[ExI] What's Wrong With Academic Futurists?

[William Flynn Wallace]

'I make a case that people have an
evolved blindness to looking into their own mental workings.'

I cannot agree with that.  Neurotics, who form some 30% of the population
(depending on who you are quoting) dig and pick at themselves, cannot get
enough of questioning their motives, and worry worry worry.

You can make a case that it is very difficult to get an objective view of
oneself, given all the self-deception that we do.  And then there is the
unconscious, hard to get to by definition.  (These are parts of Freud which
will never die.)

Of course there are people who shun any and all inward looks (mostly
extroverts), who often are the very ones who need to.

bill


On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 9:18 AM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 4:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
>
> snip
>
> > Forecasting trouble spots is generically useful,
>
> That's something which was discussed almost 5 years ago on this list.
> I wrote a paper on the subject that is available here:
> http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/17/194059/296 and was picked up
> by an journal here:
> http://www.mankindquarterly.org/summer2006_henson.html
>
> It was based on previous work here:
> http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/cults.html and extended on extropy
> chat into an model of how genes for the psychological mechanisms
> leading to wars under certain conditions were selected over genes to
> starve in place.
> http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2009-July/052083.html
>
> Other people, particularly military writers, have noticed the
> correlation between economic stress and internal civil disruptions or
> external wars.  The _Pentagon's New Map_ by Thomas P. M. Barnett is
> just one that comes to hand off my bookshelves.  The studied
> association between bad weather impacting harvest and subsequent wars
> in China gives strong empirical support.
>
> > and they like to tell anybody in government who wants to listen about
> their findings. In practice of course plenty of people who ought to listen
> have other priorities.
>
> To a considerable extent they don't _want_ to hear about it. It has
> this underlying theme that learning why other people make war may
> explain why _you_ are making war. I make a case that people have an
> evolved blindness to looking into their own mental workings. You start
> understanding why the "Arab Spring" happened and you begin understand
> why the US got into wars such as the one in Iraq.
>
> As you might recall, I was lambasted from the bench by a federal judge
> (Whyte) over talking about the human motivation for seeking status
> (and applying it to myself). Of course the judge himself was a first
> class example of how much humans seek status at great economic cost.
>
> The human motivation of seeking status is more accepted today, but
> back in the late '90s it was a hot button.
>
> > Also, I have not seen any hints of methodology over there that looks
> much better than good futures study methods elsewhere: saying smart stuff
> about the future is *hard*.
>
> If people really want to do this, they need good models of how humans
> react in tribal scale numbers and larger.  That comes out of
> evolutionary psychology and while it will give a kind of situational
> awareness, it still isn't going to give detailed predictions.
>
> Keith
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