What humans do best - part 2

There are a few issues associated with the focus on the ideal case with the main one being that it isn't the problem we actually try to solve. It is much more common that we attempt to solve a simpler sub-problem. Reality rarely gives us all the information we need for the ideal case, so while we might want to believe in the Platonic ideal for the problem, we work with mundane versions.

Earlier I asked what you might want for breakfast 10 years from now. Few people will bother to collect this information based on their belief that it doesn't really matter. There is little doubt you will want breakfast of some kind on that day, but the precise preferences you have don't have to be known in great precision. If you are a vegetarian, we might exclude sausage from the list of your preferences and from that exclude the means for getting sausage to you. If you are vegan, the list of exclusions is even more severe seemingly simplifying the problem. If you always have orange juice for breakfast, that is another kind of simplification. In both of these cases, we can set part of the solution to the overall problem without any further thought. For a more complicated example, consider what we would do if you tend to rotate between typical breakfasts like omelets, pancakes, and oatmeal. That would be enough to set probabilities at a minimum and that might be enough to get close to a solution.

Simplifying the economic problem this way isn't without consequences, though. The primary one is easy to explain. If I don't know what you want for breakfast 10 years from now, but do have enough information to make reasonable guesses, I might guess right or I might guess wrong. If my planned solution to the problem includes enough resources to provide for omelets, pancakes and oatmeal you will get what you want 10 years from now. Unfortunately, though, I've wasted resources in accomplishing that because you'll pick one of them and not the other two. Those are resources I might have put to better use serving preferences for someone else. What happens on the day when I fail to serve their preference and spent too many resources serving yours? How long would it be before someone thought that you had an unfair advantage in the plan? To avoid that, maybe I should just ensure enough is produced to cover all the probabilities so no one complains? That just ensures most of what gets produced ISN'T optimal. Perishables that don't get consumed get wasted and we might think we can live with that, but what about spending the resources used to produce that wastage on coming up with truly new products and services? What about innovation? Would there be any?

Yet this is pretty close to what we do when optimizing our resources for our families. We reduce the big problem to a smaller one and simply try to do our best. I don't know what you want for breakfast 10 years from now. Neither do you probably. Who cares? What do you want for breakfast tomorrow? If you want something exotic that I needed years to prepare to get, too bad. You aren't going to get it because I'm not omniscient. Next problem please.

Unfortunately, this limitation isn't enough to be convincing. It is vulnerable to the 'We are humans' counterargument because our computers aren't human. If we augment our data collection and processing capabilities, surely we can solve the harder version of these problems with more variables in them. Actually, we can't and the worst thing about it is that a solution could be right in front of us and we wouldn't know it in advance. The problem doesn't lie with knowing we have a solution. It lies with knowing we have an OPTIMAL solution. Remember that we are trying to optimize in the ideal case and that means we are trying to avoid waste. That is a big part of what we mean by economic efficiency, after all.

If you know the mathematics, you might be tempted to say it is just a matter of taking differences between neighboring solution attempts and using them to approximate the derivatives in a gradient. If you know a bit more, though, you'll remember that we must be careful about assumptions regarding continuity of functions. The ideal case solution is actually a function of many variables with time as a parameter of that function's curve. There is no reason to assume the function is continuous in all the variables, let alone continuous over long periods of time. In fact, it is probably a terrible assumption. How many pregnant women continue to want pickles and ice cream after giving birth? Our lives are full of discontinuities, so our preferences should be too.

It is worse than that, but I'll save the next material for part 3. We must face two inconvenient truths forced upon us by the mathematics of multi-variable problems.

What humans do best - part 1

I've been thinking on something I heard today in a economics podcast where the speaker was talking about what is likely to happen to our jobs in the coming years. He made the case that most of them will suffer the same fate as farm jobs and for a similar reason. It isn't that they will all be sent overseas. It is that they will simply cease to exist because no human will do the work anymore. This wasn't news to me since I see it at work. In fact, it is my job to make it happen. The blunt truth is that I work to eliminate tasks from the lists worked by people by automating the work. The jobs I impact don't usually go away, but they certainly do change.

What caught my attention was the speaker's focus on the kinds of things we like to think that we like doing. What can humans do well that sets us apart from the tools we fashion? It used to be that no computer could beat the best human chess player. That is no longer true. It used to be that no computer could safely drive a car in a complex urban environment. There are very bright people demolishing that belief right now and doing a good job of it. Offer up a physical task and there are many who want to tackle it and automate it so the take away lesson is to be cautious of claiming any reserved turf at all.

There was a class of problems, though, that might be immune. It isn't that we can't automate solutions to these problems, it is just that we probably won't. These are the problems we LIKE to solve. They don't have to have much else in common except the simple fact that we like them, thus the hurdle to automating them is higher in the sense of the costs involved. Someone automating drudge work like I do might be met with concern from those suffering the changes we bring upon them, but after it is over and their job descriptions adapt to the new reality (assuming they still have the job), we usually meet with smiles and appreciation and a desire for us to go away so it doesn't happen again any time soon. However, if we try to take on a task they seriously enjoy, they will fight before and after and impose extra costs upon any who would pay us to do the deed.

A psychologist might examine why we like certain problems even to the point of resisting giving up the work when others can do it better, cheaper or faster. They might examine motivations and rewards. A biologist might examine the same behavior and study survival odds of those who keep the tasks compared to those who don't. Each of those might be interesting paths, but the one that caused my ears to perk up was the biological one as it relates to the problem of caring for one's family. All animals face this kind of problem and different solutions arise with different species, but among humans there is evidence that our oldest solutions were overlain by newer ones specific to certain settings and when that happened modern humans became what they are today. We became a rapidly growing species that displaced all other hominids and is in the process of displacing much more distant relatives to such an extent we should refer to modern times as a mass extinction.

