“Intelligent Openness” & Trust - Onora O’Neill

More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life. Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim. Well once one says that, one says, yeah, okay, that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness. It's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects.

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The shop where I buy my socks says I may take them back, and they don't ask any questions. They take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted. That's super. I trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me. I think there's a big lesson in that. If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party, then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying. So in the end, I think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern. It is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy.

So the moral of all this is, we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls, much more about being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you're trustworthy.

Cattle-Aided Mental Health

While relatively rare, cow cuddling—or cow hugging as it’s sometimes called—may be an effective form of animal-assisted therapy (AAI), per a study out today from researchers at New York University and US Military Academy at West Point.

The investigation, by Katherine Compitus of NYU’s Silver School of Social Work and Sonya M. Bierbower of the Department of Chemistry and Life Science at West Point, also added a new twist: women were more receptive to bovine-assisted therapy than men were.

The researchers arranged for a group of 11 volunteers to spend 45 minutes each with one of two steers with varying degrees of gregariousness; the study was conducted at  a micro-farm called Surrey Hills Sanctuary in New York State. Volunteers ranged in age from 13 to 79. After the sessions, they filled out a survey and discussed their experience.

One of the voluntary participants responded that “it wasn’t a big deal to me that he” – one of the bulls, named Callum – “was shy. But when he finally started to approach me, I felt so good! Like I was special.”

Another participant offered that while she was worried that bulls would be aggressive, she “fell in love with cows” after the session. Another stated: “there is something about cows that is so therapeutic,” according to the study.

According to the researchers, the predominantly positive responses add to prior research suggesting that time with farm animals holds potential benefits for those engaged in psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy for mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety.

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Therapy animals typically are dogs, cats, horses or rabbits. But the range of animals can be extended to farm animals including cattle when the therapy is conducted ethically and with special care for both humans and animals.  

“We have discovered in the current study,” the authors concluded, “that bovine-assisted therapy may not only be an effective treatment model that benefits human participants but appears to be enriching to the cattle participants, as well, as shown by their proximity to and continuous interactions with humans.”

- More Here

Pigs Aren’t The Future Of Organ Transplants - Stop Acting Like They Could Be

Earlier this week, it was reported that Rick Slayman, the first person to ever receive a transplanted pig kidney, sadly passed away less than two months after the procedure. While the hospital, Massachusetts General, has stated that there’s no evidence that the patient’s death was a direct result of the transplant, it’s clear that the surgery did not succeed in substantially extending Slayman’s life.

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Pigs are intelligent and sensitive animals, with cognitive abilities that outrank dogs and, in fact, compare to those of a 3-year-old human child. Pigs have demonstrated the capability for spatial learning and memory, problem-solving, and the use of tools. They’re highly emotionally intelligent, displaying a preference for familiar humans and have even demonstrated what’s called “emotional contagion,” wherein one animal mirrors the emotions of another—an indicator of empathy. It’s little wonder that pigs are often kept as pets, and like dogs and cats, they have their own distinct personalities. It would be a major ethical misstep if our society were to create a system that calls for the torture and slaughter of even more pigs than the 3.8 million already killed daily by the factory-farming meat industry. 

I have nothing but sympathy for Slayman and his family, and if I or a loved one were sick, I’d also do everything in my power to extend my life or theirs. But the medical establishment isn’t doing any of us a favor by continuing to waste time and money on animal testing that may or may not have any practical applications for human health. 

It bears reminding that mice, dogs, and monkeys aren’t miniature people, which is why conducting experiments on them to better understand the human body is worse than useless. We have lots of analogous parts—hearts that pump blood, lungs that oxygenate the blood, stomachs that break down food—but they’re still different species entirely. Chocolate is lethal to dogs; to humans, not so much. Scientists have cured cancer in mice, but we’ve yet to see the science applied successfully to human patients. Furthermore, there are unique risks of xenotransplantation, like the cross-species transfer of diseases (which may in fact have been a contributing or causal factor in the death of one pig-heart recipient). 

