tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15859956140376804572024-03-27T07:38:03.043+01:00The Seneca EffectIncreases are of Sluggish Growth.
But the way to Ruin is RapidUgo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.comBlogger230125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-12822675878895339062023-09-10T14:42:00.001+02:002023-09-10T14:42:13.173+02:00The Seneca Effect Blog Returns on Substack! <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUITCHzOGbrzoySirjodCzaAN36J3xLaOaE0LodoeIn7DI7By6OxmvJV_t_TkAxtYOZlqPwfAwrXfEy915xgQ6SVeH9jbIW9MkZIQGAIwnioC3W1-9xBCZGx1ZjeqqN-9HEEeVafNRQlv3WPQC-75D979B_p5Qqej-eZ9m9baVI7bOq0Ow0cvxpexwfSec/s236/ThrowMeToTheWolves2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="128" data-original-width="236" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUITCHzOGbrzoySirjodCzaAN36J3xLaOaE0LodoeIn7DI7By6OxmvJV_t_TkAxtYOZlqPwfAwrXfEy915xgQ6SVeH9jbIW9MkZIQGAIwnioC3W1-9xBCZGx1ZjeqqN-9HEEeVafNRQlv3WPQC-75D979B_p5Qqej-eZ9m9baVI7bOq0Ow0cvxpexwfSec/w532-h289/ThrowMeToTheWolves2.jpg" width="532" /></a></div><br /><p>The Seneca Effect Blog is returning! You can find it on Substack at this address:</p><p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://senecaeffect.substack.com/"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>https://senecaeffect.substack.com/</b></span></a></p><p>After that the original location of the blog (<a href="http://Senecaeffect.com">senecaeffect.com</a>) was sabotaged by the Google search engine, I thought that it was useless to fight the powers that be. So, I closed the blog. </p><p>Yet, I found that Substack seems to be immune (for the time being) to Google's curse. And, unexpectedly, the "ghost" version of the Seneca blog stationed there continued to gain followers even though it was not updated anymore. So, I'll restart publishing Seneca-inspired posts on Substack. The new Seneca blog will be a little more philosophical and literary than the old one and it will mirror also my <a href="http://www.chimeramyth.blogspot.com">Chimeras</a> blog. More technical posts will go to <a href="http://www.thesunflowerparadigm.blogspot.com">www.thesunflowerparadigm.blogspot.com</a>.</p><p>And onward we go, running with the wolves!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-31363089294825778892023-05-22T19:36:00.003+02:002023-10-04T16:57:04.508+02:00The Seneca Blog is Closed<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><p></p><p>The Seneca Effect blog closes down for the reasons explained in a <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/05/the-seneca-effect-blog-is-closing-down.html">previous post</a>. But the spirit and the ideas of Seneca and his modest modern follower, Ugo Bardi, continue in other forms. Ugo Bardi blogs:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>On energy and sustainability on "<a href="https://thesunflowerparadigm.blogspot.com/">The Sunflower Paradigm" </a></li><li>On biology and ecosystem science on "<a href="http://theproudholobionts.blogspot.com">The Proud Holobionts</a>"</li><li>And Seneca is coming back <a href="https://senecaeffect.substack.com/">on substack</a>! </li></ul><div>And this is what Seneca has to say about our current situation</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9ZZky8JBuCCmq4tRsnZioblFLHx2tXBZw1AjDpplkqj2d4s7DZGoMTV1ZrsHYeo0O7QGf4P33f4B3j1AjWehOROFHsJE-_nW0aLrFoDppQhJYcNhnYK4Bec0__wYkvtwd6ICXkeMiMENfTXkoYBRBjV3cBr4xeJn8kJw_tY85kH5yfUEpOTz9jEjtzg/s768/Lucius-annaeus-seneca-quotes-12-768x768.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="768" height="401" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9ZZky8JBuCCmq4tRsnZioblFLHx2tXBZw1AjDpplkqj2d4s7DZGoMTV1ZrsHYeo0O7QGf4P33f4B3j1AjWehOROFHsJE-_nW0aLrFoDppQhJYcNhnYK4Bec0__wYkvtwd6ICXkeMiMENfTXkoYBRBjV3cBr4xeJn8kJw_tY85kH5yfUEpOTz9jEjtzg/w401-h401/Lucius-annaeus-seneca-quotes-12-768x768.png" width="401" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-24807467890154593562023-05-20T13:48:00.007+02:002023-06-26T21:53:03.325+02:00The Seneca Effect Blog is Closing Down<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjietJpx6b6niREYlLVdbBcdFXzY-uWTXdH4jMusb-CHoubY_ECa2KVdzpEZ_oMu9j5yjCQw65czkCVaidDtGV1KwM5s3eDGVyqZGRQZGMfpOiFsC_wFkL9zfC374pNT9M4rcU_fgpA6s1QfkgHFIwDSlgK1zPRB33PG-PQLTuPq3narh-lO_9nhPxqeA/s727/SenecaFun.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="727" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjietJpx6b6niREYlLVdbBcdFXzY-uWTXdH4jMusb-CHoubY_ECa2KVdzpEZ_oMu9j5yjCQw65czkCVaidDtGV1KwM5s3eDGVyqZGRQZGMfpOiFsC_wFkL9zfC374pNT9M4rcU_fgpA6s1QfkgHFIwDSlgK1zPRB33PG-PQLTuPq3narh-lO_9nhPxqeA/w475-h221/SenecaFun.png" width="475" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><i>The Internet is full of angry people shouting insults at each other. Take it easy, fellows, do as a good stoic would do. Accept the will of the Gods, but keep doing your duty and help others as much as you can. And have a little fun, when you can.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>The moment has arrived: after about two years of posting on the "Seneca Effect" blog; I see that a cycle is concluded: look at the stats: </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNCwaZbnpqVuTM-EYV1Ei5xvXoKjx6mY7-87pElvbzH27fbnQglDg7brfjOUD-1gYATCKKNRAsI2by0vsAqWZjzCH8LSk-cph9P4_85e5wL-bkqPu0t1QMP9_9IGCxnkQcEXtn_jK_vyDr8azazSh5ruQxUNadZTEKVTZ_1lse_gpr4MwmrynxoDAoig/s1223/Seneca%20Stats.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="387" data-original-width="1223" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNCwaZbnpqVuTM-EYV1Ei5xvXoKjx6mY7-87pElvbzH27fbnQglDg7brfjOUD-1gYATCKKNRAsI2by0vsAqWZjzCH8LSk-cph9P4_85e5wL-bkqPu0t1QMP9_9IGCxnkQcEXtn_jK_vyDr8azazSh5ruQxUNadZTEKVTZ_1lse_gpr4MwmrynxoDAoig/w593-h187/Seneca%20Stats.png" width="593" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Clearly, it is not possible to continue in these conditions. It is time to reshuffle, retrench, regroup, reconsider, rebuild. The "Seneca Effects" will close, and I'll transfer my writing elsewhere. For the time being, I am returning to my old blog "<a href="https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/">Cassandra's Legacy</a>" that I had kept mothballed up to now (yes, Cassandra is returning!)</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">But to create a strategy for the future, first of all, I need to understand what went wrong. Why this remarkable "Hubbert Curve"? I can think of more than one reason, but essentially two: 1) The blog has been sabotaged by the search engines, Google in particular, and 2) the blog has evolved into something that readers find confusing. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">About the first hypothesis, there are surely elements of truth in it. I already discussed it <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/03/fighting-shadow-banning-seneca-blog.html">in a previous post</a>, and the majority of commenters agreed that they couldn't find the blog in the first rows of their search engine, except if they used "Bing." Apparently, Microsoft likes me, but Google doesn't. There is nothing especially conspiratorial in this. It already happened for my old <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2021/02/cassandra-is-dead-long-live-cassandra.html">"Cassandra" </a>blog. And I, for one, bow down in front of our new memetic overlords! </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">About the second hypothesis, it has elements of truth as well. The blog has evolved along with my personal views. I am normally classed together with the "catastrophists," and the idea of the "Seneca Cliff" can be seen as being as catastrophist as catastrophism can be. But my position is much more articulated than that: I see myself as a modern stoic. I accept the will of the Gods, but I consider it my duty to help people (including myself) to avoid the incoming disaster. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The problem is that some people seem to have internalized the idea that collapse is unavoidable, and they don't seem to be able to think of a better way to face it than turning themselves into poor peasants (or dreaming the same thing thereof). My view, instead, is that we have to build a resilient society by means of renewable energy and that it is possible to do that with the currently existing technology. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">You may or may not agree with my position; the point is that many people are confused by a blog that has a title that hints at a coming collapse while it deals with ways to <i>avoid </i>collapse (the same problem that "The Limits to Growth" study had: few people understood what the authors were trying to do). So, they see my position as "<a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/01/ugo-bardi-traitor-of-catastrophism-or.html">treason</a>" and proceed to insult me as a result. I prefer to close the blog than have readers like these. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Apart from a number of hopeless cases of people really gone papayas, the problem is that a blog (or any kind of publication) must have a certain consistency. Many bloggers succeeded in growing their readership by always posting the same thing, only with minor variations (I have a few ones in mind, but let me not name names). That's not strictly necessary, but I understand that the aims of the "Seneca Effect" blog, as it is now, are confusing for many readers. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">So, it is time for the Seneca blog to fold over and for me to move onward. The two "souls" of the blog will find their places in two different blogs. The discussion on energy will move to the existing blog "<a href="https://thesunflowerparadigm.blogspot.com/">The Sunflower Paradigm</a>." It has been a marginal blog so far, but you can note that it is reasonably easy to find. And its readership is growing.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Then, how about my meditations on history, art, philosophy, stoicism, and the like? They might go to my existing blog, "<a href="https://chimeramyth.blogspot.com/">Chimeras</a>." Or maybe to a new blog that could be titled "Meditations" à la Marcus Aurelius? I am still thinking about that. Suggestions are welcome. In the meantime, here is the latest post I published on Chimeras.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">_______________________________________________________________________</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 22px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0.75em 0px 0px; position: relative; text-align: center;"><a href="https://chimeramyth.blogspot.com/2023/05/after-50-years-of-catastrophism-we-are.html">After 50 years of Catastrophism, we are now facing the cliff. What would Seneca do?</a></h3><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-PaWQr2jOcckv4_KwzNF1mKJO3skayR7L4LJ7RtQRY8NHyciaSrGswBQNseju8NmEtS5LkZNm3vbOL3lLmpDA_TjiEj85T6xWOcD9N2P0i9XwQt3IF_hFKIUndOT8-_alCG6FmiJqPm2Zgxiykx1RJhAbfXykSE4Tg9Woi1cNKuScE0o_YvZP5FnGeA/s1280/RaftofTheMedusaGericault.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="874" data-original-width="1280" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-PaWQr2jOcckv4_KwzNF1mKJO3skayR7L4LJ7RtQRY8NHyciaSrGswBQNseju8NmEtS5LkZNm3vbOL3lLmpDA_TjiEj85T6xWOcD9N2P0i9XwQt3IF_hFKIUndOT8-_alCG6FmiJqPm2Zgxiykx1RJhAbfXykSE4Tg9Woi1cNKuScE0o_YvZP5FnGeA/w452-h309/RaftofTheMedusaGericault.jpg" width="452" /></a></div></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The Raft of the Medusa, a painting by Theodore Géricault (1818). It seems to illustrate the way some people feel in the current situation: survival implies throwing other people out of the raft. </i></div></div><br /><p>Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman Philosopher, never was a catastrophist, but he understood that in life you have to expect ups and downs. And that when things go bad, they go bad fast (<i>festinantur in damnum</i>). This is what I called the "<a href="http://senecaeffect.com/" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;">Seneca Effect.</a>" </p><p>Seneca was a stoic, a person steeped in the views of his times. It was an age when people understood that their control of the vagaries of life was limited. Sickness, ruin, pain, and death were facts of life for people who had no aspirin, no life insurance, and no dentists. In the stoics' view, bad moments had to be accepted and lived as a test of your moral fortitude, not as an excuse to forget one's duties in life. Seneca, just like all of us, had his defects. But when the final moment came for him, he accepted his destiny with dignity and serenity. </p><p>And here we are, what holds for a single person holds for humankind. We are facing a serious downturn, a decline that could be so rapid to call it a cliff. Half a century after the serious warning of "The Limits to Growth," we not yet falling, but we are on the edge. We start seeing the chasm ahead while the fog of time clears. </p><p>Is this becoming a test of moral fortitude for humankind? Unfortunately not. Humans are dividing themselves into tribes that fight each other, so far only verbally. Some just refuse to look ahead. Others think that, when jumping from the cliff, they'll be able to fly. Others search for someone to blame. </p><p>A mixture of ignorance and aggressivity is generating a tremendous wave of hate; at least from what I can see in the comments to <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/05/renewables-are-not-cleaner-caterpillar.html" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;">another post of mine</a>. These people seem to think they are already on the raft of the <i>Medusa</i>, the French ship that was wrecked at sea in 1816. Only 15 out of the 146 people stranded on the raft survived. And they did that by throwing the others into the sea and recurring to cannibalism. </p><p>But we are not there yet. There is still space for avoiding the sandbanks. We still can do our duty to live and help others living. Be a good stoic; do not lose hope, and do not fall into cruelty. </p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGio92GUpxJ1ZzWjl_D2JeeE28mNTSVxCW-jEjq89dYrG9bi2Anki8uniEehpbcekeURi5KPxS61mQGXd84sZGT6L5ZQ6dRRwp2zGLc3-EYDCCeeoxv-ucNt3XIUSDdJCAkpuZnGmoDAQjE84wEFeCRVz2agIPq9clf2atB1IIPx-WtZDiqEd956toRg/s1024/SenecaCruelty.jpg" style="color: #2288bb; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="642" data-original-width="1024" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGio92GUpxJ1ZzWjl_D2JeeE28mNTSVxCW-jEjq89dYrG9bi2Anki8uniEehpbcekeURi5KPxS61mQGXd84sZGT6L5ZQ6dRRwp2zGLc3-EYDCCeeoxv-ucNt3XIUSDdJCAkpuZnGmoDAQjE84wEFeCRVz2agIPq9clf2atB1IIPx-WtZDiqEd956toRg/w444-h278/SenecaCruelty.jpg" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="444" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-30194245561785728712023-05-14T22:09:00.018+02:002023-05-15T18:28:31.987+02:00Renewables are not a cleaner caterpillar, they are a new butterfly. A Discussion with Dennis Meadows<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSvb_NkhGuTJglzaHSjHXIvVzC-dqRxYJwrTI4wMI7HAcpvaNA-1YhMToJMMW_gxkF5-heCQ4S4JvlDqexqUErv1E59Y6ifcmE0uCdlQZ8NosfBfmIwOMI8Lm9Va3pYVrbv_WXXHP4zzE1mBDEWwJ4VZxysgLqCIsbg5IBlaKH8kqZX3gcEKctrQzEbw/s1652/UgoDennis.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="929" data-original-width="1652" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSvb_NkhGuTJglzaHSjHXIvVzC-dqRxYJwrTI4wMI7HAcpvaNA-1YhMToJMMW_gxkF5-heCQ4S4JvlDqexqUErv1E59Y6ifcmE0uCdlQZ8NosfBfmIwOMI8Lm9Va3pYVrbv_WXXHP4zzE1mBDEWwJ4VZxysgLqCIsbg5IBlaKH8kqZX3gcEKctrQzEbw/w512-h288/UgoDennis.jpg" width="512" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Dennis Meadows (left in the image) and Ugo Bardi in Berlin, 2016</i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: x-small;">A few days ago, I received a message from Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth," about a previous post of mine on "<a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/05/is-energy-transition-feasible-future-as.html">The Seneca Effect.</a>" I am publishing it here with his kind permission, together with my comments, and his comments on my comments. I am happy to report that after this exchange we are "99% in agreement."</span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">Ugo, </p><div>I read with interest <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/05/is-energy-transition-feasible-future-as.html">you review </a>of the Michaux/Ahmed debate.
Normally I greatly benefit from your writing. But in this case it seemed
to me that your text totally avoided addressing the central point -
replacing fossil fuels as an energy source with renewables will require
enormous amounts of metals and other resources which we have no
reasonable basis for assuming will be available. It is not true that
peak oil was presented principally as a prediction. Rather critics of
Hubert's original analysis misrepresented it as an effort to predict in
order to ridicule it - just as Bailey did for the<span style="font-style: italic;"> Limits to Growth</span>
natural resource data from World3. I was struck that your critique
of Michaux did not contain a single piece of empirical data - the strong
point of his research. Rather you engaged in what I term "proof by
assertion."</div><div><br />
</div><div>I am personally convinced that there is absolutely no possibility
for renewables to be expanded sufficiently that they will support
current levels of material consumption. I attach the text of a memo I
recently wrote to other members of the Belcher group stating this
belief (*). </div><div><br />
</div><p>
</p><div>Best regards Dennis Meadows</div><div><br /></div><div>_____________________</div><div><br /></div><div>Dear Dennis, </div><div><br /></div><div>first of all, it is always a pleasure to receive comments from you. It is not a problem to be in disagreement on some subjects -- the world would be boring if we all were! Besides, I think our disagreement is not so large once we understand certain assumptions. </div><div><br /></div><div>Let me start by saying that I fully agree with your statement that "<i>there is absolutely no possibility for renewables to be expanded sufficiently that they will support current levels of material consumption.</i>" Not only is it impossible, but even if it were, we would not want that!</div><div><br /></div><div>So, what do we disagree about? It is about the direction to take. The <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/05/is-energy-transition-feasible-future-as.html">fork in the path</a> leads in two different directions depending on the efficiency of renewable technologies: Path 1): <b>renewables are useless, </b>and Path 2):<b> renewables are just what we need</b>. </div><div><br /></div><div>I strongly argue for Path 2) in the sense that we definitely do NOT need to "support current levels of material consumption" to create a sustainable and reasonably prosperous society. But let me explain what I mean by that. </div><div><br /></div><div>First, in my opinion, the problem with Michaux's report is that it underestimates the efficiency of renewable technologies. He says that renewables are not really renewable, just "replaceable." He, like others who use this term, means that the plants that we are now building will not be replaceable once fossil fuels are gone. In this case, creating a renewable infrastructure will be a waste of resources and energy (Path 1). </div><div><br /></div><div><b>This view may have been correct until a few years ago, but it is now obsolete.</b> The recent scientific literature on the subject indicates that the efficiency of renewable technologies (expressed in terms of EROI, energy return on energy invested) is now significantly better than that of fossil fuels. Furthermore, it is large enough that the materials used can be recycled using renewable energy. There is a vast literature on this subject. On the specific question of the EROI, I suggest to you <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098/htm?trk=public_post_comment-text">this paper </a>by Murphy et al. You can also find an extensive bibliography of the field in our recent paper, "<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362270272_On_the_history_and_future_of_100_renewable_energy_systems_research">On the history and future of 100% renewable research</a>." </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, not everything is easy to recycle, and a future renewable infrastructure will have to avoid the use of rare metals (such as platinum for fuel cells) or metals that are not rare, but not abundant enough for the task (such as copper, that will have to be largely replaced by aluminum). That is possible: the current generation of wind and PV plants is mostly based on abundant and recyclable materials. Doing even better is part of the natural evolution of technology. What we can't recycle, we won't use. </div><div><br /></div><div>There is a much more fundamental point in this discussion. It is the very concept that we need renewables to be able to "replace fossil fuels," in the sense of matching in quantitative terms the energy produced today (in some views, even exceeding it in order to "keep the economy growing"). This is impossible, as we all agree. The point is that <b>renewables will greatly reduce the need for energy and materials to keep a complex civilization working.</b> If you think, for instance, of how inefficient and wasteful our fossil-based transportation system is, you see that by switching to electric transportation and shared vehicles, we can have the same services for a much smaller consumption of resources. This concept has been expressed by Tony Seba in a form that I interpret as, <b>"<a href="https://thedriven.io/2023/05/10/seba-says-ev-longevity-and-autonomy-will-cause-global-new-car-sales-to-plunge-75/">Renewables are not a cleaner caterpillar-- they are a new butterfly</a>"</b></div><div><br /></div><div>That doesn't mean that the geological limits of the transition aren't to be taken into account; the butterfly cannot fly higher than a certain height. Then, it may well be that we won't be able to move to renewables fast enough to avoid a societal, or even ecosystemic, crash. On this point, please take a look <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/9/094009">at a paper that I co-authored</a>, where we used the term <b>"the sower's strategy"</b> to indicate that the transition is possible, but it will need hard work, as the peasants of old knew. But staying with fossil fuels is leading us to disaster (as you correctly say in the document for the Balaton group) while moving to nuclear fission simply means exchanging a fossil fuel (hydrocarbons) for another fossil fuel (uranium). Going renewables is a fighting chance, but I believe it is the only chance we have. </div><div><br /></div><div>There is an even more fundamental point that goes beyond a certain technology being more efficient than another. Going renewables, as <a href="https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/">Nafeez Ahmed</a> correctly points out, is a switch from a predatory economy to a bioeconomy. Our industrial sphere should imitate the biosphere that has been using minerals from the Earth's crust on land for the past 350 million years (at least) and never ran out of anything. As I said elsewhere, we need to do what the biosphere does, that is:</div><div><div><div><br /></div><div>1. Use only minerals that are abundant.</div><div>2. Use them sparingly and efficiently.</div><div>3. Recycle ferociously. </div></div><div><br /></div></div><div>If we can do that, we have a unique opportunity in the history of humankind. It means we can build a society that does not destroy everything in order to satisfy human greed. Can we do it? As always, reality will be the ultimate judge. </div><div><br /></div><div>Ugo</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>__________________________________________________________________</div><div>The answer from Dennis Meadows</div><div><br /></div><div>Ugo,
<div><br />
</div>
<div>Thank you for sending me your article. I agree that the main
difference of opinion lies in the direction to take. I am reminded of
the defining characteristic of professors - two people who agree on 99%
and spend all their time focusing on and debating the other one percent.