In the ideal case, the problem one faces with the simplest task of feeding oneself and procreating in a paleolithic era with associated tools is still complicated, but it isn't much more complicated than other mammals have to solve. Our task was a touch more complicated because our primary competitors were other hominids and ourselves. When the others were gone, we faced a positive feedback loop by competing with each other.

Ideally, though, the problem of meeting the basic needs of a human family is all about providing food, water, shelter, and security. How we solve for all the preferences of our family members varies considerably depending on the means we have available and the relevant information we need. If we have it ALL, though, the problem resolves to one of optimization. If you are the head of a family it isn't hard to imagine that the depth of your knowledge and ability to think through all the options associated will all available resources is how you find the optimal solution. If your family members are also talented, you might delegate or share the planning tasks. How many physical brains are involved in the planning effort doesn't really matter. They key measure is how the preferences are communicated and resources assigned. If several people are involved and closely coordinating they function effectively as one person. If they are willing to take food from a baby that has more than it needs to give it to another baby that doesn't have enough, they are optimizing in this fashion.

From a biological perspective, it shouldn't surprise anyone why we like to solve this kind of problem ourselves and only surrender it grudgingly. We are the children of past generations who solved this problem well enough to procreate. We should have an evolutionary inclination toward wanting to solve these problems for the simple fact that those who don't want to slog through the hard work are less likely to have and raise kids.

From a biological perspective, it shouldn't surprise anyone why some of us get annoyed with parents who do NOT like to solve these problems. If you are the kind of person capable of caring about the welfare of children who are not your own, you might be tempted to expand your optimization effort to include them for moral reasons. Basically, the other parents are freeloading on your good will. While the problems are easy to describe they are hard to solve. Even if we find solutions that don't deprive our own families too much to cast our wider net of concern, it is still hard work we don't accept easily.

The optimization problem in a paleolithic setting is simpler than in a modern setting. There were vastly fewer people then and our knowledge of how things worked was much more limited. There is no doubt our ancestors knew things we have since lost, but they didn't need to know as much as we do and absent many of the resources we now have available it is easy to argue the knowledge wouldn't have done them any good anyway. What need did someone have for trying to accurately predict the position of Mars in the sky to within one arc-minute if they lived 20,000 generations ago? Their problems were still very complex, though, even if one could know all the details needed as inputs. Some did it well and we are their great-to-the-nth-grandchildren.

There are two twists to this type problem that make them even more difficult. The most obvious one is that the planners don't have ALL the information. F. A. Hayek pointed out that they can't. In fact, they can't EVER. There is the annoying little possibility that approximate information might not be good enough too because the optimal solution might be very non-linear. In other words, small changes to the inputs might lead to wildly different solutions. Think about the weather on Earth and you'll have an example of that. Set that aside for now, though. The information the planners need can't EVER be completed even in tiny family settings, but it might be possible to get close enough if the solution space isn't too non-linear. The problem with completion is that it is quite like a person's preference is unknown to them until they are faced with a decision and options from which to pick. They learn OF their preference by the result of their decision. Without a time machine, there is no way to get that preference back to a planner. 

How can a planner know the preferences of their family members when no one CAN know until the preferences are discovered? What we usually do is choose for them in advance and hope for the best. What do you want to eat for breakfast ten years from the day you first read this? Do you know? Why would you bother figuring it out, let alone recording it for someone in your family to help plan for it? You might be willing to plan a week ahead or do simple budgeting to help, but that is potentially useful. Why would someone in a paleolithic setting bother doing that? They couldn't be sure they would survive the next winter, let alone eight or nine more.

The second problem is  a mathematical one and is FAR from obvious. It is related to the fact that multivariate optimization problems become hideously complicated when the number of variables grows large. It gets so bad that the odds of finding a solution drop to near zero even if the number of possible solutions is finite or constrained as we expect they might be. I'll save this for next time, though.  In a nutshell, though, you need a time machine AND omniscience to pull it off yet mortal humanity does moderately well in finding solutions. If you write algorithms to automate problem solutions as tasks, be prepared to face your limits.

For the Cynics: Unobtanium & Obtanium

I used to work on space-related projects that drew considerable skepticism from my peers. If any of them read this, they know EXACTLY to what I'm referring. For everyone else, don't sweat it too much. My friends who worked those projects with me were not so skeptical and we usually enjoyed ourselves in the work we did. We didn't always (ever?) accomplish what we set out to do, but we did learn other useful things along the way.

In the last project I worked, though, one particular skeptic framed his concerns well. He asked for a special explanation from me. If I was to avoid wasting his time in a pitch, he wanted to know precisely how I intended to accomplish what I said I could do. It was obvious to me he believed I couldn't. He was more than a skeptic; he was a self-admitted cynic. I was honest enough with myself to admit he could be correct too. I pondered his discussion requirement for awhile and then decided not to pursue him because I was fairly sure I would fail to convince him. 

Along the way, though, I worked up the terms and descriptions I include below. They are an expansion on the tongue-in-cheek terms obtanium and unobtanium. If you are unfamiliar with those terms you obviously haven't tried to build rockets and spaceships and convince people to invest their cash and time in your ideas. Don't worry about it, though. It is enough to realize that obtanium includes the first three entries below while unobtanium includes the last two. If you have tried to do such a project, though, I invite you to think VERY carefully about what you need to build what you have in mind or deliver the service you think can be brought to market at a profit before explaining any of it to me. I'm not the cynic my compatriot is, but I am decidedly more skeptical than I used to be.

Enjoy.

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Cotsium: (COTS-ium)

This is the stuff we can buy in retail outlets. It includes goods and services that share a common experience when one buys them. If one can pick them off a shelf and carry them to a check-out clerk, they are cotsium. If one can pick a service from a menu of options and pay a market price, it is cotsium. For example, internet access is a service we buy. It is cotsium today, but 30 years ago it wasn't. There are places on Earth where one cannot yet buy it, but that doesn't change the fact that is is still cotsium. If the market provides it in some places and not others, that is simply a demonstration of the profitability of the stuff being sold.

