https://daviddfriedman.substack.com
One of the first post is derived from one here, the other two are not. I expect I will continue this blog, at least for a while.
For the past several days, USA Today has had a post up with the headline:
It goes on to say:
Legal experts told USA TODAY that Biden had the authority to declassify documents as vice president as the result of a 2009 executive order signed by President Barack Obama.
Further down there is a link to the executive order. Reading it, you discover that it gives the VP the authority to classify documents, it gives any classification authority the right to declassify document he himself or his predecessor in office classified, but it says nothing at all about the VP having the authority to declassify documents classified by someone else.
Further down we find:
I don't think that was there when I first read the story a few days ago.McClanahan, who also teaches at the George Washington University Law School, said that under a 2009 executive order signed by Obama, the vice president is included in a list of "original classification authorities," meaning Biden had the power declassify anything he classified.
The Washington Post also reported vice presidents have the authority to declassify anything they classified.
Nobody, so far as I know, has alleged that all the documents Biden had were ones he himself had classified as VP. So while the headline is literally true if "documents" is interpreted as "some documents," that reading makes it irrelevant to the context. Its intended reading is a deliberate lie.
I rate this fact check false.
Multiple other sources contained the same headline and the same claim about the executive order, qualified, if at all, further down in the story.
[Spoilers for the third book]
My previous post was about inconsistencies in the books' worldbuilding. Working those out and arguing about them, treating the fictional world as if it were real, is fun but not very important. In my view there is only one thing significantly wrong with what are, in most ways, very good books.
A major theme of the series is the undesirable and unattractive consequences of large inequalities of wealth, power and status, as illustrated by the interaction between Enclavers and Indies in the school. That is, in my view, a real issue. One of the many things I admire about my father is that even after he was very famous he treated other people as equals, had, in the British sense, no side. Some high status people act that way but many do not.
In the first two books, the inequality shown can be reasonably identified with its real world equivalent. In the third book it cannot. One can argue that rich people should treat other people better and share more of their wealth, as one can argue that the Enclavers should have taken less advantage of the Indies. But one cannot argue, at least not plausibly, that every billionaire got that way by torturing someone to death, which would be the equivalent of what we learn about the creation of enclaves in the final volume.
Someone might respond that every billionaire could have used his wealth to save the life of multiple starving children in Africa, that failing to do that is the equivalent of crushing Liu and loosing a mawmouth to consume random foreign mages. But it is not true — or at least it does not fit the moral intuitions of most people including, pretty clearly, Novik, who has already shown us enclaves failing to keep Indies alive, both in the Scholomance and the outside world.
There is a sharp distinction in our moral intuitions between the consequences of action and of inaction. If failing to save someone's life is the moral equivalent of killing him then almost everyone living in a developed society is a murderer, since almost all of us, including me, Naomi Novik and most readers of this blog, could save a life by sufficiently reducing our consumption and donating the money saved to some suitable charity. By global standards most of us are, if not billionaires, at least moderately wealthy.
By making the Enclavers guilty of not merely being less aware of their advantages and less generous than they should have been but of becoming rich by crimes literally worse than murder, Novik converts her theme from a defensible criticism of real world inequality to a redo of "The ones who walk away from Omelas." It works to grab the emotions of the reader, as Ursula LeGuin has already demonstrated, but at a cost.
At the beginning of the second book it is claimed that they will not know if the cleansing worked or the seniors survived until they themselves get out, but it isn't true. Graduation is in the morning, induction just before dinner time, so the enclave freshmen will know whether their seniors made it out.
We get the size of the gym from the statement that from one end of the gym to the other and back is about 150 meters, the same as the distance they will have to run to get out at graduation. That makes the length of the gym 75 meters. If we assume the width is as great as the length — if it were longer it would be the length — that gives an area of 5625 square meters. At field day all the students are in the gym, and there are about 5000 of them. So they have at most a little more than one square meter each, even without allowing space for the food machines and gym apparatus. That is not consistent with the description of field day in the books.
About a quarter of the students in an average year survive the Scholomance, which means a bit under 400 students graduating. We are told that for each place there are two applicants, which suggests about as many students not getting in as getting in, possibly more, and the ones outside have a survival rate of one in twenty. With equal numbers in and out that means that out of 3000 14 year olds, fewer than 500 survive. Some wizard children, such as Aadhya's sister, die before they get to 14. So the fraction of children surviving to adulthood is at most one in six, probably lower.
It follows that in order to maintain the population, the average couple has to have at least twelve children, probably more. But we are told in the third book that the wizard population is increasing, so it should be more than that. No family we see described in the books has anything close to twelve children — I think Liu's grandmother had six, most families mentioned have fewer than that including two cases (El and Orion) of couples with only one child.
