You never try, you never know
Invite to Unconference. Why it’s best to try and lessons for climate doomsters. My excellent podcast with Leigh Caldwell on cognitive economics and the power of stories.
JP refuses to stay overnight at certain places. This means for a “holiday”, we commute by train, often by various roundabout ways, sometimes linking up with the other half of our family, and sometimes not. The journey is the holiday for JP.
The extreme heat in England produced many challenges this week. Plus unexpected extras including “cattle on the railway” and cancelled trains. We had a disaster brewing on top of this - JP’s beloved Class 317 trains are going out of service. We missed their farewell journey. JP was distraught.
Growing up, my family had three recurring mottos:
Everything in moderation, even (at times) moderation
To travel is to learn
You never try, you never know (also the variant: you never ask, you never get)
Evoking “you never try, you never know” we set off to try and find a class 317. Greater Anglia Twitter thought there would not be any. There was a very small chance one might appear if another train was cancelled. Still, we lived in hope.
Hanging out - for quite some time (this is common for us) - at Liverpool St Station… what appears unexpectedly? Yes! A Class 317 on one of its final journeys. This one was not in service (and had already been part of the previous weekend’s farewell journey) but the kind driver let us in.
And so, the lesson - yet again true -
You never try, you never know
There is a lesson for climate doomsters here. Psychologically, it was much better for JP (and me) to use our agency and try. The probabilities were really small. (The train was not meant to be there). I think the chances were between 1 in 100,000 and 1 in 1,000,000. I think the chances humanity both mitigates and adapts to the climate challenge are better than that.
Don’t let anxiousness weigh you down and prevent you from action.
Further… if we don’t try (on climate, on progress…), we will never know….
(Noah Smith, link end, has much to say on this and why he is so against degrowth. I also note my letter last week that notes the lower death count from the India heatwave from Wallace-Wells’ cliamte letter.)
The heat has another lesson here. We will need to adapt as well as to mitigate. Much UK infrastructure can not work well in >40c and people, organisations will need to adapt round that.
My podcast with Leigh Caldwell is out. I learned an enormous amount and it left me dwelling on how incentives, stories and day dreams work in our brains. We also dipped into policy, theories like Godel and Arrow, modelling (agency) and psychology. It’s a long read or listen, but very stimulating. Self-recommending.
Leigh Caldwell is a cognitive economist. Leigh has done excellent work around the psychology of pricing and exploring how people consume intangible products with their mind. He has founded several software companies and is co-founder of the Irrational Agency.
We chatted on Leigh graduating from university at 18 and what attracted him to the internet. Why he wanted to start companies and what lead him to the path of psychology, behavioral economics and ultimately to cognitive economics.
How the question of “Why do we get so much of what's important to us from what is manufactured inside our heads?” inspired Leigh to understand more about the brain.
Leigh discusses his ideas on why the human brain might have developed the mental tools that we have. We explore the idea of mental simulation, what the brain may be incentivised to do and how the brain may solve the challenge of planning for future action and deferred gratification.
I believe that some of these mental tools arose, not quite for communication, but at an slightly earlier stage, which is the idea of planning. When…. we talk about this idea of the future self. You may take an action now that is intended to benefit your future self. …it's not just humans. The stereotype - the cliché - is the squirrel that buries the acorn instead of eating it so that its future self will have an acorn. Now, I don't believe that your future self can motivate you today. That would be time travel. Your future self doesn't exist yet. Your future self cannot tell you what to do or influence you because it won't be there for a while.
However, clearly there is an evolutionary advantage in being able to act for your future self. There obviously is, because if you only act for your present self, you can squander a lot of resources. Your future self will have less chance of surviving and for passing on your genes. So I think evolution made this accidental discovery that if you can imagine the utility of a future consumption occasion, then you'll get utility from that right now. It's essentially a way of your brain getting the payoff now for an action that will have a future benefit. I believe that that-- In the case of the squirrel, it might be kind of coded in an instinctive. The squirrel may or may not be using an imaginary process, I don't know.
