Re: [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.




   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 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.

   

 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 

[FRIAM] Policy Modeling

[glen]

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 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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