8 months ago “Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behaviour,” says Merz. “For decades we’ve been telling people to change their behaviour without saying: ‘Change your behaviour.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all of the things that drive behaviour have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction – and we’ve been wondering why nothing’s changing.”
The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signalling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviours which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategiesto create behaviours incompatible with a sustainable world.
“People are the victims – we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction,” says the evolutionary behavioural ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. “Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?”
18 months ago Openbook allows us to collectively organize information in a more meaningful way than we could on a more mainstream social media platform, if only because there's fewer people on it. And the type of people Openbook attracts will care more about the message than the messenger, and more about truth than fame, since there's no usernames. But also because of how we use hashtags wisely and sparingly, and because every hashtag has it's own wiki article defining what it really means and how to use it.
This means we're helping build a collective base of knowledge, and culture, where it is easy to find what you're looking for, and easy to inspire and encourage each other to take constructive actions to make the world a better place.
23 months ago Food for thought: You need around 100 calories of grain to produce 12 calories of chicken or 3 calories of beef. The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion – more than the entire world population. Animals are an incredibly inefficient food source.
36 months ago “Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”
This is a panel of scientists discussing the topic of the influence of Quantum Physics on evolutionary biology, and all the ways that quantum physics is utilized by biological organisms in everyday life. A couple examples where quantum physics is implicated as an important mechanism in biological processes includes "super smell" like dogs have, and photosynthesis.