I have a tip for people whose non-air-conditioned apartments become tryingly hot during the summer: get a cactus. Now, when I wake up in the morning thinking: “Argh! It’s simply too hot in here to possibly get restful sleep!” I am simultaneously reminded that at least the conditions are well-suited to the health and growth of my friend in the family Cactaceae.
Category: Psychology
The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind
Working on climate change
I was out all day today with volunteers devoting their time to sharing the message about climate change and encouraging others to take action.
If the science is right, this is a critical time. These are the years in which humanity will either choose to abandon fossil fuels or choose to commit itself to catastrophic climate change. As such, there may be no more important topic to be working on.
That’s even more likely given how few people are actually doing it. Compare the amount of effort devoted to addressing humanity’s most important problem with the amount of effort devoted to putting up advertising, fancy hairdos, driving dirt bikes, or watching television. The fight for the future of the planet is being waged between a handful of activists and a set of massively profitable fossil fuel companies, while a largely apathetic mass of people mostly ignores it.
Norway’s response to terrorism
A year after Norway’s terrorist attack, I’d say the Norwegians are demonstrating the appropriate way to respond to terrorism: by refusing to be terrorized.
“There have been no changes to the law to increase the powers of the police and security services, terrorism legislation remains the same and there have been no special provisions made for the trial of suspected terrorists.
On the streets of Oslo, CCTV cameras are still a comparatively rare sight and the police can only carry weapons after getting special permission.
Even the gate leading to the parliament building in the heart of Oslo remains open and unguarded.”
I wish Canada and the United States had been courageous enough to follow this model, instead of doubling down on the military-industrial complex approach. Rather than responding to terror with courage and resilience, we have been driven by fear to create huge and unaccountable security states that are ultimately more dangerous than terrorist groups.
Illuminated timepiece and memento mori
After five years in The Service That Must Not Be Named – and with just a few days left before I leave to resume my studies – I got myself the Marathon Watch Company’s imaginatively-named General Purpose Quartz w/ Date, Type I, Class 1 watch as a kind of retirement gift to self.
The major distinguishing characteristic of the watch is the way in which it uses tritium-filled tubes for illumination. At each hour marker, as well as on the hour and minute hand, there are tiny tubes of phosphor-coated borosilicate glass containing a minute volume of radioactive tritium. This allows it to be easily read in conditions of total darkness. The tritium atoms are constantly undergoing beta decay and turning into helium-3. This process produces an electron with about 5.7 keV of energy and an electron anti-neutrino. The electrons hit the phosphors, causing the glow. The watch glows with radioactive fire, using the transmutation of hydrogen into helium for energy. It also produces antimatter that zips easily through the planet.
While I hadn’t intended it this way, the strongest impression from wearing the watch is that it is a memento mori – a token that reminds a person of their inevitable death. There are a few reasons for this. Most obviously, the tritium decay occurs with a half-life of about 12.32 years. Every time that span passes, the glow becomes half as bright. Ordinarily, watches highlight the circularity of time; we wake and sleep at similar times most days, pay our bills at the end of the month, and so on. The decay of the tritium is a reminder that time runs in only one direction, and there is no undoing what is in the past.
Tritium itself also has some rather ominous associations. For one thing, the gas in the watch was probably made in a nuclear reactor through the irradiation of lithium. For another, tritium is an integral component in modern nuclear weapons: both in the core of ‘boosted’ fission weapons and in the secondary stage of Teller-Ulam configuration thermonuclear weapons. On a more practical level, if the tritium leaks out from the glass tubes and forms tritiated water, it probably wouldn’t be especially good for a person to ingest.
I am pleased with the unexpected thoughts brought on by the watch. Too often, I think, we ignore the reality of our mortality and the urgency of the present moment. It’s easy for life to become routine and automated, with relatively trivial tasks occupying our time alongside relatively trivial thoughts. Being frequently reminded about the unidirectional nature of time – and about some of the terrors of the world – seems to force us to concentrate on what we want to do before we fade and expire.
Alain de Botton and Schopenhauer on status
In the course of a very interesting lecture on status, author Alain de Botton draws attention to the inappropriate way in which we often accord undue importance to the casual views of uninformed strangers.
In the course of his discussion, he quotes a scathing passage from 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:
“We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people around us when we start to acquire an adequate knowledge of the superficial, futile, and stupid nature of many of their thoughts – of the narrowness of their views, of the paltriness of their sentiments, and of the perversity of their opinions. The Earth quite simply swarms with people who are not worth talking to.”
