Bradyproblems, Goldilocks and loads of babies

The two types of problems

In life, we encounter two kinds of problems: ones that grow quickly and others that grow slowly. By adding Greek prefixes, we can call them tachiproblems and bradyproblems.

We humans are good at dealing with things that happen quickly, it’s the way we evolved. Over millions of years, we just had to worry about getting enough to eat while not getting eaten ourselves, which are very immediate concerns or tachiproblems.

On the other hand, we are terrible at dealing with issues that will cause damage at a later time, or bradyproblems. That’s why we postpone our car’s checkup and put up with an asshole boss at work. Of course, the big issue with bradyproblems is that, if we just let them fester, eventually they become so massive that they can’t be ignored any longer. One day our car’s engine breaks down so we’re late for a meeting and the asshole boss takes the credit for our hard work of the past 6 months. Unfortunately, as a problem becomes massive, the solution required becomes proportionally massive. So instead of applying timely, simple and painless prevention we are forced into a belated, complicated and painful intervention. The same goes for smoking, obesity and practically everything that is convenient/pleasant today but harmful in the long run.

If we could overcome this problem in our brain’s wiring, our inability to picture CLEARLY the future consequences of our actions, we would save millions of lives. Because, in most cases, we already have all the information and solutions that we need. Vaccinations, contraceptives, eating less sugar, doing more exercise, not smoking, not taking drugs… none of these are particularly difficult, painful or expensive. And yet most of us ignore this commonsensical behaviours until we have a massive bradyproblem on our lap that we can no longer ignore.

By the way, this works at every level of human society, from individuals to national governments. Which is perfectly logical, since national governments are still made up of humans (even if they are usually unrecognizable as such). This is the main reason why COVID has spread so rapidly. At both the micro and macro level, from the people on the street to institutions, everyone initially downplayed the “new Chinese flu” until the situation became so grave that we couldn’t continue to ignore it and we were forced to quarantine the entire fucking planet and trash the economy. Just to illustrate how pathetically bad we are at dealing with bradyproblems, even now, when lockdowns are being lifted, many people continue to not take the situation seriously, refuse to wear a mask, etc. and so we are getting second waves everywhere.

But when we go up a level in the organisational scale, things become more complicated, because the problems of societies affect many people and in completely different ways. While some may be suffering immensely the consequences of a given issue, others may be just slightly inconvenienced, and still others may even be doing quite well from it. That is why, when considering the solution to a societal bradyproblem, many (most) people’s response is “Forget it, you’re dreaming, that’s never going to happen”, because they subconsciously grasp the principle of change = suffering, so when they see the magnitude of the change required to solve the problem they can’t imagine that we would ever put ourselves through that amount of suffering. But of course, that is precisely the issue: the shock that they can’t imagine going through is actually the minimum level of suffering required as things stand, right now. But if we think it’s too much and go even longer without applying it, then that minimum level will just keep going up.

That is why societal bradyproblems are even less likely to be addressed timely than individual ones. Eventually, the radical solution can only be brought about by violence. This is a common cause of revolutions/civil wars; the ruling class doesn’t suffer the same problems as the populace and so they don’t make the changes that society demands/requires until eventually things get so bad that they lead to violent uprisings. As JF Kennedy so well put it: “Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”.

Given we are so bad at preventing bradyproblems, the best we can hope for is to suffer a Goldilocks shock, that is, one that is not so small that we can continue to ignore the issue, but at the same time not so large that it maims us permanently (or even kills us). Ideally, the best solution would be a Goldilocks one too; not an intervention so weak that it doesn’t solve our bradyproblem, but at the same time not so radical that it causes massive amounts of unnecessary suffering.

Overpopulation

Now that we have the mental model, let’s use it to look at perhaps the biggest problem humanity is facing: overpopulation.

But first, a warning.

As we’ve already explained, when problems become massive, their solutions become radical. There is simply no way to solve a huge and complex problem without a fuckload of suffering. So, Gentle Reader, if you can’t bear to even think about some radical possibilities, then please stop reading now, maybe go watch some Netflix instead.

Still with us? OK, let’s get on with the cold-hearted business.

Six months ago, anyone looking at the state the planet was in realised that it would take a MASSIVE shock to change the direction things were headed in. The world’s population has multiplied by four in the past 100 years!