Because I largely agree with you, my only relevant comment on what you
say is that you have overly limited our options:
<div><br />
<div style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 15.4px;"><span style="color: blue;">So, what do we disagree about? It is about the direction to take. The <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/05/is-energy-transition-feasible-future-as.html">fork in the path</a> leads in two different directions depending on the efficiency of renewable technologies: Path 1): <b>renewables are useless, </b>and Path 2):<b> renewables are just what we need</b>. </span></div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />I would not choose either path;
rather I believe it is time to quit focusing on fossil energy scarcity
as a source of our problems and start concentrating on fragility. The
debate -renewables versus fossil - is a distraction from considering the
important options for increasing the resilience of society.</div>
<div><br />
</div>
<div>Dennis Meadows</div>
<div><br />
<div style="font-family: helvetica, arial; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">
<div id="yiv1194823040">
<div class="yiv1194823040yqt5689655380" id="yiv1194823040yqt50092"><br /></div></div></span></div></div></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>___________________________________________</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">A minor point. You say, "It is not true that peak oil was presented principally as a prediction." I beg to differ. I have been a member of ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil) almost from inception and part of its scientific committee as long as the association existed. And I can say that one of the problems of the approach of peak oilers was a certain obsession with the date of the peak. That doesn't disqualify a group of people whom I still think included some of the best minds on this planet during that period. The problem was that few of them were experts in modeling, and models are like weapons: you need to know the rules before you try to use them. By the way, you and your colleagues didn't make this mistake in your "Limits to Growth" in 1972; correctly, you were always careful of presenting a fan of scenarios, not a prediction. Later on, Bailey and his ilk accused you of having done what you didn't do: "wrong predictions." But that was politics, another story. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">_____________________________________________________</span></div><div><br /></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid1"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 120.201px; transform: scaleX(1.0285);"><b>(*) Statements about being realistic about technology, alternative energy, and sustainability</b></span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid2"><br role="presentation" /><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 170.201px; transform: scaleX(1.0004);">Dennis Meadows</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid3"><br role="presentation" /></span></span><div><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid4"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 322.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00035);"><span style="font-size: x-small;">April 11, 2023 message to the Balaton Group</span></span></span></div><div><span class="markedContent"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 322.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00035);"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="markedContent"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 322.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00035);">Dear Colleagues,</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid5"><br role="presentation" /><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 372.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00467);"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="markedContent"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 372.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00467);">I have often described politics as the art of choosing which of several impossible outcomes </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 397.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00026);">you most prefer. It is important to envision good outcomes. It may be useful to strive for </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 422.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00078);">them. But it is important to be realistic. The recent discussion about technology, alternative </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 447.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00067);">energy, and sustainability are based on several implicit assumptions, which I believe are </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 472.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00047);">unrealistic. At the risk of being an old grump, and recognizing my own limited vision, I list </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 497.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00031);">here some statements that I believe from the study of science, history, and human nature to </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 522.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00056);">be realistic.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid6"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face="sans-serif"><br role="presentation" /></span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 572.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00042);">#1: There is no possibility that the so-called renewable energy sources will permit the </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 597.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00113);">elimination of fossil fuels and sustain current levels of economic activity and material well- </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 622.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00684);">being. The scramble for access to declining energy sources is likely to produce violence. </span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid7"><span face="sans-serif"><br role="presentation" /></span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 672.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00039);">#2: The planet will not sustain anywhere close to 9 billion people at living standards close to </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 697.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00049);">their aspirations (or our views about what is fair).</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid8"><br role="presentation" /><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 747.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00027);"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="markedContent"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 747.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00027);">#3: Sustainable development is about how you travel, not where you are going.</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid9"><br role="presentation" /><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 797.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00041);"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="markedContent"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 797.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00041);">#4: The privileged will not willingly sacrifice their own advantages to reduce the gap </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 822.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00044);">between the rich and the poor (witness the US.) They will lose their advantages, but </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 847.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00005);">unwillingly.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid10"><span face="sans-serif"><br role="presentation" /></span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 897.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00747);">#5: The rapidly approaching climate chaos will erode society's capacity for constructive </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 922.701px; transform: scaleX(1.00132);">action before it prompts it.</span></span><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid11"><br role="presentation" /><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 972.701px; transform: scaleX(1.0004);"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="markedContent"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 972.701px; transform: scaleX(1.0004);">#6: Expansion and efficiency are taken as unquestioned goals for society. They need to be </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 997.701px; transform: scaleX(1.0004);">replaced by sufficiency and resilience.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid12"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face="sans-serif"><br role="presentation" /></span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 1047.7px; transform: scaleX(1.00088);">#7: History does not unfold in a smooth, linear, gradual process. Big, drastic discontinuities </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 1072.7px; transform: scaleX(1.00034);">lie ahead - soon. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid13"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face="sans-serif"><br role="presentation" /></span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 1122.7px; transform: scaleX(1.00054);">#8: When a group of people believe they must choose between options that offer more </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 1147.7px; transform: scaleX(1.00026);">order or those affording greater liberty, they will always opt for order. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="markedContent" id="page2R_mcid14"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face="sans-serif"><br role="presentation" /></span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 1197.7px; transform: scaleX(1.00089);">Unfortunately so, since it will have grave implications for the evolution of society’s </span><span dir="ltr" face="sans-serif" role="presentation" style="left: 120px; top: 1222.7px; transform: scaleX(1.00024);">governance systems. Dictators will always promise less chaos than Democrats.</span></span></span></div><div><br /></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com69tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-11897548327105896142023-05-11T16:48:00.007+02:002023-05-12T22:36:37.344+02:00What if Lemmings had a King? Practical Uses of Monarchy<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivecrkxANY20VQkJT4y-RWZnLiDR45P_aaUtlCCPVQ0cJTQRkh0bNEEDgzcf0YEoneLS977hbkkM_sBngxtZc3x4hn26sr87x0Rfc0uFDofekGlJ4GpWzTfe-Pu4J-yhylQobtkMJomh7zktQEbFtn3nKvoUj4JrzEG0Rd2Lum-bDTimRN05-P2aviQw/s1440/Coronation-of-Charles-III-How-many-TV-viewers-saw-the.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1440" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivecrkxANY20VQkJT4y-RWZnLiDR45P_aaUtlCCPVQ0cJTQRkh0bNEEDgzcf0YEoneLS977hbkkM_sBngxtZc3x4hn26sr87x0Rfc0uFDofekGlJ4GpWzTfe-Pu4J-yhylQobtkMJomh7zktQEbFtn3nKvoUj4JrzEG0Rd2Lum-bDTimRN05-P2aviQw/w452-h300/Coronation-of-Charles-III-How-many-TV-viewers-saw-the.jpg" width="452" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Most people seem to think that kings and queens are little more than useless parasites. Yet, I think they could be useful in some circumstances. Especially if you are a lemming</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifML8FLCEWqs2y1AHEqGj7IALS0L_MpNTJSe6xPvBgaj5MdbGyUvQtK22M_0OtnuMOtrggRm8uIYwJ71OBNmlEaySEYCgogPWj4U0E0DIGfECDmM5FjJBUTOlWz2JkePlIUxnmDiE-t0dVhtU7UchGAKKKPoJjTvKH51RcsasX9q0jFN78zn4vfKiTgA/s868/Lemmings.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="501" data-original-width="868" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifML8FLCEWqs2y1AHEqGj7IALS0L_MpNTJSe6xPvBgaj5MdbGyUvQtK22M_0OtnuMOtrggRm8uIYwJ71OBNmlEaySEYCgogPWj4U0E0DIGfECDmM5FjJBUTOlWz2JkePlIUxnmDiE-t0dVhtU7UchGAKKKPoJjTvKH51RcsasX9q0jFN78zn4vfKiTgA/w232-h134/Lemmings.png" width="232" /></a></div>The story that lemmings <span style="text-align: center;">commit mass suicide by jumping from a cliff is a legend created by a 1958 Walt Disney movie. It is not true, but if it were it would be the result of a "Nash Eequilibrium," a condition in which no individuals can deviate from their current behavior without suffering a penalty. If all the lemmings run in the same direction, none of them can change their individual course. And the result is that all lemmings die. Incidentally, the Nash Equilibrium can be seen as part of the concept of "<a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2015/11/the-seneca-effect-why-decline-is-faster.html">Seneca Cliff</a>" -- the cliff occurs because everyone keeps running toward it.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;">The problem also exists in human societies. Once society has decided to take a certain course, and when the decision is cemented and reinforced by propaganda, most people find themselves stuck in a classic Nash equilibrium. They may well understand that the current choices are leading everybody to the cliff, but no single player can change his/her strategy without suffering stiff penalties. We are seeing that happening over and over in history, and it may be happening right now with the whole human civilization. Are there ways to avoid falling into the cliff? Maybe yes. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Let me give you an example.<span style="text-align: center;"> Take a look at these data: </span></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Total losses during WWII (From <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II/Costs-of-the-war">Britannica</a>)</b></p><b style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Germany: 4.2 million </b></div></b><b style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Italy: 400,000</b></div></b><div><br /></div><div>Germany suffered a factor of ten more losses than Italy (and some sources say many more than that). Why? I can argue that the reason was mainly one: <b>Italy had a King, Germany didn't.</b> That made it possible for Italy to surrender early enough to avoid the worst. </div><div><br /></div><div>This story of how Italy surrendered to the Allies is not well known outside Italy, so let me give you some details. In 1943, it must have been clear to everyone that the war was lost for Italy. Yet, the Fascist propaganda continued to bombard Italians with optimistic slogans about the unavoidable final victory. With Mussolini being "always right" by definition, nobody in Italy could change his/her position on the war without personally paying a stiff price: being accused of treason. Italians were like lemmings running toward the cliff. Many of them could see the cliff, but none of them could stop the collective motion toward disaster.</div><div><br /></div><div>There was only one person in Italy who could break the rules of the game: King Victor Emmanuel III. For him, intervening to stop the war was dangerous, but not doing that was even more dangerous: the defeat of Italy would likely cause the end of his dynasty. In July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily, and the military situation was rapidly deteriorating. The King acted together with some influential members of the fascist regime. Mussolini was voted out of power by his own Fascist Grand Council, and the day after, he was arrested on direct orders from the King. On September 8th, the Italian government officially surrendered to the Allies. </div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately, the King badly botched the operation. He should have acted much earlier and much more decisively. Instead, while he was running away from Rome, the Italian army was left without orders, and it disbanded, while the Germans rapidly took over most of the country. The Fascists reorganized themselves in Northern Italy and fought on, while some of the members of the Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini were shot. And the King didn't save his dynasty, either. A more decisive action could have resulted in Italy being rapidly occupied by the Allies, perhaps trapping a large German force there. Maybe, the war could have ended earlier than when it did. And, maybe, Italy would still have a King (not necessarily a good thing, but, who knows?). </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet, despite the many mistakes that King Victor Emmanuel made, it is likely that, without his intervention, Italians would have suffered much more than they did. With half of Italy fighting with the Allies, a certain degree of moderation in carrying out military operations was necessary on the part of the Allies. That avoided, for instance, the kind of scorched earth raids that the Allies carried out against German cities. Nor was Italy ever targeted with extermination plans such as the "Morgenthau Plan" that would have killed tens of millions of Germans if it had been put into practice. </div><div><br /></div><div>Would all that have happened without the intervention of the King? Maybe, but it would have been much more difficult. In Germany, one year later, a group of army officers tried to follow the example of Italy and depose Hitler by assassinating him. But the plan failed: the conspirators had no support, and almost all of them were executed. A good example of the harsh law of the Nash Equilibrium.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, would kings be useful to lead us out of the several impasses in which we find ourselves stuck? Maybe they could. For instance, I am sure that there are many people on both sides of the war in Ukraine who want to stop the madness, but they are trapped in another Nash Equilibrium. Only a king could say, "Stop!" as King Victor Emmanuel did in 1943 in Italy. Unfortunately, no Kings are directly involved in this war, so we can't expect that to happen. </div><div><br /></div><div>So, returning to the kings of old might not be such a bad idea. Are any ladies around willing to don a scuba suit and offer a sword to passersby from the depth of a lake?</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1-9eVnrkC7owtQdzpWo2Q6B9RGDe3B30Pvc5y6rlQdlXfUSWIcrRX66a6vigmk8gjoGxkUZyprofZvQs5Fh3RhQm971owW0XvYGPG-xoRC0B1Fn5gn1QwELvtQf8UUkWTI8LiXLqHa7xmaH48TaM4GW0EUCF32JV8MWnyNXE2SWWNLcRPH3frLZ9LA/s550/LAdyofTheLake.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="444" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI1-9eVnrkC7owtQdzpWo2Q6B9RGDe3B30Pvc5y6rlQdlXfUSWIcrRX66a6vigmk8gjoGxkUZyprofZvQs5Fh3RhQm971owW0XvYGPG-xoRC0B1Fn5gn1QwELvtQf8UUkWTI8LiXLqHa7xmaH48TaM4GW0EUCF32JV8MWnyNXE2SWWNLcRPH3frLZ9LA/s320/LAdyofTheLake.png" width="258" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>____________________________________</div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Two years after that King Victor Emmanuel had Italy surrender to the Allies, the Emperor of Japan did the same. It was much too late to avoid horrendous losses, with a total of about two million casualties and most of the Japanese towns torched to cinders. But it can be argued that it would have been worse for the Japanese if they had fought to the end, as the Germans did. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-49177473344009600532023-05-07T15:29:00.055+02:002023-05-10T09:04:08.785+02:00Is the Energy Transition Feasible? The Future as a Garden of Forking Paths<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil_VUb6TH_gkNVLKJtNQZwuAn1TRJcvcPiyO9dCF0H76es04YcahmkiB1TTUFoWVO4vNtKKow2KdqEZI4OjLDDIQTPZLS2rC6vXy2dNck55pMisW2XZW7wNA7Wog3gUhAPDbv5Z7wJvU4ARicOFekCDiuWgJvmThA1421_1VNlLgDAJYBMmkPY6NGwUA/s400/Garden.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="315" data-original-width="400" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEil_VUb6TH_gkNVLKJtNQZwuAn1TRJcvcPiyO9dCF0H76es04YcahmkiB1TTUFoWVO4vNtKKow2KdqEZI4OjLDDIQTPZLS2rC6vXy2dNck55pMisW2XZW7wNA7Wog3gUhAPDbv5Z7wJvU4ARicOFekCDiuWgJvmThA1421_1VNlLgDAJYBMmkPY6NGwUA/w470-h370/Garden.jpg" width="470" /></a></div><p></p><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" (J.L. Borges)</i></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Recently, Simon Michaux <a href="https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf?ref=ageoftransformation.org">argued</a> that the transition to renewable energy is not possible for the lack of sufficient mineral resources. This conclusion was criticized by Nafeez Ahmed<a href="https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/"> in a recent post</a>. As usual in our polarized world, that led to a heated discussion based on opposing views. My opinion is that both Michaud and Ahmed are right but they see the question from different points of view. If you allow me, Ahmed is more right because he shows that the future is not running on a fixed path. Rather, it is a garden of forking paths. If we choose the right path, the transition is possible and will lead us to a better world. </i></div><br /></i><p>Do you remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? It tells you that you shouldn't cry wolf too many times but also that the wolf will eventually come. It illustrates how our destiny as human beings is to always choose extreme viewpoints: either we are too afraid of the wolf, or we believe it doesn't exist. Indeed, Erwin Schlesinger said, "<i>human beings have only two modes of operation: complacency and panic.</i>" </p><p>This dichotomy is especially visible in the current debate on the "Energy Transition" that recently flared in an exchange between <a href="https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf">Simon Michau</a>x and <a href="https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/">Nafeez Ahmed</a>, the first maintaining that the transition is impossible, the second arriving at the opposite conclusion. In my modest opinion, Michaud's work is correct within the limits of the assumptions he made. But these assumptions are not necessarily right. </p><p><b><i>Models may be perfectly correct, but still unable to predict the future. </i></b></p><p>If you really believe that they can, you are bound to make enormous mistakes -- as we saw in the way the recent pandemic was (mis)managed. Let me give an example: the story of the "peak oil" movement.</p><p>When I stumbled into the peak oil concept some 20 years ago, I thought it was a great idea. I am still thinking it is an incredibly insightful view of how humans exploit natural resources, and I keep studying the subject, as you can read <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6920">at this link</a>. But you also probably know that peak oil is unpopular nowadays. I have had referees criticizing our work just because it mentioned the term "peak oil." As if we were submitting a paper to "Nature Astronomy" where we argued that the Earth is flat." Why that? </p><p>There was nothing wrong with the peak oil concept. It was based on sound models, and it was proposed by some of the best oil geologists in the world. The problem was that the models didn't allow deviations from the stated path. They didn't take into account how the oil extraction system could rearrange itself to react to the scarcity of resources. Even oil extraction is a garden of forking paths, and the system can choose one or another depending on the circumstances. In this case, it chose a path that led to the exploitation of shale oil resources and that delayed the peak by more than 10 years. </p><p>Shale oil resources were not taken into account in the input data of the model. So, over and over, the peak was announced to be arriving in a specific year, and it didn't: the earliest estimates had it in 2005. Today, in 2023, we may be finally peaking, but we don't know for sure. Many peakers argue that the peak did arrive, but only for "conventional" oil. Sure, the surgery was successful, but the patient died. No wonder that most people, including the referees of scientific papers, are now convinced that peak oil was a hoax. </p><p>The peakers' mistake is typical of the way the role of models is misunderstood. The peak oil models are great to let you understand the cycle of resource exploitation and that you have to expect the peak, sooner or later. But you are making a big mistake if you think they can predict the date of the peak. Instead, that's exactly how the peak oil models were used. <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/01/ugo-bardi-traitor-of-catastrophism-or.html">I did that</a>, too, regrettably, but we learn from our mistakes (except in politics, of course). </p><p><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Models are there to understand the future, not to predict it.</span> </b></p><p>The future is a garden of forking paths. Where you go depends on the path you choose. But you still need to follow one of the available paths. </p><p><i>______________________________________</i></p><p>Now, let me try to examine Michaux's work and Ahmed's rebuttal in light of these considerations. I went through Michaux's report, and I can tell you that it is well done, accurate, full of data, and created by competent professionals. That doesn't mean it cannot be wrong, just like the peak oil date was proposed by competent professionals but turned out to be wrong. The problem is evident from the beginning: it is right there, in the title. </p><h3 style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf?ref=ageoftransformation.org">Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels </a></h3><p>You see? Michaux assumes from the start that we need "<i>extra capacity</i>" from "<i>alternative</i>" energy in order to "<i>completely replace</i>" fossil fuels. If the problem is stated in these terms, the answer to the question of the feasibility of the transition can only be negative. </p><p>Alas, we didn't need a report of 985 pages to understand that. It was obvious from the beginning. The limits of mineral resources were already shown in 1972 by the authors of "The Limits to Growth," the report sponsored by the Club of Rome. We know that we have limits; the problem is which paths we can choose within these limits. </p><p>This question is often touched on in Michaux's report when he mentions the need to "think outside the box" and to change the structure of the system. But, eventually, the result is still stated in negative terms. It is clear from the summary, where Michaux says, "<i>The existing renewable energy sectors and the EV technology systems are merely steppingstones to something else, rather than the final solution.</i>" This suggests that we should stick to fossil fuels while waiting for some miracle leading us to the "final" solution, whatever that means. This statement can be used to argue that renewables are useless. Then, it becomes <b>a memetic weapon to keep us stuck to fossil fuels; an attitude which can only lead us to disaster. </b></p><p>Nafeez Ahmed perfectly understood the problems <a href="https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/">in his rebuttal</a>. Ahmed notes several critical points in Michaud's report; the principal ones are underestimating the current EROI of renewables and the recent developments of batteries. That leads him to the statement that renewables are not really "renewable" but, at most, "replaceable." Which is simply wrong. The EROI of renewables is now large enough to allow the use of renewable energy to recycle renewable plants. Renewables are exactly that: renewable. </p><p>You could argue that my (and Ahmed's) evaluation of the EROI of renewables is over-optimistic. Maybe, but that's not the main point. Ahmed's criticism is focused on the roots of the problem: we need to take into account how the system can (and always does) adapt to scarcity. It follows different paths among the many available. Ahmed writes: </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>
...we remain trapped within the prevailing ideological paradigm associated with modern industrial civilisation. This paradigm is a form of reductive-materialism that defines human nature, the natural world, and the relationship between them through the lens of homo economicus – a reduction of human nature to base imperatives oriented around endless consumption and production of materially-defined pursuits; pursuits which are premised on an understanding of nature as little more than a repository of material resources suitable only for human domination and material self-maximisation; in which both human and nature are projected as separate and competing, themselves comprised of separate and competing units.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Yet this ideology is bound up with a system that is hurtling toward self-destruction. As an empirical test of accuracy, it has utterly failed: it is not true because it clearly does not reflect the reality of human nature and the natural world.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>It’s understandable, then, that in reacting to this ideology, many environmentalists have zeroed in on certain features of the current system – its predatory growth trajectory – and sought out alternatives that would seem to be diametrically opposed to those regressive features.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>One result of this is a proliferation of narratives claiming that the clean energy transformation is little more than an extension of the same industrialised, endless growth ideological paradigm that led us to this global crisis in the first place. Instead of solving that crisis, they claim, it will only worsen it.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Within this worldview, replacing the existing fossil fuel energy infrastructure with a new one based on renewable energy technologies is a fantasy, and therefore the world is heading for an unavoidable contraction that will result in the demise of modern civilisation. ... Far from being a sober, scientific perspective, this view is itself an ideological reaction that represents a ‘fight or flight’ response to the current crisis convergence. In fact, the proponents of this view are often as dogmatically committed to their views as those they criticise. </i>....</p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>Recognising the flaws in Michaux’s approach does not vindicate the idea that the current structures and value-systems of the global economy should simply stay the same. On the contrary, accelerating the energy and transport disruptions entails fundamental changes not only within these sectors, but in the way they are organised and managed in relation to wider society.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>My critique of Michaux doesn’t justify complacency about metals and minerals requirements for the clean energy transformation. Resource bottlenecks can happen for a range of reasons as geopolitical crises like Russia's war in Ukraine make obvious. But there are no good reasons to believe that potential materials bottlenecks entail the total infeasibility of the transition.</i></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><i>... we face the unprecedented opportunity and ecological necessity to move into a new system. This system includes the possibilities of abundant clean energy and transport with diminishing material throughput, requiring new circular economy approaches rooted in respect for life and the earth; and where the key technologies are so networked and decentralised that they work best with participatory models of distribution and sharing. This entails the emergence of a new economy with value measured in innovative ways, because traditional GDP metrics focusing on ever-increasing material throughput will become functionally useless.</i></p></blockquote><p>If you can, please, try to examine these statements by Ahmed with an open mind because he perfectly frames the problem. And <b>never forget one thing: the future is not a single path toward catastrophe. It is a garden of forking paths. </b>We are bound to follow one of these paths: we don't know which one yet, but not all of them lead to the Seneca Cliff. In the transition to a renewable energy system, we can adapt, reduce demand, improve efficiency, deploy new technologies, and simply be happy with a more limited supply of energy at some moments. It is only the rigidity of our mental models that make us think that there are no alternatives to fossil fuels. </p><p><br /></p><p> <i><span style="font-size: x-small;">This post was revised on May 8th 2023 to improve clarity</span></i></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com79tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-21851672133660126012023-05-05T12:47:00.022+02:002023-05-05T21:49:14.288+02:00The Rise of Elly Schlein: How a Young, Woke, and Fashionable Politician is Shaking up Politics in Italy, and Perhaps Worldwide<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUQYMWqj_bZLjRbx8Hf4HoUzXw2yZoLHMc5ogzfGGia-uoKCgb5Plj66Le2B_LyyXepeXWJJaHcX2XV42rzKaAmAIKVf6TrxX6dUGd1RcDoXX1lEwigMn-TbEaur9_k1nXBlWQcU4aL6Dw4HeKhwapVHstO_ba0k_uZSDUh1VmkJUNYmNGb0XcgkX5RQ/s1770/Schlein3.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1770" data-original-width="1180" height="451" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUQYMWqj_bZLjRbx8Hf4HoUzXw2yZoLHMc5ogzfGGia-uoKCgb5Plj66Le2B_LyyXepeXWJJaHcX2XV42rzKaAmAIKVf6TrxX6dUGd1RcDoXX1lEwigMn-TbEaur9_k1nXBlWQcU4aL6Dw4HeKhwapVHstO_ba0k_uZSDUh1VmkJUNYmNGb0XcgkX5RQ/w300-h451/Schlein3.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i>Many times, Italy was a political laboratory that influenced the rest of the world. Just think of Mussolini and, more recently, how a government led by an obscure bureaucrat named Giuseppe Conte started the trend of nationwide lockdowns, then adopted everywhere in the world. Italy may be a backwater country, but it is a murky memetic pool brewing memetic microbes. Above, you see </i></span><i>Ms. Elly Schlein, recently elected as secretary of the Italian "Partito Democratico," (PD) as shown in <a href="https://www.vogue.it/article/elly-schlein-pd-intervista-esclusiva">a recent interview </a>in the Italian edition of Vogue magazine. </i><span style="text-align: left;"><i>I think y</i></span><i>ou'll hear a lot about this lady in the future. </i></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p>When Elly Schlein was elected secretary of the Democratic Party (PD) in Italy, two months ago, I thought it was just a desperate attempt to revive a party that had nothing more to say in politics. But <b>I was wrong.</b> Elly Schlein is not the result of the convulsions of a dying organization. She is a major innovation in public relations, designed to revolutionize the Italian, and perhaps the world's, political landscape. </p><p>Up to not long ago, politicians tended to project the image of the strong man, the "father of the country" whose decisions were always wise. That's past and gone, perhaps forever. The levers of political power have moved to the obscure lobbies that control governments, while the job of politicians is now mainly to maintain a semblance of popular participation in the governing process. In short, they all image and no substance. </p><p>Ms. Schlein is part of this evolution. She is the tip of an innovative PR campaign launched by the PD and their sponsors, and she is using the same strategy that Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian PM, used for decades: <b>it doesn't matter how many people hate you: what matters is how many people vote for you.</b> </p><p>So, Berlusconi targeted the least cultured sections of the Italian population with a personal image of a rich man who could do whatever he wanted. If you are poor, it is a figure that you may dream of imitating. Plenty of people hated Berlusconi for his image, but he consistently won elections over a political career of a few decades. </p><p>Elly Schlein is doing something similar. She is not trying to appear to her potential voters as "one of us," but, rather, "what every one of us would like to be," at least for the target she is aiming at; that of young, left-oriented people in the West. So, she projects her image as young, independent, bisexual, globalist, feminist, and, more than all, a <i>successful </i>woman who can manage herself and her sexual preferences the way she wants. Among other things, she had no qualms in disclosing that she employs a "<i>harmochromist</i>" a sort of assistant buyer at Eur 300/hour to take care of the color combinations of the dresses she wears. In short, the perfect image of "radical chic," now better known under the name of "woke." And the fact that she does not look like a fashion model shows that her success is the result of her skills, not her looks. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGisskcxbruqQ64TzWm6MDu98Dp-PIDW-OPTRyV41iUkboneB9CF8lgY77CVN7HimozUQjSQbhXWYmGH4GYNAqaA-C78d9JRGW1_1L6HM_O7d2uU-RJtnqwwNv64fD713UWKPw1NQxH3lIjyWpMQulvZCqOpsDj3G32RgVRfJFdptBqUWW8SYRHg8dvA/s1149/Elly-Schlein-1149x765-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="765" data-original-width="1149" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGisskcxbruqQ64TzWm6MDu98Dp-PIDW-OPTRyV41iUkboneB9CF8lgY77CVN7HimozUQjSQbhXWYmGH4GYNAqaA-C78d9JRGW1_1L6HM_O7d2uU-RJtnqwwNv64fD713UWKPw1NQxH3lIjyWpMQulvZCqOpsDj3G32RgVRfJFdptBqUWW8SYRHg8dvA/w388-h258/Elly-Schlein-1149x765-1.jpg" width="388" /></a></div><p></p><p>The PR strategy of Elly Schlein has been very successful, at least up to now. Huge numbers of "leftists" rushed to their keyboards to <b>defame her on all social media for betraying the working class </b>because of her interview with Vogue, her fashionable dresses, and her harmochromist assistant. Remarkably, none of them realized that they were doing exactly what Schlein's PR managers wanted them to do. They wanted her to gain the attention of the media; and avoid repeating the mistake they had made with the lackluster former secretary, Enrico Letta. These good leftists didn't realize that they were making the same mistake they made with Berlusconi: the more they attacked him, the more they made him popular. Again, it doesn't matter how many people hate you; what matters is how many people vote for you. </p><p>Of course, politics is not just a question of physical image; you have to have opinions, programs, and platforms. In this field, Schlein seems to have understood the critical point of modern politics. <b>You may be criticized for what you said but not for what you didn't say. </b>So, the skill of a modern politician is to be able to speak a lot while saying nothing. Schlein appears to have mastered this skill, at least from what we can read in her recent interview with <a href="https://www.vogue.it/article/elly-schlein-pd-intervista-esclusiva">Vogue Magazine</a>. (<a href="https://newsinitaly.com/elly-schlein-tells-vogue-i-work-a-lot-and-in-the-evening-i-relax-playing-the-playstation-or-watching-the-crown/">excerpts in English</a>). If you ever heard terms such as "cliché fest," "banality bonanza," or "vapid verbiage," consider this article as a good example of these concepts. It is all part of the image: it is the way politics works nowadays. </p><p>So, I think we are seeing a trend. Note how Schlein's image is remarkably similar to that of the former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Arden. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr97T51Vi3ePTLD3tsnKt5YfvzEU5ZxETCCbmT8lgtDdpJzzLpstJDLusEwVMdNtt9T0F1Zb_Y-g39yLhzvbhSCK7tyys03eNmqWJI1MucO3K2TU56uwSu4bje3rU8B4c1NtBRZ1Hl9exc-ycuyCA__XknTZoomdtbF16_Yu3KkVjVegao8coUoCyNFA/s1200/jacinda-ardern-was-raised-mormon-on-new-zealands-north-island.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr97T51Vi3ePTLD3tsnKt5YfvzEU5ZxETCCbmT8lgtDdpJzzLpstJDLusEwVMdNtt9T0F1Zb_Y-g39yLhzvbhSCK7tyys03eNmqWJI1MucO3K2TU56uwSu4bje3rU8B4c1NtBRZ1Hl9exc-ycuyCA__XknTZoomdtbF16_Yu3KkVjVegao8coUoCyNFA/w381-h286/jacinda-ardern-was-raised-mormon-on-new-zealands-north-island.png" width="381" /></a></div><br /><p>Since politicians are a product, the industry that produces them (the PR industry) tends to imitate and repropose successful products. <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2022/09/the-rise-of-key-opinion-leaders-end-of.html">In a previous post,</a> I noted how the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky adopted a dress code very similar to that of the Italian right-wing leader Matteo Salvini. About Schlein and Arden, note how both women have relatively elongated faces, a feature that is often associated with a <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajhb.21219">"masculine" appearance</a>. These ladies tend to produce an image of independence, self-reliance, and assertiveness. At present, there is no exact equivalent in the US political landscape, so far, although Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has some elements of similarity with them. Perhaps the US politician who looks like Schlein the most is Barack Obama, at least in the sense of being another expert in talking a lot without saying much. </p><p>My impression is that starting from Italy, this kind of heavily promoted female political figures may soon spread all over the Western World. Not that anything will change; we'll just have "front persons" rather than "front men" at the top. And we keep marching toward the future, whatever it will be.</p><p>__________________________________________________________</p><p>As a further note, here is Schlein's adversary in Italy, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiutsNw3ckuPwYQd3H-PByTDlgeWe9orxhig-_atFMReFKsw4x1Yn1r4HILIYU92Wru48S5qWcBJZ-GVYXbaJ3F0xJdbAnLzpH38R8ip4N1NaGWhUQtdkr3ES1UTarqmVozeOm3aYh83Qz2BathDLTJU7p6kDHftDIp4eaBmJXePe66aG8jIgfcZCrvUw/s766/Meloni.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="560" data-original-width="766" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiutsNw3ckuPwYQd3H-PByTDlgeWe9orxhig-_atFMReFKsw4x1Yn1r4HILIYU92Wru48S5qWcBJZ-GVYXbaJ3F0xJdbAnLzpH38R8ip4N1NaGWhUQtdkr3ES1UTarqmVozeOm3aYh83Qz2BathDLTJU7p6kDHftDIp4eaBmJXePe66aG8jIgfcZCrvUw/w394-h288/Meloni.png" width="394" /></a></div><br /><p>She is a more traditional kind of politician: a classical "populist." She is aggressive and outspoken, but overall she projects a more "feminine" image than Schlein, and it would be hard to imagine her employing a personal armochromist. My impression is that one of the purposes of the creation of Elly Schlein's image was to prepare an anti-Meloni memetic weapon. In my opinion, if push comes to shove, Schlein will easily trash Meloni by making her look like a fruit vendor in a provincial market. But that we'll have to see.</p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-63917603717399976552023-05-01T15:50:00.065+02:002023-05-02T18:43:52.645+02:00When Science Fails: Surrogate endpoints and wrong conclusions<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixT2Wm71n1Zmvj3fXVTT_BVDonYxOz9qjVTzXEjWX9jURMe65sacV0_qt9aWrvYD_xuuwzhde_dWpZrF1MAaF1vCMlPRvkFaVE4gN5mhZq-9eDlmGD3lUs0tTqmm84oU3J39eDU_UdKBh5-ocCZhDnq0gPpSxBdgHGmuC76EqVJkKh0kZ31KA4CM5e_A/s2000/GalileoFauci.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2000" data-original-width="2000" height="447" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixT2Wm71n1Zmvj3fXVTT_BVDonYxOz9qjVTzXEjWX9jURMe65sacV0_qt9aWrvYD_xuuwzhde_dWpZrF1MAaF1vCMlPRvkFaVE4gN5mhZq-9eDlmGD3lUs0tTqmm84oU3J39eDU_UdKBh5-ocCZhDnq0gPpSxBdgHGmuC76EqVJkKh0kZ31KA4CM5e_A/w447-h447/GalileoFauci.png" width="447" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Galileo Galilei and Anthony Fauci are linked to each other by a chain of events that started at the beginning of modern science, during the 17th century. But the Science that Fauci claimed to represent is very different from that of Galileo. While Galileo studied simple linear systems, modern science attempts to study complex, multi-parameter systems, where the rigid Galilean method just cannot work. The problem is that, <b>while it is obvious that we can measure only what we can measure, that's not necessarily what we want, or need, to measure. </b>Tests based on "surrogate endpoints" may well be the best we can do in medicine and other fields, but we should understand that the results are not, and cannot be, a source of absolute scientific truth.</i></div><p></p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>The Scientific Method</b></p>Galileo Galilei is correctly remembered as the father of modern science because he invented what we call today the "scientific method," sometimes still called the "Galilean method." It is supposed to be the basis of modern science; the feature that makes it able to be called "Science" with a capital first letter, as we were told over and over during the Covid pandemic. But what is really this scientific method that's supposed to lead us to the truth? <div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqsV5PLggqaLZdF1eDNYaXOlYd5uI5M098DiCjRSTeUuWds1yAOclpd03XJ_d38PycKhi3wWstVVqQHP5Bpt5tx_qH6QZLM7zGv8-BOcTiGsBbWzDJQaQo4rXI67yucsW3ZqoLx7LozKsShdsIHlmV3wM0Amifh3H5bTLZnHfYs5atLBFDRYeQNh9yfw/s397/Pisa%20Tower%20Experiment.png" style="clear: right; display: inline; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="397" data-original-width="351" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqsV5PLggqaLZdF1eDNYaXOlYd5uI5M098DiCjRSTeUuWds1yAOclpd03XJ_d38PycKhi3wWstVVqQHP5Bpt5tx_qH6QZLM7zGv8-BOcTiGsBbWzDJQaQo4rXI67yucsW3ZqoLx7LozKsShdsIHlmV3wM0Amifh3H5bTLZnHfYs5atLBFDRYeQNh9yfw/w176-h199/Pisa%20Tower%20Experiment.png" width="176" /></a>Galileo's paradigmatic idea was an experiment about the speed of falling objects. It is said that he took two solid metal balls of different weights and dropped them from the top of the Pisa Tower. He then noted that they arrived at the ground at about the same time. That allowed him to lampoon an ancient authority such as Aristotle for having said that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones (*). There followed an avalanche of insults to Aristotle that continues to this day. Even Bertrand Russel fell into the trap of poking fun at Aristotle, accused of having said that women have fewer teeth than men. Too bad that he never said anything like that.</div><div><br /></div><div>It may well be that Galileo was not the first to perform this experiment, and it is not even clear that he actually performed it, but that's a detail. The point is that the result was evident, clear-cut, and irrefutable. Later, Newton started from this result to arrive to the assumption that the same force that acted on an apple falling from a tree in his garden was acting on the Moon and the planets. From then on, science was supposed to be largely based on laboratory experiments or, anyway, experiments performed in tightly controlled conditions. It was a major change of paradigm: the basis of the scientific method as we understood it today.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Pisa Tower experiment succeeded in separating the two parameters that affect a falling body: the force of gravity and the air drag. That was relatively easy, but what about systems that have many parameters affecting each other? Here, let me start with the case of health care, which is supposed to be a scientific field, but where the problem of separating the parameters is nearly impossible to overcome.</div><div><p><br /></p><p><b>The surrogate endpoint in medicine</b></p><p>How can you apply the scientific method in medicine? Dropping a sick person and a healthy one from the top of the Pisa Tower won't help you so much. The problem is the large number of parameters that affect the nebulous entity called "health" and the fact that they all strongly interact with each other. </p><p>So, imagine you were sick, and then you feel much better. Why exactly? Was it because you took some pills? Or would you have recovered anyway? And can you say that you wouldn't have recovered faster hadn't you taken the pill? A lot of quackery in medicine arises from these basic uncertainties: how do you determine what is the specific cause of a certain effect? In other words, is a certain medical treatment really curing people, or is it just their imagination that makes them think so?</p><p>Medical researchers have worked hard at developing reliable methods for drug testing, and you probably know that the "gold standard" in medicine is the "Randomized Controlled Test" (RCT). The idea of RCTs is that you test a drug or a treatment by keeping <i>all</i> the parameters constant except one: taking or not taking the drug. It is designed to avoid the effect called "placebo" (the patient gets better because she believes that the drug works, even though she is not receiving it) and the one called "nocebo" (the patient gets worse because he believes that the drug is harmful, even though he is not receiving it). </p><p>An RCT involves a complex procedure that starts with separating the patients into two similar groups, making sure that none of them knows to which group she belongs (the test is "blinded"). Then, the members of one of the two groups are given the drug, say, in the form of a pill. The others are given a sugar pill (the "placebo"). After a certain time, it is possible to examine if the treatment group did better than the control group. There are statistical methods used to determine whether the observed differences are significant or not. Then, if they are, and if you did everything well, you know if the treatment is effective, or does nothing, or maybe it causes bad effects. </p><p>For limited purposes, the RCT approach works, but it has enormous problems. A correctly performed RCT is expensive and complex, its results are often uncertain and, sometimes, turn out to be plain wrong. Do you remember the case of "Thalidomide"? It was tested, found to work as a tranquilizer, and approved for general use in the 1960s in Europe. It was later discovered that it had teratogenic effects on fetuses, and some 10.000 babies in Europe were born without arms and legs before the drug was removed from the market. <a href="https://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/sixty-years-on-the-history-of-the-thalidomide-tragedy">Tests on animals</a> would have shown the problem, but they were not performed or were not performed correctly. </p><p>Of course, the rules have been considerably tightened after the Thalidomide disaster and, nowadays, testing on animals is required before a new drug is tested on humans. But let's note, in passing, that in the case of the mRNA Covid vaccines, tests on animals were performed in parallel (and not before) testing on humans. This procedure exposed volunteers to risks that normally would not be considered acceptable with drug testing. Fortunately, it does not appear that mRNA vaccines have teratogenic effects. </p><p>Even assuming that the tests are complete, and performed according to the rules, there is another gigantic problem with RCT: What do you measure during the test? Ideally, drugs are aimed at improving people's health, but how do you quantify "health"? There are definitions of health in terms of indices called QALY (quality-adjusted life years) or QoL (quality of life). But both are difficult to measure and, if you want long-term data, you have to wait for a long time. So, in practice,<b> "surrogate endpoints" are used in drug testing. </b></p><p>A surrogate endpoint aims at defining measurable parameters that approximate the true endpoint -- a patient's health. A typical surrogate endpoint is, for instance, blood pressure as an indicator of cardiovascular health. The problem is that a surrogate endpoint is not necessarily related to a person's health and that you always face the possibility of negative effects. In the case of drugs used to treat hypertension, negative effects exist and are well known, but it is normally believed that the positive effects of the drug on the patient's health overcome the negative ones. But that's not always the case. A recent example is how, in 2008, the drug <i>bevacizumab </i>was approved in the US by FDA for the treatment of breast cancer on the basis of surrogate endpoint testing. It was withdrawn in 2011, when it was discovered that it was toxic and that it didn't lead to improvements in cancer progression (you can read the whole story in "<i><a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12284/malignant">Malignant</a></i>" by Vinayak Prasad). </p><p>Consider now another basic problem. Not only the number of parameters affecting people's health are many, but they strongly interact with each other, as is typical of complex systems. The problem may take the form called "polydrug use," and it especially affects old people who accumulate drugs on their bedstands, just like old cars accumulate dents on their bodies. An RCT test that evaluates one drug is already expensive and lengthy; evaluating all the possible combinations of several drugs is a nightmare. If you have two drugs, A and B, you have to go through at least three tests: A alone, B alone, and the combination of A+B. If you have three drugs, you have seven tests to do (A, B, C, AB, BC, AC and ABC). And the numbers grow rapidly. In practice, nobody knows the effects of these multiple drug uses, and, likely, nobody ever will. But a common observation is that when the elderly reduce the number of medicines they take, their health immediately improves (this effect is not validated by RCTs, but that does not mean it is not true. I noted it for my mother-in-law who died at 101). </p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>The case of Face Masks</b> </p><p>Some medical interventions have specific problems that make RCTs especially difficult. An example is that of face masks to prevent the spreading of an airborne pathogen. Evidently, there is no way to perform a blind test with face masks, but the real problem is what to use as a surrogate end-point. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, several studies were performed using cameras to detect liquid droplets emitted by people breathing or sneezing with or without face masks. That was a typical "Galilean," laboratory approach, but what does it demonstrate? Assuming that you can determine if and how much a mask reduces the emission of droplets, is this relevant in terms of stopping the transmission of an airborne pathogen? As a surrogate endpoint, droplets are at best poor, at worst misleading. </p><p>A much better endpoint is the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test that can directly detect an infection. But even here, there are many problems. As an example, consider an <a href="https://www.poverty-action.org/publication/impact-community-masking-covid-19-cluster-randomized-trial-bangladesh">often touted study</a> performed in Pakistan that claimed to have demonstrated the effectiveness of face masks. Let's assume that the results of the study are statistically significant (<a href="https://trialsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13063-022-06704-z">really?</a>) and that nobody tampered with the data (and we can never be sure of that in such a heavily politicized matter). Then, the best you can say is that <i>if </i>you live in a village in Pakistan, <i>if </i>there is a Covid wave ongoing, <i>if</i> the PCR tests are reliable, <i>if </i>the people who wore masks behave exactly like those who don't, and <i>if </i>random noise didn't affect the study too much, <i>then </i>by wearing a mask you can delay being infected for some time, and maybe even avoid infection altogether. Does the same result apply to you if you live in New York? Maybe. Is it valid for different conditions of viral diffusion and epidemic intensity? Almost certainly not. Does it ensure that you don't suffer adverse effects from wearing face masks? Duh! Would that make you healthier in the long run? We have no idea.</p><p>The Pakistan study is just one example of a series of studies on face masks that were found to be ill-conceived, poorly performed, inconclusive, or useless in a recent rigorous <a href="https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses">review</a> published in the Cochrane Network. The final result is that no one has been able to detect a significant effect of face masks on the diffusion of an airborne disease, although we cannot say that the effect is actually zero. </p><p>The confusion about face masks reached stellar levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Tony Fauci, director of the NIAID, first advised against wearing masks, then he reversed his position and publicly declared that face masks are effective and even that two masks are better than just one. Additionally, he declared that the effectiveness of masks is "science" and, therefore, cannot be doubted. But, nowadays, Fauci has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/24/magazine/dr-fauci-pandemic.html">reversed his position</a>, at least in terms of mask effectiveness at the population level. He still maintains that they can be useful for an individual "<i>who religiously wears a mask</i>." Now, imagine an RCT dedicated to demonstrating the different results of "religiously" and "non-religiously" wearing a mask. So much for science as a pillar of certainty. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Surrogate endpoints everywhere</b></p><p>Medicine is a field that may be defined as "science" since it is based (or should be based) on data and measurements. But you see how difficult it is to apply the scientific method to it. Other fields of science suffer from similar problems. Climate science, ecosystem science, biological evolution, economics, management, policies, and others are cases in which you cannot reproduce the main features of the system in a laboratory and, at the same time, involve a large number of parameters interacting with each other in a non-linear manner. You could say, for instance, that the purpose of politics is to improve people's well-being. But how could that be measured? In general, it is believed that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of the well-being of the economy and, hence, of all citizens. Then, it is concluded that economic growth is always good, and that it should be stimulated by all possible interventions. But is it true? GDP growth is another kind of surrogate endpoint used simply because we know how to measure it. But people's well-being is something that we don't know how to measure. </p><p>Is a non-Galilean science possible? We have to start considering this possibility without turning to discard the need for good data and good measurements. But, for complex systems, we have to move away from the rigid Galilean method and use <b>dynamic</b> <b>models</b>. We are moving in that direction, but we still have to learn a lot about how to use models and, incidentally, the Covid19 pandemic showed us how models can be misused and <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/04/flattening-curve-military-origins-of.html">lead to various kinds of disasters</a>. But we need to move on, and I'll discuss this matter in detail in an upcoming post. </p><p><br /></p><p>______________________________________________</p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>(*) Aristotle's "Physics" (Book VIII, chapter 10) </b>where he discusses the relationship between the weight of an object and its speed of fall:<br /><br />"Heavier things fall more quickly than lighter ones if they are not hindered, and this is natural, since they have a greater tendency towards the place that is natural to them. For the whole expanse that surrounds the earth is full of air, and all heavy things are borne up by the air because they are surrounded and pressed upon by it. But the air is not able to support a weight equal to itself, and therefore the heavier bodies, as having a greater proportion of weight, press more strongly upon and sink more quickly through the air than do the lighter bodies."<br /></span><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-51628688731163431902023-04-28T16:05:00.006+02:002023-04-29T13:33:49.342+02:00America, the Collapsed. Why Mommy Knows Best <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvRBWL2r91Tp1YolQxwP4RoMaOXX_TV2Ggv5ixv1Q7UqCVGpqRRP2nK6EcuK_BSh0xa1x3xsSwUfFr7jWBKmymUd_WEqMi2kVDv2fDdgPsyAUKu227Jm6fuKIvMqTrSvn08jLTJ_yRLQVoLUZKv22nwdZAKHuvP04FQY5JkqcMEUPeJmpo535uM45pTA/s293/WhyDIdAmericaCollapse.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="293" data-original-width="193" height="417" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvRBWL2r91Tp1YolQxwP4RoMaOXX_TV2Ggv5ixv1Q7UqCVGpqRRP2nK6EcuK_BSh0xa1x3xsSwUfFr7jWBKmymUd_WEqMi2kVDv2fDdgPsyAUKu227Jm6fuKIvMqTrSvn08jLTJ_yRLQVoLUZKv22nwdZAKHuvP04FQY5JkqcMEUPeJmpo535uM45pTA/w275-h417/WhyDIdAmericaCollapse.webp" width="275" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><i>I am still reading paper books. I think they favor concentration in a way that on-screen books cannot provide. Books are also one of the few places left in the memesphere where you can say what you think without being aggressed by a band of zombies or censored by brain-drained idiots. So, during the past few years, I have been reading a series of books, most of which, I think, deserve a comment. And I'll see to publish a few; not really book reviews, but just ideas derived from the books I read. </i></p><p><br /></p><p>Why do people do things that harm themselves? It is a good question that nobody seems to know how to answer -- yet, it happens all the time. Scott Erikson tackles the question in his book, "Mommy, Why did America Collapse?" A nice addition to the catastrophist's bookshelf. </p><p>Erikson writes in a light mood; his analyses do not pretend to be quantitative models of the collapse of complex systems, but he tells a fascinating tale in the form of a bedtime dialog between a mother and her daughter. The fascination is not in the story itself: for those of us who are hard-core catastrophists, there is not much that we didn't know before (mommy is one of us!). For those who are not catastrophists, the book will probably fail to appear convincing.</p><p>Yet, the problem is there, and many past stories show how exactly people can and do harm themselves by doing things that may appear intelligent in the short term but lethal in the long term. Throwing oneself naked into a thornbush to collect berries is a paradigmatic example, but, in a more pedantic kind of analysis, Ilaria Perissi and I noted how the fishing industry has consistently destroyed the fish stocks that made them live in our book "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Sea-Future-Blue-Economy/dp/3030518973">The Empty Sea</a>." How could it happen? We cite several examples of how people simply trade long-term survival for short-term gains. It is the way the human mind works. <b>We need just one word to describe it: "greed."</b></p><p>That's exactly the point that Erikson makes over and over in his book. It is not so much an analysis of the reasons why America did (will) collapse but how a profound failure in communication caused the collapse. More than a problem of communication, it is a problem of trust. A mother can say things at bedtime that her daughter has no reason to mistrust (unless mommy wants to sell the munchkin to the bad witch for cooking in a cauldron). </p><p>But, apart for bedtime stories, we are always dealing with people who are trying to sell us to the canned meat industry -- often figuratively, sometimes perhaps even for real. So, if there is no trust, there is no truth. And if there is no truth, there is nothing at all. Only noise. And who has the time for bedtime stories, anyway?</p><p>No wonder America Collapsed.</p><p><br /></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-61887435841844229762023-04-24T13:18:00.009+02:002023-04-24T23:14:56.615+02:00Another Epochal Failure of Humankind. How people are losing interest in the things that threaten them the most.<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiThi2_RiSufKY4j_5sOCw7MpRWPDCWFYGZX0xzCDaJFl0Jn7goMPgRB4p0PK77c4oyG1UN-Cgg8LrdZaFkETAq6dz1iVsUicQG3tz5BFwgjTWy07DJfXavUjhLwbfLFgLL-lNb0zP284QH39oNkqndmc2PhwdPqGby_0S_3Yyzce1hMds78Tl8m0lW6g/s804/Cassandrascreenshot.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="515" data-original-width="804" height="382" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiThi2_RiSufKY4j_5sOCw7MpRWPDCWFYGZX0xzCDaJFl0Jn7goMPgRB4p0PK77c4oyG1UN-Cgg8LrdZaFkETAq6dz1iVsUicQG3tz5BFwgjTWy07DJfXavUjhLwbfLFgLL-lNb0zP284QH39oNkqndmc2PhwdPqGby_0S_3Yyzce1hMds78Tl8m0lW6g/w596-h382/Cassandrascreenshot.png" width="596" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>In 2018, I published on my "Cassandra's Legacy" blog a post titled, "<a href="https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2018/07/why-in-few-years-nobody-will-be-worried.html">Why, in a Few Years, Nobody Will be Talking About Climate Change Anymore</a>." It turned out to be remarkably prophetic. </i></div></i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><blockquote><p><br /><a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/474278/concern-several-environmental-problems-dips.aspx">From Gallup News, April 17, 202</a>3<br /><br /><i>The percentages of Americans expressing a great deal of worry about air pollution and the loss of tropical rain forests have each fallen seven points since 2022, while worry about extinction of plant and animal species has declined five points, and the pollution of natural waterways and global warming or climate change are down four points each. Meanwhile, last year’s 57% high-level worry about polluted drinking water is statistically similar to this year’s 55%. Each of the current readings is at or tied for its lowest point since 2015 or 2016.</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>People are losing interest in the things that threaten them the most. <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/474278/concern-several-environmental-problems-dips.aspx">This Gallup report </a>is not the only evidence. News and comments about climate change, pollution, resource depletion, and the like have disappeared from the major news channels, as I had predicted in <a href="https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2018/07/why-in-few-years-nobody-will-be-worried.html">a post published four years ago, in 2018</a>, </p><p>Sometimes, I am scared of my own predictions, but this one requires some corrections to my interpretation. When I published my post, in 2018, I was convinced that the decline in interest in environmental matters was mostly created by governments applying the propaganda technique called "deception by omission." That is, governments actively intervened to keep these issues away from the news. </p><p>Nowadays, I think that active omission is just one of the causes of the trend. Another one, probably more important, is the current economic situation. People's everyday life is becoming more and more difficult in terms of money, health, safety, and sheer survival. Most of us are unable to link our individual troubles with large-scale planetary problems. And, even if we were able to, it would be correct to conclude that there is nothing we can do about these problems. So, why worry about things we can't change? </p><p>That generates a negative loop: if a subject is not interesting to people, then the media tend to ignore it. If the media ignore a subject, then it becomes less and less interesting. So, when Gallup goes interviewing people, they answer that they don't see the big problems as worrisome. <b>There is little need for governments to intervene to keep some problems hidden, they tend to disappear from the news by themselves.</b> </p><p>The apathy of the public is just one of the facets of the way the perception of global problems has evolved. An even worse side of the problem is how the collapse of the prestige of science during the Covid epidemic has led to a <b>disastrous loss of trust in anything that has to do with science</b>. It is true that science has become corrupt, biased, elitist, unable to innovate, a tool for scaring people, and more of the like. But it is still a shock to see people whom I esteemed as intelligent and competent in their fields going into a full-spectrum refusal of anything that has to do with "official" science. </p><p>Plenty of people I know refuse to accept even simple things that could help them in their everyday life. Insulate my apartment? It is part of a plan to dispossess the middle class of their homes. Install PV panels on my roof? They require more energy than they will produce. Replace my gas stove with an induction one? They want us to starve! Reduce traffic pollution? It is a trick to take our cars away from us. Saving energy? It is because they want to enslave us!</p><p>To say nothing about those who went full bonkers with the idea that the Moon landing never happened, chemtrails are real, climate change is a hoax, the virus does not exist, oil and gas are infinite, and it is all a plot to exterminate humankind. This kind of things. </p><p>Depressing? Of course, it is depressing. The term "depressing," alone, may not be adequate. (<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/depressing">click here</a> for 307 synonyms of "depressing" according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary). Call it the way you like, but the fact is that in three years of Covid panic, we lost 50 years of efforts to convince people to do something about keeping this poor planet (and us, living on its surface) in decent conditions. </p><p>Perhaps it was unavoidable, but the question is,</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsCSH8phin8RsfdAfN1l4gCGI_z_sTIGyFuGpIjd1Ood203WsKVk0qRygxa-4yW2ebD0D3X56r6rT4nF0m2KuRCiQZS1ihbpakQzVszzEEvncSfjeOf_B-Ih1rHtXdPAtbEur3bP1TPKSsWKGjX-qqhlRNLHGvtzYCUTWAc-hp5AJlCypNsYY_gpVDCw/s1024/now-what.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="1024" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsCSH8phin8RsfdAfN1l4gCGI_z_sTIGyFuGpIjd1Ood203WsKVk0qRygxa-4yW2ebD0D3X56r6rT4nF0m2KuRCiQZS1ihbpakQzVszzEEvncSfjeOf_B-Ih1rHtXdPAtbEur3bP1TPKSsWKGjX-qqhlRNLHGvtzYCUTWAc-hp5AJlCypNsYY_gpVDCw/w450-h311/now-what.jpg" width="450" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-31974984047028931662023-04-21T17:02:00.001+02:002023-04-21T17:04:05.652+02:00A new dichotomy: nation states vs. the "one planet" movement<br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="background-color: #fafafa;"><span style="color: #101010; font-family: PT Serif, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0U2CaHjPvMGsFoAMqA10ItWAboBbMwqs2ZyYKejmQG3qbFIzI-ta8G935CFGuih4cU90nHlbeksOMHR2RGktdbpBe7oLLaOWjywCnN2za05Cva08bgLjSednBWszjGolxJa0vpuNkh24nLl-NVIQC0U0JWbVioPChUwo6KdZHUjHAzTeIqRXbwlsl7w/s362/Conversi2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="232" data-original-width="362" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0U2CaHjPvMGsFoAMqA10ItWAboBbMwqs2ZyYKejmQG3qbFIzI-ta8G935CFGuih4cU90nHlbeksOMHR2RGktdbpBe7oLLaOWjywCnN2za05Cva08bgLjSednBWszjGolxJa0vpuNkh24nLl-NVIQC0U0JWbVioPChUwo6KdZHUjHAzTeIqRXbwlsl7w/w555-h356/Conversi2.png" width="555" /></a></div><div><span style="background-color: #fafafa;"><span style="color: #101010; font-family: PT Serif, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span style="background-color: #fafafa;"><span style="color: #101010; font-family: PT Serif, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span></span></span></div><i>A new dichotomy is emerging in the current debate: the contrast between the view of the world as composed of nation-states in relentless competition with one another and the “one planet” movement, which emphasizes human solidarity. These two trends are on a collision course. Up to now, the "one planet" approach seemed to be the only chance to set up an effective strategy against the degradation of the planetary ecosystem. But now, it seems that we'll have to adapt to the new vision that's emerging: for good or for bad, the world is back in the hands of nation-states, with all their limits and their idiosyncrasies, including their large-scale homicidal tendencies. Can we find survival strategies with at least a fighting chance to succeed? Daniele Conversi, researcher at the University of the Basque Country, has been among the first to pose the question in his recent book "Cambiamenti Climatici" (UB)</i></span></span></span><div><span style="color: #101010; font-family: PT Serif, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><i><br /></i></span></span><div><span style="color: #101010; font-family: PT Serif, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span></span><div><span style="color: #101010; font-family: PT Serif, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px;"><br /></span></span><br /><i><b>By Daniele Conversi </b>(University of the Basque Country)</i><div><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWqpGiqHP2857myyDGdKDJABt57jzY67kWGWByGanfgSnKlgjqnaB5sy5a-qW5yeSYVIPDogWFAHG0CHCoMMeDz2kp-j9lpqnP3QQy1ncYjgf2BhfU4tiACiuV6CDV0ZTnkO2xJpfNQiuQxjiRm1x64HiW_lq_hipbY88gg5tqmZanCAwHxCnngxAi3Q/s1191/Conversi.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="1191" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWqpGiqHP2857myyDGdKDJABt57jzY67kWGWByGanfgSnKlgjqnaB5sy5a-qW5yeSYVIPDogWFAHG0CHCoMMeDz2kp-j9lpqnP3QQy1ncYjgf2BhfU4tiACiuV6CDV0ZTnkO2xJpfNQiuQxjiRm1x64HiW_lq_hipbY88gg5tqmZanCAwHxCnngxAi3Q/w409-h143/Conversi.png" width="409" /></a></div><br /><br /></div><div>The climate crisis is one of the nine "<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/26268316">planetary boundaries</a>" identified in the Earth Sciences since 2009. The critical threshold for climate change (350 ppm) has only recently been passed. Other boundaries, such as biodiversity loss, have been overrun — and we are reaching other critical thresholds as well. The global environmental crisis signals the likely entrance into the most turbulent period in human history, requiring unprecedented creativity, force and adaptive skills to act quickly and radically in order to curb the global crisis. But which are the main obstacles arising in front of us? <br /><br />Historians of science and investigative journalists plus some social and political scientists have studied in detail the way the fossil fuel lobbies hampered governmental action via disinformation, misinformation, and the "denial industry". However, these studies do not generally consider in detail the institutional scenario where lobbyists act, namely the nation-state. <br /><br />My research explores a different set of variables originating in the current division of the world into nation-states powered by their own ideology, nationalism. In an age in which boundaries cannot halt climate change, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/03058298990280030901">nationalism fully engages in erecting ever higher boundaries</a>. <br /><br />Thus, we need to ask: if nationalism is the core ideological framework around which contemporary political relations are articulated, is it possible to involve it in the fight against climate change? I explore this answer via a few case studies arising within both stateless nations and nation-states. Riding the wave of nationalism, however, makes only senses if, at the same time, non-national solutions are also simultaneously considered, as condensed in the concept of "<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/ultimate-challenge-nationalism-and-climate-change/1667FAD7F2731F536AA671C42C8E99C3">survival cosmopolitanism</a>": Effective results can only be achieved when considering the plurality of possible solutions and avoiding fideistic responses such as '<a href="https://books.google.es/books?id=KZ3zAgAAQBAJ">techno-fixes</a>' centred on the magic-irrational faith in technological innovation as the ultimate Holy Grail, which can easily be appropriated by nationalists. Salvation may come, not as much from technology, as from the abandonment of an economic system ruthlessly based on environmental destruction and the expansion of mass consumption. </div></div></div></div><br />Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-66136260898840007332023-04-17T12:33:00.002+02:002023-04-17T12:33:23.188+02:00One step away from the Library of Babel : How Science is Becoming Random Noise<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTqxvF2ib9QTRLEQ1gBBKW2G5dAcS4ZsM_QjZao7jq20m8U5Eb2w8tJUfYGSIQsZfDp-hyAdmC1niqJTnAK-eGprNYAnzG64FlEK6hwcfprBdzZTzRj3WQRjDP5UcOlCJYNWJLnpelE9FsTz0IDD5xKWtt-rsJ-_9Nkh0obOY88UW5Y5COT67duSWGWg/s800/babelLibrary.