The key message is that climate, health, and other big messy problems don’t have purely technical fixes. Therefore Manhattan Project approaches to solving them won’t work. Creating and deploying solutions to these problems requires public involvement and widespread change with distributed leadership. The challenge is to get public understanding of climate to carry the same sense of urgency that drove the civil rights movement. From a series at the IBM Almaden Institute conference.
Category: News
Hypnotizing chickens, Afghan insurgents, and spaghetti
The NYT is about 4 months behind the times picking up on a spaghetti diagram of Afghanistan situation, which it uses to lead off a critique of Powerpoint use in the military. The reporter is evidently cheesed off at being treated like a chicken:
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
The Times reporter seems unaware of the irony of her own article. Early on, she quotes a general, “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” But isn’t the spaghetti diagram an explicit attempt to get away from bullets, and present a rich, holistic picture of a complicated problem? The underlying point – that presentations are frequently awful and waste time – is well taken, but hardly news. If there’s a problem here, it’s not the fault of Powerpoint, and we’d do well to identify the real issue.
For those unfamiliar with the lingo, the spaghetti is actually a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD), a type of influence diagram. It’s actually a hybrid, because the Popular Support sector also has a stock-flow chain. Between practitioners, a good CLD can be an incredibly efficient communication device – much more so than the “five-pager” cited in the article. CLDs occupy a niche between formal mathematical models and informal communication (prose or ppt bullets). They’re extremely useful for brainstorming (which is what seems to have been going on here) and for communicating selected feedback insights from a formal model. They also tend to leave a lot to the imagination – if you try to implement a CLD in equations, you’ll discover many unstated assumptions and inconsistencies along the way. Still, the CLD is likely to be far more revealing of the tangle of assumptions that lie in someone’s head than a text document or conversation.
Evidently the Times has no prescription for improvement, but here’s mine:
- If the presenters were serious about communicating with this diagram, they should have spent time introducing the CLD lingo and walking through the relationships. That could take a long time, i.e. a whole presentation could be devoted to the one slide. Also, the diagram should have been built up in digestible chunks, without overlapping links, and key feedback loops that lead to success or disaster should be identified.
- If the audience were serious about understanding what’s going on, they shouldn’t shut off their brains and snicker when unconventional presentations appear. If reporters stick their fingers in their ears and mumble “not listening … not listening … not listening …” at the first sign of complexity, it’s no wonder DoD treats them like chickens.
Hell freezes over: Fox to go carbon neutral
I keep checking, but today is not April 1st:
In the Fox News universe, the world is definitely not warming. Quite the opposite: Climate change is “bunk,” a spectacular hoax perpetrated on the rest of us by a cabal of corrupt scientists. But while embracing climate skepticism may be good for ratings, the execs at Fox News’ parent company, News Corp., don’t see it as good for the long-term bottom line. By the end of this year, News Corp. aims to go carbon neutral — meaning that the home of über-global warming denialists like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck may soon be one of the greener multinational corporations around.
News Corp. announced its plan in May 2007 with a groundbreaking speech from chairman Rupert Murdoch. “Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats,” declared Murdoch. “We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction.” Formerly skeptical about global warming, Murdoch was reportedly converted by a presentation from Al Gore — whom Fox News commentators have described as “nuts” and “off his lithium” — and by his green-leaning son James, who is expected to inherit his business empire.
But Murdoch wasn’t acting out of altruism. For News Corp., he said, the move was “simply good business.” (Fox News barely mentioned the boss’ remarks.)
Murdoch’s logic was that higher energy costs are inevitable, given coming carbon regulations and dwindling supplies of conventional fuels such as oil. So why not get ahead of the game? “Whatever [going carbon neutral] costs will be minimal compared to our overall revenues,” the media mogul has remarked, “and we’ll get that back many times over.”
Computer models running the EU? Eruptions, models, and clueless reporting
The EU airspace shutdown provides yet another example of ignorance of the role of models in policy:
Computer Models Ruining EU?
Flawed computer models may have exaggerated the effects of an Icelandic volcano eruption that has grounded tens of thousands of flights, stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers and cost businesses hundreds of millions of euros. The computer models that guided decisions to impose a no-fly zone across most of Europe in recent days are based on incomplete science and limited data, according to European officials. As a result, they may have over-stated the risks to the public, needlessly grounding flights and damaging businesses. “It is a black box in certain areas,” Matthias Ruete, the EU’s director-general for mobility and transport, said on Monday, noting that many of the assumptions in the computer models were not backed by scientific evidence. European authorities were not sure about scientific questions, such as what concentration of ash was hazardous for jet engines, or at what rate ash fell from the sky, Mr. Ruete said. “It’s one of the elements where, as far as I know, we’re not quite clear about it,” he admitted. He also noted that early results of the 40-odd test flights conducted over the weekend by European airlines, such as KLM and Air France, suggested that the risk was less than the computer models had indicated. – Financial Times
Other venues picked up similar stories:
Also under scrutiny last night was the role played by an eight-man team at the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre at Britain’s Meteorological Office. The European Commission said the unit started the chain of events that led to the unprecedented airspace shutdown based on a computer model rather than actual scientific data. – National Post
These reports miss a number of crucial points:
- The decision to shut down the airspace was political, not scientific. Surely the Met Office team had input, but not the final word, and model results were only one input to the decision.
- The distinction between computer models and “actual scientific data” is false. All measurements involve some kind of implicit model, required to interpret the result. The 40 test flights are meaningless without some statistical interpretation of sample size and so forth.
- It’s not uncommon for models to demonstrate that data are wrong or misinterpreted.
- The fact that every relationship or parameter in a model can’t be backed up with a particular measurement does not mean that the model is unscientific.
