How deep does Abundance vs. Scarcity go?

So why does Abundance vs. Scarcity have to be either or? Couldn’t you just determine, in each situation, what pattern is fit and apply the right assumptions for that pattern? There are a couple different reasons why I think these specializations are best implemented as fundamental dispositions, as attitudes that are at the very core of personalities. The first has to do with Relevance Realization and the second with consistent, habitual action.

I’m using Relevance Realization to reference the concept John Vervaeke has developed. He has a whole lecture series developing this and related ideas, but the aspects I find important to the sequence of posts is how Relevance Realization is the answer to the problem that in real life, there are generally too many possibilities to consider all of them. If someone has to explicitly consider every possible consequence of an action to see if it is relevant, then, even if you are very very quick at making that consideration, it will take you practically forever, since the number of possible consequences is so large it might as well be infinite.

So humans need some way to narrow the field of things to consider that isn’t dependent on logical elimination. You need to just see it. You need to just Realize, in a way that is prior to your conscious rumination, what possibilities are Relevant. There’s no simple process to go back, after you’ve made a considered categorization of the situation, and re-do your Relevance Realization. You’ve already set your frame. Your automatic processes have already picked the things you are going to use in your conscious analysis.

People who haven't specialized are likely to miss important things about an abundance situation that scarcity specialists would see and things about a scarcity situation that a scarcity specialist would see. It will take a big breakthrough, something that shakes up their whole way of thinking and scrambles their assumptions, to let them pick up those details as relevant after they have rationally evaluated the situation as abundant or scarce. The only sure way to pick out the urgent, prominent characteristics of an abundant situation is for an abundance specialist to look at it, and likewise for a scarcity situation. Because those prominent characteristics just won’t be prominent to a non-specialist, they won’t stick-out and seem salient to weigh heavily in decision making.

  Izium Salient in 1942  The Ypres Salient at Night

The basic meaning of ‘salient’ is something that sticks outward so it is noticeable. In the military it is used of a situation where soldiers’ positions stick out towards the enemy relative to the rest of the battle line. It is a focus of both opportunity and danger. The perspective you take on them can make a lot of difference.

All this has assumed that we have a long time to consider and evaluate and consider again. But the other reason why an abundance or scarcity specialization needs to be deep set and long lasting, is that we can’t take that amount of time for most decisions. There are so many small routine decisions we make each day that most of them are made in seconds. We do this by having the basic frame and context of such decisions largely made beforehand. Stop to chat with the neighbor this morning? Put some extra tomatoes in the shopping basket? Empty the garbage now or wait til later? We make so many decisions each day that we don’t even think of as decisions. Having a set of orientations and pre-set assumptions not only allows these many decisions to be made in a reasonable amount of time, it creates a coherent strategy where the decisions support each other in a general direction toward a coherent set of goals. It creates a personality of how you approach socializing, resource management and schedule organization.

These are habits of thought that take time to develop and time to break. You can’t switch personalities and relational styles based on what sort of resource you are dealing with today. If you want to reap the long-term benefits of consistent specialized strategy you’ve got to let the disposition settle in for the long term and sink roots deep into your fundamental assumptions. So while there can be non-specialists who think about abundance and scarcity in a post Relevance Realization way and make use of understanding them on the surface layers, there will still be advantages to those who build a specialization into the base layers of their personalities.

Abundance? Why does that require a specialist?

We humans love abundance. But isn’t one of it’s good points that you don’t have to do anything about it? If something is abundant that means all you need of it is already there, easy to get to. It might seem like no special fundamental disposition is needed to deal with this situation.

But another way to look at it is that you aren’t using all of the resource that is available. If you have more of something than you can use, than some of your access to it is going to waste. Maybe you can come up with new ingenious uses for this material and encourage everyone to take advantage of those uses. Or you can apply creativity directly to decorating objects made of the abundant resource. It could be that clay is abundant but a pot made and decorated by a great artist is one-of-a-kind and priceless. Thinking like this is what allows humans to take advantage of abundance.

