"Guns, Bacteria, and Iron and Steel" Author: About Social Mathery Decisions

Picture: The heterogeneous device of the British oil company was launched, causing 15 workers to die and 180 people injured.

There is no doubt that everyone is a decision maker.

But in general, our decisions are local or individual, and the impact on other people is small. For example, do you want to run tonight?

However, some collective decisions or social decisions will not only affect the decision makers, but also bring painful consequences on the masses as a whole, such as life loss, asset losses, and economic losses.

In the face of some public decisions, people often question, "Why do you want to do this?" "Why do you know that the direction is wrong, just don't look back?"

Some are related to the ecological environment, some are related to medical and health, and some are related to the economic market. But they all point to a common topic: "Why do some society have made catastrophic decisions?"

"Why do some society have made disaster decisions? "

——Larad Dimmond

Excerpt from "New Science on Culture: About Society, Art, Rights and Technology"

01

Puzzling

Ignorant

Education is actually imparting knowledge to teachers and challenging the assumptions of teachers. This is my experience in the past few months.

In my academic career, for the first time, I started a course for undergraduates at the University of California Los Angeles. The theme of the course was the collapse of society. Why do some society collapse in the long river of history, but some society can maintain it to the present?

In the class, I discussed the decline of some famous civilizations with students, such as the Ana Zazizi Indians in the southwest of the United States, the ancient Mayan civilization on the Yicatan Peninsula Mexico, the community on the Easter Island, the Angkor Wat in Southeast Asia, and the Angkor Wat in Southeast Asia. Africa's Dazabbwe site, tribes on the Crescent Land of the two river basins, and Harapa culture in the Indian River Basin.

Judging from the archeological discoveries in the past 20 years, due to excessive mining of the environmental resources they lived in, these civilizations destroyed the environment that they lived on, and eventually destroyed themselves.

For example, the Polynesians on the Easter Island, the island they survived, had lush vegetation, and even had the highest palm trees in the world. Gradually, the islanders began to cut the forests and used wood to create canoeing, raw fire, transport sculptures, lift sculptures, and make woodcarves. Finally, one day, they fell down all the forests, and all the trees on the island were extinct. They no longer did not use wood to make canoe and erected sculptures, and there were no trees to keep the soil and soil and prevent erosion.

Their society eventually collapsed by a plague caused by the food, causing 90%of the islanders to die.

One of the most understandable questions for my student, but I never thought about it before: How did a society make such a catastrophic decision, and even cut all the trees I rely on?

My student wanted to know what they said when the islanders on Easter Island cut down the last palm tree. Are they saying "we are a logging worker, don't control those trees", or are you saying "this is my tree, I have the right to do so, please respect my private property right"? " Of course, all these islanders must have already realized what the consequences of cutting forests will cause themselves. You know, cutting trees is not a trivial problem.

Some students want to know that if human beings still exist in 100 years, would people at that time, like we are surprised by the ignorance of these islanders, and also shocked our ignorance?

Picture source: WhatsondisneyPlus.com

Why do some society have made catastrophic decisions?

This problem not only shocked my students, but also troubled professional historians who studied the collapse of society. The "Crash of the Complex Society" of the famous historian Joseph Tynene is the most cited book in this field. When discussing the collapse of the ancient society, Tyns denied that the collapse of civilization was due to the possibility of poor environmental management. He felt that this assumption looked unreliable. He wrote in the book:

They have a comprehensive management structure, coupled with the ability to distribute labor and natural resources, and respond to poor environmental conditions may be one of the best things that are best at complex social systems. In the face of the environmental conditions that they have completely avoided, the society collapses, which is really puzzling ...

As the problem of resource reserves increasingly depleted, it is becoming more and more obvious between members or managers in complex society. The most reasonable assumption seems to take some measures to find solutions.

Tyns concluded that the collapse of all these ancient society was not because of poor environmental management because they could never make such a low -level mistake. However, it is obvious now that these society does make these bad mistakes.

02

Unsolved

Failure for group decisions

My student, and Tenne, actually raised a very puzzling question: the failure of group decision -making. This group can be the entire society, or the government, small groups, companies, university academic institutions, etc.

The problem of failure of group decision -making is similar to the failure of personal decision -making.

Individuals will make wrong decisions, such as unfortunate marriage, loss of investment, failure business. However, compared to individual decisions, there are some additional factors in the failure of group decisions, especially the conflict between the interests between group members. There is no problem in this aspect of individual decisions. This is obviously a complicated question. There is no single answer, and there will be no answer that everyone agrees. Next, I want to propose a roadmap that solves the failure of group decision -making. I will divide the answers vaguely into four types:

First, the group may not foresee the existence of the problem before the problem is actually;

2. When the problem occurs, the group may not notice the problem;

3. After finding a problem, the group may not try to solve the problem;

Fourth, the group may try to solve the problem, but after many attempts, it failed to succeed.

