Disaster recovery, hiraeth
Theatre: Come see my show Jan 3. Lucy Easthope: Disaster planning and recovery Climate: Tom Gosling on the limits of financial markets on climate, and fiduciary duty.
Lucy Easthope: Disaster planning and recovery
Climate: Tom Gosling on the limits of financial markets on climate, and fiduciary duty
Climate: exponential technology improvements possible
Education : 27 April 2024, UnConference: educating otherwise
Links: AI, Victorian bread, top 2023 recipe search.
My show: If you are about on Jan 3 in London come and see me perform. Would be great to see you. Details here. I know it is early in the year but would be great if you could come.
I’m running a poll on LinkedIn if you want to participate:
I’ve struggled to sum up the show in compelling short copy but the performance is funny. I cover quirky ideas around death. It’s practical. It’s also fun to help design my funeral! Do come.
Her book When the Dust Settles is both a touching memoir of a personal journey and also an insight into disaster management covering most of the major disasters over the last 2 decades such as 9/11, 7/7 and the Thai beaches tsunami.
(Self-recommending) the whole podcast but I’d highlight 3 thoughts amongst many to pull out.
Hiraeth. A welsh term which loosely translates the idea of:
longing for a place to which there is no return…
…an echo of something that can never be found or something that no longer exists…
This concept ties together the feeling of loss that happens to us, but Lucy points out living with loss is - must be - acceptable and discounting loss too quickly feels counter to our feelings:
That resilience is you forgetting or parceling or being able to move to the next stage. Hiraeth stays with you. I think that's a really important recognition.
…There is no fix for hiraeth. And with a lot of things, I think similarly bereavement or a massive career change, there is a loss of the life before. What you watch people do in the early stages of something like bereavement is kind of try and fight it. You also watch the people around them try and fight it. For example, in my work, I've often seen people interact with very, very newly widowed young women. People are like, "Well, we can get you that life back." Way too early and way too soon people are saying, "There's still a life. We'll find the life." People are very desperate to try and convince you that it will be okay which is understandable. But hiraeth doesn't go anywhere.
A lot of the conversations that I have with communities affected by disaster stems from a life before and a life after. They will still see moments of joy. They will still see moments of hope. They might like their new leisure center better than the one before. But it doesn't mean that hiraeth is not very, very permanent. The other thing I really like about the use of that word particularly is it's a kind of direct challenge to where I go on in the book, which is the sort of modern spin of emergency management. I was quite shocked at an event a couple of weeks ago. We are still talking about minimizing the effect of these events. The ultimate role of emergency planning in the UK is to kind of minimize these events so that they almost feel like speed bumps in the road. And you're like, "Are you kidding me? These are so fundamental to the fabric of society." And also the way you described your experiences. They're so fundamental to the fabric of you that I don't believe that how we measure-- whether something has come back from somewhere-- is their ability to forget it. My much truer test is their ability to live alongside the horizon.
… I’m going to intertwine that idea into my Bigly show…
The Skyfall Effect. Lucy argues that some of the thinking around disaster management is similar to thinking about climate.
“Someone else is going to save you”
But, they are not.
“….I think the biggest issue we have, and I name it in the book after the most recent James Bond films. I do genuinely think that the Skyfall effect is a huge problem in disaster management. And this is the idea that this amazing capability is coming over the hill to save us. It's one of the problems we have with climate change as well. It's not. It's people like me and my colleagues and there's a tea club and there's a basement in a town hall where we use a lot of Excel spreadsheets. I always get asked to do quick summaries of my day or would I wear a body camera so people could see what exciting stuff I do. I'm like, "I might literally just be on a phone for an hour talking about a flood rescue strategy," whiteboards and Microsoft Word. It's not always very glamorous.
There's this huge misperception I think, of what we have at our disposal. But of course, the other side of that is what we also have at our disposal that we perhaps underestimate is just the amazingness of each other. One thing I find very difficult watching something like the Covid inquiry is that by necessity, and for many understandable reasons, it will tell the stories of what went wrong. But if you are me and you plan for a pandemic since 2004, you also got to see all the things that went much better than we ever had hope. I write a lot about things like our death care professionals, our registrars, our mortuary staff, our funeral directors who far exceeded the best case in our plans. The supermarkets far exceeded the best case scenarios we had, and that's not the story we'll tell. So I think sometimes we both simultaneously underestimate the fellow humans and overestimate the kind of quality of the response that we're going to get….”
And lastly, on the level of human - it’s often the seemingly small things which count - on trying to save the world:
Advice:
Don't go to work on a row.
