Take my tools away and I'm diminished, less than I would be had I never had the tools. The benefit seems worth the cost though. What if we were getting dumber when we are off Google, but we were getting loads smarter while we were on Google? That doesn't seem improbable, and in fact seems pretty likely. Question is, do you get off Google or stay on all the time? I think that even if the penalty is that you loose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time. At least I would. I'd like to jack in more, but I don't have the where with to do with. So, I just bump along on the bottom, making do with unenhanced intelligence the vast majority of the time....

Philip gives good char. The argument for encouraging biochar use as a ubiquitous household practice is compelling: Improved garden soil will increase food production where it has the most impact on energy demand. Implementing charcoal manufacture at a household level draws in a supply of yard prunings and workbench scraps that otherwise would be lost to non-charcoal alternatives. Unfortunately, finding even the most basic information on how to implement biochar use as a personal sustainability practice is discouragingly time consuming. In response I have started up a FAQ, a collaborative wiki, building on the efforts of the TP enthusiast community. . . If you have ever contemplated brewing your own char then go there, read it, do it, and then report back with your experiences. This isn't for commercial scale char production, but for tinker capable gardeners it's full of practical tips backed by solid science and engineering. It's a work in progress, a wiki, so help if you...

Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop. RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer . . . - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic. . . what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €400). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend... We hope to announce self-replication this year - 2008 - though the machine that will do it - RepRap Version 1.0 "Darwin"...

How to Think: Managing brain resources in an age of complexity. Synthesize new ideas constantly. Learn how to learn (rapidly). Work backward from your goal. Always have a long-term plan. Make contingency maps. Collaborate. Make your mistakes quickly. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols. Document everything obsessively. Keep it simple. So says Ed Boyden, an assistant professor in the MIT Media Lab and MIT Department of Biological Engineering. In some ways this seems more like ways to avoid thinking new thoughts, while emphasizing categorization, confirmation bias, and general immunity to novelty. I'll pick one of his rules, Work backward from your goal, to explain. 3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound--or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you. I should think that discovering what is important to you is...

I'm thinking about this. The problem here (following James March) is that the world is not just uncertain, it is ambiguous. If the world were simply uncertain, reduction of uncertainty via the aggregation of more and better information might prove just the ticket. But what happens when a decision has to be made between qualitatively different options? When more information does not provide a clear direction to go? Or when decision-making could actually increase, decrease, or change in fundamental ways the options themselves? At this point, information-mining actually becomes harmful to the extent that it replaces rather than augments real decision-making. Worse, making decisions is a skill, that needs to be flexed, and used. Understanding when and how information-mining would be useful seems to me a more important ability than even knowing how to manage the information-mining itself. My emphasis. The focus here is on individual or group decision making. It looks different if the focus is on distributed...

I see various discussions and invocations of crowd wisdom that don't seem to have a good grasp of the subject. If you think the probability that something will happen is 90% and then you find out that your friend said 30%, what should your new assessment be? What if the average of ten of your friends' assessments was 30%? . . . Most people would shift their assessment at most halfway toward 30%, to something between 60-90%. But the theory on "not agreeing to disagree" tells us that shifting even further may often be warranted. In this post, we don't weigh in on theoretical arguments at all. Instead we present empirical evidence showing that -- at least in one narrow setting -- there is a clear benefit for almost everyone to lean heavily toward the crowd's assessment rather than one's own assessment, even more so as the number of other assessments grows. . . Also note that these results...

At last, someone to blame! It has been miserably cold here for a week or so. The frozen citrus story has gone national, especially since the governator is seeking disaster relief for the $1 billion in losses, but the everyday little costs for all of us aren't trivial either. It's Al's fault. Gore Effect The well documented phenomenon that leads to very low, unseasonable temperatures, driving rain, hail, snow or all of the above whenever Al Gore visits an area to discuss global "warming". This happens every few years. It happened in 1990, 1998 and now in 2007. It's a little late this time. Had it happened a few days earlier in December, usually our coldest month, as it did in 1990 and 1998, it would be a neat eight year cycle. I had a hunch that this was going to be a bad winter and kept almost all my seed in the sack instead of trying to steal...