The boundary between cotsium and specialorderum is a little fuzzy, but here is a guide to help know where the line is. The key is to know the acronym. [Commercial Off-The-Shelf = COTS]

1. Secret menus at restaurants still list cotsium products. Just because you have to ask to have your burger made with a veggie patty instead of beef doesn't mean you aren't buying the burger retail. The vendor might refer to your request as a special order, but they are just trying to make you feel better and return next time you want to had over cash to them.
2. If you are buying a service from a small business owner and that owner pauses before quoting a price to you, it is possible you stepped over the line and are no longer buying cotsium stuff. The key to knowing is to figure out if the business owner knows how to price the service they provide to you. It is easy to mistake their pause for this, but be aware that they may simply be thinking about how to shake as much money out of you as possible.

SpecialOrderum: (Special-Order-Um)

This is the stuff that we can buy from craftsmen, artists, and other talented people, but it is generally sold in low volumes or involves unique events so no one including the seller knows how to price it at first. If you hire a photographer to take pictures of your kids, the photography service is generally cotsium, but if you extend the request and ask them to help make your kids look really good because they are competing as a team in a talent show the extension is a special order. The photographer might not know how to price that service at first, but will usually settle for charging for their time as much as they think they can get from you.

The key descriptor for specialorderum is the 'Um' people think or say as they try to figure out the price they are willing to ask or pay. We all know what it is like to ask for special things, but when the market volume for such a thing is small, the duration of the trade can become quite extended. Those with little experience bartering might not even know how to do it.

1. If your kid asks for help on their homework or science fair project, they are asking for a special order from you. How you price it is up to you, but don't imagine for a moment that they won't remember the trade later when they want another special order and have something to compare.
2. If you want some warm, fuzzy art you can buy a Kincaid print. It is cotsium. If you want a flattering portrait of your wife to make up for something senseless you said the other day, that is specialorderum and you'll pay dearly whether you get the painting or not. Your choice is how you pay.

NotYetium: (Not-Yet-ium)

This is the stuff that we can't buy yet, but we know it is coming. When we can buy it, it might be a special order or cotsium depending on the situation, but for now we can't get it and anticipate that we will soon. The new, spiffy smartphone you want with the next, spiffy feature and OS upgrade might not be on the market until summer, but you know it will be available because the vendor produces these upgrades like clockwork. You put yourself on a waiting list and stand outside the vendor's store the night before it is released. When you get it, you might bargain with their support staff to get your information migrated from your now dull and uninteresting smartphone to the new one. For a small fee they do it. They might even accept your old one in partial payment as a trade-in, but the amount they will give you depends on how well you have treated it. Condition matters after all.

Notyetium is wonderful stuff if you are a marketing person. You can sell it long before your company produces it and use that cash to finance your operations. If your customers aren't willing to hand over deposits to get on the waiting list, you can still borrow at reduced rates and pay off the loans with with the revenue you raise when your notyetium finally arrives. Do it well and you probably don't have to borrow much money anyway.

1. A shipload of spices brought back by the Dutch to 17th century European markets was notyetium until it arrived in port. A shipload of gold taken by the Spanish from the New World at about the same time was notyetium until the ship arrived safely in port without getting raided by the Dutch or English. A CPU with double the transistor density compared to the one in your cutting edge computer is notyetium. Moore's Law tells us roughly when it will become cotsium or specialorderum depending on just how fancy your system is.
2. If you think you can build a new, improved device and have experience building others like them, it is possible your new device is notyetium. If you have little experience, though, it probably isn't. If your device involves extracting free energy from the universe, for example, the odds are pretty high it isn't notyetium even if you think it is. If you want to buy Yeti fingernail clippings, though, I'm sure someone somewhere will figure out how to get them for you. Gullibility is definitely cotsium.

Unobtanium:(Un-Obtain-ium)

This is the stuff no one can get you, but no one can explain why it CAN'T be acquired either. It is a special category of magical stuff where no one can adequately argue the magic can't or won't be understood some day. Two hundred years ago our computers were unobtanium, yet we had the root knowledge for the mathematics that helps to describe them. We had rudimentary knowledge of algorithmic thinking and working examples of programmed looms to weave complex patterns into cloth. A solid-state CPU was unobtanium, though, for the simple reason that we didn't have the physics and engineering knowledge let alone the experience to build them. The magic needed wasn't yet known, but we know it now.

Unobtanium is really quite special. It is the stuff of dreams that aren't necessarily romantic fluff. We might learn later that the necessary magic isn't possible, but for know we don't know. People find this stuff to be quite motivating and even if the magic fails, they might move mountains in pursuit of it. Romanticism is powerful stuff.

1. If you plan to put together a new website to provide social media services, you might be motivated by a dream to do it, but your product isn't unobtanium. We know most of the magic necessary to make a website work. You might argue that we don't know the magic that makes such a site successful, but I'll argue that it isn't magic at all. You just have to do the most difficult thing imaginable. You have to serve a useful function to others AND get them to notice you AND do it all for a price they find palatable. Good luck with that. Do it right and you'll be rich. Do it wrong and you'll be like everyone else because you'll wind up using the product your competitor made better than you did.
2.  If you plan to take tourists to the surface of the Moon and back at a profit, you might be motivated by a grand vision of humanity expanding into space. Unless you know most of the technical details involved in such an effort, though, you need unobtanium before you'll make a profit. If your investors have a lick of sense, they will know that too. Good luck with that. Do it right and you'll have FAR more than a service for tourists. Your investors will know that too and will probably focus their questions on everything else besides your vision of tourists on the Moon. You might think you are in the space tourism business, but you are really in the R&D business.

