Ramblings of an old man: How doing nothing will solve all the worlds problems (but no one's individual problems), and the importance of precise language.
I'm writing this in honor of "National buy nothing day" which I celebrate the day after Thanksgiving every year by not buying anything. I've heard this described as "very uncapitalist" of me, however that platitude generally indicates a poor understanding of capitalism (i.e. it is not one sided). "National buy nothing day" shares the date with a conflicting holiday observed by many Americans which is now affectionately called "Black Friday". If you're a capitalist or consumer of any sort then you know that the day after Thanksgiving in America is a day where the redistribution of wealth from the unwealthy to the wealthy is celebrated by the unwealthy. You're materially harming yourself while materially benefiting me, and you're happy about it? It's truly a marketing miracle! The IRS really needs to get wind of this.
Humans are born with limited intuitive knowledge, but truly amazing tools for understanding. Sadly most humans, either by conspiracy or(/and) nature, don't apply those tools to things that materially affect their lives by even a single degree of separation. So despite caring about people in general and agreeing that suffering is bad I am against direct philanthropic and world saving efforts (philanthropic organizations are generally incredibly short sighted) but instead suggest that the best option to prevent future suffering is simply not to give starving people food and not expending resources to combat global resource inequalities, these approaches of withholding direct aid will generally be more successful at alleviating suffering then intervention over the long term. To reiterate: Inaction is generally a superior form of relief compared to symptom management.
If you don't understand the big picture quality of that statement there's a nice college lecture which will help you understand the basic implications from the University of Colorado at Boulder, originally entitled "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy." I don't know that it's the "Most important, video you'll ever see" but that's how it's now labeled and it's worthy piece. And for the remainder of this Article of stories I'm going to assume that you at least understand exponential growth and are familiar enough with the concepts & implications that you do not need to watch the video, or have watched the video.
Given your understanding of growth if you don't already understand my argument or some of it's nuance is lost on you, please forgive me as my position is both complex and uncomfortable so I will require some leave to explain the uninteresting periphery which may not immediately seem relevant before getting to the meaty center, which is that it is negligent and immoral to provide food to starving people, HIV drugs to people in Africa, and to reduce infant mortality rates. Beyond those more direct forms of human suffering I'll go on to say that it is virtually impossible to reduce fossil fuel use, combat global warming, meaningfully reduce "tobacco related death" through smoking cessation, or avert an extinction level event (crews equaling those of a mid-sized Mc Donalds not withstanding). Humanitarian aid in situations of what I will call "incidental disasters" are slightly less clear from a moral standpoint, but it can and should be argued similarly, and while it will meet with some degree of success I don't care to make that argument since there are very valid and agreeable counter arguments.
In the course of this article I believe you will find the facts to be uncomfortable but self evident, and if you had merely decided to consider them yourself would have reached the same conclusion. Your failure to consider that the supposed alleviation of suffering is negligent and actually leads to increased suffering is expected. It could rightly be said that providing assistance to your fellow humans when they are in acute distress is a moral imperative and you can check this with your fellow man and sing about it's validity. But apply that axiom in the broadest sense (globally) and that innate belief will fall apart under scrutiny. Blood letting to release "bad blood" doesn't work, morphine and cocaine are not cure-alls, and organisms you cannot touch, taste, see, or smell both exist and will kill you to advance their own interests all regardless of what your intuition or personal experience tells you or what you believe you have observed.
On topic, but in left field: Rate of change
"Rate of change" is an interesting concept because it has multiple meanings dependent on context and framing. In lay terms it refers to an ambiguous amount of alteration over an ambiguous period of time. Consider the completely imaginary scenario where I live in a city and frequently cross a one way street in an area that is not the cross walk. This would work perfectly well when the cars in question don't take my presence into account and otherwise behave predictably, generally keeping their (de)acceleration constant. Suppose this one way street happens to have 3 lanes and if the drivers don't take into account that I'm walking into a place reserved for moving cars I could easily cross it without issue by walking to where their cars won't be when I get there. This means I walk in places where a car will be, in time, and into places a car has just left. If you were to put this reasonable principle into practice you will find that it won't work with more than a couple of inbound cars because most drivers fail to anticipate my expertise at crossing a busy street using this method (Italian nationals not withstanding). Some would only see me stepping into the street were they are about to be or walking toward their 3000lb death trap traveling at speed. They would then change their speed, typically by decelerating, which invalidates the method for more then a few cars as the behavior is not uniformly applied by drivers and the schema is founded on the idea that I know were the cars will be and when. Thus as all the elements are acting independently within the system while functioning dependently in time my ability to formulate a safe path becomes critically flawed in the multi-car situation where the precise plan is not known to all parties, which is the expected result of all such situations even when the behavior arises spontaneously (consider "Drive-thru" in China vs the U.S., the American vs Chinese prison & penal system, crossing the street in Thailand, New York, Berlin, California, and Rome). That is, the specific defacto schema of multiple car operators and pedestrians must be known by all parties for fatality free execution, these schemata display substantial cultural variation and cannot be easily transposed. In America it is plausible drivers believe such a pedestrian is likely some wayward drunk or imbecile who has wandered into the street without a rigorous plan to avoid being struck by a moving car, and so conscientiousness drivers must adjust their speed to avoid the poor fool. So if you fail to cross a street in America using this method know that it is because neither can the pedestrian anticipate the driver's rate of change (which he hopes is zero) nor can the driver anticipate the pedestrians rate of change (or even his vector) without an existing understanding between these entities or an understanding of the process. The method I've described I believe I adopted or created from some forgotten interaction with a scientist, researcher, or professor and works in a surprising number of city and metropolitan cultures (to such an extent that I was unaware that anyone ever had any trouble crossing streets except in Thailand) and in the American Midwest has a tendency stop all traffic and earn fines. At it's most basic the provided schema works if drivers are not frankly malicious but display some measure of indifference to the presence of pedestrians in the street (possibly due to familiarity with a similar schemata). And while you should draw other conclusions from all this, in the literal sense in America you should always cross at the crosswalk boys and girls.
This principle, the knowledge or ignorance of schemata in use by involved entities creating substantial variations in outcomes, plays out in many scenarios in life where you have more than one independent actor and at least one of them can materially harm another. To define harm here I'm using the broader Utilitarian definition of harm (harm caused by the cascade of causality following action) rather than strict & immediate bodily harm. Poker is almost a counter example however for it is not a collaborative schema but nearly completely uncollaborative one and arguably malicious, as all players openly acknowledge they are playing a zero sum game and the object of the game is to take money from other players (they openly admit they wish you harm you). By playing the game it is acknowledged that you understand the schema: you're putting yourself at risk knowing the other actor's actions cannot be predicted with absolute certainty and thus your own actions cannot be perfectly correct. Still, you know the others are trying to earn your money and it can be said that there are decisions that are better than others with some certainty. In no event should you merely play your own hand without consideration to the hands of others.
So these are the situations, collaborative schemata, uncollaborative schemata, malicious schemata, and the (seeming) absence of schemata. Additionally schemata are generally not discussed as such, the term is an artifice to specifically describe . . . schema, but it can observed, described, and then predicted. In no scenario in life is it a good idea to take action without some basic knowledge of the repercussions of those actions and an idea of the prevalent schemata in use, such actions may be negligent and certainly failure to consider the repercussions is negligent.
Terms and conditions are unclear
Use of word "term" has multiple definitions, and I have misrepresented it in the title. While I have used it in the contractual context of "a legally binding provision" I more intend terminology "a noun or compound word used in a specific context meaning" as well as a discrete span of time. During the course of this article you may believe it is used in the context of a logical expression, as my argument and it's basis are unclear to you. In any event since misunderstanding and confusion are precisely my meaning, it is an appropriate use.
Legal contracts are obtuse to the lay reader particularly because there is so much variability in language which in common dialog is grossly ignored and verbosity is not always necessarily nor desired. If your lover says "I love you," you can't rightly say, "In what context do you mean?" though certainly definitively knowing the intended context is critical to understanding the message. We allow ourselves and each other to make great assumptions, aware or unaware, and generally the repercussions of these lapses in communication and behavior are recoverable and we expect to actively recover them. Superficially it would seem that only our own lives are affected.
