The silence of risk management victory
riskmusings.substack.com
riskmusings.substack.com
Many good manipulators (politicians, managers, influencers, etc.), take it a step further, and convince others to work against their own self-interests, in order to serve the interests of the manipulators. We've seen plenty of this, lately (I won't go into specifics).
Here's a rather pithy approach to risk management that I've used: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/risky-business/
Where I disagree with the article is that I think the author is seeing an opportunity to frame ideological concerns that exploit uncertainty by calling it risk and equating it to disciplines that he doesn't realize have very concrete competencies and performance metrics. Also, we have technology and economic solutions for our climate impact already. I'm still of the view that if your plan doesn't work unless you take over the planet and deprive entire nations of people of their freedoms, it's an objectively evil plan, and somehow that makes me a counter-revolutionary denialist.
The answer to the question "why did a thriving capitalist economy emerge in Europe in the 17th century?" is simply "risk management". It was the intellectual leap that made it all possible.
I wouldn't recommend that book. I would rather recommend reading A Treatise on Probability by John Maynard Keynes... which is insightful and genius like most of his work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Treatise_on_Probability
Some parts of Fooled by Randomness are also insightful (before Nassim Taleb became this weird, tin foil hat guy he is now)...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness
As for capitalist economy - it is of course a matter of opinion but I would rather say that capitalist economy is more about rent seeking, externalising costs and taking crazy amounts of risk with moral hazard rather then about risk management...
But perhaps it is because I am risk manager by trade and had seen too many insurance, banks and money managers from the inside...
EDIT: Both books - as I have just realized - are saying more or less that probability and risks are real but rarely quantifiable. I guess that makes me a pessimist.
> People need to get paid (very!) well for their work on the endeavor
Good luck with that one. Who, exactly, is going to pay? And if you did somehow pass a bill mandating $500/hour wages, how would the flood of applicants be managed?
> Similarly, with climate change, programs to develop ways to transport solar energy could help, if implemented at scale and with vigorous commitment and funding. (It would be fairly easy to produce the solar energy; the challenges are reducing toxicity of manufacturing solar panels and batteries, increasing storage capacity, and figuring out transmission or transportation over long distances)
I had the impression that many people already were working on all those. Is he saying that throwing more money at the problem would solve it faster?
Finally, Y2K and Ebola are only two examples. How about "nuclear war over Taiwan"? That seems like the ultimate risk, and it's not by any means improbable.
But the idea of paying people more to work on issues to mitigate risk is very valid. Lots of people are working on climate change, it’s true, but it’s not hard to imagine a world where we subsidize that sort of work (assuming a reasonable qualification process), and the result is more people working on the solution.
To put another way - if fewer people were working on it, would it take less, more, or the same amount of time? Presumably there is some optimal range where enough smart people are working on a problem to speed things up, but not enough to where there’s a lot of wasted make-work.
To the last point, there are always going to be risks that we, individually or collectively, can’t do anything about- nuclear war over Taiwan being one of those. Our inability to influence those risks does not obviate the opportunity to mitigate others.
Well, he clearly said the government. Who else would pay? Or could pay?
> if you did somehow pass a bill mandating $500/hour wages, how would the flood of applicants be managed?
We manage people going to work at FAANG and people becoming CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and people becoming actors and sports stars. "More people want this job than are applying" is something that most places that pay above minimum wage deal with.
> Is he saying that throwing more money at the problem would solve it faster?
Probably. With a lot of these problems more funding leads to faster solutions. Moreover, if you knew that solving those problems was a valid career move, the smartest people would stop aiming towards software and wall street.
> How about "nuclear war over Taiwan"?
This seems unlikely. Putin using nukes over losing in Ukraine seems far more possible, although if other countries retaliated is an open question. China seems really patient about Taiwan.
Evidence, please. Would more funding for nuclear fusion lead to faster commercial-scale electric plants? Explain how the fundamental physics problems can get solved faster.
> China seems really patient about Taiwan.
I'd call that "wishful thinking." Given that they just demonstrated how they can effectively blockade the island without an invasion.
That's not what I said. For engineering projects, even novel ones, funding leads to faster results. I mean, look at what you can do in WWII when you literally decided that physicists should get so many resources because the A-Bomb was that important.
And if your concern is storing and transmitting energy, there are engineering ways to do that at scale. It's expensive, but doable.
> Given that they just demonstrated how they can effectively blockade the island without an invasion.
A multi-year blockade is pretty patient. I'm not saying China will never act. Clearly, they are slowly moving. I'm saying they'll go slow enough that it will never come to nukes.
But the answer to "which problems" is "the ones keeping us from green energy". I though that was pretty obvious.
I don't know the answer to that, but I'm always suspicious when the answer is always "more!" no matter how much is already being spent. It suggests that simply saying "more" is a substitute for any detailed analysis.
