Brain Drain is a good thing

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Brain Drain is a good thing, Laura Freschi explains:

Conventional wisdom frets that the exodus of skilled workers — the brain drain — is bad for African countries. The share of Africans with college degrees who live outside their home countries is certainly high: nearly half of Ghanaians, about 40 percent of Kenyans, and about one-third of Ugandans.

The metaphor of the term itself implies that brain drain is a waste, as if all Africa’s most promising minds were being sucked down some global sink, leaving behind a parched continent. But a paper by William Easterly and Yaw Nyarko, published as a chapter in the new book Skilled Immigration Today: Prospects, Problems, and Policies, explores the arguments for and against brain drain, and builds on previous literature to argue four ways the benefits of brain drain could outweigh the costs to African countries.

Gains to migrants themselves. Why is this often ignored in brain drain discussions? Perhaps it reflects a neglect of the rights and well-being of individuals and an overemphasis on the nation-state as the object of development. The migrant is better off with higher living standards, not to mention satisfying her revealed preference to live in a country other than where she was born.

Gains to migrants’ families. Remittances is the most obvious and commonly-cited benefit of the brain drain. Even using official figures, which likely far undercount the value of remittances by excluding informal channels, remittances sent back by Africans abroad outweigh the cost of educating them at home. Why pass up a high return opportunity (Africans earning high incomes abroad and remitting) and insist on a low return activity (educated Africans underemployed at home)? Not to mention that families also get satisfaction from seeing their offspring realize their dreams.

Brain circulation. Brains don’t just leave Africa, never to return. Africans who have been educated or worked abroad do come back to their home countries to visit, to establish dual residence, to start businesses and universities, and, sometimes, to stay. These people bring back new ideas and skills—crucial ingredients to economic growth. Similar processes brought enormous benefits already to Asia and Latin America, so why would donors want to shut down this motor of opportunity only for Africa?

Stimulation of skill accumulation (“brain gain”). The possibility of migration and the example of role models who find success abroad (the Kofi Annan factor) provide incentives for young students to work hard and gain skills that will help them overcome the hurdles to migration. The authors argue that the new human capital created through these incentives offsets the loss of skilled people who do eventually leave.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

NOVA Extreme Cave Diving

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

The recent NOVA episode on extreme cave diving in the “blue holes” of the Bahamas struck me as almost over-the-top extreme:

Including the expedition leader, anthropologist Kenny Broad, the dive team has recovered the bodies of more than 100 cave divers. To imagine recovering just one, think of a flooded, crumbling 10-story building at night. There’s a dead body in the basement. You have to find it and drag it to the roof. Could you? What if it was a friend? Wes Skiles recovered the body of his best friend from a cave. He also recovered three brothers who realized they were hopelessly lost and out of air. Wes found them holding hands.

Not far into the episode, they find a human arm bone, then a flashlight, and then more remains in a 1970s-era wet suit. They also found some older remains:

At their deepest level, blue holes are anoxic, and this lack of oxygen helps to preserve whatever falls in. Our team was able to recover two skulls belonging to ancient humans, the fossils of vertebrates that are now extinct in the Bahamas, and fossils of birds that aren’t just extinct but have never before been described by science. Living within the blue holes are at least one new order of multi-cellular creatures, descended from animals that evolved millions of years ago, as well as single-celled organisms virtually indistinguishable from the first life-forms on Earth. Parts of blue holes are like our planet’s first seas, from a time four billion years ago when the Earth had no oxygen. NASA was interested in the expedition because the extreme life-forms found in blue holes are similar to what they hope to find on other planets.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations on C-SPAN2

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

I don’t often — or ever — watch C-SPAN2, but I am a fan of Russ Roberts, who hosts EconTalk, and Adam Smith, the subject of Roberts’ appearance (with philosophy professor Samuel Fleischacker).

