Climate change : we can fight the enemy, and he is us

We already know the technological solutions needed to, at the very least, reduce climate change. What seems like a much more difficult problem is how we go about persuading people to enact those measures. But we also understand human reasoning and irrational behaviour at least reasonably well : our default comparisons are relative, recent, and local, and our conclusions are influence by those around us. Most of the time we do not simply independently examine the evidence. The fact that people are irrational does not, however, mean that we have to give up trying to get them to do rational things. We simply have to change tactics : stop trying to rely on the evidence, and exploit their cognitive biases and especially societal network effects.

Psychologists have identified more than 150 cognitive biases we all share. Of these, a few are particularly important in explaining why we lack the will to act on climate change:

• Hyperbolic discounting - this is our perception that the present is more important than the future.
• The bystander effect - we tend to believe that someone else will deal with a crisis. 
• The sunk-cost fallacy. We are biased towards staying the course even in the face of negative outcomes.

The good news is that our biological evolution hasn’t just hindered us from addressing the challenge of climate change. It’s also equipped us with capacities to overcome them... We can imagine and predict multiple, complex outcomes and identify actions needed in the present to achieve desired outcomes in the future. 

Unfortunately, this capacity to plan to ensure a future outcome breaks down when large-scale collective action is needed – as is the case with climate change. As individuals, we know what we can do about climate change. But addressing the issue also requires collective action on a scale that exceeds our evolutionary capacities. The larger the group, the more challenging it gets. Remember the bystander effect? But in small groups, it’s a different story.

Recognising the power of small groups, Exposure Labs, the film company behind Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral, is using its films to mobilise communities to take local action on climate change. For example, in South Carolina, a US state rife with leaders who deny climate change, Exposure Labs shows a film to get a conversation started, inviting people from various interest groups – like the agricultural, fisheries, and tourism industries – to talk about how climate change affects them personally. They then work these small groups to identify practical actions that can be taken immediately at the local level to make an impact – something that helps generate the political pressure necessary to compel lawmakers to pass relevant local or state-wide legislation. When local communities shape the narrative around individual interests, people are less likely to succumb to the bystander effect and more likely to engage.  

When small groups are involved in coming up with solutions themselves, they experience the endowment effect: when we own something (even an idea), we tend to value it more. Second, social comparison: we tend to evaluate ourselves by looking at others. If we’re surrounded by other people in a group who are taking action on climate change, we’re more likely to do the same.

How brain biases prevent climate action

We know that climate change is happening. We also know that it's the result of increased carbon emissions from human activities like land degradation and the burning of fossil fuels. And we know that it's urgent. A recent report from international climate experts tells us that we are likely to reach 1.5C of average global warming in as little as 11 years.

Welcome to Decoherency !

Welcome to my third blog, Decoherency. If you have no idea who I am or who you are or why you're here, that's okay, for I shall explain.

I started my first blog (Physicists of the Caribbean) when it became clear that astronomy was going to take me to far-distant lands and I needed something to do in the evenings. PotC slowly evolved from travel and silliness into lengthy ramblings about science and philosophy or whatever I happened to find currently interesting. At the same time, Google Plus emerged as a great place to find an audience and write shorter, more focused posts in a respectably organised fashion.

The impending demise of Google Plus is a tragedy of a farce of an injustice, but I've decided not to go gentle into that good night. Instead, I've been archiving as much of my stream as I can into two new blogs. The first, Little Physicists, is all about astronomy and data visualisation, with some commentary on scientific methods and stuff. In short, it's about things I can describe at a professional level without feeling too much like an amateur hack.

This one covers everything else. For Google Plus was a great place to wax lyrical on any topic at all, and while the opinion of an astronomer doesn't deserve any special credit when he's not talking about astronomy, he's still entitled to hobbies. So here, as my rage against the dying of the light, are a whole shedload of posts on politics, philosophy, animal behaviour and intelligence, psychology, the latest technological developments, and all manner of other crap. You can find the major topics listed in the sidebar on the right. It's not quite finished yet (in particular watch out for missing or wrong links, especially in the placeholder category), but the vast bulk of the work is done.

