Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

The Secret of N.I.M.H.

I remember going to see the rats of N.I.M.H. way too young and being terrified (perhaps second only to my fear of the Wicked Witch of the West). Anyway, the secret is out…

Wong FK, Fei J-F, Mora-Bermúdez F, Taverna E, Haffner C, Fu J, et al. (2015) Sustained Pax6 Expression Generates Primate-like Basal Radial Glia in Developing Mouse Neocortex. PLoS Biol 13(8): e1002217. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002217

The evolutionary expansion of the neocortex in mammals has been linked to enlargement of the subventricular zone (SVZ) and increased proliferative capacity of basal progenitors (BPs), notably basal radial glia (bRG). The transcription factor Pax6 is known to be highly expressed in primate, but not mouse, BPs. Here, we demonstrate that sustaining Pax6 expression selectively in BP-genic apical radial glia (aRG) and their BP progeny of embryonic mouse neocortex suffices to induce primate-like progenitor behaviour.

NIMH stood for “National Institute of Mental Health”. Which was, of course, secretly creating super-intelligent rats.

more on the internet of things

Here is another Brookings article talking about the “internet of things” and productivity.

Nearly 30 years ago, the economists Robert Solow and Stephen Roach caused a stir when they pointed out that, for all the billions of dollars being invested in information technology, there was no evidence of a payoff in productivity…

By the late 1990s, the economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt had disproved the productivity paradox, uncovering problems in the way service-sector productivity was measured and, more important, noting that there was generally a long lag between technology investments and productivity gains.

Our own research at the time found a large jump in productivity in the late 1990s, driven largely by efficiencies made possible by earlier investments in information technology. These gains were visible in several sectors, including retail, wholesale trade, financial services, and the computer industry itself. The greatest productivity improvements were not the result of information technology on its own, but by its combination with process changes and organizational and managerial innovations.

So we can expect a delayed productivity effect. The real question to me is not just whether this will happen, but whether the productivity gain will translate into better quality of life for most people. If productivity per hour of work goes up, that would mean economic growth if people keep working the same amount. But it can instead mean there are fewer jobs for people to do. A small number of companies and individuals might then reap the benefits, and it might not benefit the average person.

internet of things

Here’s a McKinsey report on the potential economic value of the internet of things – they say $3-11 trillion per year in 2025, or up to 11% of the world economy.

The digitization of machines, vehicles, and other elements of the physical world is a powerful idea. Even at this early stage, the IoT is starting to have a real impact by changing how goods are made and distributed, how products are serviced and refined, and how doctors and patients manage health and wellness. But capturing the full potential of IoT applications will require innovation in technologies and business models, as well as investment in new capabilities and talent. With policy actions to encourage interoperability, ensure security, and protect privacy and property rights, the Internet of Things can begin to reach its full potential—especially if leaders truly embrace data-driven decision making.

the Gartner hype cycle

The Gartner hype cycle plots technologies on curve from emergence to “peak of inflated expectations” to the “trough of disillusionment” and finally arriving at the “plateau of productivity”. For example, in 2014, they had quantum computing in early emergence, the “internet of things” arriving at the peak of expectations, big data crashing into the trough, virtual reality beginning its assent to the plateau, and speech recognition arriving on the plateau.

DoD and Climate Change

The U.S. Department of Defense believes in climate change:

DoD recognizes the reality of climate change and the significant risk it poses to U.S. interests globally. The National Security Strategy, issued in February 2015, is clear that climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water.1 These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.

Will the U.S. public finally be ready to just laugh science-denying Presidential candidates off the stage next year?

ignorance and confidence

I always suspected that ignorance and arrogance were closely related, and that the truly competent know their limits and are appropriately uncomfortable when beyond them. But now here is proof!

In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

July 2015 in Review

I’m experimenting with my +3/-3 rating system again this month, just to convey the idea that not all stories are equal in importance. The result is that July was a pretty negative month! Whether that reflects more the state of the world or the state of my mind, or some combination, you can decide.

Negative stories (-21):

