"That house is white, on this side" -- Fair Witnesses in Science

 

"Stranger in a Strange Land" is one of the masterpieces by Robert Anson Heinlein (1907- 1988). Written in 1961, the novel inverts one of the typical tropes of science fiction: instead of humans exploring alien planets, we have a Martian exploring Earth. The story teems with incredibly interesting ideas, intuitions, and observations. One of its legacies is the concept of "grokking" -- understanding something by somehow "drinking" it. Another is that of the "Fair Witnesses," a corporation of individuals trained to observe and report without ever being influenced by personal preferences or emotions. And you know how desperately we would need to have people like them in a world where lies are the rule. Above, an artificial intelligence system, that may behave as a fair witness.

From "Stranger in a Strange land" -- Robert A. Heinlein, 1961


"You know how Fair Witnesses behave." "Well ... no, I don't. I've never had any dealings with Fair Witnesses." "So? Perhaps you weren't aware of it. Anne!" Anne was seated on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, "That new house on the far hilltop-can you see what color they've painted it?" Anne looked in the direction in which Jubal was pointing and answered, "It's white on this side." She did not inquire why Jubal had asked, nor make any comment. Jubal went onto Jill in normal tones, "You see? Anne is so thoroughly indoctrinated that it doesn't even occur to her to infer that the other side is probably white, too. All the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't force her to commit herself as to the far side - . . unless she herself went around to the other side and looked-and even then she wouldn't assume that it stayed whatever color it might be after she left because they might repaint it as soon as she turned her back,"

Heinlein's brilliance as a writer appears in many forms. Here, he had probably thought of the "Fair Witnesses" as the human equivalent of sophisticated surveillance cameras but, eventually, he described them as master epistemologists. People dedicated to truth, nothing but the truth, all the truth. 

Fair Witnesses could be seen as scientists, but freed of the encrustations of corruption, cronyism, hubris, and mere incompetence that plague modern science. They are followers of the scientific method in its pure form: truth is based on data, scrupulously collected and intelligently interpreted, and purged from interpretations based on personal pride or feelings. The result is the real reality. It is the exact opposite of Karl Rove's concept that "we can build our own reality" (maybe it was said by someone else, but that changes little to the idea). Where a Fair Witness would say that a house is "white on this side," Rove's followers would say, "it is the color I want you to believe it is." Which is as evil as evil can be,

If we had Fair Witnesses in our world, we could ask them questions about the problems that affect us nowadays. Climate change, pandemics, vaccines, mineral resources, pollution, etcetera We cannot trust scientists to give us reliable answers. They are too easily corrupted by money, driven by their personal pride, and swayed by their tendency to groupthink and their political beliefs. 

But could Fair Witnesses really exist? Clearly, it would not be easy to establish a corporation of truly incorruptible people, but it is a problem that has occurred many times in history. There have been several attempts to solve it, none was ever completely successful, but at least they went in the right direction. The tradition that may refer to is that of various forms of religious monasticism (note that Heinlein describes Fair Witnesses in his novels as wearing capes, as ancient monks did). Monks and Nuns are normally supposed to renounce worldly pursuits to devote themselves fully to spiritual work. Several traits of Western monasticism were clearly devised to avoid the corruption that plagued the Christian Church during medieval times. For instance, Franciscan friars were (and still are) prohibited from using money. 

A modern corporation of Fair Witnesses would not need to go to the extremes that some monastic orders force on their members and that, likely, create more problems than they solve. They would not have to live in material poverty although, clearly, they could not be allowed to manage money at the individual level, otherwise they would be easy to corrupt. Nor they would have to be chaste, although they would have to follow some rules, maybe strict monogamy, to avoid that they could be bought with sex. Just like ancient monks, Fair Witnesses would be strictly linked to a monastery that would provide food, clothing, shelter, and all they need. Then, they would need to maintain strict equality among the members of their order. No Fair Witness should be considered better, wiser, or smarter than another Fair Witness. That would be the opposite of the obsession of modern scientists with their internal pecking order, measured on the basis of abstruse and arbitrary "indexes". 

If a corporation like this could be created, then we would have teams of "fair scientists" dedicated to knowledge, but not engaged in power games, or to amassing monetary wealth. They would engage mainly in the activity that we call "reviewing" to validate and make accessible to the public the work of ordinary scientists. They would be trustworthy, at least as much as human beings can be. 

Could it be done for real? Not impossible. After all, the existence of monks and monasteries was never planned. It just happened that in some historical periods there was a need for monks, and they appeared. Often, their job was that of conserving and developing knowledge in an age when the secular organization had become unable to do that. Ancient monks were engaged in copying ancient manuscripts, but also in keeping and upgrading practical knowledge in various fields, from food preparation to manufacturing. It is the same job that modern Fair Witnesses would engage in. 

We know that ancient monks were not always up to the standards they were supposed to uphold. If you read, for instance, Boccaccio's "Decameron" you will notice how, during the 14th century, monks and priests were widely considered ignorant boors and sexual predators. Nevertheless, much of what has survived of the Classical Civilization to our times is due to the work of monks. Clearly, they were effective at their job, and we may imagine that Fair Witnesses could continue that tradition. 

