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A Question for My Fellow Ricochetti
I’ve got a question I’m trying to answer, and it occurs to me that someone here might be able to help me. One of the things I like most about Ricochet is the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the members. Another thing that impresses me is the diversity of this crowd. So I’m going to toss this out there and see if anyone has any thoughts to offer.
I wrote a post not too long ago about the need for a civil dialog across the political divide. A fellow in New York City, one of these young, hyper-educated computer entrepreneur types, read it and invited me to participate in a new podcast he’s launching soon. He wants his first episode to feature someone from the left and someone from the right holding a civil discussion on matters about which they disagree.
The person on the left is another hyper-educated individual — Ph.D. from MIT in machine learning, something like that — who recently left Google to found a climate change advocacy organization in D.C. I’m the person on the right. We’re going to have a civil conversation, which I am going to assume will be centered around climate change, though that hasn’t actually been stated. The conference call will take place this Wednesday afternoon.
This isn’t intended to be a debate, but rather a conversation, a discussion, a meeting of minds. That’s the hope, anyway: ideally, we’ll each come away understanding the other’s perspective a little better. I’m an old dog, and I can’t honestly say that I want or expect my own views to change. (I think that’s probably true of most people, old dogs or not.) But I intend to do my best to listen, and to take a pleasant, non-confrontational tone.
I’ll get to my question for you in a moment.
My general thinking on climate change is pretty simple, and goes as follows:
- I’m agnostic about anthropogenic climate change. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we’re warming the planet; might surprise me a little if we aren’t.
- I’m skeptical that we can project with any significant confidence the state of the climate 80 years from now, but I’m willing to entertain the possibility that we’re getting very good at modeling the complex dynamic system we call climate.
- I am more than skeptical that we can effectively model the several other complex dynamic systems involved in making cost/benefit analyses of various climate change mitigation strategies over a similar time scale. These include patterns of land use, agricultural production, technological evolution, urbanization, global distribution of poverty, etc. Eighty years is a very long time in terms of technological and economic development. (Step back to 1940 and imagine what futurists thought 2020 would be like; how much do you think they got right?)
- Given that I believe we can’t realistically evaluate the economic consequences of climate change 80 years from now, perhaps not even the sign of those consequences, I can not begin to justify imposing large-scale controls on current energy policy. While it’s difficult to model complex systems, history is full of examples of what happens when you create concentrated authoritarian control structures — and that’s what would be required to transform our energy economy as the climate change alarmists seem to desire.
I am ignoring two things, both of which are important in the discussion but neither of which is central to my argument. One is the impracticality of actually changing the future climate in a predictable way — at least, of doing so without crippling the global economy. The other is nuclear power, which I believe all climate change alarmists should eagerly embrace — believe so strongly that I distrust the motives or the intelligence (or both) of any climate change alarmist who doesn’t support nuclear power.
So my argument revolves around the assertion that we are not capable of making reliable long-term predictions about complex systems, and that climate mitigation strategies require us to make such predictions about several independent but linked complex dynamic systems. My question is this:
What examples do we have of anyone making successful predictions of the long-term behavior of complex systems?
Say that long-term is on the order of 50 years, give or take. Complex systems are “complex” in a relatively formal way, involving multiple interacting factors that are difficult to measure, the interactions of which may be poorly understood, chaotic, and involve feedback mechanisms.
Economies, political and social movements, markets, and technology-driven change all exhibit the behavior of complex systems. They are difficult to predict because they involve a lot of independent elements (often, people) making individual contributions based on an evolving range of factors. They are difficult to precisely describe, precisely measure, and accurately predict over any but the shortest time frames. They may exhibit sudden and chaotic changes in response to relatively small inputs (the shooting of an Archduke, for example).
In contrast, sending a rocket to the moon, designing a super-computer, making the next breakthrough in material science or battery technology or solar power or advanced medical imaging — all of these things may be complicated, but they are not complex. They are achieved by solving a large number of well-defined problems, with each solution contributing to the final goal. These systems are not characterized by chaotic behavior, subtle feedback loops, or factors that are difficult to define or measure.
We are very good at making predictions about non-complex systems, even fairly complicated ones, over pretty much any time frame. But I can think of no truly complex system about which we’ve ever successfully made an accurate long-term prediction. Hence my question.
Any thoughts?
Published in General
Yes, I can prove that 2/3 + 1/3 either is, or is not, the same as 1. It’s not quite as “arm-waving” as other “proofs” that I’ve mentioned elsewhere.
Henry might have come up with it independently, but it seems like pretty much the same argument as Bjorn Lomborg.
It’s all those damn SUVs we’ve been sending up there.
What? Those are electric/solar powered? And there’s only maybe one even still functioning?
“Shut up and do as you’re told.”