The terminology "rate of change" in the former jay walking scenario is derived from mathematical derivatives, an explanation which is beyond the scope of this article. However it was bastardized to reach the manner I have used it and it was bastardized further (or independently derivatived) as it is used in Stock market technical analysis. A stock's 20 day rate of change would be the ((price today)-(price 20 days ago))/(price 20 days ago). Easy, right?
Now if I said "The car hit me because I failed to anticipate it's rate of change." Your understanding of my sentence has everything to do with your individual background and nothing at all to do with the words I've actually used. Much like the colloquial use of the word "theory" and it's use in the scientific community. Or top & bottom. Not only are those words relative to the conversation but also to each individual's personal background and familiarity with multiple contexts to which those words can be applied. Genuine failure to communicate can escape both parties even when they are attempting to communicate in good faith, as there is a gulf of variability in our backgrounds and understandings which lead us to fail in the conundrum of dialog. An interesting thing happens when parties are not attempting to communicate in good faith.
Using foreign terms in common language, everyone is doing it.
Math can be a confusing subject for many reasons. Firstly there is good evidence to suggest that our basic ability to count is comprised of: One, two, many. We've expanded this as a result of an artifice we've developed to count beyond our basic ability to comprehend numbers. Then, as we are particularly cunning creatures, we created another artifice to manipulate and understand these countings beyond two. So to that extent math is an illusion. A very very useful illusion.
When you have a big creative brain, as humans believe we do, it is important to have the ability to describe things that not only don't exist but may not be possible. This is important as without fore knowledge of the outcome results and steps leading to results cannot be reliably predicted. Thus some degree of imprecision is actually required of language, we wouldn't get very far in life if we couldn't communicate or comprehend options, possibilities, or indeed irrelevant and useless concepts - our greatest flaw is our greatest strength. Math is such a language. Math can describe things that are real, but doesn't require the things it describes to be real. So if you look at math as a separate language, as I do, it's easy to understand how people are confused by it. Like throwing a few words of Chinese into a conversation using American English, the terms simply shouldn't be mixed willy nilly (wildly, without considering their effect). Especially when continuity of one language is expected, in the hidden example above I began using the psychological term schema and it's plural schemata without introduction or explanation. You either inferred it's meaning from context, knew it, looked it up, or pretended it didn't matter until I linked the definition. But schema is a great word as it doesn't make modern sense outside of it's intended lexicon (to my knowledge). Medicine at least has the forethought to label mundane things in a dead language so we all know the specific conditions we're dealing with as we continue to speak the other language, as no one really speaks Latin anymore. Plus, many people dress up in costumes so you know they'll be switching to Latin for brief periods, so if someone says "Gastric Lavage" you know that there is a Latin root and the costumed folks aren't actually talking about your aunt Lavoush.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, lets talk about math and exponential growth as it refers to actual occurrences in reality which affect our lives: Crime. If we're talking about a 7% yearly increase in the number (volume) of crimes committed after 10 years the number of crimes committed annually will have doubled. But you're probably more interested in the number of people committing crimes relative to the number of people available to be victimized in each instance, which would be Crime rate. Living in a place with 5 crimes and 100,000 people is far different than living in a place with 5 crimes and 10 people even though the volume of crime is the same. So now were talking about the volume of crime, the Crime rate (crime per 1000 people), the increase in volume of crime, and the increase in the Crime rate, which is a percentage of increase for a percentaged statistic. So not only does the volume of crime affect the Crime rate the volume of people affects the Crime rate and there will be a cascade effect in all the statistics if just one base number is changed. So if there are 72,000 crimes in Detroit in 2008 while it's population is 951,000 (7.57%) and 72,000 crimes in Detroit in 2009 while it's population is 800,000 it's Crime rate has increased to 9% which will often be reported without base information as: "19% increase in crime" (am I talking about crime rate or volume?) or "a 2009 crime rate that's 118.9% that of 2008." God help us if both the population, number of crimes, police tactics, and economic climate changed during that time and someone tries to use those statistics to say anything about crime's change.
"There are liars, damned liars, and statisticians." - Mark Twain
Deliberate or Negligent misrepresentation
My point is that headlines and conversations about statistics are often not only misleading due to ineptitude, deliberately exploitative of our collective failure to understand statistics, but also reflect falsely applied context of lexicons. While our speech is generally given a lot of leeway for understanding in dialog the language of math is very specific. And if I say: "There's been a 9% increase in crime." it will often go unchecked, do I mean a 9% increase in the Crime Rate or the volume of crime because they are not the same thing. If I want to be really dubious I can even say, "the rate of crime has increased 9%" and be referring to the volume of crime even if the Crime Rate is the same. While in lay dialog volume and rate can be freely interchanged the statistical term "Crime rate" is a specific label with a specific meaning. The fact that statistics are misrepresented both knowingly and unwittingly is relevant and must be appreciated as it addresses many proposed counter arguments.
Correlation ≠ Causation, Math portion
So whenever someone quotes you a statistic be very careful to identify the specific words they are using, their source (since most of us are unsophisticated listeners), and the relevant variables that are the basis of that statistic. For this set of examples I'm going to take a moment to dive into some of the actual statistics of smoking associated death because I can't quote anyone directly and since no one ever believes me when I say it I'll just post it here so you can do the math yourself. Smoking associated death is generally quoted by volume, percentage increases of risk from percentages of occurrence (%Got it/%Don't got it), and professionally termed "tobacco related death". "Tobacco-related death" is a list of maladies which happens to include most western diseases, and to be clear if all the tobacco in the universe had never actually existed "tobacco related death" would continue without abate. We're going to compare that data to Motor Vehicle Accident (MVA) associated fatalities (quoted both as rate & volume depending on your side) and I'd love to see you do it for snow sport associated death (generally reported as death rate per ski day by this apparently sophisticated group) on your own time as I expect it'll compare in a manner similar to MVAs to smoking with the bonus that it is also a consensual activity that not everyone in America is necessarily exposed to. You can also make your own conclusions about the goals and relevance of the propaganda on all sides.
I am well acquainted with the argument that tobacco is an insidious disease and I'm comparing it to trauma which generally arrives in tandem with evidence of it's occurrence and thus a definitive diagnosis. It is then argued that trauma and "tobacco related death" is not a fair comparison. And while it is not "fair" that is because of the low incidence of death from "tobacco related illness" which is not significantly greater in people who smoke then who do not smoke, though there is no question it greater. A 10.3 times greater chance of laryngeal cancer (relative risk or RR) sure sounds like a lot until you realize the risk being discussed uses the thousandth's place. The table below and accompanying math is provided as I am making an unusual claim and wish to substantiate it, and encourage you to do your own math too, statistics wasn't my best subject.
Please note that I'm going to use this data in a manner it that was never intended, so I would like to preface it with this: There is no question that smoking increases your risk of death from many diseases and I personally believe it actually makes your life worse (though that hypothesis could easily be observation bias), the people who do this research are attempting to help us all live better and longer through science and should be unilaterally commended, please do not construe this as an endorsement of smoking.
This data was compiled between 1984-1994 and was gathered from middle aged and elderly males who were mostly white. Males and this age group represent a worse case scenario (including women and widely distributed ages would make my argument better), I'm using this data because it was easily available and published on the web but if you have raw data from the American Cancer Society run it yourself, I expect it to be an even better example than what I've presented below (the reason I know to do this calculation for you here is I've done the numbers before with a researcher for the American Cancer Society).
(Table data comes from Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 92, No. 4, February 16, 2000)
As you'll clearly note in "current smokers" the entire category of 88 died however they had 141 cancers among them when that occurred. This data was intended to show relative risk of cancers for cigar smoking, not for what I'm using it for so there will be more cancers in every category than people who died and I can only correct that in the category where everyone died though this data may over estimate the number of deaths in the tested population by 50 to 70%. However that won't mater since death from smoking is so trivial my point will still be proved with this data that is likely several orders of magnitude greater than death from tobacco-related illness in the general population (young people die of trauma and only if you live through that does your risk of cancer go up, and this data is all from people at high risk). We'll keep it simple and play this like stat 101 if you want to play along at home.
