Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely.
Moreover, sure P. S. Landis "saved the whales", but he didn't do it to save the whales, he did it to generate an enormous amount of profit for Mobile Oil, and was paid for it handsomely.
OP mentioned that with different intent: in conservation of nature, we can get better results quicker by focusing on improving technology & organization than by merely loudly protesting current uses of natural resources. Alas, it's better to align incentives with conservation of nature than to try to conserve it against 'em.
To the wit,
> Ecological activism did not play significant role in all of these developments (...)
> It was not their attention grabbing activities that stopped killing whales, but the unsung efforts of chemists finding a synthetic replacement to sperm oil.
> Suddenly, the car companies did not need to lobby [for whale hunting] any more.
and in comments below the article:
> But demanding to stop something without suggesting such better alternatives is waste of time. I'd even say that it is immoral. I see many people believing otherwise.
I don't see how a synthetic oil developed in the 1980s could be responsible for a law signed in 1973, and I'm pretty sure it was the law (regardless of where the law came from (the future??)) that directly stopped the killing.
In this case, I'd say the passage of the law led to greater interest in synthetic oil. Conservation led to improving technology, not the other way around.
> Fortunately for the whales, by the 1970s engines became subject to tighter emissions regulations and engineers had to design them to run hotter (...) increased heat load destroyed the modified sperm oil in the ATF faster (...) forcing research efforts into synthetic lubricants.
> (...) freshly developed synthetic analogs were performing even worse. Only in the 1980s, a chemical solution to this problem was found (...)
At any rate, law prohibiting or limiting something is but a synthetic incentive. It can work, but only to a certain point; works best if there's a substitute available.
Can you name an ecosystem (as in, natural system) that doesn't have similar flaws?
A predator predates on its prey as long as feasible. When prey is overhunted, some of the predator population dies out (negative feedback, if you will), or the predator adopts (behavior or genome) to use alternative food sources, or to better utilize the resource. Nothing new to see here, move along ;-)
Not that I approve of predatory use of natural resources; we humans sure should know better. Just please don't make it sound unnatural.
I think it's OK to characterize human interaction with the ecosystem as unnatural.
Feedback loops like the one you mention work OK for cheetahs and gazelles. Too many cheetahs leads to too few gazelles leads to skinny cheetahs and eventually to fewer cheetahs, etc. But that happens because one is the food for the other; the amount of predation is directly related to the current populations of both, and the amount of predation also has an impact on the future of predation.
Consider an alternate history scenario: No replacement for sperm whale oil was ever found. Sperm whales were hunted entirely to extinction to keep those big American cars rolling. When the whale oil ran out for good and all, Americans all learned to drive stick. Impact on human population of the planet: none. Impact on the rapaciousness of future generations: questionable. Feedback loops (as opposed to straight-line cause and effect) closed or otherwise in evidence at all: zero.
Human interaction with the ecosystem is fundamentally different from the interactions that arise between the other actors within it. Demand for sperm whale oil had virtually nothing to do with the number of humans alive on the planet, and the amount of whale oil left in the world had no impact on the demand for cars, either. With no reciprocal connection, there are no levers for a feedback loop to even take hold of.
One might even say that what separates humans from animals, in the grand scheme of things, is our ability to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is in the thrall of, or even to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is.
Either less drivers on the road or more accidents ( i did drive stick back in the Russia and it is very different driving, esp. when all around you is also driving stick). It would also result in smaller cars with less powerful engines. It looks like a very powerful feedback loop for me.
>Demand for sperm whale oil had virtually nothing to do with the number of humans alive on the planet
Huh? who was driving automatic transmission cars?
>One might even say that what separates humans from animals, in the grand scheme of things, is our ability to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is in the thrall of, or even to escape from the feedback loops the rest of the ecosystem is.
a very Grand Statement of Dilusion. We'll see how we escape global warming.
I think you wildly overstate the impact of a whale-oil shortage on traffic. Regardless, unless the horrible maiming of a few thousand distracted drivers would somehow save the whales, we're not talking about a loop.
Huh? who was driving automatic transmission cars?
Humans were, of course, but demand for whale oil was a function of the number of automatic transmission cars on the road, not a function of the human population count. And the places with the strongest population growth at the time (China and India, I would guess) weren't the places buying up all the fancy new auto-transmission cars.
If there were a strong relationship between the population and the demand for this commodity, then demand would have risen relatively smoothly with the population, rather than exploding with the rise of the American suburb.
We'll see how we escape global warming.
I don't know what will happen, but I'm confident quite a few animal species are going to be a lot more screwed than humanity as a whole will be. As long as there's a way to keep humans comfortable by strangling the ecosystem, some of us will do so.
Is there any reason to believe that such an economic system that also combines much of "good" properties of capitalism cannot exist?
Disciplines like game theory and mechanism design have made tremendous advances over the last few decades. Surely we can put these ideas to work in designing better political and economic systems.