For a somewhat less clear case, it is repeatedly claimed, near the end of the second book, that they have no way of keeping the cleansing going in the long run. Claiming that is necessary for Novik's plot but there does not seem to be any good reason for the students to believe it. Protecting the machinery for a couple of years only requires wrapping it in tinfoil. The graduation hall will be almost empty as long as the cleansing is working — El at this point has seen that it is empty now. So one of the graduating teams could detour to the cleansing machinery, rewrap it, and kill any visible aglos.
The counter-argument is supposed to be that another mawmouth will show up. But that mawmouth will be by the gates, for the same reasons the two big ones will be, so won't keep them from rewrapping the machinery. It might grab a few students on their way out — or might not, given that it has just been blinded and had its tentacles burned off. But even if it did, from the standpoint of students used to a mortality rate on graduation of over fifty percent, getting it down to losing a few students is a win — especially since, with the cleansing working in the graduation hall as well as the rest of the school, there are going to be a lot fewer mals in the school.
Any mawmouths that get in will be considerably smaller than Patience and Fortitude. Since those were substantially injured by one dose of flame it is unlikely that smaller ones will survive two doses a year for very long — or even choose to stay in the school, given that they can leave.
All of this is in terms of what the students know at that point, so the claim that anyone who thinks it can be done can be obviously shown to be wrong is not supportable.
My view is that Novik is brilliantly good at designing the emotional structure of the stories but doesn't pay much attention to the physical consistency of her worldbuilding.
This time it took less than a week. But the message telling me the account was back still contained no explanation, no apology, and the clear implication that I had done something wrong and had to be careful not to do it again.
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action, as we are informed by the villain in one of the James Bond books. It is only twice so far, but I am wondering if it may be more than a glitch in the Amazon software.
Suppose you want to block publication of a book self-published on Amazon. You complain to Amazon that there is something wrong with the book, that it contains pornography or pirated content or something else they would object to. You get a dozen or two of your friends, possibly people who share the views that make you dislike the book, to send in similar complaints. Amazon, working on a very large scale, cannot afford to have competent human beings look at such complaints, so instead they have their systems programmed so that if they get enough complaints about one book they automatically cancel the author's KDP account, sending him some vague and invented reasons. If the author complains enough, in particular if he finds some way of speaking to a human being at Amazon, they restore the account.
At which point you send them some more invented complaints and they do it again.
It's only a guess, but it seems possible. If it keeps happening I plan to move all of my self-published books to Barnes&Noble, which seems to be the next best place to publish them.
Amazon KDP cancelled my account some months ago with the claim, never explained, that I
have multiple accounts, which is a violation of our Terms and Conditions. Also, this account is related to an account that was terminated due to violations of our Content Guidelines.
They restored the account about two months ago with no explanation. They have now canceled it again, with the same claim.
If this keeps happening I will have to move all my books to Barnes&Noble, which would be a nuisance.
For past rounds of this see my posts here in early November.
As I have mentioned here before, I have been working on a critique of a recent Nature article that finds a very high value for the social cost of carbon, the net cost from now to 2300 produced by an additional ton of CO2. I argue that the article greatly exaggerates the cost by errors which should be obvious to a careful reader, one of them being the implicit assumption that there will be no improvement in most of the technologies relevant to the costs, including medicine, for the next three centuries.
The implication of my critique, if it is correct, is that the enterprise of producing estimates of the costs of climate change is broken. The important point is not that this particular article makes mistakes but that it makes obvious mistakes, should never have gotten through peer review in its present form. If an article with obvious mistakes, all of which increase its estimate of the cost of carbon, can get published in a high status scientific journal and be considered by the EPA as a possible basis for regulatory decisions, it follows that the mechanisms that are supposed to filter out bad scientific work are not working in this context, hence that none of the published estimates can be trusted.
That is a strong claim and it might be wrong, but if it is right should be a serious problem for people who accept the current orthodoxy with regard to climate. I am therefor inviting anyone interested, especially anyone inclined to accept current views on the effects of climate change, to look over my critique and tell me what is wrong with it.
Hostile reviewers are more useful, for my purposes, than friendly reviewers.
I plan to attend the SFL Libertycon in Lisbon on April 22nd and 23rd and am interested in setting up other talks in Europe. My usual policy is to limit speaking trips to about two weeks. Libertycon could be at either the beginning or the end, so possible dates are from April 10th to May 4th.
Let me know if you are interested either by a comment here, an email to ddfrATdaviddfriedmanDOTcom, or a message on FB.
One of my chief criticisms of Rennert et. al. 2022 is that it calculates the cost imposed by an additional ton of CO2 by summing costs from now to 2300 while almost entirely ignoring technological change, in effect assuming technological stasis. That raises the question of how one ought to model technological change in trying to calculate costs over a long period of time. My initial response was that you can't do it, that any estimate of effects centuries in the future is a wild guess, science fiction not science. But that started me thinking about how, if I had to do it, I would.
