Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

ask not what Bernie Sanders could have done for you…

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Warning: political post follows! I’m still thinking about why the continuing Black Lives Matter demonstrations are bothering me a little bit. This Ross Douthat post (the New York Times token conservative op-ed guy) has helped me crystallize it a little bit. Police violence is an important but narrow issue. Renaming streets and tearing down statues is justified in some cases but doesn’t do much to address systemic problems. Maybe the movement will expand to encompass larger issues like violence of all types, mass incarceration, discrimination and inequality afflicting black people. All good, but only a slice of the much larger problems affecting our country and planet.

Many of the people demonstrating in the streets voted overwhelmingly against the candidate who would have done the most on these issues. The article is called “The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders”. The way I look at it, Bernie Sanders didn’t fail, we all failed to support the candidate who could have brought about real change for all the hard working people of this country, black people included. The “socialism” Bernie stood for was to take just a little of our country’s enormous wealth and use it to provide the benefits that would make ordinary people’s lives better, and that most other wealthy and even functional-but-not-so-wealthy countries in the world are providing. Health care, education, child care, and retirement for a start. If we ever decide to pay reparations for slavery, it is likely to look…something like this. Bernie would have fought to provide these benefits to the descendants of enslaved African people, and to everyone else who needs them. Big business and wealthy individuals would have fought back, tooth and nail. And Bernie would have maybe led a Congress that would have fought back by enshrining meaningful anti-corruption provisions in our nation’s Constitution. He would have led us in doing our nation’s fair share (at least) to address the climate crisis and accelerating ecological collapse. Maybe. Most likely, he would have made real progress on one or two of these issues in our messy real world political system, then tried to lay the ground work for others to continue the fight. But that is more than the next Joe B. Democrat in line is likely to do. Prove me wrong Joe!

Chinese government and genocide

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There are reports that the Chinese government is forcibly sterilizing women in detention camps.

Women who had fewer than the legally permitted limit of two children were involuntarily fitted with intrauterine contraceptives, says the report.

It also reports that some of the women said they were being coerced into receiving sterilisation surgeries.

Former camp detainees said they were given injections that stopped their periods or caused unusual bleeding consistent with the effects of birth-control drugs.

Guardian

The report goes on to say this might be genocide. I don’t understand the “might”. Let’s review the UN definition of genocide. And remember these people are either in detention camps or under heavy surveillance designed to suppress their religion, language and culture.

…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;

b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

UN

I just don’t see the ambiguity.

I’m not against intrauterine devices by the way. They are safe, effective, and reversible. Maybe we should pop one into every girl around age 13 or so (I don’t know the minimum safe age, I’m not a doctor), then let her decide when and if to take it out as an adult. The seemingly intractable abortion debate might go away. We need an equally safe, effective, and reversible male contraceptive too.

U.S. still isn’t screening international arrivals!

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In looking for that explanation of why some countries have largely dodged the coronavirus bullet while the U.S. is melting down, many people are focused on masks. I wonder if the almost total failure to screen airport arrivals could be the single most important factor. Thousands of plane loads of infected people from Italy landed in the U.S. northeast airports in February and March. The CDC’s screening and tracking protocols completely broke down, and it got out of control before there was any chance to contain it. Fast-forward to June, and they still aren’t effectively screening airport passengers!

Then we arrived in the US. No one at Dulles International Airport checked passengers’ temperatures. SAA had given each passenger health forms to fill in for the US authorities. No one asked for them. No sanitisers were on offer. No social distancing was practised in the immigration queues. People literally breathed down my neck. In Joburg the 2m apart rule was strictly observed.

At the immigration counter my passport was stamped and the very nice border policeman said: “Welcome to America.”

I waltzed over to baggage reclaim, got my luggage and left. I could have walked into the US coughing, sweaty and feverish and not a single authority would have known — they hadn’t bothered to do a basic check that I wasn’t indeed feverish.

JUSTICE MALALA: What three American airports taught me about Covid-19 and political leadership

Before it gets to the U.S. arrival, the article recounts the strict measures in place in South Africa (“one of the nations Trump included in the class of “shithole countries” – direct quote from the article). I’m not familiar with this person or publication, by the way, but it matches my experience traveling in Southeast Asia (Singapore and Thailand specifically) during the 2009 swine flu epidemic. Temperature screening and screening questionnaires were everywhere, beginning the moment I arrived at an airport, and continuing in shopping centers, on public transportation, etc. It was all polite and professional, but I knew that if I developed symptoms I would be taken to a government-run quarantine center for 14 days. (And as long as they had three meals a day and a decent internet connection, that didn’t sound like the end of the day!) Thailand and Singapore have both handled this pandemic very well. Thailand in particular is a middle income country with (until recently) a lot of back and forth travel to Wuhan, China.