Algae to solve the Pentagon’s jet fuel problem

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

DARPA-funded projects have already extracted oil from algal ponds at a cost of $2 per gallon and are on track to begin large-scale refining of that oil into jet fuel, at a cost of less than $3 a gallon:

McQuiston said a larger-scale refining operation, producing 50 million gallons a year, would come on line in 2011 and she was hopeful the costs would drop still further — ensuring that the algae-based fuel would be competitive with fossil fuels. She said the projects, run by private firms SAIC and General Atomics, expected to yield 1,000 gallons of oil per acre from the algal farm.

The military’s primary goal isn’t to be green but to shorten their supply lines:

The switch is partly driven by cost, but military commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq are also anxious to create a lighter, more fuel-efficient force that is less dependent on supply convoys, which are vulnerable to attack from insurgents. Give the military the capability of creating jet fuel in the field, and you would eliminate that danger, McQuiston said. “In Afghanistan, if you could be able to create jet fuel from indigenous sources and rely on that, you’d not only be able to source energy for the military, but you’d also be able to leave an infrastructure that would be more sustainable.”

Who bears the costs of moral vanity?

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

A high-ranking Taliban commander has been captured in Pakistan, where he’s being interrogated by “good cops” from the US and “bad cops” from Pakistan, and this leads Eric Raymond to ask, quite stridently, Who bears the costs of moral vanity?

That’s right. Because the American chattering classes have their panties in a bunch about acts of “torture” that don’t do any permanent damage to the victim, Barader is in the hands of Pakistanis who are likely to fuck his shit up the old-school way, with knives and cattle-prods and blowtorches. And yet, this is supposed to count as a moral victory.

All the manufactured indignation about Guantanamo Bay has similarly perverse effects. When you tell U.S. troops that every enemy combatant they accept a surrender from is going to be made into an international cause celebre that will be used to damage their war effort, the effect will be — count on it — that they stop accepting surrenders. This means that all the soi-disant “innocents” swept up in these operations will become innocent corpses. Instead of being stuck in a facility that’s a resort hotel compared to any prison in the Mideast, they’ll be dead — victims of someone else’s moral vanity.

I was born and educated into the class that produces gentry liberals, but I’ve come to loathe them. This is why. It’s always someone else who pays the cost of their posturing. Very often, it’s the people they claim to be helping: the black teenager who ends up in a drug posse because because minimum-wage laws would force the small businessmen in his ‘hood to take a loss if they hired him for a legal job; the coal miner who gets pneumoconiosis because nuclear-plant construction was strangled in environmental red tape; the woman found in an alley strangled with her own pantyhose, because the handgun she could have shot that rapist with was denied her by force of law.

They’re so very, very convinced of their moral superiority, they are. The pious anti-torture crusaders, the “economic-justice” cod-Marxists, the no-growth environmentalists, the gun banners, and all their kin in the tribe of wealthy white left-liberals. Armored by their certitudes and their sheepskins and their class privileges, they sail serenely above the deadly consequences of their meddling. Not for them any need to worry about second-order effects or process costs or who actually pays the cost for their delusions, oh, no. They are the anointed, and lofty intentions are their sovereign excuse however much damage they do.

Truly, I hate them all. Perhaps I hate them more intensely because I so narrowly escaped being one of them. But it’s really the invincible stupidity and myopia that gets me, and the way their “compassion” stinks of narcissism. Some days I think if I could have just one wish, it would be this: let their folly come back on their own heads.

Doctor Who had anti-Thatcher agenda

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The Telegraph reports that Doctor Who had an explicitly anti-Thatcher agenda back in the 1980s:

[Sylvester] McCoy, who played the seventh doctor from 1987 to 1989, and Andrew Cartmel, the script editor at the time, both admitted the conspiracy, saying that it “seemed the right thing to do”.

However, the secret messages remained a secret to all but Doctor Who insiders. Meanwhile the show’s popularity went into freefall and it was taken off air in 1989.

McCoy, now 66, who took over as the Doctor three months after Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987, said they brought politics into the show “deliberately” but “very quietly”.