Fantasticum: (Fantastic-Um)

This is the stuff no one can get to you and anyone with a modicum of education can tell you why it can't EVER be done. Your critics might be wrong, of course. To err is human. To engineer is human too. Unfortunately, there is a class of unobtanium where we are pretty sure the necessary magic is not possible. If your visionary product or service depends on such stuff, you need fantasticum. Basically, you need your fantasy to come true before you can succeed. Remember those Yeti fingernail clippings?  Maybe you have an idea for how to fuel a warp drive with them. The stars are within your grasp if you can just find a cooperative Yeti.

This is the realm of the dreamer who doesn't understand the physics well enough to know what can't be done. This is where you will find people who want to extract energy from the universe for nothing to build their utopia. This is where you will find the readers of science fiction who believe just a little too strongly that the stuff they read about in a story can surely be built. This is where you will find many of the romantics. They are the people who think that the world will flex for them if they can just find the right incantation and occasionally they are correct so it is easy to confuse them with people who pursue unobtanium. The key difference is that most everyone KNOWS the magic for fantasticum can't be done.

1. Prior to the time the Chinese discovered the recipe for gunpowder there were many known incendiary and burning devices. Try to imagine those early days and the research done to find the recipe. It is thought the person who funded the work was after immortality and his alchemists tripped across a different kind of incantation. Mix the right ratio of sulfur, salt peter, and charcoal and you get an explosive. How magical is that, hmm? To the alchemists, gunpowder was unobtanium because they could believe the magic was possible and had no reason to believe otherwise. It turns out they were correct. Immortality through alchemy, though, appears to be fantasticum.
2. Known science gets revised now and then. Because of this the border between unobtanium and fantasticum moves too. What we think we know to be impossible is difficult to nail down, but ask any scientist when they have had one beer too many and aren't overly worried about being precise and they will tell you. Most of them will agree on most of it too. Being tipsy only stops them from offering up their usual self-skepticism. If they still say they don't know something after two beers too many, maybe they really don't. To the less educated person, though, the border can be wished to be just beyond where they are now. No beers are necessary for that. If your work is like that, enjoy your romantic vision, but I'll go find some other project in which to invest my money.

Perceptual Blindness

Over the last few years I've been pushing myself to be involved in communities I have not typically found all that attractive in the sense that they aren't associated with my usual interests. These include a forum associated with the city I used to live in before 2009 and participation in discussions that show a break from my politically passive past. Most recently I've been getting involved with a political third-party and after the 2012 election I re-registered. Normally, I kept such outside activities associated to space-related efforts and the occasional physics/math discussion. My interest in those older topics is still high, but I haven't been putting as much time into space activities lately for a number of reasons that aren't terribly important. I'm sure I will return to them before long as I feel the pull to do something meaningful again.

What I want to put down here, though, are some thoughts about perceptual blindness. This is the kind of blindness where a person can be looking right at a thing and not see it because they don't expect it to be there or even exist. Imagine yourself in ancient times when people thought the Sun went around the Earth. The evidence we currently accept for the notion that the Earth goes around the Sun instead was right before their eyes, but because they already believed otherwise, they could see the sunrise and sunset as evidence the Sun went around us instead. The models we have in our minds that explain reality ARE how we perceive reality. Literally. If upon observing a sunrise and sunset the thoughts evoked in my mind are of geocentric astronomy, then I perceive the Sun going around us. If they evoke heliocentric astronomy, I see the Earth rotating in my mind and my view of the sky shifting as I move with it. The models we make in our heads and teach to our kids have more to do with our truths than our sensory data does.

Perceptual blindness and other related issues have been studied in terms of optical and auditory illusions for some time. There is quite a pile of evidence now pointing to the fact that we must also have senses that point inward at the models we construct as we learn about the world in order to know when the external sensory data triggers one or more of the models. My experience in this area has less to do with illusions, though, and more to do with alternate narrative explanations. Ponder this scenario.

Late at night I wake up to the realization that I left my computer monitor on in my office. It has gone black, but not powered off so there is a mild glow coming from the room that I usually find annoying when trying to sleep. I get up to shut it off, but I don't want to turn on any lights and feel the pain of the glare and loss of my dark adapted vision. I pad into my office using the low glare from my monitor as lighting. When I'm almost there and about to reach over to push the power button, I step on something that is wet. The entire path to my desk is carpeted where I live and the first thing I conclude is that the dog has pissed on the carpet in front of my desk again as a way to retaliate. That thought arrives in a flash along with the anger and disgust when I realize the carpet might not JUST be wet. The question is, can I reasonably conclude that the dog did that? Can I conclude the dog did more? Should I consider alternative options before getting angry?

Anyone who has found themselves in a similar situation knows that rational thought never gets even the slightest chance to intervene. There simply isn't enough time. The wet feeling between my toes matches a previous experience where I do know for a fact that the dog peed on my part of the carpet. I've learned to close my office door to prevent that option and the dog goes elsewhere when his tiny little bladder isn't large enough to make it through the night. He is a chihuahua too, so I really shouldn't blame him for having such a tiny bladder, right? He is what he is and could very well be trying to find the most out of the way place to do the deed. My office certainly qualifies since the door is rarely open for him anymore and when I'm at my desk he is a bit too scared to come in. None of that matters though when I match in a flash the narrative that the dog is retaliating for my pressing my will on him when it comes to establishing dominance in this house or during walks and all that. I don't even know if that makes any sense in the dog psychology way, but I don't think about any of that in the brief flash before anger and disgust.

