I had a dream last night about the world ending, but everything turned out okay.

Here’s another batch of notes on three TED Talks (you can see all of them here). The Pinker one is particularly interesting, to me; I’m going to solicit comments from an email list I’m on.

Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

Pinker lays out a story of humanity that I believe to be true, but has been challenged repeatedly by those I’m close to: A long history of dramatically-declining violence and a commensurate increase in our empathy towards the other. He describes this history at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and individual years, calling it a “fractal” decline. He also draws from thinkers over the last hundred years to lay out four explanations for why this decline has occurred:

1. Thomas Hobbes: Life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The Hobbesian solution to this problem was the “leviathan state,” a central authority with a monopoly on violent power. The Machiavellian explanation here would give some credit to the rise of central governments for the
2. Life is Cheap: When suffering and early death are commonplace, the consequences of violence seem less dramatic to us. As wealth and quality of life increase, so does our value of that life, even if it is of the Other.
3. Robert Wright: Nonzero-sum games can often result in parties benefitting when they trade or cooperate rather than enter into violent conflict. Over time, the greater ability of parties to communicate has allowed more and more people to discover these nonzero-sum dynamics in more and more situations.
4. Peter Singer: The “expanding circle” of empathy. This, too, has been borne along by increasing wealth, access to communication technologies, and education.

There are holes that one can poke in this description of our history. Pinker’s narrative is very Euro-centric (what happened in China during these centuries? Africa?) It also completely ignores the incidence of sexual violence towards women; It’s hard to say if that how much that has declined over the ages, if it has.

Overall, though, I think Pinker is right. I’d be interested to see any data that contradicts the trend line that he can draw from hunter gatherer times to our own.

Bill Clinton: TED Prize wish: Let’s build and health care system in Rwanda

Clinton discusses the work of his foundation, and how it fits into the larger picture of social inequalities and development work. He stresses the importance of focusing on systems rather than taking on problems piecemeal. The Clinton foundation cut out middlemen in Haiti, cutting per-annum costs of anti-retrovirals from $3500 to $500, and then reduced it further to $190 by helping the pharmaceutical companies change their business models (from “jewelry store” to “grocery market.”) Mentions Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health; they are working with PIH to reproduce that system in Rwanda. In time, they want to develop a health administration system that can be adapted for any number of other countries. An interesting thought on “fund leakage”: On corruption in developing nations, Clinton mentions that he believes that lost opportunities due to health problems are a much greater problem, and they in fact feed corruption.

Juan Enriquez: Why can’t we grow new energy?

Playing on words, Enriquez extends the definition of “bioenergy” to include coal and oil, which of course were originally plant and animal matter, eons ago. He describes the possibility of using biological processes to convert underground oil and coal into gas, thus allowing us to extract the energy content without mining, and thus greatly increasing the reserves we have access too (3x, possibly.) He likens the possible growth of such an industry to the “green revolution” that allowed the productivity of agriculture to boom in the 20th century: think in terms of biology, not chemistry, in order to scale massively.

Of course, this is not a carbon-reduction technique (in fact, it sounds like a perilous way to keep dirty energy costs very low.) Enriquez proposes it only a “bridge” to new tech.

Another, separate idea: stabilizing oil prices by taxing to set a floor on oil prices, giving alternative fuels a floor to work with (and thus be able to invest against.)

As usual, you can see all of the TED talk notes, here.

“Overfishing May Harm Seafood Population” is a decidedly (and uncharacteristically) understated title for this article from the SF Chronicle. Here’s the kicker:

“At this point 29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed — that is, their catch has declined by 90 percent. It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating,” Worm said. “If the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime — by 2048.”

I knew it was bad, but I wasn’t quite aware it was this bad. Those of you who know me know that I loves me some seafood, but that I’ve struggled with the environmental impact of my decision for some time. As of right now, I’m no longer eating fish. Any fish.

At least until they start growing them in vats.

From my favorite hedge fund manager/pundit/personality , Barry Ritzholtz:

[1] “Quite frankly, while I detest the intereference in the political process, I must admit to admiring the ingenuity and audacity of Goldman Sachs. As far as I can tell, either it was a brilliant ploy to impact the energy markets two months before elections, or the index is run by a bunch of naive, ham-fisted idiots, blissfully unaware of what they wrought so close to mid-term elections. So my own answer about energy manipulation turns on the question whether Goldman Sachs is a sharp collection of rocket scientists/traders, or a bunch-o-morons.”

