Why Sarah Palin Is Right*

(Originally A Call For Inaction)


Related Post

For long I get a uncomfortable feeling whenever the topic of discussion turns to global warming (also known as climate change, or Al Gore's lamentation) .  Problem is I don't know about science of climate change, and while arguing from point of ignorance is fun, such a debate doesn't serve any constructive purpose, unfortunately of course for many people entertainment of pissing contests is the point.

Now my ignorance of climate science doesn't surprise me, the things I am ignorant of vary from string theory to cooking vermicelli. However unlike string theory or cooking vermicelli, climate science affects public policy which is why some sort of understanding is required. Now I admit that when I had become skeptic of climate change, it was partly a fatigue to incessant, and one suspects grossly exaggerated, alarm about global warming.

But if global warming is crucial for deciding public policy, some sort of understanding is essential, and yet climate science is too complicated a subject for someone like me to understand in his spare time. This being the case, I was stuck in undecided category.

Then sometime back it struck me I was approaching the problem from wrong angle. The correct approach, since the question involved public policy, was to do a cost-benefit analysis. Again since I don't understand climate science, I can not estimate the cost of global warming. As it turns out, it is much simpler to estimate the cost of global warming mitigation, which I will try to explain in as complicated terms as possible,

For calculation, I am assuming that  Al Gore is right and carbon dioxide indeed causes the global warming**, and global warming is a clear and present danger*** (and by clear and present I mean around fifty years on geological scale). Further it is reasonable to assume that warming on global scale must be lagging indicator of  percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

This implies that effect of a reduction in carbon dioxide will be visible in terms of reduced temperature only after certain period of time, let's say thirty years (considering the geological time scale it errs on the side of caution)

 Now if both the previous assumption statement are correct, one might conclude it is necessary to not just reduce the output but to actually reduce the carbon dioxide present in atmosphere. Which means that the output should be reduced to a amount less than what can be removed by the natural processes.

What does this mean? Again assuming that the amount that can be removed through natural processes has remained constant****, output must be reduced to pre-Industrial revolution level (when presumably the warming started). There is a problem though, carbon dioxide is just a by-product of energy consumption, as there are no significant non carbon dioxide producing energy sourcing  reducing output in effect means reducing energy consumption to pre-Industrial revolution level, in fact as world population has increased manifold it would imply an unimaginable reduction in per capita energy consumption.

Why unimaginable? Well, energy consumption is a good indicator of the living conditions, generally better living conditions imply higher energy consumption. Therefore a decrease in per capita energy consumption to less than pre-Industrial revolution levels essentially implies living conditions of average human will revert to the same era.

And while many people may hold romantic notion of a pristine earth unsullied by machines, in reality this will mean a life plagued by poverty, hunger, want and disease, a life wasted in daily grind for survival.

Economic holocaust in other words.

I am not sure that global warming is worth it.

*Not really, this was just to bait Respected Ma'am

** Though industrial pollution also means more smoke which I believe reflects lights.

*** Though to put things in perspective, earth has been much warmer than predicted for global warming earlier, and contrary to doomsday scenario for global warming, life thrived. Also extinction of large number of species is a natural phenomenon.

**** Though geoengineering may remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. Its feasibility should be studied.

Why Save Tiger (Updated)

Update at the end of post

While writing previous post, a question struck me. Why, should we conserve tigers in the first place? Or more precisely, why should government intervene to conserve tiger at all. As I thought over it, I could find no clear reason. So let me present my case, for sake of clarity, I categorize the possible reasons first due to emotional consideration and second after rational analysis, with myself leaning towards emotional.

a. We have a natural empathy towards Tiger (or any animal), which is why animal cruelty is an issue, and in this case survival of species.

b. We are fascinated by Tiger. It is a majestic, graceful animal (albeit with poor oral hygiene), and appeals to our imagination, inner poet so as to say.

c. An attraction for wild. Although it has been quite some time since humans came out of wild, there still is a sense of mystery and magic for our erstwhile habitat, and it is natural to want to preserve it.

As I said earlier I am more open to emotional arguments, for the simple reason that human society is secured by certain emotional preconditions, that collective psyche affects the stability of society, and therefore there is a cost to emotions shared by public, further this cost is not easily calculated or even quantifiable, the best approximation depending upon context.
So yes, I am not averse to the above three arguments provided the economic cost is not too prohibitive. Which is why there are animal cruelty laws or cow slaughter prohibition in the first place.
However I am not sure that conservation of tiger has any significant emotional costs to require state intervention (I will be frank I do not like carnivores or omnivores for that matter, so I really I don't care whether they remain or not).

