Climate for Twitterers

In the past few weeks I've been using Twitter (Im a tweeter!!) in an attempt to get a feel for "social media marketing." I won't say I was a skeptic when I started, but I don't think I had any expectations other than being a researcher, not directly involved. I'm now rather more involved.


If you are on Twitter you can choose people to "follow." In fact when you first register, you'll be given a list of people you can follow. You can go to their profiles and determine if their interests and their past tweets are interesting to you. Every time they post a comment, you will receive it in your "NewsFeed." And your comments must be less than 140 characters.


If you want people to hear what you've got to say, you've got to have followers who will receive your tweets when you post them. Or you can search by topic or key word, and respond (retweet) to those messages, which will be received by the person you're responding to and whoever is following him/her.


I think I am most proud that Timothy Leary (@DrLeary) is a follower of my mine (from his location "On the outside looking in"). I'm pretty sure if you ask to follow him he'll follow you, too. If you want to follow me, I'm @WillBurd (as you'll see below).


The primary way I've used Twitter is to follow news aggregators, with particular reference to eco issues and insights into human behavior. When I find something interesting I retweet it (I now have three accounts with a total of 60 or so followers).


A few days ago I received a retweet that referenced an article from BBC News titled "What Happened to Global Warming?" that deals with temperature measurements and the fact that none of the the last 10 years reports higher temps that 1998, a marked El Nino year, which was indeed the hottest year in modern records. My tweet is below, and was meant to suggest that global temp measurements are selective at best, and there are other indicators, like ice caps and glaciers, that might tell an important part of the story. (My inter-tweet notes are notes in [brackets].)

WillBurd
8:25pm, Oct 14 from Tweetie

Melting glaciers & poles don't matter? RT@arthurtaubo: RT @eachus (Interesting article about global warming) http://twurl.nl/rh717o

A bit later I noticed that I had received a string of tweets (that 140 character limit) in response:

eachus
9:06pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd That's not the issue. 2 things here: (1) the globe has NOT been warmer since 1998. Yet... glaciers are melting. And yet again...

9:07pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd (2) The volume of ice of Antarctica is higher, even given meltings around the edges. What does this all mean? Frankly, who knows?

9:09pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd The question is not whether the earth is warming... despite peaks and valleys it has been trending warmer for at least 6000 yrs.

[About the same time human population and culture has been expanding exponentially. Ironic, no?]

9:11pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd The question is: is man (and in particular CO2) causing any warming? If so, you would expect it to be evident in recent years.

[As in the hottest decades of the last many centuries?]

9:12pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd But it HASN'T BEEN. Again: Antarctic deposits have been heavier than usual, so that despite edge melting, it has MORE ice.

[Proof, or citation?].

9:14pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Some glacier melting, like around Kilimanjaro (a favorite anecdote of "warmers"), is known to be actually caused by other factors.

[I'm not sure I've ever heard this suggested as proof. Cause for concern, yes.]

9:15pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd (Kilimanjaro melting was shown, years ago, to be due to deforestation at lower altitudes.)

[I think that IS human action, along with the burning of the wood releasing CO2.]

9:16pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd The upshot of it all is... nobody knows. The "greenhouse warming" theory has lots of BIG holes in it. Yet something is happening.

[I'm sorry, but this sounds a bit like Ed Grimley.]

9:16pm, Oct 14 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd But whether that something is overall warming is anything but clear.

I made the conscious decision to engage in this conversation because I sensed that eachus is open to arguments of fact and logic, and because I was willing to test my approach against a different one, even in a format not designed for nuanced discussion.

Limited by the format, I retweeted, focusing on the assertion that Antarctic ice mass was actually growing. I did a quick Google and retweeted the results, and a few minutes later another tweet that focused on what I think are the key issue--much of the anti-change argument focuses on responsibility, as in guilt of humans (see my earlier Blog), and climate is a chaotically complex, interconnected system that goes beyond any isolated indicator. 

WillBurd
12:24pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@eachus Googled Antarctic Ice Mass, got this study in "Science" that suggests losshttp://bit.ly/oOYqM

12:28pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@eachus Less about the "cause" of climate change than observed fact - on a systemic basis. Greenhouse gases one key variable.

eachus

2:42pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Perhaps. But there have been others that claim overall Antarctic gain. I am not surprised that there are conflicting claims.

[No evidence cited.]