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 better questions, ever better put. Brockman's stable of thinking/writing/talking heads each take a whack at the question. I checked out a few, and may read more later, but my first impulse was to scrutinize the question: What is optimism anyway? A dictionary definition such as this one is that optimism is "a general disposition to expect the best in all things ". The...

. . . cut once. It works so much better than the opposite. Similarly, assembly with the newish HurriQuake nail is best when done right the first time. [via Instapundit -> Volokh Conspiracy] The company is selling every HurriQuake nail it produces and has been doubling production capacity every month. Although the nail is currently available only in the Gulf region (it adds about $15 to the cost of an average 2,000-square-foot house), the company is adding new production lines to meet nationwide demand. Meanwhile, the nail is getting rave reviews from building-technology experts. “This is a major innovation,” says Tim Reinhold, director of engineering for the Institute for Business and Home Safety, an insurance-industry research group. “And in places that are affected by high winds and earthquakes, it looks like it’s going to make a big difference.” Before I leave Clemson, I ask Schiff if he sees any downside to his protege’s invention. “Homeowners and insurance companies are...

Roger Pielke Jr. has written a lot about the politicization of science. He even wrote a book, The Honest Broker, that explores the theme and makes recommendations. (No, I haven't bought it . . . yet, but I intend to do so.) He points to an article by Paul Starobin that deals with the issue in part. He appropriately finds that the pathological politicization of science occurs on both the left and the right, but astutely also recognizes that the scientific establishment itself bears some responsibility for today’s hyper-politicization of science: . . . the modern professional research scientist is not, by any stretch, a blameless figure -- in this tale, that scientist emerges as an increasingly partisan and self-interested figure, dependent on government grants and largely an inhabitant of Blue America. Starobin does a nice job characterizing how science is used as a tool of politics from the political Left and Right. He registers complaints similar to those...

It's not only an analogy. In an attempt to answer age-old questions about how basic musical elements work together, Dmitri Tymoczko has journeyed far into the land of topology and non-Euclidean geometry, and has returned with a new -- and comparatively simple -- way of understanding how music is constructed. His findings have resulted in the first paper on music theory that the journal Science has printed in its 127-year history, and may provide an additional theoretical tool for composers searching for that elusive next chord. "I'm not trying to tell people what style of music sounds good, or which composers to prefer," said Tymoczko (pronounced tim-OSS-ko), a composer and music theorist who is an assistant professor of music at Princeton. "What I hope to do is provide a new way to represent the space of musical possibilities. If you like a particular chord, or group of notes, then I can show you how to find other, similar chords...

Did you know that the coolest tool in your kit might be your public library card? In most states, you can get a library card from a public library outside of your county of residence -- as long as you can prove state residence (true for the San Francisco Public Library). Often you will have to go the actual state library in person to pick up your card, but once in hand, you can access the library from the web. Fanatical researchers are known to have a wallet full of library cards from numerous public library systems within their respective states. Some states, Ohio and Michigan being two of the better known, have statewide consortiums of private, corporate and public libraries, which allows you access to the combined services and databases licensing power of them all. If your local library system does not provide free online access to digital content databases, the cheapest way to get into these expensive...

May 20-22, 2006 University of California, Berkeley The conference will bring together a diverse group of participants from a variety of disciplines, including some of the world’s leaders in biological engineering, biochemistry, quantitative biology, biophysics, molecular and cellular biology, bioethics, policy and governance, and the biotech industry. A collaborative effort among Berkeley Lab, MIT, UC Berkeley, and UCSF, the conference will promote and guide the further, constructive development of the field. What is SB? Synthetic Biology is A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes. Oliver Morton is blogging from the conference This post and those which follow should really be going up on the Nature Newsblog (part of my day-job duties as the chief news and features editor of that great journal), but due to a fairly predictable snafu which is mostly my fault I don't seem to be able to post...

