Thucydides’s Trap & Four P's Problem Of US

When discussing the US election, he invokes his “four Ps” of how a rising power impacts on a ruling power in Thucydides’s Trap. He says all four dimensions are present in today’s US. There are shifts in power (“I used to be able to demand something or push a button, but it doesn’t happen any more”), perception (“I used to look down at you because you were smaller than I was and now I’m looking up or eye-to-eye”), psychology (“I’m accustomed to me being number one and not you, you’re threatening my identity”) and politics (“never let a serious [political] opponent get to your right on an issue of national security”). Allison observes that the Republican presidential platform next year may well advocate formal recognition of Taiwan, as one of the prospective candidates – former secretary of state Mike Pompeo – already does. “American politics is driving towards something that could become a provocation that China could not avoid,” Allison says. On Taiwan’s election, he notes that President Tsai Ing-wen cannot run again and that Lai Ching-te, the candidate of her Democratic Progressive Party, “privately is very keen on becoming an independent country [and he] is not as circumspect as Tsai”. 

A particularly striking applied historical example of Thucydides’s Trap is the build-up to the First World War, in which the rise of Germany after unification in 1871 destabilised Europe’s order to the point where it produced catastrophic conflict in 1914. On this parallel I have two questions for Allison.  

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The second question concerns blocs: Europe’s pre-1914 alliance system helped to propel the continent to war in 1914. We are speaking in mid-March, shortly after a major US-UK-Australia (Aukus) summit in San Diego and shortly before a summit between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Is the world entering a new era of big-bloc politics? Here, Allison sees fewer resemblances to conditions before the First World War. The future, he says, will be more multipolar than either unipolar or bipolar. “It’s going to be a much messier world, with many, many actors not determined by any [superpower]’s commands.”  

Again he cites Saudi Arabia – a supposed American ally that is increasingly following its own course. According to US intelligence, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist. But as Allison puts it, the Saudi response to US censure over the killing amounted to: “Screw you. You’re trying to ostracise me, you need me as much as I need you.” Allison sees the Saudi-Iran rapprochement as part of this message to the US: “You will have a lot of independent players not asking for permission, not apologising, just pursuing their interests. I think that will be the game.”  

This messier world will be a more dangerous one. I recall Allison’s lectures at Harvard on the Cuban missile crisis and ask him whether those lessons have been retained in major capitals. “About half and half,” he replies. On the one hand, he argues, Vladimir Putin understands well that nuclear war with Nato would mean the end of everything. But on the other, the chances of catastrophic misunderstandings or miscalculations are rising. “In the case of China, as far as I can see, [bilateral communication] is all shut down after the antics over the balloon. If you believe what we learned in the Cold War – which I think is absolutely right – that communication at many levels, some of them private, to reduce risk is important, [then] the absence of these is dangerous.” 

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The conversation leaves me with the impression of a world careening towards yet greater chaos and conflict, blind to the wider forces of history. “I think too often, we imagine that we’re writing on a blank slate, that we can just decide what we want to do,” says Allison. How much should we feel beholden to historical patterns such as Thucydides’s Trap? He replies that structural realities determine about 80 per cent of events. Many things really are externally determined. “I might like to run a marathon in Boston,” the 83-year-old professor says. “But in this life it ain’t gonna happen, given my age.” But, I note, that leaves 20 per cent of events that can be shaped. “Exactly,” comes the reply. “There are two mistakes here. One is to be arrogant: ‘I’m actually writing on a blank slate.’ The other one is to become fatalistic.” I quote a line by Otto von Bismarck, the unifier and first chancellor of the German empire: “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to his coat-tails as he marches past.” Allison responds to it immediately: “That’s a great reminder of how, if you fail to take hold of the coat-tails, you’re not going to get where you are going.” 

Then Graham Allison switches metaphors. “Think about a river that you are rowing in. You can try to row upstream, but only with a lot more exertion. Or you can declare to the river that it should stop, but that’s not going to do much good. Or maybe you can dam the river, or dam part of it, or maybe you can cut a little tributary.” In other words: though we must be humble before the forces of history, we must recognise where we still have agency. “If the river is big enough and flowing hard enough, there’s going to be water going somewhere. But it’s not necessarily determined that it stays in exactly the channel that it’s in.” Thucydides would doubtless approve. 

