January 27, 2010
Micro-Factories
The concept isn't new but they seem to be getting closer to becoming a meaningful reality. In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers. . . The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit....
January 11, 2010
Digital Reactionaries
For a brief time in the broadcast era some reaped great rewards from monopoly. He [Jaron Lanier] blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract. “The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.” There's nothing novel or digital about vicious pack behavior any more than for generous collaboration. This is how human societies are and always have been. There was a brief time when printing presses - as well as audio and video reproduction systems -...
January 09, 2010
Technobabble
Increasingly, I find the digerati to be tedious. Hall's candidate for the most important invention was not the capture of fire, the printing press, the discovery of electricity, or the discovery of the structure of DNA. The most important invention was ... talking. To illustrate the point, he told a story about a group of prehistoric cavemen having a conversation. "Guess what?" the first man said. "We're talking." Silence. The others looked at him with suspicion. "What's 'talking'?" a second man asked. "It's what we're all doing, right now. We're talking!" "You're crazy," the third man said. "I never heard of such a thing!" "I'm not crazy," the first man said. "You're crazy. We're talking." Talking, undoubtedly, was considered innate and natural until the first man rendered it visible by exclaiming, "We're talking." A new invention has emerged, a code for the collective conscious, which requires a new way of thinking. The collective externalized mind is the mind we...
January 09, 2010
Magic Digikingdom
Every generation discovers sex and imagines that they are the first to grasp its power, wonder and beauty. There is simply no way that their withered parents could ever understand what every child now knows. Yes, they obviously procreated, but they didn't get it. In time they come to understand at least in part that their ever more withered parents had in fact had a better grasp of the issues than had initially been assumed, but it is usually only a partial and grudging admission of naivety. This is the same type of intellectual error discussed in the previous post that disputed the claim that the Internet does not like a playful delight in confusion, and a willingness to make mistakes while floundering about in a 'don't know' mindset that leads to creative insights or breakthroughs. It's a common confusion. Tom Wolfe in Hooking Up: I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to...
January 06, 2010
Old Wine
I have a few Google alerts to monitor some keywords when used in net speech. Oddly, one of the alerts today was to a post I did three years ago. How does that happen? I read the old post and discovered that it was a New Year's day rumination about optimism that I still rather like and think it is worth repeating. ------------------------ Edge has a variant of the hoary old year-end custom of evaluation of the old year and prognostication about the coming year: The Edge Annual Question — 2007 WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT? WHY? As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever...
December 17, 2009
Looking Out
Would you buy a used automobile from these people? In short, the e-mails do not undermine the CRU’s surface temperature record or the wider science. But that is not the point – it is the culture of climate science that has been tarnished. A picture emerges of experts who relate tribally, avoid transparency and worry too much about getting a good press. The perception is perhaps unfair, based as it is on a small, activist-minded band, but it goes back to Adam Smith’s remark about producer interests: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Mr Trenberth insists the e-mail hack equated to a “swiftboating” of climate scientists, a reference to the smearing of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. He argues there is nothing wrong with scientists advocating policy: “I’m a scientist but I’m also a citizen of the world.” He is right that society...
November 24, 2009
Human Fuel
Via Jeremy comes a good example of the issue discussed in the previous post: Bread first or beer first? A bad question Over the years, though, I’ve come to think it’s actually the wrong way to go about the early history of cereals. It’s a barrier to asking the kinds of questions that will yield interesting answers. It was one of the cliches of the history of technology, a field I labored in for many years, that asking for the first invention, the first appearance of something was asking the wrong question. . . But why are we restricting the discussion to beers and breads? If people are going to all the trouble of tackling seeds aren’t they going to try everything they can? Gruels, porridges thick enough to scoop up with the fingers, pottages with other stuff mixed in, toasted grains, toasted powdered grains, sprouted grains (more posts coming on these). Humans by about 20,000 years ago when...
