Why do we need “individual action” (now more than ever) when what we REALLY need is “systems change?”
for - post - LinkedIn - individual change vs system change - Deep Humanity individual / collective gestalt and climate action
comment - individual / collective gestalt would be helpful framing to sort out this confusion
the aim of this particular event is to review the evidence for how mindfulness supports sustainability
for - adjacency - mindfulness - sustainability - climate action - inner development goals - SDGs - individual / collective gestalt
adjacency - between - mindfulness - sustainability - climate action - inner development goals - SDGs - individual / collective gestalt - adjacency relationship - mindfulness is to sustainability and climate action - as inner development goals are to SDGS and - as individual is to the collective gestalt
I wasn’t immune to the incentive gradient, either. After I was dismissed from the crypto hedge fund I’d planned to work for in February 2022, I kept my distance from EA for a few months, wary of what I perceived as wastefulness and superficiality in the slice of the community I had encountered. But by May, I needed a job, and it was not hard to see that the fastest path to prosperity in the Effective Altruism world included a pit stop in the Bahamas. So I bought a plane ticket to Nassau, and within two weeks of my trip I had a fantastic position at an exciting new nonprofit organization funded by the FTX Foundation. I don’t know how to feel now about that plane ticket. On the one hand, the job I ended up in was a perfect fit. I was eminently qualified, and both I and the organization were substantially better off as a result of me joining. It introduced me to a community of earnest, introspective, devoted people, banded together to try to change the world for good, a community that I feel extraordinarily lucky to now call home. On the other hand, I was a willing participant in a web of incentives that likely compromised my epistemics and ethics. Participating in it had such high expected value — first in dollar terms, when I planned to trade crypto, and then in impact-on-the-world terms, when I went in search of an altruistic job. It seemed absurd to keep my distance just because the “vibes felt off” in the world of FTX and EA (at that point, the two were interchangeable in my mind), with no concrete cause for concern or evidence of wrongdoing in my field of vision. But if the incentives hadn’t been so strong, would I have paid more attention to the suspicious feelings in my gut?I think sometimes about the versions of me out there who would have held back from buying that plane ticket. There are alternate-universe-Rickis who smelled something rotten in FTX land and decided to stay away from that rot despite the enormous incentives not to. Those Rickis don’t end up in the Effective Altruism world. I think we would have benefited from having more of them around.
Those Rickis don’t end up in the Effective Altruism world. I think we would have benefited from having more of them around.
Indeed ... and what a coincidence those other Ricki's are not the author. We desperately want it to be others who took the bullet, who committed to the costly collective action whilst we stayed home (or got out of jail early etc etc).
human murmurations - from - LinkedIn post - https://hyp.is/xHpumACHEe-9MfvNBLN4Cg/www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7183258116195561472/ - then Youtube search for " starling murmurations Italy" - - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-GZV2Af5Fyo
adjacency - between - sparling murmurations - human murmurations - human potential - emergent collective whole system change
In the neoliberal era, individuals are forced to assume sole responsibility for navigating “every hardship and every difficulty—from poverty to student debt to home eviction to drug addiction.” When the pandemic exacerbated these hardships, it was an uphill battle to build solidarity and convince people to support collective solutions. After a lifetime of being told they were on their own, “a subset of the population” doubled down on individualism. It does not, now, seem surprising to Klein that they essentially said, “Fuck you: we won’t mask or jab
for: key insight - anti-vaxxers, key insight - conspiracy theories, key insight - maga, key insight - neoliberalism and failure at collective action
key insight: neoliberalism and failure of collective action
I think government is uh can be and it a Force for good and many of the problems we Face are what social 01:04:07 scientists would call common good or Collective action problems and actually require coordination from government to be addressed so there is a a political philosophy of 01:04:20 course that is increasingly strong in the United States the government is not good for anything
for: adjacency - collective action - government - libertarianism - open source movement - commons movement
adjacency between
At best, we will see new forms of collaboration among large numbers of people toward beneficial ends. The most obvious example is the changing nature of responses to largescale natural disasters. Perhaps we will see this spirit of volunteer and entrepreneurial cooperation emerge to address such pressing issues as climate change (e.g., maybe, the Green New Deal will be crowdsourced)
Civil society is the sector where the power of We thePeople ultimately and properly resides.
