Our Cosmic Mediocrity

Insecurity is always there, but . . . 

You know how, when you wake in the middle of a dream, the emotions of that moment are overwhelming and linger as you try to transition into your day, how you can't shake them off and they color your mood for hours? Today I woke to my mind replaying old memories and recasting them through a frame that I was much more socially awkward, insensitive, and generally dumb than I had previously thought. Everyone secretly hates me and only pretends to put up with me.

So, yeah, that's been a fun way to start the day.

This post has been an attempt to distract myself out of it.

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake someone else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

Indexed

I'm always really interested in what books people are reading here. A lot of the books I'm putting back are ones that I've read too . . .

I think about that for a while. Most of these kids ignore me, and some do worse than that--but we still like the same books. We've imagined fighting the same epic battles and laughed at the same jokes.

― Michael Northrop, On Thin Ice

Our Attitude Toward Aliens Proves We Still Think We’re Special

But our institutions are still profoundly anthropocentric. We deny even the most basic rights to other parts of nature, including our close animal relatives, some of which share more than 97 percent of our DNA. We pollute our environment with close to zero regard for the well-being of its ecosystems—and we fight pollution only if and when it inconveniences us. Scientific experiments on human beings are not only illegal, but are considered barbarous even when they could provide some useful information. This is in sharp contrast to our practice of experimenting on lab animals, hunting foxes, or killing bulls in the arena. Even in the purely abstract realms of knowledge, one often hears the complaint that physical sciences are “cold” and “inhuman” exactly because they are less permeated by anthropocentrism than, say, philosophy or the humanities or arts. Almost 500 years after the onset of the Copernican revolution, we have a relic belief in the exalted nature of the human mind.

These remnants encourage us to resist animal rights, and the reality of anthropogenic climate change—and Fermi’s paradox. We presume ourselves to be so special that the question “Where is everybody as complex and important as ourselves (or more)?” cannot be taken seriously. ET isn’t here, we think, because there’s no equal to us. After Copernicus came Darwin’s revolution, and then Freud’s, delivering blows to our illusions of uniqueness and grandiosity within the biological and mental domains, respectively. It’s not that Fermi’s paradox belongs in this progression—it doesn’t explode any myth of our specialness—but appreciating its full import relies on the perspective that Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and others have given us.

That clearly is a step too far. Many of us choose to ignore Fermi’s paradox, or even fight it, because it requires too complete an acceptance of our cosmic mediocrity. We would rather secretly believe we are special than confront the real consequences of the paradox—consequences like, for example, intelligence being a maladaptive trait, or our universe being a simulation, or us living in a cosmic zoo. Some of us even go so far as to argue that we have become a navel-gazing, self-absorbed civilization, without much chance of developing a sustained cosmic presence and industrial bases all over the solar system. Destroying what Olaf Stapledon and R. Buckminster Fuller have dubbed the cosmic vision of humanity’s future lets us duck out of the Fermi’s paradox conversation. If we can’t do it, our extraterrestrial peers can’t do it either and we shouldn’t waste time and money searching for them. This subtle form of anthropocentrism leads us to a very dangerous path, since it impedes the best—and ultimately only—prospect for humanity to achieve its cosmic potential.

Humans Are Too Optimistic to Comprehend the Coronavirus

That kind of naive optimism in the face of encroaching disaster is a pitfall of owning a human brain, several experts on the psychology of risk perception told me recently. People have trouble appraising exponentially growing problems, seeing exactly how they themselves might be affected, and understanding the best way to help when disaster arrives. Our brains aren’t designed to anticipate threats such as pandemics, which allows the tiny, brainless pathogens to get the upper hand as we fumble along. The only way to counteract these biases, experts say, is to prepare ahead of time. Which is, alas, something the United States also failed to do.

Perhaps for the good of entrepreneurs, American Idol hopefuls, and buyers of real estate on Miami Beach, humans are remarkably bad at imagining everything that could go wrong in a given situation. “We’re likely to have an excessively rosy outlook on life,” says Hersh Shefrin, a behavioral-finance professor at Santa Clara University.

One reason for this subconscious Pollyannaism is that we don’t use the deliberative part of our brain very much. As the psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow, our brain has two modes: A fast, intuitive method that’s driven by feelings, and a more analytic (and evolutionarily more recent) way of thinking that’s driven by data. The intuitive process tends to dominate, says Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon. “We don’t go around calculating things in a scientific way; we just kind of are guided by our feelings, which are very much influenced by our experiences,” he told me. . . . 

The “fast” instinct in our minds tends especially to minimize risks that are harder to picture. Abstract dangers, such as invisible diseases, seem less threatening to us than do tangible threats, such as terrorists or tornadoes. Our brain interprets low-probability events as having a practically zero chance of happening, and it’s basically hopeless at contemplating exponential figures—such as, say, the way infections spread through a population. The number of cases starts out small, so our fast, intuitive brain tells us it will stay small forever. . . . 

People have trouble envisioning themselves as the kind of person something bad might happen to. . . . 

On top of that failure of imagination, a concept called “motivated reasoning” falsely reassures us that the bad thing we don’t want to happen probably won’t. . . . “Things that we are motivated not to believe, we’re very good at not believing.”

When the disease finally arrives, and people start dying, our brains fall into a different snare: The number of people affected is too large to be psychologically meaningful. Slovic has found that when many people are affected by a disaster, a kind of psychological numbing occurs. Though people are capable of feeling deeply for a single victim and her plight, “compassion fade” can set in when a tragedy involves two or more victims. People’s positive feelings about donating to a needy child decline for two needy children. This perhaps helps explain why Americans can round up thousands of dollars to donate to individual sick people’s GoFundMe campaigns, but hesitate to support a universal health-insurance system. Similarly, a disease that is likely to wipe out 60,000 Americans, most of whom are strangers, can seem less dangerous than it really is.

InspiroBot

Death is Fate's way of saying,

"You complete me."