Now we reach rational consideration. The biggest rational argument is thus, Tiger has a crucial role in ecology as apex predator, therefore its extinction will result in ecological imbalance possibly of a catastrophic scale with a significant economic cost justifying government intervention. I am not sure I agree. Study of ecological balance is very complicated subject requiring a vast amount of data obtained from field surveys and rigorous analysis using robust models. To best of my knowledge this is at best an inexact science, and there are not enough verifiable results to assign a degree of reliability. Therefore, in my opinion, the argument is a dubious one. Further evidence available with us doesn't support the argument. Population of tiger in India decreased from 40,000 in 1900 to less than 2000 at present, while this decrease may or may not have adverse impact, none has been of a scale which can be deemed as catastrophic. Therefore I am more or less that even if tigers were to become totally extinct from present minuscule number the there would be no disaster in the pipeline.

Before I end, I would like to make some general points. One, I know extinction of species is a high profile issue, but extinction of species has been norm throughout history of life, so tigers won't be first to become extinct. Second in the high decibel creed which goes with the name of environmentalism, ecology is always projected as fragile. This is not always true. Ecology varies with location, in some places it is fragile, in other robust, therefore the adjustment to stable equilibrium that ecology makes to human population growth and resulting intervention may vary from place to place. We survived extinction of Mammoth or saber-toothed tiger or American Bison. Third our knowledge of environment, especially knowledge we can act upon, is woefully inadequate, and it may take quite a bit of time and research before we understand the dynamics of environment, considering this, when we intervene to conserve environment we must make sure those actions have connection to the perceived threats. So while conservation of environment is a good thing, we are far from the stage when we can fine tune environment.

In other words, curb your enthusiasm, folks !

Over to you.

PS. This is limited to government intervention, and doesn't rule out any private solution(s).

Update 1: There might be some confusion reading the post. I am not saying government should intervene only if there is some catastrophe, I am essentially arguing that outside of emotional consideration, rational consideration dictates that any such intervention is based upon cost-benefit analysis. Note, this is not straightforward as there is always some human cost involved which may not be easily factored in economic cost.

What I wanted to emphasize was that every environmental concern is not a catastrophe, which is going to endanger the planet.

Update 2: Ok, a related point, just thought it is better to be explicit about it. Diversity is one of the catchphrases of environmentalism. Now diversity is a good thing, but conservation of diversity has a cost, the cost is human progress. I will again emphasize that for any environmental policy to work, it has to consider the costs of development as well as conservation. Most importantly environmental conservation is not the ultimate aim, it is just a means, final goal being the well being of humanity, this is also the true meaning of sustainable development.

Update 3: My bad, In all this discussion, I forgot to state my position, which while may differ in specific cases, is generally in favour of conservation. Primarily because being a vegetarian I abhor killing animals. Also as I emphasized environmental science is an inexact science with predictions hard to come by, now human society is witnessing an exponential rate of growth which is causing tremendous stress on environmental equilibrium. In absence of further information and considering that environment is a complex system, I would like to err on side of caution.

Skeptic Enviromentalist

1. Life on Earth will survive anything by humanity.

2. Humanity will most probably survive itself through prudence/good luck.

3. We are still a long way from micro managing environment. Research, research & research.

4. Mat 7:15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Destroying the world

Our planet is four and half billion years old. There has been life on this planet for nearly as long. Three point eight billion years..... Great dynasties pf creatures arising. All this happening against a background of continuous and violent upheaval, mountain ranges thrust up and eroded away, cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving .... Endless, constant and violent change... Let's say we had a bad (radiation accident), and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere .... And after all those years , when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety; And of course, it would be very different from what it is now. But the earth would survive our folly. Only we ... think it wouldn't .....

My point is that life on Earth can take care of itself.... To the Earth a hundred thousand years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes pn a much vaster scale ... We have been resident here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the Earth will not miss us ...

Let's us be clear The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. but we might have the power to save ourselves.

Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

End Of Multiplicity ?

Finished Seth Lloyd's Programming The Universe. Hardly understood anything therefore it must have been brilliant.

One of the minor theme was decoherence as possible answer to the old question whether cat is dead or alive, as opposed to wave function collapse and more troubling multiple universe interpretation. Science fiction wouldn't be same without the question, "What If"?


