Phatic Hiatus

Energy Scarcity and Water Scarcity, Coupled

One of my arguments in favor of Malthusian interpretations of environmental data is that the substitution effect is not so much a solution for "peak <whatever>", but instead a reason why "peak <whatever>" evolves into "peak everything". The attempt to create substitutions based on improving technology will synchronize the scarcity of all goods, so that we run out of everything at once. This is, on balance, much worse than running out of things one at a time, since we go from being resource-rich to resource-poor overnight, and the state of denial that exists right up the point of scarcity prevents adequate investment in sustainable solutions.

Here's an excellent example, from TNR's environmental blog: The development of oil shale in Colorado will apparently involve the exercise of water rights that are equal to the entire existing water allotment of the state.

Taboo Words

Salon's Broadsheet today asks "Is 'rape' the new 'gay'?" The author, Amy Benfer, is a feminist concerned about the possibility that use of the word "rape" as a generic slang term (for the defeat of a sports team, for example) is desensitizing us to real sexual assaults.

This is a good example of how America effective has lost the common culture touchstone of a set of "curse words", and instead the boundaries of our verbal taboos are specific to individual subcultures that perceive words in different ways. The three traditional categories of profanity ("Oh my God!"), vulgarity ("Bullshit!"), and obscenity ("What the fuck?!") have been largely displaced by a fourth category of violations against progressive ideals of race and gender egalitarianism. If you really want to offend someone in a major city, you are much better off using a racial slur than anything from the three traditional categories.

Taboo words are deeply connected with religious reverence, including respect for deities and the awareness of ritual cleanliness or uncleanliness. They provide a signal for important transitions in religious thought. In ancient Rome, saying "By Jove" would earn you disapproving stares, or perhaps get you in trouble with the local authorities, if they were particularly pious. In Victorian England, the lack of active Jove-worshiping sects makes the same ejaculation relatively harmless and comical. In some ways, language is a better way to determine our real religious commitments, rather than our nominal ones - what do we truly regard as sacred or profane?

References to overtly religious ideas like "god" and "hell" are mostly innocuous today, even in middle America. You can even hear them on network television, provided that they aren't sectarian. In effect, these are becoming markers of a dead religion, like the worship of the Roman pantheon. People might profess to believe in a god of some sort, but they aren't too worried about offending him. They're much more worried about offending their coworkers. Not offending colleagues is a higher priority than not offending a god, and so in some sense it has become the new public religion of America, the behavioral code that everyone is obligated to obey. We're still all allowed our private religions, of course, just like the Romans allowed religious freedom to their citizens, so long as the proper respects are paid to the public one.

Sexually charged slangwords like "gay" or "rape" are interesting because they overlap between the taboos of two communities, progressive and conservative. They can sometimes occupy different categories for each group. "Gay", for example, is more like an instance of profanity for progressives (taking something sacred and using it disrespectfully), but more like an instance of obscenity for conservatives (since it alludes to unclean sexuality). "Rape" would be understood as an instance of obscenity by both groups, but the offense would be located in slightly different places.

Jay Nordlinger notes how the progressive taboo categories tend to have a "creep" that results in traditionally useful words being reclassified as offensive, and replaced by words that mean functionally the same thing as the word just lost. This happened multiple times to the designation for Americans of African ethnic origin, who went from "colored" to "Negro" to "black" to "African-American", and then sometimes full circle to "people of color". The deep sense of racial guilt arising from slavery is mitigated by the elaborate cycling of terms, as an expression of courtesy. Whatever you want to call yourselves, says white America, we'll adapt to it as quickly as possible! Maybe in 20 years we'll migrate from calling our secretaries "assistants" to something even more euphemistic, as a way of declaring ourselves liberated from sexism. It can be frustrating to me that this usually results in a loss of precision, as gendered words usually get replaced by ones that deliberately mask gender information ("Is that flight attendent male or female?"), or else result in a completely generic word that needs an awkwardly verbose modifier to specify itself ("Not just any type of assistant, an administrative assistant").