We’ve already seen the effects of various zoonotic diseases, and it seems patently unwise to open up a whole new avenue for diseases to transfer between species. Animal testing in medicine is no longer required by the FDA, in part due to the fact that so many animal trials resulted in little useful—and sometimes misleading—information about how a drug will affect humans. 

- More Here

Ed Young on How Being A Birder Changed Him

After reading Ed Young, I want to become a birder. And right outside Max's Walden there are so many birds. I have no excuse not to become rookie birder other than my own laziness. 

Birding has tripled the time I spend outdoors. It has pushed me to explore Oakland in ways I never would have: Amazing hot spots lurk within industrial areas, sewage treatment plants and random residential parks. It has proved more meditative than meditation. While birding, I seem impervious to heat, cold, hunger and thirst. My senses focus resolutely on the present, and the usual hubbub in my head becomes quiet. When I spot a species for the first time — a lifer — I course with adrenaline while being utterly serene.

I also feel a much deeper connection to the natural world, which I have long written about but always remained slightly distant from. I knew that the loggerhead shrike — a small but ferocious songbird — impales the bodies of its prey on spikes. I’ve now seen one doing that with my own eyes. I know where to find the shrikes and what they sound like. Countless fragments of unrooted trivia that rattled around my brain are now grounded in place, time and experience.

When I step out my door in the morning, I take an aural census of the neighborhood, tuning in to the chatter of creatures that were always there and that I might have previously overlooked. The passing of the seasons feels more granular, marked by the arrival and disappearance of particular species instead of much slower changes in day length, temperature and greenery. I find myself noticing small shifts in the weather and small differences in habitat. I think about the tides.

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But in the past six months, I’ve seen soaring golden eagles, heard duetting great horned owls, watched dancing sandhill cranes and marveled at diving Pacific loons, all within an hour of my house. “I’ll never see that” has turned into “Where can I find that?”

Of course, having the time to bird is an immense privilege. As a freelancer, I have total control over my hours and my ability to get out in the field. “Are you a retiree?” a fellow birder recently asked me. “You’re birding like a retiree.” I laughed, but the comment spoke to the idea that things like birding are what you do when you’re not working, not being productive.

I reject that. These recent years have taught me that I’m less when I’m not actively looking after myself, that I have value to my world and my community beyond ceaseless production and that pursuits like birding that foster joy, wonder and connection to place are not sidebars to a fulfilled life but their essence.

It’s easy to think of birding as an escape from reality. Instead, I see it as immersion in the true reality. I don’t need to know who the main characters are on social media and what everyone is saying about them, when I can instead spend an hour trying to find a rare sparrow. It’s very clear to me which of those two activities is the more ridiculous. It’s not the one with the sparrow.

The Internet of Animals - Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth

The researchers had turned their jalopies into labs on wheels: They sliced holes in the cars’ roofs, through which they inserted pole-mounted antennas. “We drove like tornado chasers behind a single bird each night,” Wikelski writes, “constantly rotating our antennas to determine where the bird was going and to receive the strongest signal possible. All we needed to do was speed after the thrushes while recording their sounds continuously.”

This gonzo research effort yielded breakthrough insights into how birds communicate: A bird would fly up to a certain altitude, call out, and listen for other birds’ responses. If the replies came, the bird would know it had found a good, safe pathway. The research, Wikelski writes, revealed “a highway in the sky, where birds were providing each other with key information on how high to fly, where to go, and who to follow.” This “ancient organic symphony,” he writes, is “created by animals as they exchange information across species and continents.” And it is high time, he argues, for humans to “tune in.”

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Why is building an internet of animals so important that Wikelski has devoted decades of his career to it? The route we are on, particularly in the West, of viewing the natural world only in terms of what we can extract from it for our own gain, is a path to ruin. Wikelski believes the “next chapter in human evolution” is the Interspecies Age, where humans recognize that we are partners with other species, consider their needs when we make decisions, and “link the knowledge these other species have to our own knowledge.” Among many other benefits of this Interspecies Age, he says, will be the ability to draw on animals’ sixth sense to help us predict “when something big is happening in the environment” — a buildup of toxins in a landscape, the onset of an El Niño event, the emergence of a plague of locusts.

