Jeremy notes that African ag is slow to adopt improved methods and that there are international efforts in progress to make better methods and materials - especially seed, fertilizer, and know-how - easier to get. He would prefer alternative approaches. . . . would an equal investment in extension services be a better use of the money? Countries tend to be neglecting extension right now, possibly because they are lured by technological solutions that are more glamorous than spreading best practices. What if there were a transnational service that put an army of barefoot extension workers into the countryside? Equip them with a bicycle and some communications technology. Give them access to one another’s experience and a global network of experts. Give them access, too, to those technological developments, if they think those are worthwhile. Maybe even give farmers vouchers that they can exchange for advice. Historically and logically no solution is sustainable that depends on perpetual external funding,...

One of the tawdriest bits of political chicanery in recent times has been the gathering of a coven of scientists of note in various fields to have them pontificate about things they have no grasp of, in service of some political agenda. . . . seven laureates got on stage for a panel discussion of climate change and energy challenges. Though they were all admittedly speaking beyond their fields of expertise, the scientists offered unfiltered political and social advice. Some argue that the views of such people about things they don't understand are still valuable, at least compared to those who normally spout off on these things such as politicians, journalists, activists and normal citizens. This is seldom the case. Their views are generally of little value though there are exceptions where a wiser and more mature individual does have value to give, but it is no more frequent among scientists than any other group of normally bright individuals,...

Monsanto to the rescue. Monsanto's three-point commitment to growing yields sustainably includes: Develop better seeds - Monsanto will double yield in its three core crops of corn, soybeans and cotton by 2030, compared to a base year of 2000. The company will also establish a $10 million grant designed to accelerate breakthrough public sector research in wheat and rice yield. Conserve resources - Monsanto will develop seeds that will reduce by one-third the amount of key resources required to grow crops by the year 2030. The company will also join with others to address habitat loss and water quality in agriculturally important areas. Help improve farmers' lives - The company will help improve the lives of farmers, including an additional five million people in resource-poor farm families by 2020. It's not clear that these things can be done, or will be done, but they are certainly good things. I suspect that they can be done, and done profitably. Experts...

KK continues his ruminations about the hive mind (see Old School for previous discussion) It's taken a while but I think we've learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don't need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind. Yet if the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all? Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough. More importantly, the brute dumbness of the hive mind produces the raw material that smart design can work on. If we ONLY listen to the hive mind, that would be stupid. But if we ignore the hive mind altogether, that is even stupider. Yet because the hive mind works at a slower pace on a different time scale,...

Speaking of changed minds . . . Every year John Brockman hosts the annual World Question on his Edge site. At the end of the year he asks his circle of scientists and thinkers "a question they are asking themselves." This year I suggested the question. It is: What have you changed your mind about? . . . Much of what I believed about human nature, and the nature of knowledge, has been upended by the Wikipedia. I knew that the human propensity for mischief among the young and bored — of which there were many online — would make an encyclopedia editable by anyone an impossibility. I also knew that even among the responsible contributors, the temptation to exaggerate and misremember what we think we know was inescapable, adding to the impossibility of a reliable text. I knew from my own 20-year experience online that you could not rely on what you read in a random posting, and...

The illusion of action and competence is what politics is about. Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. . . There isn’t a policy package that can straightforwardly address some of the underlying structural changes in the global political economy that affect Peoria as surely as they affect Shenzen. Your wonkish arms are too short to box with that god. I don’t think anyone is the master of these changes, even though some people and social classes and systems have way more power to direct what is happening than others....

I saw an advert for a game device that claimed to be able to improve peripheral vision. There were a couple of supposedly humorous scenarios showing people getting blind sided when their attention was focused elsewhere. I thought of it while reading this remarkably narrow bit of advocacy for dense urban life styles. after an initial period of painful adaptation, we can live happily, opulently and indeed more healthily, in a world of permanent $100-a-barrel oil or even $500-a-barrel oil. . . If we had no fossil energy, then we would be forced to rely on an essentially unlimited amount of solar power, available at five times current energy costs. With energy five times as expensive as at present we would take a substantial hit to incomes. Our living standard would decline by about 11 percent. But we would still be fantastically rich compared to the pre-industrial world. . . The ability to sustain such high energy prices at...

