glen -
Excellent and concise summary of this thread following your main point
about policy modeling... I'm sure an LLM couldn't begin to be as
on-point and succinct! I feel remiss in not analyzing existing threads
as carefully as you must have before I stick my fat foot in my fat mouth:
All -
As many here are at least part-time modelers or familiar with the terms
of art, and some make their living as simulators (simulants?) as you
(glen) do, I think upon reflection we all know that models (and
therefore simulations) are much more useful for identifying and refining
"the question" than "giving answers"... yet I think many of us (and the
unwashed public moreso) forget that and look to models and the
simulations built upon them to give us actionable answers without being
willing to refine the questions carefully.
<rant>
My latest colloquial working definition of "consciousness" has been
something like "the structures and processes which have evolved to
elaborate possibility spaces wherefore to facilitate the exploration
of probability spaces". Our actions and decisions seem to live in
probability spaces, but we ideate in possibility space. We take
actions which we believe will yield certain consequences,
understanding there is a probabilistic element to that cause-effect,
but to the extent we have implicit and explicit models of the
various relations, we are doing so with some modicum of
rationality. Our scientific theories and engineering principles
(including economic, political policies) exist to outline the
probability estimates within possibility spaces: /If you want A in
the context of Zed then you must/should/could do Wye in the context
of Beta and Gamma which will yield results with a mean of eM and a
Standard Deviation of sD. /or somesuch.
My 8 year stint at LANL with the "Decision Support" division of
several hundred people building models and tools (mostly for the US
Gov) left me disillusioned as virtually all our clients "just wanted
simple answers" and most of my peers at least pretended they were
providing such. A good reason to leave when I did (2008).
I suppose I should grant that I'm talking about "scientific" models
more than "engineering" ones where the established practices help to
constrain the questions to "answerable" ones for the most part.
Though it is those very "established practices" which codify the
"lesser evils" (or more to the point, "as yet unrecognized evils")
in a way that supports action and progress.
I am really fascinated by the progress made in the intervening 15
years (of which many here are likely much more in touch with) on
applying M&S to Policy.
The magnitude of risk around existential threats (e.g. climate)
might suggest applying a strong bias to avoid global cataclysm, yet
the direct implications of that bias against "current practice" and
"economic/policy momentum" has us applying an equally strong bias
the other direction. /Burn baby burn, drill baby drill, war baby
war, produce (and waste) and produce/! is the theme of our
collective mantra (western industrial Kapital) as we check the value
of our 401k plans or the GDP of our nation or that of our "friends".
My sympathies are with Merle's pessimism in the sense of unintended
consequences.
The myriad first-order responses *by* the technophilic,
Kapital-driven powers-that-be are naturally going to superficially
(seem to) respond to the most urgent symptoms while (likely)
exploiting yet another level of (slightly obscured) bit of commons
only to become "next year's/decade's/generation's" problem. The
internal combustion engine resolved the overwhelming horse-manure
problem in big cities, only to yield a serious urban smog and acid
rain problem. Lead pipes and lead paint and leaded gasoline
brought myriad benefits to society and individuals only to yield
yet-another-more subtle problem that we are still struggling with.
Musk's (now famous) 2020 quote in a (now deleted) tweet: "We will
coup whoever we want! Deal with it!" referencing US involvement in
the Bolivian coup related to Lithium mining is an excellent example
of how our rush to sweep fossil fuel exploitation/abuse further out
of our view in favor of simply *not noticing* the abuses and
exploitations our "solution" to the problem represents.
<virtue-signal-laden-rant>
I love me some good Solar/Wind/Hydro/Tidal/Geo power on the
principal that all but Tidal/Geo are "just" exploitation of the
1000W/m^2 of power the giant fusion reactor in the sky streams
down on us (while tidal interference slows the moon faster and
geo cools the earth core faster). We stick our PV panels in one
flux or water wheel or a windmill blade in another flux and
viola! human/animal/fossil-fuel power no longer is needed to
empty our polders, power our crypto-currency mine-farms, grind
our grain or drill out rifle-barrels (reference to theorigin of
Husqvarna in Sweden
<https://www.husqvarna.com/us/discover/history/>)...
But already ( a decade or so into the widespread deployment of
the current wave) we are trying to figure out what to do with
the megatons/cubic-cubits of high-tech waste (PV panels,
wind-turbine blades) that are ageing out of their engineering
specs in the light of contemporary economic markets where it is
more profitable to replace the old with new and let the old pile
up somewhere.