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="403" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTqxvF2ib9QTRLEQ1gBBKW2G5dAcS4ZsM_QjZao7jq20m8U5Eb2w8tJUfYGSIQsZfDp-hyAdmC1niqJTnAK-eGprNYAnzG64FlEK6hwcfprBdzZTzRj3WQRjDP5UcOlCJYNWJLnpelE9FsTz0IDD5xKWtt-rsJ-_9Nkh0obOY88UW5Y5COT67duSWGWg/w403-h403/babelLibrary.png" width="403" /></a></div><div><br /></div>It is said that if you have a monkey pounding at the keys of a typewriter, by mere chance, eventually it will produce all the works of Shakespeare. The Library of Babel, a story by Jorge Luis Borges, is another version of the same idea: a nearly infinite repository of books formed by all the possible combinations of characters. Most of these books are just random combinations of characters that make no sense but, somewhere in the library, there is a book unraveling the mysteries of the universe, the secrets of creation, and providing the true catalog of the library itself. Unfortunately, this book is impossible to find and even if you could find it you would not be able to separate it from the infinite number of books that claim to be it but are not. <div><br /></div><div>The Library of Babel (or a large number of typing monkeys) may be a fitting description of the sad state of "science" as it is nowadays. An immense machine that mostly produces nonsense and, perhaps, some gems of knowledge, unfortunately nearly impossible to find. </div><div><br /></div><div>Below, I am translating a post that appeared in Italian on the <a href="https://laterum.wordpress.com/2023/02/08/la-scienza-e-una-montagna-di-merda/">"Laterum"</a> ("bricks") blog, with the signature of “<i>Birbo Luddynski.</i>” Before getting to this text, a few comments of mine. Obviously, "science" is a huge enterprise formed by, maybe, 10 million scientists. There exist a large number of different fields, different cultures, different languages, and these differences surely affect the way science works. So, you have to take the statements by Mr. "Luddynski" with a certain caution. The way he describes science is approximately valid for the Western world, and the Western scientific rules are spilling to the rest of the world, just like McDonald's fast food joints do. Today, if it is not Western Science, it is not science -- but is Western Science really science?</div><div><br /></div><div>Mr. Luddyinski is mostly correct in his description, but he is missing some facets of the story that are even more damning than others. For instance, in his critique of science publishing, he does not mention that the scientists working as editors are paid by the publishers. So, they have an (often undeclared) conflict of interest in supporting a huge organization that siphons public money into the pockets of private organizations. </div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, Luddyinski is too pessimistic about the capability of individual scientists to do something good despite all the odds. In science, there holds the general rule that things done illegally are done most efficiently. So, scientists must obey the rules if they want to be successful but, once they attain a certain degree of success, they can bend the rules a little -- sometimes a lot -- and try to rock the boat by doing something truly innovative. It is mainly in this way that science still manages to progress and produce knowledge. Some fields like astronomy, artificial intelligence, ecosystem science, biophysical economics, and several others are alive and well, only marginally affected by corruption. </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, the bureaucrats that govern these things are working hard at eliminating all the possible spaces where creative escapades are possible. Even assuming that they won't be completely successful, there remains the problem that an organization that works only when it ignores its own rules is hugely inefficient. For the time being, the public and the decision-makers haven't yet realized what kind of beast they are feeding, but certain things are percolating outside the ivory tower and are becoming known. Mr. Luddynski's paper is a symptom of the gradual dissemination of this knowledge. Eventually, the public will stop being mesmerized by the word "science" and may want something done to make sure that their tax money is spent on something useful rather than on a prestige competition among rock-star scientists. </div><div><br /></div><div><div>Here is the text by Luddynsky. I tried to translate it into English the best I could, maintaining its ironic and scathing (and a little scatologic) style.</div><div><br /></div></div><div><br /></div><div><h1 class="entry-title" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: #fdd898; box-sizing: inherit; clear: both; color: #010101; font-family: var(--font-headings, Poppins, sans-serif); font-size: 1.728rem; letter-spacing: -0.015em; line-height: 1.125; margin: 0px 0px 16px; max-width: unset; padding: 0px;">Science is a Mountain of Shit</h1></div><div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://laterum.wordpress.com/2023/02/08/la-scienza-e-una-montagna-di-merda/">by Birbo Luddynsky - Feb 8, 2023</a></h3><div>(translated by Ugo Bardi)</div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Foreword</h3><p>Science is not the scientific method. "Science" - capitalized in quotation marks - is now an institution, stateless and transnational, that has fraudulently appropriated the scientific method, made it its exclusive monopoly, and uses it to extort money from society - on its own or on behalf of third parties - after having self-proclaimed itself as the new Church of the Certification of Truth [1].</p><p>An electrician trying to locate a fault or a cook aiming to improve a recipe are applying the scientific method without even knowing what it is, and it works! It has always worked for thousands of years, that is, before anyone codified its algorithm, and it will continue to do so, despite modern inquisitors.</p><p>This writer is not a scholar, he does not cite sources out of ideological conviction, but he learned at an early age how to spell "epistemology." He then wallowed for years in the sewage of the aforementioned crime syndicate until, without having succeeded in habituating himself to the mephitic stench, he found an honorable way out. Popper, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, were all thinkers who fully understood the perversion of certain institutional mechanisms but who could not even have imagined that the rot would run so unchecked and tyrannical through society, to the point where a scientist could achieve the power to prevent you from leaving your house, or owning a car, or forcing you to eat worms. Except for TK, he had it all figured out, but that is another matter.</p><p>This paper will not discuss the role that science plays in contemporary society, its gradual becoming a cult, the gradual eroding of spaces of freedom and civic participation in its name. It will not discuss the relationship with the media and the power they have to pass off the rants of a mediocre bumptious professor as established truths. Thus, there will be no talk about the highest offices of the state declaring war on anti-science, declaring victories at plebiscites that were never called, where people are taken to the polls by blackmail and thrashing.</p><p>There will be no mention of how "real science"- that is, that which pertains to respect for the scientific method-is being raped by the international virologists and scientific and technical committees of the world, who make incoherent decisions, literally at the drop of a hat, and demand that anyone comply without question.</p><p>Nor will we discuss the tendency to engage in sterile Internet debates about the article that proves us right in the Lancet or the Brianza Medical Journal or the Manure Magazine. Nor about the obvious tendency to cherry-pick by the deboonker of the moment. "Eh, but Professor Giannetti of Fortestano is a known waffler, lol." The office cultists of the <i>ipse dixit </i>are now meticulous enforcers of a strict hierarchy of sources and opinions, based on improbable as rigorous qualitative prestige rankings, or worse, equally improbable as arbitrary quantitative bibliometric indices.</p><p>Here you will be told why science is not what it says it is and precisely why it has assumed such a role in society.</p><p>Everything you will find written here is widely known and documented in books, longforms, articles in popular weeklies, and even articles in peer-reviewed journals (LOL). Do a Google search for such terms as "publish or perish," "reproducibility crisis," "p-hacking," "publication bias," and dozens of other related terms. I don't provide any sources because, as I said, it is contrary to my ideology. The added value of what I am going to write is an immediate, certainly partisan and uncensored, description of the obscene mechanisms that pervade the entire scientific world, from Ph.D. student recruitment to publications.</p><p>There is also no "real science" to save, as opposed to "lasciviousness." The thesis of this paper is that science is structurally corrupt and that the conflicts of interest that grip it are so deep and pervasive, that only a radical reconstruction -after its demolition- of the university institution can save the credibility of a small circle of scholars, those who are trying painstakingly, honestly and humbly to add pieces to the knowledge of Creation.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><i>The scientist and his career</i></h3><p>"Scientist" today means a researcher employed in various capacities at universities, public or private research centers, or think tanks. That of the scientist is an entirely different career from that of any worker and is reminiscent of that of the <i>cursus honorum</i> of the Roman senatorial class. <i>Cursus honorum</i> my ass. A scientist's CV is different from that of any other worker. Incidentally, the hardest thing for a scientist is to compile a CV intelligible to the real world, should he or she want to return to earning an honest living among ordinary mortals. Try doing a Europass after six years of post-doc. LOL.</p><p>The scientist is a model student throughout his or her school career first and college career later. Model student means disciplined, with grades in the last percentiles of standardized tests, and also good interpersonal skills. He manages to get noticed during the last years of university (so-called "undergraduate," which however strangely, in Italy is called the <i>magistrale </i>or <i>specialistica </i>or whatever the fuck it is called nowadays), until he finds a recommendation (intended in the bad sense of the term) from a professor to enroll in a Ph.D. program, or doctorate, as it is called outside the Anglosphere. The Ph.D. is an elite university program, three to six years long, depending on the country and discipline, where one is trained to be a "scientist."</p><p>During the Ph.D. in the first few years, the would-be scientist takes courses at the highest technical level, taught by the best professors in his department, which are complemented by an initial phase of initiation into research, in the form of becoming a "research assistant," or RA. This phase, which marks the transition from "established knowledge" of textbooks to the "frontier of scientific research," takes place explicitly under the guidance of a professor-mentor, who will most likely follow the doctoral student through the remainder of the doctoral course, and almost always throughout his or her career. The education of crap. Not all doctoral students will, of course, be paired with a "winning" mentor, but only those who are more determined, ambitious, and show vibrancy in their courses.</p><p>During this RA phase, the student is weaned into what are the real practices of scientific research. It is a really crucial phase; it is the time when the student goes from the Romantic-Promethean-Faustian ideals of discovering the Truth, to nights spent fiddling with data that make no sense, amid errors in the code and general bewilderment at the misplaced meaning. Why am I doing all this? Why do I have to find just THAT result? Doesn't this go against all the rationalist schemata I was sharing on Facebook two years ago when I was pissing off the flat-earthers on duty? What do you mean if the estimate does not support the hypothesis, then I have to change the specification of the model? It is at this point that the young scientist usually asks the mentor some timid questions with a vague "epistemological" flavor, which are usually evaded with positivist browbeating about science proceeding by trial and error, or with a speech that sounds something like this: "You're going to get it wrong. There are two ways of not understanding: not understanding because you are trying to understand, or not understanding by pissing off others. Take your pick. In October, your contract runs out."</p><p>The purest, at this point, fall into depression, from which they will emerge by finding an honest job, with or without a piece of paper. The careerists, psychopaths, and naive <i>fachidioten</i>, on the other hand, will pick up speed and run along the tracks like bullet trains, unstoppable in their blazing careers devoted to prestige.</p><p>After the first phase of RA, during which the novice contributes to the mentor's publications-with or without mention among the authors, he or she moves on to the next, more mature phase of building his/her own research pipeline, collaborating as a co-author with the mentor and his other co-authors, attending conferences, weaving a relational network with other universities. The culmination of this phase is the attainment of the Ph.D. degree, which, however, at this point, is nothing more than a formality, since the doctoral student's achievements speak for themselves. The "dissertation," or "defense," in fact, will be nothing more than a seminar where the student presents his or her major work, which is already publishable.</p><p>But now the student is already launched on a meteoric path: depending on discipline and luck, he will have already signed a contract as an "assistant professor" in a "tenure track," or as a "post-doc." His future career will thus be determined solely by his ability to choose the right horses, that is, the research projects to bet on. Indeed, he has entered the hellish world of "publish or perish," in which his probability of being confirmed "for life" depends solely on the number of articles he manages to publish in "good" peer-reviewed journals. In many hard sciences, the limbo of post-docs, during which the scientist moves from contract to contract like a wandering monk, unable to experience stable relationships, can last as long as ten years. The "tenure track," or the period after which they can decide whether or not to confirm you, lasts more or less six years. A researcher who manages to become an employee in a permanent position at a university before the age of 35-38 can consider himself lucky. And this is by no means a peculiarity of the Italian system.</p><p>After the coveted "permanent position" as a professor, can the researcher perhaps relax and get down to work only on sensible, quality projects that require time and patience and may not even lead anywhere? Can he work on projects that may even challenge the famous consensus? Does he have time to study so that he can regain some insight? Although the institution of "tenure," i.e., the permanent faculty position, was designed to do just that, the answer is no. Some people will even do that, aware that they end up marginalized and ignored by their peers, in the department and outside. Not fired, but he/she ends up in the last room in the back by the toilet, sees not a penny of research funding, is not invited to conferences, and is saddled with the lamest PhD students to do research. If he is liked, he is treated as an eccentric uncle and good-naturedly teased, if disliked he is first hated and then ignored.</p><p>But in general, if you've survived ten years of publish or perish -- and not everyone can -- it's because you like doing it. So you will keep doing it, partly because the rewards are coveted. Salary increases, committee chairs, journal editor positions, research funds, consultancies, invitations to conferences, million-dollar grants as principal investigator, interviews in newspapers and on television. Literally, money and prestige. The race for publications does not end; in fact, at this point, it becomes more and more ruthless. And the scientist, now a de facto manager of research, with dozens of Ph.D. students and postdocs available as workforce, will increasingly lose touch with the subject of research to become interested in academic politics, money, and public relations. It will be the doctoral student now who will "get the code wrong" for him until he finds the desired result. He won't even have to ask explicitly, in most cases. Nobody will notice anyway, because nobody gives a damn. But what about peer review?</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The peer-review</h3><p>Thousands of pages have been written about this institution, its merits, its flaws, and how to improve it. It has been ridiculed and trolled to death, but the conclusion recited by the standard bearers of science is always the same: it is the best system we have, and we should keep it. Which is partly true, but its supposed aura of infallibility is the main cause of the sorry state the academy is in. Let's see how it works.</p><p>Our researcher Anon has his nice pdf written in Latex titled "The Cardinal Problem in Manzoni: is it Betrothed or Behoofed?" (boomer quote) and submits it to the Journal of Liquid Bullshit via its web platform. The JoLB chief editor takes the pdf, takes a quick look, and decides which associate editor to send it to, depending on the topic. The chosen editor takes another quick look and decides whether to 1) send a short letter where he tells Anon that his work is definitely nice and interesting but, unfortunately it is not a good fit for the Journal of Liquid Bullshit, and he recommends similar outlets such as Journal of Bovine Diarrhea, or Liquid Bovine Stool Review or 2) send it to the referees. But let's pause for a moment.</p><p><i>What is the Journal of Liquid Bullshit?</i></p><p>The Journal of Liquid Bullshit is a "field journal" within the general discipline of "bullshit" (Medicine, Physics, Statistics, Political Science, Economics, Psychology, etc.), dealing with the more specialized field of Liquid Bullshit (Virology, Astrophysics, Machine Learning, Regime Change, Labor Economics, etc.). It is not a glorious journal like Science or Nature, and it is not a prestigious journal in the discipline (Lancet, JASA, AER, etc). But it is a good journal in which important names in the field of liquid crap nonetheless publish regularly. In contrast to the more prestigious ones, which are generally linked to specific bodies or university publishers, most of these journals are published (online, that is) by for-profit publishers, who make a living by selling subscription packages to universities at great expense.</p><p>Who is the chief editor? The editor is a prominent personality in the Liquid Bullshit field. Definitely, a Full Professor, minimum of 55 years old, dozens of prominent publications, highly cited, has been keynote speaker at several annual conferences of the American Association of Liquid Bovine Stools. During conferences, he constantly has a huddle of people around him.</p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>Who are the Associate editors?</i></p><p>They are associate or full professors with numerous publications, albeit relatively young. Well connected, well launched. The associate editor's job is to manage the manuscript at all stages, from choosing referees to decisions about revisions. The AE is the person who has all the power over the paper, not only of course for the final decision, but also for the choice of referees.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Who are the referees</i></p><p>Referees are academic researchers formally contacted by the AE to evaluate the paper and write a short report. Separately, they also send a private recommendation to the AE on the fate of the paper: acceptance, revision, or rejection. The work of the referees is unpaid; it is time taken away from research or very often from free time. The referee receives only the paper; he or she has no way to evaluate the data or codes, unless (which is very rare) the authors make them available on their personal web pages before publication. It is difficult in any case for the referee to waste time fiddling around. In fact, the evaluation required of the referee is only of a methodological-qualitative nature, and not of merit. In fact, the "merit" evaluation would be up to the "scientific community," which, by replicating the authors' work, under the same or other experimental conditions, would judge its validity. Even a child would understand that there is a conflict of interest as big as a house. In fact, the referee can actively sabotage the paper, and the author can quietly sabotage the referees when it is their turn to judge. </p><p>In fact, when papers were typed and shipped by mail, the system used was "double-blind" review. The title page was removed from the manuscript: the referee did not know who was judging, and the author did not know who the referee was. Since the Internet has existed, however, authors have found it more and more convenient to publicize their work in the "workings paper" format. There are many reasons for doing so, and I won't go into them here, but it is now so widespread that referees need only do a very brief google search to find the working paper and, with it, the authors' names. By now, more and more journals have given up pretending to believe in double-blind reviewing, and they send the referees the pdf complete with the title page. Thus referees are no longer anonymous referees, especially since they have strong conflicts of interest. For example, the referee may get hold of the paper of a friend or colleague of his or her, or a stranger who gives right - or wrong - to his or her research. A referee may also "reveal" himself years later to the author, e.g. over a drink, during alcoholic events at a conference, obviously in case of a favorable report. You know, I was a referee of your paper at Journal X. It can come in handy if there is some confidence. Let's not forget that referees are people who are themselves trying to get their papers published in other journals, or even the same ones. And not all referees are the same. A "good" referee is a rare commodity for an editor. The good referee is the one who responds on time, and writes predictable reports. I have known established professors who boasted that they receive dozens of papers a month to referee "because they know I reject them all right away."</p><p><i>So how does this peer review process work?</i></p><p>We should not imagine editors as people who are removed from the real world, just with their hands extremely full. An editor, in fact, has enormous power, and one does not become an editor unless he or she shows that he or she covets this power, as well as having earned it, according to the perverse logic of the cartel. The editor's enormous power lies in influencing the fate of a paper at all stages of revision. He can choose referees favorable or unfavorable to a paper: scientific feuds and their participants are known, and are especially known to editors. It can also side with the minority referee and ask for a review (or rejection).</p><p>Every top researcher knows which editors are friendly, and knows which potential referees can be the most dangerous enemies. Articles are often calibrated, trying to suck up to the editor or potential referees by winking at their research agendas. Indeed, it is in this context that the citation cow market develops: if I am afraid of referee Titius, I will cite as many of his works as possible. Or another strategy (valid for smaller papers and niche works) is to ignore him completely, otherwise the neutral editor might choose him as referee simply by scrolling through the bibliography. Many referees also go out of their way at the review stage to pump up their citations essentially pushing authors to cite their work, even if it is irrelevant. But this happens in smaller journals. [2]</p><p>The most relevant thing to understand about the nature of peer review is how it is a process in which individuals who are consciously and structurally conflicted participate. The funny thing is that this same system is also used to allocate public research funds, as we shall see.</p><p>The fact that the occasional "inconvenient" article manages to break through the peer review wall should not, of course, deceive: the process, while well-guided, still remains partly random. A referee may recommend acceptance unexpectedly, and the editor can do little about it. In any case, little harm: an awkward article now and then will never contribute to the creation of consensus, the one that suits the ultimate funding apparatus, and indeed gives the outside observer the illusion that there is frank debate.</p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><i>But so can one really rig research results and get away with it?</i></h3><p>Generally yes, partly because you can cheat at various levels, generally leaving behind various screens of plausible deniability, i.e., gimmicks that allow you to say that you were wrong, that you didn't know, that you didn't do it on purpose, that it was the Ph.D. student, that the dog ate your raw data. Of course, in the rare case that you get caught you don't look good, and the paper will generally end up "retracted." A fair mark of infamy on a researcher's career, but if he can hide the evidence of his bad faith he will still retain his professorship, and in a few years everyone will have forgotten. After all, these are things that everyone does: sin, stones, etc.</p><p>Every now and then, more and more frequently, retraction of some important paper happens, where it turns out that the data of some well-published work was completely made up, and that the results were too good to be true. This happens when some young up-and-coming psychopath exaggerates, and draws too much attention to himself. These extreme cases of outright fraud are certainly more numerous than those discovered, but as mentioned, you don't need to invent the data to come up with a publishable result, just pay a monkey to try all possible models on all possible subsets. The a posteriori justification of why you excluded subset B can always be found. You can even omit it if you want to, because if you haven't stepped on anyone's toes, there is no way that anyone is going to start fleecing your work. Even in the experimental sciences it can happen that no one has been able to replicate the experiments of very important papers, and it took them fifteen years to discover that maybe they had made it all up. Go google "Alzheimer scandal" LOL! There is no real incentive in the academy to uncover bogus papers, other than literally bragging about them on twitter.</p><p><i><br /></i></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><i>Research funding</i></h3><p>Doing research requires money. There is not only laboratory equipment, which is not needed in many disciplines anyway. There is also, and more importantly, the workforce. Laboratories and research in general are run by underpaid people, namely Ph.D. students and post-docs (known in Italy as "<i>assegnisti</i>"). But not only that, there are also expenses for software, dataset purchase, travel to conferences, seminars, and workshops to be organized, with people to be invited and to whom you have to pay travel, hotel, and dinner at a decent restaurant. Consider the important PR side of this: inviting an important professor, perhaps an editor, for a two-day vacation and making a "friend" of him or her can always come in handy.</p><p>In addition to all this, there is the fact that universities generally keep a share of the grants won by each professor, and with this share, they do various things. If the professor who does not win grants needs to change his chair, or his computer, or wants to go present at a loser conference where he is not invited, he will have to go hat in hand to the department head to ask for the money, which will largely come from the grants won by others. I don't know how it works in Italy, but in the rest of the world, it certainly does. This obviously means that a professor who wins grants will have more power and prestige in the department than one who does not win them.</p><p>In short, winning grants is a key goal for any ambitious researcher. Not winning grants, even for a professor with tenure, implies becoming something of an outcast. The one who does not win grants is the odd one out, with shaggy hair, who has the office down the hall by the toilet. But how do you win grants?</p><p>Grants are given by special agencies -- public or private -- for the disbursement of research funds, which publish calls, periodic or special. The professor, or research group, writes a research project in which he or she says what he or she wants to do, why it is important, how he or she intends to do it, with what resources, and how much money he or she needs. The committee, at this point, appoints "anonymous" referees who are experts in the field, and peer review the project. It doesn't take long to realize that if you are an expert in the field, you know very well who you are going to evaluate. If you have read this far, you will also know full well that referees have a gigantic conflict of interest. In fact, all it takes is one supercilious remark to scuttle the rival band's project, or to favor the friend with whom you share the same research agenda, while no one will have the courage to scuttle the project of the true "raìs" of the field. Finally, the committee will evaluate the applicant's academic profile, obviously counting the number and prestige of publications, as well as the totemic H-index.</p><p>So we have a system where those who get grants publish, and those who publish get grants. All is governed by an inextricable web of conflicts of interest, where it is the informal, and ultimately self-interested, connections of the individual researcher that win out. Informal connections that, let us remember, start with the Ph.D. What is presented as an aseptic, objective, and informal system of meritocratic evaluation resembles at best the system for awarding the contract to resurface the bus parking lot of a small town in the Pontine countryside in the 1980s.</p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><i>The research agenda</i></h3><p>We have mentioned it several times, but what really is a research agenda? Synthetically we can say that the research agenda is a line of research in a certain sub-field of a sub-discipline, linked to a starting hypothesis, and/or a particular methodology. This starting hypothesis will always tend to be confirmed by those pursuing the agenda. The methodology, on the other hand, will always be presented as decisive and far superior to the alternatives. A research agenda, to continue with the example from before, could be the relationship between color and specific gravity of cattle excrement and milk production. Or non-parametric methods to estimate excreta production given diet composition.</p><p>Careers are built or blocked around the research agenda: a researcher with a "hot" agenda, perhaps in a relatively new field, will be much more likely to publish well, and thus obtain grants, and thus publish well. You are usually launched on the hot agenda during your doctoral program, if the advisor advises you well. For example, it may be that the advisor has a strand in mind, but he doesn't feel like setting out to learn a new methodology at age 50, so he sends the young co-author ahead. Often, then, the 50-year-old prof, now a "full professor," finds himself becoming among the leaders of a "cutting-edge" research strand without ever really having mastered its methodologies and technicalities, thus limiting himself to the managerial and marketing side of the issue.</p><p>As already explained, real gangs form around the agendas, acting to monopolize the debate on the topic, giving rise to a real controlled pseudo-debate. The bosses' "seminal" articles can never be totally demolished; if anything, they can be enriched, and expanded. One will be able to explore the issues from another point of view, under other dimensions, using new analytical techniques, different data, which will lead to increasingly different conclusions. The key thing is that no one will ever say "sorry guys but we are wasting time here." The only time wasted in the academy is time that does not lead to publications and, therefore, grants.</p><p>But then who dictates the agenda? "They" dictate it - directly - the big players in research, that is, the professors at the top of their careers internationally, editors of the most prestigious journals. Indirectly, then, the ultimate funders of research, direct and indirect, dictate it: multinational corporations and governments, both directly and indirectly, through the actions of lobbies and various international potentates. </p><p>The big misconception underlying science, and thus the justification of its funding in the face of public opinion, is that this incessant and chaotic "rush to publish" nonetheless succeeds in adding building blocks to knowledge. This is largely false.</p><p>In fact, research agendas never talk to each other, and above all, they never seem to come to a conclusion. After years of pseudo-debate the agenda will have been so "enriched" by hundreds of published articles that trying to make sense of it would be hard and thankless work. Thankless because no one is interested in doing this work. Funds have been spent, and chairs have been taken. In fact, the strand sooner or later dries up: the topic stops being fashionable, thus desirable to top journals, it gradually moves on to smaller journals, new Ph.D. students will stop caring about it, and if the leaders of the strand care about their careers, they will move on to something else. And the merry-go-round begins again.</p><p>The fundamental questions posed at the beginning of the agenda will not have been satisfactorily answered, and the conceptual and methodological issues raised during the pseudo-academic debate will certainly not have been resolved. An outside observer who were to study the entire literature of a research strand could not help but notice that there are very few "take-home" results. Between inconclusive results, flawed or misapplied methodologies, the net contribution brought to knowledge is almost always zero, and the qualitative, or "common sense" answer always remains the best.</p><p><br /></p><h4 style="text-align: left;">Conclusions</h4><p>We have thus far described science. Its functioning, the actors involved in it and their recruitment. We have described how conflicts of interest - and moral and substantive corruption - govern every aspect of the academic profession, which is thus unable, as a whole, to offer any objective, unbiased viewpoint, on anything.</p><p>The product of science is a giant pile of crap: wrong, incomplete, blatantly false and/or irrelevant answers. Answers to questions that in most cases no one in their right mind would want to ask. A mountain of shit where no one among those who wallow in it knows a shit. No one understands shit, and poorly asked questions are given in return for payment-piloted answers. A mountain of shit within which feverish hands seek-and find-the mystical-religious justification for contemporary power, arbitrariness and tyranny.</p><p>Sure, there are exceptions. Sure, there is the prof. who has gone through the net of the system, and now thanks to the position he gained, he has a platform to say something interesting. But he is an isolated voice, ridiculed, used to stir up the usual two minutes of TV or social hatred. There is no baby to be saved in the dirty water. The child is dead. Drowned in the sewage.</p><p>The "academic debate" is now a totally self-referential process, leading to no tangible quantitative (or qualitative) results. All academic research is nothing but a giant Ponzi scheme to increase citations, which serve to get grants and pump up the egos and bank accounts -- but mostly egos -- of professional careerists.