Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Saying something smart about Afghanistan?

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As I write on Monday, August 16, it appears the government of Afghanistan has surrendered to the Taliban with no or few shots fired. I am sure there will be an enormous number of words written about this in the coming decades, and many of them will be smarter than anything I could say now. Nonetheless, here are a few thoughts:

  1. Invading the Graveyard of Empires is not a good idea. Check on the current status of the British and Russian empires. Maybe we will look back on this moment in retrospect as the symbolic end of the U.S. empire (long live the republic!)
  2. I am not sure there is any such thing as humanitarian war. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions were sold on humanitarian objectives, but both almost certainly caused more death and suffering among civilians than they prevented. Diplomacy, economic and trade pressure, humanitarian and peace-keeping missions may be the better way to go, even when they seem frustrating and relatively ineffective.
  3. I still think the Powell doctrine of limited objectives, overwelming force, may be right after all. That was unsatisfying in the case of the first Gulf War, but it was a quick, relatively successful conflict. What would that have looked like in Afghanistan? Well, if we had captured bin Laden early on, there might have been an excuse to leave. When that didn’t happen, we got bogged down with no way out that would not cause chaos. In the end, we just got out and let the chaos unfold. This looks bad for Biden, but it took some guts to make the call and carry it through.
  4. The U.S. just really doesn’t understand other countries. We seem to have trouble putting ourselves in other peoples’ shoes. I don’t fully trust what I see on the news, not because I necessarily think it is lies, but because I don’t trust our government and media to appropriately interpret events and present them to me. I don’t know what to do about this other than seek out a lot of different types of information and try to piece it together. Study history, travel and interact with people from other places when practical. Give expert opinion some weight, while also evaluating the evidence independently using tools like logic and system thinking. By the way, I don’t think censoring the internet is a way out of this. I want access to information and freedom to interpret it, even if there is some danger in everyone having these freedoms at the same time.
  5. What other lessons do we need to heed from past conflicts? Should we maybe invade Russia from Eastern Europe, or engage in some Pacific island hopping, hoping it will put pressure on a large, powerful, proud opponent to give in short of nuclear war? NO!!! Let’s not do this.

What do I think the U.S. should do? Unwind the empire, close foreign bases while providing training and equipment (not necessarily for free) to allies who really want that. Focus on diplomacy and trade. Reinvigorate the UN, or replace it with something better. Make sure we can defend our physical shores, and up our intelligence, cybersecurity and biosecurity games. Dial back and eventually eliminate the nuclear weapons worldwide, and figure out a plan to deal with bioweapons long-term. A war tax is an idea – fund all emergency appropriations with a clear tax that Americans see every day, for example a sales tax that is printed on our receipts, credit card statements, and pay checks. If we don’t deal with short-term geopolitical instability, it will occupy all our attention and leave us no capacity to deal with the longer term threats like food security and inundation of coastal population centers.

astrobiologists on what aliens might actually look like

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Well, astrobiologists don’t know what aliens might look like, because they haven’t observed any. But they do have an idea what conditions on other planets (“at least 100 billion in our galaxy alone”) might be like, and by assuming the principles of evolution and natural selection will apply, they can theorize what kinds of organisms might inhabit them.

Darwin’s aliens
Making predictions about aliens is not an easy task. Most previous work has focused on extrapolating from empirical observations and mechanistic understanding of physics, chemistry and biology. Another approach is to utilize theory to make predictions that are not tied to details of Earth. Here we show how evolutionary theory can be used to make predictions about aliens. We argue that aliens will undergo natural selection – something that should not be taken for granted but that rests on firm theoretical grounds. Given aliens undergo natural selection we can say something about their evolution. In particular, we can say something about how complexity will arise in space. Complexity has increased on the Earth as a result of a handful of events, known as the major transitions in individuality. Major transitions occur when groups of individuals come together to form a new higher level of the individual, such as when single-celled organisms evolved into multicellular organisms. Both theory and empirical data suggest that extreme conditions are required for major transitions to occur. We suggest that major transitions are likely to be the route to complexity on other planets, and that we should expect them to have been favoured by similarly restrictive conditions. Thus, we can make specific predictions about the biological makeup of complex aliens.