What I find interesting about this is that in political communities I always advocate for a calmer interpretation of events. I always push for an exploration of alternative narratives even if they contradict ones I like and prefer. I'm not perfect in this as I am a little less inclined to explore alternatives to interpretations I like. I suspect most people do that, so I don't feel guilty about it. I learned to think this way after getting my lip busted in high school. I thought I knew what was going through the other kid's head and failed miserably to anticipate his level of anger. The truth was obviously a closer match to an alternative narrative I had not considered. Over the years I realized it was an alternative I didn't WANT to consider and in self-defense I learned to squash that anti-want.

Let me bring this story back to the present, though. I was watching a presentation the other night by an author with a strong libertarian view of life. He said a number of things I found to be agreeable and a few that I thought were quite bizarre. He spoke of life under the thumb of our government and while I recognize the risk of such a future, I obviously don't see things as he does. What I got to wondering is whether it was him or me that was perceiving the world in terms of a geocentric astronomy. He tried to articulate some of the threat he saw, but didn't get far because the other libertarians just nodded with him making it rather clear he didn't have to explain it to them. I let it go for further study later as I didn't want to interrupt his talk. It was an odd experience for me.

In the forum I frequent, though, it is often the case that the shoe is on the other foot. I wind up seeing potential threats to liberty where others do not. I'm not quite the lone nut case preaching doom and the end of the world. There are a couple of others who are close enough that they nod occasionally, but again I wonder who is the fan of geocentric astronomy. It is still fun to debate with all of them. I get a chance to have my ideas beaten up and completely thrashed instead of suffering that pain upon my body directly. I like to think my ideas have improved as a result. I've had to face some of my own mental dissonance that only another person can point out and it has been useful to me.

What I find most interesting about these related lessons, though, is that I know I can be perceptually blind. I know I can flash to a narrative explanation for events whether it involves dogs in my office or politicians taxing me and establishing competing services to what I would like to do. I know other people can point out my error if they do not use precisely the same perceptual model I use. I also know I can return the favor when they are in error. The problem, though, is that I know I am occasionally correct and the other person wrong when they believe the opposite. Both of us can be perceptually blind, thus there is no formal way to decide who has the most truthful narrative. Even a vote taken among a large group of people noodling over the same problem and evidence isn't enough to formally decide. I don't think there IS a way to know absent a metaphysical observer with omniscience. Even then that wouldn't work since my perceptual model of the universe has no room for such an entity. I simply wouldn't believe them, thus I wouldn't see the truth they offered.

Ultimately, I think this is why I have to defend liberty. If we can't decide who is right and can't agree on what to do, we have to tolerate each of us doing as they wish and letting time prove us right or wrong. Time might not oblige us with a proof, but when it does it is usually pretty obvious.  If someone tells me it is perfectly fine to talk on their cell phone and drive at the same time, I know as a last resort I can just wait and watch. My perceptual model of the risks says they won't have time to think about the danger they will eventually face some day in a complex encounter on the road. Eventually the paramedics will be called to scrape them off the highway along with other innocents who unintentionally helped prove what a stupid idea that was. Ultimately we prove our truths with our lives, but not everyone can see that truth either.

Physically modeling the ambiguous and the undefined

When we try to reduce the complexity of the world around us to understandable parts and relationships we look for patterns and then model part of the world as if that pattern explains what is happening. If I toss a rock in a pond and notice ripples on the surface, I explain the ripples in a causal manner with some kind of narrative that requires rocks thrown into ponds to lead to ripples. With such a narrative, I can try to work backwards from an observation of ripples to a statement that somehow a rock was tossed in, but there are the usual risks with working backwards with a model. There could be some degeneracy in the effects of a wide range of causes.

In the language of mathematics as it is used by physicists, we write equations for the energy and momentum of the rock and bits of fluid. We write equations for the behavior of fluids and rigid bodies tossed into them. We also use a few trial runs with the combined model to see if it works and tweak internal parameters until the predictions the model makes match well enough with reality. This kind of modeling can be done on paper or on computers by someone with a little bit of training, but at its most basic it is pretty simple. Until a model gets complicated (and they do... very fast), the mathematics doesn't get much worse than differential equations, geometry, algebra, and linear algebra. If you don't know some of these, don't freak out. You've probably used them informally and didn't know it though your experience might have been painful.

Whether one is comfortable writing physical models or not, there are some assumptions that go into them that don't involve fancy math. For example, if one models the rock tossed into the pond using momentum and energy, one has to assume the rock HAS momentum and energy, right? Energy comes in more than one form, so we might associate a few different numbers with the rock and expect them to change as it flies to its collision with the water's surface. Momentum is treated as a vector which is a number with a direction. We assign a momentum property to the rock too and expect it to change in flight. How much precision we expect for energy and momentum depends on how accurately we try to measure the flight, but we expect the rock to have well defined values for each. That is required to model the rock, right?

It turns out that there are alternate versions of these assumptions. If one models the rock as described above with well defined momentum and energy one is guilty of Classical Thinking. What this means is that we assume the rock has these properties AND that they are defined independent of anyone actually measuring them. Running the equations forward or backward in time to describe the flight path and collision speed has the built in assumption that the attributes exist. This assumption turns out to be incorrect, but physicists didn't grapple with this fact until the 20th century. On top of that there are a whole class of problems where we can safely make this erroneous assumption and still get good predictions from our models. It is as if we try to predict the positions of planets in the sky using Ptolemy's geocentric model of the universe and get reasonably good answers. The explanatory part of the model is wrong, but the rest of it works to deliver accurate results that appear not to depend on the bad assumptions.

What other assumption could be made besides the ones from classical thinking? This is where quantum thinking comes from and there are two possible versions of which I know. The first is the one we adopted and we've only recently discovered it too is wrong. The second is simply bizarre. 

One break with classical assumptions is to permit the rock not to have well defined momentum and energy, but it DOES have momentum and energy. This is Early Quantum Thinking and means that a question that reads like 'how much energy does the rock have at a particular time' is not answerable absent some kind of measurement even theoretically. We must do something to the rock to discover the energy and until we do it the answer is ambiguous. That means one can't 'just run the equations.' The rock could have several values for its energy and still be what it is. It doesn't have one value until we force a situation where it must. 