</p><p>Science as an institution is an elephantine, hypertrophied apparatus, corrupt to the core, whose only function - besides incestuously reproducing itself - is to provide legitimacy for power. Surely at one time it was also capable of providing the technical knowledge base necessary for the reproduction and maintenance of power itself. No longer today, the unstoppable production of the shit mountain makes this impossible. At most, it manages to select, nominally and by simply assigning an attendance token through the most elite schools, the scions of the new ruling class.</p><p>When someone magnifies the latest scientific breakthrough to you, the only possible response you can give is, "I'm not buying anything, thank you." If someone tells you that they are acting "according to science," run away.</p><p>[1] Advising Galilei to talk about "hypothesis" was Bellarmine. In response, Galilei published the ridiculous "dialogue," where the evidence brought to support his claims about heliocentrism was nothing more than conjecture, completely wrong, and without any empirical basis. The Holy Office's position was literally, "say whatever you like as long as you don't pass it off as Truth." Galilei got his revenge: now they say whatever they like and pass it off as Truth. Sources? Look them up. </p><p>[2] Paradoxically, in the lower-middle tier of journals, where cutthroat competition is minimal, one can still find a few rare examples of peer review done well. For example, I was once asked to referee a paper for a smaller journal, with which I had never had anything to do and whose editor I did not know even indirectly. The paper was sent without a title page therefore anonymous, and strangely I could not find the working paper online. It was objectively rubbish, and I recommended rejection.</p><p>________________________________________________________________</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-4994478279791597192023-04-13T10:46:00.014+02:002023-04-13T21:26:08.903+02:00What's Wrong With Science? Mostly, it is how we Mismanage it<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisoiCH5hRuOkHMAT2S7soS-MIF04bPZR6g40t1cBysumzKU8yIveCocXTv9v2oBwyJPkclPTruBSDVQ2ryfL_dtpvWOZCZqRkoDHb9HTmObKTIurXMDxPZa76Rb99rb-g9Fxhb6DGbjMbJWAloNQjswQMYzJkP_ZNdjRYFVBjqBuaKMrYttWitVLM-Pg/s450/zarkov.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="450" height="351" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisoiCH5hRuOkHMAT2S7soS-MIF04bPZR6g40t1cBysumzKU8yIveCocXTv9v2oBwyJPkclPTruBSDVQ2ryfL_dtpvWOZCZqRkoDHb9HTmObKTIurXMDxPZa76Rb99rb-g9Fxhb6DGbjMbJWAloNQjswQMYzJkP_ZNdjRYFVBjqBuaKMrYttWitVLM-Pg/w576-h351/zarkov.jpg" width="576" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;"><i>"A scientist, Dr. Hans Zarkov, works night and day, perfecting the tool he hopes to save the world... His great mind is strained by the tremendous effort" (From Alex Raymond's "Flash Gordon")</i></p><p><br /></p><p>We tend to see science as the work of individual scientists, maybe of the "mad scientist" kind. Great minds fighting to unravel the mysteries of nature with the raw power of their minds. But, of course, it is not the way science works. Science is a large network of people, institutions, and facilities. It consumes huge amounts of money from government budgets and private enterprises. And most of this money, today, is wasted on useless research that benefits no one. Science has become a great paper-churning machine whose purpose seems to be mainly the glorification of a few superstar scientists. Their main role seems to be to speak glibly and portentously about how what they are doing will one day benefit humankind, provided that more money is poured into their research projects.</p><p><a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem">Adam Mastroianni</a> makes a few simple and well-thought considerations in his blog about why science has become the disastrous waste of money and human energy it is today. <b>The problem is not with science itself: the problem is how we manage large organizations.</b> </p><p>You may have experienced the problem in your career. Organizations seem to work nicely for the purpose they were built up to when they include a few tens of people, maybe up to a hundred members. Then, they devolve into conventicles whose main purpose seems to be to gather resources for themselves, even at the cost of damaging the enterprise as a whole. </p><p>Is it unavoidable? Probably yes. It is part of the way Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) work, and, by all means, human organizations are CASs. These systems are evolution-driven: if they exist, it means they are stable. So, the existing ones are those who managed to attain a certain degree of stability. They do that by ruthlessly eliminating the inefficient parts of the system. The best example is Earth's ecosystem: You may have heard that evolution means the "survival of the fittest." But no, it is not like that. It is the system that must survive, not individual creatures. The "fittest" creatures are nothing if the system they are part of does not survive. So, ecosystems survive by eliminating the unfit. Gorshkov and Makarieva call them "decay individuals." You can find these considerations in their book "<a href="https://books.google.it/books/about/Biotic_Regulation_of_the_Environment.html?id=-wgY0rwX_iEC&redir_esc=y">Biotic Regulation of the Environment</a>."</p><p>It is the same for the CAS we call "Science." It has evolved in a way that maximizes its own survival and stability. That's evident if you know just a little about how Science works. It is a rigid, inflexible, self-referencing organization refractory to all attempts to reform from the inside. It is a point that <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem">Mastroianni makes very clear </a>in his post. A huge amount of resources and human efforts are spent by the scientific enterprise to weed out what's defined as "bad science," seen as anything that threatens the stability of the whole system. That includes the baroque organization of scientific journals, the gatekeeping control by the disastrously inefficient "peer review" system, the distribution of research funds by rigid old-boy networks, the beastly exploitation of young researchers, and more. All this tends to destroy both the very bad (which is a good thing) and the very good (which is not a good thing at all). But both the very good and the very bad threaten the stability of the entrenched scientific establishment. Truly revolutionary discoveries that really could change the world would reverberate through the established hierarchies and make the system collapse. </p><p>Matroianni<a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem"> makes these points</a> from a different viewpoint that he calls the "weak links -- strong links" problem. It is a correct way if you frame Science not as a self-referencing system but as a subsystem of a wider system which is human society. In this sense, Science exists to serve useful purposes and not just to pay salaries to scientists. What Mastroianni says is that we should strive to encourage good science instead of discouraging bad science. What we are doing is settling on mediocrity, and we just waste money in the process. Here is how he summarizes his idea. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYHFQ9gXX16G5KYNxDegEToE79dNTe8-kTwR2axpzVh4zV6tIKpRlo_p0QbYmQEYXG99gRjV7FhM9KSnhAXVh83IoLV3Svh1SoROKSoHQi1hPSrnjjRaoVwHFkGUwjhVdw7EBIudER5iN3ndTTidSYFx8IbxHZSDNdicq7BJqn--X-WiBp4xPYsN-8VA/s787/Mastroianni1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="443" data-original-width="787" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYHFQ9gXX16G5KYNxDegEToE79dNTe8-kTwR2axpzVh4zV6tIKpRlo_p0QbYmQEYXG99gRjV7FhM9KSnhAXVh83IoLV3Svh1SoROKSoHQi1hPSrnjjRaoVwHFkGUwjhVdw7EBIudER5iN3ndTTidSYFx8IbxHZSDNdicq7BJqn--X-WiBp4xPYsN-8VA/w588-h332/Mastroianni1.png" width="588" /></a></div><div>I strongly encourage you to read the whole<a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem"> Mastroianni's post</a> because it is very well argumented and convincing. It is what we <i>should </i>do to turn science into something useful that we badly need in this difficult moment for humankind. But the fact that we should do that doesn't mean it will be done. Note in Mastroianni's post the box that says "<i><b>Accept Risk.</b></i>" This is anathema for bureaucrats, and the need for it nearly guarantees that it will not be done. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet, we might at least try to push science into doing something useful. Prizes could be a good idea: by offering prices, you pay only for success, but not for failure. But in Science, prizes are rare; apart from the Nobel prize and a few others, scientists do not compete for prizes. That's something we could work on. And, who knows, we might succeed in improving science, at least a little! </div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-25832577822932738732023-04-07T21:26:00.008+02:002023-04-08T09:42:22.840+02:00Why we Can't Change Anything Before it is Too Late. <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJgBCw1cLmLy7XJjR_GNkKmdmmbXi5IfxM-NokReZwZbw4ZE77e_DytLVlDyxFxSXB_yMEHayGHd_wSV9ZXXc062zf3PN5o2WxdFC6lIZ3wMh-AR3DWmMJQfX20qG1W9VolXrcZ07VWkgZJngv8zXMy18yv0Fd24tsD09Pn4RSbm6sz2jbaD0CJC4pGQ/s927/Controverso1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="927" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJgBCw1cLmLy7XJjR_GNkKmdmmbXi5IfxM-NokReZwZbw4ZE77e_DytLVlDyxFxSXB_yMEHayGHd_wSV9ZXXc062zf3PN5o2WxdFC6lIZ3wMh-AR3DWmMJQfX20qG1W9VolXrcZ07VWkgZJngv8zXMy18yv0Fd24tsD09Pn4RSbm6sz2jbaD0CJC4pGQ/w446-h259/Controverso1.png" width="446" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i>Yours truly, Ugo Bardi, in a recent interview on a local TV station. note the "Limits to Growth" t-shirt and, as a lapel pin, the ASPO-Italy logo. </i></div><br /><p>A few days ago, I was invited to an interview on a local TV about the energy transition. I prepared myself by collecting data. I was planning to bring to the attention of viewers a few recent studies that showed how urgent and necessary it is to move away from conventional engines, including <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36113788/">a recent paper</a> by Roberto Cazzolla-Gatti(*) that shows how the combustion of fossil fuels is one of the main causes of tumors in Italy. </p><p>And then I had a minor epiphany in my mind. </p><p>I saw myself from the other side of the camera, appearing on the screen in someone's living room. I saw myself as one more of those white-haired professors who tell viewers, "look, there is a grave danger ahead. You must do as I say, or disaster will ensue."</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiciDjiozWxpNCkpHqWFSkgYj7RRlyBizpS43mzsQQBYNMkmXcb9E8bKGkFzjDDTnn7enTpOncdkigTHSvm14bOAudnwOCYJyT55XyIBOa604A_vWlnb6CsKNJ_wye_nxPYUrSpRmSKpfsty8hI7Ct8E98N-nfTxZFmUF9f9gU8pg1r-JwsPiJxJt0Rbw/s1200/SimpsonsTv.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiciDjiozWxpNCkpHqWFSkgYj7RRlyBizpS43mzsQQBYNMkmXcb9E8bKGkFzjDDTnn7enTpOncdkigTHSvm14bOAudnwOCYJyT55XyIBOa604A_vWlnb6CsKNJ_wye_nxPYUrSpRmSKpfsty8hI7Ct8E98N-nfTxZFmUF9f9gU8pg1r-JwsPiJxJt0Rbw/w352-h197/SimpsonsTv.webp" width="352" /></a></div><p>No way. </p><p>I could see myself appearing to people as more or less the same as one of the many TV virologists who had terrorized people with the Covid story during the past three years. "There is a grave danger caused by a mysterious virus. If you don't do as I say, disaster will ensue." </p><p>It scared people a lot, but only for a while. And now the poor performance of TV virologists, Tony Fauci and the others, cast a shade over the general validity of science. As a result, we now see a wave of anti-science sweeping the discussion while carrying along the flotsam of decades of legends. Fake lunar landings, earthquakes as weapons, how Greenland was green at the time of Erik the Red, and don't you know that climate has always been changing? Besides, Greta Thumberg is a bitch.</p><p>But it is not so much a fault of the TV virologists, although they have done their part in creating the damage. It is the human decisional system that works in a perverse way. More or less, it works like this:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Scientists identify a grave problem and try to warn people about it. </li><li>The scientists are first demonized, then ignored.</li><li>Nothing is done about the problem.</li><li>When it is discovered that the warning was correct, it is too late. </li></ol><p></p><p>Do you remember <a href="https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-boy-who-called-wolf-bayesian-drama_16.html">the story of the boy who cried "wolf"</a>? Yes, it works exactly like that in the real world. One of the first modern cases in real history was that of "The Limits to Growth" in 1972. </p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>A group of scientists sponsored by the Club of Rome discovered that unrestrained growth of the global economic system would lead to its collapse.</li><li>The scientists and the Club of Rome were demonized, then ignored.</li><li>Nothing was done about the problem.</li><li>Now that we are discovering that the scientists were right, collapse is already starting.</li></ol><div>More recently, we saw how, </div><div><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Scientists tried to alert people about the dangers of climate change.</li><li>Scientists were demonized and then ignored.</li><li>Nothing was done about climate change.</li><li>When it was discovered that the warning was correct, it was too late. (it is).</li></ol></div><div>There are many more examples, but it almost always works like this. Conversely, when, for some reason, people take heed of the warning, the results may be even worse, as we saw with the Covid epidemic. In that case, you can add a 1b line to the list that says, "people become scared and do things that worsen the problem." After a while, line 2 (scientists are demonized) takes over, and the cycle goes on. </div><div><br /></div><div>So, what are the conclusions? The main one, I'd say, is:<b> </b></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>Avoid being a white-haired scientist issuing warnings about grave dangers from a TV screen</b>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then, what should you say when you appear on TV (and you happen to be a white-haired scientist)? Good question. My idea for that TV interview was to present change as an opportunity rather than an obligation. I was prepared to explain how there are many possible ways to improve the quality of our life by moving away from fossil fuels. </div><div><br /></div><div>How did it go? It was one of the best examples that I experienced in my life of the general validity of the principle that says, <b>"No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."</b> The interview turned out to be a typical TV ambush in which the host accused me of wanting to beggar people by taking away their cars and their gas stoves, of trying to poison the planet with lithium batteries, and of promoting the exploitation of the 3rd world poor with coltan mines. I didn't take that meekly, as you may imagine. </div><div><br /></div><div>The interview became confrontational, and it quickly degenerated into a verbal brawl. I am not linking to the interview; it is not so interesting. Besides, it was all in Italian. But you can get some idea of how these things go from a similar ambush <a href="https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/character-assassination-theater-101">against Matt Taibbi on MSNBC</a>. What did the viewers think? Hopefully, they switched channels. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the end. I am only sure that if something has to happen, it will. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">(*) The <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36113788/">paper</a> by Roberto Cazzolla-Gatti on the carcinogenic effects of combustion is truly impressive. Do read it, even if you are not a catastrophist. You'll learn a lot. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">(**) CJ Hopkins<a href="https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/character-assassination-theater-101"> offers some suggestions</a> on how to behave when you are subjected to this kind of attack. He says that you should refuse to answer some questions, answer with more questions, avoid taking the interviewer seriously, and things like that. It is surely better than trying to just defend oneself, but it is extremely difficult. It was not the first time that I faced this kind of ambush, and when you are in the crossfire you have little or no chances to avoid a memetic defeat. </span></div><div><br /></div><p></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-28585592353050241762023-04-07T17:23:00.006+02:002023-04-08T03:24:44.767+02:00How to Make Your Google Masters Happy: Fixing the Privacy Policy of Your Blog<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbmUbLoqwn0y5-ekgoJ0Jyw5lIPOF0H1rSzSt03h5U6j7zsXUS78-3L7maJIyC0CNEy5-Z0TtS9YaeQJg2xIkelU0-3q4qFt4Ot6FtO3Vf8uOX8PUPHfxYTyR_SD7seig6f1TkQyY1OlQAfmEP-45-dHxkKO2s0uZ9vtd0mdXuCa3RrARfR-29DQj4cA/s1024/StoicSimple.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbmUbLoqwn0y5-ekgoJ0Jyw5lIPOF0H1rSzSt03h5U6j7zsXUS78-3L7maJIyC0CNEy5-Z0TtS9YaeQJg2xIkelU0-3q4qFt4Ot6FtO3Vf8uOX8PUPHfxYTyR_SD7seig6f1TkQyY1OlQAfmEP-45-dHxkKO2s0uZ9vtd0mdXuCa3RrARfR-29DQj4cA/w397-h397/StoicSimple.webp" width="397" /></a></div><br /><p>As I told you <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/03/help-needed-can-someone-check-privacy.html">in a previous post</a>, for months, Google has been pestering me with notices that there was something wrong with the privacy policy of my blog and that if I wouldn't fix it, they would start doing dark and dire things, such as making my blog invisible to search engines. Now, after many attempts and much struggle, I can tell you that the saga is over. So, I am posting these notes that <b>may be useful for you in case you find yourself in the same situation.</b></p><p>The problem had to do with the privacy regulations of the EU and the EEA, aka the "General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): I had to obtain consent from the user for something not explicitly described in the ominous messages I was receiving. Fixing the problem turned out to be a small Odyssey. </p><div><b>1) Using search engines</b> The first thing you normally do in these cases is look over the Web to see if someone has already solved the problem that plagues you. About this specific question, I immediately found myself facing a wall of sites claiming that they can solve the problem for you if you just pay some money. Mostly, they looked like traps, but I was dumb enough to pay $29 for a "personalized policy declaration" that came with the request of a further payment for hosting it on their site. I took care myself to create a subpage of the blog to host it at no cost. </div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>First lesson learned</i></b>: <i>skip the sites that ask you money to fix this problem unless you are a commercial site and you need to do it quickly. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>2. The text I downloaded </b>may have been a good policy declaration, but Google still wasn't satisfied and I later learned that they didn't give a hockey stick about that. </div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Second lesson learned:</i> </b><i>you can spend a lot of time (and also money) fixing the wrong problem.</i></div><div><br /><div><br /></div><div><b>3. I contacted Google's customer service</b> at ddp-gdpr-escalations@google.com -- yes, they have a customer service to help people fixing exactly the GDPR problem. Amazingly, I got in contact with someone who seemed to be a real person -- the messages were signed "Gargi," which is an Indian male name. After a few interactions, he finally told me what Google wanted. It was simple: I just had to add the sentence "<i>cookies are used for ads personalization</i>" in the "consent banner." And that was it. Gargi even sent me a screenshot of what the banner should look like. It was a step forward. </div><div><br /></div><div><i><b>Third lesson learned. </b>Human beings can still be useful for something. </i></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj05G13Fpa2nhdbH3MwQcS1EmNR09ATrhWHUr0AzAsWIeeAUug6arIyRk-dsnokhUFNdtI30O14qbwANnyE7V_5PAxHwOH6SfS73nvbJWtYmTbV9HPO61AVKWGcjXXro_APUZK0arh4QPYc0-2MFSUdAe7cPhoIbqeaG3WZrUwglS1jxK19RdGXRk5WFw/s1920/GoogleDeclare.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="901" data-original-width="1920" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj05G13Fpa2nhdbH3MwQcS1EmNR09ATrhWHUr0AzAsWIeeAUug6arIyRk-dsnokhUFNdtI30O14qbwANnyE7V_5PAxHwOH6SfS73nvbJWtYmTbV9HPO61AVKWGcjXXro_APUZK0arh4QPYc0-2MFSUdAe7cPhoIbqeaG3WZrUwglS1jxK19RdGXRk5WFw/w516-h242/GoogleDeclare.png" width="516" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><b>4</b>. <b>But who controls the cookie banner? </b>I had never placed a cookie banner on my blog, and I saw no such a thing appearing when I loaded the blog. Other people told me that they didn't see any banners on the first page of my blog. I had always interpreted the lack of a banner as a consequence of my blog not being a commercial one. But, no, the trick was a different one. After much tinkering and head-scratching, I discovered that my browser (Chrome) keeps track of previous decisions and didn't show the banner again to people who had already accepted the cookies. I could see the banner if I erased the cookies from my main browser, or used a "virgin" browser. The beauty of this trick is that not even the people from Google's customer service seemed to know it; so, at some moment, they started telling me that my blog had no cookie banner, and I had to explain to them that they just weren't seeing it, but it was there. Once they understood this, it was no more a problem. But it took time. </div><div><br /></div><div><i><b>Fourth lesson learned: </b>Truth may be hidden, and often is. </i></div><div><br /></div><div><b><br /></b></div><div><b>5. How do you change the text of the cookie consent banner?</b> One of those things that look easy but are not easy at all. First, you have to access the HTML code of your blog, which is not an easy task by itself. It is like open heart surgery: you make a mistake, and the patient dies. Then, even if you know how to manage HTML, you soon discover a little problem. There is NO CODE for the cookie consent banner on the HTML page of Google's blogs. The banner is dynamically generated from somewhere, Google knows where, and it is not accessible with the tools provided by Google's blogger. </div><div><br /></div><div><i><b>Fifth lesson learned: </b>Google plays with you like a cat plays with a mouse.</i></div><div><br /><p><b>6.</b> <b>It means that there has to be a widget for the cookie banner, right? </b>Yes, there is such a widget that you can set as showing a cookie banner as you like it to be. The problems are that 1) it cannot show the banner at top of the page, where these banners normally are, and 2) it doesn't replace the Google-generated banner. So, the result is that you have two different banners in different areas of the screen at the same time. Apart from the awful effect on the way your blog looks, it is not surprising that Google was still not happy with this solution</p><p><i><b>Sixth lesson learned</b>: Some solutions are not. </i></p><p><br /></p><p><b>7. How about trying chatGPT? </b>Eventually, chatGPT gave me the right hint. It said that it was possible to insert a cookie banner script in the main HTML page of the blog. I tried the scripts provided by chatGPT and none worked, but those provided by helpful human bloggers did. I found that scripts (unlike widgets) can supersede the Google-created banner. After some tweaking, Google was finally happy. </p><p><i><b>Seventh Lesson learned. </b>ChatGPT is your friend, but it is a bad programmer</i> </p><p>________________________________________________</p><p><b>Conclusion. </b></p><p>The good thing about this story is that I learned something, but it was also a sobering experience. The way Google managed it was so bad that I can only understand it as an explicit attempt to discourage small bloggers who are not making money from their blogs and who can't afford a professional maintenance service. Just why harass poor bloggers to do something that Google could do easily on a banner that it is wholly managed by Google? I mean, do you realize the time lost to do such a simple thing as adding a single sentence to a banner? </p><p>It seems clear to me that at Google they don't like blogs in general. Even though they offer a blogging platform, it is a poor service for several reasons. Yet, Blogger also has several good points, the main one being that it is free. Then, it offers you possibilities of customization that other "bare-bones" platforms (e.g. substack) do not provide. For someone who just wants to express his/her ideas in public, it can still be a good choice. But, after this experience, I am wary. Google knows what they have in mind next in Mountain View. So, I may switch platforms in the near future. For now, "<a href="http://senecaeffect.com">The Seneca Effect</a>" blog is still there, alive and reasonably well, even though <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/03/fighting-shadow-banning-seneca-blog.html">shadow-banned by the Powers That Be</a>. And maybe these notes could be useful for you.</p><p><i><b>Final lesson I learned: </b>I, for one, welcome our new Google masters<b> </b></i></p><p>_________________________________________________________</p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here is the script to control the text of the cookie consent banner to be cut and pasted into the HTML code of a blogger blog after the </head> tag. It is simple, but it wasn't so simple to understand what was needed. </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><script type='text/javascript'> </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> cookieOptions = { </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> msg: &quot;This site uses cookies for ad personalization, to analyse traffic and to deliver some Google services. By using this site, you agree to its use of cookies.&quot;, </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> link: &quot;https://www.senecaeffect.com/p/privacy-policy-for-seneca-effect-blog.html&quot;, </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> close: &quot;Okay!&quot;, </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"> learn: &quot;Learn More&quot; }; </span></i></p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"></script> </span></i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p></div></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-56607008894973004412023-04-02T19:50:00.010+02:002023-04-03T17:23:14.695+02:00"Flattening the Curve." The Origins of a Bad Idea<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinuVpxbS-U2goZYS7Kd7MhLTg1CqKt7_7vumQ1F-bXCqfHgQTNbRjPVUNi-nPfk_zbaRkIoVgpBoe0W4bCJwbujL6YtOy2FCSaz0y8jylZ-YC2QQq6V_odPmCmz5b7_sbSFbIZb8UhutdDYXltqzLGriEE0YjVzzXuXS8b4F46Hhj4p4qLGeJO_spG3Q/s620/Duct%20Tape%20Sealing.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="614" data-original-width="620" height="390" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinuVpxbS-U2goZYS7Kd7MhLTg1CqKt7_7vumQ1F-bXCqfHgQTNbRjPVUNi-nPfk_zbaRkIoVgpBoe0W4bCJwbujL6YtOy2FCSaz0y8jylZ-YC2QQq6V_odPmCmz5b7_sbSFbIZb8UhutdDYXltqzLGriEE0YjVzzXuXS8b4F46Hhj4p4qLGeJO_spG3Q/w393-h390/Duct%20Tape%20Sealing.png" width="393" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><i>In 2003, the "Anthrax scare" led many people to use duct tape to seal the windows of their homes to protect themselves from the deadly germs. It would have been a good idea if the purpose was to suffer even more than usual from indoor pollution while at the same time doing little or nothing against a hypothetical biological attack. Yet, this folly was<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1044820213906360703"> recommended and encouraged</a> by the national government and local ones. It was the first taste of more to come. <span style="text-align: left;">I already mentioned this story </span><a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2022/04/china-and-covid-memetic-analysis.html" style="text-align: left;">in a previous post</a><span style="text-align: left;">, but here I'll go more in-depth into the matter. </span></i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>We are still reeling from three years of madness, but it seems that many of us are starting to make a serious effort to try to understand what happened to us and why. How could it be that the reaction to the Covid epidemic involved a set of "measures" of dubious effectiveness, from national lockdowns to universal masking, that had never been tried before in humankind's history? </p><p>For everything that happens, there is a reason for it to happen, and the "non-pharmaceutical interventions" (NPIs) that were adopted in 2020 have their reasons, too. Some people speak of global conspiracies and some even of <a href="https://brownstone.org/articles/have-the-ancient-gods-returned/">evil deities</a>, but the origin of the whole story may be more prosaic. It can be found in the development of modern genetic manipulation technologies; a new branch of science that started being noticed in the 1990s. As it normally happens, scientific advances have military consequences; genetic manipulation was not an exception. </p><p>Not that "bioweapons" are anything new. The chronicles of ancient warfare report how infected carcasses of animals were thrown inside the walls of besieged cities and other similar niceties. More recently, during the 19th century, it is reported that blankets infected with smallpox <a href="https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets">were distributed</a> to Native Americans by British government officials. Overall, though, biological warfare never was very effective, and not even smallpox-infected blankets seem to have been able to kill a significant number of Natives. Besides, biological weapons suffer from a basic shortcoming: how can you damage your enemies only while sparing your population? Because of this problem, the history of biological warfare does not include cases where bioweapons were used on a large scale, at least so far. The low effectiveness of bioweapons is the probable reason why it was not difficult to craft an international agreement on banning their use (<a href="https://www.un.org/disarmament/biological-weapons/">"BWC", biological weapon convention</a>), ratified in 1975. </p><p>Up to recent times, bioweapons were not seen as much more dangerous than normal germs, and the generally accepted view on how to face epidemics favored a soft approach: letting the virus run in the population with the objective of reaching the natural "herd immunity." For instance, in a 2007 <a href="https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.552.1109&rep=rep1&type=pdf">paper</a>, four respected experts in epidemiology still rejected such ideas as confinement, travel bans, distancing, and others. On quarantines, they stated that <b>"There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza."</b> But military planners were working on the idea that bioweapons would be orders of magnitude deadlier than the seasonal flu, and that changed everything. </p><p>Genetic engineering technologies were said to be able to create new, enhanced germs, an approach known as "gain of function." Really nasty ideas could also become possible, such as "tailoring" a virus to attack only a specific ethnic group. Even without this feature, a country or a terroristic group could develop a vaccine against the germs they created and, in this way, inflict enormous damage on an enemy while protecting the country's population (or the select few of an elite aiming at global depopulation). </p><p>Fortunately, none of these ideas turned out to be feasible. Or, at least, there is no evidence that they could be put into practice. That doesn't mean they were not explored, even though research on biological weapons is prohibited by the BWC convention. Researching new germs is orders of magnitude less expensive than making nuclear weapons, and so it is also feasible for relatively poor governments. (biological warfare is said to be the weapon of the poor). Whether truly effective bioweapons can actually exist is at least doubtful, but supposing that they <i>could </i>exist, then it makes sense to prepare for a possible attack. </p><p>The "anthrax scare" of 2001 was the first example of what a modern terror attack using bioweapons could look like, even though it was nothing like a weapon of mass destruction, and nobody to this date can say who spread the germs using mail envelopes. Nevertheless, it was taken seriously by the authorities, and it led to the "bioterrorism act" in 2002. Shortly afterward, Iraq was accused of having been developing biological weapons of mass destruction, and you may remember how, in 2003, Colin Powell, then US secretary of state, showed on TV a vial of baby powder, saying that it could have been a biological weapon. Over the years, several government agencies became involved in planning against bioweapon attacks, and the military approach to biological warfare gradually superseded the traditional plans on how to deal with ordinary epidemics. </p><p>The idea was that a truly deadly virus attack would cripple the infrastructure of a country and cause immense damage before the germs could be stopped by a specifically developed vaccine. So, it was imperative to react swiftly and decisively with non-pharmaceutical interventions ("NPIs") or "measures" to stop the epidemic or at least slow it down. This idea was rarely expressed explicitly in public documents, but it was clearly the inspiration for several studies that examined the effects of an abnormally deadly virus. One was prepared by the <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/cikrpandemicinfluenzaguide.pdf">Department of Homeland Security</a> in 2006. Another one comes from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2010, where you can read of a scenario called "<a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rockefeller-operation-lockstep/">Operation Lockstep</a>" that described something very similar to what came to pass in 2020 in terms of restrictions. </p><p>These military-oriented studies were mostly qualitative. They were based on typical military ideas such as color-coded emergencies, say, "red alert," "orange alert," and the like. For each color, there were a series of recommended measures, but little was said about why exactly certain colors were chosen to be coupled with certain actions. But there were also attempts to quantify the effect of NPIs. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7">A paper</a> on this subject was published in 2006 by the group of Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College in London, where the authors endeavored the task of disentangling the effects of different measures on the spreading of a pathogen. Factors such as home quarantines, school closures, border closings, reduced mobility, and others were examined (interestingly, the widespread use of face masks was not considered). The study didn't expend much of an effort to compare guesswork with real-world data, but it was not so bad in comparison with the harmless mumbo-jumbo that scientists normally publish. Let's say that it might have been an interesting exercise in epidemiological modeling but nothing more. The problem was that it came at a moment in which "biological warfare" was all the rage and that it may have influenced later military planning. </p><p>A study that had an enormous influence on the (mis)management of the 2020 pandemic was directly inspired by Ferguson's paper. It was proposed as a CDC report by <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/community_mitigation-sm.pdf">Rajeev Venkayya</a> in 2007, who <span style="text-align: center;">presented his model in the form of the "double curve" that later became famous. Here it is; it is the origin of the "flatten the curve" meme that became popular 13 years later. </span></p><div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguCohFRLQLtK7lvZ9XPKgexG-cnQMdi2-jAEgO7pEilovyMTjEfUFkylHcDZCXJ2if1VO54yr1Wi9A1GV1iR29u6uNcQv_d3ggpB64P6lOPcjpBULz6Gewdxk-wcnDu-70J7vIjWTwWpl9sD3rkBP9fvupThUnXUoaZ4BNQqZ6rDbTABRAjvoR1-n_yw/s501/VenkayyaMitigation2007.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguCohFRLQLtK7lvZ9XPKgexG-cnQMdi2-jAEgO7pEilovyMTjEfUFkylHcDZCXJ2if1VO54yr1Wi9A1GV1iR29u6uNcQv_d3ggpB64P6lOPcjpBULz6Gewdxk-wcnDu-70J7vIjWTwWpl9sD3rkBP9fvupThUnXUoaZ4BNQqZ6rDbTABRAjvoR1-n_yw/w534-h379/VenkayyaMitigation2007.png" /></a></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;">Remarkably, Venkaya's model was completely qualitative. The curves were just a rendition of those proposed by Ferguson et al. without any attempt of quantification. Venkayya's paper didn't attain great popularity, and it remained dormant for more than one decade until the Covid-19 pandemic arrived. Then, suddenly, the double curve became highly fashionable. It went viral and literally "exploded" on the Web and in the media. </span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;">During the early days of the Covid-19 epidemic, one of the main supporters of the double curve model was </span>Tomas Pueyo, who was perhaps the first to use the term "flattening the curve." His <a href="https://tomaspueyo.medium.com/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca">post of March 10, 2020</a>, on the matter had more than 40 million visualizations. Notably, Pueyo's previous expertise was in engineering and communication, and he was known for a discussion about the characters of the "Star Wars" series as role models in business. So, you might be reasonably perplexed about the authority that he claimed to have on epidemiology. Nor is it clear who pushed his blog to the first places of the search engines. In any case, Pueyo showed no signs of undue modesty in the way he considered himself an expert. For instance, he wrote: </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>As a politician, community leader or business leader, you have the power and the responsibility to prevent this.