- Interview with Graham Allison who coined the term Thucydides’s Trap & author of the book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

Self-Regulatory Learning

A simple idea from David Epstein's blog which could have great benefits in our lives. I think, I have been doing this for past two decades and I can vouch for this method.  

ES: Self-regulatory learning — basically thinking about your thinking. I’ve seen this in a number of domains, but was just reading a relevant study of cardiac procedures at hospitals. To simplify it: in some instances, hospital staff just racked up experience doing procedures; in others, they got some experience doing procedures, but then also had some time to reflect on and try to articulate what they had actually learned from the experience — whether it went well or poorly. This whole literature on self-regulatory learning, to me, gets at some of the challenge of learning from experience if we leave it up to intuition. It turns out that doing this explicit reflection on lessons is a powerful learning aid, but it’s also not something we intuitively feel we need to do. In the hospital study, the groups that had some experience and some reflection time performed better than the groups that had more procedural experience but no reflection time. That seems like a big deal to me.

RH: Oh, I like that idea. Because there are two ways of learning from experience. One is automatic and it doesn't take any effort on your part, and the other requires effort. And if you just leave it to no effort and rely on what you pick up, you'll pick up strange things. And therefore, what is very helpful is if you actually have to analyze some of these issues and understand why you've learned one thing as opposed to anything else. So I think the general idea of sacrificing, as it were, some experience for some thinking time is really important.

ES: I know I’ve repeated this point, but usually if we just learn from a success or failure, you will think you’re learning and you’ll keep doing something. And you may be blind to what causes the difference. If you stop and think about it, and try an experiment, you will not need as much experience. But, as Robin said, our instinct is thoughtless learning, to just double your efforts doing the same thing over and over. People like the warm feeling of learning from experience and continuing, but sometimes it’s just a feeling and they like that rather than stopping and reflecting on it a bit. 

RH: Also, the thing you're learning is how to design a better experiment the next time around. So taking time out, to not only experience things but spend that time analyzing and designing experiments is important. And it’s one of the things that we're not very good at — teaching people how to be experimenters, how to actually design experiments in the real world.  

DE: Given that peoples’ lives aren’t in labs and can’t conform to the formal scientific method, what do you think we can take to get just a little bit better in our own experiments? Maybe trying to isolate particular variables when we experiment so we have a better chance at understanding causality? 

RH: Having awareness of different hypotheses is probably the key. This can be done in real life interaction with people. You do experiments with your own family just by interacting with them. You don't necessarily analyze them as experiments, but you can have hypotheses. 

DE: You mean about why they behave the way they do or react to you or to some activity a certain way?

RH: Right. 

Embracing Radical Listening

To make global health truly participatory, the world’s health institutions must adopt a radical approach to listening to everyday people. Listening must become global health’s lynchpin.

With emerging practices like narrative medicine and participatory action research, clinical health care spaces, therapeutic environments, and nonprofit workplaces have begun to embrace radical listening as a discipline. The driving idea is that people closest to a problem are best positioned to find solutions, which health professionals can help implement by providing resources and critical technical capabilities.

A commitment to radical listening would transform global health for the better. Consider the experience of communities in Borneo — an island that’s home to poor, rural villages scattered throughout one of the world’s major rainforests, threatened by deforestation. Before attempting to implement any interventions, a team led by the nongovernmental organization Alam Sehat Lestari worked as a local partner with the international nonprofit Health In Harmony, which one of us founded. The team conducted more than 400 hours of listening sessions with nearly 500 community representatives, including farmers, religious leaders, teachers, women’s groups, and other community members.

Those listening sessions revealed a problem common across the region: Despite depending on their precious forests, residents often resorted to illegal logging to pay for access to basic health care. This insight led communities to design a holistic solution for themselves. They invited health professionals to help establish nearby health facilities, with a brilliant incentive: The cost of care would be discounted for communities that halted or reduced illegal logging. People could also barter for health services with seedlings or manure, to be used for forest restoration and farming.

- More Here

Who To Read

f you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. 

This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail.”

- Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

Like everyone else, my time on this planet is ticking towards its end. 

