tech trees
There's a series
of strategy games called
Civilization.
In those games, the player controls a country which grows and develops over
thousands of years, and science is one of the main types of progress. It
involves building facilities to generate research points, sometimes
represented by Science Beakers filled with Science Fluid, and using those
points to buy tech nodes on a tree.
I'm reminded of the above game
mechanic when I see certain comments on blogs or Twitter/X. I'll use
supersonic aircraft as an example.
supersonic aircraft
Several
times, I've seen comments online similar to: "Look at this graph of aircraft
speeds going up and then stopping. People should be forced to deal with
sonic booms so we can have supersonic aircraft and get back to progress. It
will be unpopular but this is more important than democracy."
In
their mind, society has a "tech node" called "supersonic flight" and you
need to finish the node before you can move to the next node. If opponents
cause society to not finish the node, then you're stuck. But that's not how
tech progress works. How much further would we be from supersonic transports
today if the Concorde had never flown? The answer is 0.
There's a lot
of underlying progress required for something like, say, a high-performance
gas turbine. The abstract progress is more general, and each practical
application involves different specifics. Understanding principles of
metallurgy and how to examine metals leads to specific high-temperature
alloys, which are what actually get used. Funding for gas turbine
development can lead to single-crystal casting or turbine blade film cooling
being developed, but the actual production of a new gas turbine model has no
effect on whether that's developed.
The tech tree of a game like
Civilization would be more accurate if it had a 3rd dimension, with height
representing the abstract and general vs the practical and specific.
Something like the Concorde would be on a vertical offshoot off the tree.
But game systems representing something complex are simplified in ways that
appeal to players.
Similarly, Boom Technology Inc working on a
prototype for a supersonic plane does zero to bring the world closer to
economically practical supersonic transport, because the underlying
technology for that isn't there and they're not working on it. The best-case
scenario for something like Boom Technology isn't "cheap supersonic flight",
it's "a new resource-consuming luxury for rich people to spend money on that
also makes the lives of most people a bit worse", or perhaps "a supersonic
military UAV".
Similarly, I've seen people make charts of progress on
humanoid robots that go like:
early robot π‘² ASIMO π‘² Atlas from Boston
Dynamics π‘² new thing
But ASIMO had no impact on later development of
humanoid robots, and Boston Dynamics didn't invent the actuators used in
their new robots or contribute to the modern neural network designs now used
for computer vision. What was important was development of the underlying
technologies: lightweight electric motors, power electronics, batteries,
high-torque actuators, processors, and machine learning algorithms. To the
extent that there's a "tech tree" involved, it's a fractal tree where the
"nodes" are arcane things like semiconductor processing steps.
Trying
to implement something when the underlying tech to make it practical isn't
there yet can sometimes actually delay usage of it. To investors, "hasn't
been tried" sounds a lot better than "was tried already and failed".
civics trees
Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past.
β
the
BBC
In Civilization 6,
there are 2 separate tech trees, 1 for science and 1 for cultural
development.
Sometimes you see people who want to ban all cars in all
cities. It's not "I want to live in a city where I don't have to drive",
it's "We need to change all cities so cars aren't used for transporting
people, because that's The Future." Like they want to finish the "post-car
cities" civic node.
To someone mainly concerned with tech progress,
every regulation obstructing finishing the next tech node has to be torn
down. But to someone mainly concerned with social technology, saying
"regulations are bad because they don't let tech people do what they want"
is like saying "pipes are bad because they don't let fluids do what they
want".
If tech trees can only go forwards, then every change is
progress. If change can only happen along tech trees, then the only options
are "return to the previous node" and "advance to the next node". This is
the fundamental similarity between the "tech tree" and "civics tree" people.
Sometimes you get people whose ideas of progress are linear and
contradictory at some point, and then they have to fight endlessly over
progress towards the "nuclear abolition civic" node vs progress towards the
"advanced nuclear power tech" node. And then if you say something like
"nuclear plants can be safe but the fans of them don't take safety seriously
enough" or "nuclear waste is manageable but nuclear power is currently too
expensive for reasons other than unnecessary regulations" then it only makes
you enemies on both sides, because even if you partly agree with them you're
still in the way of what they want to do.
Science Beakers
The other
aspect of research in Civilization games I wanted to talk about was the
"research points". A lot of people really do have this idea that professors
and grad students basically fill up Science Beakers with Science Fluid and
then the Scientific Process converts the Science Beakers into Progress.
