Requiem for a great mind: David M. Delaney

[GliderGuider]

My old friend Dave Delaney died last Sunday. I worked for him for ten years when he was CEO/CTO of a small Canadian high tech company called Plaintree Systems. He was one of the two smartest men I've known personally, a polymath of unparalleled rigour, with a pretty damn good sense of humour.

The reason I'm noting him here is that since his retirement he devoted most of his time to unraveling the problematique. He was an unabashed Malthusian doomer, and if you pressed him he might have confided that he thought Jay Hanson (www.dieoff.org) was a pussy. His canon included Garrett Hardin, William Catton, M. King Hubbert, Colin Campbell, Jevons and of course Malthus himself. He had nothing but contempt for economists (especially those of the modern Chicago school) and all the other the self-deluded polyannas who clap for Tinkerbell.

He opened my eyes to a lot of the positions I now hold. David introduced me to the implications of Peak Oil, the lessons of the Prisoner's Dilemma game theory, the failure modes of complex systems and the obstinate challenges of human social behaviour. Although we eventually went our separate ways (he had no time for the transcendental direction I took in response to the crisis), I will always hold David in very high regard. In his honour I would like to post a piece from his blog, something he wrote in 2007. It bears directly on how those of us who beat the "drum of doom" are perceived, and hints at the challenges he ran into as he expressed his opinions.

I hope this re-post will pass the host's scrutiny, even though it exceeds the four-para rule.

[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000"]Cassandra's choice

Consider Cassandra. She knows that almost everything about the way we live is incapable of being sustained. She knows that this civilization must be radically changed, and soon, if it is to continue. The problematique was what Aurelio Peccei called the set of problems that inform her unwelcome knowledge.

If Cassandra pushes our awareness of the problematique without offering solutions for it, she will often be held in mild contempt by almost everyone. (The word "whining" is often spoken in this circumstance.) But if she offers effective solutions, which are necessarily radical, people who don't share her perception of the problematique will often assume that she offers her solutions not because she thinks they are necessary responses to an unavoidable problem, but because she will get some payoff from the solutions that they won't, or they will assume that she desires the harm her solutions would necessarily do them. These assumptions can lead to their hating her. Disingenuous opponents will assert that she desires the harm her solutions would necessarily cause.

Cassandra gets to choose which reaction she prefers: being a source of annoyance and an object of mild, sometimes amused, contempt, or being completely ignored by most and hated by some. For problems for which there are non-radical solutions, her dilemma would not be this severe, and might not exist at all. For the problematique, however, for which the only effective solutions are radical, and always will be radical, her dilemma is excruciating.

Both strategies, diagnosing only, or also proposing solutions, are ineffective in changing minds about the problematique, but offering solutions is much the more ineffective of the two strategies. Any effective solution must assume a lot about the problematique, and be radical. Those who see harm for themselves in a solution will dismiss it without considering it further, as soon as they detect a detail of an assumption they don't agree with. This is a crippling disadvantage of offering effective solutions for the problematique, since effective solutions would harm almost everyone.

If Cassandra restricts herself to diagnosing the problematique, she will have the advantage of having to make many fewer assumptions. She can make powerful arguments to deprecate solutions that arise from wishful thinking, and to deprecate solutions that are insufficiently radical to be effective. But she will annoy far more people and be far more generally disliked for pushing us to acknowledge the hazards of the problematique than if she offers her own effective solutions for it -- solutions that will not be threatening because they can be easily ridiculed and ignored.

By restricting herself to pushing our awareness of the problematique, Cassandra will change more minds than by offering solutions for it. But she will change only a few minds, and she will attract general disapproval.
RIP David, you were a true original.
http://davidmdelaney.com/

[hunter]

1. People are peculiar animals...

... clever, but rarely wise.

Our population will increase until it can't, and then things will be very unpleasant. There won't be enough rice and blue tarps for everyone.

It some places it is extremely unpleasant already.

[GliderGuider]

2. It has always been extremely unpleasant somewhere.

One of the things that perversely contributes to the global predicament is our belief that it "should" not be like that. We "naturally" want to ease the suffering of less fortunate others (and our own empathic suffering on their behalf) by convincing ourselves that we can make our relative lack of immiseration in this place and time a permanent, universal state - no matter what demands we make of nature in the process. Add a healthy helping of self-interest and greed, and the stage is set for this act of the Play.

Our beliefs and behaviour are driven by a deeply unrealistic and stubbornly persistent utopian streak in our cultural narrative. Because of that the present efflorescence of civilization can be seen as a universalized expression of the sub-prime housing bubble (or indeed bubbles of any sort) with precisely the same drivers and denial mechanisms writ large.

If we drop the mental filters that protect our self-interest for just a moment, we all know what happens to bubbles.

[Nihil]

3. Succinct summary of the issue there ...

>> If Cassandra pushes our awareness of the problematique without offering solutions for it,
>> she will often be held in mild contempt by almost everyone. (The word "whining" is often
>> spoken in this circumstance.) But if she offers effective solutions, which are necessarily
>> radical, people who don't share her perception of the problematique will often assume
>> that she offers her solutions not because she thinks they are necessary responses to
>> an unavoidable problem, but because she will get some payoff from the solutions that
>> they won't, or they will assume that she desires the harm her solutions would necessarily
>> do them. These assumptions can lead to their hating her. Disingenuous opponents will
>> assert that she desires the harm her solutions would necessarily cause.

RIP.

[Dead_Parrot]

4. "Why we're humped", lesson 2. nt