The Illusion of Relevance
I’m not a big fan of the human intellect. In fact I think one of the most obvious points in science – too rarely addressed – is how inadequately evolution has prepared us for the challenges of modern technological times. A simple example is the fact many of us eat too much, and die early from diseases that we’d rarely get if we maintained a healthy lifestyle of modest calorie intake and modest exercise.
Every year *billions* of life years are lost simply due to minor deviations from our evolutionary designed healthy lifestyle recipe. This is not to suggest that recipe of modest calorie intake + modest exercise is a health panacea, but those two factors dwarf most others in the developed world. Poor countries, on the other hand, suffer more from *too few” calories and vices like smoking, war, and poor health standards. In fact it is in this arena where humanity could have a stunning impact on raising the standard of living for about a billion people with a modest investments in health, water, and infrastructure.
Yet a combination of dictatorial regimes, inept bureaucracies, human ignorance among the victims, and widespread indifference from the affluent countries condemns an extraordinary number of people to a lifetime of relatively poor health and poverty.
What does this have to do with the illusion of relevance? I think one aspect of our intellectual inadequacy is that we often assign importance to the wrong things. Why is the death of Michael Jackson so much more interesting to so many than the deaths of some 125,000 children that have happened since Jackson’s untimely demise? Every week sees hundreds of thousands die – often painfully and miserably – from diseases like malaria, rotoviruses, and malnutrition that are all easily preventable at relatively low cost. This is NOT to suggest the people dying do not have responsibilities here – they do and I think a key component of bringing higher global health standards is to treat parents in the third world more harshly when they ignore the needs of their children in favor of their own bad habits and bad decisions. Political correctness prevents using some marketing tactics that might prove effective in combating the profound, pervasive ignorance that often creates irrational aversion to great programs like vaccinations, health, condoms, schooling for girls, and other standard western rights that are currently beyond the grasp of so many in the developing world.
The tragic circumstances of the third world are not generally our *fault* as suggested by the naive who fail to see that it is the *lack of US participation*, not the presence of it, that has condemned so many poor economies to failure.
Still, solving these problems remains a large part of our *responsibility* as global citizens. Partly due to the moral imperatives that are a product of the worldview most of us share but I think more importantly simply because we *can* solve these problems if we can extract ourselves from the foolish concerns that plague so many otherwise intelligent people.
More importantly, solving these problems requires us to dispense with the illusion of relevance about so many topics that have so little meaning to the collective humanity. Britney Spears news vs Clean water for a billion people news.
You decide.
Sowing Alarmism? You will reap skepticism.
Over at my favorite global warming watering hole “RealClimate” where several distinguished (and some controversial) climate science dudes reside, there is a lot of hand wringing and whining about why the media does such a poor job reporting on climate change, most notably the recent spate of articles suggesting that it is pretty darn cold this winter.
RealClimate correctly notes that a cold winter or cold spell or cold day tells us virtually nothing about long term climatic trends, and they correctly point out that global warming is a long term and clearly established phenomenon.
However why was RealClimate so conspicuously quiet during the nonsensical stories suggesting that the European heat wave, Katrina, and various “hot days” were a sign of impending globally-warmed-up-catastrophe looming within decades?
Even hinting over at RealClimate that climate hysteria may be out of control leads to a rash of criticism, comment moderation, and other intellectual intimidation and threats from a crowd who for the most part are very happy to see things exaggerated wildly and irrationally if that exaggeration supports their overall objective – massive intervention to reduce CO2 emissions.
Perhaps there is a lesson here? Most climate Scientists failed to correct the thousands of overblown “heat waves and hurricanes!” stories and the naively alarming tone and half truths in the film “An Inconvenient Truth”. I’m not sympathetic now that the shoe is on the other foot and the media is exaggerating cooling trends and bringing on the small handful of climate experts who are genuinely skeptical about global warming.
