Screaming Penguin

Vidoe isn't up yet, but here is a link. Fist, I have to say, Crichton is just as big of a pompous ass as he was when I saw him in person in 1990. Really, I watched his presentation before the neocon homestead of the AEI and expected to hear a little bit more about climate policy, which he has staked a relatively controversial position on. There wasn't much there, really. I want to address it, expecially in the context of where I think he is confusing himself and those who listent to him. Next, I would like to address his views on science and politics, almost all of which I still see dead-on eye to eye with him, and have written about over and over and over and over. Finally, I want to make fun of the AEI. First, lets get the climate change issue out of the way. The way I see it, he has 3 main issues: The quality of research is not on a par with where he thinks it should be. To that end, the review and verification infrastructure is incomplete. Finally, he touches on nature as a complex system. That last point is really the fundamental idea to grasp. But I will start with his first point. There has, most certainly, been some bad science done in the name of environmental science. He cited himself almost twelve-thousand studies done in the last 15 years. I personally have the NASA Earth Observatory newsfeed on my personal home page. I get news on 2 or 3 new studies every week. Is all of this science good? Of course not. However, there has always been a lot of crappy science. Even crappy science from prominent scientists of their day * cough-Lord-Kelvin-cough *. To pretend that the same crap doesn't come out of other fields is simply naive. The FDA model is great, as is the three lab model. The fact of the matter is, doing all science at that level is impractical. Science has always been a shotgun of grad students here and there and verification when someone plans on building on previous results. To say that all science that might in some way affect policy meet this level of quality is bordering on silly. We can barely get science that affects personal safety to meet that requirement, and that is at a huge cost. Secondly, review and verification is important. He and I completely agree on opening science. However, contrary to the crap that the AEI questioners were spewing, science doesn't need the “market revolution” that “manufacturing” has seen (do you believe that crap?). In fact, that is exactly the information market that has led to the kind of crappy media that gives us Fox News and MSNBC and leads Crichton says we need product liability for. Indeed, what science needs is a return to Open Source Science. We need, certainly the science the public has paid for, available publicly and immediately. Next we need a stratification of publication. The journals are now an impediment to the community they are there to serve. They publish for the sake of sales, the publish early and they lock away intellectual property that rightfully belongs to the public. Moreover, now that everything from JAMA to Nature is sold as a newstand publication, seeking popular readership, they are making the same downward slide that SciAm has already completed. If they are not going to take their responsibility seriously, then lets turn to Archive.org or Wikimedia or a new government publishing entity to handle this. Certainly we need a last-stage publication source where only science that has been adequately peer reviewed makes it. To apply “independent verification” to that qualifier, though, is a bit unrealistic. Crichton's problem with verification of so much of published environmental science, however, goes directly to the nature of the problem: complex systems. Much of environmental science is complex systems modeling. I goes directly to his pompous-asinine nature that he can deride environment computer modeling at the beginning of his talk, and close by citing Dietrich Dorner, a damned psychologist and his complex system computer modeling in his closing. The fact of the matter is, 7 of the 15 largest computers in the word are dedicated to environmental modeling. These models are being tweaked all the time, and no, they don't agree and yes you could ask all 7 groups what the weather would be like in the year 2100 and get 7 difference answers. Where all the models agree, however, is where the trend line is heading. While citing some old and easily dismissed bad environmental studies, he brushes over the truth of the matter. Even in those 928 climate studies, while they may not say absolutely that human action is the cause of global warming, it is certainly the most likely direct cause, certainly a contributing factor and tracking remarkably well with the trendlines. The models vary in timelines and other variables. Even now we are learning about CO2 absorption into the oceans and the mitigating and possibly rebounding or wall-hitting affect that will have in the future. We are looking at the possibly of CO2 burial in the soil. There is not, however, any fundamental disagreement on where the models are going. That is the nature of complex systems modeling. We will not have absolute data until the tipping points have been crossed. He speaks of people watching for unexpected behavior and responding to things on the edge in Dorner's experiments, well this is exactly what environmental science is urging today. Now, going along with is misused argument on this third point is a whole slew of arguments I would love to have. U.S. (prove it harms someone) Vs European (prove it is safe) regulatory environments. I would love to take his “children as a complex system” argument and go through the James Dobson childrearing theories. I would love to point how his mocking the “balance” of nature while noting that it was radical changes in the administration of nature, the abandonment of wildlife coexistence and true forestry that has lead to our curring problems with deer pestilence in the south and fire-trap forests in the west. I would love to talk about small farming and responsible land burns on the prairie vs corporate farming and exploitative agriculture in South America. Frankly, though, I would be writing for days if I did that. In stead, I would like