A) What is the chance that any random male died from a tobacco-related cancer?
961/129465= 0.74229%
B) What is the chance that a male who never smoked died from tobacco-related cancer?
782/121529= 0.64347%
C) What is the chance a male never smoked and never died from tobacco-related cancer?
(121529-782)/121,529= 99.35653%
D) What is the chance that a smoker died from tobacco-related cancer?
(91+88)/(7848+88)=179/7936= 2.25554%
E) What is the chance that a smoker never died from tobacco-related cancer?
((7848+88)-(91+88))/(7848+88)=7757/7936= 97.74446%
F) What is the percentage increase of percentage of death between smokers and never smokers for tobacco related cancer (answer in the form of a media headline)? D/B = You have a 350% greater chance of death from tobacco-related cancer if you smoke.
G) If a male never smoked, how much less of a raw chance (compared to random) does he have of death due to tobacco-related cancer? B-A = -0.09882%
H) If a male smoked how much more of a raw chance (compared to random) does he have of death due to tobacco-related cancer? D-A = +1.51325%
What is the risk of death after a Motor Vehicle Accident (MVA) within one year of that MVA in America in 2009? MVA deaths/US Pop = 35.9 million /307 million =11.7% (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010)
Note that the MVA data I chose is not normalized for age, but neither is my cigar smoking data. In the instance where I initially ran the raw data with a researcher I believe the answer to H was either +0.0004% or +0.004%, so be my guest and run it with general population data rather than the high risk people who volunteered for "Cancer Prevention Study II".
The math wears on me, but if you want to do the math to figure out what percentage more adult males die from MVAs than from tobacco-related illness and what percentage increase that is, feel free, but you'll actually have to dive into the census data for that and find additional research data as you can't do it with data above. Well you can, but it would be both meaningless and apparently good enough to make it into a headline.
Correlation ≠ Causation, analogy portion
The misrepresentations annoy me greatly since I know the data and it serves the argument against saving the world here. For example despite the fact that ~80% of people who died of lung cancer did smoke (American cancer society, cancer facts & figures 2005), that doesn't mean that even close to 80% of people who smoke will get lung cancer and die from it. It doesn't mean that 80% of people who smoke will die, nor that 80% of people who smoke will get lung cancer. That's not how causation works. If you smoke the chance you will get any cancer is generally low (but higher than the general population) and if you do get cancer it's not necessarily going to be lung cancer, if you do get lung cancer you probably won't die from it, but IF you were dead AND you died of lung cancer THEN there's an 80% chance you smoked. And that's all that can actually be said by the widely published data in consumer level cancer data. If you mix that sentence up any other way you are misrepresenting the data, knowingly or not. I'd also like to point out that if we stumble upon your corpse and you died of lung cancer then there's a 90% chance you ate bread, you may consider that fact evidence of a conspiracy by the bread industry but in reality both pieces of data are virtually useless to the living. The figures for "incidence" for the general population actually are available though aren't very compelling (as hinted at in the math section above), and while I can't say that's why they are generally missing from reports about cancer, they are generally missing from reports about cancer.
If you're not a data monger then a simple illustration should help you out. If 100% of the people who died in the last 100 years on an magical island I own died of murder and the death rate is 1 person died for every 950 billion person years, your actual risk of being murdered on my island is laughably low (depending on whether you have 6 or more zeros in your age I suppose). Though no one can dismiss the fact that murder is the leading cause of death on my magical island. If you take a man who lives in the real world who had lung cancer and died due to it, there's an 80% chance he smoked. If he lived on my magical island and he died for any reason, there's a 100% chance he was murdered. To put it another way, if you choose to live on the magical island you will almost certainly be murdered, but probably not today or anytime in the lifetime of a person living in Irvine, California (which had zero murders per 100,000 people around 2006). I could easily write an entire article just about data, correlation, causation, and prediction but that would be tedious. For our purposes just take away that Mark Twain had a point.
It's getting hot in here
Which brings me to all the people trying to save the world generally. I reject the premise that humanity is significant enough to determine the fate of the planet, when the reality is we are not significant and some form of life on earth will go one even after we drive ourselves to extinction. This propensity toward self extinction is not a trait that is unique to the human form of life however our ego mania makes us think that we are particularly adept at it. After all, it is our own lives that are being extinguished when it comes to us and that somehow seems more important and relevant than microbes, deer, insects, and other organisms driving themselves to extinction by over using their resources, murder, genocide, etc. It has been said that we are the only species capable of comprehending our predicament and altering our actions to prevent it, and I submit that there is relatively little evidence for that tandem claim. It is, however, relatively unlikely that a species other than our own will lead to our extinction, though that may just be my own human ego centrism talking as a virus would be eminently qualified to at least radically correct our overpopulation.
While I applaud the hearts of the philanthropic, my belief is that philanthropy in it's current form isn't useful. If it is true that the only behavior you can control (with certainty) is your own and that is coupled with the observation of a minority of humans choosing not to exercise that control it follows that any, and notably minor, destructive or detrimental behavior which happen to have either a reward mechanization or no immediately observable negative outcome will become pervasive. That behavior will grow until it reaches a self limiting point whereupon a corrective force will be exerted on that behavior, all we can have control over is when and possibly who. No matter how many times I put some brewer's yeast in a vessel of wort, the yeast always propagate until most of them die. Even when I save a few from their self induced Holocaust and place them in a new vessel of resources it's always the same, they always squander their resources in a matter of days and pollute the environment to such an extent that nearly all of them die. Without that sort of reliability from life, it'd be very hard for me to make beer. So it's a blessing really.
Choice, to the extent that we can choose, makes a difference.
If I get peace of mind eating a carrot and you get chocolate and sweet, sweet butter fat by eating a piece of chocolate cake I don't have a problem with either of our choices. If your piece of cake is 500 calories however, you cannot choose to eat the cake and match my caloric intake unless you moderate your portion. If you fail to moderate your portion, and your goal is to not gain weight, you are 1/7th your way to a pound of fat and you have chosen that path for yourself. That is: even if you choose to ignore or reject the consequences for your actions reality has already applied them for you.
Humans are born with limited intuitive knowledge, but truly amazing tools for understanding. Sadly most humans, either by conspiracy or(/and) nature, don't apply those tools to things that materially affect their lives by even a single degree of separation. So despite caring about people in general and agreeing that suffering is bad I am against direct philanthropic and world saving efforts (philanthropic organizations are generally incredibly short sighted) but instead suggest that the best option to prevent future suffering is simply not to give starving people food and not expending resources to combat global resource inequalities, these approaches of withholding direct aid will generally be more successful at alleviating suffering then intervention over the long term. To reiterate: Inaction is generally a superior form of relief compared to symptom management.
If you don't understand the big picture quality of that statement there's a nice college lecture which will help you understand the basic implications from the University of Colorado at Boulder, originally entitled "Arithmetic, Population, and Energy." I don't know that it's the "Most important, video you'll ever see" but that's how it's now labeled and it's worthy piece. And for the remainder of this Article of stories I'm going to assume that you at least understand exponential growth and are familiar enough with the concepts & implications that you do not need to watch the video, or have watched the video.
Given your understanding of growth if you don't already understand my argument or some of it's nuance is lost on you, please forgive me as my position is both complex and uncomfortable so I will require some leave to explain the uninteresting periphery which may not immediately seem relevant before getting to the meaty center, which is that it is negligent and immoral to provide food to starving people, HIV drugs to people in Africa, and to reduce infant mortality rates. Beyond those more direct forms of human suffering I'll go on to say that it is virtually impossible to reduce fossil fuel use, combat global warming, meaningfully reduce "tobacco related death" through smoking cessation, or avert an extinction level event (crews equaling those of a mid-sized Mc Donalds not withstanding). Humanitarian aid in situations of what I will call "incidental disasters" are slightly less clear from a moral standpoint, but it can and should be argued similarly, and while it will meet with some degree of success I don't care to make that argument since there are very valid and agreeable counter arguments.