The scientific truth is far more nuanced and less alarmist than journalists like to suggest, since the object of journalism is not as much “truth” as it is “readership”.
Journalism and many in science failed us during the hyperbole surrounding “An Inconvenient Truth” and too few scientists stepped in to correct the errors and explain how unlikely we are to have anything approaching a catastrophic climate disaster.
Now that the earth appears to be experiencing a cooling trend journalists are suspicious and starting to ignore the mostly irrefutable evidence that GW is here to stay.
Stop whining RealClimateers,
You are reaping skepticism because you helped to sow alarmism.
——————-
Don’t agree with me? Read this article from one of the world’s most influential climate researchers and then make your case.
Why are we failing?
Can you have too much concern over safety and security? Yes, and we do in this country. Far too much though I don’t expect things to change any time soon. Our irrational perceptions of risk are damaging our economy more severely than most people understand, mostly thanks to the two massive wasteful spending categories national defense/military and social services. Ironically each party has its sacred cows for spending and despite the nonsensical bluster from both McCain and Obama we’ll see huge ongoing budget deficits regardless of who is elected.
Humans are designed to act in short term, which is why we should not trust ourselves to do effective long term planning. This is one of the reasons the founders advocated a small and flexible government and economic structure with high levels of personal accountability.
On a more specific note along these lines Tim O’Reilly notes in a post called Why are we failing at math and science?
Because it isn’t fun any more. When you put safety on the highest altar, what do you give up? When fear of lawsuits — not to mention fear of technology — drives product design, marketing, and public policy, you eliminate science at its roots, in the natural experimentation of kids who want to know how the world works.
Tim’s point is narrower than my general contention that we must learn to accept much greater levels of *certain types of risk* in our daily lives to avoid the ongoing reckless spending. However the general rule he’s talking about applies to almost all aspects of our lives – from our indefensible military budget of 550 billion (not including the ongoing wars) to obscenely expensive CO2 mitigation schemes. When people perceive risk irrationally as they tend to do with respect to terrorism and global warming, they accept irrational resource allocations.
I’m actually only suggesting we increase the risk in our lives by a fairly small amount. Contrary to what people perceive, the riskiest things in our lives are generally cheap fixes. Auto accidents, for example, are mostly caused by drunk driving, and more seat belt use would save thousands of lives and avert tens of thousands of injuries every year at a tiny fraction of the cost of, say, saving lives with high tech medical interventions.
The military is where most of the waste is but the calculations are complicated by the fact that a “zero military” option would certainly lead to the overthrow of the US by hostile powers. Clearly the US needs to have a powerful defensive capability, though the notion that this requires spending of over a trillion every two years is beyond the pale and no rational person can be both a fiscal conservative and a big spender on military. In a similar vein liberal spending advocates absurdly suggest that massive spending on education and social services somehow “primes” the economy to greater heights of prosperity.
Solutions? Reallocate taxation and spending along rational lines which means massive reductions in spending in most sectors which can fuel increases where spending will do the most good (inner city health care has a huge ROI compared to research hospital neonatal wards). Third world health ROI dwarfs that in first world. Why are those guys worth so much less than you or I?
The Hockey Stick Controversy …
You are well advised to avoid the globally frustrating mistake of getting interested in the underpinnings of climate science as it relates to global warming, climate models, paleoclimate reconstructions, the IPCC, Al Gore, and the academy awards.
However if you fall into the trap of actually looking at the science you’ll be interested in an excellent lay summary of the hockey stick controversy by Bishop Hill. I wish he’d left out the perjorative stuff because I think he’s done a nice job of documenting some of the irregularities that seem to shape the modern debates among scientists, statisticians, and political forces.
Here’s a harder to read but perhaps more objective review of the Hockey Stick at Wikipedia. This debate is important more from a political view than a scientific one as the graph is a key cornerstone for global warming activism even though it is NOT a cornerstone for the science, which to most experts clearly indicates human caused global warming is a problem.