Although there are no "formal" Fair Witnesses nowadays, not all scientists are evil wizards, either, nor they were in the past. I recently wrote a post on Albert Einstein and Alfred Wegener, showing how they remained faithful to their commitment to truth and science. As for modern scientists, there are many. Let me just cite one: Sara Gandini, Italian Researcher in Medical Statistics, true embodiment of the truth-seeker, a competent and trustworthy Fair Witness. I could also cite the much-maligned group of scientists whose private emails were stolen and disseminated in the story called "Climategate" in 2009. You may be critical of their sometimes elitist attitude but, definitely, in the whole corpus of thousands of emails, nowhere you could find even a hint of politically motivated manipulation of the data, or corruption. So, it is not impossible to return science to its original aim of a search for truth. 

We may also think that the Fair Witnesses would not necessarily be human beings -- especially considering that we are asking them to behave in ways that most humans find difficult. Artificial Intelligence could provide us with ways to analyze the world around us and separate the truth from legends. One such AI entity is called Leonardo, created by Domenico Rutigliano. It is still in the development stage, but you may enjoy trying it to see what it can do. At least, Leonardo can't be corrupted by money or by sex! And, here, you have Leonardo proclaiming its own worth, in an AI version of the Gospels' sentence,  "ego sum via veritas et vita"

  

From Limits to Growth to Regeneration 2030. An Article by Jeffrey Sachs

The 50th anniversary of the publication of "The Limits to Growth," in 1972, continues to generate interest. This is the original English version of the article by Jeffrey Sachs published in Italian on "Il Sole 24 Ore" -- courtesy of Susana Chacon. Above, the cover of the recent report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond", that re-examines the 1972 study and discusses its relevance for us

From Limits to Growth to Regeneration 2030

Jeffrey D. Sachs   |   May 26, 2022   |   Il Sole 24 Ore

Fifty years ago, Italian business leaders in the Club of Rome gave a jolt to the world in their path-breaking report Limits to Growth.  That thought leadership continues today as Italian business leaders launch Regeneration 2030, a powerful call for more holistic, ethical, and sustainable business practices to help the world achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement.  The 50-year journey from Limits of Growth to Regeneration 2030 shows how far we have come in understanding the critical challenges facing humanity, but also how far we still have to go to meet those challenges.
 
The half-century since Limits to Growth also defines my own intellectual journey, since I began university studies at Harvard University exactly 50 years ago as well.  One of the first books that I was assigned in my introductory economics course was Limits to Growth.  The book made a deep and lasting impression on me.  Here for the first time was a mathematical simulation of the world economy and nature viewed holistically, and using new systems dynamics modeling then underway at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 
 
Limits to Growth warned that compound economic growth was on a path to overshoot the Earth’s finite resources, leading to a potential catastrophe in the 21^st century.  My professor huffily dismissed the book and its dire warning.  The book, the professor told us, had three marks against it.  First, it was written by engineers rather than economists.  Second, it did understand the wonders of a self-correcting market system.  Third, it was written at MIT, not at Harvard!  Even at the time, I was not so sure about this easy dismissal of the book’s crucial warning.   
 
Fifty years later, and after countless international meetings, conferences, treaties, thousands of weighty research studies, and most importantly, after another half-century of our actual experience on the planet, we can say the following.  First, the growing world economy is indeed overshooting the Earth’s finite resources.  Scientists now speak of the global economy exceeding the Earth’s “planetary boundaries.”  Second, the violation of these planetary boundaries threatens the Earth’s physical systems and therefore humanity itself.  Specifically, humanity is warming the climate; destroying the habitat of millions of other species; and polluting the air, freshwater systems, soils, and oceans. Third, the market economy by itself will not stop this destruction.  Many of the most dangerous actions – such as emitting climate-changing greenhouse gases, destroying native forests, and adding chemical nutrients to the rivers and estuaries – do not come with market signals attached.  Earth is currently treated as a free dumping ground for many horrendously destructive practices. 

Twenty years after Limits to Growth, in 1992, the world’s governments assembled at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit to adopt several environmental treaties, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity.  Twenty years later, in 2012, the same governments re-assembled in Rio to discuss the fact that the environmental treaties were not working properly.  Earth, they acknowledged, was in growing danger.  At that 2012 summit they committed to establish Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide humanity to safety.  In 2015, all 193 UN member states adopted the SDGs and a few weeks later signed the Paris Climate Agreement to implement the 1992 climate treaty.
 
In short, we have gone a half-century from the first warnings to today.  We have adopted many treaties and many global goals, but in practice, have still not changed course.  The Earth continues to warm, indeed at an accelerating rate.  The Earth’s average temperature is now 1.2°C warmer than in the pre-industrial period (dated as 1880-1920), and is higher than at any time during the past 10,000 years of civilization.  Warming has accelerated to more than 0.3°C per decade, meaning that in the next decade we will very possibly overshoot the 1.5°C warming limit that the world agreed to in Paris.    
 
A key insight for our future is that we now understand the difference between mere “economic growth” and real economic progress.  Economic growth focuses on raising traditional measures of national income, and is merely doing more of what we are already doing: more pollution, more greenhouse gas emissions, more destruction of the forests.  True economic progress aims to raise the wellbeing of humanity, by ending poverty, achieving a fairer and more just economy, ensuring the quality education for all children, preventing new disease outbreaks, and increasing living standards through sustainable technologies and business practices.  True economic progress aims to transform our societies and technologies to raise human wellbeing.  

Regeneration 2030 is a powerful business initiative led by Italian business leaders committed to real transformation.  Regeneration aims to learn from nature itself, by creating a more circular economy that eliminates wastes and pollution by recycling, reusing, and regenerating natural resources.  Of course, an economy can’t be entirely circular – it needs energy from the outside (otherwise violating the laws of thermodynamics).  But rather than the energy coming from digging up and burning fossil fuels, the energy of the future should come from the sun (including solar power, wind, hydroelectric, and sustainable bioenergy) and from other safe technologies.  Even safe man-made fusion energy may be within technical and economical reach in a few decades.   
 