2:44pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd No... it *IS* about cause. We know there is a trend upward anyway. If WE are causing some, then why isn't it getting warmer?

2:44pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd ... because it actually hasn't been, overall, for the last 10 years.

[Again no evidence cited, and a search of "global tempartatures 1998 - 2008" yields at best inconsistent evidence and disputes about appropriate statistical models.]

2:45pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Regardless of ice melts, and so on... the world, on average, was cooler last year than the year before.

2:46pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Which is a puzzle, but there it is. The greenhouse model still has some holes in it, too. Evidence for it is actually pretty thin.

2:47pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd When it comes to CO2, that is. We know that CFCs and so on eat ozone. Which has been healing nicely, by the way.

[Of course, CFCs have nothing to do with greenhouse gases, but do prove quite nicely that human activities affect global-scale phenomena, in both directions.]

2:48pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd I am not denying... just pointing out that it is not cut-and-dried. There are big questions. Even the basic ones aren't answered.

[Which ones?]

2:49pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Personally I would love it to be a bit warmer. Our last two winters here were a bit harsh.

2:51pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Record cold and snowfalls. I do understand that regional differences mean little. But still, some heat would be nice.
My next response tried to suggest, again, that complex systems are inherently non-linear and that if our planet is becoming less hospitable, for whatever reason, shouldn't we try to do something about it?

WillBurd

5:20pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@eachus Wiki on chaos: http://bit.ly/9ziZr - climate is complex, temp measurements limited -- systemic change undeniable - now what?

eachus

5:29pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

 @WillBurd I understand what you mean except: to what systemic changes do you refer? Known anthropocentric warming is not one of them. 
[Anthropogenic (eachus corrected it, below) warming is a possible input, not a systemic change.]

5:30pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Yes, we are seeing strange behavior in the weather. But neither do the changes match greenhouse warming theory, or any other.

[Even the article that started this whole chain doesn't claim that the general trend does not align with the model predictions.]

5:33pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd I am very familiar with chaotic systems, and I know how... well... chaotic they can be. But a theory must be proven...

[A misunderstanding, I think, of what a "theory" is in the scientific method, and perhaps a misunderstanding of a key aspect of chaotic systems -- complex interconnectedness.]

5:34pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd ... it is not enough to say, "Look! Lots of unpredicted things are happening, plus a bare few predicted things, therefore ..."

5:37pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Greenhouse warming today is on a par with "string theory": there are other hypotheses that explain observations equally as well. 
[A rhetorical metaphor, but climate change studies are dealing with observable phenomena, testable every day.]

5:39pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd Both are the "popular" theories (actually hypotheses). Those with other ideas tend to be ostracized, which is anti-science...[Again, science is about testing explanations--and discarding those that don't work to describe phenomena (and humans scientists can be as locked into their own world views as well as any one else--for the short term).]

5:43pm, Oct 15 from TweetDeck

@WillBurd I wrote "anthropocentric" rather than "anthropogenic". Haha. Well, it could be either... :0)

The upshot of all this is that as frustrating as this dialogue was in its form, it still was an opportunity to engage with someone outside my normal circle, someone who was paying some attention to what I was saying, even if in disagreement.

To the extent that eachus' s view of climate change represents the more rational-sounding of the critics, I gained an understanding of the need for us, all of us, to be absolutely clear about where we get our data. If we can build the discussion around that then we all have a chance to arrive at the optimal outcome (or at least the optimal process).

Where I've gotten to is that I am comfortable with the idea that I do not understand all the key issues or facts. It's all open to questioning and reappraisal (which is also key to the scientific method, when practiced). Certainty is not a part of this world view. Nor is lack of certainty, in itself, reason to discard a given view of the world, if the viewer is truly committed to SEEING THE WORLD AS IT REALLY IS.

At the same time, my reading of the data suggests that our limited understanding of these hugely complex forces, and our fascination with our own immediate comfort, may have already put in place a systematic change that will substantially reduce the "comfort zone" for the human race. As realist and cynic Kurt Vonnegut, said, "So it goes." And, perhaps, so will we go.

Invitation to a Conversation

An article in Science News from September describes how increased use of irrigation in northern India is depleting aquifers over a huge area -- home to one in every ten people on the planet. (And think about why it's so important for China to control the Tibetan Plateau, the source for this water and most of SE Asia's, one in every six people on the planet.)