If you know any philosophy this should bother you because it comes very close to saying the universe is what we say it is because of what we do to it. No reasonable person trained in these quantum models would actually make that claim, but the untrained reader often makes the leap to thinking they can imagine something and make it so. There are so many who will make this leap that an unscrupulous author can make quite a bundle selling this nonsense. Those with a stronger sense of moral duty to their community will instead speak of Schrodinger's cat because that little thought experiment nicely explains the oddities that come from this way of modeling. 

Unfortunately, though, it appears this is all wrong. This break with classical thinking still assumes that momentum and energy have meaning independent of observation. We model the rock as a mixed state of possible values and let an operation sort out which one actually occurs. The operations are probabilistic and would satisfy any Las Vegas bookie as impossible to fix, though one might sway them in understandable ways.

There is another way to break with classical thinking and it appears there is good experimental evidence that the universe works this way. Modern Quantum Thinking takes the next step and breaks the assumption that the attributes we measure have any meaning independent of the operation that measures them. An operation that measures the energy of the rock produces a number AND the meaning for that number. The rock itself doesn't have energy until it is measured in a way that would answer the question that asks how much energy it has. It is not that the rock has zero energy, though. It is that the energy concept is undefined. It is as if a programmer wants to read from a variable and forgot to declare it in their code earlier. The operation that answers questions about energy declares it and then measures it in one swoop. THAT is how the universe appears to work.

A whole set of reasonable questions arise now. How does one model an attribute that has no meaning until the object being modeled is measured in a way that produces the meaning AND value? How does one test such a model against reality? Can one distinguish between a successful model and one that actually explains reality? Remember the difference between geocentric and heliocentric models of the solar system. Both can be made to work, but one is very wrong! Can one write falsifiable models that work this new way? The ability to falsify models is critical to the health of science.

Modern quantum thinking can break a different assumption not mentioned above as well. We could break our assumption that phenomenon are separable. If one measurement is taken in a distant corner of the universe and another taken here, they can't influence each other as there isn't enough time for information from one to get to the other. That too appears to be wrong, but it is unclear whether this break is required or the break with meaning is required. One thing we do know is that we must either surrender separation (localization) or attribute meanings until operations occur. One of those is simply wrong and maybe both.

Is it all clear as mud now? Welcome to the world of physics. This is what some of us are pondering right now. The experimental physicists are busy in ways that occasionally hit the news sites (LHC work discovering the Higgs particle for example), but the the theorists are plugging away at the weirdest stuff you can imagine... or maybe you can't. I'm not sure I can because I'm trying to figure out how in this world I can model undefined attributes. Breaking localization doesn't bother me much, but attribute meanings too? That's asking a lot.

Limits on the meaning of Family

In this new age of social media we have an opportunity to think again about an old problem. This problem is the one about what we mean by family, tribe, or clan. Each culture establishes working definitions for these terms and might use more or less elaborate words than English for nuanced differences. For example, we distinguish between in-laws and blood relatives. We distinguish between close cousins and distant ones, though only just barely. We are learning to distinguish between mother-who-raised-me and mother-who-gave-birth-to-me and surrogate-mother with similar terms for fathers too. Exactly what we mean by these terms is probably a futile exercise best left to language philosophers, but there is one particular problem that ties to these meanings that interests me. It is the problem of how much meddling one may reasonably and morally commit with respect to a relative's decisions to act on their own knowledge as they see fit. It is the line we draw between parental duty to a child and the mature child's duty to their aging parents. It is the line we draw between a parent's responsibility to raise a child and the end of part of that responsibility when the child comes of age. It is the line we draw between a brother's duty to his siblings and his duty to distant cousins. How much meddling is required and how much is too much? When does duty become coercion?

This problem certainly has my attention at the moment. My son is autistic and I might be responsible for him for the rest of my life. That seems very likely right now. My parents are now old enough that they need a bit of help now and then to keep the house up and other tasks. The situation with my wife's parents isn't much different. I don't expect there to be a firm answer to the problem that applies across them all. I've chosen to do what everyone else appears to be doing in similar situations. I play it by ear not expecting formal structure. If we get to the end of the day with tempers reasonably cool and calm, I solved the problems well enough.

One thing is obvious, though. The level of planning and interference expected of me for my son is very different from what is expected for my mother-in-law. I have no doubt she wouldn't tolerate me treating her as I treat my son. Beside the fact that she doesn't need that level of help, she doesn't want it either. Yet I do plan part of her life when I make career and financial choices. She can try to opt out if she doesn't like a particular choice I make, but her options are limited and I know that. In a strict sense, she isn't as free as my own mother because my decisions don't impact my mother the same way yet. In a purely existential sense, my mother-in-law is just as free as my mother because both choose, but one is more impacted by my choices and there are moral limits on me related to respecting each of them.

What I find most captivating about this problem, though, is the political extension of it. Another thing that is quite obvious to me is that some people extend their definition of family to the larger community with the implied parental duty that we should care for and assist those who need it. This is especially true of children and the oldest among us, but it is often extended to the unfortunate. I understand the moral requirement to help where I can. All I need do is look into my own heart and the requirement is there. This is not surprising as I am a decedent of countless generations of parents who planned/meddled where they could to serve the prosperity of their children. Whether one feeds and shelters orphans or horsewhips the slothful until they work hard enough to fend for themselves and their kids, one is choosing to apply ones own knowledge to the problems of another person who might have different and useful knowledge too.

One of the defining characteristics of a Progressive is the broad boundary they apply to their meaning of family. It is far broader that a Classical Liberal (European sense) is ever likely to tolerate, yet the liberal can usually admit that some interference (possibly coercion) is required of them if they wish to be considered human by a progressive. In this sense a human is a person who behaves as a human and has nothing to do with genetics and parentage. Human-ness is a collection of behavior potentials.