The existence of multiple sets of taboo words has a certain utility in causing selective offense. A writer on the internet who wants to impress young liberals but offend old conservatives can let loose with a string of jocular profanity from time to time, just to remind his young progressive readers that he's on their side. Language becomes a precision bomb that only attacks the right people (the ones you want to offend) while leaving others in place. This can effectively enforce boundaries between communities, as a person who is constantly offended by one set of standards will avoid exposure. This helps to promote the ideological self-sorting of Americans into homogeneous groups, and makes it harder for them to interact with those outside their group with civility. A progressive will innocuously use a curse word, be initially surprised when someone takes offense, and then retrench into the position that it's not really offensive at all and this is an example of repressive prudishness. Or a conservative might use a slightly outdated term ("Oriental" for "Asian") and be chastised for it, reinforcing the idea that the political left is populated by humorless scolds.

Detroit Versus Beijing

At the same time that China is building its own automobile industry from the ground up, Washington is turning over Chrysler and GM to the United Auto Workers.

I know which one I'd put my money on.

Though one must admit, this is quite a bit more clever than having the government take a controlling share. If that happened, there would always be a chance a future Republican might inherit it (assuming one is ever elected again). But now the auto industry is permanently the property of the Democratic party.

Cheese On Chinese Food

Obama administration, 2009 (Jeff Wozer, Rocky Mountain Sports):

The president covets exercise like rap artists covet rhyming dictionaries. Every day for 90 minutes he transforms into Barack Lalanne, alternating between lifting weights and cardiovascular training. If time allows, he’ll shoot hoops with fellow gym rats.

He’s a man without excuse, that rare breed of workout fanatic driven by “must” rather than “should.” A key quality for any president, especially one who is not only the leader of the free world, but the fat-free world.

Bush administration, 2005 (Jonathan Chait, LA Times):

What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy.

Given the importance of his job, it is astonishing how much time Bush has to exercise. His full schedule is not publicly available. The few peeks we get at Bush's daily routine usually come when some sort of disaster prods the White House Press Office to reveal what the president was doing "at the time." Earlier this year, an airplane wandered into restricted Washington air space. Bush, we learned, was bicycling in Maryland. In 2001, a gunman fired shots at the White House. Bush was inside exercising. When planes struck the World Trade Center in 2001, Bush was reading to schoolchildren, but that morning he had gone for a long run with a reporter. Either this is a series of coincidences or Bush spends an enormous amount of time working out.

It's astonishing to see how cross-training has suddenly become a sign of moral virtue, when just a few years ago it was dooming America to terrorist attacks.

Torture Versus Warfare, ctd

The same point I made last week, about the moral similarities of arguments for war and arguments for torture, is made here by Jim Manzi. This has set off a round of attempts by other bloggers to explain why war and torture are morally distinct. The problem seems like a large one to me, given how warfare is widely praised (soldiers get medals for it) while torture is regarded as something that at best is secretive, and at worst is an a priori evil on the scale of rape or genocide. It doesn't just suffice to show that torture is somewhat worse than war (less frequently effectual, for example) to maintain this distinction, it needs to belong to a totally different category. None of these attempts is entirely satisfactory in my mind, but I figure it's at least worth review them. (For the record, I think the only moderately persuasive case is the utilitarian one, that torture doesn't work very well while war sometimes does.)

Catholic writers like Andrew Sullivan and David Schaengold (to whom Andrew links) center the distinction on autonomy. An enemy combatant is capable of resistance, but a captive is helpless. Harming a helpless person is evil, but harming a person who is capable of fighting back is appropriate so long as you are in some reciprocal danger. Schaengold cites Aquinas and Kant, but mostly just to say that torture is intrinsically evil so we should never do it, which seems like a circular argument when the point we're trying to unravel is why warfare isn't in the same category (as a pacifist would contend).