That question doesn't make sense. More money adds more resources. So even if they only have 50% efficiency, increasing the money will increase the resources. And clearly not all resources are going to avert climate change. For instance, we can fix the "transmission" problem by just choosing area close to desert cities and building plants there as opposed to further away where they are expensive. We could have giant artificial gravity storage. Those things are very expensive, but they are also very doable. We could be carrying bowling balls up the Empire State Building to build local energy storage. But we don't need to go that far. The US is just beginning to suggest that using groundwater at 100-1000x the rate of it recovering to drain the aquifers that took many millennia to fill to grow alfalfa in the desert might be a bad idea.
And don't forget, a key argument being made was that salaries aren't high enough to get the best people (especially those choosing majors in college) into the greening industry as opposed to SV or Wall St.
IMO we definitely will not do this investment, so the remaining likely scenarios are grim. Either we successfully decarbonize but at much lower standards of living OR we just keep burning stuff we found in the ground and the biosphere collapses.
Putin could use strategic nuclear weapons to destroy Kyiv, or other civilian population centers or infrastructure. But to what end? That wouldn't align with any of his war goals.
"If I can't have it, no one can".
Besides, it looks like Ukraine might be able to retake land Russia has been occupying. If he destroys one city with nukes, the "surrender or I will take out cities one by one" is a valid plan to win a war. If the alternative is losing Crimea (which he was successfully holding) I can see him taking such a step.
Also, Ukraine would have fallen (and still might) without constant aid from the West. Using nukes to raise the danger level might be enough to stop the shipments of arms and intelligence.
Czar Nicholas mobilized his troops in the run-up to WW I, which ultimately led to his and his family's executions, as well as the deaths of millions of people.
Napoleon III declared war on Prussia, which led to France's loss of Alsace-Lorraine and his own capture by the enemy.
So saying "he would never do it" is pretty irresponsible.
I think about this a lot working in SRE: Disaster avoidance is invisible and often under-appreciated.
I’ve also been reading Toby Ord’s _The Precipice_ and avoiding getting too depressed while in a bit of awe how close humanity was/is to really destroying ourselves.
What are some examples of important work with decent pay in an inexpensive area that a SV tech worker could be good at?
Compound interest is the eigth wonder of the world.
Knowing what will be profitable in the future is analogous to knowing what problems will plague humanity.
And investing for future profit equates to mitigating them.
Alternatively you can work for one of the companies burning through VC money selling products/services at a loss who need to advertise those services so they can sell more and more quickly to create the illusion that one day they will be able to generate more than they spend! Don't worry too much about the loses the VCs will just make it up in their investments in advertising companies and companies selling infrastructure to advertising companies.
Huh, something sounds weird about that setup, well good thing money is cheap!
Well, just goes to show that sarcasm is always bad for factual debates.
I'll also say that the idea of "Make lots of money now and then I'll give back later and retire early and enjoy my life" is a very risky proposition, you never know what tomorrow might bring a car crash, cancer, who knows?
> And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully: And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits? And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee - Luke 12:15-20
Not saying this is your job of course, but there are PLENTY of non-profits in this world that are actively making the world worse off. Non-profit == good is just as bad as Profit == bad.
For an example, just look at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation in LA. Some of the worst people in the country.
There are people working on robotics, working on medicine, biology, rockets, software for people’s real problems, tools to enable other businesses, all sorts of things.
Some urgent areas include assessing biological and climate tail risks.
Or are you suggesting there is only one set of things that universally matter to all humans?
Am I willing to take a 10% pay cut to work on things that are good for society instead of selling ads? Sure. 25%? Probably. But those aren't the magnitudes we're talking about. Total comp for a senior-to-staff level engineer at FAANG (or anyone competing with them) will be, let's say, 500k/year, plus best-in-the-world benefits. Total comp for government or charity work rarely cracks 100k, and even tech companies that are focused on good rather than profit, maybe 200.
And it's not like the FAANG jobs are bad - day-to-day, they're incredibly interesting. There's lots of fun stuff to build with smart people. The only problem is the background existential dread. It's also hard to argue that they're actively harming humanity in a lot of cases - maybe this line of reasoning works on potential Raytheon or Palantir employees, where the delta in morality is much greater, but convincing people to go from neutral-ish to good is harder than convincing them to go from bad to good.
So the question you're asking is, are you willing to take a 60-80% pay cut to possibly do a less interesting job, in exchange for moral fulfillment and knowing that you're helping humanity? You might think the answer is yes, but I think it's hard to fault people for whom it isn't.
The people who work at Raytheon or Palantir think they are less harmful than the people who work for Google/Facebook. Nobody who has decided to work there thinks they are just drone striking children.
Not enough people look at both sides of the ledger when it comes to the ethics and morals of their work.
