Category: Psychology

The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind

No more Twitter on the go

One convincing argument made by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness) is that we intuitively misjudge the importance of the newest information, which is actually the most likely to be trivial and wrong. I wrote about this before.

It’s an especially important point in the Trump era, where I can easily get into an endless cycle: Washington Post, The Guardian, National Post, Slate, Twitter, Los Angeles Times, CBC, BBC, Twitter, etc.

Quite a while ago, I took email off my phone and have found it a big life improvement. I definitely don’t need to be instantly notified every time I have a new message. One slight inconvenience is that I often use email to send information and to-do items to myself. That’s pretty easily addressed, however, by saving them into Google Calendar instead or using the BuryCoal.com contact form.

Yesterday I went a step further and removed Twitter from my phone as well. It’s a bit of a harder case, since I do genuinely learn things from Twitter that I don’t see elsewhere. It’s where I learned about divestment at Laval, for instance. At the same time, the huge majority of what I see on Twitter is a waste of time and it’s an easy reflexive form of procrastination. I still have an account accessible via Sasha’s iPad Mini and my computers, so all told this should be a helpful move.

Resisting Trump effectively

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum has been making the media rounds with some thought-provoking ideas about the Trump presidency and the risk that protests which lack a specific focus or which come across as a threat to public order may empower rather than constrain him.

In “What Effective Protest Could Look Like“, Frum argues:

With the rarest exceptions—and perhaps the January 21 demonstration will prove to be one—left-liberal demonstrations are exercises in catharsis, the release of emotions. Their operating principle is self-expression, not persuasion. They lack the means, and often the desire, to police their radical fringes, with the result that it’s the most obnoxious and even violent behavior that produces the most widely shared and memorable images of the event. They seldom are aimed at any achievable goal; they rarely leave behind any enduring program of action or any organization to execute that program. Again and again, their most lasting effect has been to polarize opinion against them—and to empower the targets of their outrage.

Even those closely associated with the creation of Occupy Wall Street acknowledge that the lack of a coherent program of action with achievable objectives helped make the movement ineffective.

He also criticizes “the futile squabbling cul-de-sac of intersectionality and grievance politics” — a boldly stated position on the eternal question in progressive activism, namely whether disparate movements with progressive aims (reducing economic inequality, saving the climate, treating refugees justly, ending discrimination, curbing police violence, etc) can better achieve success by attempting to form a unified coalition that can alter policy or win elections, or whether each should be trying to build support among people of all political persuasions, and finding their effort hampered by the demand that anyone who they are trying to influence buy into the whole broad (though not necessarily coherent) progressive agenda at the same time.

In “How to Build an Autocracy“, Frum argues:

Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him. Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.

It’s also worth listening to The Current’s interview with Frum.

One aspect of Frum’s thinking which aligns with my own but clashes with that of many activists is that meetings are essential. While I have seen an entire activist group fall apart partly because of how frustrated people were with meetings, they are necessary for assembling a program of action that goes beyond socially-motivated and superficial support for causes your friends seem to approve of: Facebook activism and the occasional protest march not linked to a specific demand.

In any event, we need to be thinking carefully about activist effectiveness in terms not defined by what it does emotionally for activists. I would be very interested to hear responses to Frum’s arguments, along with links to any other analysis of the Trump situation which seems perceptive and useful.

Related:

We don’t feel deaths equally

The January 21st issue of The Economist provides another strong example of how poorly our emotions serve us where it comes to evaluating and responding to abstract threats. They say:

NOx emissions cause the premature deaths of an estimated 72,000 Europeans a year.

This is in the context of carmakers like Volkswagen using software to cheat on NOx emissions tests for their diesel cars.

Now, if anything direct and intentional (terrorism, a criminal gang, etc) killed 72,000 people in one year in Europe it would be WWIII. The way in which we obsess about tiny direct threats from serial killers to plane hijackers while feeling little emotional impact from pollution-induced deaths and threats like climate change profoundly damages our ability to make sensible policy choices.

No effort without error or shortcoming

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt

Intentions, outcomes, and rejustifications

This [claim by Al Qaeda military commander Saif al-Adel that Osama bin Laden deliberately provoked the United States into attacking Afghanistan] was a post facto rationalization of Al-Qaeda’s strategic failure. The whole point of the 9/11 attacks had been to get the United States out of the Muslim world, not to provoke it into invading and occupying Afghanistan and overthrowing al-Qaeda’s closest ideological ally, the Taliban. September 11, in fact, resembled Pearl Harbor. Just as the Japanese scored a tremendous tactical victory on December 7, 1941, they also set in motion a chain of events that led to the eventual collapse of Imperial Japan. So, too, the 9/11 attacks set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of much of al-Qaeda and, eventually, the death of its leader.