Although warming is clear and human causes are likely, a reasoned review of the science hardly suggests catastrophe is looming. This is the advanced debate which is only just beginning – given that we have warming caused by humans, how aggresssively should we work to stop it? At what cost should we work to keep CO2 from rising?
I remain confused about how much problematic math and insider politics within the climate scientist community should affect our perception of global warming’s threat to the planet, but no reasonable observer can maintain that pristine science has shaped the current debate over global warming. Spend an hour at RealClimate.org reading the defense of the film “An Inconvenient Truth” by several internationally prestigious climate scientists to see what I mean.
Ironically as the scientific debate becomes far more nuanced than it was even a few years ago, the *political debate* is effectively over. The political/alarmist camp says that Global warming is destroying earth and we need to make drastic changes … yesterday … to avoid climate castastrophes of greater-than-biblical proportions.
Catastrophe isn’t looming, but it’s also true that we are damaging things possibly beyond repair. That does not mean we should spend trillions trying to fix these problems while greater problems loom so large on earth, but it suggests we should do every cheap thing we can and find better ways to pull energy from our environment.
Social Learning 2.0
Here is a great website about the intersection of education and the internet. One of the concerns of the main author is that educational institutions are ill-prepared to cope with the hurricane of new media information as well as potential new online approaches to teaching.
This is a really fascinating topic partly because for hundreds thousands of years formal education has languished under the province of a priestly class of educators operating pretty much in the same fashion since the Greeks introduced the professor to student lecture model of teaching. Although it’s not a *bad* model, I’d strongly suggest we could do a lot better, especially given the plethora of new online tools readily on hand at no cost to almost everybody.
Where an old, legacy class about global markets would dredge up boring examples from dated textbooks, a new class could use real time stock information such as the Archipelago bidding environment, currency quotes, breaking news, and so much more. In science students should be actively participating in blogs specializing in topics like Global Warming, artificial intelligence, and biology as well as interacting with other students around the globe.
A professor friend of mine who taught an online accounting class said there were challenges with the lack of personal contact, but benefits from student interaction and the fact he could answer the same predictable questions with an FAQ rather than having to deal with them over and over, basically freeing up more time for individualized instruction on the complicated topics.
As with so many online topics education is evolving rapidly within the rapidly evolving overall environment, so it is very hard to predict where things will wind up. However I think it’s easy to say there is a lot of potential for improvements on the current outmoded lecture models, and the internet kitchen is cooking up new solutions every day.
Lomborg on Zakaria GPS: Painfully Correct Thinking
More kudos to Zakaria’s GPS on CNN for bringing key global thinkers to the news table.
Today GPS featured Bjorn Lomborg, a figure who is controversial for the very simple reason that he has challenged sacred cows with common sense. When the sacred cow includes global warming alarmism even many otherwise clear thinking scientists have attacked Lomborg, generally on personal grounds rather than on the statistical high ground squarely occupied by Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus.
Bjorn Lomborg’s economically optimal approaches to finding solutions for global development, poverty reduction, global health, and more are thoughtful and rational. So rational and thoughtful that it’s always painful to hear his critics disparage him as a “global warming denier” (he is NOT even a GW skeptic as Zakaria very unfairly branded him during the introduction).
Lomborg’s main point is simple: We should seek the most effective solutions to global problems, which means seeking the most effective spending approaches given our current understanding of the problems.
I am very confident that history will show that the approaches taken by the Copenhagen Consensus were a sort of early “best practices” for Global problem solving, one of the first efforts to powerfully integrate science and economics in a rational rather than political or emotional way towards the vision of a better world.
Corporation as psychopathic? Nonsense!
RealClimate offers some great science and discussion but also reveals a lot of the unvarnished bias you get when true believers discard reason for hyperbole and nonsense. (thx to JCH for this caveat about caution when confusing a blog with the comments).
