We think fine. We think when things get serious we'll act. Then things get serious -- like billions of people locked down, plastic in our bloodstreams, would-be leaders exacerbating problems, etc -- and we don't act how we thought we would.
The problem is our behavior. Thinking is relevant, but behavior is the issue.
It explores this idea, that we like to think that we would be heroes if things got tough... even though we don't do anything heroic in our normal, cushy lives.
We seem to think we would some how be better people if things are hard, when in reality it is often the opposite. This pandemic has really driven home this point.
To quote the article:
> Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre.
That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...
Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. Being a week or a month late to the current pandemic is less costly than locking down for SARS, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, ...
Not to mention the times when we did overreact. The latest TSA budget is $8.24 billion dollars, or 824 lives per year (at a cost of $10 million per life), or 2.17 One World Trade Centers per year, or (verging into polemic) one 9/11 every four years.
Isn't the lesson that we tend to overreact? Sure, maybe it'll be a pandemic, and let's not completely discount the idea, but why not just lock the plane's cabin doors and see if it gets worse?
For the general public, ignoring and carrying on is a great response. We live in a world that capitalizes on specialists. The problem with COVID-19 was multiple failures by the people whose jobs were to care about pandemics. And we don't need massive budgets to prevent pandemics. Just epidemiologists and doctors on the lookout. Small teams working with hotspot countries.
It's not the average citizen's fault we got here. It's the fault of the institutions tasked with protecting us, who only had to hire a small team of experts every two decades to write up short proposals of what to do in unusual but eventually guaranteed emergencies. From what I've seen, the majority of Western countries were making up their pandemic response on the fly. And it's a virus that spreads like the annual flu, so not even a "black swan" method of infection.
As far as I know most countries already do that more often than you ask for. Everyone had a strong response to the 2009 pandemic, with plans, PPE stockpiles and such. The virus turned out very mild, which lead to heeding to the advice of epidemiologists to be politically costly. But in the USA pandemic preparedness was only effectively disassembled with the 2017 update.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/uk-coronavirus...
Many people created models of the spread of Covid. Some of these models worked very well and others were terribly inaccurate. We should use the models that work and not those that have lost all credibility.
- climate change: very high probability * very high impact
- terrorism: low/med probability * low/med impact
- thermonuclear war: low-ish(?) probability * extremely high impact
- superhuman AGI: ??? probability * ??? impact (likely very high impact, but + or - is uncertain)
In a standard rational decision-making framework, if: cost of action < risk, then: take action.
[Edit: Of course this is all a gross simplification. See more here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
There is a 100% probability. It has been happening since there was a climate. The question is how much can we really affect it or even if we should.
If the change is human induced and on a very short timeframe (ie since the industrial revolution), then action on a similar scale should be possible to mitigate the impact.
Impact is more like “perceived impact to me” and risk is over a timeline that matters to the assessor of risk.
War hawks see nuclear war as medium probability, low impact. Most people see climate change as something impactful in a timeframe they don’t give a shit about, and terrorism is medium or high impact with medium or high probability in a timeframe that matters to them.
This implies that the best solution to terrorism is to abolish national news, in order to diminish its impact.
Think about how OJ Simpson ushered in our era of shit news.
The “definition” of risk that I gave is a useful heuristic, even for my cat. He seems to calculate the probability of being caught on the kitchen counters, conditional on the number of people home and the time of day. He knows that he may get spritzed for violations and can balance this against the reward (simply chillin’ = stern warning; eviscerating a briefly undefended loaf of fresh challah = direct barrage from the water bottle). Clearly, this shrewd exploitation of Lady Luck is a learned behavior. (Whether is consciously strategic behavior or just serendipitously adaptive cat programming is actually immaterial in the game theoretic sense—mixed strategy Nash equilibria that result from evolutionary dynamics are equivalent to those that arise from strategic deduction).
Anyways, you’re right that the original motivation for probability theory and expected value was to “get money” (via gambling): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_points
Your cat is honest.
Humans take great leaps to dial in the answer they want!
Yes, but cost of action includes opportunity cost of not doing all the alternative actions for which you now suddenly don’t have the time.
Which makes rational decision making incredibly hard!
Example: focus all the effort on preventing climate change by reducing CO2 right now, or work on improving GDP for entire world so we have enough money and tech to mitigate the downsides?
And there is much, much more than opportunity cost that makes decision theory difficult. However, the basic definition of expected value (e.g. both risk and reward)—and decision making on the basis of it (e.g. cost-benefit analysis)—is so universally useful that I believe every living creature relies on this concept in some way or another (even if things are decided for them via evolutionary fitness—which we probably shouldn’t let happen to us as a civilization).
As for your question, I reject the premise that there exists a binary choice between “focus all the effort on...reducing CO2 right now” vs. having “enough money and tech to mitigate the downsides” (an idea I’d also reject as frankly absurd—how will money and tech address a 50% species extinction rate?). Speaking of which, there are many classes of things that defy the concept of market value or utility—like the existence of species—which is where this framework can fall down. We can’t recognize their value as infinite without reaching absurdities (like I dunno, destroying everything else in the universe to preserve toucans or something). But preserving the future inhabitability of the planet for humans and other living beings is clearly of such high aggregate value that it is rational to devote significant effort towards mitigation (beginning with the actions that have the highest benefit/cost ratio).
By the way, I highly recommend the book “Beyond Growth” by Herman Daly as an introduction to ecological economics and the failure of GDP as a measure of progress.
Capitalism prioritizes profits over people's lives.
If it were profitable to stockpile resources to protect life and/or property, in advance of foreseeable adverse events, we would be more prepared.
Precisely because it is not profitable, we are not.
Effectively, government (through taxation and public works) is the mechanism of capital (re-)distribution that is not (or should not be) profit driven.
...which is exactly capitalism: 1) private companies are required to maximize (short term) profit as their first priority. 2) the billionaire class can heavily influence policy through regulatory capture
Daniel Kahneman argues otherwise.