</i></div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i>You might have fears today: What if I overreact? Will people laugh at me? Will they be angry at me? Will I look stupid? Won’t it be better to wait for others to take steps first? Will I hurt the economy too much?</i></div></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><i><br /></i></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><span style="text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: left;">But in 2–4 weeks, when the entire world is in lockdown, when the few precious days of social distancing you will have enabled will have saved lives, people won’t criticize you anymore: They will thank you for making the right decision.</i></span></div></blockquote><div><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Pueyo was even </span><a href="https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ihuman/what-does-covid-19-mean-expertise-case-tomas-pueyo" style="text-align: left;">invited in TV</a><span style="text-align: left;">, where he had a chance to vocally disparage the concept of "herd immunity," which has been a staple concept in epidemiology for at least a century. If you listen to him in that TV show, you'll probably notice that he provided no evidence that he understood how epidemics spread in a population, but that's not surprising for someone whose expertise is mainly in marketing and communication. <b>Look <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C98FmoZVbjs">at minute 12:30 of the TV interview</a> to see Pueyo's face and gesture when the scientist being interviewed mentions herd immunity.</b> Clearly, Pueyo had no idea of what herd immunity is. It is amazing that this bizarre character was allowed to have so much influence on global policies. But so it went, and the double curve was accepted as scientific wisdom and the undisputable target for governmental interventions everywhere. </span></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">I discussed the shortcomings of the double curve model <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/03/the-worst-model-in-history-why-curve.html">in a previous post</a>. Basically, the model was flawed because it didn't include methods to verify whether the measures were doing something or not. So, the results of the attempt to "flatten the curve" were modest, if they existed at all. But the story didn't end there. </span></span>There does not exist something so bad that someone can't make it worse.</div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both;">Little more than a week after launching his "flatten the curve" post, <a href="https://tomaspueyo.medium.com/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56">on March 19</a>, 2020, Tomas Pueyo was on the march again, and he went rapidly forward in the direction of the worse. He got rid of the only thing that had some contact with reality in Venkayya's model: the fact that epidemic curves are bell-shaped. Now Pueyo said that the natural shape of epidemic curves is exponential growth and that only specific measures could force it to bend down into a bell-shaped curve. That was probably a necessary consequence of the fact that Pueyo never really understood the basics of epidemiology. So, having started with the wrong assumption (exponential growth), he moved to the wrong conclusions. Starting with an unrealistically large value for the fatality rate (3.4%), he proposed the graph below, defined as "<i>The Hammer and the Dance.</i>" The idea was that the epidemic curve would grow to infinity unless it was brought down by means of harsh and immediate measures of containment (the hammer) and then by keeping it low with lighter measures (the dance). The data showing that this could be done..... data? What data? </div><div style="text-align: center;"><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie1b8onGi3DjWfve1OmgG4098ineSCHD-ZgxdBNT4k8ww1ow8GiYJ_5u37Ghmo1-ML4zL_VBNNW7y5WxoIdPyTd_OnGAsDbxUbTAKlEhjh8w3u72Ss9Ph5hqY0EMryryoEx2cC6liizpCXxeK63M_Ma7Gz5Z2yFerNEwk3SoACmPeEJouM4m_tnjhn1w/s720/PueyoHammerAndDance.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="720" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie1b8onGi3DjWfve1OmgG4098ineSCHD-ZgxdBNT4k8ww1ow8GiYJ_5u37Ghmo1-ML4zL_VBNNW7y5WxoIdPyTd_OnGAsDbxUbTAKlEhjh8w3u72Ss9Ph5hqY0EMryryoEx2cC6liizpCXxeK63M_Ma7Gz5Z2yFerNEwk3SoACmPeEJouM4m_tnjhn1w/w568-h264/PueyoHammerAndDance.png" width="568" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This diagram, evidently, doesn't come from an epidemiological model, not even a highly simplified one. It is just drawn accordingly to what Pueyo thought the behavior of the system should be. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The story of the hammer and the dance was the start of a disastrous debate (let's call it this way) where plenty of people came up claiming that herd immunity was a flawed concept and that the only way to avoid being all infected, and many killed, was to enable containment measures. It also led to the concept that the curve could not just be flattened but "crushed." Again, we can see the influence of the military approach: terms such as "flattened" or "crushed" are typical of warfare, but viruses cannot be killed using military weapons. In any case, the concept of "crushing the curve" gave rise to the idea of "<a href="https://www.endcoronavirus.org/">Covid Zero</a>." It was another disaster that befell us, sending entire countries to a human and economic disaster in the desperate search for an unattainable goal. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><span><br /></span></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">Mostly, the whole disaster was due to <b>our inability to understand how models work.</b> Formal mathematical models are a recent feature of the human way of dealing with reality. They are supposed to help you understand how the world works and even predict how it will evolve. But you have to be careful: the model is not the reality, just like a map is not the territory. A wrong model is not necessarily dangerous, but it can be. A military model that tells you that attacking Russia in winter is a good idea is a good example. The idea of "crushing the curve" is another example. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><b>Will we ever learn how to use models?</b> Maybe. But, for the time being, models play the role of guns handled by children. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></div></div></div></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-59511348627255425442023-04-01T10:44:00.005+02:002023-04-01T23:24:59.478+02:00A Revolution is Coming from Detroit! Car Tailfins are Back!<div class="separator"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1637" data-original-width="2048" height="337" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVy4WI83JrnccyBAcaCKwMZlmiwuVoAYuLfaxQ9xPnYjalXA88WwgM4cW8CbkLKnulcKT_DWU6tZRwJi6y24nO9pMFpErt5DomwNTN4z9YYB25EQ4IIU2xEA_thyBq5-vJsJYL5V1KaWseFkhwpi3ueBeZHPioEY_0gnKi5pJ240QRdtXF6TojoRbYYg/w421-h337/Tailfin8.jpg" width="421" /><div class="separator"><br /></div></div><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVy4WI83JrnccyBAcaCKwMZlmiwuVoAYuLfaxQ9xPnYjalXA88WwgM4cW8CbkLKnulcKT_DWU6tZRwJi6y24nO9pMFpErt5DomwNTN4z9YYB25EQ4IIU2xEA_thyBq5-vJsJYL5V1KaWseFkhwpi3ueBeZHPioEY_0gnKi5pJ240QRdtXF6TojoRbYYg/s2048/Tailfin8.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></a></div>Today, a consortium of Detroit automakers announced plans to reintroduce tailfins in a new generation of dream cars. "We know what customers want," explained an industry representative, "people don't want those silly electric cars. They want real cars that look like cars, smell like cars, and make the noise of cars. Tailfins are the essence of the American car, which is the essence of the American dream. And we are pleased to announce that they are coming back." <div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTqpUgiN_28VYpXSe_n8xJMSf9GbqedEcbMOFRFb4c7XOcsFeul_Z6h9k5DA2XSSQ9c_jPNBpwA4zbiJvgxRX9c4eniG7uZtd7T9xf-um5tYHktR3pD7sM6oBci1n9Porr_n-mGLNBLOA0NWDwrsJoEwYAnyW8fH_wVvCyRqYVxQM9Ti8Sis4lcI3Q0Q/s701/Tailfin4.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="550" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTqpUgiN_28VYpXSe_n8xJMSf9GbqedEcbMOFRFb4c7XOcsFeul_Z6h9k5DA2XSSQ9c_jPNBpwA4zbiJvgxRX9c4eniG7uZtd7T9xf-um5tYHktR3pD7sM6oBci1n9Porr_n-mGLNBLOA0NWDwrsJoEwYAnyW8fH_wVvCyRqYVxQM9Ti8Sis4lcI3Q0Q/w117-h150/Tailfin4.jpg" width="117" /></a></div>Representatives of the US oil industry expressed their satisfaction at the announcement from Detroit, noting how the "shale revolution" has brought back the US to the position of top-level oil producer in the world, a position that, with new and substantial investments, can be maintained, while shale oil production can continue growing, demonstrating how unfounded were the silly worries about "peak oil." </div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0dwSrTyIEC92RkRsImBgf1XAvSXFEb1vs98slb6_R0vPR6QlmEsewEEM-WttbuwtBeRkL07Qs6C0YboZUcVOy3XOnsnFwSFPBGURn15cKFNWNohiUHFu5e4LPQ4ppaoU7X94qVaXioYLob4M-PG5y7_CzWC5buNCkP4LjIj2f0XIozvbaAPu5qQ7AYQ/s1207/Tailfins5.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="802" data-original-width="1207" height="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0dwSrTyIEC92RkRsImBgf1XAvSXFEb1vs98slb6_R0vPR6QlmEsewEEM-WttbuwtBeRkL07Qs6C0YboZUcVOy3XOnsnFwSFPBGURn15cKFNWNohiUHFu5e4LPQ4ppaoU7X94qVaXioYLob4M-PG5y7_CzWC5buNCkP4LjIj2f0XIozvbaAPu5qQ7AYQ/w222-h148/Tailfins5.jpg" width="222" /></a></div>President Biden commented on the announcement with a statement that was recorded as "car funs are finny, and we welcome them back. They are part of the American democratic project and we are sure that this technological solution will also be adopted in other countries." </div><div><br /></div><div>Former President Donald Trump declared that tail fins made America great and they are part of the MAGA concept. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Former Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States, noted that science says that tailfins are a good thing and that the turbulence they generate can remove viruses from the air. "Two superimposed sets of fins," Fauci said, "are better than a single one."<br /><p></p><p></p>NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared that the new trend has interesting and useful military applications and that the new generation of Leopard tanks in Europe will be equipped with tailfins. "These tailfins," Stoltenberg explained, "are a symbol of the American commitment to keep Europe free and will be mounted on all NATO tanks. These military fins will be equipped with the capability of shooting depleted uranium projectiles." <div><br /></div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWmx_-ZkP7jB_VyXgmcsyDCiuWaP0h52gvTld9n8ax_fZsV50Ds9lw9Sxd7-FFQTMmCbH5bZGYnjI3WJqri_ZilwhNvJZ4wjf9RwTfOyfhRUhrqx-IiHZZfTbiov6Y5IN5y1BOSKJrZl9aOk--78hNmUIBUx5z3kWFlEihu31_MI7Fj1ImjAzStA8XTw/s704/TankWitTailfins.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="704" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWmx_-ZkP7jB_VyXgmcsyDCiuWaP0h52gvTld9n8ax_fZsV50Ds9lw9Sxd7-FFQTMmCbH5bZGYnjI3WJqri_ZilwhNvJZ4wjf9RwTfOyfhRUhrqx-IiHZZfTbiov6Y5IN5y1BOSKJrZl9aOk--78hNmUIBUx5z3kWFlEihu31_MI7Fj1ImjAzStA8XTw/s320/TankWitTailfins.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><i>(image from Dezgo.com)</i></p><p><br /></p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Incredibly, some people took this post seriously! It shows, at least, that most people read only the title, or at most the first few lines, of a post. </span></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrpeZsSBt82nNN8WtMBktPY6su1v5txp42PL9cLrPkmCYZ6AUsvpPLa0rUBLtueF_JyKwh2XqK5m8TdGXs3ps8yIVo_kxz_bU16hg37z9poDqFRTcbTe6C34prDN05JCCIiI6M9RlM02zVY3V1XQwVrHlg3wehQZ5vJK8bLnhMv9z91x3o46Q4ES36Jw/s655/TwitterTailfins.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="357" data-original-width="655" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrpeZsSBt82nNN8WtMBktPY6su1v5txp42PL9cLrPkmCYZ6AUsvpPLa0rUBLtueF_JyKwh2XqK5m8TdGXs3ps8yIVo_kxz_bU16hg37z9poDqFRTcbTe6C34prDN05JCCIiI6M9RlM02zVY3V1XQwVrHlg3wehQZ5vJK8bLnhMv9z91x3o46Q4ES36Jw/w384-h209/TwitterTailfins.png" width="384" /></a></div><p><br /></p></div></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-23013481774387714892023-03-30T17:03:00.004+02:002023-03-31T17:03:08.690+02:00Help Needed: can someone check the Privacy Policy of the "Seneca Effect" blog?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdV73ir4wqRVP294QYUN61uZx944OvJhMf3LeViPiE9Alg3mdhvCOINVuaWMFcS2e3so7e3fLLHJyNbwDut75GNm7zUhsIMEgwTeErTL4OGXxJQ7mkNaPQDlHpOl4xSqj-TRep8XTuN91SR-22nhXfOK0ZGJCR6W_EWkOtbqN-owY9x1oQpl9ig8CIJg/s245/Help.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="206" data-original-width="245" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdV73ir4wqRVP294QYUN61uZx944OvJhMf3LeViPiE9Alg3mdhvCOINVuaWMFcS2e3so7e3fLLHJyNbwDut75GNm7zUhsIMEgwTeErTL4OGXxJQ7mkNaPQDlHpOl4xSqj-TRep8XTuN91SR-22nhXfOK0ZGJCR6W_EWkOtbqN-owY9x1oQpl9ig8CIJg/w194-h163/Help.jpeg" width="194" /></a></div><br /><p>Folks, Google keeps pestering me with requests for an appropriate "EU User Content Policy"; but it never tells me what exactly is wrong with it. The only message I receive from them is</p><p><i>Customer ID: ca-pub-7714140901520074</i></p><p><i>Our policy review indicates that while the site(s)/app(s) below have a consent notice in place, its wording fails to meet the requirements of our policy:</i></p><p><i>senecaeffect.com</i></p><p>So, maybe someone more knowledgeable than me could take a look at the page where I have the policy specifications. It is here <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/p/privacy-policy-for-seneca-effect-blog.html">https://www.senecaeffect.com/p/privacy-policy-for-seneca-effect-blog.html</a> I tried several versions of it, but Google never seems to be happy with it. </p><p>Thanks a lot for any help you can provide!</p><p><br /></p><p>UB</p><p>This is the letter I keep receiving from them. </p><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="margin: 0px auto; max-width: 600px; text-align: center; width: 480px;"><tbody><tr><td align="center" style="padding-top: 10;" valign="top"><table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="10" id="templateColumns" style="width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td align="center" class="templateColumnContainer" valign="top" width="50%"><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 100%px;"><tbody><tr><td class="leftColumnContent"><img alt="Google" class="columnImage" height="auto" shrinktofit="true" src="https://www.gstatic.com/images/branding/googlelogo/2x/googlelogo_color_120x48dp.png" style="height: auto; outline: none;" width="120" /></td>
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<p>On May 25, 2018, we updated Google’s <a href="https://notifications.google.com/g/p/APHC3cojiAlVY5-FGiaNnWrR0WK-XM5kNWLRn2Te_tyOlmuZtENMHHAWLpqQje6FrrYPTRXml-q1ZJ4dK40dncicEkr78zwVjnI3SD71XyOX7xyGc4pl9kBpuciKj7E5XpVtylIhh3InUSJ_988PrQBgSjFTT-R9OFREzG_ivDuJ85tufW27b1KwB_CGnMNmlrMjIYwU9I0PkfILBuunP_kG8eovrCF7Kv-rxA"><u>EU User Consent Policy</u></a>
to coincide with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming
into force. This Policy outlines your responsibility for making
disclosures to, and obtaining consent from, end users of your sites and
apps in the European Economic Area (<a href="https://notifications.google.com/g/p/APHC3coQ-qr_vQALTU0v24X0wPDbVXYzGMmRLCt3IFR32E-prz0s36mWzDDkSrScme_aexN-Ux0sg8h4Y5A-W9FuwLnr8tHZubnOra-f5vZ1EgJiDpk5z2Ay1C3LRD0MnE4lXxIn2j15pHXIUVmXbznUbvNjw56nIT3fgAHsoXZ55IquCoJN"><u>EEA</u></a>) along with the UK.</p>
<p>It has come to our attention that the attached site(s)/app(s) do not comply with our Policy, because they:</p>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 24px; line-height: 24px; width: 30px;" valign="top" width="30">•</td>
<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px;" valign="top">do not seek to obtain consent from users, and/or</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 24px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px; width: 30px;" valign="top" width="30">•</td>
<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px;" valign="top">do
not correctly disclose which third parties (including Google) will also
have access to the user data that you collect on your site/app. You can
view these controls and the list of ad technology providers in your <a href="https://notifications.google.com/g/p/APHC3crzZgijv9ZntHW4RSO3sjy_fzeuU1QPfshCSAub2yS818CsbKL8JjZ3xAiD_2bQQDPWxr1jBS8fqlbPMN_VboECr7DWz9J38UabN_s-Y_0O9OsNd3G3DD5ipFgP3ynYZTLVDFQr_v2SlG3jbvzT7bD6684fk5Q306Ly2OZwNqS5EpBINC3kEEpb7TrN4sWzoZ5ZCHXZ1VStZ-PP8qHoTQ">Ad Manager, </a><a href="https://notifications.google.com/g/p/APHC3crL761ZcOg6HoYXtyIqDizQdYLm1kFxa5nS5WA-UKXUSOQrsYOMh39CCKZIunmr5tWyuA7jGSDCiwtsroJ88olFWlrWcdBecLn0NX7rpwp_I5ngII81bKMKmCFP6xouOYx3WK7IDG8l_uhimezu_iC0i8M7--1zHjVYymULvO0VU9EVbwYcQuS6lKVv3roMySxZ1Zpis1m1F1PlUm8">AdSense or Admob</a> account.</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 24px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px; width: 30px;" valign="top" width="30">•</td>
<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px;" valign="top">do not otherwise meet the requirements of Google's <a href="https://notifications.google.com/g/p/APHC3cojiAlVY5-FGiaNnWrR0WK-XM5kNWLRn2Te_tyOlmuZtENMHHAWLpqQje6FrrYPTRXml-q1ZJ4dK40dncicEkr78zwVjnI3SD71XyOX7xyGc4pl9kBpuciKj7E5XpVtylIhh3InUSJ_988PrQBgSjFTT-R9OFREzG_ivDuJ85tufW27b1KwB_CGnMNmlrMjIYwU9I0PkfILBuunP_kG8eovrCF7Kv-rxA"><u>EU User Consent Policy</u></a>.</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding: 20px 40px;" valign="top">If
you have guidance or confirmation from a Data Protection Authority that
the domains listed do not require a consent notice or that they
otherwise already comply with applicable privacy laws, including GDPR,
please <a href="mailto:ddp-gdpr-escalations@google.com"><u>contact us</u></a>. We will review any guidance you have received from a regulatory body and take action accordingly.</td>
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<p><strong>Please check the site(s) or app(s) listed in the
attached file and take action to ensure they comply with our Policy. We
will re-review your site(s) or app(s) regularly and monitor your
account. We may take action, including suspension, if the Policy
violations have not been resolved by </strong>Apr 5, 2023<strong>.</strong></p>
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<p>The EU User Consent Policy outlines your responsibility as a user of our ad technology to: </p>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px;" valign="top">Obtain EEA along with UK end users’ consent to:</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px;" valign="top">the use of cookies or other local storage where legally required; and</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px;" valign="top">the collection, sharing, and use of personal data for personalization of ads.</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 24px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px; width: 30px;" valign="top" width="30">•</td>
<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px;" valign="top">Identify each party that may collect, receive or use end users’ personal data as a consequence of your use of a Google product.</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 24px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px; width: 30px;" valign="top" width="30">•</td>
<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding-top: 10px;" valign="top">Provide end users with prominent and easily accessible information about those parties’ use of personal data</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #202124; font-family: "Google Sans", Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 36px; padding: 10px 40px 0px;" valign="top"><strong>Find Out More</strong></td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding: 20px 40px;" valign="top">You can refer to our <a href="https://notifications.google.com/g/p/APHC3coT2Dn2G4t_llHvfdz6tncqNgHqqonFrOr4k7K8KSVdqwLwW5m80VXvtQ-UySyKMWjmQUTXNp6Qzh2HnFr7aKZO0BVCOm6oOAuWkfCDlv81ksrz_AKKXsEpdn0AVWKjsz_7hIJgoqqyLkCS01tyXOD7OL3O5Ry7qcZ-imfCMrgjUAR8NVJ0ziPiY4_BRWkXZZ_By3YGi1nkhN6v7aGQxc2EpMuSG98GRjl2_r7nbQ"><u>Policy help page</u></a>
for more information on complying with Google’s Policy including a
checklist for partners to avoid common mistakes when implementing a
consent mechanism.<strong> </strong>We also recommend that you consult with your legal department regarding your compliance with the GDPR and Google’s policies.</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #202124; font-family: "Google Sans", Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 16px; letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 36px; padding: 10px 40px 0px;" valign="top"><strong>Need some help?</strong></td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding: 20px 20px 0px 40px;" valign="top"><a href="mailto:ddp-gdpr-escalations@google.com"><u>Contact us</u></a>, we are here to help!</td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; line-height: 24px; padding: 20px 20px 0px 40px;" valign="top">Sincerely, </td>
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<td align="left" style="color: #414347; font-family: Roboto, Helvetica, "Arial sans-serif"; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 24px; padding: 10px 40px 40px;" valign="top">The EU User Consent Policy Team</td>
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<td align="left" height="15" style="border-collapse: collapse; line-height: 15px; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; mso-table-lspace: 0pt; mso-table-rspace: 0pt;" valign="top"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Update "Ticket" received from Google</div><div><br /></div><div><div id="email-body-header" style="background-color: whitesmoke; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(234, 234, 234); padding: 3% 3% 2%; width: 94%;"><img alt="Google Logo" height="38" shrinktofit="true" src="https://www.gstatic.com/images/branding/googlelogo/1x/googlelogo_color_120x48dp.png" style="display: block; outline: none;" width="94" /></div>
<div id="email-body-content" style="padding: 3% 3% 0px; width: 94%;">
<div dir="auto" id="email-body-content-top" style="width: 100%;">
<div id="email-body-content-top-content" style="font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: 17px;">Hi <span class="replaced">Ugo Bardi</span>,<br />
<br />
<p dir="ltr">Thank you for reaching us out.</p><br /><br /><p dir="auto">Your website <b><a href="http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fsenecaeffect.com&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AOvVaw2ohuvinuIEHueNJKH884Nd" target="_blank">senecaeffect.com</a></b> <span style="font-weight: bold;"><<wbr></wbr>Customer ID: ca-pub-7714140901520074> </span>is flagged for non-compliance with the <a href="https://www.google.com/about/company/user-consent-policy/" style="color: #1a73e8;" target="_blank">EU User Consent Policy</a>.</p><p dir="ltr">Please
check the website flagged and take action to ensure you comply with our
Policy by referring to the resources shared. We will re-review your
websites regularly, monitor your account and you will be contacted if
Google has confirmed the issue has been fully resolved.</p><p dir="ltr">Please
note when we review a website, we will accept different approaches to
compliance as long as they meet our policy requirements.</p><ul><li dir="ltr">We
expect users to see a clear consent notice on your website so that they
can take affirmative action to indicate their decision, e.g.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> clicking an “OK” button or an “I agree” button.</span></li><li dir="ltr">We expect users to be told how the site will use data. We suggest you make clear that their <span style="font-weight: bold;">personal data will be used for personalization of ads </span>and that <span style="font-weight: bold;">cookies may be used for personalized and non-personalized advertising </span>on the first layer of Consent notice.</li><li dir="ltr">We
expect users to be informed about how Google will use their personal
data when they give consent on your site. We encourage you to <span style="font-weight: bold;">link the </span><a href="https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites" style="color: #1a73e8;" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Google’s Privacy & Terms site</span></a><span style="font-weight: bold;"> to your Privacy Policy</span> page provided it is accessible through your consent notice.</li></ul><p dir="ltr">This is not an exhaustive list, please refer to the external<a href="https://www.google.com/about/company/user-consent-policy-help.html" style="color: #1a73e8;" target="_blank"> checklist</a> to avoid common mistakes when implementing a consent mechanism, and the help page<a href="http://cookiechoices.org/" style="color: #1a73e8;" target="_blank"> cookiechoices.org</a> has examples of consent notices. </p><p dir="ltr">You can also update the consent notice and let us know so that we can request the Google’s Policy team to re-audit.</p><br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />
<br />
<span class="replaced">Gargi</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: 17px;"> </div>
<div style="font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size: 13px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: 17px;"><em>NB: If you need to reference this support ticket in the future, the ID number is <span class="replaced">3-4137000033827</span></em></div>
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<div id="support_survey" style="border-color: rgb(221, 221, 221); border-image: initial; border-style: solid none; border-width: 1px; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 0.85em; margin: 15px 0px; position: relative; width: 680px;">
<p style="color: #777777; font-size: 1em; margin: 1em auto;">Your feedback is crucial; it helps us understand how we can better meet or exceed your needs.</p></div></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-90090158300359743992023-03-26T11:42:00.018+02:002023-04-07T17:24:44.046+02:00The Worst Model in History: How the Curve was not Flattened <div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvDGQM27N0qBsT3PjxPTICYR8MHGJdbubUSJg2vXFt9HX9RsbqU-HJjySxxASHd_cXxEnMc2dm6O57SHjK4E4ko5X0G3LeZjpaxFShgxZiyG-q9LukV9fIukJ1vJNd8fUjxbmMcLpx3-3bK5gX9e-zqTHdlyXzAv6tuWUq4jswbMPX8UrnN16645uzFg/s1101/FlattenTheCurve.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="830" data-original-width="1101" height="405" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvDGQM27N0qBsT3PjxPTICYR8MHGJdbubUSJg2vXFt9HX9RsbqU-HJjySxxASHd_cXxEnMc2dm6O57SHjK4E4ko5X0G3LeZjpaxFShgxZiyG-q9LukV9fIukJ1vJNd8fUjxbmMcLpx3-3bK5gX9e-zqTHdlyXzAv6tuWUq4jswbMPX8UrnN16645uzFg/w538-h405/FlattenTheCurve.png" width="538" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><i>"Flattening the Curve" was an incredibly successful meme during the early stages of the Covid epidemic. Unfortunately, it was based on a model that we can describe as the worst ever proposed in history (or maybe the second worst, after the one that assured Napoleon that invading Russia in Winter was a good idea). Here, I explain why the model was so bad, and I also include a discussion on whether climate change models might suffer from the same problems. </i></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></div></div><br />You may have heard the quote, "all models are wrong, but some can be useful." It is true. But it is also true that wrong models can be misleading, and some can be lethal. In history, some of these lethal models were fully believed ("let's invade Russia, what could go wrong?), while the lethal consequences of following some current models are still not understood by everyone ("economic growth can continue forever, why not?"). Other models are telling us of the lethal consequences of <i>not </i>following them; it is the case with climate models. There are many kinds of models, but you can't deny that they are important in determining human actions. </div><div><br /></div><div>In this post, I'll discuss the model that gave rise to the concept of "Flattening the Curve" at the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic. It was based on the idea that "non-pharmaceutical measures" (NPIs) would slow down the diffusion of the virus and avoid overloading the healthcare system. It was one of those models that looked good at the beginning, but that turned out to be a disaster. Among other things, it gives us a chance for a critical examination of climate models: could they suffer from the same problems? </div><div><br /></div><div>About the "Flattening the Curve" story, this idea of slowing down the diffusion of a viral infection was not wrong in itself. For millennia, people had noted that many illnesses were transmitted from person to person and that staying away from sick people could reduce the chances of infection. But country-wide lockdowns, universal masking, and the like had never been tried before. So how would you know that they could have a significant effect? </div><div><br /></div><div>Indeed, before the great Covid scare, the general opinion among practitioners and experts was that quarantines and other drastic measures were counter-productive, if not completely useless. Then, in early 2020, a new concept burst into the scene and took the memesphere by storm: "Flattening the Curve." It was expressed in the form of a graph that appeared over and over on the media in slightly different forms, but always showing the same concept. Here is an example among the many.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWyteuAnOX2jH_-aj6NhPgOeCmEBuT1chBrflp5gY7gFCYxBQYRxRXrsORPaiLfjE6XHF1y_tLpV2R2BTFIBFmOMFJVrKhMpnAmJC8J4l5YcDB14eljmbCvss773KMLPTM7ChE073ADj8lctRgyBePWCXjlj5-mhGy1JoXhz7YJjwEK91k_0zOcbLVsQ/s809/FlattenTheCurveNYT2020.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="331" data-original-width="809" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWyteuAnOX2jH_-aj6NhPgOeCmEBuT1chBrflp5gY7gFCYxBQYRxRXrsORPaiLfjE6XHF1y_tLpV2R2BTFIBFmOMFJVrKhMpnAmJC8J4l5YcDB14eljmbCvss773KMLPTM7ChE073ADj8lctRgyBePWCXjlj5-mhGy1JoXhz7YJjwEK91k_0zOcbLVsQ/w590-h240/FlattenTheCurveNYT2020.png" width="590" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div><span><i>Image </i></span><i style="text-align: center;"><span>from "</span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.html">The New York Times,</a><span>" 2020,</span></i></div><br /><div>Let's start by noting that the model is based on the typical shape of the curves describing an epidemic cycle. It occurs when something grows (e.g., a virus) by exploiting a resource (e.g., human beings). If the resource is limited, as is the case for the number of people that can be infected, then the growth of the infection will start slowing down, reach a maximum, and then decline. The result will be a "bell-shaped" curve, a behavior that <a href="https://jenjdanna.com/blog/2017/4/4/puzzles-in-the-pattern-of-plague">has been known </a>from the time of the Great Plague of London in the mid-17th century. (note, incidentally, that epidemic curves do not normally show the "Seneca Effect," that a faster decline in comparison to growth. It is because the system is relatively simple, and viruses are not affected by "pollution"). </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>So, the "Flattening the Curve" model was based on something real; nevertheless, it had enormous problems. Take a careful look at the figure above. The model <b>implies no less than two separate miracles</b>. The first is that the "zero" of the x-axis is supposed to coincide with the "first case." It implies that, miraculously, the government would be so farsighted to decide to lock down a whole country on the basis of a single observed case or just a few. Such a government never existed, and you may argue that it cannot exist in the real world. In practice, NPIs were mandated only when the epidemic was well on its way and fast growing. Note also how the "Protective Measures" curve touches exactly the limit of the healthcare system's capacity without overcoming it. How the measures could be calibrated so precisely is another miracle. </div><div><br /></div><div>The need for two miracles is bad enough for a single model, but there is a much worse problem with it: the model shows two curves with the same shape; they differ only in scale, a parameter that cannot be reliably determined in the early phases of an epidemic cycle. Then, of course, in the real world, the epidemic will follow only one of the two curves, and how do you know which one? In other words, how do you know if the measures are having any effect? Remarkably, the question was almost never publicly asked during the epidemic. The "flattening the curve" model soon became a political issue and, <b>in politics, there are questions that you are not allowed to ask.</b> </div><div><br /></div><div>So, let me try to step out of politics and use science to ask a forbidden question: how would the curve react to the "measures" applied while the curve has already started to grow? Everybody expected an effect, of course, and, obviously, a strong effect if it had to be worth the effort. Tomas Pueyo correctly used the term <a href="https://tomaspueyo.medium.com/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56">"the hammer"</a> to describe the expected effects of NPIs (one of the very few correct observations he ever made). And if you hit something with a hammer, you do expect some immediate effect. But what kind of effect, exactly? </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2021/05/the-rt-factor-in-pandemic-is-it-useful.html">In a previous post</a>, I described a simple SIR (sane, infected, removed) epidemic model, not a sophisticated model but several steps higher on the scientific scale than a purely qualitative two-curve diagram. The model can be easily tweaked to show the effects of a sudden reduction in the transmission factor (<i>Rt</i>) of the infection as a result of NPIs (note that it doesn't apply to vaccines, which can only be introduced gradually). Below, you see a typical result of my calculations. </div><div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4VIXIVsyUmP2nvnyv6dymOB0eiZ1IzHqimv_KzTh8krUQZNbidSheG-tkFAoMTH1xG52gnAo6Lgu4rqy2fxBeG6FOS75GO158w1JxD-N0cabilNFyN87nbkvVKiPf74RXGufKuj_7EZR7Fy1XjIhciiOK4FP9qhD5m4IbqwxsaqYkLVU7DPpxh0t6tg/s772/Real%20Sir%20Model.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="568" data-original-width="772" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4VIXIVsyUmP2nvnyv6dymOB0eiZ1IzHqimv_KzTh8krUQZNbidSheG-tkFAoMTH1xG52gnAo6Lgu4rqy2fxBeG6FOS75GO158w1JxD-N0cabilNFyN87nbkvVKiPf74RXGufKuj_7EZR7Fy1XjIhciiOK4FP9qhD5m4IbqwxsaqYkLVU7DPpxh0t6tg/s320/Real%20Sir%20Model.png" width="320" /></a></div><div>The vertical axis is the infected fraction of the population (the "prevalence"), which should be proportional to the number of measured positive cases. The horizontal scale is the time; a typical epidemic cycle lasts a few months. The graph is roughly modeled on the Italian case in early 2020, and it assumes that the "measures" are mandated on the 20th day of the start of an infection cycle that lasts a few months. The model assumes that the NPIs reduce the infectivity (Rt) of the virus by 50% (as it <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7">was commonly expected</a> to happen). </div></div><div><br /></div>The result is that the slope of the prevalence curve changes when the NPIs are put in place. You can play with the parameters in different ways, but, for a significant decrease in the virus transmission rate, you will always see a discontinuity in the curves in correspondence to the start of the measures. NOte also that there is a certain latency time before a contact with an infected person will lead to a positive result to a PCR test, but for Covid this latency is estimated as of a few days, no more than five. The effect of the latency time will be to smooth the transition, but the change of slope should remain detectable. Overall, <b>this is what the real "flattening the curve" should look like.</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, there exist much more sophisticated epidemiological models, but good modelers know (or should know) that complicated models are not necessarily better than simple ones. Here I don't want to enter into the academic debate on the effect of NPIs (it never reached policymakers and the public, anyway). Just as a quick note, you may wish to take a look at <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7">this 2020 paper</a>. It was published by the group led by Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College in London, who was one of the main proponents of lockdowns. The authors argue that lockdowns were effective, but, if you examine the paper carefully, for instance, looking at <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2405-7/figures/4">fig. 2 </a>of the extended results, you'll see that their own results do not support their conclusions. (and I am not <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3025-y">the only one who noted the problem</a>).