Posts Tagged ‘planning’
“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong… when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions.”*…
The immense complexity of the climate makes it impossible to model accurately. Instead, David Stainforth argues, we must use uncertainty to our advantage…
Today’s complex climate models aren’t equivalent to reality. In fact, computer models of Earth are very different to reality – particularly on regional, national and local scales. They don’t represent many aspects of the physical processes that we know are important for climate change, which means we can’t rely on them to provide detailed local predictions. This is a concern because human-induced climate change is all about our understanding of the future. This understanding empowers us. It enables us to make informed decisions by telling us about the consequences of our actions. It helps us consider what the future will be like if we act strongly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, if we act only half-heartedly, or if we take no action at all. Such information enables us to assess the level of investment that we believe is worthwhile as individuals, communities and nations. It enables us to balance action on climate change against other demands on our finances such as health, education, security and culture.
For many of us, these issues are approached through the lens of personal experience and personal cares: we want to know what changes to expect where we live, in the places we know, and in the regions where we have our roots. We want local climate predictions – predictions conditioned on the choices that our societies make.
So, where do we get them? Well, nowadays most of these predictions originate from complicated computer models of the climate system – so-called Earth System Models (ESMs). These models are ubiquitous in climate change science. And for good reason. The increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are driving the climate system into a never-before-seen state. That means the past cannot be a good guide to the future, and predictions based simply on historic observations can’t be reliable: the information isn’t in the observational data, so no amount of processing can extract it. Climate prediction is therefore about our understanding of the physical processes of climate, not about data-processing. And since there are so many physical processes involved – everything from the movement of heat and moisture around the atmosphere to the interaction of oceans with ice-sheets – this naturally leads to the use of computer models.
But there’s a problem: models aren’t equivalent to reality.
So, what can we do? One option is to make the models better. Make them more detailed and more complicated. That, though, raises an important question: when is a model sufficiently realistic to predict something as complex as climate change? When will the models be good enough? We don’t have an answer to this question. Indeed, scientists have hardly begun to study this problem, and some argue that these models might never be sufficiently accurate to make multi-decadal, local climate predictions.
Nevertheless, changing the way we use ESMs could provide a different and better way to generate the local climate information we seek. Doing so involves embracing uncertainty as a key part of our knowledge about climate change. It involves stepping back and accepting that what we want is not precise predictions but robust predictions, even if robustness involves accepting large uncertainties in what we can know about the future…
[Stainforth explains the current state of modeling, efforts to make them better, and the problems those efforts encounter…]
… focusing on high-resolution modelling is dangerous not only because we have no answer to the question of when a model is sufficiently realistic. Investing in this approach also means we don’t have the capacity to explore the uncertainties, which inevitably encourages overconfidence in the predictions that models make. This is a particular concern because Earth System Models are increasingly being used to guide decisions and investments across our societies. Overconfidence in model-based predictions therefore risks encouraging bad decisions: decisions that are optimised for the futures in our models rather than what we understand about the range of possible futures for reality.
By contrast, perturbed physics ensembles and storyline approaches focus on exploring and describing our uncertainties. Placing uncertainty front and centre is important. When we make an investment or a gamble, we don’t just base it on what we think is the most likely result. We consider the range of outcomes that we think are possible – ideally these are characterised by probabilities, although this isn’t always achievable. It’s the same with climate change. We should not only make plans based solely on our best estimate of what might happen. We should also consider the range of plausible outcomes we foresee. Our knowledge of uncertainty is also part of what we know about climate change. We should embrace this knowledge, expand it and use it.
If we understand the uncertainties well, we can bring our values to bear on the risks we are willing to take. Uncertainty therefore needs to be at the core of adaptation planning while also being the lens through which we judge the value of climate policy and the energy transition. In my view, climate researchers and modellers wanting to support society should focus on understanding, characterising and quantifying uncertainty, and avoid the trap of seeking climate models that make reliable predictions. They may well never exist…
A more practical approach to preparing for climate change: “The model of catastrophe,” from @aeon.co
* Richard Feynman
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As we preference plausibility (over predictability), we might send never-ending birthday greetings to August Möbius; he was born on this date in 1790. An astronomer and mathematician, he studied under mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss while Gauss was the director of the Göttingen Observatory. From there, he went on to study with Carl Gauss’s instructor, Johann Pfaff, at the University of Halle, where he completed his doctoral thesis The occultation of fixed stars in 1815. In 1816, he became Extraordinary Professor in the “chair of astronomy and higher mechanics” at the University of Leipzig, where he remained for the rest of his career. Möbius made many contributions to both astronomy and the math that underlay it: he was among the first to conceive the possibility of geometry in more than three dimensions; he introduced homogeneous coordinates into projective geometry; and he pioneered the barycentric coordinate system… all parts of the intellectual foundation of the complex system modeling described above.
