In 1920, Jackson Scholz set the men’s 100m world record at 10.6 seconds. The 100m race is one where progress is very hard; we’re getting towards the limit of human possibility. It’s very tricky to squeeze out another second or fraction of a second. Still, in 2009, Usain Bolt set the men’s 100m world record at 9.58… Read More »The times they are a changing…
Another article discusses the morality of different methods of organ transplant. Strangely absent from the discussion, is any indication of the scale of the problem – something that should be front and centre. The numbers are strangely hard to find, but seem to lie between 400 and 1000 deaths per year, with many more suffering from… Read More »Organ donation is not all about the donors
It is hardly a keen insight to note that there are a lot of problems in the world today, and that there are also lots of suggested solutions. Often these can be classified under three different labels:
In this view, it is tremendously good news that scientists are getting closer to producing artificial organs. If this goal is achieved, it will be a technological solution to the problem of transplant organ shortages – and technological solutions tend to be better than institutional solutions, which are generally much better than “good guy” solutions. The “good guy” solution to organ donation was to count on people to volunteer to donate when they died. Better institutions (such as an opt-out system where you have to make a special effort not to be a donor, rather than a special effort to be a donor) have resulted in much improved donation rates. But cheap artificial organs would really be the ultimate solution.
Of course I don’t denigrate the use of getting people on your side, nor the motivations of those who sincerely want to change things. But changes to people’s attitudes only tend to stick around as long term solutions if this is translated into actual institutional or technological changes.
Take slavery, for instance. Read More »Artificial organs: “good guys” finish last to technology
The Queen serve many roles, it seems. She provides stability to the British government, fosters links with the ex-colonies, promotes tourism, serves a safe focus for nationalist sentiment, gives the nation a centralised way of taking care of various palaces, provides nationalised opportunities for neighbours to come together, warms that deep part of the human heart that admires leaders but disdains those that make hard choices, is a focal point for unity, tradition and precedent, a link to history… The list is long, and to some extent genuine: she does provide these services to the nation.
But say we’d sat down, without any knowledge of the monarchy, and looked at that long list of desires, included in a list of a million other things we’d want. Nobody would have said: “You know, thinking about it, for issues 137, 2220 and 3558b… Well, the most efficient way we could deal with these is to institute an unelected hereditary figurehead, passing down by primogeniture. Come to think about it, that would also help with issue 344c…” The monarchy is certainly not the best way of accomplishing all the tasks we want it to accomplish, is likely very far from the best way. But it is the way we currently do so, changing it would require a lot of effort, and it has adapted itself to work in practice, within our current society.
Which brings us to the problem of prediction.Read More »The Queen’s an anachronism: another problem with predicting the future
If you want to effectively change the world, it helps to know which levers to push, and which ones can be moved most effectively. For instance reducing HIV suffering through the treatement of Kaposi’s sarcoma is about a thousand times less efficient that treating HIV through peer and education programs for high-risk groups. So if… Read More »Key moments of supreme importance
With thanks to Clive Hamilton for his talk. Stratospheric sulfate seems to be one of the most promising geoengineering methods to combat climate change. It involves the injection of hydrogen sulfide (H2S), sulfur dioxide (SO2) or other sulfates, into the stratosphere. Similar to what happens after major volcanic eruptions, this would reflect off part of the sun’s energy and cool… Read More »The price of uncertainty: geoengineering climate change through stratospheric sulfate
Your politics are determined by your values, your opinions about the facts of the world, and, let’s be honest, just a little bit of tribalism. But the future is approaching, as it often does, and great transformations may be in the cards. Transformations that could dramatically affect the facts of the world. So whatever your values are, there is a chance that you may soon be arguing for the opposite of your usual policies. For instance, what if the future were necessarily…
Communist: one of the easiest ones to conceive of. Here it turns out that as barriers to trade are removed and transaction costs go to zero, the natural state of the economy is one of perpetual crashes. Celebrity and fame feed upon themselves: everyone demands the best, and the definition of the best is shared widely: niche markets don’t exist. Incomes follow such a sharp power law that only a few percent of the population have any wealth at all. Automation means that most people can’t earn enough to sustain themselves: their income drops below the costs of keeping them alive. Hence a large, bloated, over-regulating government becomes a matter of survival.
Ultra-capitalist: as barriers to trade are removed and transaction costs go to zero, the whole market segments into small niches. Everyone can find some buyer for their work, as new demands and new suppliers spring up immediately, connected by new technologies. Technology solves known externalities (like global warming), so there is little need for a centralised controlling authority. Change happens so rapidly that any governmental intervention is counterproductive: by the time the change is implemented, the benefits and costs the government was trying to influence are things of the past. The efficient market, the only thing fast enough to keep up with itself, flows like a river around any blundering governmental efforts, rendering them moot.
From the always sublime Dara O’Briain:
I give out when people talk about crime going up, but the numbers are definitely down. And if you go, “The numbers are down”, they go, “Ahh, but the fear of crime is rising.” Well, so fucking what? Zombies are at an all-time low level, but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high. It doesn’t mean you have to have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies.
But let’s look at this in more detail. If there was a large demand for it, should the government have policies to deal with the fear of zombies? By zombies, we do mean non-existent flesh-eating fictional undead monstrosities that don’t exist.
Read More »Should the government have policies to deal with fear of zombies?
In 1983, scientists published a paper on nuclear winter. This boosted the death toll of all-out nuclear war from ‘only’ 200-500 million to the very real possibility of the complete extinction of the human race*. But some argued the report was alarmist, and there did seem to be some issues with the assumptions. So – a military phenomena that might cause megadeaths, possibly true but requiring further study, and a huge research defense budget that could be used to look into this critical phenomena and that was already spending millions on all aspects of nuclear weapons – can you guess what happened next?
Correct – the issue was ignored for decades. For over twenty years, there were but a tiny handful of papers on the most likely way we could end our own existence, and a vague and persistent sense that nuclear winter had been ‘disproved’. But in 2007, we finally had a proper followup – with the help of modern computers, better models and better observations, what can we now say? Well, that nuclear winter is still a major threat; the initial fear was right. Their most likely scenario was:
A global average surface cooling of –7°C to –8°C persists for years, and after a decade the cooling is still –4°C […]. Considering that the global average cooling at the depth of the last ice age 18,000 yr ago was about –5°C, this would be a climate change unprecedented in speed and amplitude in the history of the human race. The temperature changes are largest over land […] Cooling of more than –20°C occurs over large areas of North America and of more than –30°C over much of Eurasia, including all agricultural regions.
Also, precipitation would be cut in half and we’d lose most of the ozone layer. But there was a more worrying development: it also seems that a small-scale nuclear war could generate its own mini nuclear winter.
Read More »Old threats never die, they fade away from our minds: nuclear winter
Politicians often do things which are blatantly undemocratic, in that they poll poorly and are thus presumably against the will of the people: bailing out banks, nixing referendums on the EU, protecting the city of London, negotiating often unpopular free trade agreements, increasing certain taxes or cutting certain services. When this happens, the first question… Read More »When politicians are undemocratic, there’s something to learn