Many posts are just summaries of longer articles, with direct quotes in italics and my own - sometimes very brief - comments written in regular script. I decided to keep these summaries as a convenient way to look back on what I found interesting. Posts in the Predictions category contain specific predictions as to what we could expect in the future - either my own guesses or those of the experts. At some point I'll check over these and see what lived up to the hype and what didn't, which ought to be instructive. Existing posts have sometimes been edited [with new text given in square brackets] where appropriate, though there are still many "placeholders" which aren't done yet.

Like Little Physicists, this blog is not intended as a static archive but a living blog where I can continue venting short, often incoherent and inconsistent, thoughts about whatever bloomin' nonsense I feel like. This way I can safely post to whatever social media is currently in vogue without fear of losing all my stuff or needing to archive it once again. And with luck, having things more organised will help keep future Physicists of the Caribbean posts - which is where the more fully-developed ideas go - nice and concise so that people might actually read it.

Or not.

Talent versus luck : the story so far

I'm calling this one done. There's plenty more that could be done, but this is a good place to stop. The next step is to turn this into a paper and become a computational sociologist. Because no-one in history has ever claimed the title of Nazi space farming computational sociologist astronomer before... but I digress.

Anyway, I've gone through and redone a bunch of the earlier simulations so that the figures are now (mostly) consistent. I also wondered if the wealth fraction plots were misleading, since they select the agents of a specified wealth fraction independently at each timestep rather than following the fortunes of a fixed group of agents. Tests reveal that actually this makes very little difference.

For those who have no idea what this is, here's an abstract...

Last year there was a paper claiming that the role of luck may be underestimated. The authors claim that abilities are known to follow a Gaussian distribution whereas wealth is a power law. They demonstrated through a numerical, agent-based model that one way to get the financial power law from the Gaussian talent distribution is through luck, with no correlation between ability and money. Agents, with varying ability levels, wander around a world intersecting events which cause them to alter their wealth levels depending somewhat on their talent.

What I did was to recreate their code in Python (link's in the document). We all know that correlation doesn't equal causation. Well, it turns out their model actually provides an example of lack of correlation not equalling a lack of causation... In their model, talent only allows agents to exploit lucky events. This is a pretty weak effect but it should show up. The reason it doesn't is because their sample size was too small (so it doesn't contain enough agents with extreme high/low talents) and doesn't compare agents who experience the same levels of events. Basically, in their model, the mediocre people are more likely to get lucky compared to the genius simply because their are far more of them. If you compare populations of similar ability levels who experience similar numbers of events, the most talented always win.

I also found two ways to alter this model which produce a genuine model while still being in keeping with the spirit of the original. The first is to allow talent to have stronger effects on the outcome of events. The second is to allow talent to encourage agents to move towards areas where there are more good events and less bad ones. And a third, weird option is to allow talent to vary... but this turns out to be perverse : a talent-wealth correlation emerges, but it's only because wealth drives talent rather than the other way around.
I also discuss the ethics of meritocracies and why they're not necessarily very nice.

Enjoy...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TD1PCW1IG2BlBQ27GPe5Nqi5phjg4qXwhpgEfJAgbBw/edit?usp=sharing

Racing to the bottom

Brexit Secretary Stephen Barclay told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Tuesday's vote had "overturned a defeat of 230 into a victory", referring to the crushing defeat of Mrs May's deal in the Commons earlier this month. "Yes, I can confirm, according to the Guinness Book Of World Records I am indeed the stupidest man alive."

There, fixed it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-47052227

An intelligent (but still unconvincing) case for panpsychism

Excellent. This ties together a lot of different ideas I've heard about previously in a much more coherent way than I've seen before. For my part, I have no problem with accepting a non-physical component to reality (https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/09/this-equation-shows-you-cant-quantify.html). I do not accept the conclusion presented herein of panpsychism (I am not in the least convinced by it), but the article presents the case in a far more intelligent way than I've seen previously.