In my 20's and 30's, I have done good amount of exploitation vs exploration strategies (search algorithms use these strategy) on what to learn and from who to learn. Obviously, I have to encountered more than my allotted quota of dead ends (books on consciousness, blue brain project to Aristotle sans the humility of Socrates)

Maria Popova has a beautiful piece on The Value of Being Wrong: Lewis Thomas on Generative Mistakes

Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

We learn, as we say, by “trial and error.” Why do we always say that? Why not “trial and rightness” or “trial and triumph”? The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done.

 And for those who have nihilistic tendencies; he lays out more reality of our lives: 

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

- Richard Feynman 

 

How Geology Resolves The Fermi Paradox

Given the diversity of voices that have weighed in on the possibility that other civilizations may be out there, it is surprising that few geoscientists—people who study the one planet known to host life—have weighed in on the cosmic conundrum. Physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where is everybody?” has long lacked a geological perspective. 

That’s what Earth scientists Robert Stern and Taras Gerya offer in a recent paper published in Scientific Reports. Earlier speculations about extraterrestrial civilizations were based primarily on astronomical and technological considerations like the number of planetary systems in the galaxy and how long it might take an intelligent species to discover and begin using radio waves. That left little attention for the specific attributes of potential host planets—other than the presence or absence of water. 

Stern is a geologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who studies the evolution of the continental crust, and Gerya is a geophysicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who models Earth’s internal processes. Their conclusion may disappoint extraterrestrial enthusiasts: The likelihood that other technologically sophisticated societies exist is smaller than previously thought, because basic amenities we take for granted on Earth—continents, oceans, and plate tectonics—are cosmically rare.

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Bringing a geologic perspective to the problem, Stern and Gerya propose to resolve the paradox by adding two more factors to the already unwieldy Drake equation: the fraction of habitable planets with distinct continents and oceans; and the fraction of those planets with a plate tectonic system that has operated for at least 500 million years. The values of these terms are very small, they argue, because the development of distinct landmasses and water bodies, and the tectonic habit of crustal recycling—characteristics of Earth that we take for granted—are unlikely outcomes in the evolution of rocky planets. 

With these new factors, the number of advanced civilizations in our galaxy that might communicate with us falls to … almost zero.

- More Here

We Need More Jane Goodalls

Not the teachers with thick textbooks or the graphs with red lines trending up or down. I mean the voices that made you pause. That made you look at an animal not as a specimen, but as a neighbor. That made you look at a pond as a microecosystem full of life.

For many of us, those voices are growing quieter. One by one, we’re losing the great science communicators and activists who taught us to care. The ones who spoke not just in data, but in stories. Who helped us fall in love with forests, oceans, elephants, insects, and the fragile web that holds it all together.

And with each loss, the question grows louder: who’s left to carry that torch? Whose voices are we raising?

The truth is, science on its own has never been enough. Charts and reports rarely stir people to act. What moves us is empathy, love, and passion. What changes us are stories. About humans who cared, about why we should care.

Think of Rachel Carson, credited with launching the modern environmental movement, whose book Silent Spring pulled back the curtain on pesticides and reshaped environmental law. Or Carl Sagan, whose Cosmos made galaxies feel like home. These were scientists, yes, but they were also storytellers.

They translated evidence into meaning.

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And among them stood Jane Goodall.

She didn’t arrive with a PhD in hand or an ivory tower pedigree. She arrived with patience, curiosity, and a willingness to sit still in a Tanzanian forest long enough for the chimpanzees to accept her.

What she found changed science forever. Chimps making and using tools. Chimps mourning their dead. Chimps hunting in groups, strategizing, forming alliances and rivalries.

But her gift wasn’t just the discoveries. It was how she told them.

She spoke about individual chimps by name, despite other scientists insisting on using numbers and codes. She refused to reduce them to data points because she had seen their personalities, their choices, their lives. David Greybeard, Flo, and Fifi are some of the names even my kids have learned from reading about Dr. Goodall's work.

That simple act, introducing animals as subjects with dignity, cracked something open in our collective imagination. It made us reconsider not just chimpanzees, but the entire spectrum of life around us.

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And her words on stage, “Only if we understand, will we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall they be saved,” became a mantra for a generation. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve used a similar quote on my own Climate Ages’ mission: When we understand, we care. When we care, we protect.