the entire biosphere is made out of 00:41:23 um female desire for no reason no reason to it right night not with an objective of reproducing but just with an objective of wow that's really sexy I like it 00:41:35 and that's a very very good reason isn't it to to save the planet
Sciences told us that if we want to abide by this 1.5 degree Centigrade uh limit of Paris agreement we have to cut our emissions by 50 00:10:35 percent by the end of this decade by 2030 almost 50 percent so but but there is this is a huge ask and you know I cannot um answer your question because a 00:10:47 million dollar question that a world should come together uh somebody like me sitting in a developing country with its economy struggling I can only hope that that 00:10:58 put together do Collective action we need the transformation of our Energy System
// - This article provides an intersectional study of: - climate change, - collective action research - terror management theory / mortality salience - it explains the beneficial impacts of non-rational relational ontology and recommends the use of ritual practices based on this as a way to promote pro-environmental behavior
//
Another is strate-gic coordination: a great many consumers must make the same productchoices at the same time, with persistence. But this requires a level ofdiligence, focus, conviction, and resistance to greenwashing that doesnot emerge spontaneously. It comes from collective action, most oftenpromoted and organized by civil society organizations.
// - indeed - coordinated collective action is what is missing here
An Introduction to PLAN E Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First-Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats
Planetary Boundary / Doughnut Economic Main Category: SOCIO-ECONOMIC: Culture, Education
Although culture and education are chosen as the main categories, Plan E applies to all planetary boundaries and all socio-economic categories as it is dealing with whole system change.
Visit Stop Reset Go on Indyweb for detailed context graph and to begin or engage in discussion on this topic. (Coming soon)
“low-hanging fruit”
IPCC AR6 WGIII Chapter 5: demand, services and social aspects of mitigation identifies that up to 45% of mitigation can result from a demand-side socialization strategy and collective action mobilization. This gives us tremendous power of impact to mobilize people. The low hanging fruit can be identified by comprehensive, ongoing, deep, global conversations with the greatest diversity of actors with a common vision collectively searching for the social tipping points, leverage points and idling resources and scaling massively thru the Indyweb as a cosmolocal network (what's light we share, what's heavy we produce locally).
Climate scientist and realist Professor Kevin Anderson has argued for many years that demand side changes are the only solutions that can be implemented rapidly enough to peak emissions and drop emissions rapidly in the short term (next few years), buying time for reneewable energy solutions to scale globally.
The hyper-response takes the viewpoint that, in the context of the enormous amount of work that needs to be done in a short period of time, Earth’s large human population is an asset if it can be effectively leveraged as part of the hyper-response
The billions of ordinary people whose potential as appropriate level change actors has remained untapped. It is a significant reservoir of collective agency, an enormous repository of idling resource. It just needs a compelling enough narrative to lower the threshold to participatory collective action.
The top 10 percent of households have plenty of other potential for slashing emissions.
The key is to educate and track.
Benjamin Mason Meier. (2022, March 13). Having examined the CDC Director’s admonition—“Your health is in your hands”—As a moral failure https://thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00351-5/fulltext, our new article reflects on rising individualism in US COVID-19 policy, undermining collective action, health equity & human rights https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589537022000712 https://t.co/EwG9fUUQC2 [Tweet]. @BenjaminMMeier. https://twitter.com/BenjaminMMeier/status/1502989273125036032
Social convention, which has for so long worked against us, can if flipped become our greatest source of power, normalising what now seems radical and weird. If we can simultaneously trigger a cascading regime shift in both technology and politics, we might stand a chance. It sounds like a wild hope. But we have no choice. Our survival depends on raising the scale of civil disobedience until we build the greatest mass movement in history, mobilising the 25% who can flip the system.