The joking caricature - "I'm a scientist, I don't believe in anything" - almost fits me. Almost, but I'm not a scientist. The rest is pretty close. I like the notion that the way to respond to evidence and theories is not to ask "can I believe in this", but to ask "must I believe in this". The answer is very, very seldom yes, you must believe. So I try, not always convincingly, to keep a sceptical distance from global warming belief. I do succeed in avoiding global warming hysteria since that is plainly dumb as well as mean spirited, and usually instrumental - an excuse for authoritarians to try yet again to seize control of society. So, I always welcome a new paper by Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The issue of man induced climate change involves not the likelihood of dangerous consequences, but rather their remote possibility. The...

The post Overconfidence discussed and disputed Bryan Caplans reactions to Philip Tetlock's new book - Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, and drew heavily on J.D. Trout & Michael Bishop, especially their essay 50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science. Caplan's post has some interesting back and forth in the follow on comments, and he has posted again on another finding of the book. In Mind Wide Open he discusses Tetlock's findings about scenario consultants. Tetlock tried out this technique on his political experts. He made them imagine all sorts of possible scenarios about (a) Canadian disintegration, and (b) the Japanese economy. His findings: 1. Before the exercise, people's probabilities at least added to about 100%. The exercise led participants to violate this elementary logical principle: after thinking about different scenarios, every outcome seemed more likely. For the Canadian problem, the average expert gave all the possibilities...

Or, the loneliness of the honest skeptic. Philip points to this essay by Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and offers some tea - Earl Grey, hot - to enjoy while we consider this thoughtful meditation on the problems of being skeptical and the necessity of doing so. Tennekes seems to be what Cosma Shalizi calls a Left Popperian in that he requires some rigor in predictions and simulations. As Tennekes puts it: His [Popper] claim that scientists should be held accountable for the accuracy of their predictions boils down to the requirement that they have to compute in advance the reliability of their computations. For complex models, Popper wrote, this demand leads to "infinite regress": computations of forecast skill are much harder than the forecasts themselves, and the next level, forecasting the skill of the skill forecast, is insurmountable when a complex system such as the climate is involved. Popper concluded that the positivist...

A number of recent posts have dealt with aspects of reasoning and judgement. Strategic Reliabilism dealt with "epistemic excellence" directly, but Overconfidence, Finite Value, Lucidity and Whiffed were earlier posts that dealt with aspects of the issue. In Interpreting Data Don Boudreaux points out another aspect of fubar reasoning. Cornell University psychologist Tom Gilovich makes one of the most useful observations I've encountered in some time. Here's economist Robert Frank's summary of Gilovich's observation: As the psychologist Tom Gilovich has suggested, someone who wants to believe a proposition tends to ask, “Can I believe it?” In contrast, someone who wants to deny its truth tends to ask “Must I believe it?" As much as I'd like to deny that Gilovich's observation applies to me, I can't. It does apply. But now being aware, I at least try to take a more critical stance toward propositions that correspond closely to my priors, and to take a more forgiving stance toward...

J.D. Trout & Michael Bishop, the protagonists of the previous post, have written a book Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment. Book Description Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning. This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy. An Excerpt: It is time for epistemology to take its rightful place alongside ethics as a discipline that offers practical, real-world recommendations for living. In our society, the powerful are at least sometimes asked to provide a moral...

I've been wondering how those who were confident of their expertise would respond to the recent discussion of Philip Tetlock's new book - Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? - mentioned in Science Class. Bryan Caplan's response: Is my confidence in experts completely misplaced? I think not. Tetlock's sample suffers from severe selection bias. He deliberately asked relatively difficult and controversial questions. As his methodological appendix explains, questions had to "Pass the 'don't bother me too often with dumb questions' test." Dumb according to who? The implicit answer is "Dumb according to the typical expert in the field." What Tetlock really shows is that experts are overconfident if you exclude the questions where they have reached a solid consensus. This is still an important finding. Experts really do make overconfident predictions about controversial questions. We have to stop doing that! However, this does not show that experts are overconfident about their core findings. It's...