You can argue that the “second wave” or “second peak” horror show now unfolding in the U.S. can be pinned on poor state and local leadership, but the early failures of airport screening, tracking, and testing were squarely on the federal government’s shoulders, and they not only failed spectacularly compared to most other countries, they haven’t learned anything!

Edward de Bono and creativity

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Edward de Bono is a popular author on the subject of creative and original thinking. This long article is highly critical of him, suggesting that his ideas on creativity and originality are not all that creative or original. It never actually says his ideas are bad, just that he derived bits and pieces of them from the scientific literature without giving credit to the people who actually thought them up.

In the course of criticizing him, the article does a good job of summarizing his ideas.

The Use of Lateral Thinking is a short book with a long reach. Providing no more than a few slight examples of how lateral thinking might work in practice – largely on the perception of shape and function in geometric forms – it proposed four vague principles for problem-solving and creativity: the recognition of dominant polarising ideas; the search for different ways of looking at things; a relaxation of the rigid control of vertical thinking; and the use of chance.

Aeon

It sounds like decent advice to me. First, you need to learn the rules (i.e., traditional way of thinking about or doing something) before you earn the right to break them. Otherwise you run the risk of reinventing the wheel or coming up with something at odds with indisputable evidence or logic you just weren’t familiar with. Now, you have earned the right to look at the issue from a variety of angles and talk to people across disciplines that might not usually talk to each other. Finally, exposing yourself to a wide variety of information and experiences, and taking time to reflect on them alone and with others, will open your mind to new connections and possibilities.

The article goes on to survey the literature on the subject of creative thinking, which de Bono may have partially drawn on. This includes:

  • a variety of eccentric and famous figures who seem to have been good at letting their minds wander and coming up with interesting things
  • Henri Poncare’s idea of training the mind on a problem, then lettin insights slowly build while we are doing unrelated mindless tasks
  • the Einstellung effect, where people fail to solve a problem because it resembles another problem they know how to solve, but that solution doesn’t work (maybe this contradicts my idea of “learn the rules before you break them”? but I don’t know, maybe it just means that breaking out of the mold takes conscious effort)
  • Gestalt psychology’s idea of “productive thinking”, which emphasized looking at a problem from different angles
  • J.P. Guilford’s idea of “divergent thinking”, characterized by people with “the ability to produce a great number of ideas or problem solutions in a short period of time; to simultaneously propose a variety of approaches to a specific problem; to produce original ideas; and to organise the details of an idea in one’s head and carry it out.” (this sounds like brainstorming to me, other than organizing the ideas at the end, which is the logical next step after any productive brainstorming session)
  • and what do you know, brainstorming. The term was coined by Alex Osborn, who favored groups of 5-10 people thinking together on the same problem, sometimes aided by randomly selected words.
  • More recent research emphasizing the value of individuals brainstorming independently, then combining and organizing ideas through “the productive spark of debate, friction and constructive conflict”. You have to keep it friendly to be productive, in my personal experience.
  • Arthur Koestler, who apparently surveyed many of the topics above in the 1960s and also emphasized the creative role of humor.

So, I’ll attempt to synthesize all this and combine it unscientifically with my personal experiences.

  1. Define the problem you are trying to solve or the question you are trying to answer. Writing it down helps me. Then, “give yourself permission” to think about it gradually over a period of time. Also give yourself permission not to think about it – don’t force it.
  2. Do lots of reading, listening, and thinking, both related and unrelated, fiction and non-fiction. Garden, take walks in nature, listen to or make music, exercise, meditate, and even consider responsible, moderate use of recreational substances. (But consider the cautionary tale of Sherlock Holmes, who could only turn his creative brain off with music and cocaine – Arthur Conan Doyle must have been like that or known somebody like that.)
  3. Keep a notebook (or the electronic equivalent) handy to write down anything related that pops in your head. Review these notes occasionally.
  4. Keep going until you have lots and lots of ideas, then slowly let them gel in your mind. Then start organizing them in writing (or drawing, or whatever makes sense).
  5. Then consider discussing your ideas with other people who have ideas and like to discuss them peacefully. I find it hard to find people like this.

Now you might arrive at a creative idea or solution to a problem or two. It’s hard work and there are no guarantees which means it is not always a good match for billable hours, which could be why you don’t see more of it in the professional ranks. Put another way, your creativity idea will not necessarily make you rich, and it might even make somebody else rich, in which case you may have a case of the sour grapes. Good luck!

