The Fallacy of Conditional Efficacy

I just received this bit of insight on another email list, and thought I'd re-post it here. It's extremely relevant to some of the discussions on this board, and clarifies the persistent sense of unease I've felt about most of our discussions of "solutions".


Examples of this fallacy are ubiquitous on this board. They include include "powering the entire world on renewable energy by 2050", "the nuclear renaissance", "reducing CO2 emissions by 80% in 30 years", "solving world overpopulation by educating and empowering women", "feeding the world through permaculture" - along with all proposals for global solutions that contains the words or phrases "could", "would be possible...", "if every..." or "all we need to do is..."

So I hold out no hope for the general population.

all share the imaginary landscape which give rise to this fallacy. If one denies their existence, *poof* - the fallacy disappears.

Reality presents us with improbable events (black swans) every day. Accepting them is reasonable, but planning for them is foolish.

Or "It's awful cold in this cave... I wonder what would happen if I rubbed these two sticks together really vigorously..."

Or "Wow that neat communicator that Captain Kirk uses is very convenient. I'd like to have one of those, too..."

Such is the fate of those who fail to recognize the great strength of the human spirit: they are destined to be proven wrong again, and again, and again and again and again. Once unleashed there is nothing the human mind and spirit cannot achieve. Some things may take more time than others... but the statement still stands -- there is NOTHING that we cannot achieve.

because this theory says that one could be wrong.

Fallibilism (from medieval Latin fallibilis, "liable to err") is the philosophical doctrine that all claims of knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. Some fallibilists go further, arguing that absolute certainty about knowledge is impossible. As a formal doctrine, it is most strongly associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, and other pragmatists, who use it in their attacks on foundationalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallibilism

It's not so much that the knowledge is mistaken. It's that there are significant aspects of the problem that are ignored because they are subliminally recognized as roadblocks on the path to the solution. It's like having a blind spot that keeps you from seeing things you don't want to see.

is that most of the arguments that I see people making here ARE ACCURATE.

We totally can power the world with renewables, and we're already taking that journey. We're totally on our way to solving the overpopulation problem. We're making great strides in feeding the world through permaculture. And yes, we're aggressively pursuing ways to cap carbon emissions.

The problem is that the time line these things are happening on is way too long. I, for one, am fully confident that we will see an 80% renewable standard in the US by 2100. I think that's about when we're going to see world population begin a gradual decline, too.

The catch is that we need this stuff to happen NOW. We need this stuff to happen 10 years ago! By the time 90 years has gone by, we will have done a lot of irreparable damage to the earth.

Lots of things take time. Getting a PhD takes time, and it's not a process that can be rushed. Having a baby takes time. The progression of the seasons takes time. It might be NICE if we could get a PhD in a year, or have a baby in four months instead of nine, or skip the 100 degree days in the summer and move on to fall, but if we were to rush those things it would be bad.

It would be nice to skip all the crappy environment-destroying stuff we're doing now, but maybe it's happening for a reason. Without the age of whale oil and nasty soot-belching factories, we would still be peasant farmers living in un-insulated wooden houses trying to scratch a living from 5 acres of mud, and we'd still be damaging the planet with deforestation and sewage.

I don't think you're looking for a fallacy, I think you're looking for wishful thinking. All good things will come in time, and we should work on them now so we can have good things later.

You wrote:

Those are conditional phrases, and I've noticed that pro-nukes have a hard time understanding what they mean.
For example, the 2003 MIT report gave a range of cost estimates, using various assumptions.
Yet every "pro-nuke" ignored the conditional phrases, picked the lowest of the estimates, and claimed that the report proved that the lowest estimate would be the actual cost.
In the 2009 update, the MIT scientists acknowledged that their 2003 analysis completely underestimated the costs, their entire range of estimates was way too low, and came out with a new range of higher estimatescosts.
Unfortunately, even these new estimates are way too low. Yet again, pro-nukes take the lowest of these, not learning from previous experience.

I don't know why some people have problems understanding conditional phrases. It does seem to afflict pro-nukes more than others. Perhaps it's because pro-nukes tend to be more conservative and tend to think in absolutes. People who don't think in absolutes, people who are more open-minded, will consider all the various possibilities, "we could do this, we could do that, ...". Conservatives are more authoritarian, they don't want to hear the possibilities, they want someone to tell them what to do, rather than thinking for themselves.

"If someone plans something, it is necessarily fallacious."

I might agree that some people understand things on a deeper level than others, but making conditional statements as part of planning have long been an element of, well, among other things, the science of engineering. When most engineers build bridges, for instance, like say, um, John Roebling, they make statements like "if I support this bridge with braided steel wire, it will last for more than a century." You know what? It did.

The one thing that ideas exhibiting this fallacy have in common is that they rely on changing human nature before the idea would work, whereas steel cables work the same way no matter what sort of mood it's in.

Human nature is the one issue that gets ignored in all these fix-it fantasies. Every global problem has at its core an n-prisoner dilemma. It doesn't matter if there are technical solutions available if some nations can secure an advantage by defecting and continuing the damage. When they do so that forces other nations to follow suit or risk losing out themselves.