This would also rule out execution of captured terrorists, I think, so we ought to be similarly horrified by capital punishment. But we don't usually accuse people who support capital punishment of being "war criminals", even if we disagree with the position. More to the point, I don't see military technology as granting our enemies much autonomy in the first place. If you drop a nuclear device on a city from ten miles up, you aren't really granting anyone in the blast zone much autonomy at all. They're as helpless as if you strapped them to a chair and used them as target practice. The military is constantly searching for technologies (missiles, drones, robots) that remove our troops from harm's way, while being inevitably lethal against enemy targets. At some point, if you had omnipotent technology, you could effective kill someone with a unilateral exercise of pure will, and they'd be helpless to resist. The better our technological advantage, the less this kind of distinction makes sense. Almost all forms of total war (including the burning of enemy cities, when your cities are in no comparable danger) amount to violations of this principle, so if torture makes Bush or Cheney a war criminal, then at least they have company in Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson, and possibly even Clinton.

Christopher Orr, at TNR's The Plank, makes a pragmatic case based on torture removing the incentive to surrender. If we torture our enemies, then they'll all fight to the death, and wars will be vastly more bloody and ruthless. That's again a strong case against executing terrorists as well. I think that Al Qaeda is already as motivated to fight as it can get, after seeing the fate of Saddam Hussein. It's not entirely clear to me that there's a logical route to surrender for terrorists to take, at least not organizationally. They'd still need to be tried as criminals by a system that was alien to them. Is Osama Bin Laden going to fly to the Hague and hire a lawyer, right under our noses?

This argument is also a parallel version of the argument used for torture itself. After all, just like an enemy army can surrender in order to avoid death, an individual captive can become an informant in order to avoid torture. If surrender is the way to escape from death, than cooperation is the way to escape from torture. A completely sadistic torturer might not stop even after getting the desired information, but this is really an argument for forcing interrogations to follow the same rules as war. You can hurt people, as long as you stop once you attain your own objectives. It doesn't amount to an absolutist position.

Daniel Larison makes a case for both offensive war and torture being similarly evil, and defensive war belonging to a different category. This makes good sense in my mind, although it's going to indict not just the Bush administration, but almost every pundit who favored intervention in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Larison also seems to commit a recursive fallacy when he says that a "just war" is different because it follows "rules", and one of the rules is that we don't torture prisoners. When the entire point of the debate is to object that the motivation behind the rule is that it swallows the entire rationale for the war itself, this is begging the question. Or to put it another way, we could apply the same principle, recursively, and say that since torture under the Bush administration followed its own rules (no more than some number of daily waterboardings), then it was legitimizing itself in the same Augustinian way as war is legitimized. It was "just torture", not "total torture".

Overall, I still think that most forms of asymmetric urban warfare involve having to make decisions that are ethically problematic in the same way as torture, and so I can't classify it as a unique moral evil. If you think that torture is very wrong, then you should think that the war against terror itself is very wrong based on all the collateral damage it's inflicted on innocents, and want us moved back to a defensive posture as quickly as possible. (Not at some hypothetical point during Obama's second term, which seems to be the current timetable.) While I feel that we should have treated captured high-level terrorist leaders more humanely, I still feel far, far worse about the tens of thousands of civilians and footsoldiers who have died or been injured in a war that, in hindsight, doesn't seem to have served any rational purpose.

The Game's Afoot

Obama unveiled a component of his science and technology plan today, with a targeted doubling of the NSF and NIST budgets. As someone who might be applying for some of those grants at some point in the future, I can only say that it's at least good to see long-sighted policy rather than short-sighted policy, so long as the government is determined to spend money it doesn't technically have.

State level governments are also taking initiative to promote renewable energy. Texas, already the nation's leader on wind power, is moving to create a similar incentive system for solar. The state has plenty of sun, wind, and open space, making it likely that Texas will eventually be able to export some of that production. This could prove to be a shrewd long-term investment. And Alaska, which isn't optimally situated for either, seems likely to move in the direction of hydroelectric power, based on the "50% by 2025" target in the governor's energy plan. Both states have high-profile Republican governors, Perry and Palin, a good reminder that energy policy doesn't neatly divide along partisan lines.

Meanwhile, Obama has his hands full convincing the Kennedy family to follow the same course in New York.