The view is a misanthropic one, but it is a useful reminder of the excessive tendency people often have to assume the opposite: that the views of other people are generally well-reasoned and informed, that they are accurate and worth influencing in our favour. Closely connected to this is to seek the approval of those who we really have no reason to want to impress.
The essential corollary to this is that we mustn’t overestimate our own capabilities. Just as we should pay little regard to the casual views of a stranger on a complex subject requiring specialized knowledge for comprehension, we need to maintain internal awareness about which of our own views are grounded upon a rigorous evaluation of the subject matter, and which are mere guesses backed up by our intuitions or scanty background knowledge.
Drug licensing idea details
I have elaborated a bit on my drug licensing idea:
Drug licenses as an alternative to prohibition
I don’t know how good an idea it really is. As usual, I need people to argue with me.
Alcohol licenses
Today I read the first half of Marc Lewis’ Memoirs of an Addicted Brain – a fascinating combination of a personal memoir of a drug-laden life and a scientific description of the neurochemistry of common psychologically active drugs. I have also been watching ‘Boardwalk Empire‘, which explores some other elements of the societal treatment of drugs.
It occurred to me that perhaps the world would be a better place if there was a licensing system for alcohol use akin to the system for driving. Instead of just gaining the right to drink at a set age, we could require people to take a class in high school and pass an exam. The license would be subject to temporary or permanent revocation in the event that a person was causing harm to others though alcohol use. For example, people convicted of driving drunk could have their alcohol licenses suspended or terminated.
It’s an idea that could theoretically be extended to other psychologically active drugs. By educating people, it would allow people to make more informed choices. The revocable licenses would also help maintain the balance between respecting the right that people have to make use of their own bodies with the obligation that people have to avoid harming others. It could also bring in a bit of much-needed state revenue.
Alternative to a carbon tax: carbon deposit
It just occurred to me that there might be a way to both (a) spur the development of effective carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology and (b) circumvent the apparent political impossibility of creating a carbon price. It involves treating tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution like soda cans.
Instead of charging people a fee based on their tonnes of emissions, as an incentive to use less, you could require everyone to pay a disposal fee for the carbon up front when they buy oil, gas, or coal. It’s possible to separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from air and to bury it underground. The cost of doing so could be built into the disposal fee. For instance, if it cost $600 to bury a tonne of carbon, there could be a $600 deposit required on that quantity of fossil fuel. If you burn it, capture the carbon, and sequester it then the deposit gets returned to you. If you just vent the CO2 into the air, then you lose the deposit. The effect is similar to a carbon tax, with an exemption for firms that demonstrably nullify their emissions. (Of course all the issues with safety and verification and CCS remain.)
A $600 carbon price would have a large and immediate effect on an economy like Canada’s, so this probably isn’t politically possible either. (Of course, it would be possible to start lower and scale up, giving people more time to adjust.) There may well be all sorts of other problems with it also, but I thought it was an idea worth contemplating.
John Ivison is wrong about climate ethics
Writing recently in the National Post, John Ivison was dismissive of the views of the scientist James Hansen:
So overblown is Mr. Hansen’s rhetoric that it is easily dismissed. This, after all, is the man who, for all his scientific credibility, has said climate change is a moral issue on a par with slavery.
I don’t think the comparison between slavery and unrestrained climate change is unrealistic. Under slavery, the rights and welfare of one group of people (slaves) were ignored so that the wealth and privileges of another group (slave owners) could be protected. When we burn fossil fuels, we are making a similar assertion that our interests count, while those of all the people who will suffer from climate change do not.
What Ivison misunderstands is the instability of the climate system. A human being who has lived for a few decades under a largely stable (though increasingly destabilized) climate regime has no ability to intuitively comprehend how the climate system as a whole responds to forcings. We do, however, have paleoclimatic records that stretch back for hundreds of thousands of years and which reveal that the climate can be a very unstable phenomenon when subjected to such stresses.
Even under a business-as-usual scenario, in which humanity keeps burning a quantity of fossil fuels similar to what we are burning now, it is likely that the climate will warm by more than 4˚C by the end of the century. That would quite likely involve large-scale global impacts, like the progressive disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets (with accompanying sea level rise) and major changes in precipitation patterns (stressing global agriculture). If we are not to fundamentally and essentially permanently alter the climate that human beings have relied upon since the emergence of our species, we need to aggressively scale back the use of fossil fuels. Far from building new oil pipelines and coal-fired power plants, humanity should be working out the most efficient way to shut down the ones we have.