In the course of this article I believe you will find the facts to be uncomfortable but self evident, and if you had merely decided to consider them yourself would have reached the same conclusion. Your failure to consider that the supposed alleviation of suffering is negligent and actually leads to increased suffering is expected. It could rightly be said that providing assistance to your fellow humans when they are in acute distress is a moral imperative and you can check this with your fellow man and sing about it's validity. But apply that axiom in the broadest sense (globally) and that innate belief will fall apart under scrutiny. Blood letting to release "bad blood" doesn't work, morphine and cocaine are not cure-alls, and organisms you cannot touch, taste, see, or smell both exist and will kill you to advance their own interests all regardless of what your intuition or personal experience tells you or what you believe you have observed.
On topic, but in left field: Rate of change
"Rate of change" is an interesting concept because it has multiple meanings dependent on context and framing. In lay terms it refers to an ambiguous amount of alteration over an ambiguous period of time. Consider the completely imaginary scenario where I live in a city and frequently cross a one way street in an area that is not the cross walk. This would work perfectly well when the cars in question don't take my presence into account and otherwise behave predictably, generally keeping their (de)acceleration constant. Suppose this one way street happens to have 3 lanes and if the drivers don't take into account that I'm walking into a place reserved for moving cars I could easily cross it without issue by walking to where their cars won't be when I get there. This means I walk in places where a car will be, in time, and into places a car has just left. If you were to put this reasonable principle into practice you will find that it won't work with more than a couple of inbound cars because most drivers fail to anticipate my expertise at crossing a busy street using this method (Italian nationals not withstanding). Some would only see me stepping into the street were they are about to be or walking toward their 3000lb death trap traveling at speed. They would then change their speed, typically by decelerating, which invalidates the method for more then a few cars as the behavior is not uniformly applied by drivers and the schema is founded on the idea that I know were the cars will be and when. Thus as all the elements are acting independently within the system while functioning dependently in time my ability to formulate a safe path becomes critically flawed in the multi-car situation where the precise plan is not known to all parties, which is the expected result of all such situations even when the behavior arises spontaneously (consider "Drive-thru" in China vs the U.S., the American vs Chinese prison & penal system, crossing the street in Thailand, New York, Berlin, California, and Rome). That is, the specific defacto schema of multiple car operators and pedestrians must be known by all parties for fatality free execution, these schemata display substantial cultural variation and cannot be easily transposed. In America it is plausible drivers believe such a pedestrian is likely some wayward drunk or imbecile who has wandered into the street without a rigorous plan to avoid being struck by a moving car, and so conscientiousness drivers must adjust their speed to avoid the poor fool. So if you fail to cross a street in America using this method know that it is because neither can the pedestrian anticipate the driver's rate of change (which he hopes is zero) nor can the driver anticipate the pedestrians rate of change (or even his vector) without an existing understanding between these entities or an understanding of the process. The method I've described I believe I adopted or created from some forgotten interaction with a scientist, researcher, or professor and works in a surprising number of city and metropolitan cultures (to such an extent that I was unaware that anyone ever had any trouble crossing streets except in Thailand) and in the American Midwest has a tendency stop all traffic and earn fines. At it's most basic the provided schema works if drivers are not frankly malicious but display some measure of indifference to the presence of pedestrians in the street (possibly due to familiarity with a similar schemata). And while you should draw other conclusions from all this, in the literal sense in America you should always cross at the crosswalk boys and girls.
This principle, the knowledge or ignorance of schemata in use by involved entities creating substantial variations in outcomes, plays out in many scenarios in life where you have more than one independent actor and at least one of them can materially harm another. To define harm here I'm using the broader Utilitarian definition of harm (harm caused by the cascade of causality following action) rather than strict & immediate bodily harm. Poker is almost a counter example however for it is not a collaborative schema but nearly completely uncollaborative one and arguably malicious, as all players openly acknowledge they are playing a zero sum game and the object of the game is to take money from other players (they openly admit they wish you harm you). By playing the game it is acknowledged that you understand the schema: you're putting yourself at risk knowing the other actor's actions cannot be predicted with absolute certainty and thus your own actions cannot be perfectly correct. Still, you know the others are trying to earn your money and it can be said that there are decisions that are better than others with some certainty. In no event should you merely play your own hand without consideration to the hands of others.
So these are the situations, collaborative schemata, uncollaborative schemata, malicious schemata, and the (seeming) absence of schemata. Additionally schemata are generally not discussed as such, the term is an artifice to specifically describe . . . schema, but it can observed, described, and then predicted. In no scenario in life is it a good idea to take action without some basic knowledge of the repercussions of those actions and an idea of the prevalent schemata in use, such actions may be negligent and certainly failure to consider the repercussions is negligent.
Terms and conditions are unclear
Use of word "term" has multiple definitions, and I have misrepresented it in the title. While I have used it in the contractual context of "a legally binding provision" I more intend terminology "a noun or compound word used in a specific context meaning" as well as a discrete span of time. During the course of this article you may believe it is used in the context of a logical expression, as my argument and it's basis are unclear to you. In any event since misunderstanding and confusion are precisely my meaning, it is an appropriate use.
Legal contracts are obtuse to the lay reader particularly because there is so much variability in language which in common dialog is grossly ignored and verbosity is not always necessarily nor desired. If your lover says "I love you," you can't rightly say, "In what context do you mean?" though certainly definitively knowing the intended context is critical to understanding the message. We allow ourselves and each other to make great assumptions, aware or unaware, and generally the repercussions of these lapses in communication and behavior are recoverable and we expect to actively recover them. Superficially it would seem that only our own lives are affected.
The terminology "rate of change" in the former jay walking scenario is derived from mathematical derivatives, an explanation which is beyond the scope of this article. However it was bastardized to reach the manner I have used it and it was bastardized further (or independently derivatived) as it is used in Stock market technical analysis. A stock's 20 day rate of change would be the ((price today)-(price 20 days ago))/(price 20 days ago). Easy, right?
Now if I said "The car hit me because I failed to anticipate it's rate of change." Your understanding of my sentence has everything to do with your individual background and nothing at all to do with the words I've actually used. Much like the colloquial use of the word "theory" and it's use in the scientific community. Or top & bottom. Not only are those words relative to the conversation but also to each individual's personal background and familiarity with multiple contexts to which those words can be applied. Genuine failure to communicate can escape both parties even when they are attempting to communicate in good faith, as there is a gulf of variability in our backgrounds and understandings which lead us to fail in the conundrum of dialog. An interesting thing happens when parties are not attempting to communicate in good faith.
Using foreign terms in common language, everyone is doing it.
Math can be a confusing subject for many reasons. Firstly there is good evidence to suggest that our basic ability to count is comprised of: One, two, many. We've expanded this as a result of an artifice we've developed to count beyond our basic ability to comprehend numbers. Then, as we are particularly cunning creatures, we created another artifice to manipulate and understand these countings beyond two. So to that extent math is an illusion. A very very useful illusion.
