Monday, July 25, 2016
Episode 59: Mea Culpa
Play Now!To err is human, amirite? In this, Episode 59: Mea Culpa, I'm not seeking forgiveness. I know I make mistakes. I've made them before, and I'm sure I will continue to make them. Here, though, I do—for a very specific reason which will become apparent instantly to long-time listeners—feel the need to correct the record lest I be accused not-journalism. Even though, I know, I'm not a journalist.Trust me. There's a reason for this. Today, I read from Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" once again; and from Rose George's "The Big Necessity," the best book about the complexities involved in the systems and traditions tied to relieving oneself I have ever read. Shit can be hard, it turns out.Musically, KMFDM and Mistle Thrush ably open and close this episode.
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Ha. Well, to dispel the notion that I'm carefully fact-checking you, I didn't notice any mistakes.
ReplyDeleteUnless you're going to say that the error was when you said that you'd included an error. What a paradox!
But I doubt that's it.
The bit about double pendulums did take me back, I had a college physics project that involved creating a mathematical model of a double-pendulum, deriving the equations of motion from first principles. The cool thing is that you can look at the equation and see how the terms represent the various interactions involved. The problem isn't that the system of an ideal-double-pendulum isn't well understood, or that it's a bad approximation of an actual double-pendulum, it's that:
1. It's a second-order equation and it's one that can only be integrated numerically, not symbolically, so there's rounding error in all of the calculations.
2. It's very sensitive to initial conditions. (Which is why the system is "chaotic".)
So it's entirely an easier sort of problem than any problem involving politics (or economics). With a double-pendulum model can increase the length of time before your model wildly diverges from reality just by taking more precise initial measurements and doing more precise computations. And you can get a pretty good idea of how long your model will stay a good approximation by looking at how long the total energy of the system stays constant.
Political and economic systems can be chaotic in that sense, too. But the set of underlying factors is not well understood. To the extent that those factors are understood, they're hard to measure. And it's hard to tell that your model is diverging from reality before the things that you're trying to predict in advance have already happened.
(At least, outside of discussions about Peak Oil I rarely can identify the point where someone's politics start violating conservation of energy.)
There is an error, one I did not catch until the finish. It is, however, so intricately woven into the narrative stream as to require a pretty extensive re-recording. I'll give you a hint: think of the Orson Welles movie F is for Fake.
DeletePolitical and economic systems can be chaotic in that sense, too. But the set of underlying factors is not well understood. To the extent that those factors are understood, they're hard to measure.
Yup. I remember well an economist poo-pooing the notion of Victory Gardens in wartime, people growing their own food to help the country stay fed in a time when much of the agricultural produce was being shipped to troops and allies.
It stuck me that such home-grown produce was impossible to quantify, since the output was completely unknown. Rather than admit that he was unable to quantify, he just hand waved the amount away. Not really professional, I thought; but since he's the expert, who would question his resulting conclusions?
...outside of discussions about Peak Oil I rarely can identify the point where someone's politics start violating conservation of energy.
Sadly, that is not the only natural law that can be violated, as well we all know. It's the most important, sure, but not the only.
Just a couple weekends ago I got into a lively discussion about what money is and should be, specifically what Bitcoin is and how it should work, as opposed to how it is designed to work. When people can't even agree on something as simple and universal as what money is, creating a series of mathematical models trying to predict how money behaves in the real world? Fergetaboutit.