Lone Gunman

The next 50 years will bring tech­no­log­i­cal, social and geopo­lit­i­cal change greater than we can imag­ine, says Astronomer Royal Mar­tin Rees, but the emerg­ing prob­lems of pop­u­la­tion growth and cli­mate change make this cen­tury arguably the most impor­tant in Earth’s 4.5 bil­lion year his­tory, even from the per­spec­tive of an astronomer.

It’s some­times wrongly imag­ined that astronomers, con­tem­plat­ing times­pans mea­sured in bil­lions, must be serenely uncon­cerned about next year, next week and tomor­row. But a “cos­mic per­spec­tive” actu­ally strength­ens my own con­cerns about the here and now.

Ever since Dar­win, we’ve been famil­iar with the stu­pen­dous times­pans of the evo­lu­tion­ary past. But most peo­ple still some­how think we humans are nec­es­sar­ily the cul­mi­na­tion of the evo­lu­tion­ary tree. No astronomer could believe this.

Our sun formed 4.5bn years ago, but it’s got 6bn more before the fuel runs out. And the expand­ing uni­verse will con­tinue — per­haps for ever — becom­ing ever colder, ever emp­tier. As Woody Allen said, “Eter­nity is very long, espe­cially towards the end”. Any crea­tures who wit­ness the sun’s demise, here on Earth or far beyond, won’t be human. They will be enti­ties as dif­fer­ent from us as we are from a bug.

But even in this “con­certi­naed” time­line — extend­ing mil­lions of cen­turies into the future, as well as into the past — this cen­tury is spe­cial. It’s the first in our planet’s his­tory where one species — ours — has Earth’s future in its hands, and could jeop­ar­dise not only itself, but life’s immense potential.

As Richard says (via), the arti­cle “seems to be a trun­cated ver­sion of his book Our Final Cen­tury”.

It is said that mim­ic­k­ing a person’s body lan­guage helps to cre­ate false camaraderie–a man­u­fac­tur­ing of attrac­tion, if you will. Con­ven­tional wis­dom holds that this is because it helps you, the mim­ic­ker, empathise. This is false, recent research shows, but not far off; face and body motion mim­icry actu­ally “helps you to see them as they want to be seen, rather than as they really are”*.

In inter­ac­tions, tar­gets either lied or told the truth [about donat­ing to a char­ity], while observers mim­ic­ked or did not mimic the tar­gets’ facial and behav­ioral move­ments. Detec­tion of decep­tion was mea­sured directly by observers’ judg­ments of the extent to which they thought the tar­gets were telling the truth and indi­rectly by observers’ assess­ment of tar­gets’ emo­tions. The results demon­strated that non­mim­ick­ers were more accu­rate than mim­ic­k­ers in their esti­ma­tions of tar­gets’ truth­ful­ness and of tar­gets’ expe­ri­enced emo­tions. […] In the case of decep­tive mes­sages, mim­icry hin­ders emo­tional understanding.

As Han­son says, this man­u­fac­tured attrac­tion may exist because we are sig­nalling that we are not judg­ing and that we are accept­ing what is said at face value.

This talk of body lan­guage mim­icry reminded me of an arti­cle in Intel­li­gent Life pro­fil­ing Simon Lovell–the pro­lific con man/card shark who evi­dently uses the tech­nique quite extensively/purposefully in his cons.

“You have to fig­ure out someone’s wants and needs and con­vince them what you have will fill their emo­tional void.” A con man is essen­tially a salesman–a remark­ably good one–who excels at mak­ing peo­ple feel spe­cial and under­stood. A con man val­i­dates the victim’s desire to believe he has an edge on other people. […]

Mr Lovell draws peo­ple in by mir­ror­ing their body lan­guage. He breaks their defences by enter­ing their phys­i­cal space.

*The pub­lished arti­cle in ques­tion is behind a pay wall, hence the link to Over­com­ing Bias.

To think ratio­nally about risk is to think prob­a­bilis­ti­cally / sta­tis­ti­cally about the dan­gers we face.

Not­ing that “the most dan­ger­ous per­son you’re ever likely to encounter – by sev­eral orders of mag­ni­tude – is the one you see in the mir­ror every morn­ing”, John Goek­ler offers some per­spec­tive on what risks we really should be more con­cerned about than ter­ror­ism.

A sig­nif­i­cant major­ity of Amer­i­cans, polls repeat­edly tell us, list ter­ror­ism as one of their great­est fears. Like most of our media-inspired inter­ests and wor­ries, how­ever, this one has lit­tle basis in reality. […]

As the data clearly shows, the things that gen­uinely threaten us are the ones we are most likely to ignore or sim­ply accept. (We’re sta­tis­ti­cally far more likely to be killed by a light­ning strike than by an action of Al Qaeda, for exam­ple.) The ones that we’re scared wit­less of – and spend tril­lions of increas­ingly scarce dol­lars to avert in our bound­less para­noia – are less likely to harm us than a bag of peanuts. (Deaths in Amer­ica due to peanut aller­gies aver­age 50 – 100 per year. Deaths of Amer­i­cans due to ter­ror­ist activ­i­ties […] have aver­aged less than 15 per year since 2002.)

via Schneier

The fluc­tu­at­ing weight of the Mars Bar is quite a con­tentious issue here in the UK. Answer­ing a query as to whether econ­o­mists take this into account (and not just price fluc­tu­a­tions) when cal­cu­lat­ing infla­tion using the Retail Prices Index, econ­o­mist Tim Har­ford offers some enter­tain­ing infor­ma­tion regard­ing the Mars Bar unit of account.

The Mars Bar has been wor­thy of scrutiny ever since the late Nico Colch­ester noted in the Finan­cial Times back in 1981 that it was a very sta­ble unit of account. It is a ver­i­ta­ble ingot of basic com­modi­ties (sugar, milk, cocoa) that has kept its value rel­a­tive to the price of other goods such as small cars, which have cost about 20,000 Mars Bars for the past 70 years.

As Colch­ester wrote,

The Mars Bar […] is a long-established bas­ket of sta­ple com­modi­ties (cocoa, veg­etable fats, milk solids, sugar) pack­aged with great con­sis­tency. […] As such it is a reli­able unit of account cer­tainly more reli­able than gold, which is prone to spec­u­la­tion and it pre­serves a remark­ably con­stant real value.

No men­tion of deep-fried Mars Bars, how­ever.

Depres­sion is an emo­tional response that has evolved to pre­vent us from expe­ri­enc­ing men­tally dam­ag­ing events, a num­ber of recent stud­ies are start­ing to suggest.

As pain stops you doing dam­ag­ing phys­i­cal things, so low mood stops you doing dam­ag­ing men­tal ones—in par­tic­u­lar, pur­su­ing unreach­able goals. Pur­su­ing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. There­fore […] there is likely to be an evolved mech­a­nism that iden­ti­fies cer­tain goals as unat­tain­able and inhibits their pursuit.

This ‘evolved mech­a­nism’, it appears, is depression.

As one study showed, mild depres­sion is actu­ally a some­what healthy response:

Those who expe­ri­enced mild depres­sive symp­toms could […] dis­en­gage more eas­ily from unreach­able goals. […] Those who could dis­en­gage from the unat­tain­able proved less likely to suf­fer more seri­ous depres­sion in the long run.

It’s an inter­est­ing the­ory and the neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion between mild depres­sion and seri­ous depres­sion later in life is a telling sign that there may be some truth in the theories.

Oh, and the image Intel­li­gent Life is using on the arti­cle? A self-portrait of yours truly look­ing slightly dejected. So head on over and read the article/look at my ugly mug.