Bergen, Peter L. Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad. Crown Publishers; New York. 2012. p. 58-9. Emphasis in original.

Climate change messaging

A paper by Pearce, Brown, Nerlich, Koteyko (“Communicating climate change: conduits, content, and consensus“, 2015) contains some interesting ideas about effective communication about climate change. They cite one “best practice guide” which explains that:

in order for climate science information to be fully absorbed by audiences, it must be actively communicated with appropriate language, metaphor, and analogy; combined with narrative storytelling; made vivid through visual imagery and experiential scenarios; balanced with scientific information; and delivered by trusted messengers in group settings.

It also notes that: “Messages focusing on fear and predictions of adverse events can increase skepticism, perhaps because they disrupt underlying ‘just world’ beliefs and can reduce people’s intentions to perform mitigating actions”.

This kind of research is important. Motivation may be the trickiest part of the climate challenge: getting people to care about the welfare of people impacted all over the world by climate change, and well into future generations. Then making people willing to demand political and economic change to prevent the worst potential impacts of excessive fossil fuel use.

Settler stories of alcohol

Alcohol is not just in our stories — the stories that kiciwamanawak [Cree for white settler Canadians] first told about us that some of us continue to tell and believe. You see, alcohol is also in kiciwamanawak stories, the stories they tell about themselves. However, it is told much differently: they are never “the lazy, drunk, white person” in their own stories about alcohol.

To many kiciwamanawak alcohol is an everyday thing. It’s a glass of wine with supper, or a beer or two while watching the game on television, or a glass of whiskey in the evening. To them, alcohol is natural, normal, and even necessary. In their stories about alcohol, their social position determines the amount they spend on alcohol. The higher they are in their social and class structure, the more expensive the alcohol they must consume.

In their story, if a person does not drink, it is automatically assumed they do not drink because they have a religious reason, or, more often, it’s assumed it’s because they can’t handle it. Only alcoholics in their story do not drink. Healthy, normal people in that story often consume alcohol daily. Every significant event is marked by alcohol: birthdays, marriages, graduations, a sports team winning (or losing), and even death is saluted with a drink, a toast. To not drink in the kiciwamanawak story is to cut oneself off from important parts of the story. Their story and the alcohol story are so entangled that one becomes the other. The kiciwamanawak story becomes the alcohol story and the alcohol story becomes the kiciwamanawak story.

Johnson, Harold R. Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours). 2016. University of Regina Press; Regina.

A broken culture in Toronto climate activism

Recent developments (before the US election) have left me worried that there is a broken culture in Toronto environmentalism, and perhaps the environmental movement more generally.

Erosion of democracy

First — Toronto350.org and (while it existed) UofT350.org were founded on a model of open and participatory decision making, where all volunteers are members who have the final call on big decisions. That model has been undermined in a number of ways, primarily through institutional design choices, social cliques, and secrecy.

Toronto350’s decision to incorporate created a board, and almost none of the board members have been active volunteers. This has created a split between authority and involvement and has essentially broken Toronto350’s decision making structure, as decisions from the board are frequently informed by little understanding of how the group actually operates, and volunteers feel alienated from decisions being made by people who they neither see nor actually work with.

In both the Toronto and U of T groups, decision making based on personal relationships has often eclipsed or replaced open and inclusive decision making. In part this has been because a lot of members are bored and frustrated by decision making which they see as boring and bureaucratic. In part, it’s a response to interpersonal conflict: people pull back from engaging the general membership to engaging only with people who they still get along with. In part, it’s the result of a lack of respect for democratic procedure. There’s a case to be made that activist groups shouldn’t be democratic to start with, and would be better led by a vanguard of individuals capable of setting a coherent and effective agenda. That said, within groups that have been structured to function democratically, it’s deeply problematic when those in positions of authority fall back on making strategic decisions in private with their friends.

