The Limits of Human Wisdom | George Mobus
www.planetcritical.com
Aug 25, 2022 • 58M
The Limits of Human Wisdom | George Mobus
And how to go beyond those limits to confront the polycrisis
Appears in this episode
Rachel Donald
Planet: Critical is the podcast for a world in crisis. We face severe climate, energy, economic and political breakdown. Journalist Rachel Donald interviews those confronting the crisis, revealing what's really going on—and what needs to be done.
Episode details
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George Mobus is Professor Emeritus at University of Washington, Tacoma. His broad academic background saw him conduct research on artificial intelligence, cybernetics and systems science.
George joins me to discuss how systems science is failing to grasp the polycrisis—that the field has been split into silos, leaving most systems scientists without the tools to model the complexity of the emergency we face.
He also explains the neurological limits of individual human wisdom, suggesting the agricultural revolution affected our capacity for abstract thinking, before revealing how humans can work past those limits—collectively.
The Limits of Human Wisdom | George Mobus
I enjoyed this podcast but I was concerned when George talked about the carbon footprint of wind power so I looked it up. I found the Yale Climate Connections website which provides a chart of studies over the last 5 years looking at this. The chart shows how much Co2, per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated per wind turbine from cradle to grave. All studies fall within a range of between 5-26 gms of C02-equivalent per kilowatt-hour. In contrast, natural gas are responsible for 437-758 gms - and coal ranges between 675-1,689. It would seem George has this very wrong which is a shame as it makes me question everything he had to say. The Yale site also directs us to The National Renewable Energy Laboratory that has a page for comparing the carbon footprints of various electricity generation technologies. You might want to post a link on this site. Would you go back to George and ask him to clarify how he came to his figures.
On a positive note, I really look forward to this podcast every week. Keep up this amazing commitment to getting information out there. You are a fantastic journalist.
George and Rachel,
Just great to see how your threads wove and connected. We all see hard times coming, seemingly from our globally shared blindness of some sort. I liked how the contextual learning methods of Montessori and permaculture came out as environmental awareness. What I also noticed is that family life somewhat universally like that too, human and animal, as primarily centered on contextual and collaborative environments. In society people are mostly trained to think in terms of using power to increase their power, though, something that doesn't work at all in a family.
So why do we organize our economic system around it? Is it just not paying attention as societies become so powerful over nature, they destroy the planet? So... if there's such a big difference between the two models, could we identify it as two modes of thought? In one you seem to notice all kinds of relationships and collaborate. In the other you use concepts for investing power to gain more power (or money) hardly noticing what other than quite immediate relationships are affected. Is that a clear difference in the mechanism, and between 'context' and 'concept'?
I look at root meanings for help on those things. Don't "con-ceptual" insights (i.e. made in the mind) and "con-textual" insights (i.e. read from complex nature) of two different dimensionalities? Business concepts, in particular, seem made for human use and stripped of most else, as ‘tools.’ Aren't such ideas as for how to use money to make money, concepts of control? The contextual understanding, though, seems more for an appreciation of a world mostly made by other thing, to be responded to as a whole. Does that difference go anywhere?
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