I love my EV (PHEV Volt) and am proud to be squeezing the third
100k out of it with careful attention to detail, but I'm pretty
sure that the Coal burned from the Navajo Rez, spewing
particulate laden smoke over the Colorado Plateau, to push
electrons through wires a few hundred miles to me is no better,
possibly worse than the frick-a-frack disaster going on in SE
NM/W TX to keep the domestic fossil-fuel industry booming...
and even if I keep this beast rolling another 10 years which
might have gone to scrap at 166k miles when I bought it (failing
traction battery) and only pour a little gasoline through the
ICE and turn a few sets of fossil-fuel-derived tires into
tire-dust (to settle in the lungs of my grandchildren and the
aquifers they drink from), I will only have mildly mitigated the
worst-case scenario (where I bought a brand new hummer, ICE or
EV and tore up every ecosystem I could get my fat tires on) by a
small factor. Yay me. Sweeping lobal socio-economic-political
change seems to be the only scale relevant to the current scale
of the problems we have queued up on ourselves, but not /acting
local as I think global/ seems to be as crazy-making as not
acting at all. There is a huge attraction to not thinking at
all for the same reason.
<virtue-signal-laden-rant>
I think I'll go rewatch the entire MadMax movie series now... maybe
throw in Costner's WaterWorld (aka Dances with JetSkis)?
</rant>
On 1/30/24 7:56 AM, glen wrote:
I'm confident many of y'all have seen this. But each of the snippets
below, from Roger & Merle's nihilistic takes to Leigh and Cody's
optimistic takes, bounce around policy modeling. What can one estimate
in the face of overwhelming uncertainty? And given one's high
uncertainty estimates, what is there to *do* about it at an
institutional scale?
cf the theme of the Humans, Societies and Artificial Agents at
ANNSIM<https://annsim.org> this year:
Taylor Anderson, George Mason University, USA and Petra Ahrweiler,
Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany
Agent-based models (ABMs), cellular automata, and microsimulations
model systems through the lens of complex systems theory. More
specifically, such approaches simulate populations of possibly
heterogeneous individuals as they utilize either simple behavioral
rules or learning models to govern their interactions with each other
and their environment, and from which system-level properties emerge.
Such modeling and simulation approaches have supported a wide range
of applications related to human societies (e.g., traffic and urban
planning, economics, natural hazards, national security,
epidemiology) and research tasks (e.g., exploring what-if scenarios,
predictive models, data generation, hypothesis testing, policy
formation and generation).
Despite the multitude of advancements in the last few decades, there
remain longstanding challenges that limit the usefulness of such
models in the policy cycle. Such challenges include but are not
limited to: capturing realistic individual and collective social
behaviors; basic issues in model development (calibration,
scalability, model reusability, difficulties in generalizing
findings); and making transparent the strengths and limitations of
models. This track focuses generally on advancements in modeling and
simulation approaches in application to human societies that seek to
overcome these challenges, with a special interest in policy modeling
and the inclusion of models in the policy cycle.
On 10/23/11 10:10, Roger Critchlow wrote:
No one knows where the slime mold will choose to extend its
pseudopodia, or which of the pseudopodia will thrive or wither, or
what the novel beneficial or lamentable consequences will be. Some
of us worry about the suffering caused by the gold-goo-excrement,
others worry about not killing the beast that makes the gold-goo,
many just fight for the largest share they can get, and most of us
could care less until the bucket of gold-goo-excrement lands in our
neighborhood or the gold-goo pseudopod feeding our investments dries up.
On 1/28/24 16:55, Frank Wimberly wrote:
One of my father-in-law's best friends was a man named Eli Shapiro
who was the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Economics at MIT. My FIL
asked him some question about stock investing. Shapiro said, "Chuck,
nobody knows anything."
On 1/29/24 08:29, Steve Smith wrote:
I think this is one of the reasons that an open-ended "growth
economy" is so popular, it make everyone willing to take on the
mantle, a /_"tide whisperer"_/, pretending their shamanic
actions/words are lifting those boats?
On 1/29/24 19:20, Leigh Fanning wrote:
At some point we'll have SAF at scale.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/sustainable-aviation-fuels
On 1/29/24 19:35, Michael Orshan wrote:
so removing fossil fuels from power plants is the key. [snip] Still
there are many political and resource bottlenecks.
On 1/29/24 22:36, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
Sorry, Jochen, just about everything you recommend will make things
worse. I also wrote about the failure of the climate models almost
ten years ago. You nailed one of the biggest problems, though: even
really smart guys don't know shit about global warming.
On 1/30/24 00:59, Jochen Fromm wrote:
The basic facts seem to be simple. 8 billion people burning fossil
fuels are causing global warming. Is there a point I have overlooked?
What can we do to stop global warming?
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