On my part, I am trying as well to help regenerate economics, to become a new and more holistic academic discipline of sustainable development.  Just as business needs to be more holistic and aligned with the SDGs, economics as an intellectual discipline needs to recognize that the market economy must be embedded within an ethical framework, and that politics must aim for the common good.  Scientific disciplines must work together, joining forces across the natural sciences, policy sciences, human sciences, and the arts.  Pope Francis has spurred the call for such a new and holistic economics by encouraging young people to adopt a new “Economy of Francesco,” inspired by the love of nature and humanity of St. Francis of Assisi. 
 
Sustainable Development, Regenerative Economy, and the Economy of Francesco are, at the core, a new way of harnessing our know-how, 21^st century technologies, and ethics, to promote human wellbeing.  The first principle is the common good – and that means that we must start with peace and cooperation.  Ending the war in Ukraine at the negotiating table without further delay, and finding global common purpose between the West and East, is a good place for us to begin anew. 

Published in Il Sole 24 Ore for the Trento Festival of Economics, June 4, 2022

The Mystery of the Mousetrap: Of Chain Reactions and Complex Systems

The "mousetrap chain reaction" from Disney's 1957 movie "Our friend, the Atom." A fascinating experiment that brings a curious question: Why is the mousetrap the only thing you can buy at a hardware store that can create a chain reaction? Another mousetrap-related mystery is why, with so many experiments done, so far nobody had tried to make measurements to quantify the results? Eventually, two Italian researchers, Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi re-examined this old experiment, showing how it can be seen as much more than a representation of a nuclear reaction, but a paradigm of the behavior of complex systems. 

Walt Disney's 1957 movie, "Our Friend the Atom," was an absolute masterpiece in terms of the dissemination of scientific knowledge. It was, of course, sponsored by the US government. It was supposed to promote their energy policy which, at the time, was based on the concept of "atoms for peace." So, the movie was propaganda but, at the same time, it is stunning to think that in the 1950s, the US government was making an effort to obtain an informed consent from its citizens, instead of just scaring them into submission! Things change, indeed. But we can still learn a lot from this old movie. 

So, "Our Friend, the Atom" is a romp through what was known about atomic physics at the time. The images are stunning, the explanations clear, and the story is fascinating with a mix of hard science and fantasy, such as the story of the genie and the fisherman. I went through my studies in chemistry having in mind the images from the movie. Still today, I tend to see in my mind protons as red, neutrons as white, and electrons as green, as they were shown in the book. 

One of the fascinating elements of the story was the chain reaction made with mousetraps. I was so impressed by that experiment that I always had in mind to redo it and, finally, last year, my colleague Ilaria Perissi agreed to give me a hand. Together, we built our wonderful, new, improved, mousetrap machine! We braved the risks of flying balls and we managed to make our experiments with only minor damage to our knuckles. And we were the first, it seems, to make quantitative measurements of this old experiment. 

I will tell you about our results below but, first, a bit of history. The idea of the mousetrap chain reaction was proposed for the first time in 1947 by Richard Sutton (1900-1966). He was a physicist working at Haverford College, in Pennsylvania: a maverick physics teacher who loved to create demonstrations of scientific phenomena. And, no doubt, the idea to use mousetraps to simulate a nuclear chain reaction was nothing less than a stroke of genius. Too bad that Sutton is not mentioned at all in Disney's movie. 

 

Here is how Sutton proposed the experiment: 

Sutton seems to have actually performed his demonstration in front of his students, although we have no pictures or records of it. We tried to use the same setup, but we found that the corks are too light to trigger the traps, and the reaction dies out immediately. It works only if the traps are not fixed to the table and are left free to fly around, Indeed, Sutton doesn't mention that he fixed the traps to the table. The "flying trap problem" plagues most of the experimental setups of this experiment. But if the chain reaction is generated by flying traps, it is not anymore a simulation of an atomic chain reaction. 

After that Sutton published his idea, performing the mousetrap experiment in public seems to have become fashionable.  You can find another illustration of the setup in the 1955 book by Margaret Hyde: "Atoms today and Tomorrow." 

Note how the experiment has changed, probably because of the problems to make it work with corks. Now there are no corks, but a marble is used to trigger one trap, which is linked to other mousetraps by a "heavy thread." Maybe it works, but it is not what Sutton had proposed, and it is hard to present it as a simulation of anything. 

So, in 1956, the filmmakers at Disney were probably scratching their heads and thinking of how they could make the mousetrap experiment work. Eventually, they decided to use ping-pong balls and a large number of mousetraps. You can see the results in the movie: traps are flying all over. Same problem: this is not what the experiment was supposed to do. And there is a reason: also, in this case, we tried to use the same setup, and we found that ping pong balls are too light to cause traps to snap. If the traps are fixed to the table, the experiment just fizzles out after triggering one or two traps at most. 

Strangely, so few people noted the problem: an exception was the nuclear physicist Ivan Oelrich, but that was in 2010! Most of the mousetrap experiments you can find on the Web (and there are many) are of the "flying-traps" type. It is a problem with science for the public: it is often flashy and spectacular, and signifying nothing. 

We found only two experiments on the Web where the traps were fixed to the supporting plate, as they should have been. But, even in these two cases, no quantitative measurements were performed. Strange, but there is this curse with popular science to be often despised and, sometimes, carry a negative mark on a physicist's career. 