We're All Pregnant

Conducting lifecycle analysis on synthetic pharmaceutical and agricultural chemicals is hard to do experimentally, since everything goes into the same soup. Research this year found, for the first time, that testosterone-blocking chemicals (including a far broader range of substances than just estrogen) could be linked with declining fertility rates in fish, and thus perhaps also other species that show declining sperm counts: amphibians, and humans.

Even more recently, research at Texas A&M found that estrogen/progestin-based birth control can interfere with the ability of the body to form lean muscle mass. This provides indirect evidence in favor of the conclusion that rising obesity levels can partially be attributed to a general "feminizing" effect of ambient pollutants. Women have higher body fat concentrations than men, and pregnant women are particularly predisposed to sudden weight gain. Androgen inhibitors and estrogen mimics are pushing everyone toward the "pregnant" end of that spectrum. Nearly all adult women are mass-dosing their bodies with estrogen, either to suppress pregnancy or else to stave off the effects of aging, so it's hardly any surprise that so much of it is leaking into the water supply.

I suspect that this is all just the tip of the iceberg in terms of incidental manipulation of the human endocrine system by chemical means. I hesitate to speculate too extensively about the exact nature of these effects, since the sort of websites where you find these theories inevitably come off sounding a bit like General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove. Just what we know now, however, should be a good reminder of the dangers implicit in dosing ourselves with chemicals that trick our bodies into behaving abnormally.

The Death Of Neurodiversity

In the past fifteen years, the diagnosis of autism has risen exponentially. As the graphic below shows, the trajectory currently shows no sign of a plateau. This is due to a combination of factors, including more expansive diagnostic standards, a greater willingness to accept the label (since it usually entitles schools to additional funds and parents to additional support services), and a broader bias toward describing human behavior with a psychiatric vocabulary. I think most of these sociological explanations serve more than adequately to explain the rise, without a need to resort to conspiracy theories or anti-vaccination hysteria.

At the same time, the emergence of an entire new class of people has created a category dilemma. Is autism a disease, a disability, or a culture? These are not mutually exclusive, with the intermediate category - disability - suggesting the same uneasy overlap of the other two categories that it does for other identity-defining conditions like blindness, deafness, or homosexuality. All of these are undeniably genetic traits that come with substantial costs attached: blindness and deafness inhibit interaction with the physical world, homosexuality carries a curse of sterility (and, of course, substantial religious baggage), and autism interferes with the formation of normal social relationships.

When I was young, autism was only diagnosed in the case of children who were almost completely unable to develop appropriate verbal skills. As the boundaries have expanded for reasons outlined above, it becomes increasingly hard for me to stand outside them. If a majority of the children being portrayed as "autistic" in the media aren't much different than me, then I've been captured by the label, and there's not much I can do about it. (Perhaps lodge a complaint to Webster's Dictionary?)

This article at Salon is noteworthy in that it declines to engage in the more elaborate mapping of a semantical Venn diagram of "Aspergers", "HFA", and "ASD", and instead just tosses around autistic as a sufficient descriptor of certain classes of behavior. All of it looks remarkably familiar, when placed alongside my own self-descriptions. For instance, there's this:

Rather than undergoing continual and grueling speech therapy, Raymaker has fought to express herself via text chat, the communication medium with which she feels most at home. "If we'd done this interview on the telephone you would have been lucky to get much more than disjointed, stuttering, completely non sequitur responses from me," she told me in an instant-message conversation. "But because you allowed me to do this interview through text-only media where I can slow down, really understand you, and bypass my difficulties with spoken language, I'm able to give you intelligent, on topic answers."

I have a passionate loathing of telephones, and nothing has made me happier than being able to conduct most of my communication through the written word.

And then there's also this:

"I believe deeply that one contributor to Andrew's recent behavior is a system that treats him inappropriately," Bauer says. "We had an overworked and apathetic state caseworker who consistently placed my son in homes developed for people with IQs of 70 or below because she couldn't see the difference between this and high-functioning autism. I'm not sure I wouldn't have gone insane myself if housed in such a place."

That's a pretty good synopsis of several years of my life, if you swap "schools" for "homes".

