>>to hear these breathless alarmists talk, they are anti-technology, anti-progress, and apparently want us all to live stacked up in massive cities with no real quality of life at all. I tend to see this as either an exhibition of control-freak tendencies or simply full-on communism.
Where is the second half of the article where, after discussing at length many bad possible outcomes, the guy goes on to propose detailed social engineering schemes to solve the looming planetary crisis??
Either you did not read this article closely, or you are simply trolling. In my opinion, the real ending of the piece was marvelously open-ended. The author concludes by highlighting the irrational , but quintessential human, tendency to see some bright-side to the whole thing-- here are our climate scientists like Hansen and others, that know the most and see of everyone how screwed we are, still maintaining some faith we'll figure it out. And they didn't need 'communism', 'mega city' or some other nebulous concept to help them to that conclusion-- it was/is either habitual, or fantastical.
You're right in that I never made it to the end, it was just that bad. It's like the weekend crap fearmonger articles you get on Zerohedge every weekend, albeit with better graphics. Not trolling.
Do you dispute the accuracy of the statements made in the article, or just that they should be put in writing?
If you believe the article to be filled with lies, you could explain why.
If you just think it's filled with truths that should not be uttered, that seems to me like a rather strange position to take. The goal is to build political will in favor of government action that puts a price on CO2 emissions. Terrifying people about things that are truly terrifying, while not guaranteed to help a whole lot, is at worst not counterproductive. And if you happen to terrify/enlighten/educate the right handful of rich people it might just have a tremendous impact.
To be honest I also at times thought the author's alarmism went a bit far and could have scared off serious readers, but as a general principle I still don't think its valid to critique someone on a basis that is non-existent: e.g., the author at no point explicitly endorsed any of the concepts or ideas you mentioned in the GP comment.
Preliminary but important point: what you call prevention is typically called 'mitigation' by the UNFCCC, NASA, and other environmental orgs, while what you have called mitigation is typically 'adaptation' [1]. I know this is jargon, but if you have conversations with folks in the environmental/climate field it can in the best case provide instant rapport to at least be speaking the same language, and in the worst case, at least prevent serious mis-understandings.
>>The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong. We should be pushing nuclear power - even to the the point of reducing existing safety regulations. A Chernobyl every decade is preferable to global warming. Politically, we should be willing to trade existing environmental regulation for those which reduce CO2.
-Human perception of danger/emergency has, from the evolutionary perspective, been optimized for concrete, near-term events/entities, eg terrorism, explosions, enemies. On the other hand ,it has not prepared us for preparing against abstract, medium to long term adversaries, eg planetary or physics scale changes that threaten civilization, malevolent ETs, malevolent super-intelligences [AIs].. etc etc.
-Even if this weren't true and we didn't have these unfortunate cognitive bias, your argument about broad public wisdom of emergency relies upon a well-informed populace that is familiar with statistics, and the scientific methods. Unfortunately, that is not the case in almost every advanced Representative state on the planet. This broad ignorance renders the ambient public awarness point you have made quite moot.
-Finally, I see the logic behind the 'what if global warming is wrong and the planet gets better' case as analogical to Pascal's wager, or the false postive; what you forgot to mention is the false negative, which is metaphorically relatively similar to the outcome of Pascals (Hell/Earth becomes like Hell).
Re-optimizing said supply chains in an oil constrained, and eventually oil free world seems extremely non-trivial. I wonder if we will soon have to scale up the methods (both computationally, & in human/practical industrial re-organization terms) to plot new paths and then connect them, before the graph changes so much that the potential for profit disappears.
In the near term,I could see human engineers using deep learning or other computational methods for multi-scale optimization to reduce costs and carbon footprint based on locality of original sources (food/biofuels/..) In the medium term, I would bet that AI agents will exist precisely to optimize these tasks. There's hundreds of billions to be (re)-made in (re)-wiring the economy properly.
>> This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed.
And why shouldn't we (he) be doing that? Actually the author's goal is transparent, to shake up perception, to provide fodder in the imagination of folks to ultimately change how urgently we treat this in public forums. I thought this was a quite trenchant point (from the article):
>>Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing;
Back to you:
>>I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times.