People can think of research that way while understanding there's
randomness, that perhaps only a fraction of research ultimately matters, but
they think of that like gambling, like trying to pull "New medicine
developed!" in a gacha game. That's not my experience. More experiments can
collect more data, but if there's already enough data, then getting more
data doesn't help you put the right data together into a concept. And
research trying to prove the Amyloid Hypothesis of Alzheimer's doesn't help
you understand what's actually going on.
You also can't feed your
Science Beakers to The Scientific Process, because there is no Scientific
Process that every scientist uses. There are just cultures of scientific
fields, and there's some crossover and convergent evolution, but different
fields do things differently. Every "key aspect of science" in popular
culture isn't actually necessary:
- Peer review? Some fields progress
mainly from arXiv and blog posts on github. (What does the "peer" in "peer
review" mean, anyway? If my blog posts get reviewed by my peers before
posting, are they peer-reviewed?)
- Universities? Is research at Max
Planck Institutes not real science?
- Degrees? Was Michael Faraday not a
real scientist?
Back in 1920 a NYT editorial said rockets were logically impossible, and I've seen that referenced by people saying "nobody really knows what will work, so you just have to experiment randomly". But engineers actually did understand Newton's laws of motion in 1920; that's just an example of the NYT having no competence in science or engineering.
concept overbundling
People
bundle concepts together to simplify thinking. That's inevitable, but when
someone cares greatly about a complex issue, they should put some effort
into understanding its components.
When people don't do this, it's
tempting to call it "lack of curiosity" or "stupidity", but consider the
sources people read. People look to experts for how and when they should
break down concepts. If you look at, say, bike enthusiasts, they often have
strong opinions about details of gear reducers or drive systems or tire
styles. Meanwhile, "nutrition enthusiasts" are often focused on one
particular thing that doesn't even matter that much, despite (I hope I'm not
offending the bike people) nutrition being more complex than bicycles. I
think this is a result of the content of information sources about bikes vs
nutrition, which in turn is a result of incentives and network effects.
my view
gradient descent
I don't
think of science or culture as progressing through a tree of nodes. Rather,
I think of the evolution of them over time as being like unstable gradient
descent on a high-dimensional energy landscape, which is similar enough to
training of a large neural network to have some similar properties. I've
made that analogy
previously.
tech selection
My view is
that potential technology is neutral on average, but developed and
implemented technology tends to be somewhat good on average. That is, I
think tech is only good because of the choices made about it.
Researchers, regulators, companies, and individuals all have different
information and incentives regarding new technology. In that kind of
situation, I think everyone should do a little bit. Meaning, a bit of
researchers choosing their topics, a bit of regulation, and a bit of
individuals choosing how to use the things developed.
Different
people will advocate for more or less influence of particular levels, and
there's an equilibrium, a balance of power between people with tendencies
towards different views. Some people strongly want researchers and
regulators to be less selective, but I don't think even libertarian
techno-optimists would be happy about me blogging about bioweapon design.
Wirth's Law
You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that.
β
President Bush in
2005, speaking to a divorced
mother of three
It's been
widely
said that software expands to
consume the available resources. Computers get faster, and software gets
slower...up to the point where it starts actually causing problems. Large
companies release video games or use websites that have performance slow
enough to cause major problems. The existence of such failure is the force
pushing institutions towards competence, and without that, they get worse
over time until failure starts happening.
A century ago,
it was
predicted
that by now, people would be working under 20 hours a week. Apologist
economists will sometimes say things like, "But now you want a computer and
Netflix" but you can have both for $30 a month. What about the rest of those
extra work hours? Better-quality housing? People living in 60-year-old
houses aren't paying dramatically less rent.
It's true that
productivity at farms and factories has improved massively. Computers should
theoretically be a comparable improvement to office work. Where has that
extra productivity gone? It's gone to time spent in meetings and classes and
bullshit jobs that are, from
a global perspective, useless. (Also, to luxuries for the ultra-wealthy, and
supporting the people providing those luxuries.) I could post more things
than I do, but...what's the point of more technology if it just gives
institutions more room to be corrupt?
DDT
I love DDT, itβs so good.
β
Palmer
Luckey
Quite the title on that article there. More competition is fine and all,
but "American Vulcan"? Big words for making a company with designs worse
than Northrop's and DFM worse than China's. Kratos Defense seems more
competent, but somehow Anduril has a much higher valuation; I guess that's
the power of influential VCs.
DDT is bad, actually
I
didn't expect, in the year 2024, to have a need to argue about DDT. But here
I am. I guess I can talk about some heuristics for molecular toxicology.
