How Myrtle Learned to Quit Griping About Global Warming and Put On Some Sunscreen

Psychology researcher Martin Seligman has done a tremendous amount of work in the field of happiness research over the last forty years, and is best known for his studies on “Learned Optimism”; his work can really be summed up in one sentence, however:  You can either be right about everything, or you can get stuff done.

We at Myrtle’s fight a never-ending battle against forces of cynicism and despair; we suspect you are fighting the same battle wherever you are.  And there are good reasons for this; there are seemingly endless sources of pessimism inundating our senses these days, from global warming, to rogue oil wells, to soaring unemployment, to fanatical terrorists of every stripe threatening “those people over there because they don’t believe in this book we’ve got over here, which makes them infidels who must be blown up.”  That describes Maoist rebels in Peru every bit as much as Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, or Christian Militia in Michigan, by the way; crazy people come in all ideological flavors.

It’s enough to make a chicken moult.

There are numerous possible responses to such stories, of course.  We believe that when confronted with significant problems, the appropriate response is to look for transcendent solutions which turn problems into opportunities.  Unfortunately, many people instead choose to throw cold water any time they see the bright flame of optimism.  It is not enough, they seem to think, to face a huge problem; they seek to make a huge problem insurmountable, presumably so they can be excused from having to do anything about it.

The impetus for such behavior is actually not so malicious as it seems, although benign neglect can sometimes be worse than malice.  Seligman’s research highlights one of the grandest traps which sentient thought presents to its practitioners:  pessimists see the world more accurately than do optimists; optimists, however, are better able to actually accomplish tasks.

This is very reminiscent of an old dilemma posed by logicians regarding the ethics of belief.  In a modern context, say you were diagnosed with a terminal condition, and doctors gave you an historically accurate and very believable chance of survival of only 5%.  They tell you there is no proven treatment, but that there is one option they can give you which will improve your odds slightly, but only if you believe it will be 100% effective.  If you believe it will be 100% effective, then your chances of survival actually increase to 10%.

The belief that it will be 100% effective is patently not true.  It is a lie.  Is it not obviously ethical, however, to believe in this lie, since it makes you 5% more likely to survive?  Yet in believing this lie, haven’t you essentially thrown away your moral capital?  You are stating unequivocally that honesty is not the rule and measure for belief or disbelief in established fact.  Facts, in other words, are necessarily subjective.  Not because they are not true, but because you need their truth or falsehood to be subjugated to other concerns.

Clearly, doing the smart thing puts you in a dicey moral position.

Unless, of course, this is not a valid way of looking at the problem…

Here is where the pudding shows its proof:  the truth or falsehood of this particular claim – that the medical treatment will be 100% effective or not – cannot be determined prior to the actual application of the treatment.  To say that it is only 10% likely to work even if you believe it is 100% likely to work is a fable.  Statistically, you can verify that 10% of the time it has worked for people who believed it was 100% likely to work, but a future event has no probability whatsoever.  It has an unrealized potentiality – it is 100% certain that whatever the outcome is going to be will be the outcome for which it will then be historically categorizable.  Either it 100% worked, or it 100% didn’t.  One of those outcomes was 90% more likely before you started, but that’s not the same thing at all; reality on a macro level is not a series of probabilities; it is a series of actualities.

In other words, “Que será, será.”  If you guess right and die, are you really any better off than if you guess wrong and die?  But if you guess “wrong” and live?  ¡Olé!

In the classic quantum thought experiment, Schröedinger’s Cat is not 50% likely to be alive and 50% likely to be dead even though on a quantum level, a decaying particle is 50% likely to release a poisonous gas during the process of his captivity in the box.  He is, rather, 100% likely to be either alive or dead, and we won’t know which until we have opened the box and either killed or liberated him.  Whichever one he turns out to be, he won’t be the other one, too.  The quantum reality, loaded with its paradoxical probability waves, is not the cat’s reality.  The cat’s reality is unknown (except, presumably, to the cat, who, being a cat, won’t tell us) until the box is opened, but it is definite, one way or the other.

This is a subtle distinction, but philosophically an important one.  Those who apply probability and degrees of certainty to everything from climate change, to mass extinctions, to stock prices, to carcinogenic exposure, to crop yields, to effectiveness of organic herbicides are enslaving themselves to a quantum principle which does not actually apply on a macro level.  And to assign a foul looking probability and then give up on attempting a fair outcome makes one likely to become a quitter.  Quitters are losers, and we really advise not joining their ranks. 

