Shifting Baseline Syndrome
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Shifting baseline syndrome was originally coined to define a tendency within the world of landscape architecture to perceive the environment as it existed in our earliest memories to be the default state of affairs, rather than considering how things might have been before that relatively recent period.
The term was then utilized by a fisheries scientist named Daniel Pauly in a paper entitled “Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries.”
The thesis of this paper was that many people working in fish management who were tasked with, among other things, figuring out how fish populations were changing, were using an improper baseline for what fish populations looked like before the advent of human-controlled fishing infrastructure.
Many fishery managers were thinking back to what the populations were like when they were young, when they were just starting out, and using that as the metric for what “fish populations used to be like,” failing to realize, or perhaps failing to care, that this “back in the day” estimation was not terribly useful: it wasn’t anywhere near representative of what populations were like before human cultivation of those populations began—which was what they were supposedly approximating.
As a result, the mental baselines maintained by these workers were shifting, and increasingly so with each new generation of fishery worker.
Our collective memory of what unharvested fish populations might look like was resultantly lost, and a collection of adjusted-weight measurements became the numbers we use to make all kinds of important estimations about the present and the future in this space.
There’s a concept in engineering, cumulative error, that describes what can happen as a result of shifting baselines over time.
A cumulative error is a mistake that compounds with each new step, with each new assumption that’s made based on a previous, incorrect assumption.
Consider the game “telephone” (which has different names depending on where you are in the world): the variation of this game that I grew up with had a group of children sit in a circle, and one child would make up a phrase and whisper it into the ear of the person sitting next to them. That person would then whisper the same thing to the next person, and that person to the next, and so on.
You can’t ask for clarification or correction, so generally, by the time you get back to the original whisperer in the circle, the message has become so garbled that you end up with something hilariously non-representative of the original phrase.
This garbled message arises because of compounding errors along the way. And these errors are cumulative in that one error causes misunderstandings that impact future whispers, leading to more errors, which in time butcher the message being transmitted to the point where even the most accurate whisper from one person to another only contains a jumble of sounds completely lacking meaning, or a set of misheard words strung together in an attempt to glean significance from noise-ridden transmission errors.
Referring back to landscapes, shifting baseline syndrome implies that with each new generation, we base our understanding of how things once were on the misunderstandings of previous generations, who documented their environments based on flawed assumptions written down by older generations, who themselves used flawed baselines written down by previous generations, and on and on, down the line, back to the point where we no longer have any data at all, and the flawed transmission is oral rather than written: each new generation attempting to preserve something true, but accidentally failing to do so.
We succumb to this same bias in other aspects of life, as well. Perhaps all aspects of life.
Consider that modern human beings—especially those in wealthier countries, but those in poorer countries, too, in many regards—are massively better off, on average, than humans living at any other point in history.
This is true of fundamental things like infant mortality rates, but also of more superficial, day-to-day things, like the number and quality of entertainment options we have available, and the casual availability of magical devices that allow us to communicate with other human beings around the world for essentially zero cost.
But because the goal posts move along the way, our expectations change as our environments—and what’s available within those environments—change.
Thus, we find ourselves with increasingly positive outcomes, but also increasingly high expectations of what our outcomes should be—a reflection of the hedonic treadmill, but via different mechanisms.
The more accurate (and maybe healthier) perspective is probably to compare life, right now, with how life would have been hundreds of years ago.
Almost always, that will present a starker contrast, as even the wealthiest, most powerful people on Earth a few hundred years ago were unable to experience the vast range of pleasures and conveniences that most people on the lower-end of the economic pyramid take for granted, today.
This is not to ignore or dismiss the very real issues that we need to solve in the modern world, or to gloss over the immense disparity of experience between the wealthy and the impoverished—at the individual level, and on the societal level.
But it’s worth acknowledging that many of the comparisons we make, both personally and civilizationally, are tinted by this tendency to shift our baseline and establish an us-centric “past” as the true past—as something that’s representative of how things were—rather than using more objective measures to establish that baseline.
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