Picking through the ruins

[random incoherent reactions to the slow-motion in-progress disaster]

Jesus those posts from yesterday about whether “the narrative” changes or not seem so feeble today. Of course the narrative changes, but that is the least of it. People are going to lose heath insurance and their right to get an abortion. Mexicans and Muslims will be subject to discrimination, press freedoms will be muzzled, climate change will be ignored, the supreme court will be packed with authoritarian shitheels. And that՚s just off the top of my head. The Trump administration (gag) is going to be a cesspool of corruption and bad ideas and incompetence (I guess our only hope is that the incompetence beats out the other stuff).

As a parent I feel an extra helping of sadness and pain. The job of a parent is to create a safe and nurturing environment for their children, and our society has just decided to do the opposite. Clinton՚s most powerful campaign message was structured around what a horrible example Trump was for children, girls especially…I really thought that would resonate even with the Republicans, because aren՚t they parents as well? Do they really want for their children the kind of world Trump represents? For whatever reason, we have collectively failed to improve the world and are heading into a new, uncharted, and very dark territory.

I՚ve been lately defending the very idea of politics – on the grounds that it is an essential and inescapable of life and cognition. I still think that՚s true, but I wish it wasn՚t. Right now my impulse is to go off and study category theory or quantum computation or something else that is as far removed from human group dynamics as possible.

Oh yeah in terms of reactions, here՚s the latest hot take:

Donald Trump's presidential election victory has already been cheered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, a constellation of right-wing European populists, a former Ku Klux Klan leader and a Middle Eastern strongman. But there's another curious constituency that seems to be happy about the new American president-elect.

Shortly after Trump was declared the victor, a number of prominent Salafist ideologues linked to jihadist outfits in the Middle East took to social media to cheer the prospect of a Trump presidency…the remarks signaled the militants' apparent belief that the victory of a candidate like Trump, who has suggested potentially unconstitutional blocks on Muslim immigration and advocated torture, undermines the United States' moral standing in the world.

Which in turn reminds me of some stuff I was writing about ten years ago on polarization and conflict and how the real war is between those who incite conflict (because they profit from it) and those who want to make peace.

Here՚s something I wrote last night:

Trying to imagine the future under Trump. Occurs to me that the federal government will be a complete shambles leading to increased importance of state and local gov and devolution of power. No idea if this is right, maybe it's wishful thinking, I'd sure rather Jerry Brown was running my world than Trump.

File under “desperately searching for a glimmer of hope”.

Disaster Porn

Like everyone else who is not actually in the shit, I am watching the Sandy disaster unfold over cable tv and other media. There is something vaguely shameful about the fascination it exerts, but also hints of something spiritual. The difference is in subtle shades of attitude and both may be active at once. What is it about disaster that draws us so?

The spiritual part is a real-life form of PKD's Mercerism, where we all use our empathy boxes to commune with the suffering of others. We watch the horrors not to be entertained but because we want to be there for these poor people, and in fact are there in some sense. We all want to be there, to help, we would all be doing something for them if we could.

The shameful part is when you find yourself using the massive suffering of others for entertainment, for tittilation and cheap thrills, when you congratulate yourself on your luck and foresight in not being on the East coast. This attitude is born of lack of empathy, lack of imagination, and lack of ability to feel an active and living connection to others. But it is fed by the media, which can't help but turn suffering into spectacle.

The best way to keep one's mind out of the disaster porn gutter is to actively join in by helping. Since most of us are not in a position to do that, it is easy for our better reactions to degenerate from non-expression. We can give some money to the Red Cross. Or, given that we are in the midst of an election, and have the opportunity to cast our small but significant votes, we can some thought to what it is that binds us together and what is the role of government in that.

Mismanagement and grief (nuclear power edition)

[updated below]

I'd just about gotten around to acknowledging that nuclear power seems like the least-bad option for energy generation, given that all other techniques either are massive CO2 emitters or don't work at scale. Prominent environmentalists like Stewart Brand agreed. But if Japan can't manage to build nuclear reactors that can withstand perfectly predictable natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, I may have to change my mind again. I mean, it's one thing for a plant like Chernobyl to blow up, given that it was poorly built and operated, but Japan is supposed to a wealthy, technically competent, and not-very-corrupt nation, and one with a good historical memory and functioning social system to boot.

The answer apparently is that the techniques used to design for risk are just completely broken; and do not account for the fact that a single event can cause multiple problems; they assumed independence of risks that were in fact highly correlated. This is amazing to me, but oddly the exact same mistake seems to have been made by financial risk modelers.

I don't know why I'm surprised at this kind of stunning mistake. I guess at some level you assume that people capable of constructing and running a nuclear plant would also be capable of basic probabilistic reasoning; but; but it is never safe to assume competence, especially in the face of economic pressures.

[update: hm, here's a very detailed post by someone who sounds like he knows what he's talking about that says that basically things worked according to plan; despite some failures of some stages of containment and some safety procedures, there was enough backup to ensure that minimal radiation was released. OK.]