Winter day above the Clearwater River

One of the largest problems facing society in the current complexity crisis is the chronic persistence of innumeracy. If we remember that expanded relational sense actually relies on understandings of time and space, then innumeracy is a root cause. You can’t have a sense of history if you have no anchoring in what it means to live 50 years ago — let alone 1000 years ago. And our understanding of spatial scales is also tied to innumeracy. One of my favorite tells of being American is identification with the state in which you reside. If you’re talking to anyone outside the US, unless you’re in California, Texas or New York, you’re going to get a bemused blank stare. Certainly not going to help you understand where Vietnam is.

And in a world increasingly dominated by numbers, that’s a problem. Because you’re supposed to ‘get’ this locational sense. And that means when you don’t, people are going to think you’re an idiot. A classic emperor’s new clothes deal — folks oughta know better. But they just don’t.

Of course, understanding any number is key on establishing context — which may include even more numbers, or transforms of numbers. And when that’s the case, you have to add either algorithms, or best guesses, or maybe even shared perceptions. It gets complicated quickly. Or rather, complex. And what does that mean? The minute things get too scrambled, we scurry around looking for an authority to tell us what this means.

Which is where the problem arises. The minute you go looking for that authority, you are now playing in the field of psychopathy. Psychopaths are the ones that are more than happy to take your perceptions — maybe in your conscious mind — and turn them into emotions. And once that happens, you’re open to manipulation. The psychopath doesn’t even have to understand the numbers, nor their meaning, themselves. One of the aspects of beauty of the new world of AI and LLMs is we are seeing you don’t really need any understanding of anything to train your own personal LLM inside your head in spitting out an actionable response that will move a token around on the game board. You just have to have run that program through enough training data to know you’re going to get the outcome you want. One of my favorite scenes, in one of my favorite movies, ‘The Dark Knight” (with Heath Ledger’s Joker) is in the hospital, where Two-Face accuses him of having a plan. “Do I look like a guy with a plan? I’m just a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.”

So that’s what psychopaths do. And it’s wickedly effective in a society that refuses to slow down and think.

One of my favorite uses of innumeracy as a weapon of terror is the current kerfuffle over Greenland. If you go out on the street, and ask folks how many people live in Greenland, you’re likely to get puzzled looks from most folks. Most people have no idea how many people live anywhere, let alone Greenland. Don’t believe me? Go ask folks how many people live in Germany.

But some brave souls will guess. 1 million? 10 million?

The actual answer is 56 thousand, give or take. (FWIW — this is the population size of the isolated area I live in.) And if they’re tuned into the news at all, they’ve likely heard that Donald Trump is currently machinating to take control of Greenland. 51st state or whatever. The real reason, besides some degree of personal ego, is that, if you look at a polar projection map of Greenland, you’ll see it is extremely strategically located for missile and sea defense. We actually own the only military base on Greenland — Pituffik Space Base, where we have a bunch of enormous ballistic missile early warning systems (BMEWS) that look across the polar region to see if Russia is attempting to annihilate us. Greenland is important in the context of creating Trump’s “Golden Dome” plan for missile defense.

Now here’s where the innumeracy and confusion comes in. Headlines regularly blare “US will go to war with Europe over Greenland!” or “The European Union sends troops to Greenland to defend against US aggression or threats of seizure!” Troops are obviously an amalgam mental model inside media market heads — and the transformation algorithm is to take some idea of the situation and move it into people’s limbic/emotional regions, so they can, well, basically, hate Donald Trump.

The number of troops from European partners sent to Greenland? At the time, less than 50. And Greenland, with only a couple of small towns on it (and some more abandoned US military facilities) wouldn’t have much of a place to host them. Maybe they could get located at the facility at Pituffik. But that would be quite odd — welcoming a defending force inside the only military facility of the nation who supposedly wants to take control of the island.

