Education Challenges. AI art. Climate longtermism.
Thoughts on schooling. Climate from a long-termist view. AI-art. Statistical Life expectancy down in US. The UnConference on Sep 16. Toxis workers. Carbon intensity.
This week I’ve been dwelling on my conversation with Naomi Fisher on the problems of schools as institutions and the advantages of home education or unschooling. More in the podcast.
You are invited to a mingle meet up on Sep 7, London. These meet-ups are an experiment in having interesting chats across investing, arts, long-termism, progress, sustainability, life... Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mingle-for-the-curious-tickets-407058341457
Meetup: You are invited to a mingle meet up on Sep 7, London. Register.
The UnConference on Sep 16. Do come! Sustainability Accelerator UnConferenceon the long-term. This is a different type of conference. You really should come!
Thoughts on schooling. Podcast with Naomi Fisher.
Climate from a long-termist view
AI-art, another app. Stable Diffusion.
Statistical Life expectancy down in US
Links (end): Carbon intensity is falling globally. Train hunting. Dana White (ultimate fighting) profile. Renewable energy thoughts from an economic historian. NHS troubles. Carnival chills.
Unschooling. I think a “follow the child” lead education process has many advantages over a school institution. Schools attempt to “deliver” a lot of other stuff too eg. child care over and above education but it’s a poor fit for many children (or at least more than I had thought when I was at school).
I think there is - or should be - much more scope for learning/education outside the school system - such as a child-led vision of education. It’s notable (to me) how many incredible individuals come from outside the school system. I meet or hear of more and more of them now I have my eyes open for it. Now it comes with challenges but seemingly many advantagestoo .
Even, if as parents we do not want to take that on - the other aspect Naomi advises and I would recommend - is the efforts to lean into your child’s curiosities and passions even if you don’t really understand them. This is an aspect of child-led which you can follow even if you will stick to the school system. School suits some (it suited me) but it really doesn’t suit quite a few types either.
If you want to think about this more - listen to me and Naomi chat about it!. Podcast summary below and transcript/video here.
Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist. She has written a book: Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning. The work is an excellent look at self-directed education also known in the UK as home education, or in the US as home school or unschooling.
We discuss her background as a psychologist and her work with autistic people. We chat about her experience of eleven schools and why she has ended up asking questions about control. Why we control people and particularly why we control children.
Naomi discusses the different schools of thought on education and why progressive doesn't necessarily mean child-led education and why she likes the idea (Alison Gopnik) of a child as scientist.
We chat about what Naomi views as the problems of the current system such as the overuse of exams and why behvaiourism only covers a tiny slice of what learning is in the real world. Naomi highlights some of the benefit of self-directed education process and what home education can bring.
We talk about the amount of time we have spent in the world of Minecraft and why parents may be overworried about the use of technology and screen time. Why YouTube might be more beneficial than not.
Naomi answers my question on how to deal with child meltdown and outlines the idea of zones of tolerance. I pose a question on to what extent we should influence a child’s learning “syllabus” and Naomi outlines her view that a child should always have agency and not be forced into “learning” but that does not mean we should not seek to give a child a rich environment and opportunity to learn.
Naomi answers listener questions. First on if home education is only for rich people, and second the impacts of the pandemic on home educators.
We play overrated/underrated and Naomi rates: the government setting the curriculum, the role of exams, social media and technical colleges.
Naomi talks about her latest projects including a second book on neurodiversity and self-direct education, called “A Different Way to Learn” and available in 2023.
Naomi ends with advice:
“my number one advice for parents would be trust your instincts about what your child needs and how your child is. There are a lot of parents I talk to they say, "I think that my child is really unhappy or I think that my child needs these things, but the professionals are telling me that I'm wrong." I think you need to just retain your knowledge that you know your child better and you probably have a really good sense. You don't just know your child better, but in most cases you share genes with your child. Therefore you often have a kind of intuitive understanding of the experiences that your child is having and that you can get inside their heads in a way that professionals often can't. So I would say really listen to your instincts, give yourself space to think about what you think as sort of apart from what everybody tells you, you should be thinking. The other thing is lean into the things that your child likes; whatever they are, lean into them and embrace them because this is a short time of life when they're like this and when they're young and it is an amazing opportunity to connect with them if you choose to do that rather than choosing to pull them away from the things that they love.”