Cambridge University Press

Shouldn’t the abstract give us some idea of what those “specific predictions” are? Luckily, this is an open access article. There are some fun passages about why my hands are willing to help my testicals reproduce, rather than trying to reproduce themselves. This is because “their interests are aligned”, and my testicles have (or once had, at the risk of providing way too much information to the reader…) the potential to produce more hands at some point. Like a termite colony, I have gone through a transition to a complex organism, and my various parts are not out for themselves but are working together in a harmonious whole. (That’s the theory, although I’m not sure those testicles were aligned with my brain during my teenage years…)

So there might be simple alien life out there, in the form of single-celled viruses, fungi, bacteria, algae, or whatever. What we are really interested in is complex alien life, which would consist of “a nested hierarchy of entities, with the conditions required to eliminate conflict at each of those levels”. They could have complex individual bodies along the lines of ours, or some kind of creepy colonies made up of simpler organisms, more like ants or termites but with more tentacles. There are some pictures in the paper, have a look.

Universities have astrobiology departments, and it seems like a fun thing to study. You get to learn about biology and astronomy, combine theory and observation.

tipping points

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A new article from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences goes through eight climate change tipping points that have studied, and tries to assign an economic impact to each. I’ll list them here in order of highest to lowest impact according to this study (see Table 2). They use the change in social cost of carbon as their key metric.

Two tipping points have major potential impacts and represent over 80% of the total risk from the eight, according to this study:

  • ocean methane hydrates
  • permafrost carbon feedback

Four tipping points have relatively modest expected impacts, at least modest compared to the truly existential threats represented by the top two:

  • West Antarctic Ice Sheet
  • Greenland Ice Sheet disintegration
  • Indian Summer Monsoon
  • Amazon dieback

Finally, two actually have small positive impacts on the (human) economy according to these authors:

  • Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowdown (AMOC)
  • Arctic sea ice / Surface Albedo Feedback

They don’t include “nonmarket effects”, so if you just feel that the death of the Amazon forest is profoundly sad, that is not reflected here. The authors are explicit about this so I guess it is okay.

These results are mismatched with my impressions, which are most likely driven by the amount of media coverage given to tipping points. I have probably read the most about ice sheets, the AMOC, and the Amazon, and these somewhat surprisingly do not make the top of the list. I feel like I have some basic grasp of the scientific concepts on each of these other than the methane hydrates. I understand why releasing massive amounts of methane would raise temperatures. I just don’t yet understand the feedback loop that would cause it to happen, whereas with the permafrost thawing it is pretty clear. Are the methane hydrates just frozen and expected to melt? I suppose in that case they are very similar to methane under the permafrost, with the difference being land and water. So the release of vast amounts of trapped methane is by far the biggest impact identified by this paper. For the most part though, the solutions to address any of these tipping points are going to be the same – drastic greenhouse gas emissions reductions and/or drastic geoengineering. Nothing else is going to reduce the amount of heat and solar energy melting ice, thawing permafrost and undersea frozen methane hydrates, and affecting ocean currents across vast chunks of the planet.

why the development gap persists

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The world’s technology, for the most part, is available to less developed, lower income countries. So why don’t they just reach out, grab it, and catch up? Well, a few have, particularly the so-called “Asian tigers”. Others have caught up on life expectancy and education, but not on income. This article by Ricardo Hausmann suggests a few reasons why it is not so easy.

  • Restrictions on trade, competition, and/or property rights. (But the point of this article is that these are the traditional answers economists give, and they are not the only reasons.)
  • University scientists are more interested in teaching, basic research, and scientific publications than in applied research that could help profit-seeking commercial firms.
  • Businesses do not invest much in R&D, either internally or with university partners.

He uses patent filings as a proxy for technological innovation, and I am not so sure about that. For one thing, he makes this statement:

Countries like Austria, Germany, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Norway, New Zealand, and Singapore patent at a rate at least one-quarter that of the US. And other countries, such as Australia, Canada, Switzerland, Iran, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Slovenia, come in at just above one-seventh the US rate.

Project Syndicate

The countries in the list above are doing quite well I believe compared to the U.S., and I know some of them have per-capita incomes greater than the U.S. Certainly, our per-capita U.S. GDP is not 7 times Norway’s and 4 times Singapore’s! (It’s lower in both cases per the CIA world fact book.)