Tangentially, no real world economic system is "designed". They evolve out of competing interests. Even if you did design a system and implement it perfectly, it would have unintended consequences. We can't perfectly implement pre-designed political and economic systems, though; every attempt seems to turn into a bloodbath.
Sure, but what prevents you from then measuring these unintended consequences, plugging them back into your model and asking the question "how should my system change?". Is there any reason to believe we can never reach a stable fixed point?
We do things sort of like this in microprocessor design for instance - where we need to deal with "unintended consequences" like parasitic capacitances and resistances that we cannot fully model until the design is complete, but we need to account for while designing the system.
Unintended consequences aren't the only reason you can't design society. The main reason is that society insists on designing itself. It's obvious with a processor who is the designer and what is the designed. Societies are full of people who don't agree with other people's "designs" and won't voluntarily cooperate. So either you give up, or you spend most of your time designing cost-effective means of imposing your designs by force, which always turns into some combination of mass imprisonment, mass murder, and repression.
I don't buy the argument that this has to be done by force, or that this necessarily results in a bloodbath. What are governments trying to do when they tweak laws, interests rates and the like but trying to "design" societies?
I'm just suggesting that we take more quantitative and model-based approach to this issue. We can start by simply involving more scientists and engineers in policy decisions, and ask them to use the tools we've developed to analyze complex systems to analyze the socio-economic system that we live in.
To a certain extent, we're already doing this. A hundred years ago, most political decisions were ad hoc based on what "seemed right" to the party in charge. Decisions today are much more data-based and rely on expert input.
Unintended consequences aren't the only reason you can't design society. The main reason is that society insists on designing itself. ...
These are dogmatic statements unsupported by citations. I'm not sure how to respond to them.
Societies are full of people who don't agree with other people's "designs" and won't voluntarily cooperate.
It would have inconceivable five hundred years that "most" people would agree on the following:
(1) large parts of the world would elect their own rulers. (2) women would have the same rights and privileges as men. (3) violence as a means of solving problems would be perceived as "wrong".
This perception changed because we see now that these were decisions that benefited society as a whole.
Let's suppose you assemble everyone together to agree on and implement a design. The design process literally turns into a political process: a competitive effort to benefit fundamentally unreconcilable private interests and opinions rather than a collaborative effort to come up with an objectively good system. Stable, democratic governments aren't designers: they're a manifestation of the powers that be in the society already.
What form of government is a designer? The closest match seems to be some sort of brute-force colonialism--when foreigners try to redesign a society that they, themselves, are not a part of. The next-closest analogy to design is absolute dictatorship. Once you get into stable systems of government, even one-party states like China, or mature colonial states, but especially democracies, the political and economic system governing society is the result of a competitive game between different players, not the result of anyone implementing a design. Framing social problems in design terms is fundamentally wrong--well-functioning societies do not work that way and societies that are designed turn into bloodbaths until reverting to a form of society that's not designed.
I'm not unsympathetic to your viewpoint. I like to design things, too. Unfortunately, some things just can't be designed. There's a process fundamentally dissimilar to design--natural selection--that ultimately produced the human brain out of competing, uncoordinated forces following shallow goals. And when you put humans together in a social context, there are processes fundamentally dissimilar to design, made out of competing, uncoordinated forces, that ultimately produced liberal democracies. The biggest joke on the designer ever is that these undesigned processes eventually end up doing a better job than any designer would, as the blood-soaked social designers of the 20th century discovered.
I have since come to understand that the answer eluded me because it required a lesser mind, or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. Thus, the answer was stumbled upon by another, an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche. If I am the father of the Matrix, she would undoubtedly be its mother."
-The Architect from "The Matrix Reloaded"
I don't understand why we aren't doing this now. Our political mechanisms and were designed a few centuries ago by people who had the mathematical and scientific sophistication of a contemporary high school student. There is every reason to believe that we can do better if we put our best minds on this task.
As for reporting yourself as satisfied, this is hugely subjective. I could be unsatisfied because I think my bosses at my well paid and comfortable programming job are doing things wrongly, this, I suspect, would be a luxury problem to an unemployed graduate on benefits, who again has a luxury problem compared to a homeless crack addict.
> Our political mechanisms and were designed a few centuries ago by people who had the mathematical and scientific sophistication of a contemporary high school student.
Will all due respect, but there's really no way to say this without being a dick: Go read a book. The big philosophers of the enlightenment are towering intellectual capacities.
> There is every reason to believe that we can do better if we put our best minds on this task.
Quite the contrary. People are people and they all have individual goals and desires. Societies can't be designed and directed on any significant scale without devolving into totalitarianism. Our enlightenment friends realized this, and anyone who's tried to do this has failed miserably and bloodily.
1: http://www.ted.com/talks/niall_ferguson_the_6_killer_apps_of...
2: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Civilization-Ways-West-Beat-Rest/dp/...