Now here’s the rub. MAYBE psychopaths have realized the ludicrousness of all the actual numbers, and are constructing that mental model that will get people to hate Trump even more (a TDS viral accelerator, as it were.). But maybe not. Maybe it’s actually just a great angle for a relational disruption and chaos strategy across the board, for a non-event that is really a non-event. No one’s asking what a takeover of Greenland by the US military would do on anything but paper — which is actually the critical aspect of it. Declaration of Greenland being a US protectorate would be critical in telling Russia and China that weird stuff is not going to be tolerated. And it also likely will put other threats to bed preemptively.

Like China and Russia drilling for oil! Or mining for rare earth minerals. That must be the real reason for Trump’s obsession! And with Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), Greenland is really going to be green Real Soon Now.

And now we can see the exploitation of innumeracy once again. If you go out, once again, and ask folks how long it’s going to take to melt all the ice on Greenland, you’ll hear answers like ’20 years’. Or ’50 years’. Because we’re approaching the point of Global Boiling!

But once you jump off the Great Dichotomy — that the planet is going to become uninhabitable in 50 years — the numbers really don’t add up. Our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says 1000-10,000 years to melt all of Greenland’s ice. Big error bars (not that this matters) but basically we don’t know. And I could say a whole bunch of math-y stuff how all this is based on some linear model, and so on. Blah, blah, blah.

“But it doesn’t matter!” screams the psychopathic contingent. “Over 100 GIGATONS of ice a year melt off of Greenland!” Whenever you hear gigatons, you better be scared. No mention of the context for any of this — Greenland ice volume (note wikipedia measures volume, but loss rates are in mass, to confuse people)

2.9 million cubic kilometers = 2.9  x 10^15 cubic meters = 2.9 x 10^18 kg  (more or less). And reality is lost in the fact that 100 GT is really not very much at all.

And no one has any interest in popping down a level to what it would take to actually mine sites in Greenland. Greenland has 1 mine for anorthosite — a material that can be used for high temp construction material, and also a potential for titanium. Mining someplace like Greenland is hellishly hard — you gotta really want what’s under the ground — and the odds of it being accessible without a ton of ice on it is just not realistic at all. I’ve worked with a company in Labrador with my students. It was just a fun thought exercise on what do you do with all that snow you’ve got to deal with.

But psychopaths are not going to have a problem exploiting any of the ignorance around actually producing results from mining. Nor do they need to know the veracity of any potential claims. When your goal is chaos, that’s what you gear your training data for.

Does that mean there are no psychopaths with a conscious plan of manipulation on any of the basics of Greenland? Of course not. There might be a couple of smarties out there who have figured out what the public doesn’t know. But the minute the gigaton numbers come marching out, you don’t really need much. The psychopathic LLM kicks into overdrive, looks for hot spots (war! money! monomaniacal Trump!) and rapidly creates contemporaneous messages to support the bullshit. Chaos is the point, after all. There will be no epiphanies after the chaos campaign falls apart. It will just be on to the next point that might work.

And no one’s talking about how an ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure. That’s the whole metacognition thing — knowing what you don’t know. We’re just downstream of yanking Maduro out of Venezuela because of decades of neglect about dealing with a regime that allowed Hezbollah to produce long-range drones in our backyard, give a controlling interest in oil to China, and participate in poisoning our citizens with fentanyl and cocaine. Maybe a little preemptive, judicious action in another hot spot of potential global contention against real adversaries – what X mutual, @vtchakarova Velina Tchakarova calls the DragonBear (Russia and China together) might not be so stupid. In fact, it might be really smart.

But the psychopaths come out, with their magic blanket of fear. And here we are.

If there’s a remedy for any of this, just remember. The math isn’t complicated. But you gotta get your thought process to slow down, and say “huh” a lot. That dissipates that innumeracy cloud faster than any statistics class. Repeat after me: “that don’t make NO sense!”

P.S. I wrote another piece on innumeracy and COVID here. It’s quite good. COVID was driven by psychopathic manipulation of innumeracy. And it ain’t gonna get fixed just by taking another statistics course. I did go out and do a casual ‘man on the street’ sampling on what people believed the death rate from COVID was — most people said ~ 10%. Actual rate, just for your edification, was ~.05%. Typical respiratory winter numbers.

H/T to pal Joe Biello, who I work on climate issues with. Thanks, Joe!