There is good reason to believe that extending the boundary as far as the progressives often do cannot work in the practical sense. F.A. Hayek explained this concisely in his essay on the limits we face in the use of knowledge. We simply can't do what the most radical progressive wishes of us anymore than we can make the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter equal three. There is a theoretical limit that has nothing to do with ideology. The problem, though, is that we are ALL descendents of countless generations of parents who planned and meddled in the affairs of others for their children's benefit. How does one fight a truth many of us believe in our hearts and still retain our humanity in their eyes?

The Joy of Relevance

With the recent events in Russia associated with the surprise visit of a large meteor/small asteroid, I am beginning to see the political adjustments of space groups and companies to make use of the new supply of attention. I'm also seeing early signs of how fast this attention will die off. Which group will make best use of the opportunity remains to be seen, but this is how I'm seeing it. 

On the night of the event, CNN remained focused on the arrival of the damaged cruise ship with thousands of passengers who had suffered for days. On Twitter the conversation started mostly as skepticism, but quickly turned once the flood of tweets was flowing. Most tweets I saw underestimated the size of the rock, but did try to convey the emotions involved. Before long there was the inevitable attempt to associate related events and skepticism associated with each one, but the give and take appears to have produced a multi-voiced conversation that weeded out what was most unlikely. 

The next day the major news sites noticed and began to cover the event in their usual way, meaning they reached out to their pundits since very few couple put boots on the ground in the Urals. The pundits did mostly what they usually do in summarizing what was known and talking about meanings and what could come next. It was the pundits that laid the groundwork for how the public's attention will fizzle. 

Some pundits pointed out the reasonably well known statistic that large events are less common than the small, difficult to notice ones and that the Russian event could reasonably be expected to occur roughly once a century. Combine that with the fact that the last large one (Tunguska) happened about a century ago and we have a recipe for the typical statistical error most Americans make. They will jump to the conclusion that we won't see another of these until the 2100's and that there is nothing to worry about right now. 

That means there should be a race on by civil space groups to secure funding associated with asteroid hunting and remediation in the US and possibly elsewhere. As our public turns its collective attention elsewhere, they will do so comforted by the 'fact' that the professionals will deal with this issue. They will expect that some small amount of money can reasonably assigned to this threat and then return their attention to relevant matters. How much public money gets assigned to these tasks is important for while it will not be a large fraction of the civil space budget absent an imminent threat, it might be large enough to put a government group either in control of contractors doing the work or in direct competition with the private groups currently organized to hunt asteroids and exploit them. 

Another way to describe this risk to private efforts is that there is a risk that certain public efforts will find budgetary relevance from this event. Mitigation of this risk is important for the survival of the private efforts that depend on outside investment for funding. There is an existential risk here. For private efforts who have secured their funding, there is a longer range risk that might evaporate before they fly, but it might still be worth some attention. Delaying budget decisions into the future should work to the advantage of private efforts in mitigating this risk. The more time passes, the less useful the broken glass and injuries will be in giving relevance to people who will likely be far less efficient in dealing with the real risks. 

There is no doubt these rocks are dangerous to all of us and our civilization, but there is also no doubt that the solution to the issue is to get out there in economically meaningful ways. Whether one wants to blow them up, nudge them aside, or strip mine them down to dust the key to doing any of those repeatedly is to be out there and that requires a great deal of engineering experience our government can't possibly afford to purchase. We can't even afford it, so we will have to discover it as we solve every other type of problem we can imagine for a space-faring civilization.

Economics as science in the climate change discussion

I've been studying the variety of skeptical arguments people use when arguing against the evidence and theory behind anthropological climate change. This has led over the last several months to a summary study of economics and economic philosophy and even political philosophy. This effort has given me an opportunity to fill my bookshelves with interesting and new (to me at least) books and subscribe to a new group of podcasts expanding the horizon for me again. Fun stuff.

I haven't gone through the effort of categorizing all the skeptical arguments like the work done at Skeptical Science. There is no need for duplication and they do a fine job. What I have been working at is grouping the arguments into broad families and looking at how they approach the scholarly divisions between climate science, economics, and politics. I'm beginning to understand that some people object to the political consequences of a remedial policy and fight against any of the supporting arguments for the policy. That means a political objection could turn into a science skepticism even though there is no other connection between them than the fact that a science projection is used to advocate the policy.

I'm doing this because of a discussion I've had with friends that the science is in decent shape and offers good support for the conclusion that humanity is responsible for the most recent warming of the Earth. There is enough good science done to conclude that the correlation between recent human economic output and recent warming is actually a causation. This discussion has led to descriptions of what science actually is (Popper, Kuhn, etc) as distinguished from the dogma that is taught by most teachers who focus upon what science has learned. That finally led me to read F. A. Hayek and see the political distinctions he and others draw between classical liberalism, modern liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism (in a number of forms) and so on. The last 18 months or so has been a journey for me and I've met many people and heard many opinions along the way.

I don't know that shining a light on the groupings of skeptical arguments will make much of a difference, but it has been an interesting effort for me. I will generally argue that a climate skeptic should attack the thing they actually dislike, but since policy advocacy is about winning a negotiation position by forming a large voter block and not about being academically correct I'm probably urging a political impossibility. Democracy is what it is, after all.

Changes in the US manned space program

Change is coming to the US manned space program. At last! Real, dramatic, tangible, believable changes in the course and the results created will finally steer us to this nation's future we dreamed of decades ago.

