We never talk anymore

Actually, it's not that we never talk anymore, it's that we never ever learned how to talk in the first place.

Like the old tale of the blind men stumbling into an elephant and arguing that it is "like a rope" or "like a tree" or "like a huge leaf", the whole planet is stumbling into new territory without a way to compare notes and rise above voting whether the elephant is "a tree" or not, based on a 51% cutoff of votes.

There is, indeed, a "unity" higher than the "diversity" of views, that is not reached by everyone giving in to the majority view.

The New York Times had an op-ed piece on global warming, with 120 or so comments. Nicholas Kristoff had a piece, Nov 13, 2007, "Avoiding Climate Change: Why Americans Prevaricate and Delay on Taking Action." I read all the comments carefully, then posted this reply:

I think Abraham Lincoln once said that if he had ten minutes to chop down a tree he'd spend the first five sharpening the axe.

For all our high-tech at assembling machine parts and getting them to work together, we are in the dark ages at assembling each other's views of knowledge and coming up with a Big Picture we can all trust.

Sequentially speaking our own views is fascinating, but underpowered, and isn't leading to an informed consensus that has transparency and improves with time. Instead we're still back at trying to find the 51% of the votes to suppress the other 49% of us.

Lots of people want to "educate" me, but fewer want to listen to what I'm trying to say in return.

I agree we need research, but before we research some scientific thing, let's get serious work at how to compare notes, get past hysteria, and figure out which way is actually up -- in general, not just about one issue like climate change.

Sure, it's important. So is poverty. So is pollution. So are governance and human values. So are all sorts of public health issues. So are tyranny and exploitation.

We need better ways to pool notes and educate each other that we can trust, that work in 6 months not 3 generations to bring everyone up to speed on what's going on and why, or what we don't know. Something with enough credibility and transparency that even skeptics are willing to come and participate.

That seems to me what's broken or missing here. Without it, it seems we'll just go on forever disagreeing and shouting and never coming up with solutions to anything that are sustainable.

Our process for getting together and combining views of the elephant is broken, or never existed, but, either way, we need to work on that before we simply go on trying to use a broken process to argue in ever shriller and louder voices that our own views and facts have some validity too.

The complex problems will not reduce themselves to "trees" or "leaves" because those are what we understand easily. We need to figure out how to understand "elephant", which means all of us are wrong, or more precisely, right-but-incomplete.

Maybe social networking technology or Wiki's can help. Like a huge space frame used to reassemble fragments of exploded aircraft parts, we need some way to put all these small parts into a huge 3-D space where they can be compared to other parts and let the larger picture emerge.

That's the kind of thing that scientific peer-review is supposed to do, but the issues these days involve huge social issues, feedback, and interdependencies of the type that Science, sadly, hasn't really gotten to yet. Many of these issues do not lend themselves to being measured by numbers (or, as I've discussed, by "scalars" or single numbers that are rankable.)

Electing people who consolidate 51% of the views and squash the other 49% in order to "make progress" doesn't look to me like a viable solution. It doesn't matter that everyone "agree" the elephant is a "tree", if it's wrong.

It's the unity ABOVE diversity we need, not stronger or more strident voices for trees or leaves or ropes. We need to figure out a civilized way to respect each other and consult with each other and learn surprising things from each other without having to "win" the discussion.

And, it's a multi-level world. There are needs at different scales, not just different places. It's not OK if public health tries to solve needs of individuals and neglects needs of corporations, shocking as that seems. It's not ok to solve needs of corporations at the expense of individuals or nations. It's not sufficient to solve people and corporations at the expense of the nation or the planet's biosphere. It's not an "OR" equation ... it's an "AND" equation.

And it's not OK to solve the problems of the wealthy at the expense of the poor, or the problems of the US at the expense of everyone else -- not for moral reasons, however valid, but because in the end the morality is trying to tell us that we only have one lifeboat here, and all our problems are tangled together. We have to fix all the holes in the lifeboat, not just those at our end, or it will still sink. Either the planet has a functioning biosphere or it doesn't, whatever it is that depends on or doesn't. At some point the damage we're doing matters, and it would be really good to know for sure where that point is, or was.

The complexity is more than you or I or any human can grapple with, as individuals. It is not more than we can deal with as the multi-level planetary sized organized thingie that we are. Large groups of people can deal with massive amounts of detail complexity, but what we're dying on here is the other kind of complexity, interactional complexity. It's not just "more of the same", more details than we can track ... it's a more complex shape and interaction called "elephant", not just more trees than we can count.

Large groups can synthesize emergent understanding of that kind of complexity, the same way termites, individually with barely a neuron to work with, can build nests with advanced air-conditioning features built in. But we need to realize that's the problem we're up against so we focus more social energy on it.

Wade