No matter how precisely we could specify the mechanisms underlying, for example, the perception and recognition of tomatoes, we could still ask: Why is this process accompanied by the subjective experience of red, or any experience at all? Why couldn’t we have just the physical process, but no consciousness? The hard problem of consciousness would seem to persist even given knowledge of every imaginable kind of physical detail.

One might wonder how physical particles are, independently of what they do or how they relate to other things. What are physical things like in themselves, or intrinsically? Some have argued that there is nothing more to particles than their relations, but intuition rebels at this claim. For there to be a relation, there must be two things being related. Otherwise, the relation is empty—a show that goes on without performers, or a castle constructed out of thin air. In other words, physical structure must be realized or implemented by some stuff or substance that is itself not purely structural. Otherwise, there would be no clear difference between physical and mere mathematical structure, or between the concrete universe and a mere abstraction. But what could this stuff that realizes or implements physical structure be, and what are the intrinsic, non-structural properties that characterize it? The philosopher Galen Strawson has called it the hard problem of matter.

What is the hardware that implements the software of Newton’s equations? One might think the answer is simple: It is implemented by solid particles. But solidity is just the behaviour of resisting intrusion and spatial overlap by other particles—that is, another mere relation to other particles and space. The hard problem of matter arises for any structural description of reality no matter how clear and intuitive at the structural level.

The hard problem of matter calls for non-structural properties, and consciousness is the one phenomenon we know that might meet this need. Consciousness is full of qualitative properties, from the redness of red and the discomfort of hunger to the phenomenology of thought. Such experiences, or “qualia,” may have internal structure, but there is more to them than structure. We know something about what conscious experiences are like in and of themselves, not just how they function and relate to other properties.

This suggests that consciousness—of some primitive and rudimentary form—is the hardware that the software described by physics runs on. The physical world can be conceived of as a structure of conscious experiences. Our own richly textured experiences implement the physical relations that make up our brains. Some simple, elementary forms of experiences implement the relations that make up fundamental particles. Take an electron, for example. What an electron does is to attract, repel, and otherwise relate to other entities in accordance with fundamental physical equations. What performs this behavior, we might think, is simply a stream of tiny electron experiences.

Dual-aspect monism comes in moderate and radical forms. Moderate versions take the intrinsic aspect of matter to consist of so-called protoconscious or “neutral” properties: properties that are unknown to science, but also different from consciousness. The nature of such neither-mental-nor-physical properties seems quite mysterious. Like the aforementioned quantum theories of consciousness, moderate dual-aspect monism can therefore be accused of merely adding one mystery to another and expecting them to cancel out.

The most radical version of dual-aspect monism takes the intrinsic aspect of reality to consist of consciousness itself. This is decidedly not the same as subjective idealism, the view that the physical world is merely a structure within human consciousness, and that the external world is in some sense an illusion. According to dual-aspect monism, the external world exists entirely independently of human consciousness. But it would not exist independently of any kind of consciousness, because all physical things are associated with some form of consciousness of their own, as their own intrinsic realizer, or hardware.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/is-matter-conscious

This is not normal

I believe we've now reached the point beyond stupidity where words have been replaced by mere bursts of air escaping from the lungs. The clown show continues.

Theresa May has told MPs she will seek to re-open negotiations with the EU over the Northern Ireland backstop. The PM said she would go back to Brussels to get a "significant and legally binding change" to the controversial proposal, which aims to stop the return of border checks. The EU has said it will not change the legal text agreed with the UK PM. Mrs May said she knew there was a "limited appetite" in the EU, but she believed she could "secure" it.

That's just aaargh. What in the world makes her think she could do that ? Has the EU shown the slightest hint that they would be willing to change on that ? Of course not, because if they did, they'd be treating Ireland unfairly through no fault of its own. Brexit on the other hand is Britain's fault; what causes problems for us is not really the EU's problem. This continued insistence that "they need us more than we need them" is Flat Earth level of heroic stupidity.