When you have a big creative brain, as humans believe we do, it is important to have the ability to describe things that not only don't exist but may not be possible. This is important as without fore knowledge of the outcome results and steps leading to results cannot be reliably predicted. Thus some degree of imprecision is actually required of language, we wouldn't get very far in life if we couldn't communicate or comprehend options, possibilities, or indeed irrelevant and useless concepts - our greatest flaw is our greatest strength. Math is such a language. Math can describe things that are real, but doesn't require the things it describes to be real. So if you look at math as a separate language, as I do, it's easy to understand how people are confused by it. Like throwing a few words of Chinese into a conversation using American English, the terms simply shouldn't be mixed willy nilly (wildly, without considering their effect). Especially when continuity of one language is expected, in the hidden example above I began using the psychological term schema and it's plural schemata without introduction or explanation. You either inferred it's meaning from context, knew it, looked it up, or pretended it didn't matter until I linked the definition. But schema is a great word as it doesn't make modern sense outside of it's intended lexicon (to my knowledge). Medicine at least has the forethought to label mundane things in a dead language so we all know the specific conditions we're dealing with as we continue to speak the other language, as no one really speaks Latin anymore. Plus, many people dress up in costumes so you know they'll be switching to Latin for brief periods, so if someone says "Gastric Lavage" you know that there is a Latin root and the costumed folks aren't actually talking about your aunt Lavoush.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, lets talk about math and exponential growth as it refers to actual occurrences in reality which affect our lives: Crime. If we're talking about a 7% yearly increase in the number (volume) of crimes committed after 10 years the number of crimes committed annually will have doubled. But you're probably more interested in the number of people committing crimes relative to the number of people available to be victimized in each instance, which would be Crime rate. Living in a place with 5 crimes and 100,000 people is far different than living in a place with 5 crimes and 10 people even though the volume of crime is the same. So now were talking about the volume of crime, the Crime rate (crime per 1000 people), the increase in volume of crime, and the increase in the Crime rate, which is a percentage of increase for a percentaged statistic. So not only does the volume of crime affect the Crime rate the volume of people affects the Crime rate and there will be a cascade effect in all the statistics if just one base number is changed. So if there are 72,000 crimes in Detroit in 2008 while it's population is 951,000 (7.57%) and 72,000 crimes in Detroit in 2009 while it's population is 800,000 it's Crime rate has increased to 9% which will often be reported without base information as: "19% increase in crime" (am I talking about crime rate or volume?) or "a 2009 crime rate that's 118.9% that of 2008." God help us if both the population, number of crimes, police tactics, and economic climate changed during that time and someone tries to use those statistics to say anything about crime's change.
"There are liars, damned liars, and statisticians." - Mark Twain
Deliberate or Negligent misrepresentation
My point is that headlines and conversations about statistics are often not only misleading due to ineptitude, deliberately exploitative of our collective failure to understand statistics, but also reflect falsely applied context of lexicons. While our speech is generally given a lot of leeway for understanding in dialog the language of math is very specific. And if I say: "There's been a 9% increase in crime." it will often go unchecked, do I mean a 9% increase in the Crime Rate or the volume of crime because they are not the same thing. If I want to be really dubious I can even say, "the rate of crime has increased 9%" and be referring to the volume of crime even if the Crime Rate is the same. While in lay dialog volume and rate can be freely interchanged the statistical term "Crime rate" is a specific label with a specific meaning. The fact that statistics are misrepresented both knowingly and unwittingly is relevant and must be appreciated as it addresses many proposed counter arguments.
Correlation ≠ Causation, Math portion
So whenever someone quotes you a statistic be very careful to identify the specific words they are using, their source (since most of us are unsophisticated listeners), and the relevant variables that are the basis of that statistic. For this set of examples I'm going to take a moment to dive into some of the actual statistics of smoking associated death because I can't quote anyone directly and since no one ever believes me when I say it I'll just post it here so you can do the math yourself. Smoking associated death is generally quoted by volume, percentage increases of risk from percentages of occurrence (%Got it/%Don't got it), and professionally termed "tobacco related death". "Tobacco-related death" is a list of maladies which happens to include most western diseases, and to be clear if all the tobacco in the universe had never actually existed "tobacco related death" would continue without abate. We're going to compare that data to Motor Vehicle Accident (MVA) associated fatalities (quoted both as rate & volume depending on your side) and I'd love to see you do it for snow sport associated death (generally reported as death rate per ski day by this apparently sophisticated group) on your own time as I expect it'll compare in a manner similar to MVAs to smoking with the bonus that it is also a consensual activity that not everyone in America is necessarily exposed to. You can also make your own conclusions about the goals and relevance of the propaganda on all sides.
I am well acquainted with the argument that tobacco is an insidious disease and I'm comparing it to trauma which generally arrives in tandem with evidence of it's occurrence and thus a definitive diagnosis. It is then argued that trauma and "tobacco related death" is not a fair comparison. And while it is not "fair" that is because of the low incidence of death from "tobacco related illness" which is not significantly greater in people who smoke then who do not smoke, though there is no question it greater. A 10.3 times greater chance of laryngeal cancer (relative risk or RR) sure sounds like a lot until you realize the risk being discussed uses the thousandth's place. The table below and accompanying math is provided as I am making an unusual claim and wish to substantiate it, and encourage you to do your own math too, statistics wasn't my best subject.
Please note that I'm going to use this data in a manner it that was never intended, so I would like to preface it with this: There is no question that smoking increases your risk of death from many diseases and I personally believe it actually makes your life worse (though that hypothesis could easily be observation bias), the people who do this research are attempting to help us all live better and longer through science and should be unilaterally commended, please do not construe this as an endorsement of smoking.
This data was compiled between 1984-1994 and was gathered from middle aged and elderly males who were mostly white. Males and this age group represent a worse case scenario (including women and widely distributed ages would make my argument better), I'm using this data because it was easily available and published on the web but if you have raw data from the American Cancer Society run it yourself, I expect it to be an even better example than what I've presented below (the reason I know to do this calculation for you here is I've done the numbers before with a researcher for the American Cancer Society).
| Cigar Smoking status | Cancer Deaths | Men included | Total Cancers | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lung | Oral | Larynx | Esophagus | Pancreas | Bladder | |||
| Never Smokers | 269 | 20 | 5 | 67 | 327 | 94 | 121,529 | 782 |
| Former smokers | 36 | 4 | 3 | 8 | 30 | 10 | 7848 | 91 |
| Current Smokers | 88 | 6 | 4 | 9 | 28 | 6 | 88 | 141(88*) |
| 129,465 | 961* | |||||||
As you'll clearly note in "current smokers" the entire category of 88 died however they had 141 cancers among them when that occurred. This data was intended to show relative risk of cancers for cigar smoking, not for what I'm using it for so there will be more cancers in every category than people who died and I can only correct that in the category where everyone died though this data may over estimate the number of deaths in the tested population by 50 to 70%. However that won't mater since death from smoking is so trivial my point will still be proved with this data that is likely several orders of magnitude greater than death from tobacco-related illness in the general population (young people die of trauma and only if you live through that does your risk of cancer go up, and this data is all from people at high risk). We'll keep it simple and play this like stat 101 if you want to play along at home.
A) What is the chance that any random male died from a tobacco-related cancer?
961/129465= 0.74229%
B) What is the chance that a male who never smoked died from tobacco-related cancer?
782/121529= 0.64347%
C) What is the chance a male never smoked and never died from tobacco-related cancer?
(121529-782)/121,529= 99.35653%
D) What is the chance that a smoker died from tobacco-related cancer?
(91+88)/(7848+88)=179/7936= 2.25554%
E) What is the chance that a smoker never died from tobacco-related cancer?
((7848+88)-(91+88))/(7848+88)=7757/7936= 97.74446%
F) What is the percentage increase of percentage of death between smokers and never smokers for tobacco related cancer (answer in the form of a media headline)? D/B = You have a 350% greater chance of death from tobacco-related cancer if you smoke.
G) If a male never smoked, how much less of a raw chance (compared to random) does he have of death due to tobacco-related cancer? B-A = -0.09882%
H) If a male smoked how much more of a raw chance (compared to random) does he have of death due to tobacco-related cancer? D-A = +1.51325%
What is the risk of death after a Motor Vehicle Accident (MVA) within one year of that MVA in America in 2009? MVA deaths/US Pop = 35.9 million /307 million =11.7% (U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2010)
Note that the MVA data I chose is not normalized for age, but neither is my cigar smoking data. In the instance where I initially ran the raw data with a researcher I believe the answer to H was either +0.0004% or +0.004%, so be my guest and run it with general population data rather than the high risk people who volunteered for "Cancer Prevention Study II".
The math wears on me, but if you want to do the math to figure out what percentage more adult males die from MVAs than from tobacco-related illness and what percentage increase that is, feel free, but you'll actually have to dive into the census data for that and find additional research data as you can't do it with data above. Well you can, but it would be both meaningless and apparently good enough to make it into a headline.
