Hiking the Pawn Trail This Morning

The Pawn Trail is a 0.75 mile loop trail through genuine old growth forest in central Oregon, about 20 miles inland from the ocean. It's my favorite fungus finding spot. It was raining today. I had my old camera, so the picture quality isn't up to snuff.

Questioning the MSM

“Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives. They are controlling what we can & cannot see.” Donald Trump tweet, 2018

The mainstream press and other professional media outlets (MSM) are under sustained attack by authoritarians throughout the world. The US president refers to the press as the enemy of the people, apparently believing negative coverage of him is fake news consisting of lies and otherwise unreliable content. Many people reject most or all MSM content and consider the MSM to be so inaccurate and/or biased that it is worthless or nearly so. Is that true? This is the first of several discussions that will focus on that question.

A June 2019 article in the Economist, Google rewards reputable reporting, not left-wing politics, examined the veracity of the factually unsupported president's claim. They concluded: “Our statistical study revealed no evidence of ideological bias in the search engine’s news tab.”

Google said it uses 10,000 evaluators to rate sources for its search engine. The company claimed they assess expertise and trustworthiness, but not ideology. The data above shows a bias to rely on sources with higher fact accuracy and lower political ideological bias.

The data the Economist obtained shows that if Google favored liberals, left-wing sites would appear more often than their model predicted. Right-wing sites would be cited less often. The Economist summarized the bias: “We saw no such trend. Overall, centre-left sites like the New York Times got the most links—but only about as many as our model suggested. Fox News beat its modest expectations. Because most far-right outlets had bad trust scores, they got few search results. But so did Daily Kos, a far-left site.”

The Economist points out that their study did not prove Google is completely impartial. For example, there is a possibility that fact-checkers were partisan. That would tend to inject bias into the model. Some keywords suggested bias, but in both directions. The data suggested that Google’s bias increases hits for “viral articles.” Incendiary Trump stories tend to come from leftist sources, while gory crime coverage is more common on rightist sites. People click on links like that. That is where most bias toward viral articles appears to come from.

MSM -- Worthless or Not?

What this does not directly address is the question of whether the MSM is basically worthless. Although Google searches are, or appear to be, biased toward sources having a higher fact accuracy and lower ideological bias, that says nothing about what standard of accuracy and bias constitutes a very low, low, moderate, high or very high level of reliability for (i) a source, (ii) any individual article or broadcast segment from a source, or (iii) any series of related articles or broadcast segments. It also does not shed light on how to assess reliability for clusters of ideologically related sources or issues, assuming that is a factor at all.

It does appear that is it hard to objectively define the relative degree of objectivity and reliability for the MSM as a whole and for individual sources and clusters of related sources. It may be the case that professional print media is significantly more reliable than cable news. In view of the complexity, the concept of “reliability” of the MSM or any single source is probably an essentially contested concept and no universally accepted definition can be articulated. Many or most supporters of the president firmly believe that most or all of the MSM is or almost completely unreliable, i.e., worthless at best and probably harmful.

Shoulds and Effective Action

"Should" is maybe my least favorite word in the English language.

It's completely ineffective. The way the world should be is never the way the world is, and that's life.

Words are powerful things, because they influence how we think.

How do you translate a "should" into effective action?

How about starting with:

"How can I?"

"What do I do?"

Go from there.

The other issue with shoulds is they encourage us to seek unfulfillable desires, which causes us stress and clouds our mental clarity.

This is not good for you. This is not effective.

Being concerned about a thing is not the same thing as doing a thing, but it can make us feel that way.

If you cut "should" from your daily vocabulary you just might find you're more effective and happier.

Starting there is as good a place as any if you want to make real change in the world.

The World and the UN Must Reduce Population Growth

The United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals imply that there is no longer any need to reduce global population growth, even though it is a serious problem that undermines most of the SDG targets. By adding a further SDG aimed at slowing the increase in population, the world could yet save the UN’s 2030 Agenda.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/new-sdg-dampen-population-growth-by-frank-gotmark-and-robin-maynard-2019-09

GOTHENBURG/LONDON – On September 24-25, world leaders will gather at the United Nations in New York to review progress toward the UN’s 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs, which aim “to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all,” are commendable, and summarize the kind of world many of us wish to see in 2030. But if this vision is to have any chance of materializing, governments must now add an 18th goal: “Dampen population growth.”

