What, Why & How do we Know ?
… perhaps Israel and the “west” could ask themselves why a party of violence is popular with its citizens ?
“No negotiation with terrorists until they denounce violence ?” Yeah, right, we understand the PR rhetoric, but one hopes realistic questions are being asked by skilled diplomats and negotiators.
Dave Pollard picks up on The Edge 2006 Question response from Kai Krause, and adds quite a detailed take of his own.
The original Krause analogy is a good one. If you take a memetic view of cultural ideas, that drive our day to day decision making, the crises that occur (those that don’t arise from unpredictable natural causes, we couldn’t have prepared for) are pretty akin to system crashes. Conflicts that interrupt smooth running of the program – irrespective of whether the current program was actually productive, valuable or in any sense good.
Generally despite my fundamental informational / computational view of physical reality, I don’t subscribe to everyday “computer” analogies of behaviour. Social “programmes” are quite different to typical digital computer software. That said, the cultural bases of decision making are certainly software of a kind.
Dave makes a good point. He says
“We have ‘forgotten’ how to [respond to quantitative objective evidence] because we have been taught to ignore and suppress our instincts [until it gets personal].”
This is the failure of objectivity I’ve been banging on about. Without the subjective, the objective is (literally) meaningless. It’s also what I believe is behind the Brunsson “hypocrisy” of management decision making. Provided we can show evidence of objective rationale, we can do the downright wrong.
Perhaps, as MoQ-Discuss has suggested, it’s not that objectivity is for the birds, more that we need to learn a “new-objectivity”, that incorporates the meaning of instinctive personal subjective involvement with the merely (otherwise deliberately detached) objective.
When the road is paved with good (but soft and subjective) intentions, rather than hard objective facts, we’re maybe more likely to notice when we’re sleepwalking towards the freight train at the rail crossing ?
A couple of great pieces (speeches) by James Kunstler, one on US/Iraq and the concept of installing democracy, the other on Peak-Oil US-style.
[both via Matt Bartlett, who seems to have slipped off my blogroll somewhere down the line – Sorry Matt I’ll be adding you back.]
Oh well, as a fan and user of Google products I guess I too must comment on their Chinese censorship deal, given the other progressive Chinese news recently.
Look, even the BBC are completely blocked in China, so I think Google are probably right to bow to the pressure, as they said “The company argues it can play a more useful role in China by participating than by boycotting it, despite the compromises involved.”
China is not perfect, but it is evolving. Better to evolve with it, than stand outside. With so much connectivity, serious issues of free speech and communication will out, one way or another.
(Interestingly, I have been getting lots of “Baidu” hits in the last couple of years, though nowhere near as many as Google. See story)
Here are a couple of older background articles about the story blogged earlier.
The Chinergy CEO Frank Wu, interviewed in Wired. [via Net127]
A speech by a South African Government Minister.
Quote from the Chinergy article “Let a Thousand Reactors Bloom – China’s nuclear renaissance could feed the hydrogen revolution, enabling the country to leapfrog the fossil-fueled West into a new age of clean energy. Why worry about foreign fuel supplies when you can have safe nukes rolling off your own assembly lines? Why invoke costly international antipollution protocols when you can have motor vehicles that spout only water vapor from their tail pipes? Why debate least-bad alternatives when you have the political and economic muscle to engineer the dream?”
And just to remind us where China are on the nuclear map, remember they are also hosting the next international “tokomak” fusion research reactor too.
Expanding yes, moving forward too.
China (a big factor in overall global economic growth and fossil fuel supply and demand issues) has been involved in development (and safety proving tests) of a new generation of High Temperature Nuclear Reactors (HTR Technology) and the first production power plant project has just started. The technology is inherently safer and more compact than previous generation water and gas-cooled designs. (One reason is the local small-scale containment of the fissile material in carbide “pebbles” (PBMR), the second is the self-limiting physics of its “strong negative temperature coefficient”, which means the reaction slows as it gets hotter. No more Three-Mile-Island or Chernobyl ?)
[See here] [here] [here] [and here].
Pebble bed furnaces ?
Takes me back to my power boiler days at FW ….
Anyway, as most of China’s power generation is coal and hydro anyway, what does this have to do with Peak-Oil ? Well – reading between the lines – it’s like this.