So when COVID hit, more than a few people were glad because they saw it as the wake-up call that humanity needed. It makes perfect sense; what’s good for the planet is good for each and every one of us… unless we are personally affected, of course. And it’s obviously good for the planet to reduce the human population as much as possible and, while we’re at it, slow down rampant capitalism.

Unfortunately, judging by all the signs we are seeing, it seems that this pandemic did not reach the Goldilocks threshold we mentioned earlier. It hasn’t had the minimum impact required to trigger a meaningful change even to combat the disease, let alone making the world aware of the underlying bradyproblem.

The reason is that COVID mostly kills older people which, after all, is the natural order of things. If the effects were only slightly different, in that it affected children rather than elders, like the flu, it would have been a COMPLETELY different story. In fact, the situation would have gone all the way over to the opposite extreme of the Goldilocks spectrum, the disaster scenario. First, it would have put a much larger dent on the overpopulation problem, since older people are past their reproductive age anyway, but when you remove a child you are also removing all their potential offspring.

More importantly, this would have brought the world to a TOTAL standstill. No politician would dare to lift the lockdown if it meant putting children at risk. And even if they did, it wouldn’t matter anyway because no parent would dare go out until there was a proven vaccine. Sorry, check that, until they had gotten the vaccine, which is not the same thing (working on a post on this issue). Naturally, this would mean absolute chaos at every level. Violence and looting would be just the start, because with the entire world economy stopped for many months, maybe years, (i.e. completely destroyed, for all intents and purposes) things would have gone full Hollywood in no time. Perhaps some of the richer countries with large armies would manage to maintain enough social order to keep the most basic services running, but it would just be a handful. Meanwhile, starving and panicked by the disease and violence, the rest of the world (which just happens to have more children and a younger population) would quickly devolve into the pack of wild animals that we have never really stopped being. And how long do you think it would take for those few countries that still had food and electricity to be completely overrun by millions of starving immigrants?

At that point, literally anything could happen.

Let’s quickly consider just two extremes of this already pretty-fucking-extreme scenario; perhaps between pandemic, famine and violence enough people would die that we reached some sort of stability and managed to hang on until eventually a vaccine was developed and then we could start to slowly recover (hopefully as a more mature society). Or else the wrong person would get control of an army, start a conflict that escalated into nuclear war and the Anthropocene would come to an end.

When we run these thought experiments it seems clear that we got off lightly with COVID. But therein lies the problem because, if we haven’t been shocked enough, if we haven’t learned our lesson, then as soon as a vaccine is discovered we will go on just the same as before, until eventually either the problem becomes so large that it wipes us out or the solution required is only marginally less horrible.

Solutions

If there’s one thing I can’t stand (actually, there are lots, but today we’ll only focus on one) it’s people who just point out problems without offering solutions. So here are some ideas on how to not waste the pain that we have already suffered and make changes that might solve humanity’s overpopulation bradyproblem.

• Remove incentives for having many children. A society’s power and wealth are directly linked to its manpower. And, since for most of human history, infant mortality has been very high and life expectancy very short, our natural genetic impulse to have as many children as possible has always been encouraged by society, to the point of offering cash incentives or tax breaks for large families. But nowadays that mentality doesn’t make sense anymore; we are literally paying people to act in a way that will ruin the future for everyone. Instead we should remove the benefits for large families (perhaps even flip it completely and give those tax breaks to people with fewer children).
• Make adoption much simpler and give the tax incentives to those families.
• Educate aggressively. More education has been proven to have a direct impact on lowering birth rates.
• Facilitate contraception, sterilisation and abortion. Mistakes will happen, so make every single measure to prevent an unwanted pregnancy completely free and anonymous.
• Make it a global issue. The highest population growths take place in poorer countries, so target them with all of these measures, even to the point of connecting international development funding to promotion of family planning and education.

Conclusion

The modern world moves fast and we’re all rushing around trying to keep up. It’s tempting to carry on like that and just take care of emergencies as they pop up. But think back through your life and I’m sure you’ll come up with several situations when you took preventive action and were really glad that you did later on. Now hold on to those memories and block off some time to 1) identify and 2) take care of the important but not urgent things in life. If you need inspiration, it’s always a good idea to go show your privates to a doctor.

Originally published at http://pandemicponderings.wordpress.com on July 9, 2020.