And for those who say one should not waste resources on unlikely outcomes, we say Gambler’s Ruin is a real phenomenon, but it doesn’t apply to games of polynomial incompleteness, where none of the players knows all the rules and all the possible outcomes; rather, it applies to the kinds of games you play in Vegas.  Life is not a casino, and day-to-day reality is not stacked in the house’s favor.  In the real world, counting the cards is acceptable, and the house has just as good a chance of going broke as you do.

To apply a sporting analogy, in January of 2006, the University of Texas Longhorns were in desperate straits:  6 minutes left in the 4th quarter of the national championship game, the Horns were down by 12 points against a USC Trojans team sporting two Heisman Trophy winners, with a coach widely regarded as the biggest genius ever to pick up a piece of chalk.  Yet at the time, every fan in burnt orange simply knew how the game was going to end.  Vince Young was going to run for two more touchdowns.  We knew this to be true, in spite of the very palpable fact that no statistician in his right mind would have ever predicted it in 15 million lifetimes.



It was not logical; it was not practical; it was exceedingly unlikely.  But we knew because intuitively, there simply was no other alternative.  We have had discussions with every fan we have met since that time, and there is near universal agreement on this score; even usually non-intuitive people had this sense that it was all going to turn out okay.

Why?

Seligman’s research hints at the answer, although on an individual level; look to Jung if you want an explanation of group synchronicity.  In the world according to Seligman, optimism senses a different sort of “fact” than does pessimism.  Pessimism very clearly sees the world as it is.  Optimism, on the other hand, just as clearly sees the world as we would like it to become.

Seeing the world as it is frequently gets mislabelled as being “realistic”.   We would argue that what is truly “realistic” is that which really happens; and since what “really happens” is not a static event, but a dynamic one, sensing how things currently stand is not a complete picture.  A complete picture of reality includes that which things are becoming.

A good example in a contemporary context is energy consumption.  Citizens of the industrialized world are poisoning the planet with fossil fuel consumption.  Electrical power generation and internal combustion engines for transportation are pumping unsustainable amounts of carbon dioxide and other noxious gasses into our atmosphere, and if it doesn’t stop soon, there will be no recovery; we will go extinct.

However, that is only part of the equation.  Numerous alternatives are in various stages of development.  Researchers working with wind and solar electricity generation have made huge strides in recent decades.  Electric powered vehicles are hitting mass production lines this fall.

The “realists” say that these measures are inadequate, that oil will have to continue to be the primary fuel for modern society for decades to come.  They cite numerous deficiencies in solar and wind power generation and distribution, and point out that power grids are currently strained to the breaking point without the added stress of also powering electric cars.  “Can’t be done” they say.

This is not a “realistic” point of view.  It is, rather, childish pouting.

The idea that solar power and wind power cannot put enough energy into the grid to get rid of coal powered electrical plants misses the point altogether.  They don’t have to replace the same amount of electricity.  They just have to provide enough energy for one home at a time, and the technology has been well proven to accomplish that much.

Were 40 million American homes to be retrofitted with solar panels and/or wind turbines, at a current estimate of ~$10,000 per home, the total price tag would be roughly $400 billion.  That used to sound like a lot of money.  Really, though, which would you rather be spending that money on – a bailout of major financial institutions, or a one time government program which would end – for all time – your monthly electric bill?

The “realists” would not even conceive of such a plan, or would scoff at its scope or price tag.  Or they would bicker and quibble about current manufacturing capacity and argue that it simply “couldn’t be done”.  We say, put $400 billion on the table and see how quickly some firms currently manufacturing video game components figure out a way to convert their factory floors to solar film production.  Necessity may be the Mother of Invention, but profit is its Prom Date.

There is an infinite array of other such possible solutions, some of which are even crazier, some of which probably really are impractical, and none of which would be proposed by “realists”.  But the best solution to our energy and climate dilemma is somewhere in that array of proposals no one is seriously considering.

There are some very smart people who have given up on our species entirely.  The Leakeys, who introduced us to a love of science and a sense of awe and wonder at the enormity and beauty of our evolving biosphere, have written a very informative book about The Sixth Extinction, which we are currently witnessing.  A microbiologist from Australia has even predicted the extinction of the human race within the next century, but won’t give interviews about that well-documented paper because he just finds it too depressing.

Maybe he’s right; maybe we’re doomed.  We at Myrtle’s place don’t really care two figs whether he’s right – we’re going to go right on planting our vegetables and pruning our fig trees.  Because if he’s right, then we may as well go out fighting.  And if he’s wrong, it might only be because some wild and crazy optimists ignored the “truth” long enough to actually get something done.

Cynics are quick to point out that unless life also gave you sugar and water, your lemonade’s gonna suck.  But even sucking lemons, to us, seems like more fun than hanging around with a bunch of Debbie Downers.  Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with the world today.

So pick up a shovel, already!

Happy farming!