Oil Bottle/Alabastron, photo: David Jackson CC-BY-SA

Second, since it is possible to get it easily, it's a waste if you put extra energy into gathering it. Why struggle for the last inaccessible dregs of an ore in one deposit if there’s another fresh deposit right at the surface just a couple of miles away. There will also be plenty of ways to get the resource that are risk free (or technically are not significantly more risky that anything else) So you should expect opportunities to gather the resource to be non-risky. But if you do find that one is risky, you should flee from it and find another opportunity.

Which brings me to the differences in views of risk. To deal well with abundance, someone needs to have a basic starting assumption that most ordinary things are not risky, but that if it is discovered that something is risky everyone should stay away from it. So action options can basically be divided into non-risky and risky, and the risky options can be discarded as live possibilities automatically.

On the other hand someone with a scarcity orientation needs to look at everything as almost certainly risky, but be willing to engage with it anyway. If it looks like there is an easy risk-free way to get a scarce resource, you need to treat that with extra caution. Because obviously that is a trap with the risk cleverly hidden. But even with that extra caution, you approach it anyway, trying to figure out what the trap is and how to disarm it. Someone who deals with scarcity is always taking calculated risks and making trade-offs between different costs and possible consequences.

So to an abundance specialist the scarcity specialist looks totally paranoid about everyday things; but when the big risks come around they look ridiculously cavalier. From the opposite perspective the scarcity specialist sees abundance specialists as having their head in the sand about everyday risks and seem to have panicked overreactions to big risks. And this is just a very small part of the fundamental differences these different viewpoints give rise to.

Scarcity? Who wants scarcity?

It’s silly to say any human wants scarcity. Humans always prefer abundance of anything they like. But in developing a specialty you are not choosing abundance or scarcity in the abstract. What defines whether something is abundant or scarce is not it’s raw quantity, but its quantity relative to how much is desired. Something is scarce precisely because it is desired. It is desired so much that more of it is wanted than is readily available.

If you look around at what is holding your group back, it’s going to be a scarcity. A group’s maximum productivity is determined by the input they have least of. Scare items can be bottlenecks that determine the pace and path of a society's direction. Scarcity management can be literally life or death for critical items.

By Mauro Cateb  CC-BY-SA

So you do want to be able to deal effectively with issues scarcity. But what dispositional adaptations do you need for this task?

If it was easy to get more of the scare item then it would have been done already and it wouldn’t be scarce anymore. Beyond that, if it were simply a matter of hard work that would net more than its own value in the resource then it would also probably no longer be scarce. So there is also probably risk of some sort associated with getting the resource. Scarcity requires a particular attitude towards risk that is often misunderstood. But I want to wait to go over that in detail until I can contrast it with other attitudes.

Of course sometimes there is a stock of the scarce commodity. You or someone else has put in the work of gathering the resource and now you have to decide what to do with it. You also have to keep in mind that getting more of the resource if you need it later is probably not guaranteed. So whenever you use this resource it is always a trade-off against all other possible uses for this resource, and also against possible urgent needs that might come up in the future. So when using resources there should always be a question of “is it worth it?” not only in comparison to other things being considered in the front of your mind but in relation to the vast future potential of unknown-unknowns.

Perhaps that last sentence starts to give a hint why you don’t want scarcity focus to be the only perspective in your society. Next time we’ll look at the opposite focus.

Abundance vs. Scarcity

For as long as humans have been around they have been dealing to both abundance and scarcity. There are things around that there are more of than the group can use and there are some things where there is less than they would like to use. These two situations require not simply different approaches. They require different attitudes, expectations and mental dispositions to interact with most optimally. These are not surface level changes. They are deep changes in mindset that can only take place over many years.

Of course it is possible to take a compromised approach where you are not optimized for either but have flexibility for both. But this approach is always going to be at a disadvantage versus a specialist dealing with their specialty. So the stable outcome will be for a human group to contain a variety of specialization levels among its members. A few being more generalized and OK with dealing with either abundance or scarcity. Others specialized to be excellent at dealing with one or the other.

