TLDR: Short term gain causes long-term loss, examples: politics, asteroids. Change your mind, save the world!
In mathematics we think of the scarcity
trap as an optimization problem where you are focusing on short-term
gains. Due to the complexity of some mathematical problems, this
often leads to a long term loss. It's like being on a golf course
blindfolded and you're trying to find the lake. Every time you go
down hill you think, 'hey I'm getting closer to that lake', but what
you don't realize, because you can't see, is that you're actually
headed strait for a sand dune at the bottom of the little valley.
This happens most often in problems with “lots of valleys”. In
the business we call this “manly local optima”, optima being the
lowest point in the valley. To find the lake in the case above, you
often have to “go uphill”, before going down hill again.
I often think of our society having the
same penchant for short-term optimization, especially in our election
process. We are dominated by the two main parties, but it was not
always so. One explanation for why we were reduced to two parties is
that every election year, people are focused on winning that election
that year. Thoughts of what happens in 20 or 30 years are far outside
the scope of how the average person votes. Thus, after decades of
making the short-term optimization choice, we are reduced to just
having two major parties that have the highest probability of
winning. One of typical ways of peer-pressuring people into voting
for a candidate from those two parties is that friends and family
members often say: “X candidate cannot win”, as an explanation
for why you shouldn't vote for them. However, what they neglect to
say is that if you never vote for someone else, someone else will
always have a reduced chance to win during the election after this
one.
My thesis research for my Master's
program was based on analyzing an issue who's devastating effect
appears only when society solves the problem through short-term
thinking. Asteroids impacting planets are naturally occurring
phenomenon. Many of the beautiful craters on the moon and mars are
formed by impact strikes. Asteroid strikes are a statistical problem
meaning that is is only a matter of time before an asteroid hits a
major city. My researched looked at the side-effects of dealing with
an asteroid impact with little warning time. Short warning time only
happens if society does not place value in asteroid detection
programs, or refuses to invest in asteroid deflection missions.
Technologies like gravity tractors and mounting thrusts to the
asteroid can only work if scientists are given steady funding and
public support for decades. If society refuses to make these
investments, then the only method left to deflect an asteroid is the
nuclear option.
Unlike the figurative use we've heard
of in the last few days, the nuclear option means using a nuclear
device to blow the asteroid into little bits. This prevents large
chunks from piercing through the atmosphere.* The problem with this
approach is that you're taking one big rock and breaking it up into a
bunch of smaller rocks. All those rocks are still heading for Earth.
While they may put on a spectacular light show for people on the
ground, satellites, which we have come to depend on, will be having a
very bad day. Satellites are very delicate, very expense, very
important things. They are considered critical infrastructure by the
US government. They make your GPS maps work, they keep your cell
towers working, and they allow the US military to coordinate all
around the globe. All those little rocks that we created with our
short-term optimization to save ourselves, will now have the
opportunity to hit our satellites and destroy all the services we've
come to rely on. Not only that, all those destroyed satellites will
stay in space, flying around and around the Earth, destroying any
healthy satellites that survive.
This type of problem, loosing
satellites and all the services they provide, can only happen with a
society that constantly makes short-term decisions. A society that
can successfully make long term decisions won't have this problem
because they will have spent the time and the effort to develop
better deflection technology and know-how.
It is possible that this is a clear
example of Fermi's paradox which deals with the problem of, if
intelligent life exists in the universe, why haven't we heard from it
yet. One of the explanations proposed to explain this is that
intelligent life has a tendency to destroy itself. I would have to
agree with this position. We have understood celestial mechanics
since Martin Luther nailed his manifesto to the church door. We have
nightly evidence of the impacts that have scarred the face of the
moon. And yet, as an “intelligent species”, we are more concerned
with taking the shortest path to the lake than we are with realizing
that we might be headed into a sand dune.
Does this mean our society is doomed?
Definitely not! Humans are an adaptive species. We are experts at
solving problems large and small. And just like a recovering addict
must first admit that there is a problem, once we admit that our
decision making process is biased towards short-term gain, we can
become more cognizant of long-term loss caused by our decisions. This
will help us overcome problems with asteroids and problems with
politics. Who knew long-term decision making could be so useful?
Thank you for your time.
* Typically at this point, we are
forced to make the obligatory Bruce Willis reference and people in
the audience start giggling. “The Giggle Factor”, as we like to
refer to it, is odd because this is a real issue that very much has
the capability of leveling an entire metro area. The Tunguska
asteroid strike in 1908 leveled an area larger than the city of Los
Angeles.