All these are important. My one gripe about “The Internet of Animals,” though, is that it places too much emphasis on what animals can tell us about things that might harm us — like predicting earthquakes — as opposed to what they can reveal about how our actions might be harming them. Perhaps this is simply a tool to convince a broad audience of the project’s potential. But the true value of an internet of animals goes back to the meadowlarks. If we don’t know what routes they follow, where they land along the way, what pitfalls — natural or human-made — may cause their journeys to end in tragedy, then we can’t work effectively protect the habitat, food, and other resources they need to survive. An internet of animals would help us see the currently invisible parts of our world — how animals distribute seeds, how they cope with the impacts of climate change, how they interact with one another when there isn’t anyone around to watch.

- Review of the new book The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth by Martin Wikelski

The War On Weeds

When are you gonna get rid of those weeds, my father would ask every time he visited my Vermont lawn. Splotched with purple thyme, yellow dandelions and white clovers, the lawn attracted honeybees and, later in the season, fireflies. He and I saw the same plants, but we had learned to see differently. Where my father saw interlopers, I saw residents.

For most of my childhood, my father was at war on his quarter-acre plot, my childhood backyard. In some of my most vivid memories, he struggles with the lawnmower, sweat beading on his arm hair. He curses the crabgrass, he drenches dandelions and clovers with chemicals from white spray bottles he got at the hardware store down the street. It was an endless battle.

My father was a Vietnam veteran and a lifelong Republican. He liked to say that women belong in the kitchen. I had become an environmental studies professor, a member of the East Coast liberal elite, a daughter he was ashamed to introduce to his friends at the Post.

He died a few years ago of multiple myeloma, a brutal cancer that riddled his bones with holes. Until the end, he was convinced that being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam had caused the disease. He had lived half a century longer than many of the young men he’d served with, and he felt ashamed, I think, of the extra time.

In the weeks after his death, I looked up the logbooks of his aircraft carrier, hoping to piece together whether he would have been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. I later realized he’d been exposed to it in our backyard.

“Our global biodiversity crisis, a crisis of being, is at its core a crisis of seeing.”

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With ample supplies of chlorine and phenol, a waste product of fossil fuel refining, Dow and other chemical companies then faced the task of selling farmers, homeowners and land managers on the need to kill broadleaved plants. This included many Dust Bowl farmers who, for years, had been told that the degradation of their land was their fault precisely because they had removed too many broadleaved plants. It was not, in other words, a ready-made market. The author of a 1947 article in Agricultural Chemicals wondered, “Are weeds merely an annoying nuisance or are they something that farmers will pay money to combat?” Tellingly, the first venue in which Mitchell published his 2,4-D results was not a scientific or agricultural journal but a golf magazine.

Early advertisements for 2,4-D weed killer portrayed hand-pulling and hoeing as outdated technologies soon to be replaced by chemical tools. In 1947, Dow released a 20-minute promotional film, “Death to Weeds.” The film opened with an imagined class-action lawsuit pitting the plaintiffs, farmers and homeowners, against the defendants, weeds. Weeds, the narrator explained, robbed crops of water and food, and they harbored insects and plant diseases. Charging that “weeds are our common enemy,” the narrator argued that they inflicted “never-ending warfare against the American farmer.” But Dow’s “arsenal of chemical warfare” was capable of bringing these enemies to justice. The film closed by declaring weeds “guilty as charged” and deserving the death sentence. Biocide, it argued, was justice.  

Companies sought their own niches in the synthetic herbicide market. While Dow initially focused on growers of corn, wheat and sugarcane, the J.T. Baker Chemical Company worked to sell dairy farmers on 2,4-D by arguing that plants like wild garlic and ragweed imbued milk with “weedy flavors” and that killing these species with 2,4-D would improve profits. Companies’ 2,4-D products diversified as they insinuated that different formulations were needed for croplands versus pastures, small-scale operations versus large ones, fog sprayers versus airplane sprayers. Over the years, Dow has marketed 2,4-D formulations under a variety of names, including “2-4 Dow Weed Killer,” “Esteron 44,” “Dow Contact Weed Killer,” “Formula 40,” “Weed Killer 4D,” “Scorpion III” and even “Justice.”

