Apocalypse Yet?

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing stocking up on toilet rolls. And due to the lockdown, unusually, we're recording this remotely. Chris, are you likely stocked up on toilet rolls?

Speaker B: 00:00:28

We have a sufficient supply of toilet rolls that will do us for the next week or two weeks, perhaps, depending on how sparingly they're used. But I don't necessarily feel the need. I don't dismiss as irrational the plan to stock up on toilet rolls, but it's the kind of behavior that's associated with a genuine crisis and people thinking about something going on for a long period of time. And in many ways, I was reminded of the Stephen King novel I read a while ago called The Stand, and how a lot of what's going on plays into that story. And that's about a weaponized influenza virus that effectively wipes out the world population, and about one in 100 people or something survive it. So the first quarter of the book is all about the breakdown of society and what happens. So yeah, we're not quite at the stage that they get to yet, but it does seem people are responding in

Speaker A: 00:01:58

an archetypal apocalyptic way. Okay, so in that, how did people know that the apocalypse was coming,

Speaker B: 00:02:07

or that this was the apocalypse already now? People started dropping dead in their droves was the key. Now, obviously, people are dying now in quite large numbers of COVID-19, so that's one signal. But really, the breakdown of society is self-inflicted in the novel. So I mean, yes, these people are dying, but the way they deconstruct society is self-imposed. And you can argue that the main damage we're inflicting on ourselves now is based on voluntary actions that we're taking, and things like buying lots of toilet roll and pasta and so on, those kinds of sort of behavior traits. So yeah, I guess the question is, are we right to think it's the

Speaker A: 00:03:04

apocalypse or not? Yeah, I mean, how do we know if it's the apocalypse? Nick, is this the end of times? And if it is, how do we know? Yeah, it is. Oh, God, it is. Oh, yes. But so the Earth is

Speaker C: 00:03:21

going to be destroyed, but not for another few billion years, right? Why does that make a difference? You've seen you've seen Annie Hall, right? I have. Yeah, I'll be saying I won't do his homework, because the universe is expanding. And someday, it's all going to fall apart. And his mum says, what's the universe got to do with it? You're in Brooklyn, Brooklyn is not expanding. But actually, the reason I want to bring that in is because there is an issue here about very much about timescale, you know, we do know that the world is going to end, right? There's no doubt about that the universe is going to end. One end of the scale, you've got that, which we clearly don't worry about, right, very much. At the other end, you've got, you know, the gamma, gamma ray burst, or the, you know, the kind of the unseen jet black, yeah, the sort of jet black meteor, which hits us, you know, and just destroys everything on Earth, you know, sort of limited warning. And then but then you've got a whole load of other things. I mean, you know, we've, we've known about the possibility of pandemic flu. This isn't, obviously, the end of the world, it's not killing enough people to cause a really serious breakdown in society yet. But you know, what if it mutates could do? But then you've got things like, well, climate change, that's it, we're looking at sort of some fairly, you know, plausibly apocalyptic outcomes only a couple of generations away. And yet, we're not really, you know, it's taking it's taking a lot of effort to get people to change their way they behave. So the first thing we need to ask is, you know, not not, it's not if but when, and what is the timeframe that makes us, you know, why do we respond in a sort of almost like panic to the to this to the Coronavirus, but not not to seasonal flu, for example, not to tuberculosis, which has killed probably a billion people. It's been the deadliest disease ever, right? And much, much worse. But that's, that's probably 1% of anyone who's ever lived. And yet, you know, we'll just get on with it. Right. So that's the first question is, you know, how far away is the apocalypse seems to be a key driver of our behaviour.

Speaker A: 00:05:38

know, the earthquake killing: 1000

Speaker C: 00:06:08

Brummies, I know, they famously insular, but I mean, I know some people in Birmingham, they do sometimes pay attention to things that happen outside Birmingham. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:06:17

Yeah, I think I think it's quite a deeper kind of existential question about our own mortality, because, you know, and, and our attachment to society and group experience, because the thing about Coronavirus, which is his clearly panicked people is that you can get it and, you know, 10 days later, you can be dead. And so that's a, the threat of that is very immediate. Something like climate change is much less tangible, you can't see it, you know, it's not directly, obviously causing your own mortality in any in any way. And it's the same thing when people, you know, we all know we're going to die one day, right? But we, but those those moments that cause people to have epiphanies, or so on, and so on, or when you know, they have a heart attack or something, and they change their whole, you know, attitude towards life, because they're, the immediacy of their death was suddenly brought, you know, brought into focus for them. And I think it's the same thing with apocalyptic visions, we we, we don't, you know, we care about them when we think they're going to happen in on our watch, basically, we don't care about them, when they're, you know, our, our progenies look out.

