Sometimes I wonder how the human race as a whole, especially those of us in the so-called advanced countries, can be so unimaginably slow in recognizing the danger of global warming. There are, of course, many examples in history of civilizations and societies that did themselves in by engaging in practices, such as over-farming in ways that leads to the death of or erosion of vital lands. But this has typically happened to civilizations and societies that had no technological capacity to look ahead and see the long-term consequences of what they were doing.
We have that capacity. Yet we are moving slowly, and possibly far too slowly to deal with global warming.
Obviously, the political interest of the wealthy fossil fuel industry is a major barrier. And so is the anti-government ideology of the far right.
But it has occurred to me from time to time that human beings suffer from a deeper problem that partly explains why so many people, and not just those on the far right, can so easily ignore the reasoning and evidence of those of us who warn about climate issues. The problem is that we just are not very good about thinking in or about time or about understanding the way events and trends are caused by multiple factors. As a result we misinterpret events and occurrences in ways that support ideas that are, in fact, indefensible.
I have from time to time talked about one of the most problematic ways in which we fail to deal with time in how we think about various problems: recency bias. We all have a terrible tendency to extrapolate from the most recent events, not considering that those recent events may be the result of factors that are temporary or changeable. This is so common in the sports pages as to be laughable.
Look at what people have said about James Harden and the Sixers in the last year. Harden joined the team and he and Embiid played very well together and the articles on the sports pages started talking about how their pick and roll cannot be defended. And then they lost early in the playoffs and the dominant theme was that Harden was either washed up or a loser in the playoff. None of those articles pointed to two obvious reasons they lost the last series, Embiid was injured and missed two games and Harden was clearly hampered by a slow recovery from a hamstring injury.
Then the season started this year and Harden was clearly in better shape but started slow and the articles about how he was past his prime started again. Then he was injured. And then he came back and has played wonderfully and again there were articles about how Embiid and Harden are an unbeatable offensive pairing.
Recency bias is, in part the result of simply people having short memories. But there is another cause as well, that people have trouble understanding that the events we witness in our lives have multiple causes and that those cause are often a matter of degree, not simply a matter of being operative or not. Whether Harden and Embiid play well alone or together is not just a matter of some intrinsic unchanging characteristics of them. It’s a matter of other factors as well—whether they are healthy or injured, whether they are surrounded by complimentary players or not, and of course, how good their opposition is.
All those things are hard to understand if you don’t really know the game of basketball or the players involved and their history. That’s why the difference between amateurs and professionals in any field is often their ability to avoid recency bias by recognizing the various factors that influence outcomes besides those obtaining at the immediate moment.
Here is another example. I saw someone today who announced that, having gotten COVID a second time, they were not going to get a booster. The flaw in that reasoning—the failure to understand the complicated web of causation with regard to COVID— is almost too obvious to discuss. We’ve long known that because the virus mutates rapidly, the vaccine and boosters would be of limited use, over time. But there is a great deal of epidemiological evidence showing that while the vaccine does not stop us from getting COVID, it does in fact reduce the severity of its symptoms and the likelihood of being hospitalized and dying from the disease. Thus, this person’s conclusions that her getting COVID proves that there is no need to get a booster is not only fallacious about dangerous to her health.
Finally, here is an example of recency bias based on a failure to understanding how events have multiple causes I came across another day. An intelligent and sometimes well-informed person wrote that the “COVID overreaction” is similar to the “Y2K BS.”
Now it is true that, by the end of 1999, the danger of the Y2K computer bug was, in fact overstated. By then it was not a serious a threat. And, of course, most of the projections of rampant disasters turned out to be false. And so many people concluded that there never was a threat.
The reason that Y2K bug did not cause any serious problems, however, was because government and businesses in America and other advanced countries spent hundreds of millions of dollars to prepare for it. Estimates about spending US alone range from $100 billion to $200 billion while worldwide spending was as much as $600 to $850 billion.
Since none of the major disasters that were predicted happened, some people have concluded that Y2K was a hoax or BS and that all that money was wasted. That, conclusion, however, makes no sense at all. Disasters were avoided precisely because we did prepare for it. And it wasn’t just businesses and governments that did it. Every one of us who has a personal computer that receives security and other updates from Microsoft or Apple had our systems updated as well.
A few sceptics have said that because some countries, such as Russia, did not spend as much on Y2K preparation, there was no need for the US to do so. But the flaw in that claim is almost obvious. Businesses and governments and other institutions in the US and a few other countries introduced computer systems to handle things from government payrolls to tax systems to airplane reservations and traffic control many other matters years and decades before Russia. The computer systems that most needed updates to hand the Y2K situation were mostly the systems that relied on the COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages that ran on mostly IBM and then IBM and DEC computers in the 1950s. Russia didn’t introduce similar systems until much later, when computer hardware was more advanced and central processor units were capable of addressing far more RAM and that RAM was cheaper. There was thus far less of a need to save memory by recording dates in only two digits.
Again, if you don’t have some minimal expertise in the subject matter, it makes sense to conclude from the failure of planes to fall out of the sky on January 1, 2000, shows that Y2K was a hoax, that the COVID vaccine is useless, and that whatever James Harden and Joel Embiid did together in their last game shows us what they will do in the future.
The lack of expertise combined our time limited thought, our trouble understanding multiple causes, leads us to jump to false conclusions. And when it comes to things like COVID our ideological commitments often blind us, making it impossible to think issues through in a serious manner.
All these factors—plus the political power of the fossil fuel industry and the anti-government ideologues make it so difficult to deal thoughtfully about and prepare for climate change.
(In a longer piece I would point out that left-wing apocalypticism about climate change sometimes reveals the same inability to think in time that we see far more often from the right-wing climate deniers. Many who claim that dealing with climate change requires totally revamping our lives or returning to a early 20th century level of material well being fail to understand how quickly new technology has made it possible to use energy far more efficiently and to generate it cheaply from non-fossil fuel sources.)
Yet with all those excuses, I often do wonder if it really is too much to expect college educated people to be somewhat careful in extrapolating from the last thing they saw happening without thinking about the context in which those events took place.
In many of these cases taking ten seconds to stop and think would prevent us from making errors of this kind. But as I once heard the philosopher Bernard Williams say in lecture, “thinking is hard and ten seconds is a long time.”