I was reflecting with a friend recently and she said, "A lot of people say that they live life as if it's precious and you might not be here tomorrow, or the people you love might not be here tomorrow. But you Lucy, really do." And what does that look like? Everybody I love knows that I love them. Every time I say goodbye to my children, every time I go to work, it's always on the premise of how fragile this is. I think if we remember that, it sets us up to perhaps be kinder to each other. I also think that one of the most important things to me is to go back to those basics about particularly as we go into yet another difficult winter or difficult times, is think about just that couple of things that can make a difference. I think people are very anxious about trying to save the whole world. You don't need to save the whole world, just make somebody a cup of tea. Just make that tiny little kind of chaos theory difference, and that's enough.
Listen to the whole pod here or read the transcript:
Lucy Easthope is a professor, lecturer and leading authority on emergency planning and recovering from disaster. Lucy has advised on major disasters over the last decades including the 2004 tsunami, 9/11, the Salisbury poisonings, Grenfell, and the Covid pandemic and most recently the war in Ukraine. She challenges others to think differently about what comes next after tragic events, and how to plan for future ones. Her book When the Dust Settles is both memoir of her life in disaster recovery and a personal journey through life, love and loss. You can find her on Twitter / X @LucyGoBag.
I ask Lucy about what she is hopeful about looking to the future.
"I think one of the things is this ability to be able to back, back and forth between really terrible thoughts and risks which we have to do in emergency planning, and then just take incredible joy from a moment in the day... My work is one of the greatest privileges of it; is just seeing people being great a lot. So that gives me a lot of hope."
We talk about how many disasters I’ve been a by-stander to (Thailand tsunami, 9/11, Grenfell, 7/7, mortar bomb attack) and how disaster is recurring.
We chat about Lucy’s activism from young and growing up around Liverpool.
Lucy has been very involved around personal items, and the belongings of people in disasters.
I ask about why it's such an important part of Lucy’s work. We chat about the interdisciplinary nature of here work.
We talk about the Welsh notion of hiraeth /ˈhɪərʌɪθ/. This longing for a place to which there is no return.
I ask about Lucy’s writing process and how she writes. We talk about themes in her life and writing such as working class roots and feminism. We discuss the importance of humour and why Lucy is pranked a lot.
We touch on Lucy’s personal losses of miscarriage.
I ask about what is misunderstood about disaster management and what organisations and people can do. How to think about balancing risk and opportunity. We talk about the problems of systemic and structural challenges.
For those in the climate and finance field, at the edge of the movement where there are the most debates, a recent podcast with Tom Gosling, hosted by Jason Mitchell, has triggered some.
Tom makes plenty of arguments in the podcast grounded in financial theory and practice. They mostly revolve around the limitations of what financial markets can do - when constrained by the (government / global ) policy / legal environment.
A core arguments seems to be if the world is heading for a 2.5 - 3c scenario then a diversified portfolio which aims to be far outside of that range could well incur financial losses which would be unacceptable to many end investors (and break fiduciary duty). Interestingly this can work at both extremes, if you invest aligned to a eg 5c world, and lose money because of it you’d also be breaking this notion of fiduciary duty if defined only to the portfolio returns to your investments.
There are counter arguments and exceptions. A notable exception would be, you could well have a concentrated, eg, 35 company portfolio that could be aligned to a 1.5c or 2c world that would be consistent with returns. But a universal portfolio would be much harder to tilt away from the world average.
Not discussed in the podcast… but there are many problems with considering companies or portfolios under a temperature alignment framework. This is because the techniques use a “fair shares” analysis allocating a certain amount of carbon budget to individual companies. But this can not be done with any real scientific certainty. It is a political judgement of “fair share” (science does not care for “fair” and different people view “fair” differently) and there are technical challenges due to double (or more) counting of impacts down/upstream of companies.
Here are three points put forward by Tom:
(from my LI) The thoughtful and brilliant pair of Tom Gosling with Jason Mitchell. Climate. Tom:
"...I think there are there are three big issues here.
First is when you think about a goal of 1.5 C... that goal takes into account the fact that future generations matter to a very significant degree...close to as much as us. And that tends to lead you to use a low discount rate for discounting future climate damages where financial markets are set up to do quite a different thing, they tend to use much higher discount rates and so will apply much less...to future generations and the economic damages that affect future generations.
The second is that that political goal on global warming will recognize that there are vulnerable communities, especially coastal communities in the developing world, where the impacts of climate change can be absolutely devastating to their economic and social welfare. The goal therefore applies a strong weight to trying to protect those communities from the worst implications of global warming. Whereas financial markets don't really care about that. They care about what effects cash flows and what effects cash flows is to a very significant degree driven by what is happening in developed markets.
