Climate Change
A friend and I have been exchanging letters about climate change lately. I sent him a fairly detailed answer when he asked for my opinion about a certain video. My response started off as a criticism of the video itself, but quickly turned into a rant about how little trust people have for experts these days.
After I re-read my response, it occurred to me that it might make a good blog posting. If nothing else, it stakes out my position on the whole climate change issue, and explains why I adhere so strongly to that position.
Are you looking for my thoughts on climate change (which have not changed in over a decade) or my thoughts on this particular video?
This guy starts out by claiming to be a humble non-scientist, which is very disarming, until he proceeds to use a landslide of pseudo-science to "prove" his point that climate change is just a big fraud. I don't care how persuasive he is, or how many non-experts he can convince. Thanks to the Internet, it's not very hard to produce convincing charts and cherry-picked facts that seem to support *any* position at all.
This is doubly true when talking to laypeople about a highly specialized topic. If this guy's presentation was being given to a bunch of climate scientists and it seemed to convince them, well then that would make me sit up and take notice.
Actually, I'm getting sick of wading through mountains of information about global warming. I don't even read news coverage about climate change anymore; there's nothing new to read. Climate science is far too complicated for most people to really understand, and these days pretty much every news article and presentation (including Al Gore's) is nothing more than an attempt at persuasion. In other words, most of the climate change discussion these days is just an attempt to influence people who cannot possibly understand the backing science well enough to form their own well-supported conclusions. It just encourages everyone to ignore the opinion of experts in favour of their own "gut feelings".
But the truth is, the noble idea that you should "view the evidence and make up your own mind" is just plain arrogant when you don't have the training or skill to comprehend that evidence and assess how it fits into the whole system.
There are thousands of climate scientists in the world, and nearly all of them agree that climate change is real and man-made. That's it. That's all anybody who is not a qualified climate scientist needs to know. And if that doesn't convince them, then they probably don't understand how science or scientists work.
This is and will remain my position on climate change until a scientific consensus on the matter no longer exists. Frankly, as someone who isn't familiar with climate science, it would be both absurd and presumptuous for me to believe anything other than what the actual experts tell me.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy to convince people that they know more about a topic than they really do. But just because someone shows me a bunch of graphs and charts and explains things in a way that makes me feel like I understand and agree with them, that doesn't mean a thing. Why? Because I am fundamentally unqualified to verify a) whether I am being shown the whole picture, b) whether the data is accurate, and especially c) whether the interpretation of the data is correct.
Fortunately, there are people who *are* qualified to verify these things: the experts. These people have dedicated their lives to understanding how the global climate system works, and to be honest, they are the only ones whose opinions about climate change matter to me.
Everything else is just people making excuses to justify believing what they were going to go ahead and believe anyway.
Like Smoking, But Way More Useful.
I'm happy to see that there's finally been a high-quality study done on the potential dangers of cellphone use.
I'm less happy with the results. Especially given that their definition of "a regular cellphone user" appears to be someone who uses their cellphone for as little as one call per week. That seems a bit on the conservative side, since virtually everyone I know with a cellphone uses theirs a LOT more than that.
If it's true that brain tumors take about 10 years to develop, and that cellphones cause brain tumors, then we should start seeing a statistically significant rise in brain cancers in young people right about 2009-2010. Hopefully someone's looking into that.
I wonder if this study will get buried? It seems likely...once there was clear scientific evidence that smoking caused cancer, it still took decades for scientists to convince the general population. If it turns out that cell phones do cause cancer, I imagine that it will take most people a very long time to accept it. Hard core rationalists will be at an advantage in that case, because they'll be the first to allow new scientific evidence to alter their behaviour.
As for everyone else...well, you should never underestimate people's ability to find excuses to justify their current beliefs. People hate to change.
Life’s Goal
I ran across this very interesting (but harsh) article the other day. It goes over some points about the dire U.S. financial situation, and spends a lot of time blaming the baby boomer generation for all the trouble.
During the current Bush administration, Americans’ savings rate actually went below zero, while household debt as a percentage of GDP soared above 130%, a doubling in 25 years. These figures prove that the apparent prosperity of the last 25 years was an illusion. Beginning in 1982, Baby Boomers chose to take the easy road. Saving, investing and living within your means were cast aside as “Old School”. Boomers were handed a better future through the blood, sweat and tears of the “Greatest Generation”. Through their hubris, they’ve squandered that better future, the future of their children and imperiled our entire capitalist system.
I agree with most of what this article has to say about the disastrous level of consumer debt in our society. But I think it's wrong to blame only the boomer generation for the situation. While the boomers are certainly part of the problem, I'm pretty sure that the children of the boomers--my own generation--are just as bad. Actually, we're probably worse.
My generation tends to live in houses we can't afford, drive cars we can't afford, and generally overspend on everything. Why? Because we all want the same comfortable lives that our parents have, but most of us don't want to spend 20 or 30 years saving up for it. After all, that'd mean we'd have to live within our means for decades.
Why do that, when we can just go massively into debt and have it all now? And who cares if having it all now could mean having nothing later on?