Babes, science and alcohol. The same late-night revelers who spent their high school and college years plodding through mandatory science classes are now gathering voluntarily to listen to presentations on principles of string theory or how orbitofrontal cortexes work — as long as it takes place far from the fluorescent lights of classroom. Science groups for young professionals who don’t wear white coats, like the year-old Secret Science Club at Union Hall, are cropping up in bars and bookstores all over the country, from Massachusetts to Montana. “If you have a certain type of job, after a while that part of your brain starts to deteriorate,” said Amy Lee, 25, who works at an Internet startup and was attending her second Secret Science Club meeting. “You want to use it again. Plus, there’s alcohol.” It's interesting that this ancient net tradition has instantiated in meat-space, errrrrr, perhaps meet-space is more accurate. When Eric Kandel, a 2000 winner of the...

I'm amazed and amused that so many of those who claim some sort of expertise seem to have such primitive understandings. I'm something of a technology buff. I like gadgets. I like science. And I like what technology does for me and the world. I also like what came about as a result of the ramped up R&D funds during the nineties. Moreover, I've never been totally enthusiastic about some of the neo-luddite language that once passed as environmentalist, so I agree with Shellenberger and Nordhaus (S&N) that we should all be encouraging, funding, supporting, and promoting technologies that help our civilization and our country advance. In fact, I also agree that environmentalists should be considerably more aspirational than desperational. . . S&N argue persuasively that the "politics of limits" -- which is, roughly, the idea that regulation can serve as a cure-all to the world's environmental problems -- ought to be replaced with a "politics of possibility" --...

The science community seems ever less credible. Perhaps it isn't so much that science practice has changed for the worse as that the appearance of fair minded truth seeking has been dissolved by their public dalliance with pop sociology and crass political pronouncements. Dr. Keith, an organizer of the conference, said that at one time he thought scientists should not talk in public about “geoengineering” remedies for global warming — like injecting chemicals into the upper atmosphere to cool the poles, or blocking sunlight by making clouds more reflective or stationing mirrors in space. Like many other researchers, he explained, he worried that the potential for a climate fix, even an imperfect one, would only encourage people to continue the profligate burning of fossil fuels that got the planet into trouble in the first place. Never mind the science, let amateurish notions about social engineering dictate behavior. Right. Developing artificial techniques to cool the earth “is going to dampen...

[G]eneralism requires some degree of comparative thinking, otherwise it’s nothing more than brute-force universalism. That’s my problem with alleged generalists like Jared Diamond or E.O. Wilson, for example: they assert a universal that allows them to simply steamroll all variation and heterogeneity. A good generalist is aware of very different kinds of claims about knowledge in different areas of study and does not insist on subordinating those differences to some universal theory or argument. . . [T]he only sin the generalist can commit is assuming that a generalist understanding can do more than it ought, that it trumps the specialist on questions that reside with specialization. Which, unfortunately, is a sin that a lot of generalists commit. The generalist is built to communicate and translate from a specialization to a wider public, and to translate back to specialists the question, “So what?” Not to tell the specialist that his undersanding of social formations in late 17th Century North Wales...

And, why? a clear example of why corporations do basic research: For [Bill Gates] this is a triumphant visit to China, a victory lap of sorts, on which I've been invited to tag along. The country is his. No other Fortune 500 CEO gets quite the same treatment in China. ... It was not always so. Microsoft bumbled for years after entering China in 1992, and its business was a disaster there for a decade. ... But it was a relatively small step in 1998 - the opening of a research center in Beijing - that proved a turning point. "We just started it here because we thought they'd do great research," says Gates, who raves about the quality of the country's computer scientists. The lab was what Gates calls a "windfall" for Microsoft's image. It began accumulating an impressive record of academic publications, helped lure back smart migr scientists, and contributed key components to globally released products like...

We progress by accident rather than intention. It's not that we don't have intentions, they just turn out to be naive and/or mistaken. However, we tend to airbrush that out of history. Even academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for. It is not just that hypertension drugs led to Viagra or that angiogenesis drugs led to the treatment of macular degeneration, but that even discoveries we claim come from research are themselves highly accidental. They are the result of undirected tinkering narrated after the fact, when it is dressed up as controlled research. The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design. If the success rate of directed research is very low, though, it is true that the more we search, the more likely we are to...