Taken to the next level, decision-making among friends becomes decision-making by a socially exclusive clique within but not representative of the general membership. In this situation, your social positioning and alliances become more important than the quality of your ideas and people interpret decision-making in terms of social impacts rather than the degree to which one action or another serves the stated aims of the group as a whole. A good sign that a social clique has taken over decision making is when elected executives do not meet or make decisions, and where changes in group functioning or priorities seem to come out of nowhere.

Periodic strategic planning sessions attended by a subset of the membership are not an alternative to a functioning executive, and can in fact make decision making problems worse by establishing contradictory priorities or being dominated by a small number of vocal members.

Secrecy is another major factor. For a few types of direct actions, it can be necessary to maintain operational security beforehand. At the same time, when strategic decision making begins to happen in secret, it’s often a way for a group of insiders to avoid having to hear or consider the perspectives of others. This can run in concert with when functions within an organization become enduringly linked to a specific individual, making the apparent elected structure not reflective of actual organizational functioning. This is a sort of empire-building, where people feel ownership and entitlement to particular campaigns or roles and where they assert themselves through hidden and private channels rather than involvement with the general membership.

Quite worrisomely, following the disbanding of UofT350.org after President Gertler rejected divestment, the principal group which has been formed by a minority of former members now seems to be exclusively engaged in Facebook activism, and actively rejects involvement from some of the most capable and committed organizers who were involved in the divestment campaign.

Lack of democracy is even more extreme with Canada350.org / 350Canada.org, which isn’t a real organization but rather a brand used by the handful of 350.org staff who are working on Canadian issues. That being said, unlike the Toronto and UofT organizations, the Canadian group (to the extent it exists) was never built on a model of open or participatory decision making. From the perspective of local 350.org chapters, at least, that also applies to the international 350.org organization.

One-way emotional progressions

Second — I have often felt that members of climate activist groups behave as though their emotions can only progress in one direction, toward the accumulation of more frustration and resentment both toward other volunteers and toward entire organizations.

It’s as though everyone has a little frustration thermometer for each organization and other person, and it ticks up by a degree or two every time there is a decision which that feels incorrect or problematic, and each time another volunteer does something which seems worthy of disapprobation.

This is one explanation for why so many of our most effective and committed activists have broken ties with the group, as well as for why people have a frustrating tendency to break off and form new small and ineffective organizations rather than working to revitalize older ones which are larger and have at times been more capable.

Decision making largely motivated by resentment has been especially evident during elections, where people who have long histories of involvement (and who have therefore raised the temperature in the thermometers of a lot of other people) have often been rejected in favour of people whose involvement has been non-existent, limited, or invisible to the general membership.

I have chosen to stop being involved with Toronto350.org for at least a year or two in order to focus on the PhD which I neglected so much while working on the divestment campaign. I hope the culture of climate activism in Toronto can improve, and that effective and popular new groups will emerge with a variety of decision making structures and theories of change. We can’t afford to fail in our response to climate change, so everything that strips us of effectiveness is something we need to think through seriously and respond to with practical solutions.

Reminder: Anonymous comments are encouraged

Anti-capitalist environmentalism

I have generally been skeptical of anti-capitalist environmentalism for two main reasons: the added difficulty involved in changing our economic system and the possibility that an alternative economic system might not be more sustainable.

We have a tough enough fight on our hands, trying to create a sustainable world, even if we aren’t also trying to overcome the obsession of politicians and the public with endless economic growth and ever-increasing personal consumption. Indeed, criticism of either is so far outside the political mainstream that it raises questions of what kind of political program could succeed.

Furthermore, among 20th and 21st century political and economic systems, I don’t see non-capitalist economic systems that are clearly more sustainable than consumer capitalism. The clearest alternative – communism as practiced in Russia, China, and elsewhere – seems similarly ecologically destructive: maybe less capable of producing consumer goods, but even more cavalier about environmental contamination by heavy industry.

Reading Peter Dauvergne’s Environmentalism of the Poor has been another reminder of the plausible argument that the root of our environmental problems is unsustainable consumption, and only societal reforms that somehow counter that can succeed in keeping us from destroying the Earth and ourselves. If that’s true, we really have a lot of difficult political work ahead. The odds of success seem to depend on how humanity as a whole deals with the rising stress that will accompany trends like climate change and nuclear proliferation. If a growing recognition of crisis opens up political discourse and lets us challenge things like the assumption that economic growth is good, we may have a chance. If people respond instead by focusing ever-more on their own personal material interests, with less and less consideration for others, we may be on a trajectory to destruction with no means of course correction.