He said: “We were a group of politically motivated people and it seemed the right thing to do.

“Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered,” he told the Sunday Times.

Cartmel said it was almost a job requirement to detest Thatcher.

When asked by John Nathan-Turner, the producer, what he hoped to achieve in being the show’s script editor, he recalled: “My exact words were: I’d like to overthrow the government.

“I was a young firebrand and I wanted to answer honestly. I was very angry about the social injustice in Britain under Thatcher and I’m delighted that came into the show.”

His script writing team included Ben Aaronovitch, son of the late Marxist intellectual Sam Aaronovitch, and Rona Munro, who later became a scriptwriter for Ken Loach, the left-wing film director.

Sophie Aldred, who played the Doctor’s feminist assistant Ace, said the crew “weren’t very happy” with Thatcher being the prime minister at the time, which she described as “a real bonding process”.

One three-part programme, The Happiness Patrol, featured a transparent caricature of Thatcher.

Sheila Hancock played Helen A, a big-haired despotic ruler of a human colony on the planet Terra Alpha, whose subjects — called “drones” — worked in factories.

The Doctor calls on the drones to down their tools and revolt, an obvious reference to industrial disputes like the miners’ strike.

A year later Catrmel wrote a speech for the Doctor about the perils of nuclear weapons, which was based on material from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

A spin-off children’s novel called Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, published under licence by the BBC in 1987, also featured a villain called Rehctaht — Thatcher backwards.

Cartmel lamented that such satire never reached its intended audience.
“Critics, media pundits and politicians certainly didn’t pick up on what we were doing. If we had generated controversy and become a cause célèbre we would have got a few more viewers but, sadly, nobody really noticed or cared.”

He said nobody further up in the BBC such as Jonathan Powell, then controller of BBC One, knew about their plan.

A spokesman for the BBC said it was “baffled” by the claims.

I’ve never seen the late-80s Doctor Who, but it sounds like anyone who was watching would have immediately picked up on the ham-handed satire. So, why is this news now?

Erector Set Movie

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

In 1901, Frank Hornby introduced his Meccano toy set in England. In 1913, it came to America, where it was rebranded as the Erector Set. Now it’s getting its own feature film:

Helix Films, an independent film production company based in Santa Monica, today announced plans to develop an original 3-D feature based on the Erector Set, the iconic brand of children’s construction toys.

The Erector film is one of a number of coming 3-D features based on playthings. Disney’s 3-D sequel, “Toy Story 3,” hits theaters in June, and Universal will release a 3-D movie starring “Twilight’s” Taylor Lautner in 2012, based on the Stretch Armstrong doll. Paramount Pictures is currently weighing whether or not to release the third installment of Michael Bay’s ”Transformers” franchise in a 3-D format.

This might be a good opportunity to go back to the Meccano name.

Space Invaders Enterprise Edition

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

The whole notion of Space Invaders Enterprise Edition is jarring, but it’s meant to demonstrate a particular technical approach to solving business IT problems:

I’ve separated out the game logic from the Java source into a file parsed by a rules engine. This means we can easily view the game design, without it getting muddled with too much implementation code.

Rule engines are commonly used in enterprise-level companies to decide things like how much your car insurance premium will be. Let’s start using this for something more fun!

The “business” rules are written for the questionably named Drools engine:

rule "Reverse aliens if one reachs the edge of the screen"
when
$alien : AlienEntity()
exists (AlienEntity(x <> 750))
then
$alien.setHorizontalMovement(-$alien.getHorizontalMovement());
$alien.setY($alien.getY() + 10);
end

rule "Process bullets hitting aliens"
when
$shot : ShotEntity()
$alien : AlienEntity(this != $shot, eval($shot.collidesWith($alien)))
$otherAlien : AlienEntity()
then
game.getEntities().remove($shot);
game.getEntities().remove($alien);
$otherAlien.setHorizontalMovement($otherAlien.getHorizontalMovement() * 1.04);
end

rule "End the game when all aliens are killed"
salience 1
when
not AlienEntity()
exists ShipEntity()
then
game.notifyWin();
game.getEntities().clear();
end

rule "End the game when an alien reaches the bottom"
when
exists AlienEntity(y > 570)
then
game.notifyDeath();
game.getEntities().clear();
end

I’m sure if we just write code in an English-like language, non-technical business experts will be able to write their own business rules, right?