Correlation ≠ Causation, analogy portion
The misrepresentations annoy me greatly since I know the data and it serves the argument against saving the world here. For example despite the fact that ~80% of people who died of lung cancer did smoke (American cancer society, cancer facts & figures 2005), that doesn't mean that even close to 80% of people who smoke will get lung cancer and die from it. It doesn't mean that 80% of people who smoke will die, nor that 80% of people who smoke will get lung cancer. That's not how causation works. If you smoke the chance you will get any cancer is generally low (but higher than the general population) and if you do get cancer it's not necessarily going to be lung cancer, if you do get lung cancer you probably won't die from it, but IF you were dead AND you died of lung cancer THEN there's an 80% chance you smoked. And that's all that can actually be said by the widely published data in consumer level cancer data. If you mix that sentence up any other way you are misrepresenting the data, knowingly or not. I'd also like to point out that if we stumble upon your corpse and you died of lung cancer then there's a 90% chance you ate bread, you may consider that fact evidence of a conspiracy by the bread industry but in reality both pieces of data are virtually useless to the living. The figures for "incidence" for the general population actually are available though aren't very compelling (as hinted at in the math section above), and while I can't say that's why they are generally missing from reports about cancer, they are generally missing from reports about cancer.
If you're not a data monger then a simple illustration should help you out. If 100% of the people who died in the last 100 years on an magical island I own died of murder and the death rate is 1 person died for every 950 billion person years, your actual risk of being murdered on my island is laughably low (depending on whether you have 6 or more zeros in your age I suppose). Though no one can dismiss the fact that murder is the leading cause of death on my magical island. If you take a man who lives in the real world who had lung cancer and died due to it, there's an 80% chance he smoked. If he lived on my magical island and he died for any reason, there's a 100% chance he was murdered. To put it another way, if you choose to live on the magical island you will almost certainly be murdered, but probably not today or anytime in the lifetime of a person living in Irvine, California (which had zero murders per 100,000 people around 2006). I could easily write an entire article just about data, correlation, causation, and prediction but that would be tedious. For our purposes just take away that Mark Twain had a point.
It's getting hot in here
Which brings me to all the people trying to save the world generally. I reject the premise that humanity is significant enough to determine the fate of the planet, when the reality is we are not significant and some form of life on earth will go one even after we drive ourselves to extinction. This propensity toward self extinction is not a trait that is unique to the human form of life however our ego mania makes us think that we are particularly adept at it. After all, it is our own lives that are being extinguished when it comes to us and that somehow seems more important and relevant than microbes, deer, insects, and other organisms driving themselves to extinction by over using their resources, murder, genocide, etc. It has been said that we are the only species capable of comprehending our predicament and altering our actions to prevent it, and I submit that there is relatively little evidence for that tandem claim. It is, however, relatively unlikely that a species other than our own will lead to our extinction, though that may just be my own human ego centrism talking as a virus would be eminently qualified to at least radically correct our overpopulation.
While I applaud the hearts of the philanthropic, my belief is that philanthropy in it's current form isn't useful. If it is true that the only behavior you can control (with certainty) is your own and that is coupled with the observation of a minority of humans choosing not to exercise that control it follows that any, and notably minor, destructive or detrimental behavior which happen to have either a reward mechanization or no immediately observable negative outcome will become pervasive. That behavior will grow until it reaches a self limiting point whereupon a corrective force will be exerted on that behavior, all we can have control over is when and possibly who. No matter how many times I put some brewer's yeast in a vessel of wort, the yeast always propagate until most of them die. Even when I save a few from their self induced Holocaust and place them in a new vessel of resources it's always the same, they always squander their resources in a matter of days and pollute the environment to such an extent that nearly all of them die. Without that sort of reliability from life, it'd be very hard for me to make beer. So it's a blessing really.
Choice, to the extent that we can choose, makes a difference.
If I get peace of mind eating a carrot and you get chocolate and sweet, sweet butter fat by eating a piece of chocolate cake I don't have a problem with either of our choices. If your piece of cake is 500 calories however, you cannot choose to eat the cake and match my caloric intake unless you moderate your portion. If you fail to moderate your portion, and your goal is to not gain weight, you are 1/7th your way to a pound of fat and you have chosen that path for yourself. That is: even if you choose to ignore or reject the consequences for your actions reality has already applied them for you.
In this example if you weigh 140lbs that cake represents 1/980 of what is required to double your weight. If you then keep your diet in order and your activity level similar and have one full slice of cake per day for 2.68 years you'll be 280lbs after your last serving. This is not exponential growth since the serving of cake will be the same independent of your weight, and not proportional to your current weight. Exponential growth only applies when whatever you started with (the principle) is being increased at a rate that is relative to the principle (such as with compound interest). In this case, since the cake you eat isn't being increased as your waist line grows, it's not exponential growth.
In fact (excluding financials) you're unlikely to experience any exponential growth directly yourself, ever, because that's not generally how individual reality works. Your first hint that exponential growth is occurring, if you choose not to look for it, will be that there suddenly isn't nearly as much cake as there used to be. Then, ever too quickly, there will be none. You may learn that there were many people each choosing to eat the cake. As the number of people choosing to eat cake increased our consumption of cake exponentially increased even if the amount that each individual consumed diminished due to health concerns.
The universe is a system that is self limiting because infinity and abundance are illusions of math that our inept minds simply cannot comprehend. The beauty of it is that it is not particularly relevant that we understand it since when we run full face into a lack of resources our populations will automatically be adjusted to a more sustainable level. And yadda, yada, yada, situation normal! (I just yada'd war, famine, and pestilence.)
There is some degree of choice in this, if we all go live in caves tomorrow the energy crisis will have been averted. So go ahead and live in a cave. I'm waiting. Here you are armed with this knowledge and you still refuse to live in a cave. I understand, hell, I'm not living in a cave they're too cold and musty for me. I have allergies, you understand. But the energy crisis would also be averted if everyone ELSE lived in a cave and I keep my air conditioned apartment in the desert. While you're out there, see if you can bring me some dodo feathers and a few fossils, I need them to make myself some fashionable clothing.
In fact (excluding financials) you're unlikely to experience any exponential growth directly yourself, ever, because that's not generally how individual reality works. Your first hint that exponential growth is occurring, if you choose not to look for it, will be that there suddenly isn't nearly as much cake as there used to be. Then, ever too quickly, there will be none. You may learn that there were many people each choosing to eat the cake. As the number of people choosing to eat cake increased our consumption of cake exponentially increased even if the amount that each individual consumed diminished due to health concerns.
The universe is a system that is self limiting because infinity and abundance are illusions of math that our inept minds simply cannot comprehend. The beauty of it is that it is not particularly relevant that we understand it since when we run full face into a lack of resources our populations will automatically be adjusted to a more sustainable level. And yadda, yada, yada, situation normal! (I just yada'd war, famine, and pestilence.)
There is some degree of choice in this, if we all go live in caves tomorrow the energy crisis will have been averted. So go ahead and live in a cave. I'm waiting. Here you are armed with this knowledge and you still refuse to live in a cave. I understand, hell, I'm not living in a cave they're too cold and musty for me. I have allergies, you understand. But the energy crisis would also be averted if everyone ELSE lived in a cave and I keep my air conditioned apartment in the desert. While you're out there, see if you can bring me some dodo feathers and a few fossils, I need them to make myself some fashionable clothing.
The population problem is there really isn't one.
Dr. Bartlett unwittingly makes a great reference here. In 1986 we had ~5,000,000,000 people (5 billion, I know those zeros are tiring to look at) growing at a rate of 1.7%/year. In 1999 the world population was 6 billion with a growth rate of 1.3%/year. And to quote Dr Bartlett: "If this modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would reach a density of one person per square meter on the dry-land surface of the earth in 780 years." And the mass of the total people on earth would equal the mass of the earth in 2400 years which is ludicrous, obviously. Nature will control the growth rate and population down. Negative population growth will happen, which will be followed by cyclic positive and negative growth rates with zero population always being an (unlikely) option, which is the standard for other observable living systems.