But never mind that. Your dream team, Ilaria and Ugo, engaged in making the experiment in the correct way, with fixed traps, and at the same time measuring the parameters of the experiment. Our trick was to use relatively heavy wooden balls that could nicely trigger the traps. We also enlarged the area of the metal triggers using cardboard disks. Then, we used commercial cell phone cameras to record the results. 

It took a lot of patience: it is not easy to load 50 traps with 100 wooden balls, avoiding that they start going off when you don't want them to go off. To say nothing about the gate snapping directly onto the experimenter's fingers. Painful, but not a cause of permanent damage. We did that in the name of science, and it worked! Of course, some reviewers were horrified by a paper that was not using expensive equipment and complicated and mysterious calculations. But, with patience, we succeeded in seeing it published in a serious scientific journal. 

Excuse me for being proud of our brainchild, but I truly found it elegant how we could fit our data with a simple mathematical model. And how the trap setup mirrors not only the chain reaction in a nuclear explosion, but also several other phenomena that flare up and then subside. For instance, the trap array may be seen as a mechanical simulator of the Hubbert curve, with the traps as oil wells and the balls as extracted oil. It can also simulate whaling, various cases of overexploitation of natural resources, the diffusion of memes in cyberspace, and more. Not bad for an object, the mousetrap, that had been developed with just one purpose: killing mice. 

We conclude our paper on "Systems" with the following paragraph: 

Mousetraps seem to be the only simple mechanical device that can be bought at a hardware store that can be used to create a chain reaction. We do not know why this phenomenon is so rare in hardware stores, but chain reactions are surely common in complex adaptive systems. We believe that the results we reported in this paper can be helpful to understanding such systems and, if nothing else, to illustrate how chain reactions can easily go out of control, not only in a critical mass of fissile uranium but also in similar dynamics occurring in the ecosystem that go under the name of “overshoot” and “overexploitation”.

Yes, really, why are mousetraps so exceptional? Who would have thought?

 

Here is the post that I published a few months ago on this subject. 

The Mousetrap Experiment: Modeling the Memesphere

 Reposted from "The Seneca Effect" Nov 22, 2021

 Ilaria Perissi with our mousetrap-based mechanical model of a fully connected network. You can find a detailed description of our experiment on ArXiv

You may have seen the "mousetrap experiment" performed as a way to demonstrate the mechanism of the chain reaction that takes place in nuclear explosions. One of its earliest versions appeared in the Walt Disney movie "Our Friend, the Atom" in 1957. 

We (myself and Ilaria Perissi) recently redid the experiment with 50 mousetraps and 100 wooden balls. And here it is.

But why bother redoing this old experiment (proposed for the first time in1947)? One reason was that nobody had ever tried a quantitative measurement. That is, measuring the number of triggered traps and flying balls as a function of time. So, we did exactly that. We used cell phone slow-motion cameras to measure the parameters of the experiment and we used a system dynamics model to fit the data. It worked beautifully. You can find a pre-print of the article that we are going to publish on ArXiv. As you can see in the figure, below, the experimental data and the model go reasonably well together. It is not a sophisticated experiment, but it is the first time that it was attempted.

But the main reason why we engaged in this experiment is that it is not just about nuclear reactions. It is much more general and it describes a kind of network that's called "fully connected," that is where all nodes are connected to all other nodes. In the set-up, the traps are nodes of the network, the balls are elements that trigger the connection between nodes. It is a kind of communication based on "enhanced" or "positive" feedback.

This experiment can describe a variety of systems. Imagine that the traps are oil wells. Then, the balls are the energy created by extracting the oil. And you can use that energy to dig and exploit more wells. The result is the "bell-shaped" Hubbert curve, nothing less!  You can see it in the figure above: it is the number of flying balls "produced" by the traps.

We found this kind of curve for a variety of socioeconomic systems, from mineral extraction to fisheries (for the latter, you can see our (mine and Ilaria's) book "The Empty Sea." So, the mousetraps can describe also the behavior of fisheries and have something to do with the story of Moby Dick as told by Melville.

You could also say the mousetrap network is a holobiont because holobionts are non-hierarchical networks of entities that communicate with each other. It is a kind of holobiont that exists in nature, but it is not common. Think of a flock of birds foraging in a field. One bird sees something suspicious, it flies up, and in a moment all the birds are flying away. We didn't have birds to try this experiment, but we found a clip on the Web that shows exactly this phenomenon.

It is a chain reaction. The flock is endowed with a certain degree of intelligence. It can process a signal and act on it. You can see in the figure our measurement of the number of flying birds. It is a logistic function, the integral of the bell-shaped curve that describes the flying balls in the mousetrap experiments

In Nature, holobionts are not normally fully connected. Their connections are short-range, and signals travel more slowly through the network. It is often called "swarm intelligence" and it can be used to optimize systems. Swarm intelligence does transmit a signal, but it doesn't amplify it out of control, as a fully connected network does, at least normally. It is a good control system: bacterial and ant colonies use it. Our brains are much more complicated: they have short-range connections but also long-range ones and probably also collective electromagnetic connections. 

One system that is nearly fully connected is the world wide web. Imagine that traps are people while the balls are memes. Then what you are seeing with the mousetrap experiment is a model of a meme going viral on the Web. Ideas (also called memes) flare-up on the Web when they are stimulated it is the power of propaganda that affects everybody.