The challenges that humanity faces today stem mainly from overconsumption and overpopulation. Yet policymakers often fail to consider the two factors together, and largely neglect population growth in particular.

The overall human impact on the global environment is the product of population size and average per capita consumption. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that population growth and economic (consumption) growth are the two main causes of global warming. Per capita resource consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions are highest in developed economies, while rapid population growth in developing countries contributes to the loss of forests and biodiversity.

When governments adopted the SDGs in 2015, many experts were surprised by the lack of attention to population growth. Demographer Joseph Chamie, a former director of the UN Population Division, expressed concern that the UN was ignoring the issue. University of Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta and co-authors concurred, arguing that this omission “should be a point of public concern.” More recently, demographer Massimo Livi Bacci of the University of Florence wrote that “population … has become irrelevant for the sustainability of development, notwithstanding the evidence to the contrary.”

Between 1960 and 2000, the world’s population doubled from three billion to six billion. This growth contributed to greater pollution of land, lakes, rivers, and oceans, as well as urban overcrowding and a higher demand for agricultural land and freshwater (in turn encroaching on natural ecosystems). Despite significant technical advances in agriculture, famines killed millions of people over this 40-year period. And in developing countries, rapid population growth left poor people at greater risk of death, injury, and disease resulting from pollution, floods, droughts, and other disasters.

There are now 7.7 billion people on Earth. The UN forecasts that this figure will rise to 11 billion by 2100 (and that assumes steady fertility declines in many countries that have tended to resist this trend). A population increase on this scale would create more pollution, require a doubling of global food production under difficult conditions (including climate disruption), and result in more people suffering during conflicts and famines.

To be sure, there has been plenty of necessary research into how the world can better accommodate billions more people, in terms of pollution, agriculture, energy efficiency, and climate change. But such research fails to quantify the benefits of minimizing further population increases – a critical oversight.

While many researchers and policymakers seem to regard a rapidly increasing global population as inevitable, ordinary citizens recognize the serious problems and risks that this will cause. In a 2014 survey by the Global Challenges Foundation, a majority of 9,000 respondents in nine countries (the United States, Brazil, South Africa, Germany, Poland, Sweden, India, Russia, and China) considered population increase to be an actual or potential future threat to mankind. The same year, a Pew Research Center survey reported that 82% of American scientists regarded the growing world population as a major problem because “there won’t be enough food and resources.”

Yet the huge projected increase in the world’s population this century is avoidable. The size of the population in 2100 can be influenced now by international debate, government programs, and individual choices.

More specifically, an additional SDG to dampen population growth would promote funding for voluntary, rights-based family planning. This approach has a proven track record of success, not only in reducing births rapidly, but also in advancing the empowerment of women and spurring economic progress. No coercive “population control” measures are needed. Rather, wider awareness of the linkage between family size and ecological sustainability can help parents recognize the benefits of having fewer children.

Clearly, population growth cannot be stopped overnight, nor feasibly by 2030. But we could establish trends toward a population peak and decline in all countries by then. This includes not only developing countries, where population growth threatens security, but also rich countries with large ecological footprints, where population decline and its benefits are resisted because of ill-founded fears of demographic aging.

Reproductive rights and family planning are mentioned in both SDG 3 (good health and wellbeing) and SDG 5 (gender equality), but neither goal explicitly aims to reduce population growth. As they currently stand, the SDGs imply that there is no longer any need to curb the global population increase, even though it undermines most of the goals.

As a result, there is a big risk that the world will achieve little of the 2030 Agenda, especially in countries where high birth rates persist. But we should not give up. Changes in population policies and norms can reduce birth rates. And by adopting a new SDG to this effect, the world could yet save the 2030 Agenda.

Climate Change: Measuring Carbon

One aspect of climate change science is understanding how to measure the global carbon cycle. The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is a global group of more than 1,000 scientists who study carbon cycling from the Earth’s core to the edge of space. Live Science discusses an article on current understanding. DCO data suggests that with some exceptions, carbon release into the atmosphere has been about the same as carbon sinking into the planet's interior at tectonic plate boundaries for the last 500 million years. CDO believes the balance results in breathable air and a land and sea climate that supports biodiversity.