I've had some phun at the expense of the various predators seeking to exploit Katrina and in a very few places noted someone who had written something sensible, something that wasn't just venomous political opportunism or a predatory sales spiel for their used and damaged intellectual merchandise long past its sell-by date. Here's one that makes useful commentary that can be appreciated even if you disagree with parts of it since it makes a sincere attempt to grapple with the issues rather than merely profit from someone else's tragedy. At the end of the day, for social learning to effectively take hold, for actions to be implemented in a timely way, a new kind of political leadership style is needed. We are all craving this -- us "pragmatic idealists", tired of blind and binding ideological party politics. Yet what exactly a new kind of politics might look like is dimly perceived. We see glimmers of it here in the...

One of the reasons that so many have been so wrong in their predicted futures is failure to grasp the nature of techno-social evolution - the overall effect of technical advancement when coupled with social advancement. Though it's difficult to cleanly distinguish one from the other in all cases, and they are each both cause and effect when viewed from different perspectives, it is possible to talk about them usefully in the language of one or the other. Here's a useful example: Economic expansion depends on greater yield from whatever inputs are available. The energy intensity of the US economy has been falling steadily since the 1970's, yielding more and more economic output per unit of energy; still, greater efficiency can be overcome by falling supply. The alternative is to convert something else to suit. American society is no stranger to this phenomenon; in the past 229 years, US society has seen a number of transformations in its use...

Jason Shogren, of the University of Wyoming, and his colleagues suggest that trade and specialisation are the reasons Homo sapiens displaced previous members of the genus, such as Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man), and emerged triumphant as the only species of humanity. One thing Homo sapiens does that Homo neanderthalensis shows no sign of having done is trade. The evidence suggests that such trade was going on even 40,000 years ago. Stone tools made of non-local materials, and sea-shell jewellery found far from the coast, are witnesses to long-distance exchanges. That Homo sapiens also practised division of labour and specialisation is suggested not only by the skilled nature of his craft work, but also by the fact that his dwellings had spaces apparently set aside for different uses. To see if trade might be enough to account for the dominance of Homo sapiens, Dr Shogren and his colleagues created a computer model of population growth that attempts to capture the...

The paper Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers, referenced in the previous post Independent Cacophony - found by a circuitous route based on a glancing reference in James Surowiecki's talk given at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in San Diego called Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected? - notes some interesting conditions and exceptions. An ideal group would contain high-ability problem solvers who are diverse. But, as we see in the proof of the result, as the pool of problem solvers grows larger, the very best problem solvers must become similar. In the limit, the highest-ability problem solvers cannot be diverse. The result also relies on the size of the random group becoming large. If not, the individual members of the random group may still have substantial overlap in their local optima and not perform well. At the same time, the group size cannot be so...

A number of people have been linking and commenting on the recent Neal Stephenson e-interview in Reason. As usual, the interviewer tries to make political points but Stephenson dodges them, declines to define or align himself, and sticks to his literary knitting about the human condition. Jonathan Wilde complains: ... it’s clear to me that he undoubtedly has radical libertarian views. Yet, in every interview I have ever seen him give, he either avoids any questions on his political views or goes out his way to distance himself from the word “libertarian". Good. As Stephenson says: Once they’ve settled on a totalizing political theory, they see everything through that lens and are hostile to other notions. It isn't useful to self define or align if your objective is comprehension. Arguably, it isn't even useful if your objective is to influence social evolution or participate in society intellectually. If your ambition is merely to gain and hold political power then...

M&M has been evolving from its initial focus on extended ruminations about agricultural and environmental issues, broadly conceived, to something sufficiently broad that the initial blog description, "earthy observations" had become false advertising. It's no less earthy, even vulgar, but it is other things as well. This Scott McLemee column, pointed to by a Holbo post that even he has abandoned to die a painful and lingering death at this point, contained the phrase "loiter with intent" as a description of the behavior of a sort of low-income socialist cafe culture that met in cafeterias and automats in New York in the 1930s. "The cafeterias and the automats were the center of New York intellectual life back then," ... "You'd buy a sandwich or a piece of pie, both if you could afford it, but what you really went there to do was talk." They were public intellectuals long before anyone thought to coin that phrase, embodying a tradition...