So now we have a definition that encompasses some of the best scientists I knew at graduate school, and we have a more serious problem. Where autism differs from blindness, or deafness, or homosexuality, is that the benefits it provides really can't be captured in any other way. Braille replaces reading. Sign replaces verbal languages. Homosexual relationships replace heterosexual relationships. And so, if a "cure" for any of the above were discovered, it wouldn't greatly alter the shape of society. Everyone would do the same things they did before, with less inconvenience, if the replacements were made in the reverse direction. Individuals might not perceive this readily, since they would lose their connection to a tight-knit subculture and tally that as a loss, but being immersed in a subculture is an arbitrary benefit that you only think you'd miss if you've already claimed it. Straight men don't sit around wishing they could be gay.

But nothing replaces P. A. M. Dirac. A world without Paul Dirac is immeasurably poorer. And yet while representatives of (or advocates for) all of the above disabilities have made enormous progress in reclassifying themselves as cultures rather than diseases (spectacularly so, in the case of homosexuality), autism hasn't had a fraction of the same success. Instead, the medical community seems determined to follow a paradigm of control and eradication, either benignly with a pharmaceutical cure or malignly with prenatal "screening". Would a socially engaged Dirac have been able to devote the same attention to quantum mechanics? Perhaps not. We can be wholly assured that an aborted Dirac would not!

My fear is that, given the regnant psychiatric paradigm that tries to solve every childhood behavioral problem with pills, we may be on a path where children in the same position that I found myself in early childhood will be drugged into submission, even to the point of catatonia. Here's a blog post (with useful comments) about the trend toward Risperdal prescription, and the potentially severe side-effects. About halfway down, there's a cleverly worded comment from "Adriana":

A lot of people view the stereotypies, shuffling gate, deadpan look and tardive dyskinesia associated with neuroleptics as "side effects", not understanding that these started out as actually intended "primary effects" of the drugs. When first inducing Parkinsonism in institutions, psychiatrists actually sought symptoms like the flattened facial expression, shuffling gate, reported feeling of "deadness" and dyskinesia that characterize the disease, believing these things were clinically desirable... Drug induced Parkinsonism is similarly a global, pervasive and blunt effect-- those with Parkinsons and iatrogenic Parkinsonism show less anger and distress but less joy, less love, less signs of anything which make people human in general. Inducing a disease and calling it clinically beneficial is like hitting someone on the head with a tire iron and calling it a lullabye.

Receding Horizons

Yogi Berra once quipped that a restaurant had gotten so busy that no one went there anymore. In the same way, oil had gotten so cheap that there won't be any more of it available to buy. Here's the secretary-general of OPEC on Sunday:

"The price of 50 dollars is not enough to cover investment costs for the future," El-Badri told reporters in Algiers.

"The price which allows reasonable and acceptable revenues is more than 70 dollars a barrel," he added.

You can already see the emerging catch-22. If the price goes up, the higher price suppresses demand, which collapses the price again. The market is swimming in cement boots. There's plenty of oil in the ground, just like there's plenty of air above the ocean.

This story is set to repeat again every year, with an extra $5 tagged onto both the above numbers. Either some extremely clever scientist is about to cut the Gordian knot, or else 200 years of really remarkable human history are about to come to an end.

What Is And Is Not Seen

As organisms who occupy an ecosystem, albeit a strange ecosystem of stores and credit cards, we fall into the natural pattern of prioritizing our needs around immediate experiences. When we have more things, we feel rich. When we have fewer things, we feel poor.

This is paradoxically juxtaposed against the reality of a world in which the things we own are simply being shifted from one place to another, at the cost of debts (monetary, ecological, or psychological). When the ore is in the ground, it isn't added to our ledger. When we make it into a set of silverware, we own it, and it contributes to our wealth. But every chunk of ore we use for silverware has come at an opportunity cost of all the other things we could have done with that ore, so in a sense we are really poorer. The clock of entropy has ticked, and is one turn closer to unwinding.