I think it would be impossible to get rid of these specializations entirely. If everyone is unspecialized or specialized in abundance then, as long as there is even one scarce thing in the environment, there will be a tremendous advantage to any person who specialized in scarcity. And this is really good for a society. A mix of different specializations allows a group to make maximum use of their resources and allows them to be flexible in the face of many different types of challenges.

I anticipate a couple of questions. First, if this is really a thing why haven't people noticed this before? Second, even if this is a thing, is this actually useful to understand? Well, I think people have noticed this. It’s just that we usually call this liberal and conservative dispositions. As we look back through history we feel like we can instinctively label various movements as liberal or conservative despite being totally unconnected with today’s political parties. But at the same time it’s hard to define what this meta-liberal or meta-conservative core really consists of. I think this is actually the dispositions that arise from an underlying abundance or scarcity specializations.

This means that we in the west are making a basic mistake about how we approach politics. We are looking at things as if one side or another must be wrong. Now it’s true that we have to pick a singular policy or set of policies that has the set of trade offs we most prefer. But we go further, thinking that whatever disposition those other guys have that makes them think a different policy is better is stupid, wrong, and maybe even evil. Where actually any society needs individuals with both types of disposition and they need to be included in one basic fabric of society.

So I’m starting a series on this blog about abundance versus scarcity and related concepts. I really value questions, feedback and challenges to my ideas

Sympathy for Socialists

Suppose you learned these wonderful laws of physics and they seemed so elegant and right. And you didn’t really understand how these simplified forms only applied to frictionless, air-resistanceless situations and to things like ideal gasses.

Then you looked around the real world and you notice that things harder to move than they should be. You aren’t able to get as much of what you want for a given energy expenditure as you expect.  You check with a physicist and hear that some of the energy is going to Waste-heat-ists.

You ask ‘Waste-heat-ists?  What are they good for?’

‘Oh nothing, they just add to the disorder of the universe.’

‘Why are we giving them energy?’

‘Oh we discover we could use this thing called the second law of thermodynamics and now that we are using a system of Waste-heat-isum; things are going just marvelously’

You think to yourself, well maybe for they are going marvelously for Waste-heat-ists, but what about ordinary people like you? You are putting energy into all these things and a bunch of it is being stolen by these Waste-heat-ists.

You ask engineer friends if Waste-heat is really a good thing. ‘Oh, no,’ they say, ‘We’re always trying to reduce it. But we can’t ever get rid of it entirely; it’s this second law thing we can’t get around.’

Mcleo001 at English Wikipedia [Public domain]

These evil Waste-heat-ists and their evil cronies have enacted this pernicious ‘second law’. Feel the indignation rise up in you. Waste-heat-isum is a leach on society, taking from good, hard-working people and producing nothing but chaos.

Can’t you see how wrong this would seem? If this was the level of your understanding of waste-heat, wouldn’t you see if from this perspective? Think how much more energy there would be to go around if we didn’t have waste-heat taking some away.  We could have abundance if Waste-heat-isum wasn’t producing artificial scarcity. Obviously we should free ourselves from our shackles and over throw the Waste-heat-ist system.

Values Difference

I don’t agree with all of this post of Ozy's about value difference, but I think it’s an honest take on a very important issue that needs more attention than it is getting. Please go read it because I don’t think I have a similar enough perspective to do it justice. 

I  - Reassurance

First I want to provide some comfort and reassurance as a first step towards bringing clarity. So let's take a look at what the work these adjectives are doing:

"I imagine someone actively rejoicing in denying a person a fair trial because they deserve to be in prison– not just accepting this as a grim reality, but thinking it is good and right and virtuous– and I shudder. They must feel similarly about me.

However, from my perspective, conservatives are perfectly willing to sacrifice things that actually matter in the world …  in order to suck up to unjust authority or help the wealthy and undeserving or keep people from having sex lives they think are gross."

