery. As though it’s never going to run out.

This is where that relationship between identity and priors may start to rub some audiences reading this.

The bit that I’m not sure about is whether or not the human societal system can continue to become more complex, more specialized, as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases. The way I perceive it, there’s a linked set of systems that we’re winding down: the big battery in the ground and the system that enables us to exist in this universe. We exist in a razor thin layer, a film, on a rock that we’re just barely able to get off of but only if we’re super constructive with wealth generation and compassionate towards our outliers. I have some intuition on how these systems interact. The rest of this post may be challenging because so much of our identity is wrapped up in the stance, and policy tools we have or might not have as a result.

I don’t have super solid grasp on the fragility of our relationship to this system. I understand that we’re in it. Human society, global civilization, is nature.

I don’t know if the risk function is shaped like a U, n, _ or w. That is to say, I don’t know for sure if the biosphere is ultra hardened against humanity (U), ultra fragile in response to us(n), indifferent (_), or possesses multiple states (w). I do know each perception of that risk tends to map to a labelled identity some people choose to carry around.

The n identity could be labelled as degrowth environmentalism. And for this, I’ll try to replicate, faithfully, the line of argument:

A typical opening is the East / West Greenland settlement meme. The climate changed so much in the 1300’s, to the point that people from Europe who defined themselves as Europeans did not out-adapt it. These are hardcore people, many orders of magnitude tougher than anybody alive today. The people they called the Skraeling’s, likely the Thule, survived the dip in the climate. The old Euro-Greenlanders, after the last recorded voyage from Europe in 1410, could have changed to adapt to it. They could have imitated the Thule. But then, perhaps, they wouldn’t self-identify as European anymore. Identity, in this case collective, cultural identity, is a powerful cap on adaptability. Just as there was a cap on the ability of the Greenlanders to adapt to gentle global cooling, there is a cap on the ability of the entire globalized civilization to adapt to rapid heating.

As a result, we need to live within the sustainable margins afforded to us by our biosphere. We’re standing on that floor, and as a result, we need to unwind the complexity of our society and live within our means.

The U argument goes something like this:

There is no limit on human ingenuity. As a species, we’ve exterminated every single threat using our ingenuity. We know this because we are here now, and so it must always be true into the future. We exterminated legendary prey, untold megafauna and competing species of primate. We probably ended the ice age and there is no limit to our ability to re-organize matter, find new sources of energy – including the fusion reactor in the sky – and to raise all of humanity out of the depths of misery to as to realize their maximum potential. It is not only possible to technologically discover a sustainable path to human development, it is imminent. In fact, it isn’t the biosphere we should fear, we should fear any attempt to slow down our inevitable march towards complete domination over both the biotic, abiotic and societal forces that have held us back from the beginning.

The _ arguement goes something like this:

The ecosystem doesn’t have distinct states, it is only a continuous gradient. Humans can set the temperature to anything they want to, and the only limit is how much we adapt to it. What temperature is the right one for the maximum number of humans?

The W argument goes something like this:

The ecosystem, as a complex adaptive system, has multiple equilibrium states. In one version, oxygen levels wobbled between 0% and 1% for hundreds of millions of years, and as photosynthesis got popular, the oxygen life excreted as a byproduct rusted the iron out of the water, creating banded iron formations on the sea floor. This messed with the temperature and the albedo on the planet, as life, iron, and the inner core of the planet tugged on one another until the iron ran out. Later, oxygen reached as high as 35%, giving rise to massive insects. And now it’s steady at 21%. There are differences in the kinds of complexity that the biosphere enables at different oxygen levels. We don’t fully understand them, but once we exceed a threshold, the change from one state to another is exponential. We should be careful and deliberate about modifying such states as they may not be reversible within our lifetimes.

Decision Tree: U, n, _ and w

Those that subscribe to U are unlikely to be receptive to n, and vice versa. Similarly, _ and w mark differences in core capabilities to understand system dynamics. The greatest heat I’ve seen is between w and U, and for that, it’s matter of distance from the problem, not so much about core values. After all, a U becomes a W if you zoom far enough out, or zoom far enough in.

The distinction between 1,000 years and 1,000,000 may not matter in the U versus w policy decision tree. If humanity is making as large of a contribution to ecosystem decline as the PT extinction event, it’ll most certainly take at least a million years for a new set of species to naturally evolve to refill the holes we’ve punched in food web. If humanity is merely contributing a K-Pg event, the distinction between 1 million and 10 million years is akin to a debate amongst billionaires as to who gets Andromeda and who gets Triangulum, or among Aztec lords as to which one gets Barcelona and which one gets Seville. It’s boring because what’s the point?