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Rachel Carson described a world without birdsong and asked her readers to hear the silence of death, of birds killed by two decades of heedless biocide use. Today, when we look outside, we see a world shaped by eight decades of heedless biocide use. We see grass. We do not see what is missing, what we have killed.

The world that would be if synthetic herbicides had not been so successfully marketed is invisible.

- More here (A must read) 

How To Make Drugs (Without Animal Testing) - A Documentary

Animal testing is the most CRUEL thing in the world. Humans fuck up their lives by drinking, smoking, eating crap, lethargic lifestyle etc., to make their bodies fragile, And to fix it, they use these poor animals to test drugs. 

It has been proved over and over again - animal testing and studies on drugs are not good indicators for the drugs effectiveness on humans. 

In a nutshell, humans are torturing animals for no use and continue to do so because no one questions. 

I am glad this is getting a lot of moral attention now. 

HOW TO MAKE DRUGS Trailer 2 from First Spark Media on Vimeo.

Lessons From Two Pioneering Advocates For Farmed Animals

Heart touching lessons from two greatest humans ever lived on earth (and many people don't even know their names).

I have seen myself go through a "meditative transformation" in the last 20 years on how to live amongst humans and live a normal life when knowing these humans inflict so much unnecessary pain and suffering to animals. 

The simplest lesson - If you want to do good in the world, first make sure your actions will not make things even worse. 

Looking at these lessons, I am glad Max held my life together to make this transformation happen. 

How much can one person achieve for animals? Ruth Harrison (1920-2000) and Henry Spira (1927-1998) started out pessimistic. They inherited an animal welfare movement that had generated more noise than results, especially for farmed animals.

As factory farming arose in the mid 20th Century, the movement paid little attention. Moderate groups, like the ASPCA and RSPCA, were too busy sheltering lost cats and dogs — a role that had largely supplanted their original missions to win legal reforms for all animals.

Radical activists, meanwhile, were waging an endless war on animal testing. “Self-righteous antivivisection societies had been hollering, 'Abolition! All or Nothing!,'” Spira recalled, noting that during that time animal testing had skyrocketed. “That was a pitiful track record, and it seemed a good idea to rethink strategies which have a century-long record of failure.”

Harrison and Spira shook up this impasse. Harrison’s 1964 book Animal Machines exposed factory farming to a mass audience and led to the world’s first on-farm animal welfare laws. Spira’s campaigns won the world’s first corporate animal welfare policies, first for lab animals and then farmed animals.

Today’s movement, which has won dozens of laws and thousands of corporate policies to protect factory farmed animals, owes much to Harrison and Spira. So how did they do it? And what can we learn from them?

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The seven habits of (two) highly effective advocates

How did they do it? I studied their lives and writings and asked a few advocates and researchers who knew them. I think these are their most relevant lessons for us today:

• Focus. Our movement has often tried to fight every injustice to animals, seldom solving any. Harrison and Spira prioritized. Harrison focused solely on factory farming and mostly on the worst practices that could be reformed. Spira focused even more narrowly: he sought out discrete winnable campaigns with a clear target and a clear ask. As he put it, “we have to focus. Things don't get accomplished by random activity.” 

• Radical tactics, reasonable demands. Moderate advocates long sought reasonable demands through weak tactics, while radicals sought un-winnable demands via strong tactics. Harrison and Spira inverted that, seeking reasonable demands through strong tactics. Harrison coupled her calls for moderate political reforms with graphic images and headlines like “Fed to Death.” Spira coupled his requests for modest corporate improvements under hard-hitting slogans like “how many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty's sake?” 

• Do what works. Our movement, Spira observed, is prone to “day-dreaming about perfect and absolute solutions.” Spira’s solution was simple: “activists need to push for the most rapid progress. Above all, we need to continually assess what differences we are making.” Harrison was equally practical. Animal Machines contains no theorizing on what a perfect food system might look like. Instead it focuses on the sources of the greatest suffering — and the reforms that could end alleviate that suffering. 