November 24, 2009
Persistent Idiocy
One of our best examples is Thomas Friedman. I believe this Chinese decision to go green is the 21st-century equivalent of the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik — the world’s first Earth-orbiting satellite. That launch stunned us, convinced President Eisenhower that the U.S. was falling behind in missile technology and spurred America to make massive investments in science, education, infrastructure and networking — one eventual byproduct of which was the Internet. Nonsense. A historian of technology would note that the possibility of space shots emerged as a consequence of general technological development, making it inevitable that someone would be the first to do it, or at least be credited with the accomplishment, but that they in no way actually did anything of note. It could happen, so it would happen. It's not a political issue, it's an issue that politicians sought to exploit - then and now. Internetworking is the same. Diverse networks existed, so bridges between them...
November 18, 2009
Intonation
Or, personal convictions in search of a social narrative. A few months ago there was a flurry of commentary about Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford. I posted a couple of times about it since it faintly echoed some of my old notions about the mental life of laborers (see Soul Butter) and because it seemed to contradict its own main thesis that a lively mind is not a function of what one does for pay, it is an individual characteristic that could as well be true of an academic or one who does physical labor. There are dull and lively minds in each broad category. Here's another take on the book. Part of my problem, I guess, is that he oversells his case. There are people who approximate what he calls craftsmen even in knowledge work, for one, who have the agency and ethos that he sees as systematically absent...
September 29, 2009
Wrong Question
Population doomers and sustainability freaks fail to think in large scales or long terms. On the face of it, fewer people seems like good news for the environment. The population of Germany, Europe's most populous country, will shrink by at least 8 million by 2050 and this trend is set to be replicated in many of its neighbours. Remote rural areas, mainly in central and eastern Europe, might become depopulated over time. This should benefit biodiversity as displaced plant and animal species recolonise their old terrain. Given that the world population is still growing by about 200,000 people a day, and the ecological footprint of the human race already lies beyond the limits of sustainability, fewer European mega-consumers will be a blessing for the health of the planet - and fewer North Americans would be even better. But look a little deeper, and the picture becomes more complicated. Decreasing population does not necessarily promise environmental benefits. The cost per...
September 24, 2009
Dutch Uncle
OK, so he's not Dutch, but close. Mind Hacks has a great characterization of the transhumanist community: Transhumanists are like the eccentric uncle of the cognitive science community. Not the sort of eccentric uncle who gets drunk at family parties and makes inappropriate comments about your kid sister (that would be drug reps), but the sort that your disapproving parents thinks is a bit peculiar but is full of fascinating stories and interesting ideas. That is exactly the kind of uncle I try to be. For example: Over at Overcoming Bias Robin is making the argument that economic growth will eventually be limited: even by expanding at lightspeed the amount of amount of matter we can turn into something valuable will only grow as the cube of time, but any positive exponential economic growth rate will outrun this sooner or later. Others are not so convinced, arguing that the value is not strictly tied to matter but by patterns...
September 05, 2009
Good Dog
Happy man. It used to be said that if you need a friend then buy a dog. The equation has been tweaked for ICT. An Australian online marketing company is selling friends and fans to Facebook members after offering a similar service to Twitter users. Advertising, marketing and promoting company uSocial said it was targeting social networking sites because of their huge advertising potential. “Facebook is an extremely effective marketing tool,” Leon Hill, uSocial CEO, said in a statement. “The simple fact is that with a large following on Facebook, you have an instant and targeted group of people you can contact and promote whatever it is you want to promote,” he added. “The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in.” The company offers packages for Facebook, the world’s number one social networking site, that start at 1,000 friends up to 10,000 friends at costs ranging...
