The C-Realm podcast tackles the slippery topic of doomsterism - something which will be familiar to artificial intelligence aficionados. The basic thesis seems to be that doomsters are primarily low status individuals, who are seeking to enjoy an elevated status in the post-doom world which they have so cannily predicted. I'm not sure that this entirely explains doomsterism, and indeed the very vague and inaccurate nature of virtually all doom predictions means that doomsayers never actually get to the stage of being able to look back and say "I told you so".
Tim Tyler provides a more multi-faceted summation of the motivating factors behind doomsterism, but there may also be simpler origins. When a blackbird sees a cat prowling in its neighbourhood it sounds the alarm, partly to scare or annoy the cat, triggering a reflex called acoustic startle, and partly to alert other birds to the danger.
There's an obvious adaptive advantage to this behavior, and prognostications of doom may be a human equivalent of the bird's alarm call, explaining why so many people pay attention to them.
The main brand of doom discussed in the podcast relates to peak oil. The peak oil idea itself seems pretty difficult to refute. We have a good idea of how oil naturally formed, and we know that new oil is being created much too slowly for our rate of consumption to be sustainable. Sooner or later the oil will begin to run out, and most of the "easy oil" (that is, where you don't need to do much more than drill a hole in the ground to extract it) may already have been produced, as indicated by the declining volume of new discoveries. The main problem for doomsters is that oil will not run out suddenly in a single catastrophic event - like turning off a tap - but instead will from the consumer point of view appear to be becoming ever more expensive over time. Also, there are alternatives to oil, and possibly also synthetic ways of manufacturing oil using bio-engineered organisms.
The existing manner in which markets operate - however imperfectly - would seem to ensure that there will be a transition away from oil and towards other energy and hydrocarbon sources. As oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, the alternatives start to become cost effective by comparison and there will be more financial incentive to invest in those alternatives. If the transition is poorly managed at a political level, with anti-competitive interests seeking to block the transition for as long as possible, then there could be more wars or disputes in oil producing areas of the world, but unless these escalate into nuclear wars this isn't a scenario which spells doom for the whole of humanity. Things might be rocky for a while, but it's not an unsolvable problem. Doomsters typically assume that the status quo will continue until it breaks - a catastrophic state transition - and underestimate the adaptability and ingenuity of humans when faced with a challenge.
Here in the UK I expect doomsterism and doom-meisters to be on the rise in the next couple of years. Cuts in public services and rises in taxation will probably cause some degree of unrest, strikes, protests and so on. But this is really just civilization-as-usual, and shouldn't be confused with a species extinction event (although it may cause the extinction of the coalition government).
5 comments:
Nesse calls your hypothesis "the smoke-detector principle" - see:
"The smoke detector principle. Natural selection and the regulation of defensive responses."
The smoke-detector principle could potentially be adaptive on a large scale. However, I tend to think the associated mechanisms are fairly vulnerable to manipulative exploitation - for example, as we see in The End of the World Cult.
And of course the internet means that alarm signals can be spread at very little cost. You don't have to go to the expense of printing books or pamphlets. The cost is also low to retweeters, which is also important in amplifying the doom message.
In the old pre-internet times if someone sent me a message of doom in order for that message to propagate I'd have to expend some of my resources - the cost of postage, making physical photocopies or telephone calls - which would lead me to consider more carefully whether it was really worth the investment.
One of the more worrying things about DOOM mongering is that it might plausibly accelerate the types of processes it claims to be warning against.
Consider financial DOOM mongering, for example. If lots of people rush around warning others about the imminent crash of the markets, and telling them to warn their friends and loved-ones people might cash in their shares, buy gold, and then bury it. If enough people do that, it could contribute to a variety of real economic problems.
The self-fulfilling prophecy. The buried gold strategy didn't work too well for the Anglo-Saxons, who had their own problems with doom-mongering.
But this situation is the normal mode of operation in the financial markets, which are really just a big rumor mill completely dominated by positive feedback effects.
In nature, there can be a reasonable expectation that "the smoke detector principle" results in an overall positive effect - with the harm caused by the false alarms balanced by the benefits of occasionally avoiding danger. However, human culture is widely regarded as being outside the region that was adaptive to our ancestors - and no doubt THE END OF THE WORLD acts as a superstimulus to human risk assessment. The result could easily be maladaptive.
There have already been some sociological studies of DOOM mongering - but it would be nice to have more. It would be good to know more about the scale of the damage done by the false alarms - and the extent to which master DOOM mongers are benefitting by exploiting their followers.
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