The collapse of the Miami building and the Tragic Struggle for the Future of Humanity

In 2014, a a group of behavioral scientists tried to save the future from Harvard and Yale — with a little game theory.

Here’s the part of the game: the researchers divided a large group of volunteers into five groups called “generations”. The first generation designated players were given 100 points or “units” and told to take some for themselves, up to a maximum of 20 units, and then pass the rest on to the next generation. If the overall pool had 50 units or more at the end of the round, the next generation would get a reset – 100 units to start again, a model of sustainability. If the pool had less than 50 units, it was achieved by the next generation.

Do you want good or bad news? Good: Two-thirds of the players were “cooperativists,” taking up 10 units or less and ensuring the survival of the species. Bad: The least “deserters” always saved the game. In the 18 rounds of this “intergenerational goods game,” only four were old enough for the first generation to fully restore 100 units to the 2nd generation. Of these, only two have been reset for the 3rd generation. No one has reached the 4th generation.

In a game designed to test how people could plan for a sustainable world, all that was needed to reliably carry out the apocalypse was some selfish nonsense, which seems pretty popular, but the result seems ironic. ”Collaborate with the future“.

That didn’t end the story of the Intergenerational Goods Game. (I’ll get back to that.) But this past week has highlighted the deplorable human ability to avoid bad results in the possible future. You can see the horrific collapse of a condominium tower in Surfside, north of Miami, that killed at least 16 people and left dozens more untold. An warned the engineer the building’s neighbors in 2018 about the concrete and the serious damage to the weapon that supports the building. As soon as last April, there was the condom board telling neighbors that the damage was deteriorating. But the multimillion-dollar project, which has been in operation for more than two years, has not yet begun. Two years ago Champlain Towers were concerned about the residents ’reasoning, the impact of the repairs, and how much they would cost. The International Commodity Games showed how bad it is to protect future generations; The people of Miami could not protect their future.

The intergenerational game of goods was not about buildings. Of course, it was a playful study of climate change. For 2014, many people worked on the theory of the game of collaboration, the authors wrote, but this canon tends to ignore the fourth dimension: time. That’s where the Champlain Towers fall with the game and the climate catastrophe that is currently happening around the world. Risks are the risks of bad things happening — an earthquake, a hundred, a hurricane, a hot event; Disasters are those that occur when the risk is realized and people exceed any benefits previously made. And it seems that people are very bad at making preparations in advance. The danger from the Champlain towers was clear — for some residents, at least. As with climate change, the danger appeared much earlier than the catastrophe, making it almost inevitable. On the nose it seems almost impossible for people to appear about the deadly metaphor of how people think (or don’t think) about the broken climate of the Earth. sinking, floods Miami“It’s the city itself, a tragic metaphor for how people don’t think about the Earth’s broken climate.” But here we are.