August 08, 2009
Evil Empire
Anyone who has paid any attention for the past couple of decades finds this totally unsurprising, not much different than it has always been for the authoritarians. There’s a very strong indication that the Apple tablet will be sold with a mobile data connection at a subsidized cost, like many netbooks are today. This is where rumors of the device get especially worrisome. Hobbling a phone is one thing, but imagine our closed PC scenario now with AT&T (or Verizon, as many of the rumors indicate) telling you what you can and cannot do with it—-like an overbearing Mom to Apple’s despotic Dad. The thought alone makes me shudder. As oppressive as Apple has been thus far with the iPhone, its crimes pale in comparison to what AT&T has disallowed. Yes, tethering and MMS are the obvious ones that come to mind, but AT&T has also blocked things like 3G video streaming via the Sling Media app and 3G...
August 07, 2009
Chippies
Perhaps we will have a personal IP addy. Forbes.com: John Zogby's firm polled people about whether they would want implanted chips for various purposes. 13% wanted chips for Internet access, 25% wanted a chip that gave immunity to disease, 23% wanted a chip giving access to knowledge and just 6% wanted entertainment chips. Males were as expected more open to enhancement than women, younger people are more open to the idea of entertainment, internet or knowledge chips while everybody were about equally interested in immunity chips. According to Zogby, Democrats were more likely to want chips than Republicans, likely because of a co-correlation with religious adherence: non-churchgoers were more likely to want chips than churchgoers. Why would we expect males to be more open to enhancement than females? Females have not shown aversion to artifice or enhancement of their bodies for competitive advantage or personal expression. I'd take the knowledge and immunity chips, but not the net or entertainment...
August 05, 2009
Technocrats
More about the politics of expertise. Think of three points on an ideological triangle: 1. Point L, where you believe that markets are effective at processing information and solving problems. This position is to take a radically pro-market view, and to let markets fix their own failures. 2. Point C, where you believe that tradition incorporates the evolved use of information to solve problems. This position is to be very cautious about overthrowing existing institutional arrangements. 3. Point P, where you believe that expert technocrats should be in charge. You are comfortable with throwing out tradition and markets in order to cede power to experts. I'll apply this framework to some people and to some issues. Tyler Cowen is a mix of L and C. He is too C to go along completely with the brute logic of Robin Hanson or the bumptious enthusiasm of Bryan Caplan. But Barack Obama has managed to offend Tyler on both the L...
July 28, 2009
The Fall
Just as experts often lack expertise, and make poor use of whatever expertise they possess, scientists are often unscientific and make poor use of the methods of science. The authority of science is not shared by scientists. They are just people, and they are motivated by petty desires, confused about large issues, habitually irrational and mainly concerned with their own immediate needs . . . like others. Unfortunately, science has been increasingly politicized, as we should expect since scientific funding and status is controlled by politicians in government and universities. The public does not have a realistic view of the consequences of bureaucratic and political control of science in determining the political views of scientists and the skewed policy recommendations this produces. Robin speculates: If the public knew the truth, I expect two effects: 1. The public would consider scientists to be less authoritative as a neutral source on policy questions, and 2. Since scientists are respected, the public...
July 08, 2009
IVD Sperm
Men are obsolete. In the technique developed at Newcastle, stem cells with XY chromosomes (male) were developed into germline stem cells which were then prompted to complete meiosis - cell division with halving of the chromosome set. These were shown to produce fully mature, sperm called scientifically, In Vitro Derived sperm (IVD sperm). In contrast, stem cells with XX chromosomes (female) were prompted to form early stage sperm, spermatagonia, but did not progress further. This demonstrates to researchers that the genes on a Y chromosome are essential for meiosis and for sperm maturation. . . The IVD sperm will not and cannot be used for fertility treatment. As well as being prohibited by UK law, the research team say fertilization of human eggs and implantation of embryos would hold no scientific merit for them as they want to study the process as a model for research. "While we can understand that some people may have concerns, this does not...