Title inspired by Asimov's story.

What to do in case of train wreck ?

OK, so I have no idea whether free will really exists or not. Further I don't think I can confound on this issue, so I don't talk about. However ignorance has never stopped Jagadguru from expressing himself and express he does. So far it is the usual divine argument, but suddenly who else but our Desi John Galt enters the fray.

Now as I understand, to prove free will, you have to prove there is an agent, independent of the neural processes (which are biological and hence chemical in nature), and of a conscious nature, which affects the human actions or (perhaps) more accurately affects the human judgement.
Also as far as my understanding goes, this concept has remained central historically to christian theology as well as jurisprudence.
But so far no amount of observation has succeeded in finding that independent agent.
This failure has been cited by the opponents of free will as absence of free will, instead suggesting that human actions can be reduced to chemical reactions, and accusing proponents of free will of attempting to except human from natural laws.

Therefore the task for proponents is cut out, they have to either discover an independent agent, or else a serious flaw in assumption of biological reductionism. But as is usual with the case of our hero he introduces quantum mechanics to support free will, to which I can only say WTF !
Again my knowledge of quantum mechanics is sketchy, but as far as I know, quantum mechanics introduces uncertainty in observation, which I suppose will put a spanner in determining chain of cause and effect. But even if it is true, it is woefully insufficient to establish presence of any independent agent.

If I were trying to BS, I would have gone with system theory, it seems like to hold more promise.The irony is that both our protagonists are accusing each other of being "theists". I ask, is it possible to be any more wannabe ?

I think that Ayn Rand should be prohibited to teenagers. I mean think of it, hormonal changes, insecurity, a time for transition, why aggravate that with pseudo-philosophy.

And asnwer to the question in title is, to buy a ticket for ring side and enjoy.

Intervention

I find granularity interesting. How well a system works is dependant on how granular it is. Typically there is optimum limit for granularity. A system too-coarse or too-fine grained, will not give the desired output, in worst cases it may even crash.
To decide granularity, theory and even observations are of limited help. Right size, is a question of instinct, a gut feeling so as to say.

The individualist

(On his 100th birth anniversary)

Robert Anson Heinlein (July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988)

He is one individualist whom one can afford to like because he recognized the limit of reason itself. His libertarianism was based on faith on humanity, that way why he could deal with religion and nationalism. In other words one who admitted the possibility of transcendent.

What is more even though he changed his orientation from a socialist/communist to individualist/libertarian, he always compelled to think, pushing the envelope in his stories.

Both he and Asimov categorized their body of works as social science fiction. This in my view is a mistake. While their works have commentary and speculation on future of human society, their treatments are vastly different.

For Asimov social conditions propelled the story forward, guiding the action of actors, but the commentary was always in background with the emphasis upon the actors, it was only in the climax that social conditions were dwelt upon usually by the protagonist.
Examples are The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun etc.

In contrast, Heinlein stories had social commentary were the very part of narrative. Indeed in most of his famous works contain monologues by protoganists (acting as his proxy) which delineate his views on philosophy, society and role of freedom. His commentary were more often than not device to further the narrative in a much more direct way.

What a man !

Pragmatics of patriotism speech

Price of liberty monologue by Dubois in Statship Troopers

My posts on Heinlein

Read his defining novels

1. StarShip Troopers *
2. Stranger in a Strange Land*
3. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*

Aphorism:Politics & Cosmos

Life is conservative, evolution is liberal.

Remembering Stuff - III

(Previous Posts [1],[2],[2.5])

The previous post was a digression so as to prepare the background for this post.
The evolution of civilization, although faster than that of genes is still a slow process compared to the life span of humans and as such the scope of evolution is beyond endeavor of single man. Further the instincts may be the driver, it is the participating individual who is the agent.

However there is no blueprint or road map of the evolution available to the him. Combine the two conditions and it turns out that evolution is incremental process, present building on the accomplishments of the past, a bequeathing to the future.

But the problem in this is two fold, one the instincts as such remain in fragile equilibrium, which may not holdup, the other is as already pointed out the evolution of civilization is not reversible, specifically its tendency to decline is much stronger than its tendency to evolve to next stage (it can be called as entropy of civilization). I think, there is a convincing case to prevent backslide of civilization.

Question then arises how can we prevent that, the modern answer would be, "by creating appropriate institutions " or "by democracy" or "by enacting laws" or "by writing a nice constitution".