Shot in the Head

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

On Monday, Lance Cpl. Andrew Koenig got shot in the head — but he’s fine:

Lance Cpl. Koenig, a lanky 21-year-old with jug-handle ears and a burr of sandy hair, is a designated marksman. His job is to hit the elusive Taliban fighters hiding in the tightly packed neighborhood near the base.

The insurgent sniper hit him first. The Casper, Wyo., native was kneeling on the roof of the one-story outpost, looking for targets.

He was reaching back to his left for his rifle when the sniper’s round slammed into his helmet.

The impact knocked him onto his back.

“I’m hit,” he yelled to his buddy, Lance Cpl. Scott Gabrian, a 21-year-old from St. Louis.

Lance Cpl. Gabrian belly-crawled along the rooftop to his friend’s side. He patted Lance Cpl. Koenig’s body, looking for wounds.

Then he noticed that the plate that usually secures night-vision goggles to the front of Lance Cpl. Koenig’s helmet was missing. In its place was a thumb-deep dent in the hard Kevlar shell.

Lance Cpl. Gabrian slid his hands under his friend’s helmet, looking for an entry wound. “You’re not bleeding,” he assured Lance Cpl. Koenig. “You’re going to be OK.”

The gunny did his job:

Gunnery Sgt. Kevin Shelton, whose job is to keep the Marines stocked with food, water and gear, teased the lance corporal for failing to take care of his helmet.

“I need that damaged-gear statement tonight,” Gunnery Sgt. Shelton told Lance Cpl. Koenig. It was understood, however, that Lance Cpl. Koenig would be allowed to keep the helmet as a souvenir.

Gunnery Sgt. Shelton, a 36-year-old veteran from Nashville, said he had never seen a Marine survive a direct shot to the head.

But next to him was Cpl. Christopher Ahrens, who quietly mentioned that two bullets had grazed his helmet the day the Marines attacked Marjah. The same thing, he said, happened to him three times in firefights in Iraq.

Cpl. Ahrens, 26, from Havre de Grace, Md., lifted the camouflaged cloth cover on his helmet, exposing the holes where the bullets had entered and exited.

Survivor Recounts Alabama Shooting

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Joseph Ng, an associate professor who attended the meeting in which Amy Bishop (allegedly) opened fire, described the scene via e-mail to a colleague at the University of California, Irvine, Alexander McPherson:

About 30 minutes into the meeting, Amy Bishop “got up suddenly, took out a gun and started shooting at each one of us.”
[...]
Ms. Bishop, who Mr. Ng described as a “disgruntled faculty member,” “started with the one closest to her and went down the row shooting her targets in the head.”

“Our chairman got it the worst as he was right next to her along with two others who died almost instantly. Six people sitting in the rows perpendicular were all shot fatally or seriously wounded,” he wrote.

He wrote that the remaining five people at the meeting, including him, “immediately dropped to the floor.” When Ms. Bishop was trying to reload her gun, the faculty members pushed her out the conference-room door, barricaded it, and called 911.

“Blood was everywhere with crying and moaning,” he wrote.

Those killed include Gopi K. Podila, chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences; Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson, both department faculty. Two who were wounded — Joseph Leahy and staffer Stephanie Monticciolo — were in critical condition, and the third Luis Cruz-Vera, was released from the hospital over the weekend.