-Unfair trials

I don't think conservative moral foundations lead to less concern for fair trials. A respect for authority foundation means we start out with a higher prior for trials being fair, but once we have enough evidence to see it is unfair we would have just as much tendency to condemn it as liberals. Recently conservatives have been loudly condemning campus rape trials we are convinced are unfair. 

-Unjust authority

Conservatives don't respect just any authority, only their society's legitimate authority. And one of the requirements for an authority to be legitimate is for it not to be unjust. Now a human institution of any kind will mess up and do individual unjust things from time to time. Conservatives do have a more visceral sense of this which comes out both in more pessimistic predictions about the net good future government programs can do, and also in being less easily disappointed in actual government behavior, due to lower expectations. But if we see evidence that it's not just the fundamental attribution error applied to a group, but really that the authority is fundamentally unjust, then we will see it as illegitiment and be willing to trim it.

-Undeserved wealth

This is a tricky thing that is an important crux. I do think liberals and conservatives have an instinctively different reaction to accumulations of wealth. Their is a general positive feeling about people having stuff that makes them happy. But also a general awareness that people get unhappy when others have more than them. In honesty, my conservative tribal instincts say that it’s a liberal tendency towards envy and greed, at least towards the power that money conveys, that makes liberals so focused on this latter point. But I see other possibilities too. Conservatives are instinctively aware that material prosperity is constantly decaying and you must continually pump more wealth into the society to keep the same level of goods. And conservatives sense that accumulations of wealth are a generally necessary catalyst for rapid wealth creation, as well as often a marker of were successful wealth creation has taken place. Even beyond that, I do see good created by wealth differentials in that they can enable certain relationships that help stabilize social structure.  I think the place that it’s easiest to see is between teenagers and parents.  As teenagers explore their own identity and become independent, their relationships with their parents are naturally shaken.  If the parents have a much greater ability to provide economically, that provides a point of stability within the relationship as it changes.  If teenagers were wealth equals with their parents that dynamic would not be there to provide stability. And conservatives do value stability in family bonds. And in many other subtler ways economic flows, that would not be possible with absolute wealth equality, contribute to a web of social relationships that are stable over time. For conservatives, individuals that were a key player in creating their wealth and/or that are using their (legitimately acquired) wealth in a positive manor are exempt from the “undeserving wealthy” category. It may be hard for liberals to see these categories, but once conservatives can be shown someone is outside these categories, really undeserving wealthy, then they will not want to sacrifice other moral goods to protect them.

So I hope it's reassuring that on a lot of the most painful instances the difference is only different priors that then require more or different evidence before an adjective is applied, rather than a different response once we agree on the adjective.

II Clarification

That said, I agree that their really is a fundamental value difference. I really really like order, structure, stability, and regularity. They feel like terminal values to me. And when I imagine a situation where everyone is extremely happy but their is no fixed social structure, group boundaries, or incentivized commitment , I wouldn't prefer that. I would want to trade in some of that happiness for more order and rigidity. And I don't think those on the far left would agree with this intuition.

And this is an issue. Each side may judge that the other has the "wrong" values and that that is unacceptable. But I don't think that would be a good situation at all. For one thing these different tastes in fundamental values are not conscious choices and in fact may have a genetic component. For another there is not just homogeneous left and right types, but a spectrum of the degrees to which people feel the different foundations. Even if the US breaks up into several smaller nations, or even worse has a civil war which kills a bunch of people, its still highly unlikely that anyone will end up in a society were everyone's moral taste buds are like theirs. And it is a bad situation to have to live with people who find your moral instincts unacceptable, and few people are going to be willing to productively participate in society under these conditions.

But on the other hand, I think there are ways of avoiding this impasse. Because it also feels like that picture of total happiness without order is weird and unlikely. I feel like having at least some stable social structure as a context is necessary to move towards goals, which is necessary for happiness. Order generally also feels like an instinctively instrumental value. It also seems like situations where there was a lot of random disorder would cause many to become fonder of order. In fact there is a little bit of evidence that situations were a moral foundation would be need increases the prevalence of a predisposition to it.