But while he was an influential scholar and professor, he is best remembered for his creation of the “Möbius strip.”
“Before beginning, plan carefully”*…
The marvelous Matt Levine on one of the vexing challenges facing those who preserve themselves cryogenically…
See, if you go to a regular trusts and estates lawyer, she will ask you questions like “if your spouse and children die before you, whom do you want to inherit your estate,” but if you go to a science fiction trusts and estates lawyer, she will ask you questions like “if your frozen head cannot be attached to a fresh body and reanimated in 200 years, but your consciousness can be cloned in a computer simulation, would you like your estate to go to the cloned consciousness or stay with the frozen head?” Meanwhile I suppose if you go to a regular financial planner, he will ask you questions like “how much equity risk are you comfortable taking between now and retirement,” while if you go to a science fiction financial planner, he will ask you questions like “where are you most comfortable investing for the next 200 years, given that you will not be able to change your asset allocation decisions during that time, because you’ll be dead?”
When you are a kid, science fiction is fun because it imagines amazing futuristic technologies. And then you grow up and you realize that what’s really fun are the legal and financial technologies that are called into being by those physical technologies: Sure sure sure reviving a frozen head is great, but how does the frozen head get a credit card? Bloomberg’s Erin Schilling reports:
Estate attorneys are creating trusts aimed at extending wealth until people who get cryonically preserved can be revived, even if it’s hundreds of years later. These revival trusts are an emerging area of law built on a tower of assumptions. Still, they’re being taken seriously enough to attract true believers and merit discussion at industry conferences.
“The idea of cryopreservation has gone from crackpot to merely eccentric,” said Mark House, an estate lawyer who works with Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s largest cryonics facility with 1,400 members and about 230 people already frozen. “Now that it’s eccentric, it’s kind of in vogue to be interested in it.”
He and others are trying to answer questions that at times seem more like prompts in a philosophy class.
Can money live indefinitely?
Are you dead if your body is cryonically preserved?
Are you considered revived if you have only your brain?
And if you’re revived, are you the same person?
So many good legal questions — “House considers the revived person to be different in the eyes of the law, in part because a person can’t be the beneficiary of their own trusts” — but also great financial ones.
Here’s one: Should you buy Bitcoin for your long sleep? The argument for Bitcoin is that you can hold it, indefinitely, without relying on anyone else: If you put 10 Bitcoin in a wallet and only you know the private key, and then you die and get frozen and come back in 200 years, no one will have taken your Bitcoin, legal rules about inheritance and perpetual trusts don’t matter, and you don’t need some succession plan for the trustees and financial advisers who will take care of your assets. You just have to make sure you remember your private key as you’re dying. Legal rules can change, human institutions can change, but your Bitcoin is immutable.
The argument against Bitcoin is, of course, what if people stop valuing Bitcoin? Putting your money in Bitcoin is a hedge against change in other human institutions, but it puts a lot of eggs in the basket of one human institution, “treating Bitcoin as money.” It’s a bit weird to bet that that’s more permanent than anything else.
More generally, what is money anyway? “It may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world,” says OpenAI to its investors, and what if OpenAI gets to artificial general intelligence before anyone gets around to unfreezing the heads? You might be leaving your future self all the wrong stuff…
Very long-term planning: “Cryogenics Law,” from @matt_levine via Ingrid Burrington’s wonderful newsletter, “Perfect Sentences” (in this instance, “Sure sure sure reviving a frozen head is great, but how does the frozen head get a credit card?).
* Marcus Tullius Cicero
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As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1983 that the coldest (natural) temperature ever recorded on Earth was registered by the research station at Vostok, Antarctica: -128.5 degrees Fahrenheit (-89.2 degrees Celsius).
We might also note that today– July 20, 2024– is the date on which the action in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower begins: “…in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed…”
“The question isn’t ‘what can an economy produce today?’, but ‘what can it learn to produce?'”*…
… and how we do we create the conditions to encourage that learning? Industrial policy, one possible answer, is making a comeback. But as Henry Farrell explains, that raises another challenge…
… For decades, economists have argued that state policy makers lack the requisite knowledge to intervene appropriately in the economy. Accordingly, decisions over investments and innovation ought be taken by market actors. Now, the “market knows best” paradigm is in disrepair. It isn’t just that “hyperglobalization” has devoured its own preconditions, so that it is increasingly unsustainable. It is also that some goals of modern industrial policy are in principle impossible to solve through purely market mechanisms. To the extent, for example, that economics and national security have become interwoven, investment and innovation decisions involve tradeoffs that market actors are poorly equipped to resolve. There are good reasons why Adam Smith did not want to see defense policy handled through the market’s division of labor.