- Numerical measurements are not the only valid source of data; there are also laws of physics, and a subject matter expert’s guess is likely to be better than a politician’s.
- Calibration of the aggregate result of a model provides indirect measurement of uncertain components.
- Feedback structure may render some parameters insensitive and therefore unimportant.
- Good decisions sometimes lead to bad outcomes.
The reporters, and maybe also the director-general (covering his you-know-what), have neatly shifted blame, turning a problem in decision making under uncertainty into an anti-science witch hunt. What alternative to models do they suggest? Intuition? Prayer? Models are just a way of integrating knowledge in a formal, testable, shareable way. Sure, there are bad models, but unlike other bad ideas, it’s at least easy to identify their problems.
Thanks to Jack Dirmann, Green Technology for the tip.
NUMMI – an innovation killed by its host's immune system?
This American Life had a great show on the NUMMI car plant, a remarkable joint venture between Toyota and GM. It sheds light on many of the reasons for the decline of GM and the American labor movement. More generally, it’s a story of a successful innovation that failed to spread, due to policy resistance, inability to confront worse-before-better behavior and other dynamics.
I noticed elements of a lot of system dynamics work in manufacturing. Here’s a brief reading list:
- Workers fear improving themselves out of a job
- TQM improvements can undercut themselves when they interact with existing organizational systems
- Firefighting is a trap that keeps lines running in a low-productivity state
- Engineering and production don’t get along (I think there’s more on this in Daniel Kim’s thesis)
- Systems have trouble making far-sighted decisions when confronted with worse-before-better behavior (but there might be good reasons)
Sea Level Roundup
Realclimate has Martin Vermeer’s reflections on the making of his recent sea level paper with Stefan Rahmstorf. At some point I hope to post a replication of that study, in a model with the Grinsted and Rahmstorf 2007 structures, but I haven’t managed to replicate it yet. The problem may be that I haven’t yet tackled the reservoir storage issue.
At Nature Reports, Olive Heffernan introduces several sea level articles. Rahmstorf contrasts the recent set of semi-empirical models, predicting sea level of a meter or more this century, with the AR4 finding. Lowe and Gregory wonder if the semi-empirical models are really seeing enough of the dynamic ice signal to have predictive power, and worry about overadaptation to high scenarios. Mark Schrope reports on underadaptation – vulnerable developments in Florida. Mason Inman reports on ecological engineering, a softer approach to coastal defense.
US manufacturing … are you high?
The BBC today carries the headline, “US manufacturing output hits 6 year high.” That sounded like an April Fool’s joke. Sure enough, FRED shows manufacturing output 15% below its 2007 peak at the end of last year, a gap that would be almost impossible to make up in a quarter. The problem is that the ISM-PMI index reported by the BBC is a measure of growth, not absolute level. The BBC has confused the stock (output) with the flow (output growth). In reality, things are improving, but there’s still quite a bit of ground to cover to recover the peak.
One child at the crossroads
China’s one child policy is at its 30th birthday. Inside-Out China has a quick post on the debate over the future of the policy. That caught my interest, because I’ve seen recent headlines calling for an increase in China’s population growth to facilitate dealing with an aging population – a potentially disastrous policy that nevertheless has adherents in many countries, including the US.
Here are the age structures of some major countries, young and old:
Vertical axis indicates the fraction of the population that resides in each age category.
Germany and Japan have the pig-in-the-python shape that results from falling birthrates. The US has a flatter age structure, presumably due to a combination of births and immigration. Brazil and India have very young populations, with the mode at the left hand side. Given the delay between birth and fertility, that builds in a lot of future growth.
Compared to Germany and Japan, China hardly seems to be on the verge of an aging crisis. In any case, given the bathtub delay between birth and maturity, a baby boom wouldn’t improve the dependency ratio for almost two decades.
More importantly, growth is not a sustainable strategy for coping with aging. At the same time that growth augments labor, it dilutes the resource base and capital available per capita. If you believe that people are the ultimate resource, i.e. that increasing returns to human capital will create offsetting technical opportunities, that might work. I rather doubt that’s a viable strategy though; human capital is more than just warm bodies (of which there’s no shortage); it’s educated and productive bodies – which are harder to get. More likely, a growth strategy just accelerates the arrival of resource constraints. In any case, the population growth play is not robust to uncertainty about future returns to human capital – if there are bumps on the technical road, it’s disastrous.
To say that population growth is a bad strategy for China is not necessarily to say that the one child policy should stay. If its enforcement is spotty, perhaps lifting it would be a good thing. Focusing on incentives and values that internalize population tradeoffs might lead to a better long term outcome than top-down control.
State of the global deal, Feb 2010
Somehow I forgot to mention our latest release:
The “Confirmed Proposals” emissions above translate into temperature rise of 3.9C (7F) in 2100. More details on the CI blog. The widget still stands where we left it in Copenhagen:
Feedbackwards
In the 80s, my mom had an Audi 5000. It’s value was destroyed by allegations of sudden, uncontrollable acceleration. No plausible physical mechanism was ever identified.
Today, Toyota’s suffering from the same fate. A more likely explanation? Operator error. Stepping on the gas instead of the brake transforms the normal negative feedback loop controlling velocity into a runaway positive feedback:
… A driver would step on the wrong pedal, panic when the car did not perform as expected, continue to mistake the accelerator for the brake, and press down on the accelerator even harder.
This had disastrous consequences in a 1992 Washington Square Park incident that killed five and a 2003 Santa Monica Farmers’ Market incident that killed ten …
Given time, the driver can model the situation, figure out what’s wrong, and correct. But, as my sister can attest, when you’re six feet in front of the garage with the 350 V8 Buick at full throttle, there isn’t a lot of time.
Read more at the Washington Examiner