Nature's Republic Research - The Trap of a 'Realist'

Echo and Narcissus
by John William Waterhouse

By "realist" in the title I mean elected pragmatic leaders. As nature has it the most successful ones are not just gentle bullies, but also closet narcissists.

Now, for all of you who think Nature's Republic is a neat idea, you know I am a Nature's Republican, here is an interesting adage.

Give a bunch of self-absorbed (or narcissist) folks a replenishable forest as their livelihood and the task to lop enough trees to make it both a living and a success. And they are all faced with the same dilemma:

Act selfishly and cause collective disaster - even your own livelihood will be finished. Or act altruistically and aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins. And the very tangible result: the forest is erased in no time.

This tragic dilemma is called the "Hobson's choice" and the result is the "tragedy of the commons."

To paraphrase the social psychologist W. Keith Campbell talking about the 2008 US Presidential primary: the political system is biased toward the narcissist. This is to say that the more-selfish person has a higher probability of winning. I am convinced, most political systems are such - in this they are most certainly perfectable.

But Campbell also devised an ingenious way to spot the narcissist. Just ask this questions and see what the answer will be out of the two available ones:
Q: Which of the two statements describes you better? Think about it carefully.

• If I ruled the world, it would be a much better place.
• The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me.

Edella Schlager, political scientist from the University of Arizona puts the dilemma in another way:

"Rational individuals are trapped. To act rationally, to pursue one's self-interest, leads to collective ruin. To act irrationally, to place the collective interest above one's self-interest, exposes one to exploitation."

According to Schlager, their is a natural way of reasoned regulation:

Lorenz Strange Attractors.
Courtesy: Wikipedia

"The way to prevent tragedies of the commons is to set up structures in advance that reward long-term thinking and punish short-term selfishness. This happens mostly among competitors who share long-term interests and have social relationships of trust: If you and I are Maine lobstermen, we are likely to agree to set up limits on the overall catch each year because we see our future, and our children's future, inextricably linked. In the absence of trust and long-term relationships, the only way to prevent these tragedies is to have an outside regulatory agency step in to establish - and enforce - limits."

Now, I am not much of an enforcer - too bad. In fact, I am convinced that politics is managing complex systems of people and resources. So what I believe in is setting up a transformational framework that sets the basin and the attractors. Those are dynamic limits towards which the system will then naturally converge.

----------As an aside
An example I found for a complex system applied to people realm: - The notion of media enforced public relation reputation could be viewed as a non-linear complex system where attractor basins are the "adjacent realms that contain both distinct and separate topics as well as those that mutually influence one another." I'd be barking mad if I understood exactly what this meant, but if you are a mathematician with this kind on knowledge I respectfully agree that you probably do.
Update on this:
I am still not much wiser, but it could be close to George Lakoff's framing problem. The impossible terms "liberal elite" or "tax relief" might just be such starge attractors.
----------

In Australia this would certainly involve a Constitutional reform and an infant Republic. In the US it would require more than a few amendments on the Constitution. These new instruments would then become the necessary social wherewithal to stock bipartisan policies for the long term. -- Emanate and reinforce a transformational change toward Nature's Republic acceptable to both major parties would likely have the support by the public as well as replenish the forests that be. The first question then: what kinds of amendments, what kinds of transformational reforms on the Constitution. The second: what kinds of policies?

But in the very first instance: we need to imagine it possible.

Resources:

Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/../2008/04/27/ST2008042701712.html

McRae, James J., 1978.
Optimal and competitive use of replenishable natural resources by open economies, Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 29-54, February.
Note: this publication is available to subscribers only.

George Lakoff's Rockridge Insitute: An introduction to framing and its uses in politics

What is an attractor?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor

Attractors Everywhere
Order from Chaos: http://www.calresco.org/attract.htm

Yesterday's Researcher Today's Witness

Time to give a new status to the research scientists of Global Warming and Climate Change. Let's call them Expert Witness instead of Scientific Researcher. Here is why.

For the next 30-40 years and possibly longer, the most they can do is to research the consequences. As they are playing catch up to events out of our and their influence finding out new consequences daily pretty much overwhelms their task of finding out the reasons. By the time a new reason is pinpointed two new and unexpected consequences bob up redefining the status and validity of those earlier reasons.

You need facts? Here is the latest all encompassing and really disturbing set: http://www.washingtonpost.com/../2007/10/21/AR2007102100766

Changes play out with speed where a scientist can do a good job at following consequences on a hot trail, but a poor job in keeping with redefining the reasons. All they can do really is to investigate consequences and answering to questions we pose about WHAT is happening as Expert Witnesses.
Play video >>

And even that is not easy. In fact it is damn hard and eats up tremendous resources. The cause may be as simple as an overkill of green house gas in the atmosphere compounded with an increased sun flare activity that arrived as clockwork at the end of the zodiac age of Pisce to be concluded by 2012.