For me, and for countless others, she was a bridge. A reminder that science doesn’t have to choose between rigor and empathy. It can carry both.

Now that she is gone, I keep telling friends the same thing: we need more Jane Goodalls. Not because we need more chimp researchers in Tanzania. But because we need more scientists willing to be human in public. To risk being vulnerable. To speak with care as well as evidence.

- More Here

The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters

I am going to stop using the phrase "non human-animal" from now on. 

Here's a thought experiment.. well rather a test for you: 

• What did I eat for breakfast today?
• What color is the t-shirt I am wearing now? 

If you cannot answer these "simple" questions then you are stupid and dumb. 

Sounds ridiculous?  Even the above two questions you might be able to get right by random guess.

For centuries , the "system" to "test" cognitive abilities is zillion times worse than this. 

For starters we suffer from the inability to fully grasp another animal’s umwelt.

I know so many people who never even interacted with a dog or cat even for 24 hours but look down on them. 

Review of the new book The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine Webb:

Webb, a primatologist, has no doubt about the answer. She belongs to a growing subfield of ecologists, naturalists and evolutionary biologists who argue that animals do indeed have minds, and all that goes with them, including feelings, intentions, agency and consciousness. (She urges us to avoid the term “nonhuman animal,” as it implicitly reiterates human exceptionalism, and also to use personal as opposed to impersonal pronouns when writing about animals — both suggestions I am now following, although I may be guilty of misgendering a snake as a result.)

To those of us who have animals at home — two-thirds of U.S. households, for a total of some 400 million pets, according to Webb — the fact that our cats and dogs have thoughts and feelings won’t come as a surprise. But then, why do we continue to permit the torture and slaughter of similarly intelligent and feeling animals on an industrial scale, along with the confinement and experimentation that takes place on university campuses and in the labs of pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies?

Webb argues that the culprit is a pervasive belief in human exceptionalism — specifically, the belief that humans are exceptionally intelligent. This belief, however, is wrong. As she shows, data supporting the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence has been systematically rigged in our favor.

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Why is this criticism of any importance, given how convincing I find Webb’s larger denouncement of our treatment of the animal world? To my mind, the greater ideological danger is not the belief that humans are unique, but rather our tendency to overlook the limits of possible knowledge and impose our ways of being on others.

To better cultivate the intellectual humility Webb calls for and mitigate the attitudes and errors she denounces, I would argue that we must come to better understand human experience and how it sets us apart from the natural world.

 

A Day. A Miracle. A Beautiful Life

October 4th 2019. 

Max came back home after 4 days in critical condition. 

I knew that a day would come when Max would take his last breath before I did. The only thing I ever wanted was to have the moment in our home. In Max's home where we spend zillions of moments. The home where we became so close that we became distant to everything and everyone. The home where our language was smile, air was peace, and life filled with awe and wonder. The home where two living beings became one. 

But I also knew, I have no control over that moment and when and where it will happen. 

The thing I wanted the most happened at home because he was able to come back home on this day, six years ago. 

My Max came back home.

What else more I can ask from life? I just need to pay back for lifetimes to come for that moment in time. 

My Max came back home. 

Two simple beings had a spectacular time together on this planet. I am eternally grateful for each and every moment. 

My Max came back home. And one day, someday, I like to take my last breath in the same home. That's my only wish, desire now. 

There is immense beauty in this bond which has changed me in multi-dimensional ways that I can neither comprehend nor explain. 

My max came back home. 

Good Bye Dr. Jane Goodall

Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. 

As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent?

She passed away yesterday at an age of 91. 

What a life!! We all know life is short but the impact of her work will save millions of animals for generations to come. 

Thank you, Madam. 

I am blessed to have lived during your lifetime and shared this planet amongst all living beings. 

Peter Singer's tribute: 

I first encountered Jane’s work through In the Shadow of Man, which I read soon after it came out in 1971. It broke new ground, showing chimpanzees as individuals with personalities, capable of thought, problem-solving, and planning. At the time, I had just become a vegetarian and was beginning to think about the ethics of how we treat animals. Jane’s work was thrilling, and it influenced me deeply. I refer to it in Animal Liberation, using it to rebut the argument that because animals cannot use language to tell us what they are feeling, we can’t really know what they are feeling. She showed, through her close observation of chimpanzees, that the basic signals we use to express such feelings as pain, fear, love, anger, joy and surprise are not specific to our own species, so we have little difficulty in recognizing these emotions in some species.