Now here's the rub. Humanitarian aid is generally aimed at preventing death and suffering. We offer medicine, water & irrigation systems, peace, and social assistance which delays the system's inherent correcting for a time. All we've done by preventing these peoples deaths is give them a longer life which sounds good at first blush but it generally means they will continue to need additional resources and will have children who will require still further food and resources that the population still doesn't have. If each couple has two children you've just perpetuated their problem. If each couple has more than two children, as is often the case, you've magnified it. Now there are even more people and their limited or absent resources must be subsidized at an increased rate. Since the world pie is limited, it's not even possible to sustain that level of growth and all you will have done is increased the number of people who are suffering. The choice is yours, 5,000 people can be suffering from starvation today or 20,000 in a few years. In the area known as Darfur there are 5.3 million people who left their homes due to a conflict involving a lack of resources, in this case water and arable land. The nuances of the atrocities committed there and in other refugee camps and among internally displaced persons are beyond the scope of this article. But feel free to investigate them on your own time.
While our humanity may compel us to fixate on the alleviation of the current suffering of our fellow human beings, and that suffering is significant, our help will only allow them to live which makes future death and suffering occur somewhat later and with greater magnitude. The pie, however big, has always been finite and treating the symptoms of limited resources ignores the equilibrium that is inevitable. We have chosen to allow our populations to grow out of control and beyond their resources, and in so doing we have chosen the form the Destructor. Thus, I argue, that non-contingent humanitarian aid is an absolute waste of resources. All philanthropic endeavors should include a measure to off set their positive benefit, chiefly in this would be family planning and general education (I accept that generally our loss of resources can be off set by good will and political good fortune in our favor when "aid" is dispensed appropriately). And education generally hasn't alleviated the problem to date, but merely kicks the can (maybe far enough, maybe not). Although, if you're heartless enough I suppose you could bring a polio vaccine to a rural area then advocate war, but to me that misses the point though it would be mathematically effective. By this same logic I have argued that the HIV epidemic in Africa is nature controlling the population (based on the virulence principle of disease) and that there should be no efforts to treat HIV if sustainable methods of contraception, famine prevention (resource management), and a culture of personal responsibility cannot be erected. It's called acquired immune deficiency syndrome for a reason.
Limited resources are the solution, not the problem
Back to world population, in 2010 the world population was 6,840,507,000 (Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators) with 1.1%/year growth. So what does this data tell us in light of the previous 1.7% and 1.3% quoted rates? That despite our relative failure to address population growth on an international level and the millions of additional population added to the planet each year the growth rate is declining. Even though the number of people on the planet is ever increasing, the growth rate is declining. Just reading the world population growth rate graph I'd say that we'll have ~0.5% population growth in 2030 if all goes well. Around that time I expect it to start fluctuating, merely as a natural living system that I'm observing mathematically, which means I'd expect there will be several instances where millions more people die than are born each year world wide. Whether that is because of family planning, resource management, and education or because of war, famine, and pestilence is really up to individuals who are not generally anyone who would be reading this. We choose the headlines, either through force of will or ineptitude. Personally I'd rather hear about an outbreak of contraception over one of HIV. Education in the states has somewhat successfully mitigated HIV after a generation, but why Americans are railing against drug companies for not donating billions in drugs to reduce the HIV epidemic in Africa is quite confusing when, by the American measure, several hundred thousand dollars of education could have a superior effect. The counter argument here is often that it wouldn't work in that culture, which to me is merely evidence that their culture must change as failure to adapt will result in continued suffering on the part of the blighted. If I were to offer any advice in improving the failed attempts at education here to it would be to provide education in a manner that the intended audience would be receptive to not in the manner the providers would like to provide it. If the majority of the condoms you donate have hearts and love poems on them, you're more the fool.
There is pleasant truth and unpleasant truth and whatever your opinion about any particular truth may be, it doesn't change the facts.
Which brings me to the "Inconvenient Truth" global warming debate, which I believe is ridiculous. We, the human race, have demonstrated time and again that we are fundamentally incapable of diverting crisis, rather we mitigate crisis when beset by it. Ask the Dutch about damns. All of which is convenient because when systems reach the tipping point they will auto-correct. So until those who are currently alive witness the deaths of millions I consider the grand swath of human history evidence that we will do nothing until it is "too late" as Al Gore might say. I believe the globe is currently warming, I suspect it's part of a larger warming trend that will continue, though I'm not convinced that the cause of it's warming is worth discussing nor that there is even enough information to discuss it's cause. Though I do agree that it'd be a hell of an experiment to run in your only Petri dish.
What's interesting to me in this particular "save the world" debate is that I expect peak oil output has come and gone with little notice (out side of price increases) several times already. While the US has some transparency about oil reserves and the like, most countries don't share the opinion that the free flow of information is useful. Places like Saudi Arabia and Opec have a financial incentive to limit the availability of that information though the market will force them to monitor it themselves. Whether they monitor it as well as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Enron, and World Com, or Coke and Standard Oil remains to be seen.
It's curious that a morality play in October of 1973 (Several Muslim nation's objection to the western support of Israel) revealed that even minor disruptions in the supply of oil significantly affect it's price. Within a month the price of oil quadrupled, thus leading to Opec. Armed with this knowledge it was reasonable for Opec to engage in price fixing and conduct additional pricing experiments after 1974. I know it's morally wrong when Opec creates false scarcity but ok when Apple, Ferrari, and De Beers do it, but stay with me.
Without first hand data it's difficult to estimate what level the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries oil reserves are at, or even if they know among each other, but I expect they are at less than half of total reserves. What is certain is that oil is finite and extraction is inefficient, and if delicately handled those who own the oil reserves will be able to have truly impressive returns on their investments if they keep them long enough - despite alternatives or arguably better fuel types existence. The optimal price for oil is slightly above the market price of the best alternative provided that alternative has a significant financial barrier to entry (reference artificial diamonds) such as a lack of infrastructure, adoption cost, and perhaps most importantly a cultural barrier, the like which are plentiful and varied for "Big oil". Just like the HIV epidemic in Africa, unless we have substantial and immediate cultural reforms energy will continue to be a problem for us. And it's understandable I suppose, just like I'm sure condom free orgies with many partners in whore houses must be considered great in certain parts of Africa. By contrast I believe Oil is really great, it's an easily transported, stable, energy dense fuel source, that facilitates our ability to freely go where ever we want whenever we want. If you were going to invent a fuel source you'd wish you could invent petroleum, I'm talking to you Diesel!
Back to Opec, I expect that they will continue to steadily raise prices by reducing production in order to ride their one trick pony as long as possible. The longer they can provide sufficient oil not to spur us into paying for a transition to another source the longer they will have for innovation to improve extraction techniques. This makes peak oil a moving target, as does the discovery of additional sources so "peak oil" itself is a bit of a foolish and unworthy concept. What is both more worthy and certain is that the price of oil extraction, and thus oil, faces exponential growth.
For any given "peak oil" we will see that point were we believe attempting to recover additional oil is not feasible only to be surprised by the price consumers are willing to pay for it. I personally won't stop using gas until its about $6 a gallon in (2009 dollars), below that fee it's just not worth a dramatic behavior change (and I'd love for that to happen tomorrow). For this reason I would find it hard to fathom Opec not regularly increasing the price of oil. Price will increase and many consumers will be priced out of oil use which will drop across the board. The decrease is an obvious necessity when availability has decreased, but the consumer will feel as though he has chosen to consume less oil (I can almost hear it, "Those bastards raised the prices! I refuse to buy it!" Sure buddy, sure). If you want to lower the emissions from fossil fuel today, you can end oil subsidies tomorrow and have a great reduction in fossil fuel use by the end of the quarter by similar mechanism. If you really want to reduce fossil fuel consumption you can add a 10% tax on it tomorrow, but that's not quite as useful in the long run as ending subsidies first.