Also, being healthy and well educated in a middle income country might not be all that terrible a life.

Those are my criticisms. But I do sometimes fantasize about how I would jump-start progress in a developing country. Certainly, I want to believe that big investments in research and education would pay off in the long term. Building universities, attracting talented professors, and then connecting them to private sector needs would seem to be important. I would want to bring in direct investment from private firms with high-tech know-how, and also seek expertise from development agencies like the World Bank, USAID and its equivalents in other countries. In all these cases though, you have to drive a hard bargain or you are likely to be exploited. I might hire Norway or Singapore to help me do that. Get the economy moving, then use the proceeds to build the infrastructure and keep the education and R&D thing going. At some point, you have to invest in health care, environmental protection, and labor standards if you want to provide a decent quality of life for people. I would probably follow Costa Rica’s lead and not bother with much of an army, but then I would probably be invaded by my neighbors or murdered by my own body guards.

Philip K. Dick, Prophet of the Happy Ending

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My “summer of parallel universes” reading theme is about to come to an end. Which doesn’t mean I have to stop reading about parallel universes, it just means the meteorological, astronomical, and social season known as summer is coming to an end. I have made a significant dent on the last Dark Tower book, which is known as…The Dark Tower. I might actually finish it by Labor Day, but that doesn’t matter. Anyway, this speech reminded me that Philip K. Dick had a lot to say on the subject. Not only does he have a lot to say, he at least claims to believe it or at least consider it more than just a fictional plot line. Finally, he has gathered it into something almost approaching a coherent religion, and not only that but a unifying theory of religions, complete with a (quite rosy) end times scenario.

It’s very hard to pick an excerpt that captures the essence of the speech. The whole thing really is worth a read. But here is one unsatisfactory choice:

“We in the field [of science fiction writers], of course, know this idea as the ‘alternate universe’ theme. …Let us say, just for fun, that [such alternate universes] DO exist. Then, if they do, how are they linked to each other, if in fact they are (or would be) linked? If you drew a map of them, showing their locations, what would the map look like? For instance (and I think this is a very important question), are they absolutely separate one from another, or do they overlap? Because if they overlap, then such problems as ‘Where do they exist?’ and ‘How do you get from one to the next’ admit to a possible solution. I am saying, simply, if they do indeed exist, and if they do indeed overlap, then we may in some literal, very real sense inhabit several of them to various degrees at any given time. And although we all see one another as living humans walking about and talking and acting, some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of, say, Universe One than the other people do; and some of us may inhabit relatively greater amounts of Universe Two, Track Two, instead, and so on. It may not merely be that our subjective impressions of the world differ, but there may be an overlapping, a superimposition, of a number of worlds so that objectively, not subjectively, our worlds may differ. Our perceptions differ as a result of this… It may be that some of these superimposed worlds are passing out of existence, along the lateral time line I spoke of, and some are in the process of moving toward greater, rather than lesser, actualization. These processes would occur simultaneously and not at all in linear time. The kind of process we are talking about here is a transformation, a kind of metamorphosis, invisibly achieved. But very real. And very important…

Christ was saying over and over again that there really are many objective realms, somehow related, and somehow bridgeable by living – not dead- men, and that the most wondrous of these worlds was a just kingdom in which either He himself or God himself or both of them ruled. And he did not merely speak of a variety of ways of subjectively viewing one world; the Kingdom was and is an actual different place, at the opposite end of continua starting with slavery and utter pain. It was his mission to teach his disciples the secret of crossing along the orthogonal path. He did not merely report what lay there; he taught the method of getting there. But, the secret was lost, the Roman authority crushed it. And so we do not have it. But perhaps we can refind it, since we know that such a secret exists…

“This problem-solving by means of reprogramming variables along the linear time axis of our universe, thereby generating branched-off lateral worlds – I have the impression that the metaphor of the chessboard is especially useful in evaluating how this all can be – in fact must be. Across from the Programmer-Reprogrammer sits a counterentity, whom Joseph Campbell calls the Dark Counterplayer. …The Programmer-Reprogrammer is not making his moves of improvement against inert matter; he is dealing with a cunning opponent. Let us say that on the game board – our universe in space-time – the Dark Counterplayer makes a move; he sets up a reality situation. Being the Dark player, the outcome of his desires constitutes what we experience as evil: nongrowth, the power of the lie, death and the decay of forms, the prison of immutable cause and effect. …The printout which we undergo as historic events, passes through stages of a dialectical interaction, thesis and antithesis, as the forces of the two players mingle. Evidently some syntheses fall to the dark counterplayer.