I subsequently met Jane at an event for animals, and was very pleased when she told me that Animal Liberation had helped persuade her to become vegetarian. When Animal Liberation Now, the 2023 updated edition was approaching publication, she was kind enough to endorse the book, writing: “I became a vegetarian when I read Animal Liberation back in the 1970s. Then and there I stopped eating meat. If I’d read this revised Animal Liberation Now, I’d have become a vegan much sooner.”

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Jane Goodall showed us how to look at animals differently, how to live with courage, and how to dedicate a life to something larger than oneself. Her legacy is in the forests she fought to protect, the animals whose lives she changed, and in all of us who were touched by her example.

Perhaps no single image captures that legacy better than the moment with Wounda, the chimp who turned back from freedom to embrace Jane. It symbolises the compassion, trust, and love that defined her work, and it will continue to inspire generations.

It feels right to honour her together, because although we knew her in different ways, her life led us both to the same conviction: that change is possible, and necessary.

The Omnivore’s Deception By John Sanbonmatsu

Review of the book The Omnivore’s Deception By John Sanbonmatsu:

The global destruction of other animals at the hands of the meat industry is absolutely staggering: Humans kill more than 80 billion land animals and nearly 3 trillion marine animals every year, reports Professor Sanbonmatsu. Half of the planet’s land surface is dedicated to agriculture, with 80% of that devoted to either rearing animals for slaughter or growing monocrops to feed them. Tragically, almost all of Earth’s animals are captives, observes Professor Sanbonmatsu, with just a teensy 4% of all mammals (excluding humans) living freely in nature whilst their captive brethren are confined, awaiting slaughter. Seventy percent of all birds on Earth are our prisoners too, living out their flightless lives in brief, abject misery, thanks to the poultry industry.

Professor Sanbonmatsu discusses the well-known cognitive dissonance where most people think that hurting animals is wrong, but strangely, they are not bothered by killing and eating the very same animals. This paradoxical moral blindness makes meat-eaters view vegans and veganism as threats to their moral self-image and to the core of their group identity. Such human narcissism (as Freud referred to it) also leads to open contempt for vegans and vegetarians because people see themselves as superior to other animals. Such global, systemic abuses underlie and normalize the frequent recrimination that anyone or anything that is different from their oppressors is “an animal.” In short, to be born a non-human animal in today’s world is to be viewed as being unworthy of life. And yet, “[o]mnivorism is not a license to kill; it’s an invitation to improve our moral character, to act in accordance with our better natures,” Professor Sanbonmatsu asserts.

Amongst the many arguments that Professor Sanbonmatsu makes is a discussion of Aristotle’s bizarre ideas that social inequality and hierarchy are aspects of nature, “embedded in a Great Chain of Being”. Thus, according to Aristotle, it was natural for men to dominate and to victimize women (Aristotle viewed women as “incomplete” men), for masters to dominate and victimize slaves, for stronger city-states to destroy or enslave weaker ones, and for humans to dominate and victimize other animals. Despite Aristotle’s permission to abuse and kill other animals, it has been shown, repeatedly and in numerous different ways, that raising and eating other animals is devastating for the environment and a waste of natural resources, is dangerous to human health, provides an inferior source of nutrition, is a leading cause of food insecurity for our fellow humans, and is unspeakably abusive and cruel to the other animals trapped within this system.

One argument made by Professor Sanbonmatsu that especially resonated with me is that by waging war on other animals, we are continuing the war on women, on formerly enslaved peoples and on peoples with different skin colors or ethnicities. Professor Sanbonmatsu also agrees with my personal assessment that the problem with raising and killing animals for food isn’t just bad for the animals nor for the environment, but this practice actually damages our very souls.

This is not only the best book I’ve read this year but it’s the best book I’ve ever read about the morality of ethical veganism and of animal rights. It is so compelling, so coherent, and so crammed full of relevant information that even I, as a widely-read vegan and zoologist, learned so much. It eloquently presents a well-researched, thorough, nuanced and powerful argument for ending the near-universal human habit of exploiting animals for food and for entertainment.