Month: April 2012

Dreaming of *redacted by government order* things

So, I see the stories about a bunch of billionaires seriously considering an asteroid mining venture and it always gets me wondering. They are dead-on correct that with great risk investment comes great reward. If they can find and harvest a ore-rich asteroid, the ROI could be astronomical. They inherently avoid all of the regulation down here, and own the entire asteroid so there wouldn’t be any crown taxes or the like on the goods.

However, at the same time, my mind wanders to missed opportunities we have here on Earth all the time. The ROI on investments in infrastructure is never immediately apparent to anyone. However, without all of the high-speed internet lines we have around the world, the entire industry upon which Google’s billionaires and Amazon’s billionaires, and even arguably Apple’s billionaires come from, would not exist.

Without the heavy government investment (including debt) in our interstate/transcontinental highway system, I’d argue a full 70-90% of modern commerce really wouldn’t exist. Yet that commerce essentially paid off the debt and now we are simply dealing with keeping everything balanced.

Now though, it seems that government isn’t allowed to make massive infrastructure investments, even though it is fully permitted to make massive regulatory investments — creating entire regulatory structures that need to be paid for in the long run to tell other businesses how to work and then ensure they are following those rules.

Regulatory structures, in almost all cases, only create work for the government. There may be a few small businesses that form (mostly lawyers and accountants) to help other businesses around it, but in the end it doesn’t create the massive booms of growth you see with infrastructure investment. If the government spent the money it should to properly expand Toronto’s (or any other major city’s) public transit system, you would see the payoff almost immediately in available jobs for people and less expense on road maintenance and costs.

Yet, for some reason we cannot seem to do that anymore.

Instead, we have Harper arguing over whether a fetus is a living thing, and if he has his way, creating even more regulation to tell us how to live without making our lives any better and McGuinty trying to come up with some other way to regulate our businesses without adding any value to them. Both sides are chasing up the tree of not working for us, but telling us how we should live.

And worse! The one elected politicianI can see who doesn’t seem to be immediately trying to tell us how we should live has the social skills of a cucumber and, honestly, even I really dislike him.

*sigh*

I have no problem with taxes when I can see that they are going towards things that will make it easier for me to produce value for my clients. I have no problem with taxes when I can see that they are building a future Canada we can all love and respect.

I do have problem with taxes when I can see they are going down a black hole and, even worse, when I can see they are being used to make it even more difficult for a small business to survive and produce value for its community.

We need a party or a politician or someone who can stand up and say government can do good for society, but it needs to stop telling us how to live and start helping us live better. Until then, it’s just all such a waste of time. I may as well try to get my money in with the asteroid miners.

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Abstract from an unfinished paper

Going through my old computer files and ran across this paper that I have 95% written, but just cannot seem to get myself to finish:

An economy is a complex flow system with the conserved quantity “value” moving either between agents in the system or between an external environment and the agents. While it would be very difficult to derive the entirety of flow for an economy such as that of the United States, it is possible to observe the flows for a coarsed-grained repre- sentation of the economy. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics gathers this data and produces a yearly series of tables called Inter-Industry relationship matrices to represent these flows. These matrices are an empirical observation of the financial interactions between sectors for any given year. With this data, it is possible to derive a variety of properties for the economy. This paper takes two sets of Input-Output data (one from 1983-2000 and one from 1998-2006) and studies two important sector measures originally used in ecological modelling. The first is the trophic level, a measure of how dependent a sector is on other sectors within the system. The other is the anti-trophic level, a measure of how dependent the system is on a given sector. From these measures, the effects of specific policy changes on specific indus- tries becomes startlingly apparent, and a new tool to see critical phase shifts as they happen is described.

I don’t really know why. It’s got some pretty good graphs and makes some interesting predictions based on similar models to watershed fish stocks and such.

Hmm, maybe one day I’ll find the time and try to get it into PNAS before it’s too late. 😛

KJR

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Texas Sharpshooter fallacy made large

Academia has a fascinating issue I’ve been pondering about recently. In essence, the fact that almost all journals have a clear and obvious bias towards positive results, there is almost a guaranteed texas sharpshooter fallacy that will occur over time when many many papers are written.

From wikipedia:

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy often arises when a person has a large amount of data at their disposal, but only focuses on a small subset of that data. Random chance may give all the elements in that subset some kind of common property (or pair of common properties, when arguing for correlation). If the person fails to account for the likelihood of finding some subset in the large data with some common property strictly by chance alone, that person is likely committing a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

Now, I’m not entirely sure if this is the best fallacy to use, but basically it’s based around the idea that given a million monkeys and an infinite amount of time, someone will eventually write Shakespeare. Now, if we ignore all of the negative results, and all of the gibberish and only publish once someone writes Shakespeare, it would seem, at times, as if a monkey left to a certain type of typewriter is more inclined to write Shakespeare.

Don’t get me wrong though, science is explicitly built around the idea that these points would be made public and then eventually proven false by repeated experiments by other individuals. However, with the modern media hyping everything the moment it is published and an overconfidence on anything that is “science” or “published” we have a big problem on our hands.

Yes, evolution is a fact, that’s been around long enough and there is no credible theory that challenges it that I’m willing to say that. In the same sense that I am wiling to say that Maxwell’s Laws are facts and the like.

However, 90% of the new science you keep hearing about… Is probably wrong. Especially psychology and medical science has this flaw (with the sheer number of papers and the need to publish or perish, how could it not.) Yet, we keep going back to that trough. It was published in a peer-reviewed journal, so it must be true, right? The media hypes that red wine is good for you, bad for you, indifferent…

Here’s my theory on this whole matter, not peer-reviewed or published, but at least a functional heuristic. Give it 20 years, or 40 years. Let people challenge the results and see if they actually apply. I wish we could teach people how science (and to be honest any knowledge development) really works. You have an idea, it seems to work for you. You try to figure out why and reproduce it so you can continue to enjoy the benefits. You develop something that seems to work and is reproducable, then you tell people and they try it out.

And 9 times out of 10 they discover that you weren’t quite right.

However, if the idea continues to generate positive results for you, you ignore them and keep using it. If they are right and it starts to fail, you go back and you try again.

To believe that new science is right simply because it’s published is to be as dogmatic as to believe the a religious book is correct simply because someone told you so. Journals (even good journals) are not always right.

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