It also seems obvious that it's instrumentally beneficial for liberal's policy goals if people pay their taxes, obey regulations, and are polite to fellow citizens. So conservative’s innate taste for these things as a benign or even beneficial quirk that liberals can manage to work with. Liberals often use some sort of hierarchy in their internal endeavors and often prefer group loyalty within their own circles. I think that if the liberals look at it calmly they could see that even if they don’t like as an abstract thought, in the real world at least a little order is often an instrumental good.  And given how biased and prone torationalization humans are, surely it’s a provident safety feature that there is a spectrum of initial priors on protection of such basic and generally useful instrumental goods.

III - Complaint

When we’re both looking at dirty dishes piled up, my husband’s sense of big-enough-pile-to-be-worth-doing-dishes has a lower threshold than mine.  In fact he generally does the dishes before it ever gets to the point I would feel like it’s time to do dishes.  The couple of times he has left the dishes there until there’s a big enough stack of dishes for me, not only does he have to wait through the irritation of the dishes there that are past his threshold, he has to point out to me when there’s actually a big pile. That's because I've gotten out of the habit of checking for dishes. Then when I do the dishes it feels like a weird imposition, because I don’t have a slot in my chore scheduler for doing dishes; it’s just not in my model. When I introspect on my preferences for daily routine items, I don’t see any value on getting the dishes done. It doesn’t feel like it’s worth trading off any other good, like walking the dog or doing the laundry, against it. I don’t think it’s because I have an intrinsic quality of not caring about dishes, but rather because it’s a reliable feature of my environment that I get sufficient ‘the-dishes-are-clean-now’ without having to put any effort into it.

hummm.... maybe I better reconsider my threshold for doing dishes, or at least make sure my husband knows how much I appreciate that he does them.

This reminds me of a dear friend of mine who is always pushing pro-immigration arguments. I once gave her an argument for why I thought unlimited immigration would collapse US society and lead to no benefits to any immigrants. And she said that of course she wasn't for open borders, because America couldn't handle everyone. But when she sees any specific process or proposal to limit immigration she still reacts to it as wrong and awful. What I think is happening is that conservative pressure has always provided more than enough immigration restrictions for her tastes. So if feels to her like this is just a feature of the environment, rather than something someone has to work to produce. So when she sees someone arguing for or implementing restrictions she sees it as only producing harm (without seeing the contribution to good) and therefore evil.

I think there's a danger of liberals being desensitized to the need to make provision for creating social order and cohesion because they aren't involved in providing that. This can make liberal goals unrealistic.But it can also make conservatives feel they an being misunderstood and taken advantage of, making them resentful and unnecessarily encouraging hostility.

For various reasons beyond the scope of this post, conservatives have concerned as you might expect about some things that relate to conservative foundations, for example Trump's impure sex life or Russian pokes at group loyalty. And many liberals have been very upset about this. Now some of the this is just because they want to use these things as political levers to pursue their goals. But perhaps some of this because their is a sense that it's the conservatives job to be the prudish guardians of moral norms and the adhesive militants on national pride. Some On the left may have a visceral unease to the role being vacated, maybe even a need to step into the breach. It might why they looks to conservatives so erratic and unhinged. Because they don't have a lot of practice at this, and maybe they don't even have as much inborn instinct for it.

hummm.... maybe liberals had better reconsider cultivating more moral foundations, or at least make sure my they show conservatives their appreciation.

Reading through the Sermon on the Mount

This morning I'm reading through the Sermon on the Mount and thinking how we can miss the tremendous energy and movement of the passage. Because there is so much important wisdom there we tend to study the Sermon on the Mount in small pieces, so we can thoroughly examine each phrase. But this can lead to a slow reflective mood, which can obscure the stern and forceful impact of reading command after command. I really like the feel I get from it just reading it through.