When we carry on with fossil fuels because they happen to be convenient to us, we are imposing suffering and death on our fellow human beings. By threatening substantial increases in sea level, we are threatening the existence of entire low-lying countries. Hansen isn’t wrong to say that climate change is a moral issue on par with slavery; people like Ivison are wrong to dismiss Hansen’s concerns because they can’t imagine the world changing so much.
The Unfolding of Language
The key argument in Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention grows out of the subtitle. Deutscher argues convincingly that languages branch and mutate much like species, though the process is different in that it occurs within and between the minds of human beings. People working to express themselves both concisely and forcefully continuously change their languages, building up complex grammatical structures and other linguistic elements while also shortening and simplifying and forgetting. As with biological evolution, the process of change leaves traces:
For whenever one finds impressive edifices in language, one is also likely to find scores of imperfections, a tangle of irregularities, redundancies, and idiosyncracies that mar the picture of a perfect design. (p.40 paperback)
All the complexities of this process exceed the scope of what any linguist or group of linguists can ever really track, since we are all involved in the re-invention of language whenever we communicate. Still, Deutscher is able to draw on examples from many languages to demonstrate and defend his argument, all while openly acknowledging the limits of our knowledge and the questions that can only be answered partially and by conjecture.
There are no doubt readers who will revel in every example in Deutscher’s 274 pages plus appendices, but I personally found myself well convinced of his basic thesis by the time I was halfway through. The key to understanding it comes in the second chapter, in which Deutscher draws attention to how we are all exposed to a whole spectrum of usage of any particular language during the ordinary course of life. We deal with upper class speakers who are pernickety about rules of grammar and with rebellious teenagers who develop their own cryptic argots and transfer patterns of abbreviation from text messages and Twitter into their love letters and academic papers. With so much variation at a single point in time, it is no surprise that language as a whole can drift across time, without ever creating solid breaks where people stop being able to understand one another. A word like ‘willy-nilly’ can go from meaning ‘whether you like it or not’ to ‘done in a haphazard way’ without anyone imposing that change on the language, and without the word becoming incomprehensible to anyone.
Speaking of this linguistic evolution generally, Deutscher says:
[T]his invention is not the design of any one architect, nor does it follow the dictates of any master plan. It is the result of thousands of small-scale spontaneous analogical innovations, introduced by order-craving minds across the ages. So while language may never have been invented, it was nonetheless shaped by the attempts of generations of speakers to make sense of the mass of details they have to absorb. (208)
Deutscher goes on to explain:
The elaborate conventions of language needed no gifted inventor to conceive them, no prehistoric assembly of elders to decree their shape, nor even an overseer to guide their construction. Of course, saying that language changes ‘of its own accord’ does not mean that it evolved independently of people’s actions. Behind the forces of change there are always people – the speakers of a language.
For my part, I am trying to change the general convention on punctuation and quotation marks. It would also be nice if English dealt with possession and contraction in a less confusing way.
Deutscher’s account of metaphors in language is also convincing and worthy of attention. He shows how we reach out to metaphors in an effort to make our points clearly and forcefully. (So many metaphors, when you start looking! Reaching out! Points! Clarity! Forcefulness! All concrete concepts being used to express abstract ideas.) The book is also scattered throughout with charming little facts about the history of words and how they have changed across time, including extremely common words with non-obvious origins. Deutscher also makes good use of humour in pointing out some of the stranger aspects of language. For example, Deutscher quotes Mark Twain’s priceless poem mocking German along with doggerel making fun of the inconsistencies in English spelling.
Deutscher’s book was recommended to me by Stephen Fry- not directly, but in his comforting and inspiring ‘podgram’ on language. I made extensive use of that podgram in shaking off the absurdly parochial and self-righteous perspective on English maintained by the creators of the Graduate Record Examination. Deutscher’s book is a similarly effective response to anyone who assumes that their language – as they happen to speak it – is correct and eternal and that all variations are representative of the failures in the education of other people. Language is something we all do together – one of the most important inheritances of humanity. Both Fry and Deutscher are right to wish that language were taught and understood more as a participatory process than as a set of rules to be followed.