Speaker C: 00:07:44

But if we all woke up, if we went to bed, and we woke up, and one in 100 people had died. End of story, we'd all get on with it, wouldn't we?

Speaker B: 00:07:53

Like, like, like in that terrible, that terrible Marvel film where the where the purple guy kills 50% of the universe's population. I think I think his name is Thanos. Thanos. That's the guy. Yeah.

Speaker C: 00:08:06

But no, but seriously, I mean, that that would, if that happened, if we accelerated it, and just said, look, everyone is going to die just dies. And then and then the next day, you know, no one will be panicked by toilet rolls. So why did the fact that it's happening over a period of time make us panic by toilet rolls? What's the mechanism there?

Speaker A: 00:08:26

I don't know the answer to the question.

Speaker C: 00:08:27

No, I don't. I don't. But also, I don't understand. Does it make do you see where I'm going with that? Like, it's, it's, it's weird when you put it like that, like the fact that it happens slowly, what why would that affect behavior? I mean, if we're going to end up in the same place anyway,

Speaker A: 00:08:42

but there's one thing I can't get by, but which is why toilet rolls anyway. But anyway,

Speaker B: 00:08:47

Chris, you know, in a way, I was gonna say maybe, you know, there's a there's a degree of sort of rationality about it, which is that, you know, people in some sort of intuitive way sense that the, the logistical infrastructure of the country was going to be affected. So, you know, not only you're going to have people dying, but you're going to have a large number of the workforce sick, that a kind of lockdown like this is going to happen. And you know, the people in factories making toilet roll, aren't going to be turning up to work every day. So, you know, maybe that sort of panicky intuition was actually, you know, serving some, some purpose.

Speaker A: 00:09:34

Yeah, I mean, I mean, sorry, sorry, there's a couple things I want to ask. But first of all, I just can't get past this thing of toilet rolls, which is, first of all, you know, when it's the Black Death, what did people panic by then it probably wasn't toilet rolls, because what people use as toilet roll in the past, and why is toilet roll suddenly the big thing that everyone must

Speaker C: 00:09:49

he great toilet roll panic of: 1973

Speaker A: 00:11:19

Well, here's the thing. And sorry, I know I keep interrupting you. No, no, no, it's good. I'm really hung up on this, though. Yeah, I know you're going to talk about other things there. But the other thing is, because this relates to herd mentality and market sentiment, markets. What's the word I want to use market sentiment? Because I look at all these people in news clips on TV and social media, I go, my God, there's a lot of stupid people around a lot of thick people. But actually, am I the stupid one? Should I be out there just cramming my, you know, knocking over old grannies and just grabbing whatever toilet roll I can? Am I the stupid one?

Speaker C: 00:11:48

No, well, listen, because nobody is a panic buyer. Other people are panic buyers. Yeah, everyone else is just stocking up sensibly. And and it's all the other people who are panic buying. So I think I think we're in one of those it just I mean, it's very, very common, you know, kind of attribution error. Everyone is seeing everyone else as panic buyers, but their own behavior is completely rational. We're just, you know, buying but just buying, you know, more than we need just in case we get stuck indoors for two weeks.

Speaker B: 00:12:18

nalties in against England in: 1998

Speaker A: 00:13:19

That's a bit weird, that one. So I'm now hung up on that. Why didn't he just sign the contract

Speaker B: 00:13:23

anyway? And if it all went, yeah, I think he sort of felt he might have been tempting fate in some way. I don't I don't know what was going on in his in his mind. But but yes, I mean, I think this I this idea, you know, of of kind of looking for for portents and feeling we can influence what's what's going on is is is quite quite an interesting one, because if you look at all of the the kind of stories of of the apocalypse, they all have these, you know, this sort of sign watching element for them. And and that's got into popular culture. And, you know, we we get it ourselves. I mean, you talked about the Black Death. And, you know, around that time in the Middle Ages, there was a a widely sort of circulating kind of body of knowledge called the 15 signs before doomsday that were, you know, like millenarian kind of Christian theology was was massive around them because the world obviously was ending for 40 percent of of the population. So yeah, good. Don't spill the beans. What are they? Number number one, right? Toilet roll. This sounds pretty good. Yeah, exactly. Toilet roll stocks drop and you can't get any dried pasta. No, it's this one does sound quite quite good. I quite like this one, which is that the waters rise above mountains. Right. So that sounds pretty, pretty prophetic. Right. Until you hear number two and three, which is that the waters then go sink so low that you cannot see them.

