{"id":64858,"date":"2023-01-25T06:45:32","date_gmt":"2023-01-25T11:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=64858"},"modified":"2023-01-25T06:45:32","modified_gmt":"2023-01-25T11:45:32","slug":"hope-on-the-balance-of-probabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=64858","title":{"rendered":"Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/howtosavetheworld.ca\/2023\/01\/23\/hope-on-the-balance-of-probabilities\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large\" src=\"https:\/\/howtosavetheworld.ca\/images\/The-New-Political-Map-2015.png\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" \/><br \/>\n<em>my now-slightly-outdated map of worldviews about collapse; right-click and open in a new tab to see it full-sized<\/em><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s interesting to listen to social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger try to reconcile his assessment of the state of the world with his vehement insistence that we have to try as hard we possibly can to avert the \u2018metacrisis\u2019 that threatens to bring about the collapse of human civilization and the extinction of most or all life on earth, including humans.<\/p>\n<p>In a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=kbg8nHuNggU\">recent<\/a>\u00a0video, he said:<\/p>\n<p>How can evolutionarily nasty chimpanzees with a high orientation for conflict and irrationality, with nuclear weapons and AI and synthetic biology, with a history of using technology in conflict-oriented and harm-externalizing ways, how can 8 billion of us with exponential tech [increasingly available to all] do a good job of governing that much power? It doesn\u2019t actually look that promising.<\/p>\n<p>Yet he insists that \u201cwe cannot know for certain\u201d that we are fucked (or that we are not), so we each have a responsibility to do what we can, working with others, to pull us back from the brink.<\/p>\n<p>His argument reveals a curious quirk about humans and our relationship to complexity, uncertainty, and hope. We seem completely preoccupied with what John Gray calls \u201cthe needs of the moment\u201d, and it is clear that this preoccupation has directly produced the metacrisis (a combination of many, unintended, crises and system collapses \u2014 economic, ecological, political, social, health, educational, resource, technological, and, for some, spiritual\/religious) in which we find ourselves. Yet we continue to cling to hope for our future when all logic says it\u2019s unfounded.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hope, on the Balance of Probabilities my now-slightly-outdated map of worldviews about collapse; right-click and open in a new tab to see it full-sized It\u2019s interesting to listen to social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger try to reconcile his assessment of the state of the world with his vehement insistence that we have to try as hard [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[32260,287,2057,1252],"class_list":["post-64858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-dave-pollard","tag-extinction","tag-hope","tag-worldview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64858"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64859,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64858\/revisions\/64859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}