It springs from the same root as economic growth itself. Even if some recognize that our material growth is killing the planet, no nation dares to stop or even slow its growth because it will be overtaken by others who do not. We're all running the Red Queen's Race towards the abyss.

Mainly, it assumes that that the "condition" for "efficacy" for a proposed course of action can be determined to be impossible at the outset. This assumes, essentially, perfect knowledge of the universe and its workings. "You can't achieve X through the process of Y, because Y is impossible."

It's essentially a crystallization of pessimism.

At the very least, it's fallaciously overbroad. One might argue, for example, that it is impossible to reduce Co2 emmissions by 80% in 30 years based on particular facts, but dismissing the goal on the basis that one simply can't do things like that is an irrational conclusion. No one can know that, and proposing that it's ridiculous to try when the benefits are fairly obvious would be ridiculous in itself.

We really don't know what we can do until we attempt it, so it's hardly fallacious to propose something which appears impossible. The "impossible" has been achieved repeatedly throughout human history, and every single one of those achievements has occurred in contravention to claims that whatever it was was demonstrably, concretely, without a shadow of a doubt, beyond the realm of possibility. Ridiculous. "Pie in the sky."

A lot of times these positions are put forward by those with a vested interest in putting a stop to the attempt. Michael Crichton's asinine Bush-pandering diatribe-disguised-as-fiction "State of Fear" posited essentially that there is no point in trying to protect the environment at all because a) We can't always predict the results (because we don't know everything) and b) We won't always be successful. That, of course, is pure baloney, and appeared motivated by the impulse to get people to stop annoying business concerns by asking that they please don't pave over our oxygen supply or warm their mansions with heaps of burning bald eagle embryos. Or maybe to get invited to brunch at the White House. I think it worked, by the way. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/national/19warming.html

The "conditional efficacy" fallacy also ignores the benefits of 1) consciousness raising and 2) the benefit of partial results. Merely proposing a solution which turns out to be infeasible can result in either a better proposal which is more feasible, or may provide partial results which confer a benefit short of the original goal, but still worthy.

What if we can reduce CO2 emissions by 60%? 30%? 5%? What if we can feed more of the world more efficiently? What if we can empower women more than they are presently empowered?

Will we suffer somehow because we tried? Are we afraid the universe will laugh patronizingly at us and wag its cosmic finger knowingly? Is it somehow childish or undignified to attempt or suggest an approach that is difficult or unlikely?

Screw that.

You don't discard a goal on the basis that it seems difficult to achieve. That's what goals are for.

Granted, you might make qualitative distinctions and argue that a particular proposal doesn't make sense because it is too costly, or too risky, or so unlikely to succeed that our efforts would best be placed elsewhere, but I don't think you can make a sweeping declaration that broad proposals for beneficial change are simply fallacious thinking.

Perhaps we can't create a fleet of city-sized hover farms powered by mosquito wings to simultaneously cure world hunger, the energy crisis and overpopluation, while reducing the world's mosquitos to slow-motion pedestrian bloodsucking attacks, but aiming for more solar power or a broader understanding of birth control methods, whether or not those efforts are likely fully succeed, is hardly irrational.

The bigger fallacy, by far, would be to assume we already know what is possible and impossible, worthy and unworthy, before we even try.

I used to completely accept the position that the writer of the email in the OP holds, but I generally don't now for the reasons you laid out so well.

I've been reading Twitter streams out of Libya, and they kind of soured my attitude - I backslid. I do think people vastly underestimate the barriers to action posed by human nature and the Prisoner's Dilemma, but that shouldn't keep us from trying. To do otherwise risks the slide into despair. Having been there for many years over this exact issue, it's not a place I would send anyone but Moammar Qaddafi.

Thanks for taking the time to write that, and in such a non-judgmental tone - it meant a lot to me.

Thanks for noticing the non-judgmental. I like to think these forums are for conversing, not blood-sport yelling contests, and aim for that. I see you do as well.

I wasn't familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma, and looked it up. I assume you're using it casually, i.e., general failure of people to choose the long-term benefits of cooperation over the quickest, easiest, most self-serving short-term result?

It's true, but the mechanism in these recent results is instructive -- the Internet. Simplistic? Sure. But look at the reaction of the dictators in shutting it down as quickly as possible. Note the Egyptians sending pizza to Wisconsin. Note Anonymous revealing a DOJ - recommended lobbyist / law firm hiring mustache-twisting villians for professional deception proposed to protect BOA and the Chamber of Commerce by destroying good-faith arguments.

Perhaps it would be "Pie in the Sky" to see a global consciousness forming in all of this. But the "prisoners" are more likely to cooperate if they speak to each other, unimpeded by the "guards?" eh?

And communication is the one thing the net gives us in spades. I've been almost paralyzed with empathic grief today reading the tweets from people in Tripoli. It's becoming harder all the time to pretend that we are separate individuals in different nations instead of members of a global family.

I am a firm believer in a coming revolution in human consciousness, and I'm convinced that the net is a cornerstone. A transformation of consciousness is the only thing I can see that's has a real chance of getting us out of this ecological/economic/psychological/spiritual mess we've gotten ourselves into.