• The inside and outside game. Moderate advocates traditionally favored private engagement, while radicals preferred loud protests. Harrison and Spira did both. Harrison loudly denounced factory farming and then quietly worked with animal welfare scientists and officials to reform it. Spira began every campaign by trying to privately push decision-makers to do the right thing. But when that failed, he was unafraid to go public. “The point isn't to socialize for its own sake,” he explained, “but to get results. And when dialogue isn't getting anywhere, then we shift to confrontation.”  

• Compromise. “Too often,” Spira observed, “the animal advocacy movement has been viewed as a holy war with the world divided between saints and sinners. Just as often the war cry has been ‘all or nothing,’ — with the almost inevitable result being nothing.” Harrison and Spira both agreed with radical advocates that the entire factory farming system was rotten. But they saw it could only be reformed in small steps. Harrison asked farmers what was feasible before proposing reforms. And Spira ensured that every campaign had a winnable goal. 

• Facts matter. Some animal activists are prone to exaggeration: no, milk doesn’t cause autism. Harrison saw how a reputation for inaccuracy could harm our movement’s political credibility. So she was meticulous with her factual claims, visiting farms and consulting scientists to ensure she was accurate in every detail. So did Spira, who noted that “credibility is the most precious resource any campaign against injustice can have.” 

• Focus outward, not inward. Our movement has long been oddly fascinated with itself. Activists have fought each other over what’s “humane,” who’s “vegan,” and which ideology is “right.” “Sometimes it seems as if more time is spent discussing whether or not the public functions of animal organizations should be vegetarian than fighting to protect farm animals,” Spira observed. Harrison and Spira’s antidote was simple: focus on external campaigns to help farmed animals, and let other people do the infighting. 

We lost Harrison and Spira a quarter century ago. But their work lives on in the effective advocacy of the modern farmed animal movement. Today’s movement is more focused, strategic, and successful thanks to them. That’s an impressive legacy.

Saving Birds & Bats from Wind Turbines

These are the kinds of innovation humans minds should be working on!! 

- More here

Albert Hirschman's Strategy of Economic Development

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman is one of my all time favorite books. 

In a world where economists live and die in an ideologically driven parochial view; Hirschman's micro economic solutions are based on his experiences and reality - they will outlive all of us and hopefully make this planet a little better place for all living beings. 

If you haven't read it (you should) then check out Oliver Kim's summary of Hirschman's timeless wisdom:

Hirschman, however, was not so easily impressed. Having seen firsthand the difficulties of getting things done on the ground—and the arrogance of foreign planners—he was skeptical of the grand promises made by the balanced growth theorists. During his fellowship at Yale, he worked furiously at a rebuttal–a project that eventually became his 1958 classic, The Strategy of Economic Development. In it, Hirschman set out to slay the dragon of the Big Push, and replace it with a theory more grounded in reality.

Hirschman’s main critique of balanced growth stems from a simple observation. “If a country were ready to apply the doctrine of balanced growth,” he writes, “then it would not be underdeveloped in the first place.” The capabilities needed to successfully kickstart the “modern sector” in one go–the systems of organization, the scientific and technical knowledge–are precisely the ones that need to be nurtured by the development process. In other words, balanced growth theory provides the correct but unhelpful diagnosis that a country’s failure to modernize stems from its lack of modernity.

Rosenstein-Rodan’s Big Push tries to solve the problem by starting the modern sector all at once, grafting it like foreign tissue onto the traditional agrarian economy. But even if the graft somehow sticks, Hirschman observes that the results can be quite unpleasant. A common outcome is a dualist economy, which you’ll still often see today around the world—a gleaming modern sector of skyscrapers and shopping malls, next to a traditional agrarian sector that remains desperately poor. Further examples are the persistent gulf in Latin America between indígenas and mestizos, and the foreign-owned plantations that are islands of “modernity” surrounded by seas of poverty.

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The solution Hirschman proposes is unbalanced growth. Instead of trying to solve all problems all at once, policy-makers should push forward in a limited number of sectors, and use the reactions and disequilibria created by those interventions to inform their next move.

Take the example of an industrial district. With limited resources, a policymaker may have to choose between building the actual factories, or laying down the highways and power-plants (what he calls Social Overhead Capital) to supply it.