Philip K. Dick, 1977

To me, this religion actually seems logically coherent with the world I am experiencing right now. Which doesn’t mean I believe it, but I would rate it as more probable than a number of others, and if I were currently shopping for a religion I might add it to my cart but not hit the check out button just yet.

kids, risk, and herd immunity

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Like many parents I am trying to judge the risk of Covid-19 exposure at school for my under-12 children, and finding it challenging. They seem quite likely to be exposed, moderately likely to be infected, unlikely to experience dangerous symptoms, likely to infect others who are unvaccinated, and unlikely to infect others who are vaccinated (including parents and grandparents), who are in turn unlikely to experience dangerous symptoms. That all adds up to an acceptable risk to me. The one risk above we have some control over is the risk of exposure, and that is why I support the reasonable precautions the school district is taking, including masking. Once children have the opportunity to be vaccinated and parents have had a reasonable period of time to take advantage of that opportunity, I think the masks should come off. Adults who choose not be vaccinated are irresponsible in my view, especially if they are over 50 or so, but they have been given the chance and chosen to accept the risk, although some may not fully understand it.

This statement in an article in The Week caught my eye:

That’s feasible because most of these questions are familiar, and familiarity gives us a working knowledge on which to base our calls. I’ve climbed trees and drank beer and gone to sleepovers, and I know firsthand the advantages of driving a car. I put my children in our car without a second thought, though vehicle accidents are the second-highest cause of children’s deaths in the United States, because I believe (as almost everyone does) the benefits exceed the risks. I never considered doing otherwise. I certainly didn’t agonize over the decision the way many Americans are now agonizing over the best choices for kids and COVID-19.

The Week

I do not accept the risks of daily car travel! The article includes some Twitter screen shots which in turn link back to a New York Times article (which I do not subscribe to because lying about weapons of mass destruction) about risks to children. According to these, car accidents are the second most likely cause of death for children under 14, killing about 2 out of 100,000. Incidentally, drowning is the top cause of death for ages 1 to 4 and cancer for 5 to 14. The death risk due to Covid is an entire order of magnitude lower at about 0.2 per 100,000. The only other communicable disease that even makes the list of flu/pneumonia, which kills children at higher rates, even during the pandemic. We should remember that one reason these things are at the top of the list is that child mortality is pretty rare, and we have eliminated many of the communicable diseases that used to kill children, or come up with highly effective ways to deal with them like vaccination and simply keeping kids well hydrated with clean water when they are sick. Shockingly to me, both homicide and suicide are pretty high on the list as causes of death for children.

I put my children in a car when there is somewhere we need or want to go, and a car is clearly the best way to get there. But I have chosen a place for our family to live where nearly all school, work, shopping, and the majority of recreational trips can be done on foot. This nearly eliminates the single most risky thing most U.S. children do every day. I also want to state for the record, as I have many times and you might be tired of hearing it if you are regular reader, that U.S. street/sidewalk/intersection/bike lane designs are unnecessarily dangerous and children are dying unnecessarily just because our politicians and professionals are ignorant of international best practices or too cynical to adopt them. Come on, let’s do something about this for our kids.

Incidentally, I’m a childhood cancer survivor and obviously I am grateful for the technology, health care workers, and most of all my parents who got me through that. We need to keep up the cancer research. Who knows what role pollution plays in childhood cancer, vs. random chance? But working on pollution, especially air pollution, is a no-brainer so let’s do that too. Living in walkable, bikeable communities where most trips can be taken without internal combustion would eliminate a lot of air pollution and keep kids safer in multiple ways.

August 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?

Most hopeful story: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.