Use of irrigation in this area was ramped up starting in the '60s, as part of the "green revolution." The goals of the revolution were admirable: produce more food to keep people from starving. But sometimes the actions we take, with the best of intentions, yield unintended consequences, if you'll pardon what has become a cliche.


In every action, some of the consequences can't be foreseen; that's part of life. The damnable part is when the negative consequences are visible, and nothing is done.


And, of course, it's not just northern India. Stories in the past few days have drawn attention to Yemen, Kenya, and China. A quick Google brought up a continuously updated map of current drought conditions in the US, which shows that every West Coast watershed is in drought conditions, It is interesting that the huge dead zone off the coast of Oregon and Washington is not thought to be the result of the reduced fesh-water inflow (partly because lower flow means fewer contaminants washed to sea). The primary cause is large-scale changes in wind patterns. Which is due to climate change. Which is due to ....


Of all the many chains of consequence that we have to deal with, those involving water may be the most important. If you want to track the ecological threat to human culture you can probably concentrate on water troubles. And soon you realize that is about the ways we use water for things (many of them necessary) other than drinking.


A study on the Human Appropriation of the World's Fresh Water Supply hits some of the high points:

• The planet is largely water -- but only seven one-thousandths is available for human use
• As the population has grown for tens of thousands of years people have used more water, and contaminated more water, but the water supply remains the same
• About 65% of water humans use is for agricultural irrigation and is returned to the system mostly contaminated

And, the point that really got me interested, the thing that made me want to write this, a point backed up with daunting numbers and graphs:

• The evidence is that over the last 40 years we have found more efficient ways to use water -- the increase has been much less than increases in population.

Efficiency is higher in some regions than others, which means there are still opportunities to reduce consumption. "We" are learning something.


No matter what the skeptics believe, humans do have an effect on their surroundings. It's not a sin; it's a fact. The sin comes when we don't accept responsibility for our actions and choose to ignore our legacy. And we are learning that we can learn. 


We may not be perfect-able, but we are absolutely improve-able.


If we're going to start somewhere, we might as well start close to home -- 

• What is the water picture in my area in terms of sources, storage, distribution and usage tracking (and every part of the US has dealt with drought and water-supply issues these past 10 years)?
• And what is being done to deal with current threats, like a three- or four-year drought (let alone long-term climate change issues)?

I think of this in terms of starting a conversation with the people around us, a conversation could change the larger meme that sets the environment in opposition to near-term prosperity. "Choose the environment and you're out of a job." Of course, get enough people out a job in the next few months and things might change. But the conversation needs to change.

At this point I get to a place where I can only be skeptical. I'm not a cynic -- I have a great faith in individual humans. Groups ... not so much. But I have to start questioning the "call to action" tone of my last paragraph and that "absolutely improve-able" shot. I don't want to be seen as unrealistic about the odds for change, for more evidence of intelligence and for more long-term, humanistic thinking.

So you tell me. Take a second and write a brief comment below -- basically , answer the question:

"Is change possible"

"Yes"    or    "No".

If you wish to elaborate, please do. This is a chance to start one of those conversations, and now is as good a time as any to start.

A Call to Action?

There are a lot of comparisons between this Depression and the last one, and the challenges facing Roosevelt then and Obama now. There is, however, one huge difference: the possibility of an actual revolution, based on the political strength of the  Communist Party in virtually every country affected by the collapse of the global financial system.


In fact, the '30s Depression was a powerful recruiting tool, as the failure of western economies seemed to validate Karl Marx's prediction of inevitable collapse of the capitalist system. By the time Roosevelt took office there were probably fewer than 100,000 CP members in the US, but there were millions who thought this might be the last gasp of the ancien regime and good riddance. 


So Roosevelt was working with a dynamic where corporate and finance capitalists were up against a potentially powerful adversary, and he could propose a middle road of evolutionary change that built in limited social safety networks. The oligarchs had little choice, and so went along with it -- for the time being. Once the War was over, it has been the underlying raison d'etre of the capitalist right to overturn the New Deal and re-establish corporate hegemony.


As we know, starting with Reagan, they were able to put in place the elements they were looking for. Specifically, they have created a judiciary with a vastly different style and attitude, one that is dedicated to preserving the prerogatives of wealth and position, and the  dominance of the financial elite. Beyond that (with the help of a compliant news media), they were able to reframe the discussion around the fundamental evil of government and taxes. 


For periods they actually ran the government, or enough of it, that they were able to strip out New Deal limitations and return to "free-market" values and policies. And they blew it. Their ideas about economic governance were put to the test ... and failed.