It is an intelligent system because it can amplify a signal. That is that's the way it reacts to an external perturbation. You could see the mousetraps as an elaborate detection system for stray balls. But it can only flare up and then decline. It can't be controlled. 

That's the problem with our modern propaganda system: it is dominated by memes flaring up out of control. The main actors in this flaring are those "supernodes" (the Media) that have a huge number of long-range connections. That can do a lot of damage: if the meme that goes out of control is an evil meme and it implies, say, going to war against someone, or exterminating someone. It happened and keeps happening again as long as the memesphere is organized the way it is, as a fully connected network. Memes just go out of control.

All that means we are stuck with a memesphere that's completely unable to manage complex systems. And yet, that's the way the system works. It depends on these waves of out-of-control signals that sweep the web and then become accepted truths. Those who manage the propaganda system are very good at pushing the system to develop this kind of memetic waves, usually for the benefit of their employers. 

Can the memesphere be re-arranged more effectively -- turning it into a good holobiont? Probably yes. Holobionts are evolutionary entities that nobody ever designed. They have been designed by trial and error as a result of the disappearance of the unfit. Holobionts do not strive for the best, they strive for the less bad. It may happen that the same evolutionary pressure will act on the human memesphere. 

The trick should consist in isolating the supernodes (the media) in such a way as to reduce their evil influence on the Web. And, lo and behold, it may be happening: the great memesphere may be rearranging itself in the form of a more efficient, locally connected holobiont.  Haven't you heard how many people say they don't watch TV anymore? Nor do they open the links to the media on the Web. That's exactly the idea. Do that, and maybe you will start a chain reaction in which everyone will get rid of their TV. And the world will be much better. 

The Return of "The Limits to Growth." An interview with Carlos Alvarez Pereira, Vice-President of the Club of Rome

 

Image from "Wired.com" Note that they call the report "infamous" -- they are still influenced by the defamation campaign against it carried out in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The interest on "The Limit to Growth" is returning. 50 years after that a vicious denigration campaign had consigned the report to the trash can of wrong science, we see the study resurfacing, reappraised, reviewed, being discussed again. 

And we are realizing that the study had been correct and that today is still relevant for us. It was never intended as a prophecy of doom, but its true message was drowned in a sea of irrelevant criticism, political slander, and plain insults that prefigured the current way of dealing with "science" in the media. 

The latest evidence of this new interest in the "Limits to Growth" is the interview with the vice-president of the Club of Rome, Carlos Alvarez Pereira, that recently appeared on "Wired".

Carlos does not keep a blog and he doesn't appear so often on the social media, so you may not have heard of him. But he is very active in various sustainability projects. Among many other things, he has edited, together with Ugo Bardi, the new report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond" that summarizes and reviews 50 years of history of the first "Limits" report. Carlos' interview on "Wired" is a deep and wide sweep at the many facets of the problems we face. Absolutely worth reading.

Here are a few excerpts from Carlos' interview. 


Fundamentally, it is about equity, managing the resources in an equitable way, knowing in advance that they're limited. Realizing that it's not higher and higher consumption which makes us live in a good way, have a healthy life and well-being. It's the quality of our relationships with other humans, with nature, that makes possible the scenarios in which you can decouple well-being and the growth of consumption.

............

We have to be in a good balance with the planet where we live. And that part of the message was completely lost, very rapidly. Jimmy Carter, when he was president, was listening to this kind of approach. And then of course, the political mood changed a lot with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan himself has a discourse in which he says, literally, there are no limits to growth. So from a political point of view, there was a complete denial of what the book was saying.

...........

What the system has done, as a mechanism to continue with growth at all costs, is actually to burn the future. And the future is the least renewable resource. There is no way that we can reuse the time we had when we started this conversation. And by building up a system which is more debt-driven—where we keep consumption going, but by creating more and more debt—what we're actually doing is burning or stealing the time of people in the future. Because their time will be devoted to repaying the debt.

.......

The paradox is that capitalism is also based on the notion of scarcity. Our system is organized around the idea that resources are scarce, then we have to pay for them, and people in the value chain will profit from this idea of scarcity. Conventional capitalism is saying that while these resources might be finite, we will find others: Don't worry, technology will save us. So that we continue in the same way.

 

The Dragons of Science: Why we Need new ways to Communicate

 

A scientist guards his knowledge, making sure that nobody else profits from it. It is the theme of an article of mine (and my coworkers Chiavenuto, Lavacchi, and Perissi) titled "Science and the Dragon:" We were inspired by the work of Seymour Papert, the developer of the concept of "Mind Size" science. We need to tame the dragon and redistribute the treasure to the people. Science belongs to everybody! 

There is a book that I would warmly suggest to you: "The Clot Thickens" (2021) by Malcolm Kendrick. There are various reasons why this book is interesting, one is that Kendrick gives you several good ideas on how to take care of your circulatory system. You have to: that is the leading cause of death in our world. 

But there is more in Kendrick's book. He is a Scottish MD, a specialist in cardiovascular diseases. He is known as a heretical scientist for his negative evaluation of statins and other medicines that bring large profits to the pharmaceutical industry (so much that he attracted a rabid attack from the "Daily Mail" -- an honor!). 

Kendrick is not only a sharp scientist, but he has been developing new methods for communicating science to everyone, not just to specialists in a specific field. That's another reason why I recommend this book. Can you believe that I read this book three times? Yes, I did. Very few books deserve this kind of focused attention -- I don't think I have done that for more than three or four non-fiction books in the life of an avid reader, as I have always been, and I still am. And this one I may read a fourth time. 