This bit of history is darkly fascinating:

On Saturday afternoon, the police in Braintree, Mass., announced that 24 years ago, Dr. Bishop had fatally wounded her brother, Seth Bishop, in an argument at their home, which The Boston Globe first reported on its Web site. The police were considering reopening the case, in which she was not charged and the report by the officer on duty at the time was no longer available, said Paul Frazier, the Braintree police chief.

“The release of Ms. Bishop did not sit well with the police officers,” Chief Frazier said in a statement, “and I can assure you that this would not happen in this day and age.” He said at a news conference on Saturday that the original account describing the shooting as an accident had been inaccurate and, The Globe said, that while he was reluctant to use the word “cover-up,” it did not “look good” that the detailed records of the case have been missing since 1988.

A 1987 state police report, released Saturday by the Norfolk County district attorney’s office, said that Dr. Bishop tried to teach herself to use the family’s shotgun after a break-in occurred at their home. She said she had loaded the gun but could not unload it and asked her brother for help, in their mother’s presence. She said the gun accidentally went off, striking her brother. Because her mother, Judith Bishop, confirmed that account, the report said, the death was ruled accidental.

But Chief Frazier said in his statement that the officer on duty, Ronald Solimini, remembered that Dr. Bishop had shot and killed her brother after an argument. She fired another round from the shotgun into the ceiling as she left the home, the officer said, and fled down the street with the shotgun. The officer also remembered her pointing the shotgun at a vehicle in an attempt to get the driver to stop, the chief said.

Another officer, Timothy Murphy, seized the shotgun, and Dr. Bishop was handcuffed and transported to the police station under arrest, Chief Frazier said.

He said that he spoke with the person who was the booking officer at the time, who recalled getting a call “he believes was from then-Police Chief John Polio or possibly from a captain on Chief Polio’s behalf” to stop the process. Dr. Bishop was released from police custody, and the two left the police station by a rear exit, Chief Frazier said.

Of course, you should never trust the New York Times to properly report gun facts:

After she left the room, the police said, she dumped the gun — for which she did not have a permit — in a second-floor bathroom.

While not technically untrue, that’s quite misleading, because Alabama does not issue gun permits.

Death By Revenue Plan

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Steve Blank describes Death By Revenue Plan:

We were at the board meeting of company building a radically new type of communication hardware. The company was going through some tough times. It had taken the company almost twice as long as planned to get their product out the door. But that wasn’t what the heat being generated at this board meeting was about. All discussion focused on “missing the revenue plan.”

Spread out in front of everyone around the conference table were the latest Income Statement, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements. The VC’s were very concerned that the revenue the financial plan called for wasn’t being delivered by the sales team. They were also looking at the Cash Flow Statement and expressed their concern (i.e. raised their voices in a annoyed investor tone) that the headcount and its attendant burn rate combined with the lack of revenue meant the company would run out of money much sooner than anyone planned.

The VC’s concluded that the company needed to change direction and act aggressively to increase revenue so the company could “make the plan.” They told the CEO (who was the technical founder) that the sales team should focus on “other markets.” Another VC added that engineering should redesign the product to meet the price and performance of current users in an adjacent market.

The founder was doing his best to try to explain that his vision today was the same as when he pitched the company to the VC’s and when they funded the company. He said, “I told you it was going to take it least five years for the underlying industry infrastructure to mature, and that we had to convince OEMs to design in our product. All this takes time.” But the VC’s kept coming back to the lack of adoption of the product, the floundering sales force, the burn rate — and “the plan.”

Given the tongue-lashing the VC’s were giving the CEO and the VP of Sales, you would have thought that selling the product was something any high-school kid could have done.

What went wrong?

What went wrong was that the founder had built a product for a New Market and the VC’s allowed him to execute, hire and burn cash like he was in an Existing Market.