June 2020 in Review

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In current events, the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. is spinning out of control as I write this in early July. I made a list of trackers and simulation tools that I have looked at. Asian countries, even developing countries, pretty much have it under control, Europe is getting it under control, and the U.S. and a few other countries are melting down. Some voices are very pessimistic on the U.S. economy’s chances to come back. So of course I’m thinking about that, but I don’t have all that many novel or brilliant ideas on it so I’m choosing to write about other things below. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The UN just seems to be declining into irrelevancy. I have a few ideas: (1) Add Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia to the Security Council, (2) transform part of the UN into something like a corporate risk management board, but focused on the issues that cause the most suffering and existential risk globally, and (3) have the General Assembly focus on writing model legislation that can be debated and adopted by national legislatures around the world.
Most hopeful story:
  • Like many people, I was terrified that the massive street demonstrations that broke out in June would repeat the tragedy of the 1918 Philadelphia war bond parade, which accelerated the spread of the flu pandemic that year. Not only does it appear that was not the case, it is now a source of great hope that Covid-19 just does not spread that easily outdoors. I hope the protests lead to some meaningful progress for our country. Meaningful progress to me would mean an end to the “war on drugs”, which I believe is the immediate root cause of much of the violence at issue in these protests, and working on the “long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own.”
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Here’s a recipe for planting soil using reclaimed urban construction waste: 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost

Jeff Masters: We’re all going to die!

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Jeff Masters, who used to write a neat blog for Weather Underground before weather.com/IBM destroyed everything that was ever good about that site, has a dark take on climate change. He now writes on Yale Climate Connections, which is okay, but I notice that one by one my beloved RSS feeds are falling prey to neglect (there’s an RSS feed for Yale Climate Connections, which is okay, but not one for Jeff Masters’s blog specifically.)

When the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica melt, the forests of the Amazon transition to scrubland, and vast swaths of once-fertile land become inhospitable desert, there will be no climate change vaccine that will suddenly bring an end to these essentially irreversible catastrophes. Tens of millions will starve. Wars will break out over scarce resources. Hundreds of millions of climate change refugees will flee rising seas, coasts will be ravaged by stronger storms, and desert-like lands will be without the food and water needed to sustain civilization.

Jeff Masters, Yale Climate Connections

I think that’s a pretty good elevator pitch for the “why should I care?” crowd: (1) massive melting of ice sheets on both poles leading to catastrophic sea level rise, (2) loss of the Amazon rain forest, which along with the oceans maintains the mix of gases in the atmosphere that we have become accustomed to throughout human history, (3) loss of huge amounts of what used to be productive farm land, due to high temperatures and lack of water. These processes will play out slowly, maybe over decades. We are the frogs in the slowly heating up cook pot. We may see slowly rising prices for food, and we will have to clean up after increasingly frequent storms, floods, and fires. Eventually we may see absolute food shortages. These acute crises will start to affect poorer nations, and poorer people in richer nations, before others, of course. Mass migrations, civil conflicts within nation-states, and geopolitical conflicts between nation-states may break out. Throw in a few random events like earthquakes and pandemics at already vulnerable moments, and things may get dicey.

This sounds awful, and there is certainly no worldwide effort to effectively deal with it. At the same time, science, technological know-how, and financial wealth continue to increase, although they obviously are not spread equally or fairly among the world’s people. We have seen examples of effective leadership and cooperation in the past at times of crisis, and maybe these will emerge again. As Jeff Masters rightly points out though, unlike wars and pandemics, a big difference with climate change is that when it becomes obvious to absolutely everyone that something has to be done, there may be no good options left.

my proposal to reform the United Nations Security Council

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Most of this article in National Interest (which I’m not too familar with) is an opinion piece about Iran sanctions, but a little more than half way it does a good job explaining the rationale behind the UN Security Council.

The UN Security Council is the most important multilateral institution engaged in global governance and cooperative rule-setting. Created in the aftermath of two successive and catastrophic world wars, the council’s legal structure of giving veto power to the major world powers has helped maintain peace between major powers for over seventy-five years. Its decisions mark the highest level of international law.

The raison d’être of the UNSC is to prevent the unilateral use of force by countries. The council relies on consensus decision-making among the five permanent members, ensuring the world’s most powerful countries are constantly in dialogue over pressing security matters. The council’s approval is required to launch wars and the resolutions it passes are binding on all UN members.

Crucially, the veto power the UNSC affords the United States, China, Russia, the UK, and France gives these leading powers a stake in the global order. This helps obstruct zero-sum competition from taking hold among them, which could easily spiral into the kind of worldwide conflicts that reaped immense suffering in the last century.

National Interest

So, one way to state the purpose is to avoid cross-border aggression by major powers against other major powers, because such aggression by any one would automatically be opposed by the other four. No one country is so powerful that the balance of power would be in its favor.