This little nugget emerged from a regular commenter:
I called the corporations psychopaths, not those running them, and for a very good reason: they are legally bound to consider only maximising shareholder value. Damage to the environment? No. Deaths among employees, customers or third parties? No. So long as such deaths or damage do not break the criminal law, and will increase profit, that’s what they are legally bound to do. That’s why I said capitalism created these psychopaths…
I’m seeing this bizarre view appear more and more and I’m not sure where it comes from, but probably the film I have yet to see about corporations and how evil they are. I think it’s called “The Corporation”.
One can easily make the case that corporations *emphasize* profit. They should do that within legal means – that is the *whole point*. American style socialist (ie heavily taxed) capitalism is the reason we live large while those in less corporate driven societies struggle just to keep fed and keep healthy, often failing in both measures.
Almost *every single corporation* will typically factor in a variety of environmental and social factors in the interest of the greater good, the good of employees, and the prevailing cultural and ethical standards. This is in part due to the laws and prevailing cultural standards as is almost every type of collective behavior, but it is also because contrary to the assertion above, corporations that act psychopathically
In the USA these factors generally make big businesses a great place to work. Yahoo, for example, has extensive ‘green’ initiatives. Google not only pays a small fortune in stock and salaries but pays for all the meals and does the laundry…free. You’ll say these are the exceptions but good stewardship is the corporate rule which is why the west enjoys such high living standards. That prosperity sure didn’t come from the bureacracy – it came in spite of it. This is why your rules are better applied to enterprises run by those who generally despise US style multinational corporations.
My challenge to corporate critics is to randomly pick 10 companies from S&P 500. Assign either “mostly psychopathic activity” or “mostly morally acceptable activity” to each and also do that on the “mostly exploits those in developing world” or “mostly helps those in developing world”. In most cases 9 of those 10 will pass both tests if you answer these rationally and reasonably without cherry picking from the companies or company histories as CL has done above.
Here’s a list of the S&P 500 - clearly a good list of companies that powerfully represent a globalized capitalist vision and experience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies
Now let’s grab ten of these. Presumably the first letter should not bias the sample so I’ll grab the first and last five on the Wikipedia S&P 500 list:
3M
Abbott Labs
Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
ACE Limited
Adobe Systems
| XTO | XTO Energy Inc. | reports | Energy |
| YHOO | Yahoo Inc. | reports | Information Technology |
| YUM | Yum! Brands Inc | reports | Consumer Discretionary |
| ZMH | Zimmer Holdings | reports | Health Care |
| ZION | Zions Bancorp | reports | Financials |
OK so now the questions to apply to each are whether they are “psychopathic” or not, and whether they are “exploiting more than helping”. My test allows only ONE to fail either test.
—– to be continued after I get some real work done ——–
—– Ouch, Karma injection alert? Just after posting I was trying to get Bank of America to credit my card for the Beijing Scam I was conned with in China. After charge dispute sent me away claiming that becaue I signed the paper it was out of their hands, fraud said (incredibly) that even if they had changed the number it would not be a fraud case - fraud is basically only reserved for stolen numbers. I’m not sure this makes Bank of America a psychopathic corporation but it’s also true that they are helping perpetrate scams all around the globe by failing in follow up. Given that I *cancelled my card number* after this they should assume I’m not just ranting without cause. But backwards Karma injection: Super low interest for one year will save far more than my $85 ripoff from the Tea House.
——– back to work! ————
Hey, double karma reinjection - B of A eventually refunded my Tea Scam payment. Would a psychopath have done that?
Stern on Climate Change: Act Now or Else
I think economic analysis should be a key part of how we seek action plans for Climate Change, and although I’m partial to what most economists suggest with respect to Climate Change mitigation spending – moderate to low mitigation spending until we know more about impacts and our ability to change things – I also respect the fact that … they could be wrong.
