Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

“Disease X”

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Are you worried that nobody is prepared for the next big pandemic? Have no fear, there is a group preparing to “advise the WHO on developing a framework to define comprehensive studies” about that. And after that, the WHO is going to be “developing policies and enhancing preparedness” about it. I am sure this will not take very long!

It seems like the UN and the WHO should be the organization to lead this effort globally, and creating new bodies in parallel would be redundant and counter-productive. But the UN approach did not seem to work very well this last time around. There are also the intertwined risks of natural pandemics, biological warfare and biological terrorism that need to be dealt with, and the WHO does not seem to be the agency to deal with these as existential threats. It seems to be more about representing the world’s under-represented people and countries at the table where these things are discussed.

In the U.S., our existing agencies (CDC, customs, FEMA, etc.) did not deal with this threat effectively. Again, nobody wants to just make new redundant agencies, and nobody wants to just turn the thing over to the military industrial complex. But it seems like we need to do something. Maybe this is why Obama created the “white house office of pandemic whatever” to try to coordinate or at least understand all this. Not a new parallel agency, but a new layer of oversight or at least a watchdog. The government grows this way, and the new growth may be healthy, but we never prune out the dead underbrush.

the (thing everybody calls the) Nobel Prize in economics

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This year’s Nobel prize for economics, which we are supposed to call the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences”, is for a method of identifying natural experiments in data. The importance of this is to get over the “correlation is not causation” hump and actually be able to make some statements about causation. In my very simplistic understanding, you would find at least two data sets where at least two variables are correlated in one but not the other, and the state of the system they represent is roughly the same except for one other variable. Then you can infer that other variable had some role in causing the correlation or lack thereof. This is how you design an experiment of course, but in this case you are looking in existing data sets for cases where this occurred “naturally”.

That’s my simplistic understanding. Let’s look at how Nature describes it.

In 1994, Angrist and Imbens developed a mathematical formalization for extracting reliable information about causation from natural experiments, even if their ‘design’ is limited and compromised by unknown circumstances such as incomplete compliance by participants3. Their approach showed which causal conclusions could and could not be supported in a given situation.

Nature

It seems like this would have applications well beyond economics and social science. For example, ecology, and environmental science in general, where there are just so many variables and complex interactions that setting up randomized controlled experiments in daunting. (Although it can be done – in ecological microcosms, for example). It must have evil applications too of course, from advertising to politics.

The Metaverse (what is it?)

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This supposedly influential article from January 2020 (remember that innocent time?) is called The Metaverse: What it is… But at the end, you are still not quite sure what it is. It will involve references to Snow Crash and Ready Player One, obviously. It will be the successor to the current internet. It will be interoperable between platforms and technologies, and it will be always on and always accessible. It will not be a “virtual world”. Okay, I have to admit that is exactly what I thought it would be.

There are a couple things I can imagine coming in the near future. One is much better video conferencing using avatars with facial expressions and eye contact. Those of us who have participated in the last year and a half of mostly remote work have learned that video conferencing has come a long, long way, but this is a key next step to make it more engaging and realistic. I still think augmented reality has to be a big deal (see Rainbow’s End). This will project an additional layer of information/content onto the real world, which I personally am looking forward to although I can imagine it becoming addictive and making the un-augmented real world seem dull and ultimately be neglected (see Rainbow’s End). We just need the right sort of unobtrusive glasses or visor to make it work in the short term.

People will be able to live much farther off the (physical) grid if that is what they want to do, and real-world cities might suffer as a result. On the other hand, real-world cities might become even more interesting than they are now. Cities are information and experience-rich, after all.

who goes Nazi?

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This is a 1941 article in Harpers, and be warned parts of it don’t read as politically correct today.

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.

Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

Harpers, 1941

What’s interesting to me is the idea that members of the American upper class having garden parties at the time seemed to contemplate the possibility of America itself “going Nazi”. And it is the whims of a very small group of upper class people who seem to get to decide whether the rest of us in the vast masses “go Nazi” or not.

Taiwan war early warning?

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The belligerent rhetoric over Taiwan seems to have ramped up suddenly (I’m writing on Saturday morning, October 9). See for example this article in Eurasia Review (a publication I know nothing about this publication, couldn’t find out much about it online, and it raises some propaganda alarms as I read it. It credits “VOA” as the author of the piece, which would make it official propaganda assuming it is true.

U.S. officials have expressed growing alarm in recent days, describing China’s behavior toward Taiwan as increasingly aggressive and belligerent. The concern has been heightened by repeated aerial incursions, with Beijing sending more than 150 military jets into Taiwanese airspace over several days.