Global carbon cycle -- carbon dioxide in gigatons
(Source: Figure 7.3, IPCC AR4)

CDO data shows the current rate of human caused carbon flow is about 80-fold higher than release of carbon by present-day volcanoes. Over time, various events or ‘perturbations’ have thrown the cycle out of balance, causing increases in greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and global climate disruption over hundreds of years. The perturbations are often resulting in widespread extinctions.

Since 1750, CDO estimates that human activity has released about 2,000 gigatons of CO2 into the air. The Chicxulub asteroid impact that is believed to have caused dinosaur mass extinction 65 million years ago is believed to have released about 1,400 gigatons of CO2. The CO2 release eventually led to global warming. A separate study from 2018 that analyzed fossil records suggests that the Earth's temperature increased by 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) for thousands of years.

The Chicxulub asteroid (~6-9 mile diameter) interacting 

with Earth and its life forms

Live Science writes that DCO researchers believe the “pace and scale at which humans are disturbing the planet's carbon balance are comparable to some of the most cataclysmic geologic events in history. It's likely, the researchers wrote, that the results of this era of man-made meddling could look similar to the troubled centuries following Chicxulub and other ancient cataclysms. This era, the researchers concluded, ‘is likely to leave its legacy as a mass extinction from greenhouse-induced climate change on a biosphere already at a tipping point caused by habitat loss.’ ”

Given the apparent wealth and political power of climate science deniers in the US to block action climate change legislation, it looks like other countries are going to have to try to deal with global warming without us. Public opinion is shifting toward increasing concern, but that has been mostly irrelevant so far.

An Alternative Visual Model for a CAS

Complex Adaptive Systems are complicated to model and to understand. 

The application of a model like this to a particular entity like a social system or an ecosystem or an economy can be confusing, but typically you'll find common ways to do it with in any particular arena.

The nice thing about this model is it's basically a dissection of the overarching process. It's just that we don't normally need to see the insides of all this to be able to use it.

One of the downsides of the above is that it underplays the impact of environment, which serves a primary, not secondary role in shaping CAS behavior.

Furthermore, the above model doesn't say anything about the roles of the individual agents, even though they can be broadly categorized into at least two discrete groups.

Another issue with the model above is it's oriented as though the "complex adaptive behavior" is what we're trying to figure out. In most cases, we already know the emergent behavior, and we have some idea of the local relationships. What we're usually looking for then, is either the moving parts that connect one to the other, or often as not, simply plotting a course based on past behavior.

The former is difficult no matter what. The latter is simple, as CAS follow a simple overall dynamic where this is concerned. CAS have inertia due to the positive and negative feedback loops

I propose a very simple alternative model when you don't need the inner workings of the CAS, and you know the emergent behavior with some idea of the local relationships. This alternative can be useful in terms of charting the overarching course of a CAS, and locating it within the downcycle or upcycle phases of its evolution.

Here's the most basic example

In the context of modeling economies, agents would be market transactions (or if you want to try for it - market actors, though that can get dicey) - the predictable ones versus the disruptive ones. When a market tanks, the sell offs of previously profitable stocks is disruptive. As the market tanks there are greater numbers of these sell offs and they encourage more sell offs, taking into account that negative feedback inertia, up until it reaches an equilibrium again. That process is the downcycle phase. The high water mark rises, tapers, then crashes usually slowly rising in response to a market tanking and finally recovering.

In the context of modeling societies, agents would be individual social behaviors (or if you want to try it, social actors) - the predictable ones versus the disruptive ones. A crime is disruptive. Response to a crime is disruptive. As crime increases, and response to it increases, the high water mark raises until it finally finds its equilibrium, often again with a finally drop as said crime is now once again "under control" - until conditions create the rise again and crime reasserts itself.

This is very simplistic, but I'd argue it's very useful as CAS go because it makes understanding the motion of them much easier.

I've never really tried to flesh this out before, I just keep this stuff filed away in my head. Any attempt to articulate it is a work in progress.