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Hirschman formalizes this insight with his famous notion of backward and forward linkages. Backward linkages are the demand created by a new industry for its inputs, like steel for an auto plant or milk for a cheesemaker. Forward linkages are the reverse—the knock-on effects of a new industry’s outputs on the firms it supplies. Backward linkages, Hirschman goes on to explain, are better at spurring growth than forward ones. Rather than plopping down a steel factory somewhere, with no customers assured, it is far easier to build the auto plant first, sourcing the car parts from other countries as needed, then gradually entice local producers to enter the market. Instead of a Big Push across all industries at once, Hirschman calls for the Targeted Strike–choose the sectors with the most potential to create demand for other inputs, and support those.

Ahead of his time for economics, Hirschman also argues that the “nonmarket” responses induced by a policy change may be just as important as market ones. If, say, the factories in the industrial zone face a shortage of trained workers, the locals may clamor for new schools. Or if the trucks congest their neighborhood roads, they may pressure their local officials to improve the highway. Politics cannot be separated from economics when thinking about developmental choices.

Hirschman’s theory of unbalanced growth is rooted in empiricism, allowing policy makers to test and gauge the reactions of the specific context rather than applying some universal formula. It recognizes that development is naturally a chaotic, messy process, much closer to a “chain of disequilibria” than the result of a master plan. To paraphrase another important development thinker, Hirschman’s unbalanced growth is the modest call to cross the river by feeling the stones, one intervention at a time.

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Far too many Wisdom of the Ancients pieces—those op-eds that claim Adam Smith had it all right, if only you hadn’t dozed through The Wealth of Nations; or Marx saw it all coming, it’s just all in the endnotes to Capital Volume III–end up wringing their hands in despair, bemoaning what their chosen prophet would think if they saw the state of economics today.

But not so with Albert Hirschman.

Since Krugman wrote his 1995 essay, development economics has undergone another intellectual upheaval. Highly formalized growth models are still around, but the center of gravity has shifted decisively towards randomized control trials (RCTs) and micro-level evidence—a more Hirschmanian approach if there ever was one. The 2019 Nobel Prize to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer was, in a sense, just a belated recognition of this de facto intellectual triumph.

The methodological switch to RCTs has not been without controversy; I’ll leave that whole debate aside for another time. But the randomista revolution remains underrated in one crucial respect. Running RCTs has forced a whole generation of economists to leave their desks, go to the countries they study, and talk to the people who live there. In Chris Blattman’s words, we’re all Hirschman now—tramping through fields, collecting our own data, trying our best to not let theory obscure the evidence of our eyes. It’s not hard to see Hirschman’s ghost wandering through the Busia offices of Innovations for Poverty Action, nodding his head in wry approval.

The Moloch Trap of Environmental Problems

A Moloch Trap is, in simple terms, a zero-sum game. It explains a situation where participants compete for object or outcome X but make something else worse in the process. Everyone competes for X, but in doing so, everyone ends up worse off.

It explains the situations with externalities or the preference for short-term gains at the sacrifice of the long-term future.

The problem is that it’s incredibly hard for any “player” to break the trap. If they do, they will lose out in the short term (and they might still be exposed to the downsides in the long term). Everyone is stuck in a “game” or “race” that they don’t want to be in, but it’s impossible to stop.

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The Moloch Trap explains almost every one of the world’s environmental problems. I struggled to think of one that doesn’t fall into this camp.

Environmental problems are caused by a fight for scarce resources, activities that push externalities and negative impacts onto others, and the sacrifice of long-term sustainability for short-term gains.

People overfish because they know that other fishermen are doing the same. If they don’t maximise their catch now, they’ll be left with none. This is not optimal for anyone in the medium to long term because the fish stocks will be depleted.

We cut down forests because there are economic gains – from using that land for something else, such as farming – to be made in the short term. If we don’t cut it down, then someone else probably will.

We burn fossil fuels because it offers us huge immediate benefits (energy) but at the expense of a stable climate in the medium-term. It’s in no single country’s interest to stop doing so because they will miss out on the short-term energy gains and will still have to deal with climate change if other countries keep polluting.