But there is this idea of mental simulation that we have observed in lots of animals; not just humans. It's the idea that we can replay or pre-play an experience and essentially feel again what it felt like. So you'll see it when you can see a mouse, for example, that is sleeping. If it's been trained to follow a maze, you can see the same kind of place cells that are activated when it's in the maze, you can see them activating again while it's sleeping…. And what it's probably doing is replaying that experience so it can makes synaptic connections that will make it more efficient to follow the maze next time, or it's kind of calibrating, "What if I went that way through the maze, what would that be like?" And it's kind of planning out some possible routes. So essentially, what I think happens there is when the mouse is at a certain point in the maze where the cheese is, it gets some reward so that generates dopamine in the brain and so on. But when the mouse imagines being at that point in the maze, I think it also gets some reward. So the brain is doing this clever job of being able to reward you for imagining something good. And essentially for planning out the chain of events that would get you there so that you could take an action now that will follow those rewards bread crumbs and lead you there.
So essentially, in order to solve the problem of future action of planning and deferred gratification, the brain has evolved a synthetic gratification or a synthetic reward that happens when you imagine things. And I think that is, although probably the evolutionary function of it was to allow us to conserve resources and spread consumption over time, the side effect of it is that we can get rewards for not consuming anything. That in a sense, what we're doing, I think with art and with daydreaming is where we're tricking ourselves into having this reward, even when we may never get the thing that originally it was associated with.
Leigh discusses the idea of discounting the future, the challenge of long causality chains in our scenario thinking and how the ease of imagination may impact how we think of future actions.
Leigh explains his model exploring agency and choice, and the difficulties and limitations of models.
We discuss the power of stories, why narrative might work and the possible process of conditioning and deconditioning to story narratives. Why once a myth or pattern is embedded, it is so difficult to work around.
Leigh gives me some free consulting on how to price and sell sustainable investing products, how to use surveys and how a small company could do it themselves to an extent. We discuss utility theory and nudge economics.
We play over-rated/under-rated on: nudging, carbon tax, carbon labels, being a generalist, deliberative democracy; and Scottish Independence.
We end on current projects and Leigh’s life advice.
‘...storytelling is your voice going out there and hopefully having as big an impact as you want. But, story hearing is the other side of it. We should be listening to the stories of all the people around us, and the many people whose stories are not heard in society. By hearing those stories and understanding what underlies them, then we will be able to figure out what the right story is that we might then want to tell…”
Interested in sustainability, innovation, progress… how humans might thrive and survive over the long term?
The Sustainability Accelerator UnConference is a participatory one-day event. We will bring together thinkers from a wide range of backgrounds to discuss challenges and solutions to reach a sustainable future over the long term.
We will use OpenSpace with Improbable. At traditional conferences, some of the best conversations happen in the corridors and the audience have just as many ideas as the panel. You can find out more about Improbable and the way in which they use Open Space here.
On the day, participants self-organise to create their own agenda, allowing a dynamic and immediate response to the issues at hand. Any participant can timetable a topic on something that they want to work on. Nothing is out of bounds. Once all the topics are timetabled, participants move into smaller, flexible break-out groups. People work on the things that they feel most passionate about.
Date: Friday, 16 September | Approx 9.30am to 4.30pm
Venue: Chatham House, 10 St James’s Square, London SW1Y 4LE
If you think this might be for you and I hope it is, email me and I will register you. Or link to register here.
Links:
More from Saloni - on how peer review works, ideas for improving the process.
(Seems like it is very burdensome and cumbersome now)
Brain implants are a reality now, not only science fiction…
Forests are slowly coming back
The ongoing COVID death toll in the US will be a top 10 killer for some time:
Worrying but plausible theory on NHS in crisis:
Another UK crisis… this time in the legal system:
Arguments that the “de-growth movement” is not working…
UK policy ideas for growth and progress
Do please share, or like - and leave a comment if you wish. Also, if you can be bothered - it is super helpful to move this letter from “Promotions” to the main inboc if you get this in gmail, so you can teach the algorithm. Thanks so much - Ben