To have a future, the Security Council clearly needs to be expanded to include today’s most powerful countries. It is unlikely it could kick off less powerful countries already there (looking at you, England and France). However, there is some limit to how many parties could be expected to reach consensus. How many? We need more than 5, and more than 10 seems like too many.

How do you define “powerful”? How about a formula? I pulled stats on GDP (at purchasing power parity) from the CIA World Factbook. GDP correlates to economic power, and potential though not necessarily military might. The top 10 look like this:

1China
2United States
3India
4Japan
5Germany
6Russia
7Indonesia
8Brazil
9United Kingdom
10France

That would include all the current members, plus add Japan, Germany (news flash: WWII is over!), India, Brazil, and Indonesia (hands down the world’s most populous and powerful nation that westerners never think about.)

Who barely misses the cut? #11-15 are Mexico, Italy, Turkey, South Korea, and Spain.

What if we decided actual military spending mattered. I pulled those numbers, gave 50% weight each to GDP and military spending, and it looks like this:

United States
China
India
Russia
Japan
Saudi Arabia
Germany
United Kingdom
Brazil
France

So this would trade Indonesia for Saudi Arabia, which seems odd. If you rate GDP 75% and 25%, you keep Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and leave out France. That seems like a non-starter.

Giving 10% weight to military spending doesn’t change the top 10 compared to straight-up GDP.

So I think my proposal is straight-up GDP. To summarize, it wouldn’t cut out any current member, and would add Germany and Japan, major developed countries and economic powers who lost a war 70 years ago, and major developing countries India, Brazil, and Indonesia. It would be harder to reach consensus with 10 than 5, but the effort of adding these important voices to the conversation would be worth it, and any hard-won consensus would have more legitimacy as representing the majority of the world’s power.

More from Less by Andrew McAfee

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More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next is a new(ish) entry in the decoupling/dematerialization debate. The argument is that we (i.e. the United States) are gradually using fewer natural resources and producing less pollution each year while still growing our economy and quality of life.

This is the point in the post where I have to admit I am reviewing a book I haven’t read. I read the description of the book on Amazon, and this review in Foreign Policy. I would imagine that an MIT scientist (the author, Andrew McAfee) would get the math right. I would imagine he probably understands the difference between stocks and flows. But the general public, and even well- but narrowly educated people typically do not. First we have to decrease the rate at which our footprint is growing, which it sounds like this book might make a case that we have. That is good. But our footprint is still too big to sustain our way of life indefinitely, and still growing. Second, we have to start shrinking our footprint. I don’t think we have, and I am not sure this book makes that case. It is still too big to sustain our way of life indefinitely. Third, we have to shrink it to a level that can sustain our way of life indefinitely. We have to complete these three steps in order, and complete them all before it is too late to save our civilization and our planet’s ecosystems in roughly their current state. It’s unfair because I am literally judging the book by its cover, but it sounds like it makes a case that we might have completed only the first step.

The Foreign Policy article argues that it doesn’t even make that compelling case because it ignores trade and external impacts. In other words, the environmental impact of our domestic consumption and economic activities is happening in developing countries, plus the oceans and atmosphere. It’s surprising to me if he made that obvious a mistake, but again, I would have to read the book to find out. It is unlikely my employer and family and need for some minimal amount of physical rest will afford me an opportunity to do that soon. So if you read it, let me know what you find out!

the latest on the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox

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An updated (and serious) estimate on the Drake equation, which estimates the number of alien civilizations in the Milky Way, says it’s complicated, and uncertain, and highly sensitive to input assumptions…and a possible answer is 36. This kind of sounds like a lot to me, but the article says that given the size of the galaxy, and how far the 36 would be from each other on average, it could explain why we haven’t been able to detect anyone else so far. An important variable in the Drake equation is how long advanced civilizations tend to last. “Advanced” is defined as having invented the radio, because this should make them possible to detect by other civilizations that have also invented the radio. But the theory goes that once the radio is invented, the ball also starts rolling on potentially civilization-ending and ecosystem-killing technologies. There could be many civilizations that come and go, but only a few around at any given time.

India and China

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Soldiers from India and China literally fought with sticks and stones – in June 2020 – and reports are that at least 20 were killed. What appears to happen is that both sides undertake construction projects close to the disputed border. Troops occasionally encounter each other – or attack each other on purpose, who knows?

This just seems dangerous when it’s two large, powerful countries with powerful militaries, including nuclear weapons, and nationalist politics. Isn’t the UN Security Council supposed to help mediate in these cases? I haven’t heard a word about that – maybe one more sign the UN has weakened to the point of irrelevance.