to talk about where Crichton and I agree, though I think he might have been muddled. First, science and politics need to be protected from each other at nearly the same level that religion and politics do. The politicization of science is far, FAR beyond climate change now. It affects the FDA, the EPA, OSHA, NASA, NOAA and nearly every government agency that does science. The science should come first, then informed policy. This however means science isolated from politics and policy separated from ideology. These are two things we most certainly haven't seen in the last four years. I also agree with him on science as the business of creating testable hypotheses. This is, of course, the main area where Intelligent Design falls flat on its face – the only prediction it is capable of making is the second coming of Christ. He is also quite within his right to note that String Theory has yet to yield an honest to god prediction. It is, as yet, just an interesting mathematical theory adapted to observations. However, we because there hasn't been anyone to break the field open like an Einstein, Hawking, or Watson and Crick doesn't mean that the long hard slog to get there isn't worth it. And certainly the “spin-off” mathematical applications have already proven valuable in quantum computing and number theory. Next I would like to make a few points on his “Promoting Desirable Technologies” heading. He is quite incorrect to say that aside from the Manhattan and Apollo projects that every other government action in technology has been a failure. First, he is passing over the areas where regulatory action and government involvement has changed the way we live. Rural electrification, metropolitan sewage, universal telephone service, the interstate highway system and the birth of the original FCC and the spectrum allocation all represent huge successes in government involvement. I would certainly argue that given the intransigence of the telecom sector in spite of the Bush and Clinton administrations giving them about everything they wanted, government telecom services like Marietta Fibernet in my neck of the woods or the Philadelphia Muni-WIFI are excellent continuations in this tradition of technology infrastructure. Secondly, the fact that the government funds non-directed research leads to desirable technologies. Need it be pointed out that HTTP/HTML came from non-directed research at CERN, Mosaic came from non-directed research at NCSA. In fact, with the notable exceptions of Bell Labs and PARC, both of which were products of large government regulated monopolies in the first place, you would be hard pressed to cite a significant technological advance in the last 25 years that didn't spawn from government research. To pontificate magnanimously before the neocon intelligentsia about “what if the government ran Silicon Valley”, I just want to state that the government gave birth to Silicon Valley, and raised it like that complex system child. The previous administration protecting it from the “Darth Vaders” of the John Malones of the world while the Reagan deregulation of telecom infrastructure and the gutting of the “real” FCC gave us WorldCom, GlobalCrossing and Adelphias. By the way, your jackass sagehood, your 1984 tome Electronic Life was cribbed entirely from Al Gore's SciAm article on the Internet of that same year and was about as original as a Creed album. If you want to look at someone who actually got it right, and inspired the Blade Runner image you cite as so accurate, perhaps you should credit that other 1984 book: Neuromancer. Please, don't take your abominable writing about technology from Congo to Disclosure and try and sell yourself as a prophet of the electron. Finally, let's make fun of the Q&A. It was obvious that nobody got him. The neocons tried to hammer home that big government is the problem, however, in almost every area, Crichton was arguing for BIGGER and BETTER government. Government where science is understood as an investment in the future and protected from the political as almost a fourth branch of government. A health care system that puts us on the level with the rest of the industrial world. Putting a reasonable value on National Parks and hey did I mention that the Reagan library got $25 million for the Air Force One exhibit while the King Center that sees 5x the visitors can't get $10 for repairs? Market forces are great for the right except where the Gipper is involved. Regulation, for lack of a better word, is good. We need policy, and we need informed, not idealogical policy. It is a choice between litigation and regulation, and in general regulation is a much better way to go. The “Small Government” zealots like Norquist can talk about “private property rights” encompassing all these issues, but they always leave out that those rights have to be litigated to be asserted. Speaking out the other side of their mouth, however, they complain about tort reform and our litigiousness in society. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Treatment vs adaptation is a valid point, and while his cell phone joke was funny, it misses a larger point: cell phones are a personal health hazard. When you start talking about complex systems, where we can't clearly lay out a risk analysis or ROI we have to respond to the small things as they appear, as Dietrich taught us. We already know that according to the OMB, we are saving WAY more money on pulmonary ailments that we are spending regulating ozone and particulates in metro air. Perhaps that is just lucky, but we can't wait for the problems to reach a tipping point before we respond. We must act with policy. Again, aside from Crichton being a jackass, I generally agree with him on philosophical issues. I think he is mixing metaphors when it comes to assessment of climate science, partially because he is stuck in that “this is the way and I am right” doctor mentality to all things. Expecting Newtonian science in a chaos and complex theory system is just foolish. Maybe he should spend just a little more time on these concepts that just enough to add some flavor to Jurassic Park. Then again, if he was smart enough to do math, he never would have gone to med school.