One Book To Save Them

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

William Grassie has a fuzzy-headed far view on surviving a catastrophe like a super-volcano eruption that wipes out most of the US:

Stockpiling food and weapons in the mountains of Idaho would be a silly and small-minded emergency plan for the scenario I am describing, in the first order because anywhere in North America would be the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead of focusing on the survival of my tribe, my family, or myself, we need to focus on the survival of civilization, of what is most precious and useful to future generations. And the only way to do this with assurance is to distribute the most valuable and practical knowledge as widely as possible across the planet today in anticipation that unfortunate day. How do we give the survivors a head start? What information would be most useful in rebuilding human civilization in the event of such a horrible collapse? Remember the best and the brightest, the most privileged and most educated, are not likely to survive in any great numbers. You get to choose one book for the survivors to help them rebuild civilization.

The book I would chose is Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, by David Christian (2004). There are other books in this genre. I can imagine even better books in the future, but for now David Christian does a remarkable job in putting ‘it’ all together. It is the combined history of the universe, our creative planet, and our restless species. I want to argue that the most useful information for the long-term survival of our species is this macrohistory from the Big Bang to today. It goes by different names — the New Cosmology, the History of Nature, the Epic of Evolution, and Big History. Whatever we call it, it spans some 13.7 billion years from the primordial flaring forth of the early universe to the rapid flaring forth of our global civilization in the last century. I like to call it Our Common Story, because for the first time we have a progressively factual account of the universe and ourselves that encompasses all religions, all tribes, and all times. This grand history is perhaps the most remarkable achievement of human civilization.

The scientific metanarrative is quite new and still evolving. In brief outline, this omnicentric universe began some 13 billion years ago as infinite heat, infinite density, and total symmetry. The universe expanded and evolved into more differentiated and complex structures — forces, quarks, hydrogen, helium, galaxies, stars, heavier elements, complex chemistry, planetary systems. Some 3.5 billion years ago, in a small second or third generation solar system, the intricate processes called “life” began on at least one small planet. Animate matter-energy on Earth presented itself as a marvelous new intensification of the creative dynamic at work in the universe. Then some 2 million years ago, as if yesterday in the enormous timescales of the universe, proto-humans emerged on the savanna of Africa with their enormously heightened capacities for conscious self-reflection, language, and tool making. Ten thousand years ago agriculture begins and with it growing populations of humans living in ever larger and more complex societies. And this unfolding leads us all the way to today, six billion of us collectively transforming the planet and ourselves. The wonder of it all is that each of us is a collection of transient atoms, recycled stardust become conscious beings, engaged in this global conversation, brought to you by ephemeral electrons cascading through the Internet and bouncing off of satellites.

Maps of Time provides this overview in six parts, fifteen chapters, eight different timelines, nine maps, thirty-nine charts, two appendices, over six hundred references, all bound in one big book. The story of the universe and the evolution of life are covered in the first hundred and forty pages. The remaining four hundred some pages detail the evolution of humans, the rise of agriculture and agrarian civilizations, and the great acceleration of the modern era. That seems like the right balance for a survival manual for human civilization. David Christian is a skilled historian and storyteller. He provides not only the macrohistory, but explains the evidence for why we know it to be so and when the evidence might be inconclusive.

Robin Hanson finds this amazingly wrong-headed:

  1. The reason to stockpile is not to save “my family” but to ensure that our species survives at all. A disaster that kills all but a thousand couples could nearly as easily have killed everyone. Well-chosen stockpiles could easily make the difference between survival and extinction.
  2. You either preserve literacy or you don’t. A literate culture needs a lot more than one book to function. Readers would quickly forget what the words in that one book meant unless those concepts were commonly used in many other books and in their lives.
  3. It would take a huge effort to maintain even a small literate subculture, that read regularly, and passed this habit on to thier kids. This won’t last unless some very practical advantages accrue to readers. Impressing friends by quoting fascinating cosmology facts just won’t do.
  4. Yes knowledge is key, but survivors would face an immediate need to know about how to survive as foragers. It is far from easy to forage well, and with effective foraging they’ll die. If you want distribute copies of a book to ensure our species survives, it should a book on how to forage. You might also pack those books with some simple foraging tools (like knives).