AI and fusion

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This article talks about machine learning/AI helping to make sense of the data from fusion experiments, and maybe eventually designing and even running the experiments. It’s interesting to think about computers speeding up progress by being able to design and run experiments orders of magnitude faster than humans could. If it works well, they could fail a million or a billion times in short order and there would still be value in a single success. You could also imagine a computer going down a rabbit hole and coming up with a result that humans are not able to explain or replicate, and then you would have to think about what to do with that result. There’s also the question of whether a computer can ever truly “understand” a system, but I guess constructed a model, whether mental or mathematical, testing it against observation, tweaking it, and then testing it against more observation is basically how we do it.

modern high-tech Noah looks at ectogenesis

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If you were going to build an ark and put two of every animal on it, in these modern times, you would have to consider ectogenesis. Basically, you would freeze embryos, which is a 100% viable existing technology, and build robots with some kind of reliable renewable power source to thaw them out and raise them after you are long dead. You could fit a lot of this on an ark, or a spaceship, and they wouldn’t eat or drink or poop as long as you kept them frozen. One conundrum, which the article does go into, is whether or not to include humans, or just see if some other species evolves intelligence. I would bet on crows/ravens personally. Dolphins have had their chance, and they are perpetually stuck at toddler level, although they seem to have fun. Whatever it is, then they could use their intelligence to develop planet-killing weapons and energy sources, along with ethical consciousness, ark building technology, and the ability to freeze embryos and build robots to hatch and raise them.

the new IPCC physical science basis for we’re fucked

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I suppose I have to say something about the new IPCC science report that came out this week (I’m writing on Thursday, August 12). It’s easy to find summaries of it from actual journalists in the media, for example this one from the AP.

I’ve only read the summary for policy makers. I have the best intentions to read the full report, but then I had the best intentions to read the last 16 IPCC reports, not to mention the proliferating ecosystem and biodiversity reports. Anyway, if you don’t mind a collection of random observations, here are a handful of things that caught my eye:

  • The graphics are kind of nice. If you are trying to communicate science-y or tech-y things to general audiences, they are worth a glance.
  • If we stopped emitting carbon emissions today, the earth would continue to warm for decades, if not centuries or millennia. This means the effects we are feeling right now were caused by emissions decades ago. Emissions have not only continued for decades, but they have accelerated. Things are going to continue to get worse, and probably not linearly but exponentially. If we drastically cut emissions today, the results would be detectable in about 20 years or so. The Earth is a dynamic system with lags and feedback loops.
  • Warming of about 1.5 degrees C (I don’t know how to make a degree symbol in WordPress) would be considered a great outcome. The Earth has already warmed by about 1.0 degrees as of right now (2019 actually).
  • Human activity is the overwhelming cause of warming. Come on, don’t be stupid. Natural factors exist but they are small compared to the human activity.
  • One thing that did surprise me is that scientists are pretty sure that human-caused air pollution has had a significant retarding (using this word in the scientific/musical sense of slowing something down) effect on global warming. But again, more than overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of burning, burning, burning with reckless abandon for centuries now.
  • Scientists are very sure human activity is driving massive ice loss in the Arctic. They are only kind of medium sure it is the main driver in the Antarctic.
  • So what is a good place to live? Well, central and eastern North America are some of the only regions are Earth that are not unequivocally hotter already, meaning scientists disagree on whether they are or not. They are more at risk of flooding though, along with most of Asia. Drought is biting harder in western North America, parts of Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and southern Australia than elsewhere.
  • There are five scenarios in this report. They are called SSP1-1.9, SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5.

Compared to 1850–1900, global surface temperature averaged over 2081–2100 is very likely to be higher by 1.0°C to 1.8°C under the very low GHG emissions scenario considered (SSP1-1.9), by 2.1°C to 3.5°C in the intermediate scenario (SSP2-4.5) and by 3.3°C to 5.7°C under the very high GHG emissions scenario (SSP5-8.5)24. The last time global surface temperature was sustained at or above 2.5°C higher than 1850–1900 was over 3 million years ago (medium confidence).

IPCC
  • Coastal property may not be a good investment.
  • Scientists are divided on the tipping point theories involving the global meridional circulation. They agree it is going to weaken though. The tipping point collapse scenarios “can’t be ruled out and are part of risk assessment”. Ha – risk assessment language might say something like “unknown but non-zero probability, existential threat”.
  • The report provides a remaining carbon budget that could be used for policy making, depending on the end point the world would like to target.