In January, my friend and mentor Peter Russell died. His son Alex invited me to give remarks at his funeral reception: Remarks at the funeral of Peter Russell Yesterday, I spoke at Innis College’s memorial event: Remarks about Peter Russell at Innis College Related: Peter Russell on recent decades of Canadian constitutional politics CPSA 2014, day 2 CPSA conference 2015 Peter Russell’s forthcoming book Contradictory thinking in Canadian treaty-making Canada’s history of oppressive Indigenous policies Canada’s deadly residential school system Canada’s courts and Indigenous rights Reviewing an ..read more

Photo by Lyuba Encheva ..read more

..read more

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling. If you like the current health policy, you believe its benefits are substantial and its costs more manageable than the costs of alternatives. If you are a hawk in your attitude toward other nations, you probably think they are relatively weak and likely to submit to your country’s ..read more

Massive volumes of ink have been spilled arguing that social media and smartphones are the reason young people around the world are not doing well. While there may well be truth to that, to me the whole discussion seems like an evasion of the real issue: we are living in a world where our leaders are killing our kids, because they are unwilling to act on climate change even though it could bring about the end of our civilization. We live in a world where the people in charge are willing to condemn everyone who follows them to torment and destruction, all because they are unwilling to give up t ..read more

A central assumption of many climate change activists and advocates for climate stability is that once people experience how destructive and painful climate change will be, they will become more willing to take actions to limit its severity – chiefly by foregoing fossil fuel production and use. The Economist reports on how this assumption may not be justified, in discussing the threat of sea level rise to The Netherlands: The longer-term issue, of course, is climate change. The North Sea has risen about 19cm since 1900, and the rate has increased from about 1.7mm per year to about 2.7mm since ..read more

Furthermore, intelligence, particularly beyond a certain level, may lead to behaviors that make acquiring or holding on to influence less likely. People who are exceptionally smart think they can do everything on their own and do it better than everyone else. Consequently, they may fail to bring others along with them, leaving their potential allies in the dark about their plans and thinking. Being recognized as exceptionally smart can cause overconfidence and even arrogance, which, as we will see in more detail later, can lead to the loss of power. And smart people may think that because of ..read more

I used to attend a health club in the middle of the day and chat with an interesting Eastern European fellow with two Ph.D. degrees, one in physics (statistical no less), the other in finance. He worked for a trading house and was obsessed with the anecdotal aspects of the markets. He once asked me doggedly what I thought the stock market would do that day. Clearly I gave him a social answer of the kind “I don’t know, perhaps lower”-quite possibly the opposite answer to what I would have given him had he asked me an hour earlier. The next day he showed great alarm upon seeing me. He went on a ..read more

..read more

One of the many challenges on the road to fossil fuel abolition is the US-style of bankruptcy, where any valuable assets of a bankrupt corporation or individual are sold to help compensate their creditors. With fossil fuels, this risks setting up a perverse circumstance where coal, oil, and gas which we should not burn keeps getting shuffled to new owners whose only reason for buying it is to burn it: Financing more digging at existing mines—the second link in the supply chain—is no problem either. Last year coal production hit a record 8bn tonnes. It is not quite business as usual. Since 201 ..read more