In Fallibilist Philosophy current political polarity was explained as an aspect of the older conflict between Anglo and Continental philosophy. [via A&L Daily] A thought thread woven through previous posts deals with the conflicting world views of those who seize upon an idea and become zealous proponents of it - taking it to extremes and so losing any value the original idea may have had - and those who maintain a critical stance, even of their own ideas, and so avoid turning them into dogma or caricature. The excitable extremists ride their notions into the ground and end up walking, or crawling, while the more critical not only keep their mounts they do better at choosing routes among the various turnings and forkings of paths. It's not just a difference in temperament. There's an element of personal integrity and intellectual honesty involved as well as courage. When uncertainty or doubt arises, as it always does when fully engaged, what...

On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote In the comments of the Critical Mass post linked in Blue Anti-Intellectualism Timothy Burke (I know, I link him too often, but he's so interesting) attempted to imagine a more diverse, and so more intellectually demanding, syllabus. ...though many of us might cite ourselves as exceptions (since I've also taught Fukuyama, Hayek, and Ferguson) I would say that I regard myself as atypical in this regard. There's no way to know for certain without a comprehensive survey of a huge number of syllabi in my discipline or across the humanities, but I think it's a reasonable guess that these are uncommon and non-canonical inclusions. What I think would be a more theoretically principled kind of conservative literary criticism would basically derive from Edmund Burke, that would see literature as the expressive conservation of existing forms of cultural and social consciousness and practice, and to violently contest statist attempts to set cultural...

The earlier post Anti-Intellectualism took exception to the common accusation that those outside elitist institutions were anti-intellectual arguing that they were squicked out by the narrow mindedness of those institutions and so pursued knowledge through other mechanisms, especially ICT. This is a great good thing. As ever more people have access through information and communication technologies to written materials and live commentary by both professional and amateur scholars the increase of the general level of knowledge in the social mind is explosive. It is uneven, and includes as much dross as gold, as we should expect. Every idea is exposed to critique by commenters ranging from the intelligent and informed to delusional ignoramuses. They not only critique the ideas of the anointed, they have the temerity to propose their own theories. In Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual Mark Baurlein hoists those who so glibly accuse others of anti-intellectualism on their own petards. [via Arts & Letters Daily] Such parochialism and...

How and When to Shoot Your Dog The most heated shrieking in political contests is invariably devoid of factual content or, more importantly, useful policy implications. In several earlier posts the shrill accusations against the current US administration that they have politicized science, as if it was a special perfidy recently introduced, were debunked. The facts are that this is a long standing practice enthusiastically endorsed by current critics when their political teams were in charge. The useful policy issues apply to all administrations past, present and future and are devoid of political content. They revolve around mechanisms to achieve high levels of scientific output, chiefly funding methods, and mechanisms for integrating that data with policy inputs from other disciplines such as economics and ethics to formulate policies that reflect the will of society in all its subtle and conflicting expressions. Useful policy isn't merely crude, majoritarian or authoritarian imposition of policy on dissident minorities. Benign despots are not...

It may seem as if I harbor a special enmity for Nicole-Anne Boyer since I have repeatedly dunked her pigtails in the ink well1, 2, but as usual it's a special affection expressed through close attention and criticism. She's the best of the lot at WorldChanging, by a wide margin, and has her own blog at Fuzzy Signals, a venue worth visiting regularly and so resident in my blog roll. Her most recent post, Jamming in the Flux: Insights For A WorldChanger's Strategic Agenda, is a fine example. The core of the post is an introduction to C.S. Holling's Panarchy cycle and the group of fellow travelers at the Resilience Alliance. Their magazine, Ecology & Society, is the first resource listed at right and they are among my most important influences. That Boyer seems to value them too shows why I pay attention to her. The Fluxology category here includes direct references to Holling et. al. as well as...

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson Emerson may have exaggerated a bit though independence has been too rare in social history. Increasingly we are coming to understand that indpendence of mind isn't so much an attribute of greatness as it is a simple social duty, the minimum contribution we each make to social wisdom. Consideration of social wisdom, the ability of a society to govern itself wisely, is an important topic now. It always has been but it's getting lots of pixels due to events. The failure to usefully anticipate and prevent the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the failure to usefully analyze Iraq's WMD involvement, and the current election cycle have combined to make this a hot...

