The End Of The World?
Posted: Fri Mar 21, 2014 4:59 pm
I think not.
This story from the guardian has been making the rounds lately:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/14/n ... -collapse/
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas ... ?cmpid=htx
NASA says industrial civilization headed for collapse. Must be true, right. After all NASA is the world's leading scientific and engineering institution. Well, not so fast. First of all this came from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, which has mad quite a name for itself as being the home of people like James Hansen, who drift a long way away from actually studying space and a lot closer to social policy of the leftist kind. So you have to take what they pronounce with a certain degree of skepticism. Not having seen the actual paper I just ignored the story as the usual BS from the religious left. Then a friend of mine on facebook linked to a thread where a man named Carlos Yu said this:
Hey all, before you start panicking about this study? it's not NASA. it's written by a grad student in public policy at the University of Maryland. Dude uses a mathematical model called HANDY, a cunning way to get some cheap PR. HANDY claims to be the "first model that shows not only Ecological Strain, but also Economic Stratification can lead to a societal collapse."
What is HANDY really? Basically, it's a mathematical model rather less complicated than a game of Settlers of Catan. All the drafts of the paper have been pulled off the Internet, but I know the power of Google cache. (The one for publication is under some sort of embargo, making this even more obviously a PR move.) I've read the preliminary draft. I am not impressed.
The basic model uses a "predator-prey" cycle from the 1920s, which Motesharrei and his colleagues repurpose into an Elite vs. Commoners model. Where I come from, that's called assuming your conclusion. It's well-known what sort of behavior this class of models show. And as a reflection of the human condition expressed in mathematics, it's the sort of thing I came up with when I was twelve.
Anything associated with NASA has a direct line to science journalists everywhere. Sometimes this leads to amazing news. Sometimes it leads to bogus news -- the classic recent case was the arseno-life debacle, in which a young biologist's career destroyed to promote a bad result about life based on arsenic, all so NASA could get a little bit more PR.
This story, unfortunately, appeals to people's sense of doom about the modern world. I wish I could convey to you exactly how bogus this paper really is. It's like Jeanne Dixon and Larry Kudlow had a baby and the baby started hissing like a snake."
That piqued my interest. This whole chicken little scream couldn't be based on something as simple as "rabbits and wolves." That would be like using toy tools to build an airplane. The "rabbits and wolves" algorithm is the simplest and crudest way of modeling anything. I can't imagine for one minute that somebody would use a computer program that can be written in minutes to predict the end of the world and be taken seriously. So I searched for the paper. Up until yesterday the online copies had seemingly disappeared, but google cache doesn't let things disappear that easily and I read it. Then this morning I found that the paper was back online so here it is:
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/ ... kalnay.pdf
They had, in fact, used the "rabbits and wolves" predator prey model. Unbelievable!!! You can write a simple computer program with this algorithm in about half an hour if you work slowly. It's a toy and a simple one at that. It's not something that you take seriously. This is the biggest piece of BS I have ever seen since the limits to growth model that was just slightly more sophisticated. Yet all the media seemed to eat it up because the paper pandered to the Progressive prejudice. Appeals to authority and other logical fallacies have replaced good judgment, at least for a while. fortunately it appears as if smarter heads are backing off from this POS.
http://www.space.com/25160-nasa-stateme ... study.html
Hopefully this dies quickly and the report gets dumped into the obscurity it deserves. I'm tired of the chicken little crap.
This story from the guardian has been making the rounds lately:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/14/n ... -collapse/
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas ... ?cmpid=htx
NASA says industrial civilization headed for collapse. Must be true, right. After all NASA is the world's leading scientific and engineering institution. Well, not so fast. First of all this came from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, which has mad quite a name for itself as being the home of people like James Hansen, who drift a long way away from actually studying space and a lot closer to social policy of the leftist kind. So you have to take what they pronounce with a certain degree of skepticism. Not having seen the actual paper I just ignored the story as the usual BS from the religious left. Then a friend of mine on facebook linked to a thread where a man named Carlos Yu said this:
Hey all, before you start panicking about this study? it's not NASA. it's written by a grad student in public policy at the University of Maryland. Dude uses a mathematical model called HANDY, a cunning way to get some cheap PR. HANDY claims to be the "first model that shows not only Ecological Strain, but also Economic Stratification can lead to a societal collapse."
What is HANDY really? Basically, it's a mathematical model rather less complicated than a game of Settlers of Catan. All the drafts of the paper have been pulled off the Internet, but I know the power of Google cache. (The one for publication is under some sort of embargo, making this even more obviously a PR move.) I've read the preliminary draft. I am not impressed.
The basic model uses a "predator-prey" cycle from the 1920s, which Motesharrei and his colleagues repurpose into an Elite vs. Commoners model. Where I come from, that's called assuming your conclusion. It's well-known what sort of behavior this class of models show. And as a reflection of the human condition expressed in mathematics, it's the sort of thing I came up with when I was twelve.
Anything associated with NASA has a direct line to science journalists everywhere. Sometimes this leads to amazing news. Sometimes it leads to bogus news -- the classic recent case was the arseno-life debacle, in which a young biologist's career destroyed to promote a bad result about life based on arsenic, all so NASA could get a little bit more PR.
This story, unfortunately, appeals to people's sense of doom about the modern world. I wish I could convey to you exactly how bogus this paper really is. It's like Jeanne Dixon and Larry Kudlow had a baby and the baby started hissing like a snake."
That piqued my interest. This whole chicken little scream couldn't be based on something as simple as "rabbits and wolves." That would be like using toy tools to build an airplane. The "rabbits and wolves" algorithm is the simplest and crudest way of modeling anything. I can't imagine for one minute that somebody would use a computer program that can be written in minutes to predict the end of the world and be taken seriously. So I searched for the paper. Up until yesterday the online copies had seemingly disappeared, but google cache doesn't let things disappear that easily and I read it. Then this morning I found that the paper was back online so here it is:
http://www.atmos.umd.edu/~ekalnay/pubs/ ... kalnay.pdf
They had, in fact, used the "rabbits and wolves" predator prey model. Unbelievable!!! You can write a simple computer program with this algorithm in about half an hour if you work slowly. It's a toy and a simple one at that. It's not something that you take seriously. This is the biggest piece of BS I have ever seen since the limits to growth model that was just slightly more sophisticated. Yet all the media seemed to eat it up because the paper pandered to the Progressive prejudice. Appeals to authority and other logical fallacies have replaced good judgment, at least for a while. fortunately it appears as if smarter heads are backing off from this POS.
http://www.space.com/25160-nasa-stateme ... study.html
Hopefully this dies quickly and the report gets dumped into the obscurity it deserves. I'm tired of the chicken little crap.