It's curious that a morality play in October of 1973 (Several Muslim nation's objection to the western support of Israel) revealed that even minor disruptions in the supply of oil significantly affect it's price. Within a month the price of oil quadrupled, thus leading to Opec. Armed with this knowledge it was reasonable for Opec to engage in price fixing and conduct additional pricing experiments after 1974. I know it's morally wrong when Opec creates false scarcity but ok when Apple, Ferrari, and De Beers do it, but stay with me.
Without first hand data it's difficult to estimate what level the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries oil reserves are at, or even if they know among each other, but I expect they are at less than half of total reserves. What is certain is that oil is finite and extraction is inefficient, and if delicately handled those who own the oil reserves will be able to have truly impressive returns on their investments if they keep them long enough - despite alternatives or arguably better fuel types existence. The optimal price for oil is slightly above the market price of the best alternative provided that alternative has a significant financial barrier to entry (reference artificial diamonds) such as a lack of infrastructure, adoption cost, and perhaps most importantly a cultural barrier, the like which are plentiful and varied for "Big oil". Just like the HIV epidemic in Africa, unless we have substantial and immediate cultural reforms energy will continue to be a problem for us. And it's understandable I suppose, just like I'm sure condom free orgies with many partners in whore houses must be considered great in certain parts of Africa. By contrast I believe Oil is really great, it's an easily transported, stable, energy dense fuel source, that facilitates our ability to freely go where ever we want whenever we want. If you were going to invent a fuel source you'd wish you could invent petroleum, I'm talking to you Diesel!
Back to Opec, I expect that they will continue to steadily raise prices by reducing production in order to ride their one trick pony as long as possible. The longer they can provide sufficient oil not to spur us into paying for a transition to another source the longer they will have for innovation to improve extraction techniques. This makes peak oil a moving target, as does the discovery of additional sources so "peak oil" itself is a bit of a foolish and unworthy concept. What is both more worthy and certain is that the price of oil extraction, and thus oil, faces exponential growth.
For any given "peak oil" we will see that point were we believe attempting to recover additional oil is not feasible only to be surprised by the price consumers are willing to pay for it. I personally won't stop using gas until its about $6 a gallon in (2009 dollars), below that fee it's just not worth a dramatic behavior change (and I'd love for that to happen tomorrow). For this reason I would find it hard to fathom Opec not regularly increasing the price of oil. Price will increase and many consumers will be priced out of oil use which will drop across the board. The decrease is an obvious necessity when availability has decreased, but the consumer will feel as though he has chosen to consume less oil (I can almost hear it, "Those bastards raised the prices! I refuse to buy it!" Sure buddy, sure). If you want to lower the emissions from fossil fuel today, you can end oil subsidies tomorrow and have a great reduction in fossil fuel use by the end of the quarter by similar mechanism. If you really want to reduce fossil fuel consumption you can add a 10% tax on it tomorrow, but that's not quite as useful in the long run as ending subsidies first.
My proposal of first ending subsidies (which should happen regardless of our stance on fossil fuel consumption) and later adding a Federal fossil fuel tax will never occur as the American legislature is entirely too corrupt beholding to corporate interests and the American people oppose inconvenience with supernatural vigor. I am always surprised by the American people's ability to oppose things that make sense, and ignore facts with such fidelity, that I have concluded that supernatural forces are involved.
People like their cars, plastic, and petroleum products, I get it. This is entirely expected, but no amount of market manipulation, socialism, denial or bullshit will stop it's inevitable collapse. HIV will correct a cultural problem in Africa as the global financial collapse fixed foolishly high risk nontransparent financial bets. Just maybe not now, and probably not nicely. The free market always works because it can't be stopped, but giving a trillion new whore houses to a bunch of whore mongers isn't an action of the free market it's an attempt at manipulation. Despite this, systems will correct despite all deception and manipulation whether we regard that correction as a "correction", "crash", "collapse", "ruin", or "devastation" will be proportional to the degree of manipulation and our exposure to the gerrymandered resource. Which is why you want to be on the right side of the wave (Capitalism is a tidal wave, surf it or be crushed by it. Eh? Pay attention!) Since we can't control those who oppose reason and good sense with supernatural vigor we must instead position ourselves to both not be destroyed by their tremendous stupidity and to benefit from it if at all possible.
Closing thoughts
In relation to my so called pessimistic view of humanity my grandmother once told me something to the effect of:
Humans have demonstrated that they behave exactly like any other organism, yeast included, in their inability to regulate themselves without system pressures brutally forcing behavior upon them. It may be true that we have a profoundly sick culture in certain ways, and other cultures may be correct to point at it's toxicity, but it's fairly well adapted to the World as it exists today for whatever reason as evidenced by Western culture's destruction of native culture and native culture's self destruction when faced with Western problems without the benefit of Western culture. But the West consumes too much and will face further correction itself. More efforts should be taken to make matter fail safely, because they will fail. Symptoms of suffering should not be treated if a greater effort is not placed on altering the root cause of the suffering, lest suffering be perpetuated. Supporting causes that do not properly address the cause of suffering is immoral and futile. Knowing the actual root of problems and addressing them is complex enough to be near impossible, fortunately it doesn't much matter as the system is self correcting. Unfortunately the system may correct us out of the equation.
We're likely on the titanic. If you're smart you'll be in first class, if not you'll be in steerage, but we're both heading toward the same iceberg. Some of us will wind up on the bottom of the Atlantic, but the organisms that feed upon us will flourish.
People like their cars, plastic, and petroleum products, I get it. This is entirely expected, but no amount of market manipulation, socialism, denial or bullshit will stop it's inevitable collapse. HIV will correct a cultural problem in Africa as the global financial collapse fixed foolishly high risk nontransparent financial bets. Just maybe not now, and probably not nicely. The free market always works because it can't be stopped, but giving a trillion new whore houses to a bunch of whore mongers isn't an action of the free market it's an attempt at manipulation. Despite this, systems will correct despite all deception and manipulation whether we regard that correction as a "correction", "crash", "collapse", "ruin", or "devastation" will be proportional to the degree of manipulation and our exposure to the gerrymandered resource. Which is why you want to be on the right side of the wave (Capitalism is a tidal wave, surf it or be crushed by it. Eh? Pay attention!) Since we can't control those who oppose reason and good sense with supernatural vigor we must instead position ourselves to both not be destroyed by their tremendous stupidity and to benefit from it if at all possible.
Closing thoughts
In relation to my so called pessimistic view of humanity my grandmother once told me something to the effect of:
If a woman wants to find a good man to marry, she must merely ignore everything he says and pay attention only to what he does.I've been watching humanity for a long time, and despite the up beat lip service humanity constantly gives itself and our high and mighty view of our own actions, humanity's actions have betrayed you. And the evidence is all around all of us. To put it in as Dr. Albert A. Bartlett does "Please. You check the facts. Please check my Arithmetic. If you find errors please let me know. But if you don't find errors then I hope you'll take this very, very seriously."
Humans have demonstrated that they behave exactly like any other organism, yeast included, in their inability to regulate themselves without system pressures brutally forcing behavior upon them. It may be true that we have a profoundly sick culture in certain ways, and other cultures may be correct to point at it's toxicity, but it's fairly well adapted to the World as it exists today for whatever reason as evidenced by Western culture's destruction of native culture and native culture's self destruction when faced with Western problems without the benefit of Western culture. But the West consumes too much and will face further correction itself. More efforts should be taken to make matter fail safely, because they will fail. Symptoms of suffering should not be treated if a greater effort is not placed on altering the root cause of the suffering, lest suffering be perpetuated. Supporting causes that do not properly address the cause of suffering is immoral and futile. Knowing the actual root of problems and addressing them is complex enough to be near impossible, fortunately it doesn't much matter as the system is self correcting. Unfortunately the system may correct us out of the equation.
We're likely on the titanic. If you're smart you'll be in first class, if not you'll be in steerage, but we're both heading toward the same iceberg. Some of us will wind up on the bottom of the Atlantic, but the organisms that feed upon us will flourish.
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