COP 28 and the Smoke Under the Door | Frankly #50
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 553 Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week's Frankly, we join Nate in a fascinating thought experiment imagining participants in this week's COP 28 in Dubai are liberated from the usual social sorting mechanisms which constrain real, forthright, challenging conversation around solving our most dire issues. What questions might participants ask at COP28 if there were no fear of losing social status and how might this liberation change the conversation around global heating? As social primates, there is a stainless steel ceiling on how much we can say in large groups of other humans -especially high status ones. Like the famous "smoke under the door" experiment of the 1970s, as the events of our world get more complex and more threatening, our first reality filter is observing the response of contemporaries. If they are unconcerned, we too tend to be. Unlike the one-room controlled college experiment, we now live in a smoke filled world, and the stakes couldn't be higher. If you were sitting in Dubai at the convening of COP 28, what question would you ask given the state of the world right now??
For Show Notes and to learn more: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/50-cop-28-and-the-smoke-under-the-door
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings. It is December 6th, halfway around the world in the United Arab Emirates, |
| 0:06.7 | is COP28, which is the 36th international meeting about climate change in the last 44 years. |
| 0:19.3 | If there were a benevolent pro-social alien observer landed on Earth, and he looked at when |
| 0:27.5 | these meetings were, and he looked at the CO2 in the atmosphere, he could plausibly conclude |
| 0:34.7 | that it was these meetings themselves that were causing emissions to rise. |
| 0:39.6 | What's going on? We are social primates. We're also predators. And we can only state things |
| 0:50.8 | that are socially acceptable to the higher status people around us for |
| 0:55.3 | risk of losing our jobs, our reputation, the social influence that we have. |
| 1:03.5 | There was a famous study called a smoke under the door that 75% of people would notice if there was smoke coming from under the door for |
| 1:15.5 | good reason, because dying in a fire is terrible. However, if they were with two Confederates |
| 1:24.4 | and the other two people looked at the smoke and were unconcerned, |
| 1:29.3 | 90% of humans would not report that there was smoke coming from under the door. |
| 1:34.3 | We are that conscious and aware of social conformity. |
| 1:40.3 | The problem with these climate meetings is that we can't say our truths under a structure |
| 1:49.5 | where the highest status silverback gorilla male or female has a different view and the narrative |
| 1:58.0 | is different. |
| 1:59.0 | So in effect, we as a species are using social sorting mechanisms |
| 2:05.8 | to solve physical world problems. What if, what if there was some technology that was able |
| 2:15.5 | to allow all these high status humans in Dubai |
| 2:20.1 | ask the questions that they really wanted to ask without any recourse to their status |
| 2:26.0 | or reputation. It was a total anonymous technology. That's going to be the thought experiment of |
| 2:32.8 | this, frankly. |
... |
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