We deplete groundwater resources to irrigate our farms despite knowing that it will soon run out. If we don’t do it, someone else will, so we might as well make some money from what’s left while it’s still available.

Each of these is a classic “tragedy of the commons” situation.

The key question is how we can break the Moloch Trap and solve them?

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What’s key to breaking the Moloch Trap is turning zero-sum games into positive-sum ones. I think this is underrated in environmental discussions. I often see people pushing for solutions that are, inevitably, zero-sum. That won’t win widespread public support and definitely won’t allow it to be sustained for decades.

The good news is that I think we’re in a unique position today to generate more positive sum games than ever before. In the past, energy and agriculture were zero-sum games. There really was no way to increase agricultural productivity: yields were low and constant for thousands of years. There was really no way to make energy without burning stuff: either wood or fossil fuels. Technological innovation is what allows us to break out of these win-lose games. That’s the opportunity we have, and it’s up to us to use these innovations responsibly.

Technology won’t do it on its own: it relies on a social, political and economic ecosystem around it to guide it towards the outcomes we want. 

When focusing on environmental solutions, be on the lookout for win-wins. Switching from one win-lose to another is not going to get us there.

- More Here

I Think, I am Amish!

I never read this 2017 post by Carl Newport but as long as I remember, I treated technology I buy and/or use like an Amish. 

This filter helped me buy my first Mac decades ago, Prius (2008), Nest & Hue (when those came out) and even the Airpods.  Other than those mentioned, I pretty much don't have any other technology since it doesn't help with my life nor my values. 

I wish I had such a good filter in other areas of my life. 

The Amish and Technology

“Amish lives are anything but anti-technological,” Kelly writes. “I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselvers. They are often, surprisingly, pro-technology.”

He explains that the simple notion of the Amish as Luddites vanishes as soon as you approach a standard Amish farm. “Cruising down the road you may see an Amish kid in a straw hat and suspenders zipping by on Rollerblades.”

Some Amish communities use tractors, but only with metal wheels so they cannot drive on roads like cars. Some allow a gas-powered wheat thresher but require horses to pull the “smoking contraption.” Personal phones (cellular or household) are almost always prohibited, but many communities maintain a community phone booth.

Almost no Amish communities allow automobile ownership, but it’s common for Amish to travel in cars driven by others.

Kelly reports that both solar panels and diesel electric generators are common, but it’s usually forbidden to connect to the larger municipal power grid.

Disposable diapers are popular as are chemical fertilizers.

In one memorable passage, Kelly talks about visiting a family that uses a $400,000 computer-controlled precision milling machine to produce pneumatic parts needed by the community. The machine is run by the family’s bonnet-wearing, 10-year old daughter. It’s housed behind their horse stable.

These observations dismiss the common belief that the Amish reject any technology invented after the 19th century. So what’s really going on here?

The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backwards to ask whether a given technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

 

Rhyme-As-Reason Effect

Many summers ago, when I was young, I got some booze, I got drunk, and I got a hangover. The next morning, I told my dad what happened over breakfast. “We had some wine at the restaurant,” I groaned, “and then a few beers at Mark’s house. It doesn’t seem enough for me to feel this bad.” My dad chuckled the chuckle of the knowing. He then said something I carry with me to this day: “Beer before wine and you’ll feel fine; wine before beer and you’ll feel queer.”

Years later, I’m fairly certain my dad was dealing in aphoristic pseudoscience, but the point is that out of all the many tidbits of advice he handed down over the years, only a few stick in my memory. And those are the ones that rhymed. There’s a mnemonic heft to a well-turned phrase, and a rhyming line lodges itself far easier than an entire book’s worth of learning.

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There are two important lessons to learn from this. The first is that rhyming is a great mnemonic. If you want to retain it, rhyme it. The second is to appreciate that just because you remember something in rhyme doesn’t make it accurate. My dad’s wisdom, “Beer before wine and you’ll feel fine; wine before beer and you’ll feel queer,” might sound neat but is based on scant and dubious evidence. Better something like “Consume a lot of booze; you’ll get the hangover blues.” Keep in mind that a nice turn of phrase isn’t necessarily better than a clumsier one.

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