Imagine how much better our planet's future could be, if only those who claimed to be the most knowledgeable and concerned about it could somehow acquire the basic social skills need to stop behaving like Bond Villains.
quantified•6mo ago
You make this sound like the real problem. Does raising the alarm about the mechanisms and effects of GHG-accelerated climate change count as Bond Villain villainy?
bell-cot•6mo ago
> Does raising the alarm about...
No - but after a few decades of endless "raising the alarm" (so pretty much everybody who might possibly care has lost track of how often they've heard that message), the impression which it gives is a mixture of:
- Sports cheerleading. The kids in school-colors uniforms, bouncing around with pom-poms and chanting "Our Team Will Win!", are not there to inform anyone. Let alone change their minds. It's an in-group feel-good exercise, for the benefit of folks who already are fans of that team.
- A person suffering from dementia, who repeats the same phrase or sentence over and over and over. Their words may reflect an important truth - "nurse, I need help to the bathroom". But the broken-record behavior pattern also guarantees that almost no one will believe the person to be a mentally competent adult.
(It's usually the start of the Dangerous Mad Scientist's monologue where he outlines what he has decided is Wrong With the World. Regardless of what other people think. It's usually a bit later in his monologue where he talks about how he plans to Fix The Problem, without regard for the consent of anyone else. That later stuff is where the danger music gets the loudest. And where these scientists seemed all-to-eager to go.)
quantified•6mo ago
Interesting. What you are pointing to is how ill-equipped we chimpanzee relatives are for slowly arriving and -occuring events.
bell-cot•6mo ago
I'd say that when human societies are longer-term stable, and not divided by powerful competing interests or culture wars, they can be very good at planning ahead. Doing so tends to be a signifier of legitimacy and status for the ruling class.
In some ways, you could describe the climate-change mess as a broad social class, of well-to-do academics/scientists/progressives, imagining themselves to be the undisputed ruling class. They tried to order the whole world to do as they wished on the climate issue. That failed, because they pretty much live in a social bubble - not realizing that their "authority" ran very thin outside of that bubble, among peoples who they neither knew nor cared much about. So they doubled down on "But We're Right!". Now failing to realize (if not willfully blind to) the fact that "it's Science, and we're Right!" is a very good signifier of authority within their bubble...but not outside of it.
From there - the climate believers are eager to compete for social status among themselves. But too anti-authoritarian to have or want any strong leaders - who might impose real discipline, or do some big-picture thinking. So the whole thing devolves into a stupid mess. The climate believers are busy arguing and posturing and proclaiming their creedal piety and one-upping within their own narcissistic bubble. Outside of that bubble, the climate believers look more like a bunch of callous creepy dangerous delusional nut jobs.
bell-cot•6mo ago
Imagine how much better our planet's future could be, if only those who claimed to be the most knowledgeable and concerned about it could somehow acquire the basic social skills need to stop behaving like Bond Villains.
quantified•6mo ago
bell-cot•6mo ago
No - but after a few decades of endless "raising the alarm" (so pretty much everybody who might possibly care has lost track of how often they've heard that message), the impression which it gives is a mixture of:
- Sports cheerleading. The kids in school-colors uniforms, bouncing around with pom-poms and chanting "Our Team Will Win!", are not there to inform anyone. Let alone change their minds. It's an in-group feel-good exercise, for the benefit of folks who already are fans of that team.
- A person suffering from dementia, who repeats the same phrase or sentence over and over and over. Their words may reflect an important truth - "nurse, I need help to the bathroom". But the broken-record behavior pattern also guarantees that almost no one will believe the person to be a mentally competent adult.
(It's usually the start of the Dangerous Mad Scientist's monologue where he outlines what he has decided is Wrong With the World. Regardless of what other people think. It's usually a bit later in his monologue where he talks about how he plans to Fix The Problem, without regard for the consent of anyone else. That later stuff is where the danger music gets the loudest. And where these scientists seemed all-to-eager to go.)
quantified•6mo ago
bell-cot•6mo ago
In some ways, you could describe the climate-change mess as a broad social class, of well-to-do academics/scientists/progressives, imagining themselves to be the undisputed ruling class. They tried to order the whole world to do as they wished on the climate issue. That failed, because they pretty much live in a social bubble - not realizing that their "authority" ran very thin outside of that bubble, among peoples who they neither knew nor cared much about. So they doubled down on "But We're Right!". Now failing to realize (if not willfully blind to) the fact that "it's Science, and we're Right!" is a very good signifier of authority within their bubble...but not outside of it.
From there - the climate believers are eager to compete for social status among themselves. But too anti-authoritarian to have or want any strong leaders - who might impose real discipline, or do some big-picture thinking. So the whole thing devolves into a stupid mess. The climate believers are busy arguing and posturing and proclaiming their creedal piety and one-upping within their own narcissistic bubble. Outside of that bubble, the climate believers look more like a bunch of callous creepy dangerous delusional nut jobs.