Speaker C: 00:15:07

I hold up. But so first we've got we've got water levels rising. We know yes, we have seas like the Aral Sea, which are drying up. Yes. You start to freak me out, Nick. But go on. Right. Then.

Speaker B: 00:15:19

Right. Here's the really freaky bit. They return to normal levels. So they go up and down. So

Speaker C: 00:15:26

they were kind of like the old Duke of York. So they go down and then they go up and then they go back to where they were. They go up, then they go down. Right. And then a bunch of sea

Speaker B: 00:15:35

sea creatures come to the surface and start bellowing crazily and some other weird stuff happens. But yeah, number 15 is the one that you got to worry about, which is where all men die and the earth burns. So at that point, we're in we're in trouble. I've just got it up on the

Speaker C: 00:15:52

internet here. And the one I'm looking forward to is number nine. The stones fight each other.

Speaker B: 00:15:57

Yeah. I would love to see what that looks like. Yeah, it's going to it's going to be a rocky

Speaker C: 00:16:03

time. But I think the reason that I think this is interesting, the progression here. And this issue about timescale, which, as we know, is important, like it's not the end of the world is how long it's going to take is is that, you know, if you look at the sort of game theory of it, a lot of what keeps society functioning, is that we're playing and what what keeps us trusting each other, and, you know, not not worrying about being murdered every time we get the shops, for example, is the fact that we're playing repeated games. So, you know, we're in Prisoner's Dilemma language, we're playing a kind of repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game. The reason that we don't just, you know, go and steal from the shop is that we think that, you know, well, our life will be worse off as a result that the shopkeeper is going to punish us through the proxies of the police. All of that depends on this repetition, it depends on you sort of being playing the same game over and over again with the same players. Now, in the sort of game theory solution for that repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game, if you know it is going to end, be it ever so far away, then that cooperative solution unravels, right? If you know when the last game is going to be, you know that on the last game, you've got no incentive to be nice, so you both defect. Now, the problem is that then means on the game before, you have no incentive to be nice because you know you're going to defect the next time, so you're going to defect that time. And the whole thing unravels from the sort of last game backwards. And I think you can really see that as something that, you know, that is how society falls apart when there is an end in sight. You know, if we say it's going to end on Tuesday, you know that money is going to be worthless. Laws are not going to be enforced. You know, the police are not going to bother doing their jobs. You know, people aren't going to bother to be faithful to their spouses if they don't immediately want to be. You know, all of these institutions that depend on trust and repetition rationally fall apart when you put an end date

Speaker B: 00:18:05

he US-led invasion of Iraq in: 2003

Speaker A: 00:18:45

Yeah, I guess framing it another way, usually we've all got something to- If you live within the sort of the correct- by the rules, you've got something to lose, right? But suddenly, we've all got nothing to lose. We're sort of- Everyone's suddenly pushed to the edge of society because there is no society anymore. Okay, so where are we with this? We're sort of close. We're sort of, you know, moving towards wanting to wrap up. There's a couple of- There's a question I want to ask, but is there anything we want to round this off with? Well, no, I was just

Speaker B: 00:19:11

going to say, I think one of the interesting things is how much, you know, these kinds of apocalyptic visions, they're just so durable, you know, that you've had them in every kind of major religion has some, you know, some apocalyptic story. And we now got them totally ingrained, you know, the whole genre of dystopian fiction and so on, all kind of fits in. But there are these kind of common themes among them. And I think, you know, that probably tells us something about our own psychology, you know, like there's very often a small number of survivors. So it's not actually the end of the world. You know, there are, there are, you know, Ragnarok, for example, has two human survivors going on to populate the rest of the earth. If you look at the Noah flood story and all of those kinds of most apocalyptic visions, we still can't totally write the world off. There always has to be, you know, somebody pulling through. And then, and there's this cleansing element to it as well. There's almost this sort of sense of, well, you know, the, the amorality of society kind of caused it and we got rid of that. And then, you know, everything is pure after, after that point. Yeah. Like the