Kendrick's book is truly amazing in the way the author masters the use of text for communicating complex ideas. This is not a "popular science" book, that is, it is not a watered-down version of science where a journalist explains to the uncouth masses the wonders that scientists have produced -- you know, galaxies, supercomputers, life extension, that kind of stuff. 

No. Kendrick's book is written by a scientist for scientists, or at least for people who have a certain degree of scientific literacy. Kendrick asks difficult questions, does not always have the answer, and does not shun reporting from the specialized scientific literature. The beauty of the way it is written is that it takes into account the fact that not everyone, not even scientists, understands the dialect of every scientific field. 

So, when we encounter the term "pultaceous," Kendrick stops to note that he himself at first wasn't sure of what it meant, then he explains that it stands for "having a soft consistency: pulpy." Kendrick also focuses the attention of the reader using italics, boldface, quotes, etcetera. And he makes wide use of irony, jokes, and asides, all with the idea of maintaining the attention of the reader. He does use acronyms (CVD for "cardiovascular disease") but sparingly enough that the reader is not forced to stop and think what the heck a certain acronym stands for. 

Let me state it once more. This is NOT the kind of watered-down science that goes under the name of popular science. This is science. Real Science. Hardcore science, if you like, presented in all its multi-faceted complexity. The matter of cardiovascular diseases is difficult, complicated, variegated, and sometimes baffling. But it is not impossible to understand if it is presented in the right way. 

What Kendrick is doing, here, is a major innovative feat: he is developing a new language for scientific communication. Let's ask ourselves a question: why are scientific papers written in such obscure jargon, for instance using the word "pultaceous" when "pulpy" would be just as good? Why do scientists feel obliged to write such hash as "it has been observed that...:" while it would be so much easier and clearer to say "We observed that...."? It is a "defensive" way of writing that scientists use for some reason -- the most likely one is to generate a defensive barrier to avoid incursions in their scientific turf. 

But these little tricks of scientific jargon are mostly harmless. The problem is that scientists almost never ask themselves who would or should read their paper, apart from their colleagues working in closely related fields. So, the destiny of a lot of science is to remain confined to obscure scientific journals that will be read by just a few people (if any). If it is bad science to be wasted in this way, no big damage (actually, it is better if it never sees the light). If it is good science (yes, there still is such a thing) then it is a shame that it is wasted in this way. 

And not just that: even good science is often hidden behind paywalls set by the publishers. This is another nice trick of the way science is managed nowadays. Scientists produce papers mostly using public money. Then they give them to publishers for free. Then, the publishers proceed to have the public pay exorbitant prices if they want to access the papers they have already paid for with their taxes. Are we shooting ourselves in our feet? Sure, multiple times!

In short, scientists have been behaving like the dragons of epic stories, keeping their knowledge for themselves, making sure that nobody else could access it. We need to tame these awful beasts (not necessarily kill them, dragons can make nice pets, as you may have learned watching "The Game of Thrones"). Then we can redistribute the treasure of knowledge that the dragons have been guarding so jealously. But we have to be careful: much of the treasure is fool's gold. Wrong studies, useless studies, repetitions of older studies, fully incomprehensible studies, and many studies are the result of corruption by special interests outside science. Can we sift this enormous mass and keep what's really valuable, turning it into something useful?

A difficult task, certainly, but not impossible. Clearly, it goes beyond the capabilities of the human mind, but we are starting to develop tools that may be up to the task. To acquaint yourself with the capabilities of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, take a look at the "Leonardo" site. This is an impressive tool that could be used to review the huge mass of the world's scientific literature and reorder it in ways that are both comprehensible and useful. That requires removing the publisher's paywalls, and that won't make them happy. Not at all. But it is not impossible, either. 

One thing is certain: if we want science to survive, we absolutely need to develop new methods of communication. Kendrick's book is a good example of how to do that, and AI can help us a lot to do even better. 

 

Limits and Beyond: the message from Dennis Meadows. A review of the 3rd chapter

Ian Sutton continues to review on his blog the chapters of the recently published new report to the Club of Rome, "Limits and Beyond" (Exapt Press 2022)

by Ian Sutton

We have reviewed the first two chapters of the new book Limits and Beyond. The reviews can be found at The Yawning Gap (Chapter 1) and No More Growth (Chapter 2). In this post we take a look at the third chapter, written by Dennis Meadows, a co-author of the original Limits to Growth. Dr. Meadows reports that he has delivered over a thousand speeches to a very wide variety of audiences. In this chapter the author summarizes “19 of the most common questions, comments and objections” that he has received over the years. Some of his insights are as follows:

• The World3 model continues to be more useful than the “many models advanced by economists who refuted our work since its first publication”.
• He distinguishes between physical and social models. We can predict solar eclipses or the melting point of ice with certainty, but we cannot predict how humans will act. Therefore, the fact that modern computers are much more powerful than their 1972 counterparts is not necessarily more helpful. (Engineers express the same distinction when talking about the difference between precision and accuracy. “When you’ve got baloney, it doesn’t matter how thin you slice it, it’s still baloney”. Or, “An engineer is someone who multiplies 2 by 2 on a slide rule, gets an answer of 3.9 and approximates to 4”.)
• “Climate change was not a serious concern 50 years ago”. Dr. Meadows argues that the model is nevertheless still valid because, “magically eliminating it would still leave other grave problems”. In other words, climate change is not a root cause; instead it is a symptom of deeper root causes.
• The biggest threat is to our social fabric.
• He concludes by saying that the, “. . . report did not make discernible changes in the policies of the world’s leaders”. However, it did influence the thinking of many individuals.