On the flip slide, there’s an interesting discussion on how to make schools better. This acknowledge much about what Naomi and I critique in the podcast but focuses on making schools better rather than opting out of school system. This is with Emily Oster (ecomomist and data driven parenting blogger) and Michael Horn.
“your thing is more or less like, “This whole system is just a broken mess and we’re just going to do it differently.”
So I want to pull out a few of those [ideas]. And I want to start with something you start with in an early chapter, the idea of different things for different kids and the idea that school is delivering a lot of stuff.” So they discuss different solutions but actually hit on many of the same challenges.
In climate world, I’m still pondering this paper from a longtermist perspective (10,000 years), by John Halstead of Forethought Foundation, link end. This foundation works on longtermist ideas and how to allocate charitable resources effectively particularly with the very longterm in mind. I will be podcasting John later in Sep let me know your questions.
He writes:
Warming will likely be lower than once feared, in part because of lower emissions and in part because the scientific community has reduced uncertainty about climate sensitivity. Where once current policy seemed likely to imply 4oC of warming above pre-industrial levels, now the most likely level of warming is around 2.7oC, and the chance of 4oC is around 5%. Moreover, where once there seemed to be a >10% chance of 6oC on current policy, the risk now seems to be well below 1%.
On a worst-case scenario in which we burn all of the fossil fuels, the most likely level of warming is 7oC, and there is a 1 in 6 chance of more than 9.5oC. \
He quotes the Hausfather et al work that I have previously quoted.
Average living standards will probably continue to rise
Climate-economy models confirm that the costs of climate change will fall disproportionately on poorer people, but most models also suggest that global average living standards in the future will be higher than today, on plausible levels of warming. Income per person looks set to increase by several hundred percent by the end of the century, notwithstanding the effects of climate change.
‘Bottom-up’ climate-economy models included in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report that add up the effects of climate impacts in different sectors and plug them into modern economic models suggest that warming of 4oC would do damage equivalent to reducing global GDP by around 5%.
I have previously been critical of climate-economy models, but now believe they are more reliable than they once were. Until recently, a key determinant of aggregate impact assessments was how to model the effects of >4.4oC because the chance of that level of warming was so high. Estimates that models arrived at were unmotivated and arbitrary in part because the literature on the impacts of >4.4oC was sparse. However, warming of >4.4oC now seems increasingly unlikely (<1% given likely trends in policy), and there is a rich and voluminous literature on the impact of warming up to 4.4.oC. This makes recent bottom-up models more reliable.
However, even the best bottom-up climate-economy models underestimate the costs of climate change because they do not account for some important direct costs:
● They do not include tipping points
● They do not explicitly model the potential effects of climate change on economicgrowth and technological progress
It is unclear how much these factors would increase the overall direct costs of climate change; that is an important area of future research for climate economics. However, for levels of warming that now seem plausible, these effects seem unlikely to be large enough to outweigh countervailing improvements in average living standards.
Some tipping points could have very bad effects
In my view, the most concerning tipping points highlighted in the literature are rapid cloud feedbacks, collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
Some models suggest that if CO2 concentrations pass 1,200ppm (compared to 415ppm today), cloud feedbacks could cause 8oC of additional warming over the course of years to decades, on top of the 5oC we would already have experienced. The impacts of this sort of extreme warming have not been studied, but it seems plausible that hundreds of millions of people would die. Moreover, people would be stuck with an extreme greenhouse world for millennia. This would extend the ‘time of perils’: the period in which we have the technology to destroy ourselves, but lack the political institutions necessary to manage that technology. It would also make it much harder to recover from a civilisational collapse caused by something else (such as a pandemic or nuclear war). However, given progress on emissions, it is now difficult to come up with plausible scenarios on which CO2 concentrations rise to 1,200ppm.
Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation would cause cooling and drying around the North Atlantic, and more importantly would probably weaken the Indian monsoons and the West African monsoons, with potentially dire humanitarian implications. For 4oC, models suggest that the chance of collapse is 1-5%, though they probably understate the risk.
There is deep uncertainty about potential sea level rise once warming passes 3oC. For higher levels of warming, there is a risk of non-linear tipping points, such as collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would cause sea levels to rise by around 5 metres over 100 years, which would probably cause flooding of numerous highly populated cities, especially in Asia.
Due to progress on emissions, these tipping points now look less likely than they did ten years ago, but their expected costs (impact weighted by probability) may still be large. Furthermore, our understanding of the climate system is imperfect, and there may be other damaging tipping points that we do not yet know about. [BY: my bold]
All this being said, contra some prominent research, the evidence from models and the paleoclimate (the deep climate history of the Earth) suggests that it is not the case that, once warming passes 2oC-4oC, runaway feedback loops will kick in that make the world uninhabitable.
He makes many other well-argues points and concludes that climate is a significant risk and challenges but under a neglected / impact / tractable framework and long-termist perspective he rates AI risk, man-made pandemics, and nuclear war risk as more significant problems to work on (and are less well known than climate)
The report is 400+ pages (available through here) and while I might weight some of his answers differently, he draws upon a wide body of where the science currently is and in some ways it highlights the success of the climate movement so far, even with much more work left to do.
This is my second play with "AI-art". This time Stable Diffusion (see picture at top) It's astonishing. It is raising / going to raise many questions.
eg AI skills, rogue AI, what will human illustrators do, this is trained on human work, what does that mean?
So, I recommend you try it out and see what you think.
"Stable Diffusion, a next-generation AI model that takes 100 terabytes of images and takes it down to a few gigabytes that can create anything from a few words. Releasing this open source so everyone, everywhere can use it. Try it out here:
http://beta.dreamstudio.ai
"Made humanity more creative today. Feel good." Lead by Emad Mostaque
https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-public-release
“When I saw a 6.6 year decline over two years, my jaw dropped. … I made my staff re-run the numbers to make sure.” Americans born in 2021 can expect to live for just 76.1 years — the lowest life expectancy has been since 1996.
This is the biggest two-year decline — 2.7 years in total — in almost 100 years.
The Covid-19 pandemic is the primary cause of the decline. However, increases in the number of people dying from overdoses and accidents is also a significant factor.
Life expectancy isn’t really a prediction for a single individual. It’s more like a check engine light — an indicator for the health of society as a whole. When more people die than would be expected, or when they die at younger ages than expected, then life expectancy will decline.
“Life expectancy is an interesting measure, because it emphasizes deaths that occur at younger ages,” Anderson explained. “A death at a younger age basically takes away more years of potential life than again in older age.”
Report on the anlaysis here: https://lnkd.in/gfpwmDen and Linkedin comments
Links:
Toxic workers are destructive. Removing toxic workers helps more than hiring more superstars in a study of 58k service workers.A top 1% superstar upped performance by $5,300. A toxic worker costs $12,800 in extra turnover.
"While there has been a strong focus in past research on discovering and developing top performers in the workplace, less attention has been paid to the question of how to manage those workers on the opposite side of the spectrum: those who are harmful to organizational performance. In extreme cases, aside from hurting performance, such workers can generate enormous regulatory and legal fees and liabilities for the firm. We explore a large novel dataset of over 50,000 workers to document a variety of aspects of workers characteristics and circumstances that lead them to engage in what we call "toxic" behavior. We also explore the relationship between toxicity and productivity, and the ripple effect that a toxic worker has on her peers. Finally, we find that avoiding a toxic worker (or converting him to an average worker) enhances performance to a much greater extent than replacing an average worker with a superstar worker. Paper on Linkedin.
Carbon intensity is falling.
Train hunting
Dana White
Renewable energy thoughts from an economic historian
NHS troubles
Carnival chills