Many of them have also suffered some pain, but the real blow has fallen on almost every other area of our culture, including many who thought they had achieved the class status that would protect them. All has been sacrificed to protect the few at the top of the pyramid.


Simon Jones' article in The Atlantic this May called it "The Quiet Coup". And it almost sounds as if the meltdown were actually part of the plan to bury the New Deal -- which is exactly what happened. (FYI: Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. He's one of the money guys. And his analysis is devastating. He also shared it with Bill Moyers earlier this year.)


To those patient oligarchs, government is of no longer of any real consequence in the areas that matter. And with the Supreme Court poised to grant full First Amendment "personhood" to corporations, they will have absolutely nothing to worry about on that score. It will be the new global corporate order -- energy, medicine, military, communications, finance, agriculture, water -- and its only obligation will be to shareholder value. And there is a core part of the right that has aided and abetted this takeover.


With a power grab this naked, this devastating to American (and world) culture, the critical question is why there hasn't been a public uprising. Not the so called Tea Baggers -- they're stuck repeating the lines they got from the oligarchy's mouthpieces. It is the triumph (for now) of emotion over facts, fear over reason. If they were to "win," that would just be another way to bring the whole structure down, which might lead some "strong-man" types to think they could end up in control over a fragmented opposition, left or right.


But then, the safety net put in place by the New Deal and Great Society reforms have meant that we (American workers and "middle: class) haven't yet hit bottom. In a few months -- if more people are on the street, going to bed hungry, seeing their families broken up by this new poverty -- we may see a more public display of indignation, even revolt. And which side will they be on? 


For now, one can only wonder at the right who seems oblivious of what the "fire next time" might mean to them, and to all of us.

Trusting reason

In the last post I talked about the Prisoner's Dilemma "game" and the question of trust. This morning I read an article in The New Yorker that looks at the financial meltdown as "rational irrationality." 


One of the article's points is that almost all the players in the debacle of sub-prime mortgages and CDOs knew that it was unsustainable, but the way the game was set up they had to opt for short-term gain and rely on their knowledge to get themselves a chair when the music stopped. Well, we know how that worked.


The article also discussed the issues involved in the prisoner's dilemma, specifically that a key factor for each prisoner is trying to guess how the other prisoner is going to act (especially in the single-iteration version, where there is the possibility of a high penalty for dual defection). The role of the investor, like the prisoner, is not to see the world as it really is, but as he thinks others see it. What's the harm in that?


It made me think back to Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund and investment company founded in the early 90's by John Meriweather. LTCM used not only seasoned traders, but some extremely high-powered mathematicians, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who in fact went on to share a Nobel Prize. They were "quants" who had developed equations that helped LTCM discover and take advantage of certain discrepancies in the arcane realms of fixed income arbitrage and foreign government bonds. The rate of return on each trade was tiny, but leverage allowed them to turn a tidy profit. For a few years their annual return was in the area of 40%.


The point of this is that LCTM knew that their advantage depended on using an approach that only they used. They had discovered an opportunity where the information (equation) available to them was asymmetrical to anyone else's knowledge. And they knew that when enough other people figured out what they were doing, the advantage, and the profits, for LCTM would disappear.


So, of course, as the market caught up to them, they kept on doing exactly what they had done. Of course, there were other factors, such as the Asian collapse and Russian crisis, but then, their trades were affecting those very markets. In September of 1997 their value fell from $2.3 billion to $600 million (for the same portfolio).


This led to a bailout of close to $4 billion organized by the Fed. (Can anybody say the word "counterparties?") Eventually, all the banks that participated by purchasing pieces of the portfolio realized at least small profits. LCTM eventually went out of business but Meriweather started another hedge fund, JWM Partners, supposedly having learned his lesson about leverage. That knowledge was not enough for the recent crisis, and JWM went bust in July of 2009. Some lesson.


My point is that, on the one hand, we trust what we know. The killer equation is always going to be the killer equation. And, on the other, we may think we can gauge what is in the other prisoner's mind and change our thinking accordingly based on our hard-earned experience. Unless our own perceptions (and killer equations) get in the way, because that's what we've learned to trust.


I suppose we are left with the moral that "rational irrationality" is more a tautology than an oxymoron. Many of us may try to be rational in the way we deal with the world, but but we just don't always know enough about how the world is really working, so we keep doing what worked in the past. 