I’m hardly an original thinker — and I suspect it predates Mr. Lomborg as well, this general principle that big decisions should be approached cautiously, particularly when the evidence is scant or suspect. When you discover that an entire industry is counseling panic, it’s time to express some skepticism.
You don’t say. 😂😂😂
Good luck tomorrow! Hope you can share the final product when the time comes.
Thanks. I hope it will be something worth sharing.
I used to take pleasure in showing the proof of this to folks and they all always said, “It’s not rue, it’s a trick.” I gave up. It’s good to see others know and remark upon it.
Of course, just because we can “prove” it symbolically in terms that we like, doesn’t make it “true.”
Perhaps not. But, in this instance, it happens to be true.
Rather, its being true is what made it able to be proved symbolically.
It might be true at something like the “Newtonian” level of mathematics (or physics) where you might also think you can get to any speed you want just by accelerating enough, but when you get to what for lack of a better term I’ll call “Einsteinian” mathematics you can run into things like different levels of infinity…
https://thatsmaths.com/2014/07/31/degrees-of-infinity/#:~:text=In%20the%20late%2019th%20century,subsequent%20development%20of%20the%20subject.
Has anyone mentioned that CO2 could arguably be the most important thing on earth? With out CO2 no O. Sure we need H2O but need to breathe first.
Please, keep it
surreal. ;)I see what you did there. (I’m hoping you do too, that it wasn’t just an accident.)
And remember that real numbers can be rational, or irrational. !!!!
But the point is that Newtonian physics says we can go faster than light just by accelerating until we get there. It’s not until you get to Einstein that you see why THAT isn’t “true.”
No, it was deliberate. And I’m hoping that the so-called surreal numbers are the only ones that can occupy the space between “adjacent” real numbers (rational or otherwise).
I don’t like them. I’ll say that plainly. I don’t like anything that breaks basic math.
Doesn’t 9.99999…. = 10 already “break” “basic” math? Or it “breaks” one part without taking the next step to where it’s not “broken” again? Well, yeah, that’s not “basic” math any more, but what can you do? Deciding to stop where “basic” math is only “half broken” doesn’t seem right.
Is basic math broken by simple logic? If there were any difference between them, it would be infinitely small. An infinitely small thing does not exist.
No, 9.999… = 10 is just fine. That’s just math, two ways of saying the same thing. Nothing spooky or… surreal… about it. It’s simply counter-intuitive. (But then there are lots of counter-intuitive things in math.)
Cantor was a witch.
I would argue that the reason we write 9.999999…. instead of just 10 is that they ARE different. Maybe “infinitesimally” different, but still. To coin a phrase, “facts don’t depend on significant digits.”
But they do depend on significant digits, when there are an infinite number of them and they’re all nines.
9.999… and 10 are different only in the way we feel about them. The two ways of writing them preserve state, in the sense that they suggest something about the way we approached the values. But they represent the same value.
An infinitely small quantity is no quantity at all.
I still can’t fathom 0.9 repeating infinitely. The logic and symbology is all I have. And it does have powerful philosophic implications, the nature of which escape me at the moment.
Our feelings do not make reality. That sounds like a lot of typical leftist claptrap.
That’s exactly the kind of anti-science math-denier nonsense I’d expect to hear from a right-winger like you.
You probably hate trees, too.
Oh, good. The philosophical implications escape me as well, so I guess we don’t have to worry about them.
Of course, the philosophical implications of the idea of a thing of infinitely small size do not escape me. What that means, it seems, is a thing of no measurable quantity. A thing whose existence does not depend on size.
Augustine called it the soul.
Au contraire, the math denier is one who claims that 9.99999… is the same as 10 because it “feels right.”
And there you’ve completely misrepresented my theory once again! This is the kind of nonsense I’d expect from CNN or MSNBC.
I’m saying exactly the opposite: it feels wrong that 9.999… and 10 should be the same value — and yet they are.
The implications are yuuuge.
Ah but where you’re going wrong is, they AREN’T really the same. If you think they are, that’s actually feeling, not really thinking.
Poor guy, I don’t know how you got thinking and feeling reversed like that.
Just because no person could ever measure out 9.999999… grams (or pounds or kilometers) of something, is irrelevant. No person could measure out exactly 10 pounds (or grams or kilometers…) of something, either.
We’re talking real/rational numbers here, not ordinal or cardinal or “whole” or “counting” numbers.
10 apples, or 10 people, etc, we can do. But 9.9999999…. apples, or people, is impossible.
Maybe that’s where your confusion arises?
If I handed you one apple, and were you to take a bite of it that contained any quantity of apple at all, including an infinitesimally small quantity, you still could not take a bite of it so small that what remains is 0.999… apples.
Ergo, QED. If that doesn’t constitute a thoroughly formal and convincing mathematical proof, I don’t know what would.
(And apples, as you know, are the most mathematically rigorous of all of the fruits.)
Is a number something other than a quantity?
Is a quantity with an infinitely small quantity still a quantity?