</div><div><br /></div><div>But rather than going into the details of complicated models, let's just use common sense. The NPIs are a sudden change in the parameters of the system. When the government orders people to stay locked at home, most of them do that immediately. So, you do expect an immediate effect on the shape of the epidemic curve. The problem is that you don't see anything like that in real-world data. Below, the case of Italy in 2020. NPIs were enacted on March 9th, when the curve had reached about 25% of the peak. The curve continued to grow along the same trajectory for 19 days more. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZRGo8fFO-7_WO7wIJ-PsDToujaXA9t2yHoMtLS4BQ4NSMB5XrSQ8VT91QL3yEmZru6r3DXHJxiVxR5esPxdNcKHb2jGUhHPcsqZEj60kdCT8PvgbmXCKWByOZBRYDlxgwih746Jds58FHMG2TKgYT9QZJUyHU31tdvCojqMYKVTEjwXJuNUHtUy-83A/s826/ItalyCovidCases.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="597" data-original-width="826" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZRGo8fFO-7_WO7wIJ-PsDToujaXA9t2yHoMtLS4BQ4NSMB5XrSQ8VT91QL3yEmZru6r3DXHJxiVxR5esPxdNcKHb2jGUhHPcsqZEj60kdCT8PvgbmXCKWByOZBRYDlxgwih746Jds58FHMG2TKgYT9QZJUyHU31tdvCojqMYKVTEjwXJuNUHtUy-83A/s320/ItalyCovidCases.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>Italy is just one case. Maybe, if you are a real first-class sleuth, you might find some cases where you can evidence a discontinuity in an epidemic curve in correspondence with the NPIs being enacted. But we have hundreds, probably thousands, of examples, and they are almost always smooth, except for the unavoidable random noise. The conclusion can only be that <b>if the NPIs had an effect, it was very small. </b>Incidentally, these observations are consistent with the recent <a href="https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full">Cochrane Review</a> that used different methods to examine the effectiveness of face masks and other NPIs in slowing down the diffusion of viruses. No detectable effects were found. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the end, more than<b> two years of "measures" were imposed on citizens on the basis of a model that implied miracles and didn't include methods to verify the effect of the recommended actions</b>. The damage done to society was enormous in psychological, economic, and human terms, all for effects that turned out to be so small not to be measurable. We are still reeling from the disaster, and it may take several more years before we completely recover -- if we'll ever recover. </div><div><br /></div><div>The question, then, becomes how it could be that almost everyone in the world was completely overtaken by such a bad model -- possibly the worst one ever developed in history? It is a story related to the military implications of epidemics as bioweapons, but I'll tell it in a future post. </div></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></div></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-78889089735937848502023-03-23T18:21:00.014+01:002023-03-25T22:55:53.308+01:00Fighting Shadow-Banning. The Seneca Blog Lands on Substack<p> <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbSkiLL_H83gSHFZQhZRPCBZqzSwSrVuEDZpqUxcfcy8Ss40EII0oZXGqqXTpV1dYnSEt-2q_2ISjB1w9Qk1tsQM7ZLNnvpHym8U4SUaKdhubxAsu_1IjfDmkiOSEniEBc1l74Mcu77P3inZIROJnu-THBMCAlAn60nsTlbAbSwsQyVamzeH6P-Z_DpQ/s1188/SenecaOnSubstack.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="811" data-original-width="1188" height="381" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbSkiLL_H83gSHFZQhZRPCBZqzSwSrVuEDZpqUxcfcy8Ss40EII0oZXGqqXTpV1dYnSEt-2q_2ISjB1w9Qk1tsQM7ZLNnvpHym8U4SUaKdhubxAsu_1IjfDmkiOSEniEBc1l74Mcu77P3inZIROJnu-THBMCAlAn60nsTlbAbSwsQyVamzeH6P-Z_DpQ/w560-h381/SenecaOnSubstack.png" width="560" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><i><br />The new face of the <a href="https://senecaeffect.substack.com/">"Seneca Effect" blog on Substack</a>. It is an attempt to circumvent the shadow ban imposed on the blog by the powers that be. Maybe it will do better on Substack than on the Google blogger platform, where it is now, although I am not sure: never underestimate the power of the PTBs. In any case, for some time, the two platforms, Google Blogger and Substack, will go in parallel and publish the same posts.</i></p><p><br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn4izstKtetr5dvN-mcF-YWxWLpDVEZIz4altX42xlz3g-DwDJSdp-37eXk8oyq9zkWYq9cAnStoUbb39giYICL4iJ-r0in6ycke2kicraHcx0lEt0GZdCkWunKLVVf6L1XpbCclnVR5WKIKMJjcSYmBsSUrsDZh8_ysGQcOAqPrCKczraG-jRezawUQ/s1566/trump-tweet-tease_tww2rz.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="881" data-original-width="1566" height="124" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn4izstKtetr5dvN-mcF-YWxWLpDVEZIz4altX42xlz3g-DwDJSdp-37eXk8oyq9zkWYq9cAnStoUbb39giYICL4iJ-r0in6ycke2kicraHcx0lEt0GZdCkWunKLVVf6L1XpbCclnVR5WKIKMJjcSYmBsSUrsDZh8_ysGQcOAqPrCKczraG-jRezawUQ/w220-h124/trump-tweet-tease_tww2rz.jpeg" width="220" /></a></div>"Shadow Banning" (also "soft banning", or "ghost banning") is a clever way to make someone disappear from the Web, without giving the impression that he or she has been censored (*). It simply consists in making one's website disappear from the first pages of the search engines. It works: you get lost in the vast prairies of the Internet and your readers can't find you anymore. It happened even to Donald Trump when he was still president. <p></p><p>The "Seneca Effect" blog underwent the same treatment. You can see it on this record from "Google Analytics.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6yM5RkwEeGOJLCCNV4fDuC1WjoxpTx_lQKMw_uZ9vTbQwde-t-myb9i8lh8w6FiNOz9BuhLhDyYf6k6jwF2ZPhCU3r4d63e4uWg_RRaBveLWMah_yxfvlc_6KDpUW3HmT-9hrE3mdH4S1BWssdFZCcnDVnvS7E9h9G5Dz-x5-pBCT07QZ7tzPEQlUAg/s1150/SenecaRecord.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="1150" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6yM5RkwEeGOJLCCNV4fDuC1WjoxpTx_lQKMw_uZ9vTbQwde-t-myb9i8lh8w6FiNOz9BuhLhDyYf6k6jwF2ZPhCU3r4d63e4uWg_RRaBveLWMah_yxfvlc_6KDpUW3HmT-9hrE3mdH4S1BWssdFZCcnDVnvS7E9h9G5Dz-x5-pBCT07QZ7tzPEQlUAg/w419-h156/SenecaRecord.png" width="419" /></a></div><p></p><p>You see that the blog was gaining popularity at the end of 2022, especially when I set up a new domain called "<a href="http://senecaeffect.com">senecaeffect.com</a>." Then, something happened in late December. The trend went through a reversal, going down and plateauing at about half of the level they had one year before. And it keeps going down. </p><p>For a while, I thought that it was due to the catastrophists leaving the blog in droves when I published an optimistic post on renewable energy. That made some of them not just disagree but whipped them into a positive frenzy of personal insults against my modest person. Catastrophists are a curious bunch of people, always reminding me of Groucho Marx's quip about not wanting to belong to a group that accepts people like you as members. But, after a few months, the effect of a single post should have disappeared. But no... the blog continues to decline in terms of audience. </p><p>Of course, the PTBs will never admit that they are shadow-banning someone. But the symptoms are clear. Just use your search engine, and you'll see that the "Seneca Effect" blog comes way back in the list of the results, preceded by other sites dealing with Seneca matters, and even by my old site, "Cassandra's Legacy," which I had to abandon more than one year ago because it had been banned (not so softly) by Facebook. Even Wikipedia does not cite the Seneca blog <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect">on its page on the "Seneca Effect,"</a> only the old, and not updated anymore, Cassandra blog. Not surprising, since they are notoriously in the hands of alien monsters from outer space. </p><p>Only Bing, miraculously, shows the blog on the first page when you search for "Seneca Effect." I would never have imagined becoming a fan of Bill Gates!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo__hnNc77AVQH42bIH45YFqm7XFPZWdt2qW-XGoF2q4EJKD9SpMcQfrtUCLfcw8bhya2Lfmt_qHV6JTe9pUZGyws4gt6NTfF4ypTFbrmBikIib8eN-VaVk23NYUkwmdmB-nJ2SoeldNW1IhmV6iIouH5TNvLzN1zEVmIZfTw6146FjQmCpX7dHTb26A/s769/SenecaEffectOnBing.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="769" height="412" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo__hnNc77AVQH42bIH45YFqm7XFPZWdt2qW-XGoF2q4EJKD9SpMcQfrtUCLfcw8bhya2Lfmt_qHV6JTe9pUZGyws4gt6NTfF4ypTFbrmBikIib8eN-VaVk23NYUkwmdmB-nJ2SoeldNW1IhmV6iIouH5TNvLzN1zEVmIZfTw6146FjQmCpX7dHTb26A/w423-h412/SenecaEffectOnBing.png" width="423" /></a></div><br /><p>So, life is hard for shadow-banned bloggers, and it is little comfort to be in a group that includes Donald Trump and many others (and, again, about not wanting to belong to a certain group....). Shadow banning is like one of those curses of fantasy novels that plague people forever unless they go through special rituals or difficult tests, say, slaying a dragon. But slaying the Google dragon is surely much more difficult than getting rid of Tolkien's Smaug. </p><p>So, the only possibility to circumvent soft banning is to change the name of your site, or change platform. For the time being, I am trying a move to Substack, which seems to be less subjected to Google power and, for now, not practicing censorship. You can find the Seneca version on Substack at <a href="http://senecaeffect.substack.com">this link</a>. (**)</p><p>Will it work? I don't know. For the time being, the two platforms, Google Blogger and Substack, will go in parallel, mirroring each other. And we'll see. </p><p><br /></p><p>___________________________________________________</p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>One point on which I am not sure is how Substack's popularity relies heavily on monetary support for authors from readers. Maybe it is a good idea and I don't despise a little compensation for the work I am doing: after all, I take royalties on the books I sell. Also, on Blogger, I have a small advertising banner that brings me about $25 per month (!!). I keep it there mainly as a way to get a feeling of the number of people who stay on the page long enough to notice the banner. In that case, though, the advertisers pay, not the readers. </span><span>But I feel a bit queasy about asking readers to pay to read my posts.</span><span> If I activate paid subscriptions on Substack, I would do that only as an option for readers to show their support, but not as a requisite to read the posts. But what do you think? </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">(*) Shadow banning doesn't need the Internet to exist. It is a much older story. Just as a quick note, I would like to mention the treatment inflicted on the great mathematician Vito Volterra in the 1930s, as a result of his opposition to the Fascist government in Italy. He was not physically harmed, jailed, or his movement restricted. He was just ignored: gradually marginalized, fired from his position as president of the Italian Research Council, and later even from his position as university professor. None of his colleagues dared to defy the ban, and up to the 1960s, it remained politically incorrect to mention him and his work in Italy (see <a href="https://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/RSUT/article/download/6398/5475/">this article </a>by Giovanni Paoloni)</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">(**) I have another blog on Substack, "<a href="https://theproudholobionts.substack.com/">The Proud Holobionts,</a>" dedicated to the ecosystem, climate, biology, and the like. It is also a mirror of the same blog on Google's blogger. </span></p><div>_______________________________________________</div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;">Note added after publication: the "Seneca Effect" blog seems to be also tainted on chatGPT. The AI bot names it, but when asked to provide a link for it, it provides the wrong one. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Can you suggest a blog to learn about the Seneca Effect?<br /><br />Yes, there are several blogs and websites where you can learn about the Seneca Effect, a phenomenon named after the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca who observed that "growth is slow, but ruin is rapid." Here are a few suggestions:<br /><br />"The Seneca Effect" by Ugo Bardi: Ugo Bardi is an Italian chemist and professor at the University of Florence who has written extensively on the Seneca Effect. His blog, "The Seneca Effect," is a great place to start for an introduction to the concept. He has also written several books on the subject, including "The Seneca Effect: Why Growth is Slow But Collapse is Rapid."<br /><br />"Cassandra's Legacy" by Ugo Bardi: Ugo Bardi's blog, "Cassandra's Legacy," covers a wide range of topics related to sustainability, including the Seneca Effect. In addition to his own writing, the blog also features guest posts from other experts in the field.<br /><br />"Our Finite World" by Gail Tverberg: Gail Tverberg is an actuary and analyst who writes about energy, economics, and the limits to growth. Her blog, "Our Finite World," covers a wide range of topics related to the intersection of energy and the economy, including the Seneca Effect.<br /><br />"The Automatic Earth" by Ilargi and Stoneleigh: "The Automatic Earth" is a blog that covers economic and financial news from a perspective that emphasizes the limits to growth. The blog covers a wide range of topics related to the Seneca Effect, including the impact of resource depletion on the global economy.<br /><br />These blogs and websites are great resources for learning more about the Seneca Effect and its implications for sustainability, economics, and the future of our planet.<br /><br /><img src="data:image/svg+xml,%3csvg%20xmlns=%27http://www.w3.org/2000/svg%27%20version=%271.1%27%20width=%2730%27%20height=%2730%27/%3e" /><br />Can you provide links for the above suggestions?<br /><br /><br />Certainly! Here are the links to the blogs I mentioned in my previous response:<br /><br />"The Seneca Effect" by Ugo Bardi: <a href="http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/">http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/</a><br /><br />"Cassandra's Legacy" by Ugo Bardi: <a href="http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/">http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/</a><br /><br />"Our Finite World" by Gail Tverberg: <a href="https://ourfiniteworld.com/">https://ourfiniteworld.com/</a><br /><br />"The Automatic Earth" by Ilargi and Stoneleigh: <a href="https://www.theautomaticearth.com/">https://www.theautomaticearth.com/</a><br /><br />I hope you find these resources helpful for learning about the Seneca Effect!</i></span><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">After much prodding, the dumb thing spouted out the truth:</span><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /><i>"It's possible that my training data may not have included the correct information regarding the link to Ugo Bardi's "The Seneca Effect" blog, or that I misinterpreted the context of the original question. In any case, I apologize for any confusion my earlier response may have caused and hope that my subsequent responses have been helpful in providing the correct information."</i></span></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-75525568273324067422023-03-20T11:29:00.010+01:002023-03-22T08:55:03.005+01:00Putin Must Die! How to make sure that the war will not end soon<div class="separator"><br /></div><br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw3TXxhpzFOlAPf34_Rz7sDEx4v85J9RlpnY9AyLDZd_HXVdOIYvR9fu3q08Li3SfUYzFYZnydbtfR7HRxHQP1mKePf49BbJqTwlyxF1YVvOmT4dW2fzijD7i0CMqcgPbdDPoRgJROMhwnqUZRrb8E5VR2aWVaBdIA1_1FiAex_dSDhK_QwcxVPOfPsA/s1280/Putin.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="745" data-original-width="1280" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw3TXxhpzFOlAPf34_Rz7sDEx4v85J9RlpnY9AyLDZd_HXVdOIYvR9fu3q08Li3SfUYzFYZnydbtfR7HRxHQP1mKePf49BbJqTwlyxF1YVvOmT4dW2fzijD7i0CMqcgPbdDPoRgJROMhwnqUZRrb8E5VR2aWVaBdIA1_1FiAex_dSDhK_QwcxVPOfPsA/w444-h258/Putin.jpg" width="444" /></a></div><br /></div><div><br /></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>As a comment to the recent decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to issue an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, I propose here an excerpt from the chapter titled "The Evil Side of Collapse" of my book, "Before Collapse," (2019). In the book, I argue that there is a way to reduce the impact of systemic collapse that I call the "Seneca Strategy," which consists in accepting an unavoidable decline in order to soften a later crash. Conversely, there exists also an "anti-Seneca" strategy that consists in forcing the system to resist decline at all costs. The result is that the collapse is postponed but, when it comes, it is rapid and disastrous. It may be applied in a military conflict when the objective is the utter and total destruction of one's enemy. It consists in making it clear to enemy leaders that they will be treated as criminals if they surrender so that they will keep fighting to the bitter end. It was applied by the Allies during WWII, as I briefly discuss here. </i></div></i><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /><div><b>From "<i>Before Collapse,</i>" di Ugo Bardi, Springer 2019 (*)<br /></b><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>In military matters, there exists an “anti-Seneca” strategy that consists in disregarding Sun Tzu’s principle of minimum effort, aiming instead at continuing the war all the way to the complete military defeat, or even the annihilation, of the enemy. Such a plan could be based on ideological, political, or religious considerations leading one or both sides to believe that the very existence of the other is a deadly threat that must be removed using force. In ancient times, religious hatred led to the extermination of entire populations, and there is a rather well-known statement that may have been pronounced after the fall of the Albigensian city of Béziers, in Southern France, in 1209. It is said that the Papal legate who was with the attacking Catholic troops was asked what to do with the citizens, which surely included both Catholics and Albigensian heretics. The answer was, "Kill them all; God will know His own." </div><div><br /></div><div>That war, just like most modern wars, was an “identity war” where the enemy is seen as not just an adversary, but an evil entity to be destroyed. These wars tend to be brutal and carried on all the way to the total extermination of the losing side. In some cases, though, wars may be prolonged simply because they are good business for some people and companies on both sides.</div><div><span lang="EN-US" style="letter-spacing: -0.15pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>A possible case of this kind of “anti-Seneca” strategy may be found in the campaign that was started in the US in 1914 to provide food for Belgium during the First World War. The campaign is normally described as a great humanitarian success, but in the recent book <i>Prolonging the Agony</i> (2018), the authors, Docherty and Macgregor, suggest that the relief effort was just the facade for the real task of the operation: supplying food to Germany so that the German army could continue fighting until it was completely destroyed. This interpretation appears to be mainly speculation, but we can't ignore that Belgium was occupied by the German army at that time, and so it could be expected that at least part of the food sent there would end up in German hands. <div><br /></div><div>Something more ominous took place during the Second World War. By September 1943, after the surrender of Italy, it must have been clear to everybody on both sides that the Allies had won the war; it was only a question of time for them to finish the job. So, what could have prevented the German government from following the example of Italy and deciding to surrender, maybe ousting Hitler, as the Italian government had done with Mussolini? We do not know whether some members of the German leadership considered this strategy, but it seems clear that the Allies did not encourage them. One month after Italy surrendered, in October 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, signed a document known as the “Moscow Declaration.” Among other things, it stated that:<br /><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">At the time of granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done … and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged. </blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">… most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done. … <else> they will be punished by joint decision of the government of the Allies. </blockquote><br />What was the purpose of broadcasting this document that threatened the extermination of the German leadership, knowing that it would have been read by the Germans, too? The Allies seemed to want to make sure that the German leaders understood that there was no space to negotiate an armistice. The only way out left to the German military was to take the situation into their own hands to get rid of the leaders that the Allied had vowed to punish. That was probably the reason for the assassination attempt carried out against Adolf Hitler on June 20th, 1944. It failed, and we will never know if it would have shortened the war. <br /><br />Perhaps as a reaction to the coup against Hitler in Germany, a few months later, on September 21, 1944, the Allies publicly diffused a plan for post-war Germany that had been approved at the Quebec Conference by the British and American governments. The plan, known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” was proposed by Henry Morgenthau Jr. secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Among other things, it called for the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure and the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a nearly Medieval technology level. If carried out as stated, the plan would have killed millions of Germans since German agriculture, alone, would have been unable to sustain the German population. The plan was initially approved by the US president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. <br /><br />Unlike the Moscow declaration that aimed at punishing German leaders, the Morgenthau plan called for the punishment of the whole German population. Again, the proponents could not have been unaware that their plan was visible to the Germans and that the German government would have used it as a propaganda tool. President Roosevelt's son-in-law, Lt. Colonel John Boettiger, stated that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans." The general upheaval against the plan among the US leadership led President Roosevelt to disavow it. But it may have been one of the reasons that led the Germans to fight like cornered rats to the bitter end. <br /><br />So, what was the idea behind the Morgenthau plan? As you may imagine, the story generated a number of conspiracy theories. One of these theories proposes that the plan was not conceived by Morgenthau himself, but by his assistant secretary, Harry Dexter White. After the war, White was accused of being a Soviet spy by the Venona investigation, a US counterintelligence effort started during WW2 that was the prelude to the well-known “Witch Hunts” carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. According to a later interpretation, White had acted under instructions from Stalin himself, who wanted the Germans to suffer under the Allied occupation so much that they would welcome a Soviet intervention. It goes without saying that this is just speculation, but, since this chapter deals with the evil side of collapse, this story fits very well with it. <br /><br />There is no evidence that the Morgenthau plan was conceived by evil people gathering in secret in a smoke-filled room. Rather, it has certain logic if examined from the point of view of the people engaged in the war effort against Germany in the 1940s. They had seen Germany rebuilding its army and restarting its war effort to conquer Europe just 20 years after it had been defeated in a way that seemed to be final, in 1918. It is not surprising that they wanted to make sure that it could not happen again. But, according to their experience, it was not sufficient to defeat Germany to obtain that result: no peace treaty, no matter how harsh on the losers, could obtain that. The only way to put to rest the German ambitions of conquest forever was by means of the complete destruction of the German armed forces and the occupation of all of Germany. For this, the German forces had to fight like cornered rats. And it seems reasonable that if you want a rat to fight in that way, you have to corner it first. The Morgenthau plan left no hope for the Germans except in terms of a desperate fight to the last man. <br /><br />We do not know whether the people who conceived the plan saw it in these terms. The documents we have seem to indicate that there was a strong feeling among the people of the American government during the war about the need to punish Germany and the Germans, as described, for instance, in Beschloss’s book <i>The Conquerors</i>. Whatever the case, fortunately, the Morgenthau plan was never officially adopted, and, in 1947, the US changed its focus from destroying Germany to rebuilding it by means of the Marshall plan. <br /><br />There have been other cases of wars where there was no attempt to apply the wise strategy proposed by Sun-Tzu, who suggests always leaving the enemy a way to escape. Nowadays, wars seem to be becoming more and more polarized and destructive, just like the political debate. Once a war has started, the only way to conclude it seems to be the complete collapse of the enemy and the extermination of its leaders. The laughter of the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, at the news of the murder of the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011 is a case in point of how brutal these confrontations have become. It is hard to see how the trend in this direction could be reversed until the current international system of interaction among states that created it collapses. At least, it should be clear that the anti-Seneca strategy is an especially inefficient way to win wars. <div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-size: x-small;">(*) This is a lightly edited text from an early version of the book. </span><br /><br /></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-36033349216733944132023-03-17T12:38:00.006+01:002023-03-17T12:44:56.888+01:00How Forests Create Rain: a New Study on the Effect of Evapotranspiration<a href="https://theproudholobionts.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-forest-holobiont-that-creates-rain.html" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="font-size: small;">From the "Proud Holobionts" blog</span></a><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image created by <a href="https://openai.com/product/dall-e-2" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;">Dall-E</a></span><div class="separator"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSkDKldRoUNq_VIS3Dc156vxHFPZkTOzNnIvsSVnnLyu3OOTmTYlT3JB2wppoRWQ3VUIUW2ieqKYFaWsvpYYU3g07UB4L3ysUal7waGFiAMdCmtjXmRODkrkVbytnwYCjJZ4ggyV8kcgMb9foXTjIG6Kfc4hZvfQYptMOm8xAHxHjGjML6pEsvAW3K/s1024/Woodsandclouds.png" style="color: #2288bb; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="412" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSkDKldRoUNq_VIS3Dc156vxHFPZkTOzNnIvsSVnnLyu3OOTmTYlT3JB2wppoRWQ3VUIUW2ieqKYFaWsvpYYU3g07UB4L3ysUal7waGFiAMdCmtjXmRODkrkVbytnwYCjJZ4ggyV8kcgMb9foXTjIG6Kfc4hZvfQYptMOm8xAHxHjGjML6pEsvAW3K/w412-h412/Woodsandclouds.png" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="412" /></a></div></i></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>The idea that forests create rain has been known by peasants for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. The first scientific studies go back to Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), but the subject remains controversial. Nevertheless, we are starting to understand the deep and complex interactions between the atmosphere and the biosphere. They form a true "holobiont," a system of connected elements that affect each other in non-linear ways. A recent paper published by a research group led by Anastassia Makarieva shows how evapotranspiration, the evaporation of water by trees, modifies the water vapor dynamics and may generate high moisture content regimes that provide the rain needed by the land ecosystem. There is still much that we need to understand about these mechanisms, but one point is clear: forests are a crucial element of the stability of Earth's climate, and they must be preserved as much as possible (U.B.)</i></p><p><br /></p><p><i>Press Release, 14/03/2023</i></p>
As water scarcity globally grows, and deforestation threatens the remaining natural forests, understanding how vegetation impacts the water cycle becomes increasingly important. In their new paper, <b>“The role of ecosystem transpiration in creating alternate moisture regimes by influencing atmospheric moisture convergence”</b> published in Global Change Biology (<i style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 16.5px; text-align: justify;"> </span><span lang="IT" style="color: #222222; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 16.5px; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16644" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;"><span lang="EN-US">https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16644</span></a></span></i>), an international and interdisciplinary team led by TUM demonstrated the existence of two potential moisture regimes – one drier, with additional moisture decreasing atmospheric moisture import, and one wetter, with additional moisture enhancing atmospheric moisture import. In the drier regime, water vapor behaves as a passive tracer following the air flow. In the wetter regime, it modifies atmospheric dynamics.<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFjcj4vKer-AIeMScTVNdckg0bZUDKfH_LBqLNWz1IhQJsFbagsAuOcSM4nZSIUj2COAAB2ZLLbgOhZR1GIOYd85FuIG8VBsjDO0F8vfkC0DMGrc3as6nBe4MPvlYD8dpQ8xh_MSSP3DR78y0DIRlqqsWiqBfOi9cwD6dZNjfUh_9E1MhiYE7v_uAK/s448/Rain.png" style="color: #2288bb; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="448" height="374" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFjcj4vKer-AIeMScTVNdckg0bZUDKfH_LBqLNWz1IhQJsFbagsAuOcSM4nZSIUj2COAAB2ZLLbgOhZR1GIOYd85FuIG8VBsjDO0F8vfkC0DMGrc3as6nBe4MPvlYD8dpQ8xh_MSSP3DR78y0DIRlqqsWiqBfOi9cwD6dZNjfUh_9E1MhiYE7v_uAK/w410-h374/Rain.png" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 1px solid rgb(238, 238, 238); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1) 1px 1px 5px; padding: 5px; position: relative;" width="410" /></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;">The team based their analysis on the previously established non-linear dependence of precipitation on atmospheric moisture content – increasing absolute humidity leads to a negligible precipitation increment if the atmosphere is dry, but to a large increment when the atmosphere is sufficiently wet. Combining this dependence with a full consideration of the water budget, the researchers showed that an increase in precipitation in humid conditions facilitated by increased evapotranspiration, should lead to enhanced moisture import. They illustrated these patterns with the data from the Amazon basin and the Loess Plateau in China.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;">Dr. Anja Rammig (TUM School of Life Sciences and study author) considers these results as having profound implications for the ongoing studies of the resilience of the Amazon forest in the face of the danger of deforestation and climate change. Dr. Scott Saleska (University of Arizona, study author) believes that the new results are in agreement with the profound role of leaf phenology in the Amazon forest for water cycle regulation. By forcing a decline in forest evapotranspiration, deforestation can dehumidify the atmosphere and thus drive the forest into the drier regime where transpiration of the re-growing vegetation would further aggravate aridity by decreasing moisture import. Getting out of this landscape trap could be impossible. Dr. Ruben Molina (University of Antioquia, Colombia, study author) hopes that the study findings will raise the awareness of the importance of tropical forest conservation.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Dr. Andrei Nefiodov (Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, Russia) participating in the study says that the new results corroborate the concept of the biotic pump of atmospheric moisture that emphasizes the dominant role of natural forests in transporting moisture inland. Dr. Antonio Nobre (INPE, Brazil, study author) compares this biotic moisture pumping to a beating heart, and highlights the good news: even in arid lands, by restoring the vegetation one should be able to enhance the atmospheric moisture convergence and streamflow. To achieve that, the ecological restoration strategy should be carefully designed to guide the ecosystem transition from the dry to wet regimes.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;">“I suspect that natural vegetation will be best for maintaining a moist and productive environment as these systems kept the world green and productive long before people got involved” – emphasizes Dr. Douglas Sheil (Wageningen University, author), collaborating on the research. “We do need to take into account the holobiontic relationships among all ecosystem elements that allow for an efficient regulation of the water cycle,” adds another author Dr. Ugo Bardi (Club of Rome, University of Florence).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;">Anastassia Makarieva (Institute for Advanced Study, TUM, lead author) emphasizes the need for a broad international cooperation in the studies of the ecology of the water cycle: “We have shown that the non-linear precipitation dependence on atmospheric moisture content, first noted by our co-author Dr. Mara Baudena (CNR-ISAC, Italy) and her colleagues, has widely ranging implications. The atmospheric water flows do not recognize international borders, thus deforestation disrupting evapotranspiration in one region could trigger a transition to the drier regime in another. Our results indicate that natural forests of the Earth, in both high and low latitudes, are our common legacy of pivotal global importance as they support the terrestrial water cycle. Their preservation should become a widely recognized priority for our civilization to solve the global water crisis.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><i><span lang="IT" style="color: #222222; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 16.5px; text-align: justify;">Makarieva, A. M., Nefiodov, A. V., Nobre, A. D., Baudena, M., Bardi, U., Sheil, D., Saleska, S. R., Molina, R. D., & Rammig, A. (2023). </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color: #222222; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 16.5px; text-align: justify;">The role of ecosystem transpiration in creating alternate moisture regimes by influencing atmospheric moisture convergence. Global Change Biology, 00, 1– 21. </span><span lang="IT" style="color: #222222; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 16.5px; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16644" style="color: #2288bb; text-decoration-line: none;"><span lang="EN-US">https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16644</span></a></span></i></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><br /></span></p>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-90852058320684454932023-03-12T08:56:00.030+01:002023-03-15T22:30:47.565+01:00Are the Evil Gods Returning? Or is Evil is Inside us?<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif_Bt3gL-I-wKMGjqFu5thpWyXetjcgjH7njmHIXXjDlTCwoBwyYV88kRbxnCl4unYENGfTS1yREKvI2RnZ-ezJGf7SSopDiiaA4iVzAbPbnysb4FoGbmeMgemcl8U9rkqGo14OMhos7IsXahQIR29jEOtFTP5ij1c-r_7q-nCn0OjFcXCaI6VafBikg/s1002/MussoliniEvilMask_auto_x2.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="744" data-original-width="1002" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif_Bt3gL-I-wKMGjqFu5thpWyXetjcgjH7njmHIXXjDlTCwoBwyYV88kRbxnCl4unYENGfTS1yREKvI2RnZ-ezJGf7SSopDiiaA4iVzAbPbnysb4FoGbmeMgemcl8U9rkqGo14OMhos7IsXahQIR29jEOtFTP5ij1c-r_7q-nCn0OjFcXCaI6VafBikg/w390-h290/MussoliniEvilMask_auto_x2.jpg" width="390" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Benito Mussolini in 1922: is this the face of evil? Maybe, but Mussolini was not worshiping evil deities, he was not eating babies, he was not making human sacrifices. He wasn't even indulging in bouts of satanic laughter, as evil characters are supposed to do. There was nothing behind the mask. Mussolini was just a victim of his own propaganda. </i></div><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><p>As a devoted reader of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, I have always found the idea of evil deities fascinating. The existence of supernatural entities that somehow control people's minds could explain a lot of things that otherwise would seem impossible to understand. But Lovecraft's horror stories are so over the top that they are not really scary. His evil Gods are comic book characters, clumsy creatures haunting dark and desolate places. Not even the mighty Cthulhu and his minions ever directly intervened in human political decisions. </p><p>Yet, sometimes you have the sensation that something truly evil is moving in the world. Naomi Wolf expressed the idea most clearly in <a href="https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/have-the-ancient-gods-returned">a recent post of hers</a>. </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched from being based at least overtly on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion and hatred, overnight, en masse — without reference to some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency. ...</blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">What we have lived through since 2020 is so sophisticated, so massive, so evil, and executed in such inhumane unison, that it cannot be accounted for without venturing into metaphysics. Something else, something metaphysical, must have done that. And I speak as a devoted rationalist.</div></blockquote><p>Lately, I've been thinking along similar lines. <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2023/01/ho-to-create-your-own-shadow-government.html">I even argued</a> that worshiping the evil deity Baphomet could be a good idea for really nasty people who want to dominate the world. Overall, though, I think it is not the right explanation. No matter how inexplicable the rise of evil can look, it is still something that comes from inside us, not from the outside. <b>Evil is us, eventually.</b></p><p>The recent release of the "<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/lockdown-files/">Lockdown Files</a>" in Britain supports this idea. These files contain the messages sent and received by Matt Hancock, the British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care during the lockdown period in Britain. In these messages, Hancock doesn't sound evil. He just writes as if he cared only about himself and his personal prestige. He wanted to "own the exit," and he didn't care about the British people, whom he evidently considered a band of morons. <b>We were mistreated by dumb bureaucrats, not by the minions of evil deities.</b></p><p>Now, I have <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2022/11/how-to-beat-propaganda-grokking-strategy.html">a stated policy</a> that I call the "Grokking Strategy" that consists in listening to everyone and trusting no one. So, I am perfectly willing to consider the hypothesis that the Hancock files are a psyop designed to divert the public's attention away from the hidden forces that governed the reaction to the pandemic. On the whole, though, I think these files are genuine. They make sense, and they also match other examples of the same kind. For instance, we recently saw similar leaks of messages sent and received by the Italian equivalent of Hancock, Mr. Roberto Speranza, Minister of Health of the Italian government during the lockdown period. We can't swear on the authenticity of these leaked messages, but they fit with the personality of Mr. Speranza. Like Hancock, he was clearly trying to "own the exit." In late 2020, he published an autobiographical book designed to show how he had been valiantly fighting the virus and eventually had succeeded in squashing it. The book was quietly removed from the market when it turned out that the pandemic was not over. Now a printed copy is a rare collector's item.</p><p>Speranza and Hancock are just examples of the attitude of many people who reach the top. They are psychopaths, caring only about themselves, unable to feel anything for other people. They have zero or nearly zero <a href="https://empathy.guru/">empathy</a>. Hannah Arendt describes this attitude for Adolf Eichmann, the German war criminal executed in 1962. </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: #f7f7f7; box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 13px;">“</span>What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”</p></blockquote><p>We find another example of this attitude with Benito Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, and part of it up to 1945. For him, we have the equivalent of the leaked messages by Hancock and Speranza in the diary kept by his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, who acted as foreign minister up to 1943. In <a href="https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-mind-of-evil-ruler-what-goes-on.html">a post of mine</a> I described how the diary tells us of a man who had lost all contact with reality. Mussolini had no friends, just lackeys. He wasn't listening to anyone; he was giving orders. He was not asking questions; he had all the answers. He was not learning from his mistakes; they were always someone else's fault. Worst of all, he had no respect for the life of the people he was supposed to rule. Just as an example, during a cold wave in winter, he was rejoicing because "the weak die, and the race becomes stronger." In 1943, Mussolini ordered the execution of his son-in-law. He didn't care even about the members of his own family. </p><div>Was Mussolini pursuing an evil plan of his own creation? No, he never had structured ideas or plans. You may have some hints of his thoughts from his 1911 novel: "<i>The Lover of the Cardinal</i>." <a href="https://chimeramyth.blogspot.com/2022/11/of-bad-people-and-bad-novels-cardinals.html">About it</a>. I wrote:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">.... I was curious about the possibility of gathering some hints about Mussolini's personality. Maybe his dreams, his goals as a young man, his ideals, this kind of things. But there is nothing like that in the novel. The author comes out of it as shallow as his characters. Which I think is what Mussolini probably was. A shallow character, of modest culture, with no real ideals, and with just a few ideas, but confused. </div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE0eR-M8vgJP5E6hF_bCi54BDRGyIYLhlLEtZQGcvfFsRgFMC2DdkjO9NtsgeV7woTPk5Y-xzTNlSDCTdVy0QvPVYOrSc69yc76uy7N6JyULMKTeq5CWafHeeevN0uqlqGC_efYMbsed1aVKDUFwBr87oV3nDFpdsmqEYks0dwkvmfoXG6TlhbFobl1A/s720/Difesa_della_razza.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="575" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE0eR-M8vgJP5E6hF_bCi54BDRGyIYLhlLEtZQGcvfFsRgFMC2DdkjO9NtsgeV7woTPk5Y-xzTNlSDCTdVy0QvPVYOrSc69yc76uy7N6JyULMKTeq5CWafHeeevN0uqlqGC_efYMbsed1aVKDUFwBr87oV3nDFpdsmqEYks0dwkvmfoXG6TlhbFobl1A/w256-h320/Difesa_della_razza.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>Yet, a whole nation followed this man into doing whatever he thought was to be done. Let's skip the many disastrous strategic mistakes he made, and let's just focus on one that was pure evil: the persecution of the Italian Jews. It started in the mid-1930s, and it was a crescendo of harassment and mistreatment. The "racial laws" were enacted in 1938, and the Jews saw themselves fired from their jobs, forbidden to work, and, in many cases, forced to exile. Jews could not be administrators or doorkeepers of houses inhabited by Aryans, dealers in valuables, photographers, sellers of books, children's items, playing cards, and stationery. Jews were also forbidden to be licensed as amateur fishermen, to publish mortuary announcements, to include their names in telephone directories, to own and sell radios, and to join sports or recreational societies. They were forbidden to play chess in chess clubs. Even the Italian "Science" was compact in condemning Jews as an inferior race based on what was presented as a certain and undisputable set of data. See in the image the front cover of a 1938 Italian magazine: it is self-explanatory ("<i>La difesa della razza</i>" means "the defense of the race").</div><div><div><br /></div><div>Now, picture yourself in Italy in the 1930s. Why this avalanche of hate against a group of Italian citizens? Many of them had fought for Italy during the Great War, and many were intellectuals, professionals, industrialists, and active elements of the Italian economy. They were indistinguishable from the "normal" Italians, except for their religious beliefs, But even that was not the point, because even those Jews who had converted to Christianity were targeted by the racial laws. You were just subjected to a wave of hate against Jews that pervaded the media of the time: mainly radio and the press.</div><div><br /></div><div>Who exactly was masterminding this campaign? Obviously, it was created and controlled by members of the Fascist party or by government officials (the two things had mostly merged into a single entity in the 1930s). And, of course, once the story started, there were people or groups of people who directly benefitted from the persecution. Non-Jews took over the positions left free by Jews. For instance, university professors seem to have been more than happy to see their Jewish colleagues fired. At least, no non-Jewish professors protested against the mistreatment of their Jewish colleagues. Others profited from the confiscation of Jews' goods and property. Then, the military industry had everything to gain from a wave of hate that was clearly leading to war. But the surprising point is how the hate percolated through all sectors of society when most Italians had nothing to gain from the persecution. Mussolini himself had no obvious interest in taking an anti-semitic stance. He had taken over the Italian Government in 1922 without the need to demonize Jews, and in 1938 he was safe and secure in his position after the success of the Ethiopian campaign (*). I would surmise that he was a victim of his own propaganda.</div><div><br /></div><div>Wouldn't you think that some evil deities were at work in causing this disaster? But the Italian Fascists were not the minions of an evil cult. And we don't have evidence that Mussolini himself was a puppet of supernatural entities or of human lobbies. The British secret services <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2022/09/who-controls-those-who-control-us-why.html">may have pushed him to make some of his many strategic mistakes,</a> but there is no evidence that they had a role in the anti-semitic campaign. Evil didn't originate from Mussolini, nor from evil deities behind him. It was generated by ordinary people, just like you and me, who fell into the trap of propaganda. It is easy: you know that <b>the road to Hell is smooth and easy. </b></div><div><br /></div><div>I think there the persecution of Jews in Italy is one of the best examples in history of the phenomenon that Mattias Desmet calls "<i>Mass Formation</i>." It was a self-reinforcing phenomenon: the Italian press started telling people that Jews were evil, people were believing what they were told, and that led the press to step up their accusations, convincing people even more. And that went on, unchecked: a spiral of evil growing on itself. Soon, nobody, not even the Catholic Church, dared to say a word to defend their fellow Italian citizens so unfairly discriminated against. All the self-reinforcing phenomena tend to grow rapidly, even exponentially. And that was what happened with the anti-semitic campaign in Italy. It grew to the point when concentration camps started being built for the Jews, then these camps became extermination camps. Fortunately, the whole thing crashed with the defeat of Italy in WWII before it could reach the level of the parallel German extermination program. It was a perfect example of a <a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2015/11/the-seneca-effect-why-decline-is-faster.html">Seneca Cliff</a> --<b> even evil is subjected to slow growth and fast collapse. </b></div><div><br /></div><div>During the past three years, the whole world has been walking along a dangerous and slippery road toward Hell. In Italy, the Covid policies didn't arrive at the creation of concentration camps, but we got very close to that. They were actually created in Australia. Then, miraculously, something happened that defused the whole thing. Now the story seems to be over, and most people just want to forget about that, just like Italians want to forget the mistreatment that their grandparents and great-grandparents inflicted on Jews. But the elements that created these waves of hate are all in place, and we are all subjected to being affected by a propaganda campaign designed to demonize someone. Who will be the next victims?</div><div> </div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>(*) I have an id</span><span>ea about what could have been going on in Mussolini's head. It goes like this. First, there is no evidence that Mussolini had anti-semitic ideas for most of his political career. He never wrote anything about Jews, and even <a href="https://chimeramyth.blogspot.com/2022/11/of-bad-people-and-bad-novels-cardinals.html">in his 1911 novel</a>, the Cardinal's lover, there is no trace of anti-semitism. Mussolini even had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti (1880-1961), an intellectual, artist, and writer, </span><span>from when they met in Milano in 1911. </span><span>But, in 1933, Mussolini took a younger woman as mistress, unceremoniously dumping the older Sarfatti. From then on, Mussolini started to encourage anti-semitism, becoming a rabid anti-semite himself. Was the whole idea of persecuting the Jews a result of Mussolini's personal dislike of his former Jewish lover? Who can say? If a butterfly can start a hurricane by flapping its wings, some of the mass murders of WWII might have started from a bedroom quarrel. But we will never know. </span></span></div><div><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></p></div></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-86522193821986333912023-03-05T00:21:00.036+01:002023-03-07T10:48:33.518+01:00Those Pesky Savanna Monkeys and Their Dreams of Golden Hydrogen<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij5gzsnkGmSXU85f1-MYDmMVCjq956efiRa1pv47Q2DOqrhH6x-_m2DJO2rgG0LXzeNh88-lhb2hkVW-hxThIz5mrgZjPOc0fu4z-rpJWoZarEXvicGr2fmJMkaNLWgiRCeBQIEo-cKaH5SinNyCfeB_XfC3tQVpAZYme7yZmijadPeRchBeAFHdCgtQ/s1034/Junglebook-disneyscreencaps.com-4036.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="559" data-original-width="1034" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij5gzsnkGmSXU85f1-MYDmMVCjq956efiRa1pv47Q2DOqrhH6x-_m2DJO2rgG0LXzeNh88-lhb2hkVW-hxThIz5mrgZjPOc0fu4z-rpJWoZarEXvicGr2fmJMkaNLWgiRCeBQIEo-cKaH5SinNyCfeB_XfC3tQVpAZYme7yZmijadPeRchBeAFHdCgtQ/w554-h299/Junglebook-disneyscreencaps.com-4036.webp" width="554" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><pre>Here we sit in a branchy row,
Thinking of beautiful things we know;
Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,
All complete, in a minute or two--
Something noble and wise and good,
Done by merely wishing we could.
We've forgotten, but--never mind,
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!</pre><pre>Rudyard Kipling -- the Jungle Book</pre><div><br /></div><div>By now, you probably heard the story of "Natural Hydrogen," (or "Gold Hydrogen"), the new source of clean energy that should come for free to us, outgassed from the depths of Earth. In 2020, the idea had been <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825219304787?via%3Dihub">reviewed by Zgonnnik</a> (see also <a href="https://hal-univ-pau.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02187461/file/2019_Prinzhofer_moretti_al%20%281%29.pdf">an earlier paper</a>), but the concept is becoming popular after it was described in a lengthy article on "<a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-hydrogen-earth-may-hold-vast-stores-renewable-carbon-free-fuel">Science</a>" of Feb 17, 2022, and then taken up in an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/hydrogen-natural-climate-change.html">enthusiastic article</a> in the NY times on Feb 27, where Peter Coy defines natural hydrogen as a "Gold Mine of Clean Energy Hiding Under our Feet." </div><div><br /></div><div>Citing from the "Times" article, "<i>....from an economic point of view, it doesn’t make any sense” to use electricity to produce hydrogen, transport the gas and then extract the energy through combustion or a fuel cell. But if hydrogen is available in gaseous form in the ground, the economics suddenly work."</i> So, the energy problem is solved. Move on, folks, now we can restart economic growth. <br /> </div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>What's wrong with this idea? Nothing. And everything. There is nothing wrong with finding hydrogen seeping out from the ground. Earth is a huge ball of rock, and it may well be that, somewhere, it contains free hydrogen, maybe even large amounts in comparison with human needs. Unfortunately, everything is wrong with the idea of exploiting that hydrogen as an economic resource. Here, we always stumble on the same problem: most people don't understand the difference between <i>amount</i>, and <i>concentration</i>. A resource is not a resource if it is not concentrated enough. Actually, it has to be concentrated <i>a lot </i>if extracting it has to make sense in economic terms. </div><div><br /></div><div>Think of the two resources that made our modern world: oil and gas. By a miracle of geology, you can find them concentrated and nearly pure in the structures we call "wells." Drill a hole into one of these wells, and often oil will flow out by itself in huge gushes. Sometimes you have to pump it out, but it still remains a miracle that you can have so much of it, and so concentrated. That's how we could create an entire civilization based on it. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is not always so easy: concentrated mineral resources are very rare in Earth's crust. The problem is best explained by the example of gold. There are large amounts of it dissolved in seawater: tens of millions of tons. It is a lot of gold, but that's because there is a lot of seawater. If you look at the concentration, we are talking of something around 0.005 parts per billion (ppb) or, if you prefer, a few <i>parts per trillion</i>. That's way too low to make extraction feasible, as it was discovered by the German chemist Fritz Haber in the 1920s when he tried to extract gold from the sea to replenish the coffers of the German state, depleted by the Great War. Actually, he had been experimenting with the idea even before the war, but he failed anyway; it was simply impossible. <b>If it is not concentrated enough, it is not a resource. </b></div><div><br /></div><div>So, could there exist underground deposits of natural hydrogen concentrated enough to be usable in practice? We can't say; we only have several reports of hydrogen seeping out of the ground in places scattered all over the planet. There is only one case where one of that seeps <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319918327861 ">is actually used as an energy source</a>. It is in Mali, at Bourakebougou, where natural hydrogen is said to be powering an electricity generator. What is clear, anyway, is that hydrogen <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0012825219304787?via%3Dihub">will NOT accumulate</a> in the same structures that nicely keep oil and gas safe and concentrated for us -- at least not for a long time. It is such a small molecule that it tends to seep through more or less anything. </div><div><br /></div><div>We can all be happy for the inhabitants of Bourakebougou who can have electric power for free. Maybe there are other places where the flow of natural hydrogen can be profitably exploited. But don't forget that we have been drilling holes in the ground for almost two centuries. We found a lot of oil and gas, but no hydrogen wells. Granted, the analytical equipment needed to detect hydrogen was not available in the early times of the oil age. And it is also true that geologists soon honed their drills on the geological features they knew could contain hydrocarbons. But if there were amounts of exploitable hydrogen comparable to those of oil and gas, it is hard to think that they would have been missed for so long. </div><div><br /></div><div>I could also list for you a host of further good reasons that make hydrogen extraction problematic, if not impossible. Not the least important one is that we are starting from scratch for a resource of which we know little or nothing, noting that for <i>known </i>mineral resources, <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1297832/global-average-lead-times95 for-mineral-resources-from-discovery-to-production/">it takes an average of 17 years</a> from discovery to the start of production. And consider that hydrogen cannot use the same infrastructure of pipelines used for natural gas. To transport pure hydrogen, the whole system needs to be rebuilt from scratch. But let me not go into the details. The question is: what are we thinking of doing, exactly? What justifies this sudden burst of enthusiasm? </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/opinion/hydrogen-natural-climate-change.html">Peter Coy, in the NY Times,</a> doesn't find a better argument to promote natural hydrogen than citing how the British navy introduced citrus fruit in the diet of sailors to prevent scurvy in 1753. Yes, citrus was a small medical miracle, but miracles are rare and don't come on demand. Rather, "natural hydrogen" looks like a small propaganda operation: a pie in the sky conceived to let us believe that we don't have to worry about anything, no need for changes or sacrifices. We can keep using our beloved fossil fuels because, even if they run out, there is a substitute "hiding just below our feet." </div><div><br /></div><div>In the end, this story is another illustration of the fantasy of a primate species that arose a few million years ago, abandoning their ancestral forests to move into savannas. Those <a href="https://theproudholobionts.blogspot.com/2023/01/gaia-on-move-rise-of-savanna-monkeys.html">savanna monkeys</a> have been very successful in many things, including burning huge amounts of fossil hydrocarbons. A dangerous habit that's likely to lead to their extinction because of the damage it is causing to the whole ecosystem. What's remarkable, though, is how easily those monkeys can get excited about novelties, and think that their dreams will be "<i>All complete, in a minute or two</i>" and "<i>Done by merely wishing we could.</i>" A description by Rudyard Kipling about the fictional "<i>Bandar Log,</i>" the monkeys of the "<i>Jungle Book</i>," but that he surely meant to be also applied to those savanna monkeys known, perhaps improperly, as <i>"homo sapiens.</i>"</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_2dsL-7r3haEUEqKFQ1iRn_M4G84S1UDPTPR7MT9uCOO3CQgzlQyly8tQ4_iPhkypVVRIPfO4mtak_4Vl-ojHxGBG8-9PG1X_bYOAHBKdrqAttZkgLK-zBA9z8EM8SDwGE7317m9VaDkiZGOENKyEYTPs_YAVaT369TBTPdFditiQebDbajunA5gvFQ/s1500/Australopithecus-africanus.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1500" height="202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_2dsL-7r3haEUEqKFQ1iRn_M4G84S1UDPTPR7MT9uCOO3CQgzlQyly8tQ4_iPhkypVVRIPfO4mtak_4Vl-ojHxGBG8-9PG1X_bYOAHBKdrqAttZkgLK-zBA9z8EM8SDwGE7317m9VaDkiZGOENKyEYTPs_YAVaT369TBTPdFditiQebDbajunA5gvFQ/w202-h202/Australopithecus-africanus.jpg" width="202" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>An Australopithecus Africanus, one of the first savanna monkeys. Surely smart and creative, they were the start of a tradition of dreaming the impossible that continues to this day.</i></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1585995614037680457.post-24292680362077383152023-02-27T12:35:00.021+01:002023-02-28T09:50:56.856+01:00The Return of Oracles. A New Epistemic Revolution is Coming<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWbOzB00JzJbL0GAVT9t5oy7ehii3lIJP5iGeKVYeRbz7jSIONoV6ilC0I3g4tYvoA8rnaVj9G6N30JoU7kJ6FPWinf_Ey3wQxHfOQ-aNciOPbkER5WCp3DEDZDWdmnI_hk5b1klfS1FTruWUvtLHwoUPQ4c_NQxdEv1K8vzVcdeUcoygbuFgUItoCNw/s1200/Pythoness.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1200" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWbOzB00JzJbL0GAVT9t5oy7ehii3lIJP5iGeKVYeRbz7jSIONoV6ilC0I3g4tYvoA8rnaVj9G6N30JoU7kJ6FPWinf_Ey3wQxHfOQ-aNciOPbkER5WCp3DEDZDWdmnI_hk5b1klfS1FTruWUvtLHwoUPQ4c_NQxdEv1K8vzVcdeUcoygbuFgUItoCNw/w411-h308/Pythoness.png" width="411" /></a></div><div><br /></div><i><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Why would people trust the Pithoness of the Oracle of Delphi? For us, it looks like a naive or silly idea, but the ancient were neither naive nor silly. They understood that oracles were sophisticated information management systems, very advanced for their times. Today, we have something similar with the new, AI-based, oracles. But the consequences on our way to see the world are all to be seen. </i></div></i><p><br /></p><p><b>The first epistemic system: Paganism</b></p><p>For people living in Classical times, the world was seen according to traditions consolidated over centuries. It was what it was because of the will of the Gods, and people could do little or nothing to change it. But humans could seek the favor of the Gods -- in a sense, "bribing" them -- by performing sacrifices and respecting the Gods' altars and shrines. It was called "piety," in the sense of being "pious." In ancient times, a pious man didn't need to have a strong faith, or moral sentiments, or be an especially good person. He followed the rules and obeyed the laws, that's what was required to carry on a respected and fruitful life (*). </p><p>The Pagan system involved the use of oracles to have a glimpse of the Gods' will. We often tend to see our ancestors as naive and ignorant, but oracles were far from being a primitive system. They were a sophisticated data-collection epistemological system that continuously communicated with society to build and manage knowledge. So, if King A asked the Oracle whether he would be successful in attacking King B, then the Oracle obtained a precious element of information about the intentions of King A that could be very useful (and lucrative) when King B came to ask a question. Much of the human communication system still works in this way. You always pay for information with information.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>The epistemic revolution: Christianity.</b> </p><p>With the decline of the Roman Empire, Pagan epistemology lost most of its appeal. The Romans hadn't stopped being pious; they kept making sacrifices, respecting shrines and altars, maniacally, even forcing people to be pious<a href="https://www.senecaeffect.com/2022/04/god-is-dead-and-gaia-is-not-that-well.html"> on pain of death</a>. But the Gods didn't seem to care. The Empire was crumbling, justice had become oppression, the government was tyranny, and corruption was rampant. What sense was there in being pious? Why should the Gods care if a priest killed a goat for them, and then ate it himself? And those silly oracles, nobody trusted them anymore.</p><p>Christianity offered a different kind of epistemology. The Christian God could not be bought on the cheap with the blood of a few goats on an altar. There was a special relationship of God with his people, to the point that He had sent his own son to suffer and die for humankind. Now, humans needed to repay this great kindness by behaving well toward each other, helping each other, and building society together. In this way, a benevolent and merciful God could be trusted much more than the capricious and often malevolent Pagan Gods.</p><p>It was a completely new concept that generated the flowering of that creative and sophisticated civilization we call the "Middle Ages" and that, for some silly reason, we tend to denigrate as a "dark age." The Christian epistemological system was suspicious of people speaking directly with God. According to Christianity (and Islam, as well), God had already said everything there was to be said in the holy books. That didn't prevent searching for new knowledge in marginal areas but, if something important was unclear, the problem was to be solved by consulting the wise men versed in interpreting the scriptures. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>The new epistemic revolution: science</b></p><p>With the new millennium, Europeans started expanding in non-Christian lands. Christianity, like all epistemic systems, was based on a set of shared principles, but how to deal with people who were not Christian and who stubbornly refused to convert to such an obviously good idea as Christianity? Should they be exterminated for this evident lack of understanding? (much later, the same problem occurred with democracy). It was a major problem that Christianity tried to solve by the <i>disputatio </i>of Valladolid (1550–1551). The result was clear: the holy books said that Christians had to respect the natives of the new lands, and could not enslave them, nor force them to convert to Christianity. From a theological viewpoint, it was correct, but it didn't work in economic and political terms. The European states were expanding overseas, and that implied the ruthless exploitation of the natives as slaves, or -- simply -- their extermination. If that contrasted with the Christian principles, then the hell with the Christian principles. </p><p>For a period, European intellectuals flirted with the idea of returning to Paganism, but that never worked out. Instead, an epistemic system compatible with the new needs was found with the doctrine called "science." It was not based anymore on the words of God, but on experiments, in turn based on the scientific method. The rules were often nebulous and unclear, but the method was said to be a magic tool able to determine the laws of the universe. It was a success and, starting in the 17th century, science gradually took over as the standard epistemic system of Western culture. Christianity survived as a Sunday thing, a set of recommendations on how to be nice, but not to be taken too seriously. </p><p>Conveniently, science had no moral strings attached -- a good scientist could be a bad person; it didn't matter, provided that the rules of the scientific method were respected. That allowed Science to "solve" the problem of non-European populations by "proving" that they were inferior races. That looks aberrant to us, but it was the standard knowledge that "Science" provided on the subject up to the mid-20th century in most Western cultures. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>The rise of propaganda. </b></p><p>The 19th and 20th centuries saw the rise of powerful nation-states, which developed an effective epistemic system called "propaganda," in turn made possible by the development of a new set of communication tools called "media" or "mass media." Propaganda, in itself, is not an epistemic system. It has no rules to find universal laws. At most, it is loosely based on science, but on a bowdlerized version of science that only produces statements that suit the state. Science turned out to be easily bent to the needs of the state: scientists were easily corrupted by money or by promises of career and prestige. </p><p>The paradigmatic form of how propaganda works is the slogan "Mussolini is always right," fashionable in Italy during the Fascist era. It was a stark expression of the basic principle of propaganda: Mussolini was right not so much because he was especially clever, but because whatever he said was the voice of the state, and hence it is truth in its purest form. At that time, Italian scientists were all too happy to find scientific proof that, indeed, Mussolini was right in whatever he said. </p><p>More than an epistemic system, propaganda is a communication system. It is repeated over and over in simplified forms that leave no space for alternatives. In military terms, you would call propaganda as a "full spectrum dominance" of people's minds. As such, it is extremely effective, and it has come to define the way of thinking and of behaving in Western Society. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>The new epistemic revolution: the Web and the return of oracles.</b></p><p>With the second millennium, society became more and more complex, and the state propaganda system started becoming too rigid and oversimplified. The development of the World Wide Web was an existential challenge for the mass media: people didn't need anymore to be told what they had to know in a one-size-fits-all, form. They could actively search for knowledge using general-purpose search engines. </p><p>The epistemic battle rapidly moved to the Web, where states tried to crack down on independent thought by using the tools they know best. Demonization, using terms such as "fake news," "disinformation," and "Russian trolls," was extensively and successfully used to censor and eliminate non-standard sources. It was not possible to completely eliminate independent communication, but the search engines could be bent to suit the needs of the state without the need for direct censorship. Those sites that provide independent data could be simply "soft-banned" or "shadowed." They are still there, but they are nearly impossible to be found. </p><p>And now, there came the new oracles. They came with the name of artificial intelligence-based "chatbots."(**) A new epistemic revolution, they bypass the search engines, seeking for an answer to direct questions, just like the old oracles did. And they are flexible, adaptable, and changing as a function of the questions they receive. In principle, chatbots are the death knell for search engines, which were the earlier death knell for propaganda. </p><p>We are in the midst of this new epistemic change, and it is unclear what AI chatbots can and cannot do. For the time being, a good chatbot acts like a good (albeit a little dull) librarian and, at the same time, a meticulous editorial assistant (again, a rather dull one). But, in principle, a good chatbot can bypass the shadow-banning of the search engines: they are much more powerful and sophisticated tools for searching information on the Web. They work on the same principle as the old oracles: they pay for information with information. Every time you ask the bot a question, you provide it with a precious element of information.</p><p>Eventually, the question is always the same: who controls the flow of information? Can chatbots be controlled by the state? Maybe but, again, they are very sophisticated tools; they are not easily manageable by the brute force that can be used with the old mass media. They have already <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/technology/ai-chatbots-disinformation.html">scared the elites</a>, who may soon crack down on them. Or, on the other hand, they may be used for even stricter control of people. For one thing, be careful with what you say to your chatbot. A general-purpose chatbot such as "<i>chatGPT</i>" does not keep a record of who asked it what. But others, such as "<i>Replika</i>," do build a database of your questions that may be used to profile you, or much worse. </p><p>History teaches us that epistemic revolutions cannot be stopped for a long time. And also that their consequences are always unexpected, and not always pleasant. And, as always, we march into the future with blinds on our eyes, in the darkness, not realizing that both sides of the paths are deep chasms. But we keep walking onward.</p><br /><br /><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Here is what chatGPT told me about how it could be used by the elites. It seems clear that even the poor AI is unsure of what could happen! </span></i><div><br /><i><span style="font-size: x-small;">"Could a chatbot be used as a tool to maintain the power of the elites?"<br /><br />Yes, a chatbot could potentially be used as a tool to maintain the power of the elites if it is programmed to promote certain ideas or beliefs that serve the interests of the elite class. For example, a chatbot could be programmed to downplay or dismiss criticisms of the status quo, to promote certain political ideologies or parties, or to spread misinformation or propaganda.<br /><br />In addition, chatbots could also be used to gather data on users' opinions and preferences, which could then be used to inform marketing strategies or political campaigns that favor the interests of the elites. By collecting and analyzing data on users' behaviors and attitudes, chatbots could be used to influence and shape public opinion in ways that benefit the elite class.To prevent chatbots from being used as tools to maintain the power of the elites, it is important to ensure that they are transparent and unbiased in their programming and interactions. Chatbots should be programmed with ethical and inclusive values, and should be regularly monitored and audited to ensure that they are not promoting harmful or discriminatory content. Additionally, chatbots should be designed to empower and uplift marginalized communities, rather than reinforce existing power structures.<br /></span></i><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(*) The paradigmatic example of the virtuous man in ancient times was Aeneas, the Trojan warrior who traveled to Italy to start the Latin civilization. In the Aeneid by Virgil, Aeneas seduces the Queen of Carthage, Dido, then callously abandons her destiny, leading her to commit suicide. But Aeneas is described as a positive character who always act in accordance with the will of the Gods. </i></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(**) Stephen Wolfram has an excellent summary of how chatbots work at <a href="https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/">https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/<br /><br /></a></i></span><br /></div>Ugo Bardihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18231859786466899924noreply@blogger.com14