The only rationality is to accept the irrationality -- the asymmetry of information -- as a fundamental fact of existence, closely tied to constant change. Even the smartest quants need to be reminded that the world is more complex, and more changeable,  than any equation. And every bubble bursts. Again.

Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt

As I have become aware in writing these blogs, and some intrepid souls may have discerned from reading them, these essays are ways for me to play with, and test, some of my basic convictions. The challenge is for me to, within the space of a few hundred words, apply some basic filters to the chaos we call life and project a coherent image on the wall of the cave we happen to be sharing. And this current economic crises is casting some very interesting shadows.


One of the filters that I use to see human behaviors as motivated by some a simple but universal concern for fairness. Somehow, people are constantly observing what is going on around them and keeping up a running computation of what they're getting compared to any one else.


The behavior is well observed in children down to a few months old. Monkeys are acutely aware: "Female brown capuchin monkeys tend to turn uncooperative, and sometimes even throw things, if they see a neighbor receiving a lovely grape in exchange for the same token that gets them only a cucumber." -- Science News, September 20th, 2003. Even dogs get it, as the article from the January 9 Science News reports that dogs will go "on strike" if they are not treated fairly:

Dogs got increasingly fidgety and finally stopped shaking hands when a researcher repeatedly failed to supply rewards for a trick but gave another handshaking dog bread bits, Range says. The dogs cooperated longer, though, if their neighbors didn’t get a snack either.

What's more, as reported in the same article, both dogs and primates allowed for more inequity if they knew or were related to the lucky one.


In other words, my well-being is as much about what I compare myself to the well-being of my cohorts as it is about my absolute safety or comfort. I think about the certain comedians and memoirists of the '50s and '60s (and even more recently) whose schtick was riffing on "We were poor but we didn't know it." Right now we are seeing another Great Depression-type leveling, another rebuke to the acquisitive urge and , perhaps, a lessening of envy.


Envy may be one of the seven deadly sins, but who's really causing trouble, the one who has "too much" good stuff (the envied) or the envier? After all, we can't claim that the lucky one doesn't know that he's got more than the sad sack. That seems to be the one thing humans do pay attention to, all the time, in every situation. And because everyone can point to someone else who got a better deal, there doesn't seem to be an end to it. So maybe greed is just the other side of the fairness coin: fear of inequity (I lose) leads to inequity (I get, if not win).


Human nature, no? "Humans are acquisitive, some more than others, there will be winners and there are losers. That's the natural order of things." But in the planet's history not all cultures lived like that. The fact that they were sitting ducks for the ones that did doesn't mean they were wrong. We've gone pretty far down the road to planetary annihilation in just a few centuries, where many of those cultures functioned effectively for perhaps tens of thousand years. The fact that we can all do the math on fairness is what makes the Golden Rule universally honored, so why isn't it actually practiced more often?


If it seems our culture is basically acquisitive, that may not mean that the impulse was always there for a given human being. How you see the world right now is not the same as when you were young: we've all learned to use new filters to help us survive in this culture. But there are still vestiges of what may be deeper, more universal values.


A recent study, reported on the Science News (no this is not a plug, but I've been reading SN for 20-plus years and is an excellent overview of science reports and studies), suggests that children from about age seven to early adult years, in cultures around the world, generally agree that the best way to solve disputes and make decisions is by reasoned discussion and sharing of ideas, rather than by withholding affection or rewards, or relying on the authority of the family or the culture. For example:

Even in rural China, most 12- to 19-year-olds favored democratic decisions reached by a public vote or the consensus of elected representatives. In all settings, teens said that democratic systems ensure that the people have a “voice,” let different segments of society contribute to decisions and give the public a chance to remove unpopular government officials.

Government rule by the wealthiest or most knowledgeable people was generally deemed to be unfair, especially by older adolescents.

The study pulls together a broad range of research that reinforces the understanding that children and adolescents are naturally democratic. Especially in the sense of wanting their voices to be heard.


So what happens after early adulthood? Why doesn't every new generation bring the revolution with them? How hard can it be to create a society based on our common understanding of fairness? Maybe it's because they learn that their voices are not going to be heard.


Just to make it clear (to myself as much as you), I don't write these essays because I have all the answers (assuming there are answers). I write them because I hope that somehow they might kick off a conversation in which we can all share what we've learned and what we're looking for.