But the Earth atmosphere is an extremely hyper complex system. There is no direct cause and effect in any given sequence, micro or macro. Multiple events occur parallel and simultaneous all the time. Even simple causes play out on an imaginable scale of complexity. Even if scientists turn expert witnesses playing catch up they have more than a full time job on their hand.

We can not ask of them more than that.

We are on shifting sand. It is no longer viable to interrogate causes. That time has passed big time. We need to ACT boldly and go where instinct tells us we need to go.

Scientists now need to work on averting bigger disasters BEYOND the 40 years horizon. How we do that? We ACT WITH AN IMPACT and then keep doing what we do now. MONITOR THE CONSEQUENCES.

Fertilise the Oceans? I don't know. But if what we sow is effective to reap GLOBAL COOLING thereafter, then by all means. We are now global peasants plowing oceans. And all nations need to come plowing otherwise there will be no harvest to share. Otherwise many more will become disenfranchised as the desperate new nomads in Nature's Republic. But Nature, including our Human Nature can and will do better.

In this, scientists should be relieved of the burgeoning responsibility of finding the right causes and made Expert Monitors of the Consequences sought.

Earth needs a correctional facility with the best Expert Witnesses we can have.

Otherwise the carriage pulls the horse, and not the other way around.

Global Climate Change as a Complex Problem of a Complex System

footnote:
Conventional sciences tend to focus on isolated systems under controlled circumstances. Decision support sciences must often deal with real world problems, the complexity of which far exceeds the complexity of the problems typically studied in conventional sciences. This realisation has lead to the designation of a new class of problems, complex problems, which includes issues such as global climate change, ... and stratospheric ozone depletion.
Complex problems are characterized by one or more of the following properties
(adapted from NRC, 1988; van Asselt, 2000; Funtowicz et al., 1999; Holling, 2001;
UNESCO, 2005):

• There is not one problem, but a tangled web of related problems;
• The underlying processes interact with one another within some sort of hierarchy;
• The dynamics of the systems studied are not necessarily regular, but are characterized by synergistic and/or antagonistic relationships, indirect relationships, long delay periods between cause and effect, thresholds or non-linear behaviours;
• The issue lies across or at the intersection of many disciplines, i.e., it has economic, environmental, socio-cultural and political dimensions;
• There are a number of different, equally legitimate and plausible, perspectives on how the problem should be conceived.

The hierarchical relationships encountered in complex systems may be hierarchies of inclusion and scale, as in a watershed that includes streams, ponds, rivers, lakes and the sea, at ascending levels. Alternatively, they may be hierarchies of function, as in an organism that is comprised of a number of separate organs, each performing a function subordinate to the overall function of the organism, which itself may be sub-ordinate to the overall function of an ecosystem.

Environmental systems may also include human and institutional sub-systems, which are themselves systems. In complex systems, causes and effects are not always obviously related. Pushing on a complex system "here" often has effects "over there" because the parts are indirectly dependent of one another. Similarly, the future conditions in a complex system may not always follow closely on the conditions in the past.

When a particular threshold is exceeded, the system can abruptly shift away from a period of relative stability in one state, to another, fundamentally different state. An example is that of the impacts of climate change on thermohaline circulation, the large-scale ocean circulation that currently transports heat from the mid-latitudes to the high latitudes. Geological analysis and model experiments suggest that these currents can be on or off, and that the two states are characterized by drastically different environmental conditions in Western Europe (Broeker, 1997; Cusbasch et al., 2001). Similar dramatic regime shifts have now been documented for a wide range of environmental systems (Scheffer et al., 2001; Scheffer & Carpenter, 2003).

Because of the hierarchical, indirect, synergistic and non-linear relationships that can characterize complex systems, any attempts at reductionist analysis will be inherently incomplete. The concepts used to represent the functionings of the system will necessarily be rough approximations. The empirical data required may not be available, or may only be available in a form that requires interpreting or massaging to make it relevant to the problem at hand.
...

An approach inherent to conventional sciences is that of reductionism, whereby an overall system is understood as an assembly of sub-systems. By studying and understanding each of the sub-systems, an understanding of the overall system is achieved.

While the reductionist approach has led to many great achievements in Western science, the properties of complex problems, ... greatly reduce the effectiveness of the [reductionist] approach. Systems that are complex are not merely complicated; by their nature they involve deep uncertainties ...

MR2005-202.pdf (application/pdf Object)