Due to their long range HIMARS don’t have to be anywhere near the front line to be used. It’s pretty unlikely that any would be captured and even if it looked like they could be they could easily destroy them.
Did palantir do shady things ? I now that the CEO got in trouble for looking down on poor people ( or something along those lines ?), but is there more ?
It’s not exactly fair to criticize a company because of what they aren’t telling us, but that goes with the territory.
Not to criticize you directly, but just sharing this perspective.
But if I build up enough investment wealth to pay for my life in the future, I could take on more meaningful work in the future. If I leave for meaningful work now, I may be making money at that pay scale trajectory for the rest of my career, similar to how people who graduated in 2008 have never caught up to their peers wealth wise.
I think it comes down to control about your financial options. Relinquishing income puts you at a disadvantage.
They like the idea of doing something good, but not enough to sacrifice much for it.
I am the same way. I work on boring as heck ad tech and security stuff.
I could do much more interesting work, but I would make less. Interesting and beneficial to the world is even less.
I won’t even sacrifice pay for interesting.
This is the same with climate change. Emergency? Many will say so. Enough of an emergency not to fly to Thailand this winter or not buy a monster house? Nope.
I am the same way. I consider climate change a problem. But I’m also likely going to eat beef every day for the rest of my life in a meal or two.
I think many of us common folks have fairly low energy demands.
But, the same set that goes to Davos, and is preaching to us about cutting our consumption, is the same that has the private jet, 3 mansions and a football field sized yacht.
I'm so over the entitled elite telling us what to do.
It's always a balancing act though. I won't go to do a job I loathe, because I won't stick there for long enough. I choose jobs that I'm fine doing, and pass many jobs that I might love doing but which won't pay the bills.
I was fortunate enough to have a job I outright loved, and which also paid well; it lasted 3.5 years. I'm immensely happy to have had such luck.
Or not even the best, just average/competent enough scientists and engineers?
Phrased a little differently, would you accept being paid a life-changing amount of money in exchange for anonymously engineering a deadly threat to some people far from home and knowing you could get away with it? Would you let your morals stop you?
I simply think that the venn diagram of people willing to do software dev work for a defense contractor like Boeing or Raytheon and people willing to do software dev work for the cartels/terrorist groups is not even close to approaching a full circle.
Sure, most people willing to do software dev work for the cartels/terrorist groups are probably totally morally ok with doing work for a defense contractor. But I am willing to bet that most people willing to work for a defense contractor will not feel morally alright working for the cartels/terrorist groups even in the slightest.
The difference is that many or most won't cross borders to work for the opposing team.
ISIS has many engineers.
There is no “both sides” argument to working for a group that just wants to get filthy rich using brutal violence, bribery, and disregard for the downsides of hard drug addiction. The cartels don’t have a recruiting story of bringing justice to the oppressed, etc. It’s just opportunity for money and power for people with limited opportunities otherwise.
Totally orthogonal to recruiting for “mission focused” orgs like terrorist groups.
Two points.
You pivoted from terrorists to cartels. You clearly don’t realize that cartels actually get their info and their purpose from protecting (or at least doing enough visible work to appear to be protecting) the average person in their territory. Sure, not all cartels work this way, but even if not initially, they eventually buy their info this way.
And, yes, terrorist groups absolutely do try to claim they are fighting for justice. They are just targeting a different demographic than you have in your mind. The children of parents killed by US defense contractor weapons. The religious zealots convinced of whatever religious transgression. The clash of values. There are plenty of political platforms, and they all can be recruiting stories.
No I didn’t. Read the thread. It lumped both together.
Everything is awful, except for what pays your mortgage. The world is about shades of grey, not black and white.
That applies to all peddlers of moral indignation. The most strident patriots are usually pasty old men who bear no cost for their actions.
edit: this is even a problem for people who write FOSS (unfortunately leading to some of them putting moral clauses in licenses), never mind those taking a check from some of the worst people in the world.
In essence you're giving up most legal protections (since you've got as much to lose as anyone else if the police catch you) while working with people who likely have no moral issues with killing you. Will they pay you or will they kidnap your family and cut off someone's toe every time you complain?
It wasn't ridicule, it was propaganda intended to get people to vote against their own best interests (and therefore stop politicians from acting, by threatening them with consequences)
And it worked, really well. Still does.
If you're treating these issues as if it was a bunch of misled but ultimately well meaning individuals then you are in trouble before you start.
For example, "we need new tech to solve this", which is both true and dangerous. True in the sense that a million little fixes have made things better, dangerous in that climate change deniers will use it to divert time, energy and money from known fixes:
> Green energy cannot meet Germany’s need for reliable electricity. That is why Germany still needs copious amounts of fossil fuels; German CO2-emissions have risen since the nuclear power phase-out of 2011, despite the incredible subsidies for renewables.