...the fact that Pakistan was 50% underwater because of the monsoon flooding recently... wasn't relevant for corporate cash flows in many companies.Finally, in setting the climate goal, we might well take into account quality of life issues. You might not want to live in a world where you live for 6 weeks of the year purely in an air conditioned environment, because temperatures that exceed the wet bulb limit outside...But these nonfinancial factors don't necessarily impact company cash flows.
Financial markets have been set up to intermediate between the savings and consumption preferences of individuals who are largely alive today. And that produces sort of an allocation of investment. It produces a discount rate, which we should have no reason to believe will align with this more kind of political or social goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 C with little or no overshoot. And a consequence of that is that investors pushing for that goal, even if they could achieve it, aren't obviously taking action that would maximize returns declines...."
Listen/read the podcast here: https://lnkd.in/e5FtwPsR
I have pretty esoteric thoughts about future discount rates (due to some of my reading of moral philosophers). I comment:
There are moral philosophers and economists who grapple with the idea of what "discount rate" we should use for future humans. Those from a long-termist, consequentialist school (EA, Derek Parfit) have argued that both time (and distance) should not matter so much. You should save a life in 100 years, almost the same as saving a life today. Or save a life in your country, like saving a life in Africa.
Tyler Cowen has also come to argue for this via economic philosophy in his book Stubborn Attachments.
If financial markets really did reflect social choices, and if society really did value the future as much as today then this is a mechanism which could work.
But, the current reality is that many (if not most) do not in practice value a stranger in 100 or 200 years as valuable today; and in practice we do not reach much across geography (yet) either. But this could change in the same way we used to think the lives of slaves (or women, to name just two things that have changed) were worth less. So maybe culture change widely defined is one of the more important factors to consider.
And Tom comments:
It would surprise me if there was a 1-1 correspondence between an ethical discount rate and financial market discount rate although I can see they might be correlated.
I think this is true as of now. Iim unsure if it always has to be true.
Chris Stark (CEO Climate Change Committee) on COP process:
“It depends on what you think the COP is for - I don’t see it as a regulatory framework. It’s a consensus position which sends an important signal of how the ‘floor’ of action has moved upwards. The ‘ceiling’ is presented by the side deals and the ambition agendas from business and key countries. Taken together, it’s fairly obviously working now. But we do need to start thinking more about how implementation is overseen (and this COP had new words on that too).
A wise man said to me that with COPs we should see the movie not the snapshot. When you look at it like that, the COP28 text is a further step along - and an enormous step forwards from where we were a few years ago. That doesn’t stop me saying that there are lots of disappointments too - and the focus on the fossil fuel language has masked a lot of that this year.”
I view COP more closely to how Chris Stark views COP, it’s a slow motion movie that has a once a year snapshot (like a balance sheet at that time).
Ending my climate section on a techno-optimist note. Michael Nielsen:
“1. Looking back over the last few years of BP's (very helpful!) Statistical Review of World Energy, renewables are typically growing maybe 15% per year *faster* than non. Very roughly, that means every 5 years renewables double in relative size(!) Of course, that trend can't continue forever, but you don't need a lot of doublings, either, even starting from a tiny baseline...
2. The price of solar keeps dropping by a factor of about 4 every decade (Swanson's Law). I believe similar is true for other renewables, but with different constants
3. The price of large-scale batteries dropped (IIRC) by a factor ~6 over the 2010s. Again... you don't need a lot of such drops
(People used to talk a lot about scale of battery production. Well, between 2010 and 2021 battery production increased in scale by a factory of 600, I believe.)
Slowly, then suddenly, is what happens with exponentials. It's true that exponentials eventually saturate into sigmoids, though often later than people anticipate - ingenuity is real! My guess is that the 2020s and 2030s are when the world will mostly flip off of fossil fuels, with the transition being essentially completed in the 2040s...
Links:
Top recipes searched for during the year 2023 in google search. Would not have guessed Bibimbap.
AI alignment, new paper (technical, but worth knowing):
From Leopold Aschenbrenner and OpenAI team:
Intuitively, superhuman AI systems should "know" if they're acting safely. But can we "summon" such concepts from strong models with only weak supervision? Incredibly excited to finally share what we've been working on: weak-to-strong generalization.
This is a fun thread on the current meme of asking GPT to “do/be more X” in this case make a scene “more normal”. It has a neat story arc as well, which I might write about another time, but it has a reversal and coda in the narrative plus it always toys with our own expectations.
From Eliezer (who is the pinnacle of AI doomster and rationalist thinker):
Me: Can you draw a very normal image?
ChatGPT: Here is a very normal image depicting a tranquil suburban street scene during the daytime.
Me: Not bad, but can you go more normal than that?
https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1734772533373939784?s=20
Thanks for reading!