The time for change is long past due. What we have been doing in human space flight in the US since Apollo has been a failure of epic proportions. Many will defend the status quo and express anger over the upcoming changes proposed by the Obama Administration, but the national track record for manned space flight demonstrates a past that is more about jobs programs, Congressional pork, and broken promises. Defenders of the past are left protecting many billions of dollars spent flying some stuff around in circles, employing a work force that has had no appreciable effect on any grand vision we hold for our national future, and quietly agreeing to accept the myth that they all are doing something useful.

At the risk of heresy, consider any rational measure of the NASA operated human spaceflight program since Apollo. How many promised milestones have been achieved regarding flight rates, payload costs, access for regular people, and science? The unmanned space program HAS managed to accomplish quite a lot with respect to science, but even they are held back by the high costs of accessing space. The original promises for the Space Shuttle spoke of weekly flights, ten dollars per pound ($22 per kg) to orbit, and low operational costs of a mundane service. Instead we were doing great to get five flights a year, purposely obfuscated costs for payloads, and $1,000 Million spent on each flight. We have a standing army employed to accomplish those flights and not a mundane service crew. This is an epic failure considering just the Space Shuttle alone! Consider the $1,000 Million spent on the X-33 that failed to be good enough to even leave the hangar and other attempted transportation projects since Apollo and it becomes abundantly clear that NASA human space flight expenditures weren't about successful space goals. The only measure of success by which they pass is the funneling of money to Congressional districts.

The background of repeated failures in our nation's human spaceflight program must be kept in mind when we judge the changes coming from the White House. These changes focus on Earth to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) transportation plans and how they can be provided by commercial sources. NASA proposes (at the White House's encouragement) to hand over this role to commercial space firms. They propose to buy transportation as a service. At the moment, the announcement is from the NASA Press Office, so a dose of skepticism is a good defense against yet another promise dashed by pork politics. This time, however, the White House is behind the message. We can dare to hope (audaciously so!) that we will break the circular self gratification huddle of our old ways and go somewhere else. More importantly we will go somewhere else in a way that lets us do it again, and again, and again. This time, 'we' will mean more than NASA's employees. It will mean us too. How can it? Those commercial providers will want to make money to increase share holder value (as they must) and that means they will want to sell other flights. That is where 'we' get our vision of the future.

NASA will have to make changes. It can no longer see itself as the Emperor of all things in space. It has done this in the past and failed to deliver. The agency simply cannot get it right when it comes to building their own launch systems, let alone operating them. They cannot be both a government agency and a profitable company. It is time they stopped trying and accept their successes elsewhere while relying upon the free markets to deliver the other services. They succeeded with Apollo because they had an achievable set of goals and didn't have to act like a corporation competing in a free market. They can let the taxi and trucking services go to those who want to deliver them now.

For example, California's SPACEX from its creation through its first successful orbital flights and all the industrial tooling and facilities to support them spent far less than the $445 million NASA has on the recent flight of the Ares 1-X mockup. That mockup didn't even make it to orbit. The Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 from SPACEX is projected to cost a fraction of the Ares and Orion systems proposed by NASA. We know in which direction NASA's cost projections trend over the life of their programs of the last few decades and must remember that SPACEX has managed to put things in orbit. Orbital Sciences Corp is in a similar position with it's Taurus vehicle and projects similar cost savings over the smoke and mirrors that is Ares/Orion.

Even if one feels less that secure in betting on NewSpace firms, it is important to realize that some of the large traditional companies are adapting old systems to carry payloads and people into orbit to serve commercial customers and yes... even the International Space Station. Atlas V and Delta IV have flown many times (infinitely more than Ares/Orion in terms of percentages) and the Boeing/Bigelow crew capsule under development will cost a fraction of that needed for Orion. This isn't smoke and mirrors as Bigelow already has experience in orbit too. NASA's exploration job need not start at the launch pad anymore. The gate to their part of the frontier has moved up and out into orbit

None of this will happen if the old politics and the old players win the day, but we are on the proverbial edge of a bright new frontier. We can not rationalize wasteful spending that leads us around in circles and employs bright people to accomplish nothing of great value. Access to orbit can be made more mundane, but only by unleashing the free market to do what it does best. NASA can achieve higher goals of exploration and science, but only by unleashing the power of free enterprise to deliver goods and services NASA fails to deliver to itself. The Obama Administration is proposing (through NASA) to do exactly that.

And so the battle is joined. In a dose of historical irony, many who fought so long the wasteful spending and years of great talent lost in the human space flight program in the US find ourselves standing with the current agency leaders like Charlie Bolden and the Obama Administration to fight for this new vision. Those of us who loved the early NASA and what it did for a generation of engineers, scientists, and dreamers fought back tears of anger and frustration for years over what they did next, but now we can join them in a defense of their new plan that makes rational sense. It is about time.

Dare we hope again?

Do we have the audacity?

(Thanks Rick!)

Last Moving Truck

I hope anyway. 8)

The family move to southern California is almost done and the new job is going well. I'm doing Remedy work still, but my new employer needs ITIL is a much bigger way than my last one and they know it. I'm going to have to learn to call it ISO 20000, though. I'm beginning to think of these standards as job security for guys like me.

We've used two 26 foot trucks and two 17 foot trucks from U-Haul now. This last 17 footer won't be full, so we probably could have done it with three 26 foot trucks. That's how much... uhmm... history... I am tracking around with me. Obviously I need some help getting rid of old stuff. It's much more fun to just acquire new stuff.

We arrived last night with typically foggy weather where it's not exactly safe to drive the highways at full speed. Of course, people DO drive the highways at full speed. I've lived in the central valley for about 26 years now. I won't miss this fog.

We have fit almost everything into a smaller house. I expect it to burst at the seams any day now. One more truck load should do it, though, like an after-dinner mint. It's wafer thin.

Rocket Racer prototype progress

Rocket Racer prototype video from XCOR last year. Oshkosh show. Note the re-ignition capability and what the pilots are NOT wearing. 8)