It isn't just quibbling with the hypothetical. You might think it poetic, to give one word many meanings, and thereby spread shades of connotation all around. But even poets, if they are good poets, must learn to see the world precisely. It is not enough to compare love to a flower. Hot jealous unconsummated love is not the same as the love of a couple married for decades. If you need a flower to symbolize jealous love, you must go into the garden, and look, and make subtle distinctions - find a flower with a heady scent, and a bright color, and thorns. Even if your intent is to shade meanings and cast connotations, you must keep precise track of exactly which meanings you shade and connote. It is a necessary part of the rationalist's art - or even the poet's art! - to focus narrowly on unusual pebbles which possess some special quality. And look at the details...

Eliezer Yudkowsky has been on a roll with a series of posts at Overcoming Bias about belief. His latest, Belief as Attire, deals with what he terms "improper belief". A proper belief can be wrong or irrational, e.g., someone who genuinely anticipates that prayer will cure her sick baby, but the other forms are arguably "not belief at all". Yet another form of improper belief is belief as group-identification - as a way of belonging. Robin Hanson uses the excellent metaphor of wearing unusual clothing, a group uniform like a priest's vestments or a Jewish skullcap, and so I will call this "belief as attire". . . Belief-as-attire may help explain how people can be passionate about improper beliefs. Mere belief in belief, or religious professing, would have some trouble creating genuine, deep, powerful emotional effects. Or so I suspect; I confess I'm not an expert here. But my impression is this: People who've stopped anticipating-as-if their religion is...

The type of rigid thinking and refusal to countenance dissent discussed in the previous post isn't rare or a quirk of climate hysterics, it is pervasive among the do gooder types that are attracted to social issues. That the environment in general and climate change in particular have become the focus of do gooders can be confusing since they have little or no real knowledge or interest in the environment, it's just an excuse to hector society. Once they have an expert and authoritative dogma - whether it makes any sense or is verified over time or not - they seek to enact restrictions and then all become proctologists, determined to inspect every nook for infractions, crawling up society's butt in hot pursuit of those whose normal behaviors have been criminalized. Anders Sandberg's posts about these issues, contrasting the behaviors of the Extreme Green Guerrillas (EGG), who among other things insert an earring at 20 that will euthanize them...

Bryan Caplan whinges about F.A. Hayek's antique writing style: Here's a random paragraph: In particular, there can be little doubt that the manner in which during the last hundred years man has learned to organize the forces of nature has contributed a great deal toward the creation of the belief that a similar control of the forces of society would bring comparable improvements in human conditions. That, with the application of engineering techniques, the direction of all forms of human activity according to a single coherent plan should prove to be as successful in society as it has been in innumerable engineering tasks, is too plausible a conclusion not to seduce most of those who are elated by the achievement of the natural sciences. It must indeed be admitted both that it would require powerful arguments to counter the strong presumption in favor of such a conclusion and that these arguments have not yet been adequately stated. It is...

I've encountered a few more posts and essays about "intellectuals" lately, a subject I've had a whack at before, and will do so again. I've lost the chain of links, so there is a break in attribution, but I'd ended up here, Why Do Intellectuals Oppose the Military?, which in turn led to this old Nozick essay, Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism? By intellectuals, I do not mean all people of intelligence or of a certain level of education, but those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors. It does not include those who primarily produce and transmit quantitatively or mathematically formulated information (the numbersmiths) or those working in visual media, painters, sculptors, cameramen. Unlike the wordsmiths, people in these occupations do not disproportionately oppose capitalism. The wordsmiths are concentrated in certain occupational sites: academia,...

I've been geeking about bio-char for some time, and about Terra Preta for even longer. I've wondered why it seemed to be ignored by researchers, and pursued diffidently at best. It was on the crackpot fringe, too good to be true, or so it seemed when official neglect was taken into consideration. But officials are frequently wrong. [A]cademia is no more about making useful intellectual progress than advertising is about informing consumers. Professors seek prestigious careers, while funders and students seek prestige by association. Academics talk and write primarily to signal their impressive mental abilities, such as their mastery of words, math, machines, or vast detail. Yes, contributing to useful intellectual progress can sometimes appear impressive, but the correlation is weak, and it is often hard to see who really contributed how much. Progress happens, but largely as a side effect. For example: [Smolin's] points on groupthink, and the systematic bias which discourages innovation and risk taking by young...