I have to wonder if it’s something we want to decide for our descendants? Around 900,000 years ago, in the middle of a cold spell that was something like 4 to 8 degrees cooler than today, we were down to fewer than 1,500 breeding pairs. Maybe the ones that got through the bottleneck were the few bright pre-homo sapiens that learned and remembered to control fire? I think of those folks as a kind of hardcore survivalists, and if they were brought that low, if it got that tough for them, how many modern humans would make it through a shock in the other direction? Suppose we peak at 10.4 billion people. Do want to speed run that figure down to 5,000 people? For what reason would we do that to billions of people? And what kind scars would those 5,000 people bear?

The conversation it doesn’t seem we’re having is how many humans can the planet enable to reach their maximum human development? It’s probably upsetting.

Do you have to live like a median Swiss or median Canadian to be able to reach your maximum human potential? Or is it somewhere lower? Or higher?

What’s the truly sustainable carrying capacity of the planet, assuming circular economy and we discover a successor competitive arena? And by sustainable, I mean that we’ve solved it as steady state, the liabilities and the assets of the biosphere are balanced in such a way that humanity could live more than comfortably, without material misery (we’ll return to the psychological misery of social existence) for millions of years? A future in which we print enough machines, food, ideas, and electrons and space for wildlife remains wild. Everybody gets enough room to stretch. Is that 1 billion people? Is that 200 million people? Lower? Higher?

In WEIRD countries, we only got into the business of compounding interest because the alternative, gore soaked fields, was unsatisfactory. They had serious debates about this. They tried shaming men into not dressing up in steel and slaughtering each other. They tried stories about the afterlife. They tried directing them to other men outside of Europe to go kill other men who had different stories about the afterlife. Feudalism was miserable. Europe sucked. It sucked when they tried to recreate feudalism in South Carolina. It sucks in the Middle East. Raising men to kill each other in duels and wars is boring and evil. Raising women as breeding stock is boring and evil. Debating who is more human or less human is tedious and pointless. There had to be a better way.

Let’s maximize our human potential. Let’s celebrate our outlier freaks. Let’s enable those fierce defenders of the status quo to feel comfortable in the crowd. Let’s enable everybody to grow, develop, and flourish.

Our answer to conquest and domination was venture capital, invention, sportsbook-shitcoin scammery, tucknuts, and all the five dollar lobster you can eat. And it has delivered. More humans live to see their 5th birthday than ever before. More humans flourish than at any time in history. Is the opportunity even distributed? No. Should that state of affairs persist? No. There isn’t a compelling reason for it to be so.

The cracks between undemocratic and democratic forces are more obvious than ever. I’d argue if those with extreme wealth want to continue playing, they will have to make better calculations as to the nature of their social license, lest they follow the path of South Carolina plantation owners. There’s no feeling more hurt than a privileged man scorned. In this way, whether it’s the misery of Taliban soldier forced to report to his desk job, or the Japanese Samurai who killed himself rather than submit to Meiji reform, or, the German Prince that decided to accept a buy-off into the bureaucracy, fragile warrior classes can reform.

After all, doesn’t the root of the word triggered orginate from duelling? Have we not been amused by billionaires challenging each other to cage fights to assert dominance? Truly, what an era to be alive!

So for them, we’re going to have to come up with a new game, perhaps similar to the way rams evolved, with horns arranged in such a way that they can’t gore one another when they butt heads, doesn’t harm anybody else in the process, yet enables them to feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe the supercycle is entirely about who gets to concentrate power and who gets to distribute it?

Maybe it’s in the form of a vast international park, a state of nature preserve, where men who want to kill each other for status can hunt one another down.

Think of the ratings if we all got to watch!

Assuming that we’re capable of inventing a power-correcting mechanism for solving negative-externality competition, reduce aggregate fear, and financialize collective security, we may be able to identify an equilibrium point to work towards.

The identification of that point, and depending on how far you zoom out, the distinction between U and w may not matter, so long the policy decision is in the doubly-sustainable zone. That is, a system that works for humanity over the very long run and for the biosphere over the extremely long run.

Priors and Identity

I would love to believe that we could run the battery down to 0 without consequence and that we could deconstruct Ceres into a 1,000 O’Neill cylinders, seeding over 1 trillion humans over a million years, diffused across the entire galaxy, each human inheriting enough resources to reach their absolute maximum human potential. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Recent events in my lifetime give me pause as to the resilience of institutions to be able to achieve that. We’re barely experiencing +1.4c and look at what’s happening. The Russians certainly aren’t coping too well with the aftermath of their multi-generational, unironic, serious, attempt at communism. The experiment failed, it ended their empire, and they aren’t too happy about it. The Americans, after winning the global economy, aren’t coping too well with those stresses and perhaps … the cognitive dissonance of getting fed one story and living another may be akin to mercury accumulation in fatty tissue. The Chinese aren’t over August 29, 1842 or April 17, 1895. The French still act as though June 22, 1940 never happened and the British fit over August 5, 1947 culminated on June 23, 2016. Canadian society hasn’t recovered from Tom Hanks getting COVID, and overall, it’s a blip compared to the black death, and an order of magnitude of what is likely to come next.