Speaker A: 00:20:37

Noah. Yeah. I'm sorry, Nick. I'm just slightly worried that if it's just us three left at the end of it all, and we're going to have to repopulate the earth. I'm just not sure how I

Speaker C: 00:20:46

feel about that, but yeah. Yeah. On TV tropes has quite a good sort of scale of, of sort of six point scale of how bad your apocalypse is. And it goes from societal disruption, right? Which is sort of basically you kind of regress that's, I guess that's the dark ages. So we've experienced that as a species or the, you know, the, the yeah. So every time there's a kind of decline of empire, you know, which you see periodically over time. So that's, you can imagine that that's something that, you know, people have always worried about as well. You know, it might be that, you know, our sort of folk memories, you know, have, have, have this sense of, well, nothing is permanent, you know, and, and which is why we like those sorts of stories. But then we have, then we have, you know, a kind of serious societal collapse where we sort of backslide to, you know, kind of pre-industrial levels, you know, where it's sort of, and I think something like threads is a good example of that, where, you know, it sort of shows after the nuclear war, people are just subsistence farming and the crops are failing and, you know, the back to that, that kind of life. Then you have species extension extinction. So of course that's humans getting wiped out, total extinction, life itself ends. And I think there's, there's a thought that in probably in the road, that's what, that's what is happening. Physical annihilation is a total destruction of the earth. Like it just gets blown up by a, by an asteroid or something. And then finally the worst kind, probably not something we need to worry about, but metaphysical annihilation, where the whole area, the earth ceases to ever have existed, erased from time. What's that been in? What's, what's, I mean, I suspect it's been Doctor Who and things like that, but it also, it was something that the, didn't, wasn't there a special punishment that people like the Romans had where they would erase your name from any statues and any records, you know, your old memory of you will be wiped out. Yeah, I'm not sure about the Romans, that was interesting though.

Speaker B: 00:22:54

Certainly an Egyptian Pharaoh who was erased from history. Yeah. I can't remember who that was.

Speaker C: 00:23:02

But look. How do we know that though? They didn't do a good enough job.

Speaker A: 00:23:05

Yeah, they didn't. Okay. So let's wrap this up. That sort of brings us nicely to where I want to get to, which is, is there an apocalyptic vision that you actually quite like the sound of for whatever reason? Chris.

Speaker B: 00:23:18

nd of October,: 1844

Speaker A: 00:24:29

Blimey. That's dark. Yeah. Now I feel, yeah. Nick, cheer me up. Uh, not sure I can. With your apocalyptic vision.

Speaker C: 00:24:36

I did recommend there's a very good, someone had done a, someone's done a YouTube video called time lapse of the future. And, uh, it covers the, uh, the future of the universe. And certainly one thing I didn't realize, I think, I think the, so it's half an hour long, this, this video is very long. The universe. Um, the, it, it does, it logarithmically accelerates. So it starts by doing, you know, a kind of year a second, and then it's 10 years a second, and it's a hundred years a second and kind of get up to, um, you're going a million years a second and then to, uh, and the thing I didn't really appreciate is that, well, the, the end of the earth is in the first couple of minutes or something. And then we have this very long period of the universe just slowing down and slowing down, but things are still happening. That's the thing that amazed amazed me is that the we're right at the beginning of the universe and, and, you know, in the future when there'll be a point where it's all black holes and then the black holes will disappear. And then there'll be a point where there's kind of bits of energy here and there, there'll be a bit where there's neutron stars, you know, there's lots of different periods where, where sort of the universe looks like something completely different to what we have now. Um, I, you know, I'm, I'm intrigued by that. I mean, time travel is always a thousand years ahead at the most, you know, it's kind of what is, what's it going to be like in a billion years time? Yeah. You know, I mean, I, in a way I think, I think, you know, let's in the most optimistic visions for, for humanity, we find a way to colonize the stars and persist for a million or a billion years. Um, but at some point it is going to end. What will that be like? I, I, you know, I just would love to know the answer. Nick, you did your job. Now I

Speaker A: 00:26:19

feel suitably uplifted after, um, Chris's or bleak, um, um, outlook, um, which I can't remember what that was about now. So that's a, yeah, you definitely did the job. I feel I can feel the rapture, um, coming on. Um, okay. Uh, we're going to wrap up there. Um, thank you as always for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.