This is the core philosophy behind Stop Reset Go, but NOT NECESSARILY just in the direction of civil disobedience. To invest only in that is to put all our eggs in one basket that top down actors will be pressured beyond a certain threshold. It may happen, it may not, or it may just take too long. We must diversify and also invest in systematized bottom-up efforts.
Casara, B. G. S., Suitner, C., & Jetten, J. (2021). The Impact of Economic Inequality on Conspiracy Beliefs. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gtqy8
In the future envisioned here, decentralized networks play the role of governments, municipalities and intentional commons, fostering common goods. It is possible to produce common goods when a big-enough community cooperates to bear the cost of production and its implementation; but this, correspondingly, requires large-scale coordination, and large-scale coordination is generally a very hard problem. In this article we introduce Common Good, a blockchain-based application that solves this problem by enabling the coordination and motivation of different relevant actors for achieving a desired common good, by providing it with a “business model” just as in the profit-seeking sector. Our solution takes inspiration from the Social Impact Bonds (SIB) model.
A proposal to use decentralized blockchain to make large scale coordination possible.
Currently, there is no formal or mandated monetary threshold applied to determine what is, or is not, considered material in the sustainability context. Many companies, especially large publicly traded ones, identify their own unique set of sustainability priorities on a regular basis, and include them in their sustainability reports and related disclosures.
This is an opportunity for collective action to complement corporate action. Such collective action will be more effective if closely coordinated with individual actors as well as broader umbrella sectors, as in this particular case.
Krumpal, I. (2020). Soziologie in Zeiten der Pandemie [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yqdsu
Free our knowledge. (n.d.). Retrieved June 30, 2020, from https://www.freeourknowledge.org/pages/about/
Pescetelli, N., Cebrian, M., & Rahwan, I. (2020, February 10). Real-time Internet Control of Situated Human Agents. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/xn7sr
Pieper, D. (2020, May 1). Challenging social systems under the threat of pollution: Replication and extension of Eadeh and Chang (2019). Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/axbj4
It should be no surprise recognizing the problematic-theoretical similarities between disaster research and its "half-sibling" (e.g., see Wenger 1987), collective behavior. Both disaster research and collective behavior are at a theoretical standstill (e.g., see Aguirre and Quarantelli 1983), and both still rely upon every-day language rather than a broader scheme for describing events (e.g., see Weller and Quarantelli 1973, McPhail 1992). Works by Kreps and Bosworth (1994) and Dombrowsky (1981; 1987), (and perhaps Barton's 1970 classic work) reflect the theoretical attention disaster research needs to build.
Connects crisis informatics research with collective behavior.
I wonder though does Neal define collective behavior and collection action differently?
Look at these citations:
Quarantelli, E.L. 1985. Emergent Citizen Groups in Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Activities. Final Report 33. Newark, Delaware: Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware
Turner, Ralph and Lewis Killian. 1987. Collective Behavior. Third Edition. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Weller, Jack M. and E. L. Quarantelli. 1973. "Neglected Characteristics of Collective Behavior," American Journal of Sociology 79:665-85.
Wenger, Dennis. 1987. "Collective Behavior and Disaster Research." Pp. 213-237 in Sociology of Disasters, edited by R. Dynes, B. De Marchi and C. Pelanda. Milan, Italy: Franco Angeli.
Also, with disaster research having strong theoretical ties with the study of collective behavior(Wenger 1987), and with the field of collective behavior often looking at issues related to social change {e.g., riots, social movements), another link between disasters and social change has implicitly
Neal connects concerns about disaster-driven social change and the natural desire for people to respond via some collective action impulse.
Nice segue into SBTF as collection action motivated by social change
By examiningwork practices, and tracing how those practices are reified in the social-technical organization of a group that is forming and stabilizing as they do the work, we learn not just what this particular group did, but also how the mechanisms by which collective action in digital environments are organizedbottom-up. We also learn how those lessonsaregraduated into prescriptivetop-down direction to sustain and direct future action
Interesting frame of reference for this study that also helps to unpack the contribution of the SBTF research.
Perhaps Elinor Ostrom's work could be helpful here too.