What we now face is a quite different kind of knowledge problem. We lack the kinds of expertise that we need to achieve key goals of industrial policy, or to evaluate the tradeoffs between them. This lack of knowledge is in large part a perverse by-product of the success of Chicago economists’ rhetoric. Decades of insistence that economic decisions be handed off from the state to markets has resulted in a remarkable lack of understanding among government policy makers about how markets, in fact, work. This has a variety of consequences. Policy mistakes are more likely. Market actors find it easier to manipulate the understanding of government policy makers, e.g. as to the extent and kind of subsidies required in particular sectors or for particular purposes.
One way to remedy this is to rethink the kinds of specialist education that public administrators receive, both to ensure that low and mid-level functionaries are better equipped to take the decisions they need to take, and to signal increased prestige for non-traditional forms of policy knowledge. As the sociological literature suggests, elite US policy schools such as the Harvard Kennedy School, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and Georgetown University (to name three entirely random examples) play a key role not simply in directly imparting knowledge through education, but in disseminating norms about the kinds of knowledge that are considered to be appropriate for policy decisions. These schools have by and large converged on a framework derived from a watered down version of neoclassical [indeed. one might suggest, neoliberal] economics. I argue that new skills, including but not limited to network science, material science and engineering, and use of machine learning would be one useful contribution towards solving the new knowledge problem…
Assuring access to the right tools and techniques: “Industrial policy and the new knowledge problem,” from @henryfarrell in @crookedtimber.
* Joseph Stiglitz (@JosephEStiglitz)
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As we retool, we might send thoughtfully calculated birthday greetings to Paul Collier; he was born on this date in 1949. An economist who specializes in development, he is a professor at Oxford and director of the International Growth Centre.
Collier is a specialist in the political, economic and developmental predicaments of low-income countries, and is probably best known for his 2007 book, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. His philosophy, developed there and in his 2010 The Plundered Planet, is encapsulated in his formulas:
- Nature – Technology + Regulation = Starvation
- Nature + Technology – Regulation = Plunder
- Nature + Technology + Regulation (good governance) = Prosperity
“By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities”*…
… yes, but in what, Christopher Moon-Miklaucic asks, does that wisdom inhere?
The [Robert] Moses and [Jane] Jacobs debate begins as a disagreement over the future of New York City but ends up becoming a much larger representation of two divergent views of the fate of cities. If Jacobs saw in cities, life, diversity, and complexity, Moses saw infrastructure, efficiency, and the act of building. Robert Caro famously dubbed him the “Power Broker”, symbolizing a top-down, large-scale approach to planning, while Jacobs was seen as the “eye on the street”, in many ways epitomizing a much smaller-scale reading of the city as viewed from the handlebars of her bicycle. Despite looking at the city from different angles, and offering wildly different solutions to improving city life, both Jacobs and Moses were ultimately critics of utopian planners such as Ebenezer Howard, Daniel Burnham, Le Corbusier and other “order obsessed” types. Unsurprisingly, planners have long been fascinated by these two characters, who have been simultaneously celebrated and polarizing. Their disagreements have often served as a proxy of both the power and importance of citizen participation, but also its striking limitations. Today, the debate is being reassessed because despite the romantic allure of Jacobs, the efficiency of the planning process and its ability to strive for change while taking into account a wide variety of needs is still in question, and a longing for Moses’ adept ability to navigate bureaucracies seems to be resurfacing…
[The author unpacks the history of the disagreement, and unpacks the duelling principles/imperatives at work on each side…]
…It might be too simple to say that Jacobs’ view was ethically and morally correct. Clearly, planners should strive to ensure that the will of the people is represented adequately and equally in the plans put forth by developers and local governments. The issue, though, is that Jacobs criticized city planning, but not the “big economic and social forces” that originated many of the projects she opposed. In other words, Moses wasn’t completely alone in his undertaking to shape New York City. There were powerful vested interests behind his actions as well, and his accomplishment was the ability to “get things done” in a manner that most wouldn’t expect of municipal government. If planning is often criticized for being too slow, and even when communities are involved the equity results remain suboptimal, Moses seems to represent an alternative, more efficient approach.
