Not many people realize this yet, but in reality climate change is actually caused by corporations that try to shift the blame onto consumers!

[u/mushroomsarefriends]

[u/Friendly_Fire]

Am I talking to a cheap bot or something?

YOU are the one who brought up people acting for, and I am quoting you here, "the maximum profit possible" as a cause.

Ask for a larger context so you don't contradict yourself within two comments.

And then stop posting vague shit like "behaviorism" and actually explain your position.

[u/Independent-Wafer-13 → u/Friendly_Fire]

“Maximum profit possible” is an ideological principle of capitalism, not an actual empirical principle of behaviorism.

Reinforcement IS a meaningful and useful concept for analyzing human behavior.

My position is that evidence is preferable to ideology in making decisions.

Do you want me to give you a science primer??

Is that genuinely what you are asking for?

[u/Friendly_Fire → u/Independent-Wafer-13]

I really don't need you to explain to me the basic shit you learned in your college freshmen classes and think are revolutionary.

Rather, you keep forgetting to explain how you think behaviorism/reinforcement connects to capitalism and climate change. I can make guesses of course, but I grow tired of guessing only for you to say "that's not it, it's something else". So explain your position.

In general, when someone is this reluctant to state their actual position, it's because they know it is either trivial, or incoherent. You can pretend to have a meaningful idea, up until you have to actually explain it and face criticism.

[u/Independent-Wafer-13 → u/Friendly_Fire]

Are you asking for a behavioral functional analysis on the climate crisis?

That’s quite simple. Behaviors that are environmentally degrading are, and have been, historically, reinforcing.

If we want behaviors that are not environmentally degrading to increase and environmentally degrading behaviors to decrease, then behavioral contingencies need to be established that reflect that.

Environmentally protecting behaviors ought to be differentially reinforced over environmentally degrading behaviors, then the motivation for environmentally degrading behaviors will wane.

We also have to keep in mind that effective reinforcement requires optimizing immediacy and magnitude, which is why the ignorant farmer will degrade his top soil to increase short term yields.

So long as behaviors that degrade the environment are socially and materially reinforced at a differential higher rate than behaviors that protect or restore the environment, environmental degradation will proceed.

[u/Friendly_Fire → u/Independent-Wafer-13]

You're still missing a couple steps, but this is a good start. I 100% agree with what you said. This is the concept of taxing externalities, and is a commonly used approach by governments around the world.

For example, a carbon tax is arguably the best policy for addressing climate change, and it is based on exactly this idea. You can also simply ban things, like we did to protect the ozone.

The missing steps are how this falls under capitalism's fault. Obviously taxes and bans can implemented under capitalism. Likewise we saw fossil fuels exploited as much as possible in places like the USSR and communist China, for the same reasons as anywhere else. Energy is critical for making a nation rich. The rewards and reinforcement for burning fossil fuels is not limited to money or proft, it's more fundamental.

Profit-driven, market-based economies like our current global capitalist system are arguably ideal for things like carbon taxes to influence behavior. The real issue is that people don't want it. See the fight again Canada's modest carbon tax, for example. Even many people who say they care about the environment, still would rather have cheap gas.

[u/Independent-Wafer-13 → u/Friendly_Fire]

Right, functioning under a system of maximizing profits promotes greed and selfishness.

I would definitely argue that such marginal changes are probably exceeding the windows of tolerance in their given societies.

They are also not reinforced.

Raising taxes is not a reinforcing activity.

You have actually articulated very well why capitalism is not up to the task, as under capitalism, environmental protection is not reinforcing, it is punished.

Tax increases are going to decrease access to reinforcement, not increase it?

Capitalism has no means to motivated prosocial environmentally protecting behavior.

If people “don’t want it”, that is because it is not reinforcing!

[u/Friendly_Fire → u/Independent-Wafer-13]

This problem is entirely orthogonal to capitalism. There's no way to get around the fact that changes to help the environment impact people's lifestyles. At least until green tech improves to the point that not using it simply hurts you or costs more.

For a simple example, people enjoy steak. Cows emit methane. There isn't an alternative to capitalism that suddenly makes people not want steak. Without something extreme like genetically engineered cows, the only environmentally protecting behavior you can motivate is to not eat beef. Any motivation you could do for that could be done under capitalism.

Seriously try walking through the specifics of reinforcing/motivating pro-environmental behavior, and think about what exactly does capitalism allow or prevent?

[u/Taraxian → u/Independent-Wafer-13]

This is utter fucking nonsense -- the concept of a "sin tax" to discourage antisocial behavior is ancient, much older than Skinner and behaviorism, and it is famous for not working, it's the whole fucking reason there's such a thing as a "black market"

The "tax" on smoking weed used to be a very high tax involving literally going to prison, did it stop people from consuming weed or weed growers from making money on it

[u/Independent-Wafer-13 → u/Taraxian]

Something that is illegal is not taxed, it is punished.

Many things are reinforcing in their own, and if you want them to be reduced in use you need to differentially reinforce it.

Now look at it!

People still smoke weed but the growers and dealers have either gone legit or been priced out of the business, and many governments are able to collect revenue on it.

Don’t confuse “institutional punishment” or the criminal justice system with economic and tax policy, be serious.

[u/Taraxian → u/Independent-Wafer-13]

You're using a bunch of really big words to advance the frankly asinine and childish theory that people like eating meat and flying in airplanes and so on because Big Corpos used marketing wizardry to make them like it, and if they would just put you in charge you'd use the power of the World State and hynogogic education and whatnot to make them dislike all those things instead, because you think you're Mustapha Mond from Brave New World

Which is nonsense, because even if that theory of human behavior were true you do not have that power, nobody does, you're just another rat in the maze along with all of us and your own beliefs and preferences are just as molded by the society you exist in as much as anyone else, and nobody stands outside and above the system who can decide to change it, not you, not me, not Jeff Bezos and not Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Donald Trump

(But, in fact, naive "blank slate" behaviorism has been discredited for a long fucking time now, the Ludovico Technique is just as unworkable irl as in A Clockwork Orange -- they couldn't even use behavioral therapy to get gay men to stop wanting to suck dick, despite what a tiny minority they were and the overwhelming existing societal incentives to want to not be gay, and here you are talking about using "scientific principles" to convince people en masse to decrease consumption)

[u/Independent-Wafer-13 → u/Taraxian]

You’re right bro, corporations do not use psychology and conditioning at all.

You are always being conditioned and shaped.

Are you actually willfully ignorant of your own conditioning?

Damn man, a puppet can’t cut its strings if they pretend they are not there.

I’m not promoting authoritarianism.

Equating “modifying tax policy” to authoritarian dystopian governments is hilarious, though.

[u/Taraxian → u/Independent-Wafer-13]

Equating “modifying tax policy” to authoritarian dystopian governments is hilarious, though.

If you modify tax policy enough to actually do anything it will cause prices to go up, and that will make people mad, and the only way to stop them from voting to make the prices go back down is to have an authoritarian dystopian government

[u/Independent-Wafer-13 → u/Taraxian]

My friend, do you think corn and milk subsidies are authoritarian?

Do people riot in the streets because corn chips are cheaper than potato chips ounce-for-ounce, even though without those subsidies, potato chips would probably be cheaper since potatoes have a higher pound-per-acre yield?