Ep11 -- You Can't Have Too Much F'ing Perspective

 When my kids were really little, like five or six years old, they wanted to learn to skateboard or roller blade. So we take them over to the middle school a couple blocks from our place and through trial and a lot of error they'd slowly begin to figure it out.  Occasionally there'd be some 12 or 13 year old kids over there, like a little skate gang ruling the black top.  And every once in awhile one of my kids would lose control and go careening, arms and legs all flailing, towards those older kids.  And every time those tweener punks would help my little kid up, give them some pointers and words of encouragement, and send them out there to keep practicing. Now, I don't know if other parents have noticed this, but it seems to me that kids these days are way nicer than we were when we were kids. And there's research to suggest that, not just kids, but all of us have gotten nicer.  A meta analysis of over 500 studies found that cooperation among strangers has increased by 8% over the past 60 years.  But when asked how much they thought cooperation had changed over that time, subjects in a recent study, estimated that cooperation had decreased by 9%. 

There were also a couple of huge studies done by Adam Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert at Harvard that showed how inaccurate our assessments of ourselves are.  One survey asked people to rate their firsthand experiences of civility or incivility in their daily lives.  Over 20 years, there was no change in the responses.

And yet year after year, respondents said they believed morality was declining.  Mastroianni wrote a piece in the New York Times last year that explains why we tend to believe everything is getting worse and worse.  One reason is that negative events are more salient, so we notice them more.  This is something we've talked about on this podcast before and it's one of the reasons why the news is so depressing.  The other reason is that negative memories tend to fade faster than positive ones. Just think back on some trip or activity you did that in the moment was actually really unpleasant. Like I remember a camping trip where we slept in hammocks slung between trees. I ended up soaking wet and miserable and barely slept. But what I remember now, where the amazing bio luminescent funghi that I saw at two in the morning while I was desperately trying to stay warm.  So now all of that is just a really cool, happy memory.

None of this is to say that there aren't big problems in the world that need fixing. There definitely are.  But thinking that things and people are just getting worse and worse is not only incorrect, it's unnecessarily demoralizing and gets in the way of solving those big problems.  So this week, I want to look at the power of perspective. And not just making those proper comparisons, like with the past versus the present, but also how looking at things from different angles and through other people's eyes can give us a clearer picture of what's really going on. Stay tuned. 

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I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we've all been conned into accepting a human culture that's out of sync with human nature, and how we can fight back and start putting the kind back into humankind. 

This week, as I was thinking about perspective taking, I kept replaying over and over in my head that scene from Spinal Tap where  Nigel, David, and Derek go to Graceland and stand over Elvis's grave.  And after they do their raga-barbershop version of Heartbreak Hotel, the two great poets of the band wax philosophical.

Derek: Oh, this is thoroughly depressing. 
Nigel: But it really puts perspective on things.
David: No, too much. There's too much f'ing perspective.

I don't really have any brilliant segway between that clip and this week's topic, but I'll just take any opportunity I can to throw in a Spinal Tap reference whenever possible.  Although, I might suggest that we all often exhibit that same kind of self-assuredness that David St Hubbins shows when he can't help correcting Nigel, his friend and long-time band mate. And establish what he believes is his intellectual superiority. 

It's our egotism that so often gets us in trouble, but one can hardly blame us, right? It reminds me of that joke, the one common element in all of your bad relationships is you.  For better or worse, we are all at the centers of our own universes.  Remember a few weeks ago, I played a clip from the David Foster Wallace graduation speech at Kenyon College. Well, it turns out he touched on this self-centeredness as well, in a way that only he can:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe,  the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.  We rarely talk about this sort of natural basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive.

But it's pretty much the same for all of us.  It is our default setting, hardwired into our boards at birth.  Think about it. There is no experience you have had that you are not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, and so on.

Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real. 

You can see the effects of this kind of thinking all around us.  I was reading an article in Wired Magazine about the pitfalls of Effective Altruism, which is all the rage in tech bro circles these days.  And it really just came down to that the people who thought they were doing good were just failing to understand the full human complexity of the people who they thought they were helping. 

Or if you remember last week, I talked about how some wealthy people claim to envy the poor, because they don't pay income taxes. And I think that's based on the fact that wealthy people only really notice income taxes. They don't give the sales tax a moment's notice beyond glancing at a receipt once in a while. But I can promise you, people struggling to pay their bills notice that sales tax added on to so many purchases. 

Also, I think a lot of the original momentum for the anti-vaccine movement came from resistance to those very aggressive vaccination schedules that public health agencies recommended for very small children.  People who have good health insurance might find those schedules, overly aggressive, and actually get angry about them. They might even suggest some nefarious motivation for such schedules, like they were created by big pharma.  But the truth is public health officials are trying to do what's best for as much of the public as possible.  And the kids at the highest risk are those who rarely go to see a doctor.  So the best thing to do for the largest amount of people is to get as many of those vaccines administered as early as possible and in as few appointments as possible.  Now if people with excellent health insurance and lifestyles that allow them to easily make doctor's appointments want to push back on those schedules, that's fine. But understand where those mandates came from and don't demonize public health officials just because their strategies are really intended to help people who live very differently from you. Incidentally. I think one of the reasons why there was so much pushback and animosity towards public health officials during the COVID years was because people were never really educated about how public health officials see the world, what their priorities are, what their mandates are. And how they decide what's best for the largest amount of the public.  And of course there were plenty of politicians more interested in fanning the flames of that animosity rather than educating the public and mitigating it.