Mrs May said the vote later would be a chance to "send a clear message" to EU on the backstop... Mrs May said backing it would "give the mandate I need to negotiate with Brussels an arrangement that commands a majority in this House - not a further exchange of letters, but a significant and legally binding change to the withdrawal agreement".

Da fuq ? The EU isn't going to change stance, because it can't. What Britain wants is of little consequence. Brexiteers are still acting as though Brexit is some sort of threat we can scare the EU with, somehow. Unless there's some actual, credible alternative to the backstop, then May is little more than an oxygen thief.

But Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Mrs May herself was the "obstacle to a solution"...

Of fer cryin' out loud... NO SHE ISN'T. She's a daft old bat, but she isn't the problem. The problem is Brexit itself. In two years, no-one has proposed a workable solution, because there isn't one. The whole thing is an unnecessary, omnishambolic and farcical solution to a purely fictitious problem conjured as a scapegoat to Tory policies, advocated by demagogues and endorsed by the (sometimes wilfully) ignorant. It is wholly and utterly a self-destructive act of stupidity.

"... and that, whatever happened in the votes later, it had "now become inevitable" that the government would have to extend Article 50 - the mechanism which means the UK leaves the EU on 29 March."

Well, I can't disagree with that, at least in principle. The government clearly should extend Article 50 at the absolute minimum. But will they ? They seem hell-bent on always adopting the stupidest option possible. And it gets worse :

However, Mr Corbyn, told the Commons they wanted a shorter window of three months to allow time for a deal to be finalised.

AAAAAAAARGHHHH.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-47037365

Using pigeons as drones

Nowadays, some birds are trained to take down pesky drones.  Back before drones became a cheap and easy way to acquire aerial imagery, a German inventor proposed using pigeons to capture photographs of the earth from above.


Curious to see where his pigeons were flying, he devised a way to capture pictures of their flight path.  In the early 1900s Julius Neubronner developed an aluminum breast harness to which a lightweight camera was attached.  The camera was equipped with a timer that would take a picture every thirty seconds.  This contraption was attached to a homing pigeon in order to capture aerial photographs. While aerial photographs taken from balloons and kites had been taken some 20-30 years earlier, the perspective of seeing the landscape from above was still a novel and exciting view for most people.  The unreliability of flight paths and quality of the aerial photographs compared to  made the pigeon aerial invention a short-lived strategy.

As eloquently noted in Popular Science Monthly, volume 88, 1872, p.30-31 :

"It is a strange medley, the air-ship, the last and most daring invention of man's brain, rising in the early dawn to search out and photograph the foe's movements, and the graceful pigeon, so frequently mentioned in the stories of early days, soaring, perhaps at the same moment, to act as an aerial scout."

"Faster, better, cheaper" was a basically good space policy

The "faster better cheaper" idea probably suffered (I guess) from two related things :
1) A (not wholly unjustified) belief that "failure is not an option", though in fact failure is part and parcel of research, especially risky research.
2) While missions were relatively cheap, they still required serious levels of money. Certainly, if your $10 million mission explodes this is not as bad as if your $200 million mission dies a fiery death. But who's willing even to risk $10 million ? It's a heck of a lot of money and required time invested to tell people, "well, it might all just go kerblamo, but we'll see".
And a possible third point : the overall savings are hard to compare at the time. Only after a considerable period of implementation can you evaluate which method is more economical. And even if the savings were evident, this might not be terribly comforting if you were working on a project that exploded and all your work was wasted.

The article mentions cubesats at the end, which are cheap enough to dodge this scary-number threshold. I would cautiously add that, thanks to SpaceX's sequence of spectacular first-stage failures (whilst also successfully delivering the payloads to orbit, thus giving the best of both worlds), the mantra of failure as acceptable might be more acceptable. Won't work for manned missions but it might for robotic probes.