Although the problem of social decision -making mistakes and social collapse may seem a bit pessimistic, the other side of the problem is optimistic, that is, successful decisions. Perhaps, if we understand the reasons for group decision -making errors, we can use this knowledge to make a memorandum to help the group make correct decisions.

Another phenomenon is that politicians use the word "gradually changing normal" to describe this slow trend hidden in chaotic fluctuations.

If the situation just deteriorates slowly, it is difficult for people to realize that this year is more than last year than last year, and each year is more worse than the previous year. Therefore, people's baseline standards for "normal" have gradually changed without being noticed.

This kind of subtle change of year, people may have to spend decades to suddenly realize that the situation has become much better than decades ago, or the normal state that people accept is much lower.

03

It is good for me

Harmicis to you and society

Picture source: British drama "Yes, Prime Minister"

The most common and shocking problem for decision -making errors: the society recognizes the existence of problems, but does not try to solve the problem. The reason why such failures often happen are "rational behaviors" caused by the conflict of interest between people.

Some people may draw such conclusions through "correct reasoning": they can improve their interests by harming the interests of others. Economists call this behavior "rational", although they also admit that this behavior may be immoral. The evil goals are usually clear, and they can escape after doing evil.

Because, as the winner in the complex status quo, they are usually highly concentrated, the number of people is very small, and the purpose is very clear. Therefore, they can immediately get a lot of determined benefits. In contrast, the losers are scattered, and many individuals share the loss caused by bad behaviors. At the same time, the losers lack motivation, because they do not do the "rational person" that damages the self -interest, which can only bring them a small and uncertain long -term income.

The typical adverse rational behavior is "beneficial to me, harmful to you and society", to put it bluntly, it is selfish. A few people may realize that their own self -interest is contrary to the interests of most people in society. For example.

Prior to 1971, Montana's mining companies dumped toxic wastes containing copper and arsenic directly in rivers and ponds. This phenomenon was common, because the laws in Montana did not require minerals to be abandoned at the abandoned mine. After the good after -treatment.

After 1971, Montana issued relevant laws, but the mineral company found that they could directly declare bankruptcy after mining valuable ores to avoid spending after good afterwards. The consequence of this is that the cost of billions of dollars in good afterwards can only be borne by residents of the US government and Montana. The mineral company accurately found a way to improve its own interests, saving money by leaving a mess, but left a burden to the society.

This special form of this kind of conflict is called "public land tragedy", which refers to such a scenario: Many people have harvested from public resources, but there is no effective supervision to control how much resources everyone can harvest from it Essence "Even if I do n’t catch the fish, or do n’t let my cattle and horses eat those grass, other fishermen will catch the fish, and other herders will let his cattle and horses eat those grass. Do you want to worry about excessive fishing and excessive grazing! "

Why did you try to solve it after discovering the problem? For this issue, I also want to mention the last reason -psychological denial. This is a professional term that is precisely defined in personal psychology, and was later introduced to popular culture.

If you perceive something that makes you unbearable pain, in order to avoid such unbearable pain, you may subconsciously ignore or deny this feeling. Even if this feeling may cause great catastrophic consequences in reality, you are not expected. The most common emotions that cause psychology are fear, anxiety and sadness.

Take a typical example. For example, you will refuse to assume that your husband, wife, child, or best friend is in a state of dying, because this idea will make you feel sad. You will refuse to imagine terrible things.

Psychological denial is a concept of mature in the field of individual psychology. Now it seems that this phenomenon also seems to exist in group psychology. There are many evidence that during the Second World War, the Jews and other races had always refused to acknowledge that the Nazis were slaughtering their compatriots. Although there is constant evidence that the bloody slaughter continues, they refuse to admit that they are in danger, because this idea is really terrifying, so they do not want to believe this fact.

It is obvious that some of the causes of social collapse are obvious. Why are those declined society facing these obvious problems? Psychological denial may be explained.

The society realized the problem, and it did try to solve it, but failed to succeed. There are many possible explanations in such results. The first may be because the problem is too complicated, far exceeding the ability of people at that time. Secondly, failed to solve the problem often because we do not do our best when we solve the problem, or it is irreversible to make up for the dead sheep.

Why does civilization rise and fall? What are the origin and purpose of art? How does technology change society? How does social network run? Open this book and follow the great minds of Daniel Dannit, Jaared Dimmond, Bryan Arthur, Stuart Brand, etc.

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