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So the big question as always is what do we do about all this?

How do we make ourselves less knee-jerk, egocentric, so we can understand how things fit together into a bigger picture and how decisions might affect people who live very differently from us.  I just finished a book that helped me put a lot of big, scary issues into their proper perspective, helped me see other people's perspectives on those issues, and probably most importantly helped me correct several beliefs that I strongly held, which were just flat out wrong when you look at the actual data.

The book is called, Not the End of the World. How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.  It's written by Scottish data scientist and researcher, Hannah Ritchie. She also writes an excellent Subtack called "Sustainability by Numbers". 

I'll give you just a couple of examples of these mind alterations that I think can help all of us avoid overly narrow or improper perspective-taking. 

She starts off with the UN definition of sustainability, which is "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". 

And so you can see, there are two parts to the definition. It's not just about protecting the future. It's also about meeting the needs of people in the present, which is important.  And right in the first chapter, she makes a perspective-changing claim:  We have never actually been sustainable. We've never been able to satisfy both parts of the definition at the same time.  So when we lament the fact that we're not living sustainably, it's less because of some moral failure on our part and more because it's really hard to do.  And the whole point of her book is that while it's really hard, it's not impossible. 

She then goes on throughout the book, using hard data to show that if your goal is to limit the rise in global temperatures, you have to look at all the data and understand the trade-offs. And sometimes when you do that, you'll find that what you thought was true from an environmental standpoint might not be. She admits herself to having believed certain things that once she looked at the numbers, just really didn't make sense. 

And one of the big metrics she cites is land use, which is something most people don't consider when deciding to give something as good or bad, or at least it's further down the list. So, for example, I thought it was great that Ben & Jerry's stopped using palm oil in their ice cream. After all palm oil plantations are horrible, destroying habitat and producing an oil that is terribly unhealthy.  But when you look at the data, you realize that palm oil plants are crazy productive, about 10 times more productive per area of land used than olives or coconuts for olive oil or coconut oil.  So, if you get rid of palm oil, it will be replaced by something that needs much more land. And that's the trade-off you have to consider.

None of that is to say that palm oil has been perfect and hasn't destroyed a tremendous amount of habitat. And that all seed oils don't need to be managed more effectively. But if there is a worldwide boycott of palm oil, there are going to be consequences.  See, perspective. 

And also with the health effects of palm oil, I was always told the results were clear and it was really bad. After all seed oils are very high in Omega-6s, which are linked to inflammation.  But there are plenty of valid studies in reputable journals that argue the exact opposite.  One study followed 2,500 men for 22 years. And found that those with the highest levels of Omega-6 had a significantly lower risk of dying from any disease.  The point of all, this is not to then become an absolutist in the other direction on palm oil, but to become more comfortable with the ambiguity and to be a good scientist when it comes to reaching your own conclusions.

Dr. Ritchie also offers an example to help remind us that what we think is normal may not be the case for the vast majority of humanity.  We may applaud the fact that in 2021, Sri Lanka banned the import of fertilizers since they wanted to move to an organic farming system nationwide.  But the result was that crop yields plummeted almost in half and prices skyrocketed.  The experiment has been a total failure and they're trying to figure out a way to reverse it.  The point here is that what might work in some places might not in others and that organic farming everywhere is clearly not the answer to meeting our sustainability goals. 

This entire book is just an excellent exercise in developing your intellectual dexterity, getting comfortable with ambiguity, with changing your own mind, and not applying the assumptions that work in your life to people who live very differently than you. 

By the way, I found that a great way to practice this kind of flexibility is through cooking of all things. In particular, if you're familiar with the magazine Cook's illustrated or the television show America's Test Kitchen,  they very often come up with completely new and novel ways to prepare dishes that have been done the same way -- almost by law -- for generation after generation.  Bunch of years ago, they came up with an idea of using vodka in pie crusts, which made the dough much easier to work with while achieving the same flaky result.

It felt like a revolutionary idea, but it worked.  Or there was a single serving chocolate soufflé that you could make ahead, freeze, and then like 40 minutes before serving just pop in the oven.  They actually have an entire cookbook called Cook's Illustrated Revolutionary Recipes and going through those recipes is actually a great way to get comfortable changing your mind and staying intellectually flexible. And that is the best defense against gaslighting that there is.

Before we wrap things up this week, I just want to leave you with one more pearl of wisdom from the philosopher poets David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap:

It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.  

Well, that's it for this week. Until next time be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack, and if you absolutely have to get in your car, drive nice, honk twice, and use your damn turn signal.