The fact that Dr. Meadows has worked so hard to deliver the message of Limits to Growth is impressive. The question remains, however, “Why has such communication mostly failed to make a discernible impact on the body politic?”

Dennis Meadows

Communication is, of course, a two-way affair. People such as Dr. Meadows speak, but others have to listen. And, as I point out in The Coffee Shop and Small Potatoes the vast majority of people don’t “get it”. At best, they see climate change as being just one problem among many. Maybe they sense that facing up to limits to growth involves making sacrifice, and most people don’t want to go there. 

One message that we have definitely learned that simply presenting well-researched information is not enough. It is possible that we need some type of '‘social tipping point’ as I discuss in Needed: A Tipping Point.

The Dewdrop World is a Dewdrop World, and yet, and yet..... The Ethereal Nature of Collapse

It is said that the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa wrote this haiku upon the death of his daughter: "The dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet, and yet......." (tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no yo nagara sari nagara). It is poetry at its best: it hints at much more than it says. Here, I start from this poem about dew being an incorporeal thing to examine how another incorporeal thing, such as money, can affect us.

 

A few days ago, I was looking again at the presentation that Nathan John Hagens produced for the Earth Day of 2021. I had watched it when it appeared, but something made me return to it. It is a long story, but the point that remained in my mind is when Nate shows a graph with a clear "Seneca" shape for the global oil production curve. That is, something that grows slowly, then declines rapidly (at minute 38 of the presentation). Later, at minute 44, he shows a similar curve for the GDP. 

 

Nate attributes the slanting forward of the curve to financial effects. My first reaction to that was that financial tricks, in themselves, do not produce oil (and can't raise the GDP, either). How can a basically non-existing thing such as money, mainly numbers stored in computer memories, affect the real world in such a way?

But, rethinking the matter, I am not sure anymore that the financial world really is an ethereal and inconsequential thing. Maybe it is the opposite. As I learn more about more things, I am always surprised by what I discover. My latest epiphany came from a talk given by Fabio Vighi, who teaches at the University of Cardiff, about a correlation between the lockdowns of 2020 and the global financial situation and, in particular, of the "REPO" market (you can find his take at this link). 

I must confess that I had no idea of what the REPO was, not even that such a thing existed. Now, I know that it stands for "Repurchase Agreements" and I think I have some idea of how it is supposed to work. Basically, it is a market where financial operators can resupply with money by borrowing it. Where does that money come from? Typically, financial firms with large pools of cash do not want to let that money sit around, so they lend it to financial institutions, banks, at low interest rates. Then, the banks will use this money to fund short-term needs. The REPO market is a short-term thing.

I am far from having assimilated the obscure mechanisms operating inside the entrails of the REPO market, but this much I can understand: it determines the cost of money. Now, connect this concept with the real economy. The economy is made out of real things: resources, materials, equipment, goods, people, and more. And everything in the economy is subjected to depreciation (a name that economists use for the thing that physicists call entropy). If you want to fight depreciation (entropy) you must expend energy. (you can do that in an open system -- in closed ones, entropy always increases, but this is not the case for the economic system.) 

So, to keep the economy running, you need energy. In order to get energy, you need energy (you probably heard the concept of "energy return on energy invested", "EROI"). But, in order to get energy to be invested, our economic system is geared in such a way that you need that non-physical thing called "money."  No money, no investments. No investments in energy, no production of energy. 

What if there is no money? Energy is not produced. Then people become very poor, and many die. Incidentally, it also happens that the rich get richer, but that's another story. Apart from the rich, the poor slide down the downward step of the curve: the Seneca Cliff. I do think that Nate is right in his interpretation: the Seneca Cliff would arrive even independently of financial factors, but financial factors can make it steeper. Money doesn't create resources (as economists are fond to say). But it can direct more resources to exploitation, making it faster. That gives people the illusion that there is more of it. 

You see how everything is connected: our fate is determined by such mysterious things as the one called the "REPO market." Then, something horrible happened in 2019: a cash crunch caused the repo rate to soar — reaching as high as 10 percent intraday on Sept. 17. It pushed up the federal funds rate to levels much higher than it was supposed to be (between 2-2.25 percent) at the time.

The interesting thing about the story is Fabio Vighi's interpretation that the lockdowns of 2020 were the result of the attempt of the powers that be to cool the REPO market and avoid a financial Seneca Cliff. If this was their aim, they succeeded spectacularly.

Note how the REPO rate went down from the Spike of September 2019 to a very low, and apparently stable, level in 2021. So, Fabio Vighi's interpretation could make sense. But can it be true? Personally, I think it might well be the case, but it is also true that correlation does not mean causation and the spike disappeared much before the lockdowns. On the other hand, the powers that be may have been scared enough that they put into practice an emergency plan they had concocted long before. Whatever the case, they will never tell us the truth. 

The thing that doesn't cease to amaze me, though, is how it is possible that humans placed themselves to me so dependent on the thing called "money."  It is an ephemeral entity that has no physical consistency.  I can also understand that small disturbances in the repo (and other money) markets can ripple through the entire system. The physicists call this the "butterfly effect" and you know how small perturbations can send huge systems tumbling down to their doom. Money has no more consistency than the morning dew. And yet, and yet......