Skepticism of a perfunctory model of citizen participation, which still often rests in procedural and consultative arrangements, may be the reason behind the rehabilitation of Moses and the shifting of the narrative underlying the debate. Perhaps within a context of an ever-changing world that is obsessed with instant gratification, Moses as “America’s greatest builder” is seen as the type of planner needed in order to quickly and efficiently improve current conditions, whereas Jacobs is seen as the “champion of stasis”, content with the status quo and seeking to stifle inevitable change and progress. To some, the Jacobean ideology of community-based planning might represent a decline in the authority and influence of the planner, leading to a nostalgic longing for the golden age of Moses, when planners were considered masters of their domain and free from the bureaucratic shackles that often limit large-scale developments.
Ultimately, the Moses and Jacobs debate remains relevant to planners today because it serves as a proxy for the power and limitations of citizen participation. If the planning sphere often links Jacobs’ life and work to a recently emerging style of communicative action planning, the criticisms of the approach are part of the reason Moses’ legacy is being rewritten. To some, Jacobs’ ideologies have led to a style of city planning that is too cautious and self-reflective, and Moses’ top-down methods symbolize planning that asserts itself in order to focus less on process and more on outcomes. If not slightly alarming, this shift in narrative should lead the planning profession to ask itself a difficult question which lurks within the shadows of this debate: what do we value more, the effects planning decisions have on communities and people, or the physical act of building and getting things done?
A half-century-old debate about New York City’s urban development continues to evoke a multitude of controversies in planning: “Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, and the Ever-Changing Role of the Planner,” from @chris_moonm in @TDocumentarian.
* Socrates
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As we ponder planning, we might that it was on this date in 1781 that El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles (“The town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels”; in common use, Pueblo de los Ángeles) was settled. By the 20th century it became known simply as Los Angeles.
“Do for the future what you’re grateful the past did for you. (Or what you wish the past had done for you.)”*…
A love letter to infrastructure…
The Nobel Prize–winning developmental economist Amartya Sen describes income and wealth as desirable “because, typically, they are admirable general-purpose means for having more freedom to lead the kind of lives we have reason to value. The usefulness of wealth lies in the things that it allows us to do—the substantive freedoms it helps us to achieve.” This is also a fairly good description of infrastructural systems: they’re a general-purpose means of freeing up time, energy, and attention. On a day-to-day basis, my personal freedom doesn’t come from money per se—it mostly comes from having a home where these systems are built into the walls, which became abundantly clear during the coronavirus pandemic. Stable housing and a salary that covered my utility bills meant that, with the exception of food and taking out the trash, all of my basic needs were met without my ever even having to go outside. It’s worth noting that this is an important reason why guaranteed housing for everyone is important—not just because of privacy, security, and a legible address, but also because our homes are nodes on these infrastructural networks. They are our locus of access to clean water and sewage, electricity, and telecommunications.
But the real difference between money and infrastructural systems as general-purpose providers of freedom is that money is individual and our infrastructural systems are, by their nature, collective. If municipal water systems mean that we are enduringly connected to each other through the landscape where our bodies are, our other systems ratchet this up by orders of magnitude. Behind the wheel of a car, we are a cyborg: our human body controls a powered exoskeleton that lets us move further and faster than we ever could without it. But this freedom depends on roads and supply chains for fuels, to say nothing of traffic laws and safety regulations. In researcher Paul Graham Raven’s memorable formulation, infrastructural systems make us all into collective cyborgs. Alone in my apartment, when I reach out my hand to flip a switch or turn on a tap, I am a continent-spanning colossus, tapping into vast systems that span thousands of miles to bring energy, atoms, and information to my household. But I’m only the slenderest tranche of these collective systems, constituting the whole with all the other members of our federated infrastructural cyborg bodies.
…
The philosopher John Rawls once offered up a thought experiment, building on the classic question: How best should society be ordered? His key addition was the concept of a “veil of ignorance”: not just that you would live in the society you designed, but that you wouldn’t know ahead of time what role you would have within it. So, while you might want to live in a world where you are an absolute ruler whose every whim is fulfilled by fawning minions, the veil of ignorance means that there is no guarantee you wouldn’t be one of the minions—in fact, given the numerical odds, it’s a lot more likely. Positing a veil of ignorance is a powerful tool to consider more equitable societies.
Seen from this perspective, shared infrastructural systems provide for the basic needs of—and therefore grant agency to—members of a community in a way that would satisfy Rawls. Universal provision of water, sewage, electricity, access to transportation networks that allow for personal mobility, and broadband internet access creates a society where everyone—rich or poor, regardless of what you look like or believe—has access to at least a baseline level of agency and opportunity.
