[FRIAM] Policy Modeling

[Steve Smith]

glen -

Excellent and concise summary of this thread following your main point 
about policy modeling... I'm sure an LLM couldn't begin to be as 
on-point and succinct!   I feel remiss in not analyzing existing threads 
as carefully as you must have before I stick my fat foot in my fat mouth:

All -

As many here are at least part-time modelers or familiar with the terms 
of art, and some make their living as simulators (simulants?) as you 
(glen) do, I think upon reflection we all know that models (and 
therefore simulations) are much more useful for identifying and refining 
"the question" than "giving answers"... yet I think many of us (and the 
unwashed public moreso) forget that and look to models and the 
simulations built upon them to give us actionable answers without being 
willing to refine the questions carefully.

<rant>

    My latest colloquial working definition of "consciousness" has been
    something like "the structures and processes which have evolved to
    elaborate possibility spaces wherefore to facilitate the exploration
    of probability spaces".   Our actions and decisions seem to live in
    probability spaces, but we ideate in possibility space.   We take
    actions which we believe will yield certain consequences,
    understanding there is a probabilistic element to that cause-effect,
    but to the extent we have implicit and explicit models of the
    various relations, we are doing so with some modicum of
    rationality.   Our scientific theories and engineering principles
    (including economic, political policies) exist to outline the
    probability estimates within possibility spaces: /If you want A in
    the context of Zed then you must/should/could do Wye in the context
    of Beta and Gamma which will yield results with a mean of eM and a
    Standard Deviation of sD. /or somesuch.

    My 8 year stint at LANL with the "Decision Support" division of
    several hundred people building models and tools (mostly for the US
    Gov) left me disillusioned as virtually all our clients "just wanted
    simple answers" and most of my peers at least pretended they were
    providing such.  A good reason to leave when I did (2008).

    I suppose I should grant that I'm talking about "scientific" models
    more than "engineering" ones where the established practices help to
    constrain the questions to "answerable" ones for the most part. 
    Though it is those very "established practices" which codify the
    "lesser evils" (or more to the point, "as yet unrecognized evils")
    in a way that supports action and progress.

    I am really fascinated by the progress made in the intervening 15
    years (of which many here are likely much more in touch with) on
    applying M&S to Policy.

    The magnitude of risk around existential threats (e.g. climate)
    might suggest applying a strong bias to avoid global cataclysm, yet
    the direct implications of that bias against "current practice" and
    "economic/policy momentum" has us applying an equally strong bias
    the other direction. /Burn baby burn, drill baby drill, war baby
    war, produce (and waste) and produce/! is the theme of our
    collective mantra (western industrial Kapital) as we check the value
    of our 401k plans or the GDP of our nation or that of our "friends".

    My sympathies are with Merle's pessimism in the sense of unintended
    consequences.

    The myriad first-order responses *by* the technophilic,
    Kapital-driven powers-that-be are naturally going to superficially
    (seem to) respond to the most urgent symptoms while (likely)
    exploiting yet another level of (slightly obscured) bit of commons
    only to become "next year's/decade's/generation's" problem.   The
    internal combustion engine resolved the overwhelming horse-manure
    problem in big cities, only to yield a serious urban smog and acid
    rain problem.   Lead pipes and lead paint and leaded gasoline
    brought myriad benefits to society and individuals only to yield
    yet-another-more subtle problem that we are still struggling with.

    Musk's (now famous) 2020 quote in a (now deleted) tweet: "We will
    coup whoever we want! Deal with it!"  referencing US involvement in
    the Bolivian coup related to Lithium mining is an excellent example
    of how our rush to sweep fossil fuel exploitation/abuse further out
    of our view in favor of simply *not noticing* the abuses and
    exploitations our "solution" to the problem represents.

    <virtue-signal-laden-rant>

          I love me some good Solar/Wind/Hydro/Tidal/Geo power on the
        principal that all but Tidal/Geo are "just" exploitation of the
        1000W/m^2 of power the giant fusion reactor in the sky streams
        down on us (while tidal interference slows the moon faster and
        geo cools the earth core faster).  We stick our PV panels in one
        flux or water wheel or a windmill blade in another flux and
        viola!  human/animal/fossil-fuel power no longer is needed to 
        empty our polders, power our crypto-currency mine-farms, grind
        our grain or drill out rifle-barrels (reference to theorigin of
        Husqvarna in Sweden
        <https://www.husqvarna.com/us/discover/history/>)...

        But already ( a decade or so into the widespread deployment of
        the current wave) we are trying to figure out what to do with
        the megatons/cubic-cubits of high-tech waste (PV panels,
        wind-turbine blades) that are ageing out of their engineering
        specs in the light of contemporary economic markets where it is
        more profitable to replace the old with new and let the old pile
        up somewhere.