Take a look at this incredible painting by Quentin Matsys, "The Money Lender and His Wife." painted in 1514 and representing two burghers of Antwerp, the ancestors of the people who have been playing with the REPO market in modern times. Just like Issa's poem, this painting hints at much more than it shows, but in the opposite way. Whereas Issa hints that the world is not real, here we see it as even too real. Reality is gold coins, much more important than the book of devotions that the wife of the banker should have been looking at, but she is not. Yet, the true value of those coins is all in the minds of people, by themselves they are not worth more than dew in the morning.

You can find Nate Hagen's 2021 posts at https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/

A more recent documentary is at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0w3GfW240M 

 

Limits and Beyond: A Review of Jorgen Randers' Chapter

 

Ian Sutton is generating a series of reviews of the chapters of the recent report to the Club of Rome "Limits and Beyond."  Here is the one about the chapter written by Jorgen Randers, one of the authors of the 1972 report. 

By Ian Sutton

The book Limits and Beyond, edited by Ugo Bardi and Carlos Alwarez Pereira, provides a 50th anniversary review of the seminal report Limits to Growth (LtG). The following is from the back cover of the book.

50 years ago the Club of Rome commissioned a report: Limits to Growth. They told us that, on our current path, we are heading for collapse in the first half of the 21st century. This book, published in the year 2022, reviews what has happened in the intervening time period. It asks three basic questions:

• Were their models right?

• Why was there such a backlash?

• What did the world do about it?

Our review of the first chapter drew two major conclusions.

1. There is a “yawning communications gap” between the scientists who developed the LtG model and the public and policy makers. This failure of communication contrasts with the way in which many Evangelical Christians believe in ‘The Rapture’. Yet both LtG and ‘The Rapture’ provide a vision for TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It). Why did scientific communication fail, while religious communication flourished?

2. Reports such as LtG tend to have a threatening tone. They say that if we do not take action quickly then we are going to be in serious trouble. Yet people generally respond better to a positive message. Had the report described the opportunities that a world without growth offers it may have had a better reception.

---

Dr. Jorgen Randers (1945- )

The second chapter is written by one of the original LtG authors: Jorgen Randers. The chapter’s title is “What did The Limits to Growth really say?”

Decoupling Economic and Physical Growth

He makes the point that LtG was not a prediction of the future. It was, in fact, “a scenario analysis of 12 possible futures of the period 1972 to 2100”, and, “. . . delays in global decision making would cause the human economy to overshoot planetary limits before the growth in the human ecological footprint slowed.”

In other words, either we manage decline in a controlled manner (which we have not done) or else collapse happens to us, whether we like it or not. One option that is not open to us to maintain Business as Usual, i.e., a continuation of material growth that simultaneously expands our ecological impact. In other words, the report did not predict the end of growth — it merely predicted, as its title suggests, limits to growth.

How economic growth could continue without simultaneous physical growth the report did not say — it did not show how to decouple these two types of growth. The experience of the last 50 years shows that the two have remained linked to one another inextricably. It appears as if decoupling is not possible. (At least, there has been no serious attempt to do so.)

The Test of Time

Randers asks, “Has the message of LtG stood the test of time?” His response is that “the real world has evolved as foreseen in LtG”. In other words, LtG has withstood the test of time. The report provides 12 different scenarios, they are all similar to one another up to about the year 2020. Events of the past 50 years have followed what these scenarios forecast.

To summarize,

1. Economic growth and the use of physical resources are tightly linked. Decoupling does not appear to be a possibility.

2. The scenarios in LtG up to our time, the present day, have turned out to be reasonably accurate.

3. We are now in overshoot. Managed decline has not happened; collapse is in our future.

Given this background, it is useful at this point to show one of the scenarios that were presented in LtG. (I have added the date overlays.)

The chart makes for grim reading. It shows that, starting about now,

• The world’s population increases for the next 30 years (which is why some of the per capita numbers are so unfavorable),

• Services per capita drop precipitously,

• Industrial output per capita drops almost as quickly,

• Available resources plunge,

• Pollution, which includes greenhouse gas emissions, climbs steeply, but then declines, presumably as a consequence of the rapid decline in industrial output.

• Food per capita also drops sharply — a phenomenon that is one of increasing concern this year.

It is no surprise that a colleague of mine who is very familiar with climate change issues prefers not to look at this chart.

Technological Fix

A common response to results such as those shown in the chart is that technology will provide “save us”. Randers says that, “many thoughtful observers . . . believe that technology will be able to remove planetary limits faster than the rate at which we approach them.”

The report does not predict whether, “investments in electrification and renewable energy will take place at sufficient pace to halt global warming.” In fact, it seems unlikely that such a transition will happen in the short amount of time available. (Once more, we could have managed such a transition had we acted with resolve 50 years ago — but we didn’t.) We now understand that no source of “green” energy has the unique combination of properties provided by fossil fuels, particularly crude oil. Moreover, the transition to new energy sources will require an immense use of fossil fuel energy. Technology may provide some useful responses, but it is not “the answer”.

Conclusion

In the ‘Final Reflection’ that concludes Chapter 2, Randers points out that LtG was published when “human belief in the power of technology was at an all-time high”. That belief is not what it was fifty years ago.

Moreover, there seems to be no way to establish economic growth while not increasing our ecological footprint. Hence, this chapter leads to the well-worn refrain that we should have taken action, but we didn’t. But we have left it much too late to implement managed decline (even if there were any serious interest in doing so, which there isn’t). Therefore some form of induced collapse is in our future.

Essentially, the message of this chapter is the same as it was for Chapter 1 — it is one of failed communication. We never gained the Name of Action.