I also thought this statement was scientifically unclear, but I think the author was trying to say that the rate of methane release increases, thus, the impact on climate systems multiplies relative to an equivalent release of CO2 in that period (100 yrs v 24 yrs). If someone else can mention exactly how he got from 34x to 84x though, id love to hear it; i didn't get it..
I do want to mention, however the 30x GHG effect number is not set in stone. In fact, depending on the rate of release, there may be 'force multipliers' depending on how (quickly) ecosystems can absorb and use these gases. Ominously, this multiplier seems to go up anyways as temps rise. [1]
Methane deteriorates in the upper atmosphere fairly quickly, whereas CO2 sticks around. Methane is a dramatically better insulator than CO2, so in the short run its impact is higher, but when you stretch out the timescale, your methane is deteriorating while the CO2 sticks around, so the relative impact tilts slowly toward CO2.
While you are right that methane wont naturally stick around for ever, and that it breaks down sooner than CO2. After googling around a little, I finally managed to find the source of the author's two numbers, and in the end I am more troubled than ever :/
>>At issue is the global warming potential (GWP), a number that allows experts to compare methane with its better-known cousin, carbon dioxide. While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2. In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential (GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC.[1]
Doesn't 'reducing' (really, normalizing) the GWP for the
~80 yrs of the 100yr period (when it is not existing) seem sort of like an accounting trick? In other words, if 20GT of CH4 were released next year from the Bering Sea into the atmosphere (this would be spectacularly bad), the overall shock to the climate/atmosphere systems is precisely the same.
First off, the author is prodding people into action by scaring/alarming them. Thus, the entire point of this article is to highlight many of the bad long-tails (note I did not say WORST long tails, eg Clathrate Gun, or phytoplankton crash leading to global anoxia, because they almost instantly wipe out human life), which could give the impression we are more screwed than we are;
In other words, all of these happening is not a probable outcome (the article is not based on a statistical inference or climate model). However, as we climb up the \delta +C ladder, all of these effects/implications become increasingly probable. If you crank up \delta +C to +5C for instance, at least half if not all of these will occur (due to positive feedbacks eg albedo);
I would not say we are beyond the hope of any action at this point. There are two sub-sets of conventional actions being discussed in the context of official orgs, eg UNFCCC at the moment:
-Mitigation- reduce emissions directly,- eg turn off coal plants or plan to do so to dozens within the next few years, massively scale up solar adoption
-Adaptation- take actions now to reduce devastation from past [inertial] and unavoidable future emissions, e.g, invest in heat-proof seeds and crops for certain tropical biomes
Broadly, both are still possible. The former is notably more susceptible to political landmines and fossil fuel monopoly blocking than the latter, so a lot of climate scientists are urging folks to focus on the latter. Is it enough to save us? In terms of physics and climate systems--no, but metaphorically it could reduce pain like palliative care for the swathes of humanity, largely from tropical regions, who probably wont make it. The real heartbreaker here: mitigation is crucial to avoiding all the evil long-tails, but our poltical and economic systems seem allergic to it. How about just a little mitigation- eg lukewarm Paris implementation-- do we still miss some of the worst evils? Very unclear-- now we need to consult the statistical physicists.
There's a third bin too which I would call pure engineering solutions; These could involve for instance, building plants to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere [1], seeding the oceans with certain chemicals to increase Co2 oceanic uptake [2], or straight up engineering the atmosphere [3]. I listed those in increasing order of possible risk/backfiring (complexity of the climate engineering operation).
I invite anyone to clarify or add to which they think are feasible and infeasible amongst these; I listed this all for context, and not to advance a particular legal, moral, or political argument, although clearly there are a litany to be made.
> Penrose appeals to quantum woo to claim that the human mind isn't strictly algorithmic.
Penrose doesn't appeal to quantum woo, he has a quite well articulated set of assumptions and arguments , related to loop quantum gravity [1], about how objective collapse of the wave function may occur at bio-physically feasible decoherence times.
Now, whether you think his biophysical theories of consciousness are valid, or even required (whether you buy the microtubules argument/hypothesis), is one thing. But stating that Penrose- arguably the 20th century's foremost mathematical physicist- is a practicioner and/or a spreader of 'quantum woo'-- that belies a level of mis-informantion so catastrophically high that it renders your quoted statement indistinguishable from a pure ad-hominem.