Here's another example of the confusions noted in Extended Senses; Nova Spivack's blog post/essay Minding the Planet: From Semantic Web to Global Mind [via Future Now, again] I believe that the Internet (the hardware) is already evolving into a distributed global brain, and its ongoing activity (the software, humans and data) represents the cognitive process of an increasingly intelligent global mind. This global mind is not centrally organized or controlled, rather it is a bottom-up, emergent, self-organizing phenomenon formed from flows of trillions of information-processing events comprised of billions of independent information processors... Although we created it, the Internet is already far beyond our control or comprehension - it surrounds us and penetrates our world - it is inside our buildings, our tools, our vehicles, and it connects us together and modulates our interactions. As this process continues and the human body and biology begins to be networked into this system we will literally become part of this network...

Little of the commentary or punditry about terrorism and current military efforts is either interesting or insightful. Timothy Burke at Easily Distracted has posted the exceedingly rare exception. If you support the war as part of a battle against illiberalism, then illiberal conduct by your own "side" in the war has to mean something to you, have inescapable implications for your struggle. You can't just shrug off the creation of a gulag in Guantanamo where people have no rights, or evidence of a consistent policy of humiliation and abuse. To understand this as a conflict that is resolvable strictly through military means or through the imposition of formalist structures is my mind to absolutely and completely misunderstand the nature of the larger conflict against terrorism... Those who do misunderstand it this way almost all share two things. One, a belief in the universal and inescapable obligations of modern liberalism. It’s no accident that some Marxists, some liberals and many...

Having taken steps to bury the old year we look ahead to the new and attempt to predict what lies ahead. Eddie at The Greenhouse links an article by Hari Kunzru, futurecasting, that traces a brief but interesting history of a type of predictive modelling from the early days of cybernetics in the 1950s to more current efforts at scenario building. Kunzru's objective is to illuminate the errors of the dot com bubble and its advocates, especially Peter Schwartz and GBN. There are parallels both in time frame and intellectual failure to those of Donella Meadows and the Club of Rome spoken of in the earlier post Mental Tools. I think its useful to recognize that these failures weren't the work of a rogue or two, that they were pervasive in the era, and felled planners from Siberia to California. Cosma Shalizi has some wry but useful comments at Three-Toed Sloth about these events. The idea that it is...

I imagine a multitude of children with little more than a net connection and a sympathetic adult assistant diligently inventing our future for the pleasure of it. I suspect these agile and hungry young minds have already hatched notions that will soon come to fruition.

An example of Meadows failure to understand and apply her own advice comes from the same column discussed in the previous post. Listen to the wisdom of the system. Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. Don't be an unthinking intervener and destroy the system's own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what's already there. A friend of mine, Nathan Gray, was once an aid worker in Guatemala. He told me of his frustration with agencies that would arrive with the intention of "creating jobs" and "increasing entrepreneurial abilities" and "attracting outside investors." They would walk right past the thriving local market, where small-scale business people of all kinds, from basket-makers to vegetable growers to butchers to candy sellers, were displaying their entrepreneurial abilities in jobs they had created for themselves. Nathan spent his time talking to the people in the market, asking...

Donella Meadows was one of the leaders of a blundering, ineffective sort of environmentalism for many years in the last part of the twentieth century. As lead author of the doomsday book Limits to Growth - commissioned by the doom think tank Club Of Rome - she epitomized a heart sick, mean spirited and anti-humanist approach to change. Meadows built her career around doom mongering and hectoring humanity to stop developing, stop growing and stop enjoying itself. Inspired by Systems Dynamics, a.k.a. systems thinking, Meadows and a coterie of fellow travelers fully embraced command and control governance as a mechanism to contain and diminish humanity, an objective that she and others justified with model based scenarios of impending global doom due to anthropogenic causes, especially population growth and resource consumption. A generation of concerned but uninformed believers treated her pronouncements as gospel and her methods as enlightened. She is still held in high regard by many and the influence...