But here’s the kicker: it’s not a thought experiment. We’ve all passed through Rawls’s veil of ignorance. None of us chooses the circumstances of our birth. This is immediate and inarguable if you’re the child of immigrants. If one of the most salient facts of my life is that I was born in Canada, it’s also obvious that I had nothing to do with it. But it’s equally true for the American who proudly traces their family back to ancestors who came over on the Mayflower, or the English family whose landholdings are listed in the Domesday Book. Had I been born in India, my infrastructural birthright would have been far less robust as an underpinning for the life of agency and opportunity that I am fortunate to live, which stems in large part from the sheer blind luck (from my perspective) of being born in Canada.
…
Our infrastructural systems are the technological basis of the modern world, the basis for a level of global wealth and personal agency that would have been unthinkable only a few centuries ago. But those of us who have been fortunate enough to live as part of a collective cyborg have gained our personal agency at an enormous moral cost. And now anthropogenic climate change is teaching us that there are no others, no elsewhere.
For millennia, these systems have been built out assuming a steady, predictable landscape, allowing us to design long-lived networks where century-old aqueducts underlay new college campuses. But this predictability is becoming a thing of the past. More heat in the atmosphere means warmer weather and shifting climates, with attendant droughts, wildfires, and more frequent and severe hurricanes. But it also increases uncertainty: as the effects of greenhouse gases compound, we may reach tipping points, trigger positive feedback loops, and face other unprecedented changes to climates. Engineers can’t design systems to withstand hundred-year storms when the last century provides little guide to the weather of the next. No matter where in the world you reside, this is the future we will all have to live in. The only question that remains is what kind of world we want to build there.
Our shared infrastructural systems are the most profound and effective means that we’ve created to both relieve the day-to-day burdens of meeting our bodies’ needs and to allow us to go beyond their physiological limits. To face anthropogenic climate change is to become a civilization that can respond to this shifting, unpredictable new world while maintaining these systems: if you benefit from them today, then any future in which they are compromised is recognizably a dystopia. But that “dystopia” is where most of the world already lives. To face anthropogenic climate change ethically is to do so in a way that minimizes human suffering.
Mitigation—limiting the amount of warming, primarily through decarbonizing our energy sources—is one element of this transition. But the true promise of renewable energy is not that it doesn’t contribute to climate change. It’s that renewable energy is ubiquitous and abundant—if every human used energy at the same rate as North Americans, it would still only be a tiny percentage of the solar energy that reaches the Earth. Transforming our energy systems, and the infrastructural systems that they power, so that they become sustainable and resilient might be the most powerful lever that we have to not just survive this transition but to create a world where everyone can thrive. And given the planetwide interconnectedness of infrastructural systems, except in the shortest of short terms, they will be maintained equitably or not at all.
Ursula Franklin wrote, “Central to any new technology is the concept of justice.” We can commit to developing the technologies and building out new infrastructural systems that are flexible and sustainable, but we have the same urgency and unparalleled opportunity to transform our ultrastructure, the social systems that surround and shape them. Every human being has a body with similar needs, embedded in the material world at a specific place in the landscape. This requires a different relationship with each other, one in which we acknowledge and act on how we are connected to each other through our bodies in the landscapes where we find ourselves. We need to have a conception of infrastructural citizenship that includes a responsibility to look after each other, in perpetuity. And with that, we can begin to transform our technological systems into systems of compassion, care, and resource-sharing at all scales, from the individual level, through the level of cities and nations, all the way up to the global.
Our social relationships with each other—our culture, our learning, our art, our shared jokes and shared sorrow, raising our children, attending to our elderly, and together dreaming of our future—these are the essence of what it means to be human. We thrive as individuals and communities by caring for others, and being taken care of in turn. Collective infrastructural systems that are resilient, sustainable, and globally equitable provide the means for us to care for each other at scale. They are a commitment to our shared humanity.
Bodies, agency, and infrastructure: “Care At Scale,” from Debbie Chachra (@debcha), via the indispensable Exponential View (@ExponentialView). Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “Infrastructure is much more important than architecture“; and resonantly, “Kim Stanley Robinson: a climate plan for a world in flames.”
* Danny Hillis’ “Golden Rule of Time,” as quoted by Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline
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As we build foundations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that the first balloon used for meteorologic research in the U.S. was released near St. Louis, Missouri. The balloon carried instruments that measured barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity, that returned to Earth when the balloon burst.
The first weather balloon was launched in France in 1892. Prior to using balloons, the U.S. used kites tethered by piano wire– the downsides being the limited distance kites could ascend (less than 2 miles), the inability to use them if the wind was too light or too strong, and potential for the kites to break away.
Since this first launch, millions of weather balloons have been launched by the National Weather Service and its predecessor organizations.
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