These are high-temeperature reactors, hot enough to do more than raise steam (to drive power turbines), the hot gas can itself be used to drive gas turbines before (raising steam and/or) recycling through the reactor bed. What’s more the heat can be used to gassify coal and drive other hyrdocarbon processes, like Hydrogen-Cracking and Synthetic-Gasoline production – both of which take the load off Oil and Natural Gas fuel and raw material demands. Not surprisingly, South Africa which originally bought German technologies for synfuels and pebble-bed reactors, is a partner with both Chinergy and US Nuclear consortia for next generation (cleaner, greener, safer) nuclear power. [Post note : For the Chinese production projects, the focus, after power, is thermo-electric generation of hydrogen from water, made feasibly efficient at the temperatures involved. See later post.]
The significance of South Africa and Germany ? Both countries that in recent history (second world war and apartheid sanctions), had reason to find real alternatives to not having natural oil and gas supplies available for their industrial and/or military might. Real practical crises, not just hypothetical ones.
It’s an ill wind, etc.
(Vested interest ? The s/w company mentioned in the press-release is my employer, but we’re into all aspects of power and oil & gas, and a lot more, so business-wise we’re ultimately neutral on which energy and feedstock resources, or efficiency measures people choose.)
Sam has a great link to a short video summary of Jeremy Leggett’s story on the looming oil crisis. A good powerful documentary. Notice that the difference between the late (optimistic) and early (pessimistic) toppers may be 2:1 in terms of effective reserves, but the net result isn’t a lot different – given the lead time needed for viable alternatives.
“It’s gonna happen on our watch”
(Full detailed article here.) (Direct link to the ABC Video and transcript here.)
PS – Playing down the need to panic is a fair point, given the global market economies and unstable politics involved, but ignoring the need to plan the transition and invest in the alternatives, and to condition public opinion to the changes needed, is hardly good planning.
Also, love the optimist’s suggestion that the doom-mongering pessimists are the ones with vested interests in this situation. Breathtaking. Don’t you just love rhetoric.
… that Intelligent Design (ID) Creationism is not a scientific alternative to anything, and religion is quite distinct from science. They even refer to supporting the Pennsylvanian court ruling that upheld parents objections to IDC being taught as alternative science in their schools.[ via Sam at Elizaphanian]
The Jeremy Leggett oil-crisis article is I guess no great surprise, in terms of the discovery, reserves, production, security and consumption of oil & gas supplies. It’s only ever been a matter of when, though as he points out even intelligent public guesswork would be way off the mark on many of the key dates. The consequences of not planning a smooth transition through the crisis don’t bear thinking about. Actually they do, but like Jeremy you feel that perhaps a small disaster soon might be what we need to wake everyone up before a total global economic crash and word war three.
It’s a well researched article and worth the long read. Excellent.
My main interest is in the “facts” – that is my epistemological agenda. I mentioned the Shell overestimation of their own reserves, that led to the fall of their then CEO and Chief Geologist, in my MoQ Conference paper last year. I mentioned it amongst other “accounting” scandals, not to raise the nightmare scenario, but in order to raise the question of “subjective” information “objectively” presented, as part of the normal “hypocrisy” of taking a “scientific” view of complex situations involving behaviour of humans individually and collectively in organisations of any kind. My main agenda.
Before I go there – the other striking “fact”. Is it really true that the full worst-case predicted demand for global energy could actually be satisfied by solar power occupying <1% (less than one per-cent !!) of land area currently used for agriculture ? If that were only vaguely true, nothwithstanding engineering and logistical factors, we could solve the EU Common Agricultural Policy and the world energy crisis in one move. What a missed opportunity for the UK’s year as EU Chair. What a criminal waste if true and known. Except … what are truth and knowledge anyway … therein lies the rub.
I won’t cherry pick the quotes – you can read the article – but Jeremy has so many examples of “rational” distortion and exaggeration of quantitative “facts”, and hypocritical denial and sharing ignorance, and so on. Every trick in the rational logical-positivist objective book.
My urgent agenda – to get us thinking, decision-making and acting with quality instead of pseudo-objectivity – just got its urgency re-inforced. Talk about intent, power and interest – all more significant than any objective “facts”.