        I love my EV (PHEV Volt) and am proud to be squeezing the third
        100k out of it with careful attention to detail, but I'm pretty
        sure that the Coal burned from the Navajo Rez, spewing
        particulate laden smoke over the Colorado Plateau, to push
        electrons through wires a few hundred miles to me is no better,
        possibly worse than the frick-a-frack disaster going on in SE
        NM/W TX to keep the domestic fossil-fuel industry booming... 
        and even if I keep this beast rolling another 10 years which
        might have gone to scrap at 166k miles when I bought it (failing
        traction battery) and only pour a little gasoline through the
        ICE and turn a few sets of fossil-fuel-derived tires into
        tire-dust (to settle in the lungs of my grandchildren and the
        aquifers they drink from), I will only have mildly mitigated the
        worst-case scenario (where I bought a brand new hummer, ICE or
        EV and tore up every ecosystem I could get my fat tires on) by a
        small factor.  Yay me.   Sweeping lobal socio-economic-political
        change seems to be the only scale relevant to the current scale
        of the problems we have queued up on ourselves, but not /acting
        local as I think global/ seems to be as crazy-making as not
        acting at all.   There is a huge attraction to not thinking at
        all for the same reason.

    <virtue-signal-laden-rant>

    I think I'll go rewatch the entire MadMax movie series now... maybe
    throw in Costner's WaterWorld (aka Dances with JetSkis)?

</rant>

On 1/30/24 7:56 AM, glen wrote:
>
> I'm confident many of y'all have seen this. But each of the snippets 
> below, from Roger & Merle's nihilistic takes to Leigh and Cody's 
> optimistic takes, bounce around policy modeling. What can one estimate 
> in the face of overwhelming uncertainty? And given one's high 
> uncertainty estimates, what is there to *do* about it at an 
> institutional scale?
>
> cf the theme of the Humans, Societies and Artificial Agents at 
> ANNSIM<https://annsim.org> this year:
>> Taylor Anderson, George Mason University, USA and Petra Ahrweiler, 
>> Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany
>>
>> Agent-based models (ABMs), cellular automata, and microsimulations 
>> model systems through the lens of complex systems theory. More 
>> specifically, such approaches simulate populations of possibly 
>> heterogeneous individuals as they utilize either simple behavioral 
>> rules or learning models to govern their interactions with each other 
>> and their environment, and from which system-level properties emerge. 
>> Such modeling and simulation approaches have supported a wide range 
>> of applications related to human societies (e.g., traffic and urban 
>> planning, economics, natural hazards, national security, 
>> epidemiology) and research tasks (e.g., exploring what-if scenarios, 
>> predictive models, data generation, hypothesis testing, policy 
>> formation and generation).
>> Despite the multitude of advancements in the last few decades, there 
>> remain longstanding challenges that limit the usefulness of such 
>> models in the policy cycle. Such challenges include but are not 
>> limited to: capturing realistic individual and collective social 
>> behaviors; basic issues in model development (calibration, 
>> scalability, model reusability, difficulties in generalizing 
>> findings); and making transparent the strengths and limitations of 
>> models. This track focuses generally on advancements in modeling and 
>> simulation approaches in application to human societies that seek to 
>> overcome these challenges, with a special interest in policy modeling 
>> and the inclusion of models in the policy cycle.
>
>
> On 10/23/11 10:10, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>> No one knows where the slime mold will choose to extend its  
>> pseudopodia, or which of the pseudopodia will thrive or wither, or 
>> what the novel beneficial or lamentable consequences will be.  Some 
>> of us worry about the suffering caused by the gold-goo-excrement, 
>> others worry about not killing the beast that makes the gold-goo, 
>> many just fight for the largest share they can get, and most of us 
>> could care less until the bucket of gold-goo-excrement lands in our 
>> neighborhood or the gold-goo pseudopod feeding our investments dries up.
>
> On 1/28/24 16:55, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> One of my father-in-law's best friends was a man named Eli Shapiro 
>> who was the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Economics at MIT.  My FIL 
>> asked him some question about stock investing.  Shapiro said, "Chuck, 
>> nobody knows anything."
>
> On 1/29/24 08:29, Steve Smith wrote:
>> I think this is one of the reasons that an open-ended "growth 
>> economy" is so popular, it make everyone willing to take on the 
>> mantle, a /_"tide whisperer"_/, pretending their shamanic 
>> actions/words are lifting those boats?
>
> On 1/29/24 19:20, Leigh Fanning wrote:
>> At some point we'll have SAF at scale.
>> https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/sustainable-aviation-fuels
>
> On 1/29/24 19:35, Michael Orshan wrote:
>> so removing fossil fuels from power plants is the key. [snip] Still 
>> there are many political and resource bottlenecks.
>
> On 1/29/24 22:36, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
>> Sorry, Jochen, just about everything you recommend will make things 
>> worse.  I also wrote about the failure of the climate models almost 
>> ten years ago.  You nailed one of the biggest problems, though: even 
>> really smart guys don't know shit about global warming.
>
> On 1/30/24 00:59, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>> The basic facts seem to be simple. 8 billion people burning fossil 
>> fuels are causing global warming. Is there a point I have overlooked? 
>> What can we do to stop global warming?
>
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