June 03, 2009
Ecostalinist Bus
Unfortunately, environmentalists in general and climate alarmists in particular, are sending us on a bitch ride to hell. As Eric Drexler blogs in Greenhouse Gases and Advanced Nanotechnology, most people make the mistake of thinking CO2 will just disappear if we stop producing it. Instead it remains in the atmosphere over a century timescale, affecting the heat balance. If one is a believer in that there are already sinister effects on biosphere, and especially if one is concerned with tipping points and positive feedback loops, then this is a very serious matter. Just urging (or achieving) emissions reductions will not fix the problem. There has to be very large carbon sinks, or one should argue for much bigger attempts at climate adaptation than currently is fashionable. As I like to say, if you are in a car rolling downhill and want to stop, it is not enough to just stop pressing the gas pedal, you better find the brakes,...
May 09, 2009
Purple Wage
I read an article the other day that discussed growing rejection of democracy in developing countries. There is conflict between urban middle classes and rural lower classes. In conventional political thinking the middle classes are viewed as proponents of democracy leading nations away from various despotisms such as monarchy and military authoritarianism, but the despots have turned the tables on them and become populists who buy the votes of the poor cheaply. The countries then spiral into poverty and chaos, as in Zimbabwe and various S. American nations. It occured to me that the same thing is happening in developed nations but that it is the urban poor that support populist despotisms. This has been so in Europe for decades and more recently in the USA too. The trend is accelerating as the old industrial base decays and formerly middle class people and their children face bleak prospects. Social Democrats are working to create a society where the majority...
May 02, 2009
Patio Heaters
I was wandering around in the garden section of a home store a couple of weeks ago and saw a variety of outdoor fire containers. They are for gentrified camp fires and are used by suburban entertainers for house parties and barbecue gatherings. They range in style from large iron bowls intended to be sunk into the ground to large ceramic stove-like urns with decorative shapes and patterned cutouts. They came to mind while reading this page about the design of simple ceramic pots that can be used by developing world people for cooking and biochar production. There are many ways to make biochar. Huge machines and factories can produce a lot of char in a centralised manner. But for the millions of poor farmers in developing countries, there may be a way to make char too. In an efficient, simple way. The "terra preta pot" might be just this appropriate technology. With a "terra preta pot" you can...
March 19, 2009
Impracticality
Timothy thinks about how poorly prepared students often are for life after school. I’d even love to see a life-skills course at the college level in a liberal-arts environment. Why not? We have a swim test here, rather infamously. Here’s what would make my list of concrete skills that men and women will find useful to know as adults, some of which I’m still awkwardly trying to pick up now in mid-life, a few of which I’ve never picked up. The key thing here is to insist that both genders have to be exposed to all of this stuff, that nobody gets to opt out on the argument that it’s not manly or feminine. It’s ok if later on people divide these chores according to facility or preference. He and his commenters are constructing a list - from basic cooking to computer setup and minor repair - of things that every human should know. I'm for it, especially when...
February 04, 2009
Air Capture
As discussed recently in Opti-Pessimist, capturing carbon emissions from the air and sequestering them is an inherently superior approach to GHG mitigation. It doesn't require totalitarian control of all of the societies on the planet, it just takes technique, energy and money. It's like cleaning up street litter rather than hectoring people to bin their discards. The streets have to be cleaned anyway, so all of the hectoring just degrades the quality of life while not actually saving any costs. That post highlighted biochar as a means to do air capture, citing multiple benefits, not least the fact that biochar is carbon rather than carbon dioxide, a far more stable substance. Still, there are other air capture technologies available, and they are worth a closer look. The systems being developed by Klaus Lackner of Columbia University's Earth Institute and Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT) have been mentioned in earlier posts and may perhaps be the best example so far....
February 01, 2009
Pinhole Econ
I've scolded scientists for their pinhole vision, but they are hardly unique. when you have a very efficient economic sector what happens is that it tends to go away. Consider agriculture. Our modern-day agricultural technology is way better than what was available 200 years ago. But agricultural progress hasn’t meant that everyone goes to work in the super-charged high-tech agriculture of the future. It’s meant that more food than ever is grown with fewer person-hours of labor than ever. . . And that’s how the whole private sector part of the economy will go. Markets, doing their work, will make those sectors more and more efficient leading them to shrink as a share of the overall economic pie. What will be left is big government. Or, rather, bigger and bigger government. some progressives wish to argue that government is fairly efficient (low Medicare overhead costs is a common observation here); in those sectors this argument won't apply. Second, if...
