Category: Science

I am still thinking about Nick Bostrom’s stimulating essay (and Robin Hanson’s precursor essay).  Nick of course is worried about finding signs of alien life, which would suggest that life has arisen many times, leading to the question "where are they?" and the fear that life dies out pretty easily.  For Nick it is cheerier, from our point of view at least, to think it is very hard for life to get underway in the first place.

In pondering the Fermi question, I often wonder if I am not simply missing the party, so to speak.  Most people already *do* think they see signs of an alien presence of some kind, of course defining that concept broadly to include The Gods.  So how can we say we don’t see "them"?  Maybe I, the agnotheist, don’t see "them" (Him?) but surely most other people think they do.

Doesn’t that make the Fermi paradox go away in a snap?  No one cites Blind Boy Blake and screams "He doesn’t see them!".

Another way of putting it is to say we don’t take David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion seriously enough.  We really have just one data point, so who can say what "they" look like, or what kind of "display" they would have made for us?

Alternatively, I am struck by the tension between the Fermi paradox with the "We are probably living in a simulation" claim.  Both are popular with the same group of people because they are nerdy ways of making you believe something weird; in reality the two conundrums don’t fit together.  If you take the simulation option seriously, you again see the creators all around you, albeit in disguised or cloaked form.  Of course you had to use Bayesian inferential reasoning to see them, but what’s wrong with that?  Better than a telescope, some would say.  And since most people believe in God, the creators might even consider their artwork to be already "signed."  (I’ll note rapidly in passing that the arguments against the simulation hypothesis also strike at the Fermi worries, but establishing that would take lots of work.)

Either way, it seems we see "them," or ought to think we see them, even if that turns out to be a visual mistake of sorts.

Addendum: I liked Michael Goodfellow’s point:

After that first species gets control, it makes all the rules.  If it shells over all the stars, no other life can even develop, since all the planets are frozen solid.  If it wants to let biological evolution continue, it can do that, by avoiding stars with fertile planets.  It can prevent any other technology from arising (by monitoring all the planets where life is evolving.)  It can guide or change any life that it does find.

This may seem horrible to you — little robots putting all the stars out!  Spreading like a weed and killing or preventing any new life from developing.  But you’re looking at it the wrong way…The first species out there gets to decide the future, for every species that follows.  For lack of any other evidence, let’s hope it’s us.

Splendid, but I part company at the last sentence.  There is some other evidence (of the Bayesian sort) and I think the most logical assumption is — whether you believe in God or space aliens — to think of ourselves as their product, one way or another.

Or to put it yet another way, what’s the principle of individuation here?  Isn’t "seeing us" and "seeing them" more or less the same thing?

Hail David Hume!

Economists say that people buy insurance to cover themselves if something bad happens.  Some experiments by psychologists suggest that people buy insurance because they think it will prevent the bad thing from happening.   John Tierney has more.

Wow.  It’s supposed to amount to about 90,000 pages; here is an article about the project.  Here are a few indicated highlights.

His new book Common Wealth devotes an entire chapter to this important topic.  Sachs writes:

The main lesson of ecology is the interconnectedness of the various parts of an ecosystem and the dangers of abrupt, nonlinear, and even catastrophic changes caused by modest forcings…It is a basic finding that biological diversity increases the productivity and resilience of ecosystems.  With more species filling more niches in a given location, a biodiverse ecosystem is better buffered against external shocks in is more adept at cycling nutrients, capturing solar radiation, utilizing water resources, and preventing the takeover of the system by single predators, weeds, or pathogens.  In other words, preserving biodiversity helps to preserve all aspects of ecosystem functions.  Removing one or more species from an ecosystem, for example, by selective harvesting of trees or fish or hunted animals, can lead to a cascade of ecological changes with large, adverse, and nonlinear effects on the functioning of the ecosystem.

Now, loyal MR readers may remember that I am genuinely uncertain how much we should worry about the loss of biodiversity.  I do know the following:

1. Many smart people who know much more science than I do are very worried about the loss of biodiversity.

2. Given that the human population has ballooned for the foreseeable future, massive losses in biodiversity are inevitable.  The question is how bad the marginal losses will be, if we do not adapt policy accordingly.

3. If I had to conduct a debate and argue that the marginal loss of biodiversity was going to be a tragedy for human beings (obviously, I can see the loss to animals, and yes I do count that for something), I would not do very well.  Yes Yana’s children won’t eat tuna and then I would sputter something about carbon and nitrogen cycles.

So OK readers, help me out.  I’ve read Sachs’s passage and I don’t think I disagree with any of the claims in it.  But I still cannot articulate to a skeptic exactly what marginal disaster will come if we do not take drastic action to preserve biodiversity.

Please use the comments to set me straight.  What exactly will go wrong?  And do not compare seven billion humans to pristine nature.  Compare seven billion humans with bad biodiversity policy to, say, five billion humans with a pretty good biodiversity policy.  What exactly is the difference?  What are these costs as a percentage of gdp? 

Please be as specific as possible; I genuinely would like to learn more.

From 1968:

A typical vacation in 2008 is to spend a week at an undersea resort,
where your hotel room window looks out on a tropical underwater reef, a
sunken ship or an ancient, excavated city. Available to guests are two-
and three-person submarines in which you can cruise well-marked
underwater trails.

But many of the predictions are good, at least in part.  Get this:

The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer.
These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and
waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track
of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units,
communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the
computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even
before any obvious breakdown occurs.

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages,
keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even
figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other
utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families
reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The
machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does
with other utilities.