I’ve long been fascinated by the challenge of bootstrapping society — and the question of what tight canon of books might help — and I agree that Grassie’s answer is terribly disappointing. He transparently wants to replace “outdated” religious cosmologies with the New Cosmology, which has very little to do with economic growth.

I think we can agree, per point 1, that well-chosen stockpiles could make the difference between survival and extinction — so they are vital — but they don’t directly address the issue of advancing beyond hunting and gathering.

I think points 2 and 3 are soundly refuted by the Bible, Koran, etc. Many, many people have learned to read specifically to read one religious text, and many, many households throughout history owned exactly one book, that religious text. (For a time, I believe, millions of American households owned two books: the Bible and Ben Hur.)

Would we want to craft our bootstrapping text as a religious text? That’s an interesting question that raises an even more interesting question: Can you craft a religious text that meets the religious needs of ordinary pre-modern folk that does not contradict the tenets held sacred by overcomingbias readers?

As for point 4, would books full of successful folkways, like the Foxfire books, retain any value after a generation? Again, we certainly want to see humanity survive in the first place, but would such books help beyond that? Would they even be a force for retaining literacy, once everyone in that society had been raised using such practical skills on a daily basis?

Shiny Rocks

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Two of the smartest people Scott Adams (Dilbert) knows are putting all their money in silver and gold, and he finds it absurd that they’re trading their ownership of American companies for shiny rocks:

If things go so badly that the S&P 500 becomes permanently worthless, I have a hard time believing that the people who own gold will rule the world. I think it’s more likely that the people who own steel that is conveniently shaped like guns will control everything, including all of the shiny rocks. At that point, the new currency will be something along the lines of “Wash my car and I won’t shoot you in the leg.”

Should we STFU about Global Warming?

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Should we STFU about Global Warming, Aretae asks, if we’re not qualified to have an opinion? Well, that raises the question of who’s qualified to have an opinion:

People qualified to have an opinion are anyone who has experience with the analysis of large hairy datasets or the software used to analyze them. I am suspicious of whether lab-scientists are qualified, because they may have the incorrect opinion that modeling in climate science is similar to their lab-science under controlled conditions. Software folks, quantitative science folks, statistics folks, and even some quantitative social scientists (particularly economists who run models like these) all have the necessary qualifications. Also, lab (or field) techs who take the measurements, or mess with the equipment.

I can personally say, as a software guy, that just the comments in the software used at East Anglia show that the model isn’t worth as much as the 286 used to run it. If your software is trying to adjust data to get a result, as is obvious from the code comments, you are not doing analysis; you are doing what is popularly known in the software world as estimating. For the non-initiated, this means creating an initial value with some degree of rigor, and then changing the numbers until the boss likes them.

I can also say, as a dabbler in economics, that the type of modeling that is done in climate science is awfully similar to the kind of modeling done in macroeconomics. It doesn’t appear to predict for shit in either case.

Risky Experiments on New Directions for Humanity

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Sociologist William Sims Bainbridge has shifted his focus from religious cults to virtual societies:

Each well-designed virtual world is based on a coherent theory of human society, history, and our options for the future. Thus, this is like an entirely new field of literature or a laboratory that develops and tests social theories with actual human beings, somewhere between philosophy and social science but also with utopian qualities.

For example: Pirates of the Burning Sea is set in the Caribbean in 1720 and reflects a general view of society often called political economy.

A Tale in the Desert, set in a kind of utopian ancient Egypt, illustrates principles of industrial supply chains, and fits theories of technology as ritual originally proposed by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.

Star Trek Online (which opened only two days ago) is based on the cultural relativist principle Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

Tabula Rasa expressed a well-developed ideology of space exploration, and our avatars were actually taken up to the International Space Station.

Of course The Matrix Online was built on European theories of false consciousness.

In the 1960s I started studying utopian communes and religious movements, because I saw them as valid if risky experiments on new directions for humanity. That’s what virtual worlds are today.