@Chronos (can't reply for some reason, so I'm just replying to my own post and tagging you)
Its true that LQG is not known a natural schema to implement hyper-computation. However, since we don't well understand the time-dynamics of twistors ( how these operators may interact non-linearly through time), i don't see any a-priori reason why it is not a possible scheme for super-computation (you could make a good counter- response based on occam's razor, which I'd grant).
Look, lots of thereotical CS folks get disturbed by the idea of hyper-computation/super-turing machines, but in truth Turing machines are a toy model in comparison to true physics; as such, it doesn't take a whole lot more to get something more powerful; Siegelmann and colleagues have shown that real weighted, analog recurrent nets have super-turing abilities [1] [2]. While Aaronson and other raise good questions about physical realizability of such systems, a good thing to keep in mind is that these discussions often take place at computational 'limit' cases, eg solving intractable PSPACE problems, which may not be as relevant to more pedestrian problems solvable by biological systems. Central point: dynamically evolving systems iteratively exploring through (from) in-consistent systems towards more and more consistent ones have many of the same compelling qualities we would call 'super-turing'. Also see the lit on evolving turning machines.
Finally, while I don't agree with the magnitude your Pauling analogy, I certainly agree with you statement that Penrose is out of his depth here. While I do not , presently, buy his argument that quantum effects are necessary to realize consciousness, I remain open to the idea until we know more about BOTH physics and computation.
LQG is not believed to allow hypercomputation, i.e. the solving of Turing-uncomputable problems. Penrose's entire argument is based on the idea that the human brain is a hypercomputer, which is why it cannot in principle be simulated by a computer (or any other machine).
It's worth noting that Penrose's field of expertise is General Relativity, not quantum physics, and definitely not Computer Science / philosophy of computation. I see the situation with Penrose as equivalent to Linus Pauling's unfortunate foray into Vitamin C pseudoscience late in his life.
Penrose' claim is much simpler. He thinks that gravity playing a role in wave function collapse will show that non-quantum computers are incapable of accurately modeling quantum gravity. IOW, he thinks gravity will end up showing the physical Church-Turing thesis to be false.
Say what you will about Penrose, but can you seriously deny that he is one of the world's foremost experts on gravity?? You might not like his conclusion, but to say that he is out of his element here is ridiculous. Are you in your element when discussing gravity causing wave function collapse? Who do you think would be more in their element on this subject than Penrose??
Call me back when Penrose convinces a well-regarded quantum physics expert. At that point we can call up Scott Aaronson and ask him his opinion, as Aaronson is an expert on the intersection of quantum physics and computing.
Scott is a friend of mine. I've talked with him face to face about this very subject. He disagrees with Penrose, but his objections are far more nuanced and respectful than anything I have seen here. He would be horrified to see Penrose belittled and his arguments not given a fair reading. Penrose is an intellectual hero to Scott and someone to be admired.
That's good to know. I read his post on his 'debate' with Roger and really enjoyed it. Also of interest may be the discussion between him and Hameroff in the comments section.
Meta-comment:
It a sad sort of situation when intellectual communities, whether they be HN or another, tend to idolize a set of individuals and demonize others.
Thanks @manyosos for your comments in this thread, you really helped elevate the discourse.
I have a mild case of synesthesia and this is one of the closest things I have seen/heard (:) ) that comes close-ish to capturing how I see/feel when I experience great music.
Of course, I was not surprised to see the creator of the video list a similar motivation in his caption for the upload.
It's far from clear that STDP is sufficient to the brain's learning mechanisms, though it is certainly necessary at some scales and stages.
The possibility space between relatively simple and insufficiently general unsupervise/clustering approaches and rigid SGD schemes is large, and probably contains the brain's true inference engine. Personally, I am excited by some of the ideas brought forward in this Bengio paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.05179.pdf
Check methods-- the simulations exhibit sparse coding because the model was built that way, in particular, it assumes LIF (leaky integrate and fire) output neurons that can inhibit each other. In fact, this assumed inhibition is the only reason it works as is. Else, many neurons would probably fire simultaneously in an unstructured crossbar without a set learning rule.