They are all correct, but only partially. Because the simple truth, that advocates of these measures do not realize, that institutions are just nice building, constitution is just a big fat book, passive, inactive, inert.
Of course these do "moderate" the effect of opposing forces and instincts, but in themselves they can not prevent the backslide of civilization, and while they do facilitate enlightenment, in themselves they can not drive evolution to next phase, finally, in themselves they are superficial.

What gives life to institutions and to constitutions, is the "conscience" of civilization, which is just another word for value system (as explained in previous post). So a more accurate answer is to create value system.
But this is back to square. It turns out that in order to have a value system, we need a value system! What an absurdity !

As it is science rescues us. To continue with analogy that I have alluded to in more than one place, civilization is a dynamic system, and our aim is its optimization, this optimization is possible only for certain specific configurations of its participant forces, these configurations change with time depending on the optimization level.
These configurations are fragile, our aim is to decrease probability (it is impossible to eliminate it) of chaos (or entropy) that this system can fall into.
Now this system manifests adaptability, this system is also capable of learning and biggest of all this system has feedback going for it.

This means the output arising from specific configurations can act as feedback (both positive and negative) to the system, control being the collective conscience.

Here another problem arises, unlike electronic circuits where feedback is almost instantaneous and can be directly used in control , civilization has slower response hence it means that feedback can not be directly routed to control.

Instead the feedback has to be stored as an impression to account for time delay factory, which acts as proxy between control and feedback.

I call this impression as "memory of civilization".

Remembering stuff - II

(Previous post)

So far, the ability to store and retrieve information for future requirement evolves from genes to memory, the later being much more complicated than former.

Memory finds its most evolved, and needless to say profound, expression in humans. It is not exactly clear how memory works, but the overall flow is clear. Storing, retaining and retrieving information. One assumes that there are specialized interfaces, regions and organs to execute the specific sub-tasks which constitute memory.

There are two important aspects to memory one is learning, other is forgetting.
We learn as well as forget all the time. While learning helps in acquisition of information, forgetting helps in getting rid of irrelevant information. Without this, faculty of memory will be impaired by information overload.

Now there are some special situations where memory may not function as desired.
First, it is possible that due to shocks (for example physical accident), some of the memory, or access to it, may be lost, in worse case it is also possible that even the capability to remember things is lost. While I am not sure, this must involve some drastic disruptions in the region(s) of brain which store, retain and retrieve information.

Then there is active suppression of memory, this is not forgetting, because the memory can be accessed but there is a block against it, as a result of trauma (physical or psychological).
Now it is my assumption that this block (or state of being in denial), has two forms.
One in which the signs of trauma (responsible for denial) are explicitly visible, this may be in immediate aftermath of a shock. The other form, is when the signs are not explicit, but nevertheless trauma has adversely affected the stability and robustness of psyche.

I guess the first may be at more conscious level and the second at subconscious.

But what is the point ..... ?

Remembering stuff - I

Once again we start from genes, genes are some ridiculously complicated chemicals (complicated thanks to promiscuity of carbon), which synthesize a range of chemicals vital for life, for example protein. Anyway the point is genes are in essence information encoded in form of molecules.

This information is passed from one generation to another, along the lines there is mutation and exchange. Nature selects the genes which are better suited and the rest perish.
Now there is a thing. The genes are blueprints of traits and structures which aid in survival*. But the evolution of gene is a very slow process, it follows then that genes are bound to reflect only the factors which affect them in a “significant” way for a “significant” duration.

This is not a very efficient way of ensuring survival, because what this essentially boils down to, is the fact that while the anatomy and instincts of organism as hard coded in genes are indeed suitable for coping with macroscopic environmental factors, they are not equipped to deal with short term variations (which have only local presence), which predominate at the level of individual organism.

The next stage of evolution that follows from this is the organism (now more complex than ever) gets the ability to think, that is process the input and act on it, this means development of nervous system from its primitive forms to brain.
Brain acts on the input and patterns (possibly in form of synapses) decide the output, now these patterns may be formed due to genetic inheritance, but complex brains have this capability whereby they can store information (input and output) in form of complicated networks comprising of neurons and their connections, and retrieve it for further use.

This is memory and and as we move up the hierarchy in animal kingdom, evolution of the memory (along with brains) is most noticeable.

Where I am leading with this ....

* Survival of what is the question? Of genes, of individual or of species. I think that depends on context.