Via www.geekpress.com.  As usual, it is presumed that traffic and transportation problems will have seen a lot of progress when in fact they have not.  Nor was it understood how unevenly the benefits of progress would be distributed and how possible it would be to continue a life basically devoid of these advances.

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their
thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of
goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who
successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a
second, seemingly unrelated task.

In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others
received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an
impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on
average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who
were excused from eating radishes.

From the NYTimes with some good advice on test taking, dieting and how to increase your will power over time.

In a study of Gordon Tullock’s The Organization of Inquiry (the full Tullock symposium is here), Bruce Cadwell writes:

Tullock next turns to what he considers to be the real reasons behind the backwardness of the social sciences, which in his view is due to differences in the social organization of natural versus social science. The first difference is the relative absence of applied research: because there is no way to patent applied research in the social sciences (He asks, for example, how does one patent a new sales technique?), little of it is done. But this means that, unlike the natural sciences, there are many fewer checks from the applied side on pure social science research (p. 149). Furthermore, the second motive for research, curiosity, is in the social sciences “likely to get distracted to essentially non-scientific ends.” This is because in the social sciences:

[TC: this is now Tullock]. . . there is a strong possibility of artistic distraction. Literature of all kinds is quite frequently based on careful observation of human beings. A large number of brilliant men led by their curiosity to study their fellow men have produced great literature instead of science (p. 151).

Tullock is responding to Mises and Hayek, who both thought that the social sciences were different because matters of human affairs are more complex and because of the subjective dimension of human choice and expectation (NB: the views of Mises and Hayek are not exactly the same and Hayek himself changed his position over time, laying greater stress on complexity rather than subjectivity). 

I would note, by the way, that while economics lags behind physics, we understand the economy better than we understand the human brain or for that matter the deep ocean.  I see complexity of the topic and accessibility to information as determining the progress of a science; I am not so far from Hayek’s view, although he underestimated how much progress quantitative and experimental economics could make.

It seems there were even ancient computers, not to mention advanced philosophy.  So the point remains: the absence of a developed economics until the mid-18th century remains a startling anomaly in the history of ideas.  Why was that?

Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.

1. **x in Chile (but safe for work and wife)
2. Is this how they built Stonehenge?
3. Does Obama’s popular vote advantage come so much from Cook County?
4. Seth Roberts visits and explains what is unique about blogging

5. More on Bear Stearns

6. Anatol Lieven on John McCain

“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr.
Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative – no
psychological or social problems – or any correlations with either
masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive
factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more,
but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

Here is much more, interesting throughout.  I liked this part:

“In the past, there was more of a sense of humor, probably because
fathers had more say in the names.” He said the waning influence of
fathers might explain why there are no longer so many names like Nice
Deal, Butcher Baker, Lotta Beers and Good Bye, although some dads still
try.

As I’ve told you before, my dad had wanted to name me Tyrone.  It could have been worse:

…why would any parent christen an infant Ogre? Mr. Sherrod found several
of them, along with children named Ghoul, Gorgon, Medusa, Hades,
Lucifer and every deadly sin except Gluttony (his favorite was Wrath
Gordon).

Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.

The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.

The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person’s dreams or memory.

Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant from the University of California at Berkeley, said: "Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time."

Here is the full story.  It’s a big step from paragraph two to paragraph four, and paragraph one reads to me like a misrepresentation.  Predicting a viewed image from a set is very different from figuring out the image from scratch.  But still this is impressive.

Addendum: Elsewhere from the world of science, here is a new article on finger ratios and the length of ring fingers and what it all means.

Here is the story, via Megan McArdle; an excerpt:

“On global warming, the problem is
ideologically I suspect it did cause me to …discount evidence which cut
against the way I wanted it to be in that case. My justification to my
self would be that I had seen [the environmentalists] be so wrong so
many times before, why should I trust them this time?” he says.

But when the science appeared irrefutable, Bailey changed.

It is important to distinguish two claims.  The first is that a revenue-neutral carbon tax is, in expected value terms, a good idea.  If nothing else, we cannot emit accelerating rates of carbon forever. 

The second and more dubious claim is "a carbon tax is likely to solve the problem."  That’s not so clear.  China and India may not follow suit, the oil may be pumped and used anyway, and the elasticities may be working against us.  I give the carbon tax about a thirty percent probability of significantly ameliorating global warming and that is assuming that we engage China in a constructive manner.  A pessimistic view, however, does not refute the case for trying.

Addendum: Here is an interesting post on whether more information about global warming causes people to worry about it less.

Chimpanzees are highly sensitive
to inequity, and typically refuse to continue in interactions in which
they get less than a social partner. However, chimpanzees from stable social groups
do not respond negatively in situations in which their partners
received better rewards, whereas chimpanzees from less-established
groups show rejection rates as high as 60 percent.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout; the hat tip is to Mark Thoma.

As one cryonicist puts it: "We didn’t evolve to be frozen."

But:

"It’s pretty well accepted that at the point at which the usual human
being gets pronounced dead, all their cells are alive. It’s a very
eerie question: if all their cells are alive, what is death?" says
Becker. Besides, if all the patient’s cells are alive, why can’t the
patient recover and walk out of the hospital?"

Here is the full article, which covers recent advances in cryonics.

Addendum: Or try YouTube on related issues, hat tip to Robin Hanson.  Maybe that is the right way to do philosophy, namely by cartoon.  Definitely recommended.  It also presents a solution to the current subprime crisis.

Felix Salmon points to the declining price of self-knowledge.

• Cost of sequencing Craig Venter’s genome: $3 billion, over 10 years.
• Cost of sequencing James Watson’s genome: $1 million, over 2 months.
• Cost of sequencing an anonymous African’s genome: $100,000, over 1 month.