Here is my answer.
Step 1: Create a simplified procedure for deducing the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) from your preferred climate change scenario using causal relationships, such as the effect of temperature on mortality or on crop yield, calculated with data from a single decade. The causal relationships should take account of variables other than technology, such as income, that can be expected to change over time.
Step 2: Use the procedure to produce a value for SCC using data from the most recent decade for which suitable data are available, say 2010-2020. Call this SCC(2010).
Step 3: Repeat step 2, using data from the previous decade. Call this SCC(2000).
Step 4: Calculate the ratio R1=SCC(2010)/SCC(2000)
This is essentially what Lay et. al. 2021 did for the effect of technology on temperature-related mortality.
Suppose R1=.9. That implies that changes over the decade were reducing the social cost of carbon implied by your climate change scenario at about 1%/year.
Step 5: You now abandon your simplified procedure and substitute whatever you consider the best way of calculating SCC. But instead of discounting at the discount rate you discount at the discount rate plus 1% (or whatever R1/10 turned out to be). You have now allowed, as best you can, for the reduction in cost over time due to technological change.
It is not a very good solution to the problem but better than assuming stasis. One problem with it is that it ignores the fact that, the farther into the future you go, the more uncertain your estimate of the effect of technological progress. To solve that you need ...
The Improved Version
Step 3a: Repeat step 2 using data from each earlier decade for which the necessary data exist, generating SCC(1990), SCC(1980), ...
Step 4a: Calculate R2=SCC(2000)/SCC(1990), R3=SCC(1990)/SCC(1980), R4= ...
If you are willing to model the effect of technological progress as a constant rate of decrease of costs, use the average of your ratios R1, R2, ... instead of R1 alone to estimate the rate at which cost is being reduced due to technological change. Alternatively, if you think the rate of change due to technological change is itself changing over time and you have enough ratios, you could try fitting them to a function linear in time and use that.
In either case, use the variation of the ratios (from the average or from the linear fit) to calculate by how much you should increase the uncertainty in cost for the later years. If you estimate the rate as 1% when it is really 2% that will have little effect on costs in the near future but produce a large overestimate of costs a century or two later.
Actually doing all of this would be a large and complicated project. Even turning my verbal sketch into a precise mathematical formulation would be quite a lot of work. I don't propose to do either, but perhaps someone more ambitious could. Having been done once, the result could be applied to a variety of different approaches for estimating future costs — from CO2 or anything else.
I believe I have discovered an error in that argument, an inefficient incentive produced by a Georgist LVT. Suppose there are two adjacent plots of land, one suitable for apartment buildings, one for a shopping center. Further assume that, due to administrative diseconomies of scale, the two plots will be worth more with different owners, would be owned by different people if there were no LVT.
I buy and develop one, you buy and develop the other. My conveniently nearby shopping center raises the rent you can charge for your apartments hence the site value of the land under them, so your LVT goes up. Your nearby apartments raise the rent I can charge tenants of my shopping center, hence the site value of the land under it, so my LVT goes up.
If, however, I bought both plots and developed them the increase in income from both plots would be income from improvements — so the LVT would not go up. Hence it may be in my interest to buy both even though they would be more productive, tax aside, with separate owners.
More generally, the LVT is an incentive for inefficient integration of land holdings, makes a company town more profitable than a bunch of separately owned plots even if, in the absence of an LVT, it would be less profitable.
My initial idea was to cut off the calculation at some earlier date, perhaps 2100, but that introduces an arbitrary discontinuity as well as ignoring technological change earlier than that. A better and continuous solution, since the paper is producing a probability distribution rather than a single value, is to have the uncertainty of the costs increase over time. If the estimate, before allowing for technological change, is that cost in year t has a mean of Ct, a standard deviation of Ut, replace that with a mean of Ct, a standard deviation of Ct*e**(A*t), where A is a measure of how fast you believe uncertain technological change increases the uncertainty of the cost.
That would leave the mean of the total cost unchanged but increase the variance. If you think, as I do, that technological change will tend to reduce costs, for example because improved medicine reduces the effect of temperature on mortality, put in an additional factor of e**-(B*t).
How do you pick A and B? For B you could try to see how fast each category of cost calculated for a given amount of warming has decreased over time. Lay et. al., for example, reports the effect of calculating the mortality cost of a given amount of warming using numbers calculated with data from two periods thirty years apart; one could do something similar for other costs.
I don't have a good idea of how to calculate A, save that it should not be zero, as it implicitly is in Rennert.
This is a first pass at the problem. Perhaps commenters here can suggest a better way of incorporating uncertain technological change into a calculation of the social cost of carbon.