In an effort to correct the planetary science community’s impression and memory of FBC, here are some facts that changed my perception of the era.
-The Viking mission to Mars in 1976 cost $1.06 billion in real-year dollars and took 6 years to develop. The Pathfinder team was instructed to send a lander AND rover (Sojourner) to Mars in half the time and 1/14 the budget. They succeeded.
-In fact, the Pathfinder lander cost less than the life detection experiment on Viking ($220 million, inflation-adjusted). The Sojourner rover only cost $25 million.
-Leveraging new CCD detector technology, the Pathfinder team spent $7.4 million to develop a new camera while the Viking team spent $27.3 million (inflation-adjusted) on their 2 cameras (1 for each lander). New CCD detector technology allowed a significant camera mass reduction.
-All 16 FBC missions combined cost less than the Viking missions.
-Cassini required 15 years for development; combined, all 16 FBC missions took 7 years.
-Lunar Prospector, which developed very little new technology yet discovered water ice on the Moon, only cost $63 million.

An obvious counter-argument is that the FBC spacecraft may have been cheap, but they were also a lot less capable than larger spacecraft with many more instruments. True. Cost reduction happens in part by reducing capability, e.g., Pathfinder didn’t have an orbiter, and Viking did. However, FBC missions resulted in more scientific publications (a proxy for science return) per dollar spent than traditionally managed missions (Dillon and Madsen 2015). The ability of the FBC approach to increase the science return from finite funding is a missing yet critical part of the space community’s narrative about the Faster, Better, Cheaper era.

http://www.elizabethafrank.com/colliding-worlds/fbc

By any other name

The shutdown was worth it, Trump insists, because the wall is necessary to stem the ceaseless tide of violence from the border. “The only thing that is immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized,”

But there’s one spike in violence that the president rarely acknowledges or even mentions, and it’s the rise in far-right terror that has accompanied his ascension to the White House.

On Wednesday, the Anti-Defamation League released a report finding that attackers with ties to right-wing extremist movements killed at least 50 people in 2018. That was close to the total number of Americans killed by domestic extremists, meaning that the far right had an almost absolute monopoly on lethal terrorism in the United States last year. 

_The number of fatalities is 35 percent higher than the previous year, and it marks the fourth-deadliest year for such attacks since 1970. In fact, according to the ADL, white supremacists are responsible for the majority of such attacks “almost every year.” The 2018 attacks include the one at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue by a man who blamed Jews for the migrant caravan, the mass shooting at a yoga studio by an “incel” obsessed with interracial dating, and the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, carried out by a student who wished that “all the Jews were dead.”

From 2009 through 2018, right-wing extremists accounted for 73 percent of such killings, according to the ADL, compared with 23 percent for Islamists and 3 percent for left-wing extremists. In other words, most terrorist attacks in the United States, and most deaths from terrorist attacks, are caused by white extremists. But they do not cause the sort of nationwide panic that helped Trump win the 2016 election and helped the GOP expand its Senate majority in the midterms.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-terrorists-2018-were-almost-all-right-wing/581284/

Smack not lest ye be smacked

Interesting :

Of the countries included in the study, 30 have passed laws fully banning physical punishment of children, both in schools and in homes. The rates of fighting among adolescents were substantially lower than in the 20 countries with no bans in place: by 69 percent for adolescent males and 42 percent less for females.

The other 38 countries in the study — which include the United States, Canada, and the U.K. — have partial bans, in schools only. In those countries, adolescent females showed a 56 percent lower rate of physical fighting, with no change among males.

The association held true even after accounting for such factors as the differences in the wealth of the countries and the nation's homicide rates, said Elgar. Even so, Elgar cautions, the study shows a correlation only, not a cause and effect.

"It could be that bans come into place in countries that have already generally accepted that spanking is not the best discipline method," he said, or there may be other cultural factors involved. "We haven't answered with certainty" the impact of the bans, he says, noting that more research is needed.

I propose we test this with two groups of politicians...

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/10/25/660191806/what-happens-when-a-country-bans-spanking