Of the 5500 gigatons we started started with in the battery, we’ve burned 2,000 and we got 3,500 gigatonnes left in the tank. If we burn it all, I’ve read estimates is that we raise to the temperature by 9.5c and get 1200ppm of CO2. Given that we’ve been surprised by how conservative our models have been, it may be higher. It’s probably way worse than that. It’s enough to melt Antartica and then we’re into a 60 meter sea level increase.

If we’re committed to winding down that battery all the way down, then that’s spicy. That’s hot. Okay. And that certainly seems like it’s the decision. That because we’ve made a promise to capital that we will extract it all, and because there are billions of people living beneath a Swiss level of material development, we are morally obligated to burn down that battery. If the policy is that we won’t stop it, then, there’s a Canadian identity response to that.

The Canadian response is to amortize the cost of over multiple generations and to adjust insurance and capital mix to plan for a 1200ppm atmosphere. What land along the coasts and rivers are we going to gradually de-insure and turn over to wildlife before they go under? How do we adjust the tax code to effectively disincentivize speculation on the effect of inundation? How do we adjust the building code to ensure low indoor CO2 levels for normal brain function? How do forestry practices change during the burndown? How are small towns hardened against fire? Is there a minimum town density for economic viability or does the Canadian shield revert to wandering families who carry their homes on wagons? How do Canadian secure our southern border and manage climate refugees? Is a vision of Canada with 100 million people compatible with 1200ppm, and if not, how many Canadians do we need to maintain a quality of life as Earth winds down? How many Canadians can reach their maximum potential, sustainably, and how rapidly do we decouple from the global economy as the lights go out and complex civilization ends in the grimlands? How much and what kind of rations does Canada maintain in its reserve as food webs collapse? How does agrifood policy change as a result? What happens when its too hot to grow potatoes? What’s the policy for humanitarian release of insect protein meal? Should we feed feral packs of starving children?

In the likely event of a limited nuclear exchange sometime during the burndown, the soot causes global temperatures to plummet by a couple of degrees and billions starve to death in the cold [1, 2]. When the dust settles, those left get to contend with the incremental heating from the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, and likely, an even worse follow-on plague. How can Canada harden itself to ensure the maximum number of Canadians come through the other side true north strong and free?

If we’re going to commit our descendants to such a future, we should at least make sure their descent is well coordinated, for the shareholders. Shouldn’t everything be done to ensure a smooth and orderly drawdown on the last of the coupons? It is quite literally the least we can do.

The future very likely lies somewhere between these two extremes: neither an inferno hellscape (for some) nor a glittering future amongst the stars. I’m not convinced that most societies are sufficiently resilient to handle even the mildest of inconveniences. While I am optimistic that the best of our outliers are capable of developing technology that can solve the present crisis while setting up the next, I’m not convinced that global civilization can handle it.

Here’s a fun thought experiment. Suppose that a bunch of folks got together in the Pyrenees in 1505 and they somehow had the resources to speed-run the discovery of the scientific method. Let’s not think too much about the industrial infrastructure required to make glass for lenses and metals pure enough to get into the electromagnetic force. Let’s just say they figure out the scientific method and they apply it to math and logic by 1535. A massive, improbable, leap in just 30 years. Do you think Spanish society would be able to absorb those inventions and prevent its imperial decline by 1600? They weren’t in a place to accept the scientific method. Would the Spanish of 1535 even recognize themselves as Spanish if they had accepted the scientific method? Is that kind of like asking European Greenlanders to become Thule?

Is a Parisian really Parisian if they don’t eat baguette?

Our ability to out-run any crisis may be limited by the identity of global civilization.

We just might not be in a place to adopt the ideas we need to adopt in order to survive, little though flourish.

Sticky Priors

There are some constructs that we may be quite slow to update. Beliefs. Opinions. Estimates. Values. Morals. Stories. Scripts. Dreams. Many are circular and self-reinforcing. Many people become the stories they tell themselves over and over again.

The loops that make us may bind us.

They could liberate us too.

After all, the difference between a loop and a spiral is a mere deviation in slope.

If over the course of this post you changed your mind about risk perception, about the nature of U, n, _ and w, then just about anybody could.

References

[1] Bivens, M. (2022). Nuclear famine. IPPNW.

[2] Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K., Harrison, C. S., Bodirsky, B. L., Weindl, I., … & Heneghan, R. (2022). Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection. Nature Food, 3(8), 586-596.