Last summer we had houseguests coinciding with what turned out to have been the hottest weekend of the summer. It hit 90⁰ Fahrenheit here in Vermont the second week in July and only dropped to the mid 60's at night. We don't have air conditioning because there are about 5 days out of 365 where keeping a house cool is of interest. On those days, opening the house up at night, filling it with cool air, then closing it up mid morning, along with closing the shades on the south facing windows, holds the cool air in well enough to last until sundown. Several 90⁰ days in a row puts that strategy to the test.
The response from our house guests was telling. One who grew up in sub Saharan Africa didn't find it hot. Another from Europe found it uncomfortable.
We stand on the same planet at the same time, in the same place, and have a different experience of our surroundings.
Now put ourselves in different places on the planet and it raises the dissonance. In early March of this year, I spoke with an associate in Finland, and related that I felt as though we hadn't gotten a winter this year. We went from late autumn to early spring without having experienced the deep cold and deep snow customary to what we call winter here. My Finnish colleague reported that they had experienced an unusually cold and snowy winter.
Predictable Randomness
We humans are good with things that are predictable: sunrise and sunset for example. Even though these change a bit every day, they change in a highly predictable way. Like or not, we adapt. The predictability of these changes allows us to make festivals of the predictable changes that occur with the solstices and the equinoxes.
What gets more challenging are things that are ultimately predictable that show up at random times. We can get pretty good at that over time. North Africans early on recognized the seasonal arrival of monsoons in Ethiopia that led predictably to flooding in the Egyptian portion of the Nile 4000 miles away. This same adaptiveness to predictable randomness led the school I served in LA to have food and water for 1000 people for three days in the event of a serious earthquake, and leads nearly every Vermonter with a truck of any size to have a snow plow attachment.
What's even harder is the randomness changing and becoming less predictable by existing standards. In this area, the dates of the first frost of autumn and the last frost of spring appear to be shifting, and, as yet, not as predictably as the changes in sunrise and sunset.
When predictable randomness drifts toward less predictability and more randomness: What is it? and What do I do? is less clear. Do I invest in a new snow plow, or in air conditioning. What if the thing that drives my desire to invest in home cooling will also accelerate the need for it? Are things more random, or is there a new predictability that integrates this perceived change?
Humans get destabilized in direct relationship to perceived uncertainty increasing.
Next up: Denial, False certainty, Probability
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Denial: https://xkcd.com/1321/