Tag Archive for 'paradigm'

The Dynamics of Science

Published on February 17, 2010 in Feedback Everywhere and SystemDynamics. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

First, check out SEED’s recent article, which asks, When it comes to scientific publishing and fame, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How can we break this feedback loop?

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
—Matthew 25:29

Author John Wilbanks proposes to use richer metrics to evaluate scientists, going beyond publications to consider data, code, etc. That’s a good idea per se, but it’s a static solution to a dynamic problem. It seems to me that it spreads around the effects of the positive feedback from publications->resources->publications a little more broadly, but doesn’t necessarily change the gain of the loop. A better solution, if meritocracy is the goal, might be greater use of blind evaluation and changes to allocation mechanisms themselves.

Lamarckat35

The reason we care about this is that we’d like science to progress as quickly as possible. That involves crafting a reward system with some positive feedback, but not so much that it easily locks in to suboptimal paths. That’s partly a matter of the individual researcher, but there’s a larger question: how to ensure that good theories out-compete bad ones?

170px-Darwin_ape

Now check out the work of John Sterman and Jason Wittenberg on Kuhnian scientific revolutions.

What We Need

Published on January 5, 2009 in Climate and Ethics & Equity. 0 Comments Tags: , .

In Four Legs and a Tail I pondered what we need to get some action on climate. Over the holidays I heard Seamus Heaney on NPR. A story from his Nobel lecture came up, which I think rather poignantly illustrates the nature of the needed paradigm shift, in a different context:

One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. I remember, for example, shocking myself with a thought I had about that friend who was imprisoned in the seventies upon suspicion of having been involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by thinking that even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be helping the future to be born, breaking the repressive forms and liberating new potential in the only way that worked, that is to say the violent way – which therefore became, by extension, the right way. It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.

(Emphasis added)

Four Legs and a Tail

Published on December 3, 2008 in Climate, Policy and SystemDynamics. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I’m continuously irked by calls for R&D to save us from climate change. Yes, we need it very badly, but it’s no panacea. Without other signals, like a price on carbon, technology isn’t going to do a lot. It’s a one-legged dog. True, we might get lucky with some magic bullet, but I’m not willing to count on that. An effective climate policy needs four legs:

  1. Prices
  2. Technology (the landscape of possibilities on which we make decisions)
  3. Institutional rules and procedures
  4. Preferences, operating within social networks

When I wrote that list down, it reminded me of Dana Meadows’ list of leverage points in systems. I’m a bit of a heretic, in that I don’t agree with the ordering of the list. In fact, I’m not even sure that it’s possible to come up with a general ordering for nonlinear dynamic systems. Nevertheless, I find it very useful in practice for pondering whether the solutions proposed for a problem are operating at the right level. In the case of climate, I think the reason we don’t have much of 1 through 4 above is that we don’t have much of 4 through 1 below:

Leverage points to intervene in a system (in increasing order of effectiveness)
12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards)
11. The size of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport network, population age structures)
9. The length of delays, relative to the rate of system changes
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the effect they are trying to correct against
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops
6. The structure of information flow (who does and does not have access to what kinds of information)
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishment, constraints)
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure
3. The goal of the system
2. The mindset or paradigm that the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises out of
1. The power to transcend paradigms

Most of climate policy and public perception as I see it is operating near #12, trying to preserve economic growth (#7), facilitated by deficiencies in #6 to ignore #9. Integrated Assessment Models focus on prices and technology, largely neglecting a variety of institutional factors that obstruct the response to carbon and energy prices and constrain the adoption of technology. They take preferences as a given and thus neglect the possibility of social change complementing (or driving) technical and institutional change.

The reason we don’t have an effective price on carbon is not that it’s suboptimal to do so. It’s that getting to a price that would actually do something will take a massive paradigm shift – the tail that wags the dog. So, I’ll continue to like #12, but from here on out I’ll be working a lot harder on #6 as a path to #1.