In this case I don't know why the forces for institutional inequity are so strongly defended, in many cases by the very people who've got the fuzziest end of the lollipop. Of course, this could only be the period before the tipping point, that any day the barricades are going up, and the aristos will have to reconsider inequity from some other position as the plebes opt out of the confidence game that's been running for much of the industrialized era. Could happen, but ....


For myself, the only meaningful, consistent action or attitude I have found is that I should think less about whether I'm being treated fairly and more about whether I am acting fairly to others. And, when I can, I learn something from the kids, the monkeys and the doggies, anybody who can teach a lesson.


[The title is from the instructions Wavy Gravy gave to participants in the Whole Earth New Games Tournament, 1973. Not a bad philosophy generally.]

Prisoners of Our Own Device

One of the themes that tends to recur in my blog-essays is "trust." In a social world, we are constantly making decisions about how we accept or reject what other people say, which is largely a function of how much we trust them. (I suppose we can trust someone to always say something unacceptable: that's pretty much how I feel about Glenn Beck, or Glenn beck feels about Barack Obama, but that's another issue.)

Game theory has had an amazing impact on how we approach life. A relatively recent variation on the kind of puzzles with which mathematicians have been testing each for as long as there have been mathematicians, game theory actually gets close to questions of how people act in real life. In fact, game theory underlies much of the academic and political approaches to economics, political science, business, even biology.

(This would be the perfect place to get into the whole Chicago School of economics and the fundamentally flawed assumptions that helped the tribe of Friedman (and Greenspan) to drive our economy into the ditch. But no.)

Suffice it to say that game theory is often based on the judgment that there is something called "norms of rationality" -- people can be counted on to make choices that optimize their success, especially if success is measured as money. Not everyone agrees that a rational norm is so easily described, but that has been the dominant assumption of the last several decades.

One of the competing approaches to norms of rationality can be found in the posing of the "Prisoner's Dilemma." This math game goes back to 1950, and a pair of Rand researchers, Merril Flood and Melvin Dresher. I first became aware of it in Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas column in the Scientific American in the early '80s. He laid out the parameters of the game in terms of two prisoners, kept apart and incommunicado, who each had something the other wanted. Because each passed the same spot in prison at different times each day, they worked out a way to communicate a way to exchange items. The challenge was that the first prisoner had to trust the other -- no point in leaving the goods unless he trusted the other to leave his -- and the second could just take the goods if they were there and leave nothing. So the set-up had to be that it would take several exchanges to transfer everything each prisoner wanted -- an iterative game.

Hofstadter then challenged computer programmers to write programs that maximized a prisoner's gains, or profits. In the classical approach to the game, where you can either "cooperate" or "defect," the strategy that best reflects normative self-interest is to defect, give as little as possible and take whatever is offered. There were already those who did not agree that that strategy reflected the way real people make decisions.

For one thing, there is evidence that people -- some people at least some of the time -- act in way they want other people to act. You could look at this in terms of the Golden Rule or Kant's categorical imperative, but it seems to be a part of human life.

Hofstadter developed rules that recognize that at least some (but not all) prisoners would act  that way, and then challenged computer programmers to devise the most successful program, the one strategy that a prisoner would use to maximize his gains. Over several iterations the winning strategy was almost always the simplest: "tit for tat:" start by cooperating on the first move and every subsequent act reflects the partner's previous action: defect after defection, cooperate after cooperation.

Okay, great. That's an argument for trust. But didn't I just say in a previous blog, "Trust no one?"

I did say that, and I still do.The lesson from the Prisoner's Dilemma is that you do best by starting with cooperation, but it's only provisional. Be prepared to defect. Two or ten or 100 cooperative acts do not "prove" trustworthiness in the future.

I want to trust other people. Or rather, I want people to earn my trust. So I have to demonstrate trust. When it's appropriate. I also have to demonstrate that I'm paying attention to what they actually do and will answer a defection with a defection. And cooperation with cooperation. I think, in reality, we have a bigger social problem from trusting people who have not earned it, who have, in fact, defected.

That approach kind of takes the idea of normative rationality and refigures it as provisional, or contextual, rationality (my term, as far as I know). It's based on a moral decision (what I do matters, and what I want is a community based on trust) that gets applied to a world of social interactions that are largely unpredictable and sometimes dangerous. The rational basis of my decisions reflect a constantly changing reality -- the world as it really is right now. And it is informed by a desire to see things get better. We may not be prisoners (even if it is the Hotel California), but we're all looking for a jail break.