[2] “Of course, the Fed does control money supply, and while it is understandable their providing additional liquidity during the rate tightening phase (i.e, more money supply as rates go higher) the most recent firehose of cash hitting the past few months since the pause is a bit harder to rationalize . . .”

What the second comment doesn’t explicitly state is that not only is the spate of money supply increases somewhat strange, it is coincident with the fact that last year the Fed announced it would stop explicitly reporting the overall money supply figure, known as ‘M3.’

Yes you can re-assemble this figure yourself, more or less, but if this regime has proven anything it is that only one or two levels of indirection are enough to plant reasonable doubt.

This is driving me nuts.

Is there anything else left for him to ruin?

The policy calls upon the Secretary of Defense to “develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries.”

– Dubya, introducing his new National Space Policy

Maybe the Asia edition just printed too early to pick up the Annie Liebovitz retrospective scoop. Original site here. Via TittyD

A poster to a political discussion group I take part in sent one of the recent STRATFOR reports on the escalation situation in Israel and Lebanon, the gist of which was that Israel had no choice but to seize this unique political/strategic opportunity to eradicate Hezbollah’s weaponry, and that a ground invasion is necessary to achieve that goal and therefore likely imminent. Parsing the report and its context gave me my first opportunity to scrawl some semi-cogent thoughts on the war that has been occupying a large part of my attention for several days now. Here goes, with links, after the jump:

I try to avoid posting links that are making the rounds, because I don’t like being redundant. I doubly try to avoid posting political links that are making the rounds, because the word ‘politics’ is already big and honking and red up there in the righthand corner. But I feel that this story is of particular note, and an important watershed that I want to emphasize.

Have you been hearing the stories about the Iranian government preparing a law to require Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians to wear specially-colored clothing? Maybe heard it picked up in one or two “news” outfits? I did. And it really struck me as odd. I am very much not a fan of fundamentalist religious governments, especially explicit autocracies such as Iran. But this sort of action was so blatant, so obviously … impolitic that I felt it kind of hard to swallow. Only the need to maintain an air of ‘not paranoid-delusional’ kept me from flat-out denying it instantly.

Well, turns out the story is demonstrably false. It is, in fact, so easily verified as false - one search in Google news would have debunked the story - that any reporting organization that has chosen to make news of it is instantly of suspect motivation.

Or, at least, methods. I’m reminded of this article from the March 2006 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review:

[The Pentagon Information Operations Roadmap, signed by Donald Rumsfeld, stated that] “psyop messages . . . will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public.” The Smith-Mundt Act, signed into law in 1948, was designed to prevent the American people from being targeted with propaganda meant for foreign audiences (specifically, it prohibited the broadcast of the Voice of America within the U.S.). But technology has rendered it effectively moot.

I know this is probably, uh, old news by now. But more than the executive branch playing the same old game of abusing source confidentiality to plant political cover stories or even fake journalists who suspiciously receive coveted White House access, the idea that our military is knowingly planting overtly fake news with the understanding that they will sway political opinion inside the United States disturbs me to the very core. Combine this admission of complicity with an environment in which it’s clear that the incentives to produce verifiably accurate journalism are greatly diminished, both for resource and legal concerns, and we have a complete evaporation of the news media’s privilege as the (delegated) ‘fourth estate.’ I’d say that now, as much as any time before, in any country on earth, the onus is on each and every citizen to not only question, but to use the unprecedented tools at our disposal to actively verify everything we hear, see, or read. And then, if we find something that doesn’t jibe with the official story, it is our responsibility to ensure the counter-meme rises to as great or greater prominence as the fake story itself, lest the vague impression of past lies be used as cover for another military misadventure.

Secretary of Health and Human Services, Michael Leavitt, speaking about the threat posed by H5N1 Avian Flu:

“Any community that fails to prepare, with the expectation that the federal government or, for that matter, even the state government will come to their rescue at the final moment will be tragically wrong,” the secretary told the audience.

DHS Secretary Chertoff emphasizes the point:

“The responsibility for preparedness,” said Chertoff, “falls on everybody.”

At least you can’t say they didn’t warn you.