A prominent economist who suggests we must act now to avoid huge future costs is Sir Nicholas Stern who was commissioned by the UK Government to answer the most important question with regard to Climate Change. That question is NOT “what’s up with the climate?” but rather “what’s up with what we are we going to do about it”?
Here is a great executive summary of Stern’s view and by extension the official stance (I think) of the UK Government. The key departure Stern makes from the more prevalent view of economist who study this relates to *discount rate*, which is the interest rate used in determining the *present value* of future cash flows. The gist of the discount issue relates to how we treat *current* cost and benefits vs *future* costs and benefits.
In a nutshell, Stern argues that climate change can’t be treated with the same discounting assumptions we’d use in a business analysis, I think (not sure here), because the time spans are very long and the stakes are potentially very high. This assumption is why in Stern’s model *acting now and acting big* is so important.
I’m still trying to digest the issues here, though intuitively I simply don’t understand why we should change the rules for Climate that we use so successfully in other economic analyses.
Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN
There’s a new show on CNN called GPS for “Global Public Square” and despite the dumb name the show, hosted by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek, is brilliant – exactly the kind of dialog Americans need to hear as we face the complex challenges of the coming years.
Frankly I’ll be surprised if the show can last for long – the Larry King demographic is not going to tune this in, even if they jazz things up as Anderson Cooper has effectively done with AC360 in an effort to pull in younger viewers and a more mainstream news audience. In fact the weakest part of the show was the clever but insulting “GW Bush as idiot” sketch to close, effectively undermining the show’s (correct) contention that it’s going to bring together insiders and ask them very good questions. Note to Fareed - you’re a great example of a respectful but edgy correspondent. Don’t allow others to violate the trust this inspires in your interview folks. I noted that Doug Fieth, an excellent spokesperson for the neoconservative cause, hardly spoke or was severely edited. This was unfortunate as he was the only person on the panel with complete insider knowledge of the situation in Iraq. Don’t let your guests and their *opinions* undermine interviews with people who were the architects of the still-active Iraq policies.
Zakaria is one of the best observers of the global state of affairs. He balances the open, democratic, globalized, and entrepreneurial sensibilities we enjoy in the USA with the fact that most of the rest of the world does not share those sensibilities and in many cases *does not want to share them*. This simple realization separates his views from the more common, and naive, idea that everybody wants to be … just like us.
Freeman Dyson on Climate Change Hysteria
Visonary physicist Freeman Dyson most certainly cannot be labelled a “global warming denialist” yet in this review of two new books he is expressing the growing reservation of clear thinkers that for some environmentalists, the gospel of catastrophic climate change is leading them to dismiss intelligent debate and allocate resources in very ineffective ways:
Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.
The lack of insight that Dyson notes in the article is expressed well by the sloppy response to Dyson over at RealClimate.org, which betrays the naivete many physical scientists bring to the table in terms of a quality grasp of economics and social policy. The key issue with Climate Change is not that it’s happening or that humans play a significant role – the key issue is what we should do about this and how we should carry on the debate.
I wrote over at RealClimate.org:
The comments here about discounting strike me as very naive and begging the key question of what we should do. DICE models aside, the basic issues are how much do we spend (or how much wealth do we forego) on mitigation, when do we spend it, and on what? We will address these questions whether we do it haphazardly as suggested here, or more analytically as suggested by Dyson and others. Dyson and most mainstream economists reasonably suggest that we should spend modestly on mitigating CO2 in favor of using those resources to mitigate current catastrophic conditions and saving them to use on more effective mitigation measures of the future.
<i>So, we are a lot richer now than when the last Moa was eaten. Can we use that wealth to bring back the Moa?</i>
No, we cannot, but what if we use those *extra* riches we would not have today to keep 10 species from extinction? Without looking at both sides of these equations we lose our ability for reasoned analyses.
I’d be interested in hearing where people here would draw the line in spending to mitigate warming? The number *must* be between 0% and 100% of global GDP.
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