The problem with borrowing, of course, is that one day you won't be able to borrow any more, no matter how badly you need to. By then, your high interest payments and large debts will make it impossible to save any money for the future, and that will pretty much guarantee that you'll be poor when you're old.
Obviously none of us want to be poor when we're old, but I suspect that many of us make that choice long before we're in our forties.
Another way to look at this is to understand that accumulating wealth is one of the most important life-long projects that you can undertake. And you should get started early.
You don't need to be fabulously rich by the time you retire, but surely you'll want to be more than just debt-free. You'll want to be comfortable and secure, and you'll want to completely own your home. It's also best if you can "live off the interest" from your wealth, rather than slowly spending it away and hoping that you die before it runs out.
I know it sounds kind of shallow when I say that your future happiness depends on accumulating wealth now--but it does. Just ask any elderly person:
The simple reality is this: it's no fun to be broke when you're young, but it's absolutely awfulto be broke when you're old. At least the baby boomers seem to understand this.
I'm not sure if I can say the same about my own generation.
Bigger, More Complex, and More Violent
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction. (Albert Einstein)
That's one of my favourite quotations, at least when it comes to my professional life. It captures what's probably the single most important idea in all of the scientific and engineering disciplines, my own included.
Simplicity.
When it's given any thought at all, simplicity is usually treated as something that's nice to have, but not really essential. This is wrong. In fact, striving for simplicity is so important that it is in my mind synonymous with both striving for perfection and striving for truth. The world is complicated and messy to start with, and the most brilliant ideas, devices, and processes are inevitably the ones that cut through all that complexity and ultimately expose only what is necessary and useful.
Be it an mp3 player, a software product, or an amazingly powerful website, if you want to build something that will be successful, you've got to make simplicity your overriding goal. Always.
Sometimes that's a very hard thing to do, especially when you're trying to build something complicated. That's why a "touch of genius" is sometimes required. Sometimes it even means that you have to take a chance on an entirely new idea, which is the part that requires "courage".
My second favourite quotation on this topic is:
Fools ignore complexity; pragmatists suffer it; experts avoid it; geniuses remove it. (Alan Perlis)
And my third, which is directed specifically at software developers:
... the cost of adding a feature isn't just the time it takes to code it. The cost also includes the addition of an obstacle to future expansion. ... The trick is to pick the features that don't fight each other. (John Carmack)
Perspective
Nothing irritates me quite like listening to people complain about their lives.
If the whining came from someone who'd lived a truly hard life, I could tolerate it. But I don't know anyone who fits that description. Instead, I know a lot of people who think they've got it tough, even though they've all won what Warren Buffet calls "The Ovarian Lottery". That is, they were all born in a rich country, and raised by rich parents. If you're reading this, you're almost certainly a member of this privileged elite, at least by global standards. Like me, you can probably expect a lot more out of life than almost everyone else in the world.
Don't believe me?
Go here to find out how wealthy you are relative to everyone else. I'm in the top 100 million globally, which makes me part of the richest 5 percent of humanity. Trust me, you're in the top 5 or 10 percent, too.
Of course, random misfortune can strike anywhere and sometimes bad things do happen, even to rich folk like us. So that's fine if you want to complain about a real tragedy. But remember: getting a traffic ticket because you were speeding is not a tragedy, and neither is failing an exam, missing a sale, or getting bad service in a restaurant. If you can afford to own a car, go to school, shop for anything other than food, or eat in a restaurant, then you've already got it better than most.
Once you've won the Ovarian Lottery, you've lost the right to complain about life's petty annoyances. And the fact that the average Canadian doesn't recognize that is just proof of how detached from reality we really are. (That's my nice way of saying that Canadians are, for the most part, very spoiled.)
You know how sometimes you hear about someone who just won the lottery, and you kinda hate them for it? And deep down, you just wish that you could catch a break like that? I don't blame you. Life just seems like it would be so much sweeter if you were really rich. But don't forget that there are a lot of very poor people in this world who are just as smart, hardworking, and deserving as you are. They all wish that they could catch a break, too. They see the gap between how YOU live and how THEY live, and they also think that their lives would be so much sweeter if they were really rich.
The only difference is, when you think about being rich, you imagine being like Bill Gates. When they think about being rich, they imagine being like you.
Human happiness is not tied to wealth so much as it is tied to a sense of perspective. Happy people are the ones who can remember their place in the world. They're the ones that are good at imagining how much worse things could have been--because that's what lets them appreciate how good things actually are.
Anyhow, my intention in writing this blog entry was to do more than just growl self righteously for a few paragraphs and then sign off. There's actually something very worthwhile that you can do to help reduce the wealth gap between you and all the truly poor people in the world. It's an organization called Kiva, which lets you loan money directly to the world's poor (an activity known as microcredit.)
I'm a huge fan of Kiva. I've been making $25 loans here and there since sometime last year. I've found that it doesn't really hurt much to give up such a small amount of money, so when the people I loan to pay me back, I just reloan the money to someone else.
If you find the idea of doing something like this appealing at all, I strongly encourage you to check Kiva out. Consider it chance to do a favour for someone who really needs it.