The tendency to value goods in proximity has created an illusion of wealth that colors our perceptions of reality. Here is Lionel Basney, writing in 1986:

What does the store teach us about food? First, and most obviously, that there is plenty of it - that the selves will always be full. This is, in one sense, a blessing beyond reckoning, but it has a profound unconscious effect on us. This flood of food, these aisles full of enough and too much, are as much a cultural symbol as the fact that "good" restaurants always serve you more than you can eat. Both examples of excess keep us from remembering that food is grown in limited quantities - so many acres, so many ears of corn. The drive to surround ourselves with excess comes in part from the fear of scarcity - a universal fear that has shaped more history than have kings or wars.

The daily experience of abundance makes us (as Americans) believe that it is simply the way the world ought to work, the way the world will always work. It is the default, and it is deviations from abundance that require precise explanations. If Zimbabwe would get rid of Mugabe, they would share abundance. If the Soviet Union had embraced capitalism sooner, it would have never suffered a decade of empty shelves as it collapsed. Everyone could be rich, if they simply emulated us, since we exemplify the most natural condition of human society.

A similar fallacy drives the movement toward universal college education. People with college degrees are richer than people without them, goes the theory, so that means if we all went to college, we would all be rich. But of course the job market doesn't work like that. In reality, there are a finite number of jobs that pay well, and producing twice as many English majors would just result in twice as many English majors working as waiters at restaurants. No one really needs college degrees to work in the sort of occupations that have enjoyed robust growth over the last few decades (mostly in the service sector), so instead the experience of rising college graduation rates creates 1) debt for those who do participate in the system, and 2) an arbitrary barrier to progress for those who don't (mostly immigrants and minorities). What started as an option to get ahead has now become a requirement not to fall behind.

Even when the evidence stares us in the face, we still trust immediate experience over the data. Whenever I tell people that the world is facing an agricultural crisis, I get ignored, or people make some gentle jokes at my expense: "Look how full the supermarket shelves are. That's real! Your theories are just numbers on paper." The numbers seem silly when at every hour people are wheeling carts full of frozen pizzas into the parking lot. It's hard to care about numbers until they become something that matters to us, like the subjective feeling of being hungry. Our minds are programmed to respond to experiences, rather than to numbers.

Here are the numbers, for anyone who cares. From the Potash Corp of Saskatchewan:

A year ago, concerns over world food shortages were headline news and little has changed to alleviate the pressure on food supply. The world's population continues to grow. Economies in countries like China and India, although not as robust, keep expanding giving their people more money to spend on food. At the same time, global grain inventories remain historically tight.

This was brought to the forefront again earlier this week as G8 officials called for increasing public and private investment in agriculture citing growing concerns over the global food supply. A dangerous game is now unfolding around the world. Fertilizer applications are being reduced at unprecedented levels, with our estimates for North American potash applications falling as much as 30% to 35%, phosphate by 20% to 25% and nitrogen by 5% to 10%.

To put this in context, U.S. applications this fertilizer year are expected to be similar in total volume to the 1983 pick year while farmers now need to generate 90% more production than in 1983 and will plant 25 million additional acres of corn, the most fertilizer intensive crop in the U.S. Clearly, nutrient replenishment will suffer.

This level of reduction has never been seen before. No one can state precisely what the impact will be on the world's food supply immediately or over the longer term, but we know with scientific certainty that nutrient under application damages both crop yields and quality.

Why does this not attract concern? Because we see proximate causes, and not ultimate ones. We attribute causality to the credit system, when the credit system is only a parasite of the material economy. And we'll continue that pattern of behavior all the way down to the bottom of the cliff. Twenty years from now, when we've gone through the same upheaval as the Soviet Union, we'll still be arguing over whether a different fiscal policy could have changed the outcome. We'll still see oil in the ground, and not really understand why it's no longer profitable to pump it to the surface. We'll see farmland lying fallow, and not really understand why a billion people are starving to death.

We think that supermarkets are a source of food, and if you run low on food, you solve that problem by building more supermarkers.

Edit: Immediately after I posted this, I discovered that Rod Dreher's blog posted the exact same quote, from the exact same article! So why don't I get his traffic?