Some thoughts on "The Rainforest and the Desert"
Agent-arena, narrative structure and social divergence
Epistemic status: Making some claims connected to evopsych, easily googleable.
Category: Analysis, Virtue ethics.
In “The Rainforest and the Desert”, I used allegory to present two different ways of perceiving the world. When perceiving the world as a desert, you turn yourself into a risk-averse desert survivor. When perceiving the world as a rainforest, you increase your own agency by removing urgency and increasing your perceived levels of slack.1
These are two examples of “agent-arena relationships”, a concept introduced by John Vervaeke.2 In this model, your self-image and perception of the world exist in a mutually-defining relationship.
You are constantly trying to make sense of the world and your relation to it. Depending on your perception of the world, you will perceive different kinds of rules and different kinds of opportunities. As you act in the world, you will conform your actions to this framework, modelling your agency to your arena. Every such action will anchor your worldview with an extra piece of evidence, making the arena more solid.
Because of the cyclic nature of this relationship, it’s easy for things to escalate. Your actions easily turn into habits. Your thoughts easily turn into anchored perspectives and automatic value judgements. As such, it’s important to pick perspectives and thoughts that make your decision-making and actions more skillfull.
In this post, I’ll analyze scarcity vs abundance (risk-aversion vs opportunity-seeking) using mental models from my own stoic practice. The aim is to correct systemic unskillfulness, increase agency and live a more fulfilling life.
Risk vs Reward
Some actions carry potential risk. Some actions carry potential reward. When you choose what actions to take, you need to weigh the risk and the reward. We seldom calculate this explicitly,3 mostly relying on our intuitions.
When thinking about this explicitly, it’s common to mess things up by limiting your considerations to the likelihood of different outcomes.4 The significance of the outcomes is generally much more important. A 1% risk of stubbing your toe is very different from a 1% risk of dying. The same goes for potential upsides.
Our intuitions serve us well for the most part. Our genes come from people that survived and managed to procreate. Skilled risk-takers are over-represented in this sample.
Unfortunately (?) though, society has evolved rapidly over the last centuries. Our current situation is very different from the one in our ancestral environment. One area where our instincts are particularly off is the social sphere.
Our ancestors lived in small bands and depended on their troupe for their very survival. Being excluded carried a high risk of death. Fitting in, being pleasant and fearing exclusion became a winning concept evolutionarily.
Now zoom in to our modern day. If some people don’t like you, there are thousands of others to connect with. Taking social risks might lead to new relationships, meeting great people, sex and other nice things. The actual risk profile is the mirror image of your gene’s legacy one.
Conclusion
I’ll end this post here, a bit abruptly. The reason is that I had too many different directions to go down, and decided to save my thoughts for future posts. Potential directions: “What aspects of modern life require additional skill to navigate?”, “Exploring the potential of narrative-bending!”, “Stoicism!”.
You might want to look over what kind of stories/perspectives you use when thinking about your life. If you are overly careful, particularly when it comes to the social sphere, you might benefit from adopting a narrative of plenty.5
You live in a rainforest, not a desert.
P.S.: This post is all about virtue ethics if you read between the lines. The virtue of Wisdom is all about acting in attunement with the true state of the world. Sophrosyne is all about modifying your value judgements to enable skillfull action.
“Slack” is resource abundance that leads to freedom. When you don’t need to optimize short-term, you are able to respond more flexibly to opportunities that present themselves. Time-slack is extra hours you can use to write blogs. Money-slack is extra cash you can use to handle unemployment. Emotion-slack is a sense of emotional security, allowing you to face emotionally loaded situations without going into trauma responses.
I need to write an “on slack” post. We’ll see when I get to it :D
Together with Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic.
Imagine a scenario where you have a decision to make. Should you eat the funny-smelling piece of avocado? To decide whether to eat or not to eat, you need to know two things:
What is the risk level? Percentage chance of food poisoning?
What is the magnitude of suffering induced if the risk comes to be?
If you expect a 99% probability of getting 1 happiness point from eating the avocado and a potential -200 points from severe food poisoning, then you need the likelihood of food poisoning to be less than 0.49% to be worth it. 0.99 * 1 > 200 * x for all x > 0,0049; 0.49%
According to predictive processing, your brain uses bayesian reasoning to estimate probabilities and correct your world model. Intuitive access is not the same as explicit knowledge, unfortunately.
Remember the law of equal and opposite advice.
Some people are too careless. They might benefit from visualizing deserts all day long.