  • In The Dead Hand, I learned that the risk of nuclear annihilation in the 1980s was greater than I thought, and the true story of Soviet biological weapons production was much worse than I thought. (-3)
  • Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, among others, are concerned about a real-life Terminator scenario. (-2)
  • I playfully pointed out that the Pope’s encyclical contains some themes that sound like the more lucid paragraphs in the Unabomber Manifesto, namely that the amoral pursuit of technology has improved our level of material comfort and physical health while devastating the natural world, creating new risks, and leaving us feeling empty somehow. (-1)
  • Bumblebees are getting squeezed by climate change. (-1)
  • The Cold War seems to be rearing its ugly head. (-2)
  • There may be a “global renaissance of coal”. (-3)
  • Joel Kotkin and other anti-urban voices like him want to make sure you don’t have the choice of living in a walkable community. (-2)
  • I think Obama may be remembered as an effective, conservative president, in the dictionary sense of playing it safe and avoiding major mistakes. Navigating the financial crisis, achieving some financial and health care reforms, and defusing several wars and conflicts are probably his greatest achievements. However, if a major war or financial crisis erupts in the near future that can be traced back to decisions he made, his legacy will suffer whether it is fair or not. (-0)
  • We can think of natural capital as a battery that took a long time to charge and has now been discharged almost instantly. (-3)
  • James Hansen is warning of much faster and greater sea level rise than current mainstream expectations. (-3)
  • Lloyd’s of London has spun a scenario of how a food crisis could play out. (-1)

Positive stories (+7):

everything I know about cities is wrong?

Planetizen called this anti-urban article “frank, tough talk at it’s [sic] most provocative”. It sounds somewhat scholarly on the surface, but dig in and it stinks. They use the same scare tactics Joel Kotkin used recently, descriptions that suggest people are being forcibly marched out of the countryside and into urban high-rise towers. Sure, that has happened in a few places and times in history, but it is not the norm. In fact, you could argue that history’s greatest tragedies (if you measure simply by body count) were caused by the exact opposite, people being marched out of cities and onto rural farms at gunpoint, only to starve in the tens of millions (Ukraine, China, Cambodia). For the most part, cities form organically when people concentrate in pursuit of economic opportunity. Agriculture and mining are just as necessary as they ever were, but we don’t need large numbers of people engaged in these any more because they are largely automated. For large numbers of people to achieve a high living standard, the bulk of us have to be working together in higher-tech pursuits like manufacturing, design and invention of new products, processes, and ideas. This is the direction our species has evolved, and there is no stopping it now.

Much of their argument rests on the idea that cities can be stressful, and that they are linked to diseases of the affluent and physically inactive such as diabetes and heart disease. Concentrating people certainly gives rise to obvious stressors like noise, air pollution, heat, and traffic deaths, and less obvious ones like reduced leisure time and contact with nature. Richer and more egalitarian-minded cities are doing more to mitigate these stressors, while developing cities and cities where the pursuit of profit dominates everything else are doing little. There are ways to mitigate the stressors – noise abatement, non-motorized transportation, parks and green infrastructure to name a few. We need to focus on maximizing the positive aspects of cities while removing the stressors.

We should all welcome serious, scholarly thinking about the form future human settlements could take to maximize the potential and minimize the impact of all of us, but this is not serious scholarly thinking so let’s not take it seriously.

the economics of extinction

Here are some economists tying themselves in mental knots on how you would do cost-benefit analysis on complete annihilation of humanity.

…estimating these benefits means that we need to determine the value of a reduction in preventing a possible future catastrophic risk. This is a thorny task. Martin Weitzman, an economist at Harvard University, argues that the expected loss to society because of catastrophic climate change is so large that it cannot be reliably estimated. A cost-benefit analysis—economists’ standard tool for assessing policies—cannot be applied here as reducing an infinite loss is infinitely profitable. Other economists, including Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University and William Nordhaus of Yale University, have examined the technical limits of Mr Weitzman’s argument. As the interpretation of infinity in economic climate models is essentially a debate about how to deal with the threat of extinction, Mr Weitzman’s argument depends heavily on a judgement about the value of life.

Economists estimate this value based on people’s personal choices: we purchase bicycle helmets, pay more for a safer car, and receive compensation for risky occupations. The observed trade-offs between safety and money tell us about society’s willingness to pay for a reduction in mortality risk. Hundreds of studies indicate that people in developed countries are collectively willing to pay a few million dollars to avoid an additional statistical death. For example, America’s Environmental Protection Agency recommends using a value of around $8m per fatality avoided. Similar values are used to evaluate vaccination programmes and prevention of traffic accidents or airborne diseases…

The value of life as a concept is a natural candidate for a tentative estimation of the benefit of reducing extinction risk. Yet the approach seems somewhat awkward in this context. The extinction risk here is completely different from the individual risk we face in our everyday lives. Human extinction is a risk we all share—and it would be an unprecedented event that can happen only once.

I’m not sure we want to turn over the keys to civilization’s future to these guys, who insist that their science must be values-free. In other words, they try to discern people’s values through their actions and statements, but try to make no ethical judgments independent of those observations. I think there is room in this world for ethical principles of right and wrong that are not economic in nature, and more of us need to be actively thinking every day about what those might be. Even though all 6 billion of us would certainly not agree on the details, we could certainly come to a consensus on the broad outlines. Couple this with better mental tools for understanding the complex nested systems we are embedded in, and it could really guide our choices as a civilization in a better direction.