I'm having phun playing off Kevin Kelly's technium posts. He's dealing with interesting subjects, and while I find lots of fault with his views he still gets good marks for choosing such subjects and giving them a whirl. This is the case with the post Dealing With Rogue Technologies. The common element among the techniques of GRIN [geno-, robo-, info-, nano -] - and the reason they are worrisome – is that they are all self-reproducing. . . The threat of self-duplicating technology is new. No, it's not new. Humans have been tinkering up new organisms for eons. We tend to overlook the creations of those ancient bio-engineers because we largely approve of their efforts and have come to think of them as being "natural", a word that usually means no more than that we are used to it. It wasn't just breeding - though that can accomplish great change over time - it also involved chemical and mechanical...

Kevin Kelley's work in progress, The Technium, is getting more interesting. I claim that technology has its own agenda. What is the evidence that technology as a whole, or the technium as I call it, is autonomous? Because without autonomy, one could argue, how can something have its own agenda? I have three parts to my answer. . . First, I believe that a system can have an agenda even when it depends upon another system to remain viable. . . Second, technology is still young. The concept of “technology” was not invented until 1829, and most of what we call technology just arrived on earth this century. We consider a two-year old baby to be alive and “autonomous” even though it is dependent on its parents to remain alive. . . Thirdly, eventually technology will far more autonomous than it is today. Right now not only are we the parents of the technium, we are also the sex...

This is hopeful. Millions of pounds are on offer for the person who comes up with the best way of removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson launched the competition today in London . . . A panel of judges will oversee the prize, including James Lovelock and Nasa scientist James Hansen. . . He said if the planet was to survive, it was vital to find a way of getting rid of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. He said he believed offering the $25m (£12.5m) Earth Challenge Prize was the best way of finding a solution. . . Carbon capture and storage is already a key area of research. Scientists have been looking into removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and storing it in oil and gas fields, injecting it deep into the ocean, or chemically transforming it into solids or liquids that are thermodynamically stable. However, these methods have...

The net has existed for many decades. Some think it was a 90s thing - the fall that never ended - when the unwashed hordes gained access, or that it is something the government invented. This is a false narrative, one that leaves out the most interesting parts. A better story begins in 1968 with the Carterphone Decision. On June 26th a landmark decision in telecom history as the Carterphone Decision is rendered by the FCC. Under this decision, the FCC struck down existing interstate telephone tariffs prohibiting attachment of connection to the public telephone system of any equipment or device that was not supplied by the telephone companies (Bell System). The suit, which began October 28, 1966 centered on the desire of Carter Electronics of Dallas to interconnect private mobile radio systems with the nationwide exchange and message toll telephone network. The Carterphone Decision created the interconnect industry and allowed manufacturers other than Western Electric to sell their...

Philip Small of transect points is back from holiday and posting about Terra Preta and glomalin again, most recently highlighting Wim Sombroek, who has been called The Godfather of Terra Preta. Sombroek had a life-long fascination with it beginning with his Ph.D. thesis in 1963, Amazon Soils, and intensifying in later years. Sombroek was discussed in the Nature article Black is the new green, which was the focus of a post here last August, Black is Back. Philip's post highlighted Sombroek's challenge: Before his passing, he assembled specific soil scientists, challenging them to discover the process for making and sustaining a modern equivalent of the bio-char enhanced terra preta, what he termed terra preta nova. A great opportunity in answering Sombroek's challenge lies is surmounting the opacity of mutualistic rhizospheric species to traditional analytical approaches: only 1% of rhizospheric species are cultureable ala petri dish. We don't have a robust body of culture-independent studies against which to compare Terra...

Democracy is tedious. Lately, I’ve found myself at the peak of a periodic cycle of frustration with blogging and online discussion. I think it’s partly because I get told periodically by friends and readers that I expect too much of it, that I just need to filter out all the noise and hubbub, all the people engaged in culture war, all the dialogic illiteracy. What’s the point if you have to filter all that? Because I really do think that there is both practical and abstract peril in that kind of “skills gap”, in some ways far more so than with simple weakness in mathematics or competency in writing. In a way, what I think Americans might need most from their educational system is to better learn the arts and science of public reason, about how to form arguments and opinions and respect evidence. That’s not just about the health of the body politic or about how we sustain...