> Germany is an example of how not to do green energy. Instead the solution is to research and develop better green energy technology.
That was Bjorn Lomborg during the previous Ukraine gas crisis in 2014. Better technology than Wind and Solar, which are the two winners of a global, 4 decade race to produce cheap, clean energy. That's what he thinks we need. While at that time Wind energy was the cheapest source of energy available, and Solar was rapidly catching it up.
And here he is on twitter a few months ago doubling down on that:
> The idea that the Ukraine war could be fixed by choosing Western dependence on Chinese solar panels and batteries over Western dependence on Russian oil and gas reveals just how unserious the environmental movement really is
So, it's a real problem, and we really need to do something about it, but what the consensus solution is, isn't a solution after all, we just need to invest in future tech that will solve the problem. We can't rely on the the Chinese manufactured solar panels that he himself claimed did not work. Now they work, they're just too Chinese.
That's the depressing lesson of Climate Change and COVID, if right-wing politicians can buy a few votes and stall some regulations via attacking science, reason, fact etc., then they will.
Germany is neither sunny nor windy nor has a long coastline. It's a poor candidate for those forms of energy regardless of who's making the panels and windmills. If they want zero emissions from power production they'll have to go nuclear or build out the infrastructure to import clean energy from countries with better renewable options.
Solar and Wind as we know them are part of the solution, but aside from a few areas that are abnormally sunny or windy by global standards there's no way they can even theoretically be the entire solution, and that's not even touching on the inadequacy of current battery technologies and mineral inputs needed to manufacture all this stuff.
From a political perspective, I'd say he's right that being beholden to China is little better than being beholden to Russia, only practical difference being China lacking options for military invasion.
Simple fact is there is no solution to climate change at the moment. We're working on a number of things that might one day become pieces of the solution, but I see too much "we just have to do X, Y and Z and climate change will be solved!" rhetoric that is wishful thinking at best, and ivory tower edicts ignoring all externalities of said decisions at worst. The world isn't a computer model.
He's not making a specific point about Germany, he's attacking anything that might lead to government action on climate change:
Seven years ago: > When considering climate change, most people think wind turbines and solar panels are a big part of the solution. But, over the next 25 years, the contribution of solar and wind power to resolving the problem will be trivial – and the cost will be enormous.
Thirteen years ago: > A good illustration is Denmark, which early on provided huge subsidies for wind power, building thousands of inefficient turbines around the country from the 1980s onwards. Today, it is often remarked that Denmark is providing every third terrestrial wind turbine in the world, creating billions in income and jobs.
> A few years ago, however, the Danish Economic Council conducted a full evaluation of the wind turbine industry, taking into account not only its beneficial effects on jobs and production, but also the subsidies that it receives. The net effect for Denmark was found to be a small cost, not benefit.
> Not surprisingly, the leading Danish wind producer is today urging strong action on climate change that would imply even more sales of wind turbines.
Turning round after 20 years of saying solar is bullshit and attacking the wind industry in his home nation as if they're part of a climate hoax and then complaining that they're all made in China is shockingly brazen.
What is completely different from buying fuel.
Buying panels from another country helps that other country realize both enduring expertise and aides their economy of scale.
Also, should solar-powered countries ever go to war, I suspect single airbursts of comparatively small conventional munitions will be sufficient to shatter large swaths of panels, making production capacity important.
And yes, productive capacity of everything is important when you consider a war. Still, fuel supplies are much more fragile than solar generation.
Germany built up more renewables in 20 years than there ever was nuclear and the speed is still accelerating: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.s...
Nuclear currently is too slow to be built and too expensive for fighting climate change in time. France is partially to blame for the current energy crisis in Europe, because they put pride in their nuclear power plants before realistic replacements for their old reactors that are way over their initial designed runtimes.
Have no problem with renewables in the meantime.
Interesting background about Lomborg, thank you!
the plain lie that Germany "doesn't have enough coastline, sun and wind on shore" which is perpetuated also in some sibling comment serves only fossil and nuclear traditional energy.
the resistance of that fossil lobby forced photovoltaics and wind turbine.planta out of business in a world wide growth market.
they manipulate opinion and thus the market. oh I'm so angry.
Many people that talk about Climate Change, aka, Global Warming, are so indoctrinated via ideological shades that they do not recognize basic facts, and understanding where we are with our own knowledge
1. Deglaciation, and Warming as climate trends preceded our oil-based economy by thousands of years
2. Glacial Maximums are associated with low CO2 environments
3. "Our understanding of the Global Climate System is in its infancy"
4. There are massive discrepancies between accurate space based weather observations, and in-situ measurements.
5. Renewable Energy currently is insufficient to replace petroleum sources, and will be for a long period of time.