Eurasia Review

Here’s an article from something called “The Conversation” which also sets off my propaganda alarms. But Wikipedia describes it as “a network of not-for-profit media outlets that publish news stories on the Internet that are written by academic experts and researchers, under a free Creative Commons licence, allowing reuse but only without modification.”

Taiwan’s porcupine doctrine has three defensive layers. The outer layer is about intelligence and reconnaissance to ensure defence forces are fully prepared. Behind this come plans for guerrilla warfare at sea with aerial support from sophisticated aircraft provided by the US. The innermost layer relies on the geography and demography of the island. The ultimate objective of this doctrine is that of surviving and assimilating an aerial offensive well enough to organise a wall of fire that will prevent the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from successfully invading.

The Conversation

Sounds like a fun video game, or an unbelievably hellish reality. Let’s not let this happen.

cold hard cash

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Axios has a short primer on the idea of giving out cash to alleviate poverty. Conceptually, I am more attracted to the idea that the government should provide services the private market is failing to provide, employ people at market/living wages to provide those services, and provide people with the education and lifelong training to succeed in the private marketplace. Along with that, it should provide generous unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits to those who have a good reason for not working. Also, child care and health care so people can work part time, start a business or study without one spouse being chained to a full time large employer to get those benefits for the family. Of course, we do have unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and these do amount to giving cash to people. We also have tax credits, which are mathematically indistinguishable from giving out cash but psychologically very different. Because we have a tax system that is intentionally designed to be hated so nobody will support it.

asteroids can sneak up on us

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I have been putting asteroid strikes in the category of potentially catastrophic but so rare as to not worry about. I have also assumed we would see a really big one coming for decades if not centuries and would at least have a chance to get organized and do something about it (a big if, given the lack of coordinated international response to climate change and the pandemic.) But according to this Jerusalem Post article, a fairly sizable asteroid could sneak up on us by passing close to the sun on its way to us. This happened on September 16, 2021 with an asteroid somewhere in the 50-100 m diameter range. The article doesn’t do the math on what size conventional or nuclear weapon this would be the equivalent of if it hit. I thought that was pretty standard…

The article has an interesting (and chilling) photo of the 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid streaking in, which was about 17 m wide. The article says that on April 13, 2029, a 340 m asteroid is supposed to “safely pass by” the earth at a distance of “under 32,000 km”. Assuming the article has the number right, that is only about one-tenth the distance from the Earth to the moon. This sounds like one to watch.

simulation games

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This Wired article has a run-down of new(ish) simulation games. Before I entered the intensive child rearing years, I was one of those people like the author that was into this type of game (and also sports games, which are a simulation of sorts), and not so much into arcade-type games. So it is somewhat comforting that there are other people like me.

I keep hearing that the intensive child-rearing years do eventually wind down, and that you remember them fondly as you start to enjoy having some time to enjoy your own grownup life again. For my wife and I, there are just some slight twinkles of light at the end of the tunnel. It’s been a long dark tunnel, particularly with Covid, although of course there have been many joyful moments along the way and over time we will probably remember those and forget the hard parts.

Also appealing to me is the idea of writing my own simulations of real things that I can play something like games. For example, the stock market? climate change? the ecology of my neighborhood? geopolitics? Can I link these things together into one simulation of the universe as it actually plays out, Asimov Foundation-style? Of course not. Many smarter people than me have tried and failed. But the fun could be in the trying. Now, if you will excuse me I need to attend to the (beautiful, healthy, wonderful in every way) whining children and mountains of dirty laundry and dishes and unpaid bills and things in my house that are broken.

Covid-19 probably wasn’t made in a lab, but something like it could be at any time

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This Atlantic article is about a grant proposal to artificially create something very close to Covid-19 in a laboratory. Not to worry, it was not funded and it does not prove or disprove the “lab leak hypothesis”. Wait a minute, regardless of the lab leak hypothesis, what is chilling here is that the technology exists to create a Covid-like bioweapon or something even worse in a laboratory right now. This does not particularly surprise me, but it is scary. Even if we assume scientists in leading countries like the U.S. and China are relatively well regulated and have relatively high ethical standards, somewhere in the world there will be experts who are not as ethical and people willing to fund them. And over time, the technology will become more accessible to more people. And garage biotechnology will be harder to monitor and control than nuclear technology.

If I were spinning conspiracy theories here, I would say isn’t it an interesting coincidence that U.S. laboratories are set up to genetically engineer a Covid-19 if they want to, and U.S. laboratories also happened to have the vaccine for Covid-19 pretty much developed and ready to commercialize when needed. Hmm…I have no evidence of this and am not saying it is likely, I am just saying it is a story that would not be inconsistent with reality.