Tyler links to this post noting that it seems to be Trading one kind of inequality for the other. Sides of the Same Coin: U.S. “Residual” Inequality and the Gender Gap (PDF): In this paper, we show that the two major developments experienced by the US labor market - rising inequality and narrowing of the male-female wage gap - can be explained by a common source: the increase in price of cognitive skills and the decrease in price of motor skills. We obtain the implicit price of a multidimensional vector of skills by combining a hedonic price framework with data on the skill requirements of jobs from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and workers’ wages from the CPS. We find that in the 1968-1990 period the returns to cognitive skills increase four-fold and the returns to motor skills decline by 30%. Given that the top of the wage distribution of college and high school graduates is relatively well endowed...

That's where I'm from. The closest town is Milo. It's still on some maps but it isn't even a ghost town. There isn't anything there except a curiously fancy bridge across the river. The buildings are all gone, torn down or moved to other towns down stream. I suppose I truly am a local yokel. Still, I may live to laugh about that. We talked for two days about the effect that the new electronic archives and networked scholarship will have on the practices of scholarship, preservation, pedagogy, and publishing. Blah-de-incremental-blah. While there was an understanding of the importance of these huge archives, and the impact that improved access and availability will have internally on the system of four major academic players, nobody seemed to consider one crucial thing. These resources are no longer geographically isolated. They’re in the system of pipes. Eventually, depending on either draconian licensing agreements or the diligence of lay competitors, they’re becoming available to...

The post Size Matters quoted Herb Gintis discussing why humans often hold grossly irrational and false, yet somehow plausible, beliefs. One of the reasons he cites is excessive present orientation. . . . humans, like all other animals, do not maximize fitness, but rather an objective function (which may be called a preference function) based on immediate costs and benefits, that has evolved to correspond to fitness enhancement. . . . . . humans (like other animals, although much less so) tend to have preference functions that are excessively present-oriented, and so undervalue behaviors with long-term payoffs (Google Ainslie, Laibson, and Loewenstein for documentation). Cultural beliefs and values that counter this tendency (e.g., be slow to anger, invest in good hunting skills) are fitness enhancing but will be judged to be welfare reducing by the sociopath who assesses them according to his own preference function. There are some interesting consequences to this evolved tendency to undervalue behaviors with long-term...

Like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett is making a very big mark on philanthropy. Warren Buffett, has decided to turn over most of his $44 billion fortune to the nation's richest man, Bill Gates. Buffett is committing to give about 10 million Class B shares in his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, to the $30 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. To put this in perspective the Rockefeller Foundation last year made $110.5 million in grants. The Gates Foundation gave out more than $1.3 billion in grants. Now, with Buffett's billions as well, the grant totals will be even higher. The interesting bit is that Buffett is determined to get his money's worth in philanthropy just as he has with other investments. Creating and operating a foundation to house, manage, and give away significant sums can be an expensive proposition. You have to rent office space and hire executives, accountants, program officers, and support staff. In its most recent annual survey,...

I never cease to be amazed by how time flies when I'm fully engaged in a task. One moment the day is young and I'm fresh but the next thing I know it's dark and I'm drained. Some people seem to live their whole lives without ever looking up to notice that the world has changed while they had their noses to the stone. Environmental activists and scientists have both documented, and responded strongly against, human encroachment upon "natural" systems. They are, in other words, fighting against the tail of the asymptotic curves of the material and energy revolutions. But they have entirely failed to engage with the information revolution, a powerfully accelerating technological phenomenon that may well obsolete current mental models of environmentalism entirely. After all, when the power structure of the world is urbanized, fed by ICT systems and constructed content rather than observation of "natural" systems, and embedded in a number of virtual worlds of choice...

Alex Pang notes the advent of Kosher Phone, a basic cell phone to make and receive calls through a carrier that blocks a few thousand numbers such as porn sites. Rabbinical overseers maintain the filters. Similarly he notes the advent of Xianz (get it?, like X-mas), a "Christian-themed alternative to MySpace": it's HIS space. From these examples he develops the idea that the internet will fragment into gated special interest communities. . . . all . . . raise the question of whether the "future of the Internet" isn't a "future of Internets:" whether one of the big stories with the future of the Internet might be the creation of distinct arenas closed off not for commercial purposes (like the walled gardens of cell phone networks), but for the purpose of cultural and religious defense. Well, yes, sort of. But it's worth reviewing what the internet is: a network of networks, the internetworking of many networks. It is already...