Nevertheless, a STDP type learning rule can inspire interesting applications. One of my co-advisors authored an article [1] which shows a completely unsupervised classification on the MNIST challenge in a crossbar environment, achieving 93 \% . Nothing like state of the art CNNs etc, but considering this was done without labels, that's pretty impressive.
> shareholder capitalism. they have zero accountability except to their shareholders.
Random thought that just came to mind. Have coalition of debt holders (borrowers ) ever considered buying stock in these companies to influence them in the form of another company that is jointly owned or invested in by thousands or tens of thousands of folks?
Eg, mass activism campaign launches request for everyone to invest X% of what they normally would have paid into loans for the month (above the minimum thresholds of course), and/ or y% of disposable income into this fund. Now obviously one or ten people doing this will own just a few hundred stocks, but thousands doing this get tens of thousands of stocks-- thats when it could get interesting ;)
Obviously, would not be available to those really struggling under massive loan burdens and struggling to make every payment, BUT for those in the AND gate between reasonably high loan burden and comfortable income, which is a huge overlap with HN by the way, the impact could be massive.
In the end the results could be beautiful though: cannibalizing capitalism , - an inside job.
the combined assets of the entire class of student debtors is probably NEGATIVE (they are debtors, remember) whereas the assets of even a single major shareholder (Carl Icahn as a benchmark) are in the billions of dollars and outweigh the rest of it combined.
this is one of the side effects of the massive income and wealth inequality American style capitalism causes.
If debtors could get organized and all stopped paying at once, it seems likely that Navient would run out of money before they got the spigot turned back on.
The consequence of course would be that student loans would cease being made, or be made much less frequently. This would have effects, some good, some bad.
US has never had problems with putting 1% of their population in jail. If every student, even the children of billionaires, massively refuse to pay back as a group, the banks would be too happy to strike a deal with the children of billionaires in order to put the 99% others in jail.
We need to be a little more clear: Carl Icahn's asset is the students' debts. That is what his wealth is made out of, in the way that soda is made out of corn syrup and water. No student debt would mean Carl Icahn would have to make an honest living, and he's not gonna go quietly.
Present assests- probably, but when taken over a longer time scale this makes increasing sense. many folks with >100k debt usually have several grad degrees , medical, engineering, law, etc, & whether annualized or summed, their future earnings may be productively invested into an advocacy campaign which would not only benefit them but others who have less natural income cushion and thus less of a parachute.
Individual mega-investors are no doubt powerful, but what about investor collectives. if a single company and/or entity can take on even 1/10th the power of Icahn collectively, it is something worth considering.
there is asymmetry of purpose as well as asymmetry of net worth. an individual mega investor spends as much as he (or she, but lets be honest, its almost always he) wants on anything at all. a class of several tens of thousands of investors in a collective will struggle with their decision making in all the expected ways.
Navient is a servicer. They make sure the money gets from the borrower's account into the lender's account on time. Their revenue consists entirely of the fees paid by the lenders for providing this service.
Make radical changes that impact the servicer negatively and the lender will switch to a new servicer to manage its payment flow.
The coalition of debt holders is now stuck with shares of some underperforming servicing company that just lost a huge contract.
Ever seen those articles talking about how in the last few decades increases in wealth have overwhelmingly gone to the top 1%? This is the outcome. The little people can't hope to compete.
Target market would not be folks already massively invested in these stocks. Target market would be student loan debtors who have comfortable jobs and salaries north of 50k.
Apps like Robinhood have opened the ability for folks earning even less than 50k , to comfortably invest.
Many tens of thousands may be interested; there could be a bigger market opportunity than you think.
Where is the second half of the article where, after discussing at length many bad possible outcomes, the guy goes on to propose detailed social engineering schemes to solve the looming planetary crisis??
Either you did not read this article closely, or you are simply trolling. In my opinion, the real ending of the piece was marvelously open-ended. The author concludes by highlighting the irrational , but quintessential human, tendency to see some bright-side to the whole thing-- here are our climate scientists like Hansen and others, that know the most and see of everyone how screwed we are, still maintaining some faith we'll figure it out. And they didn't need 'communism', 'mega city' or some other nebulous concept to help them to that conclusion-- it was/is either habitual, or fantastical.