When you have aromatics with
halogens on them, they're relatively likely to be endocrine disruptors. And
indeed, the problem DDT is
best known
for is it being an endocrine disruptor.
PBDEs are
bad for the same reason.
When you have aromatics without any
hydrophilic groups on them, they might be oxidized to epoxides by p450
oxidases. That's why benzene is toxic: it's oxidized to benzene oxide in an
interesting reaction. And indeed, DDT is metabolized by p450s
to products
including
epoxides.
So, we should expect DDT to be bad in similar ways to benzene - that is,
genotoxic and carcinogenic.
Compounds designed to kill a certain kind
of organism are more likely to harm similar organisms. DDT was designed to
kill mosquitos, so it might be bad for other insects. And indeed, it kills
bees pretty effectively, as do many insecticides.
When you have a
molecule like DDT without any of the functional groups that make enzymatic
processing easier, it tends to be metabolized slowly. When you have a
slowly-metabolized molecule that's hydrophobic with moderate aprotic
polarity, it tends to build up in fats, and then
biomagnification happens
as predators eat prey. And indeed, DDT has biomagnification, and levels got
high enough in birds and larger fish to be a real problem.
Of course, that only covers half
the argument about DDT. Advocates for it say, "DDT isn't bad, but even if it
is, it still saves lives, so bans on it mean more deaths". But that's wrong
too.
There is no global ban on DDT; a few countries are still using
it, notably India. The biggest use of DDT was for agriculture, and even if
malaria is the only thing you care about, you shouldn't want DDT used on
crops. Insects can and have evolved resistance to DDT, and reduced use of it
on crops delayed resistance to it in mosquitoes.
People decided DDT
isn't worthwhile largely because
pyrethroids are a better option;
they basically do the same thing to insects but with more specificity. The
only advantage DDT has over those is lower production cost, but the
environmental harms per kg of DDT are greater than the production cost
savings, so using it is just never a good tradeoff. What kind of costs are
we talking about, exactly?
Here's a paper
on that; it concluded that replacing a kilogram of DDT with safer
insecticides would cost ~$6. The environmental harms from 1 kg of DDT are
much greater than $6, so it's not worth using.
Well, the above is just a half-assed side-note of this post covering what I already knew; I could certainly be more thorough. Since Palmer is still so proud of his debate-club arguments for DDT, I'd be happy to provide another chance to show them off by publicly debating him.
circular reasoning
When
someone like Palmer does something like advocate for DDT, what's the mindset
involved? I think it's basically circular logic:
- DDT is good
because the only people arguing against it are environmentalists, and
environmentalists are dumb
- if someone is arguing against something good
like DDT they must be an environmentalist
- environmentalists are dumb
because they argue against good things like DDT
Even when each point is correct (which they aren't here) you're obviously supposed to compensate for that kind of looping feedback, but some people don't.
anti-democratic tendencies
For the sake of progress, some people want to force everyone to deal with
sonic booms, and Palmer wants to force those silly environmentalists to put
up with some chemicals they dislike. "Progress", in the mind of Palmer
Luckey, being a return to mass production of a particularly toxic chemical
that was replaced decades ago by more-complex but superior alternatives.
Sigh. I'm talking about a billionaire here yet I feel like I'm shooting fish
in a barrel; I guess that's what happens when I'm used to fans of LoGH or
Planetes and I'm talking about a fan of Yugioh and SAO.
Government
regulations and agencies have a lot of problems and poor decisions. I'm
sympathetic to calls for changing them, but I've lost track of how many
times I've seen an article by some pundit or economist or CEO saying "This
government agency is flawed...and that's why we need to override it to do
[something extremely stupid]." I've seen people extremely mad about things
such as:
- the FDA not
approving Ivermectin for COVID
- the FDA not banning aluminum cookware
- the FTC prosecuting actual monopolies
- the FDA banning BPA in drink
containers
- the NRC not allowing TerraPower's unsafe design
- people
trying to ban leaded aviation gasoline
As bad as things are in government regulatory agencies these days, on average, the suggestions for changes I've seen in magazine/newspaper articles have generally been worse. But some people take it to the next level by saying that their favorite stupid idea not being implemented means democracy is a failure. To them I'd say, "If democracy is failing, it's because of people like you."
learn some humility
Harm comes to those who know only victory and do not know defeat.
β Tokugawa Ieyasu
I like
that quote, but many powerful people don't seem to understand its meaning.
Some people succeed because of luck or their family, and the conclusion they
make is that they're always right. Some people believe in X, then X happens
to be true for their case, and the conclusion they make is that X is always
true.