January 03, 2009
Minority Report
Social hacking. Among the many provocative answers to this year's Edge question, "What Will Change Everything?" my favorite was Sam Harris' "True Lie Detection": Deception commends itself, perhaps even above violence, as the principal enemy of human cooperation. Imagine how our world would change if, when the truth really mattered, it became impossible to lie. ... Reliable lie-detection will be much easier to achieve than accurate mind reading. ... We will almost surely be able to determine, to a moral certainty, whether a person is representing his thoughts, memories, and perceptions honestly in conversation. . . The greatest transformation of our society will occur only once lie-detectors become both affordable and unobtrusive. . . . there may come a time when every courtroom or boardroom will have the requisite technology discretely concealed behind its wood paneling. Thereafter, civilized people would share a common presumption: that wherever important conversations are held, the truthfulness of all participants will be monitored. ....
December 07, 2008
Kibitzers
Sometimes when a disputed issue is discussed here a principal for one side or another of the conflict shows up in the comments following the post. That happened recently for the post UFOs that quoted some disparaging commentary by other scientists about the the System of Rice Intensification advocated by Norman Uphoff of Cornell. Norman put up a partial defense but mostly objected to the fact that his ideas were being attacked. one of the co-authors of the McDonald et al. article which he cites as 'authoritative' has conceded to me personally that half of the data they used for their analysis should never have been included in the study because it did not meet their own stated criteria. Why he did not withdraw the article, or withdraw himself from co-authorship, having made this concession, is hard to fathom. But then the antagonism and derision directed toward SRI is also hard to fathom. I responded that it wasn't hard...
September 27, 2008
With Interest
When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Surgeons want to cut, lawyers want to sue, and economists want to tax. The economics of climate change is straightforward. Virtually every activity directly or indirectly involves combustion of fossil fuels, producing emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. . . Emissions of carbon dioxide represent "externalities," i.e., social consequences not accounted for by the workings of the market. They are market failures because people do not pay for the current and future costs of their actions. If economics provides a single bottom line for policy, it is that we need to correct this market failure by ensuring that all people, everywhere, and for the indefinite future are confronted with a market price for the use of carbon that reflects the social costs of their activities. Economic participants—thousands of governments, millions of firms, billions of people, all making trillions of decisions each year—need to face...
September 02, 2008
Skin Game
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,...
July 15, 2008
Gong Show
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,...
June 05, 2008
Fat Years
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...
February 12, 2008
More Old School
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,...
January 17, 2008
Old School
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...
January 10, 2008
Power Drinks
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....
December 23, 2007
Twee Economics
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...
November 18, 2007
Secret Science
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...
November 15, 2007
Inspector Gadget
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" --...
November 10, 2007
Weird Science
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...
October 23, 2007
Long Waves
[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...
September 03, 2007
Who Pays?
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...
August 21, 2007
Drunkard's Walk
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...
August 07, 2007
Word
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...
August 02, 2007
Colors
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...
June 20, 2007
Sickly Green
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...
June 09, 2007
Omniscience
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...
March 09, 2007
DWIM
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,...
February 27, 2007
Slow Train
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...
February 23, 2007
Fantasy Land
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...
February 15, 2007
Tech Gonads
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...
February 09, 2007
Cooling Off
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...
January 23, 2007
Carterphone
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...
January 04, 2007
Risky Business
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...
October 20, 2006
Argy Bargy
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...
October 03, 2006
Wired Myths
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...
September 16, 2006
Yokhol Valley
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...
September 15, 2006
Present Perfect
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...
June 26, 2006
Value Philanthropy
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,...
April 05, 2006
Behind the Curve
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...
April 02, 2006
Sleeping Furiously
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...
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