Bad models and the end of the world

I loathe journalism as a profession: a claque of careerist whores, half-educated back-slappers and propagandists for the oligarchical lizard people who are ruining civilization. I loathe “science journalism” particularly, as they’re generally talking about something I know about, and so their numerous impostures are more obvious.

Journalists: they’re mostly like this

Today’s exhibit, the “NASA study predicting the end of Western Civilization.” The actual study can be found in PDF format here. If you read the “journalism” about this in the guardian, cnet, or wherever else, it’s all about our impending doom. Not only do scientists tell us we are doomed, fookin’ NASA scientists tell us we are doomed.

The authors of the study are not NASA scientists. The NASA subcontractor  associated with this paper would like you to know this; probably because NASA was annoyed their name was associated with this paper. The only contribution NASA made was in partially supporting an institution which partially supported one of the three authors for one semester. The author in question,  Safa Motesharrei is a grad student in “public policy” and “mathematics” at U Maryland. The other two authors are also not NASA scientists. One is allegedly a professor of … political science in Minnesota -and more recently some cranky looking outfit called “Institute of Global Environment and Society.” The other one is a professor of the U Maryland department of Oceanic and Atmospheric sciences. Unless you consider the partial ramen noodle stipend one grad student received for one semester to be “funding,” or you consider NASA’s subcontractor to be liars, NASA did not fund or endorse this study in any meaningful way. Journalism 101, failed before even getting to the content of the article.

The three authors of this study

For what it is worth, had I published anything my sophomore year of grad school instead of trying to build a crazy vacuum chamber and catch a venereal disease, I’d have had some words in my paper thanking NASA for their support as well. This is despite the fact that most of my money came from the NSF and the University I was attending. I wasn’t in any way a NASA scientist. My institution wasn’t NASA affiliated. But we did get a NASA grant that paid for at least a month’s salary for me over the course of a year. When you get those grants, you say “thank you.”

Nafeez Ahmed, the imbecile at the Guardian who broke the story, continues to insist that NASA funded this study, despite the fact that they didn’t. I guess when someone Discovers you are a shoddy journalist, the accepted thing to do these days is doltishly double down on your error. Ahmed, of course, works for some preposterous save-the-world outfit, which apparently means he can pretend he is a journalist and doesn’t have to tell the truth about anything.

Journalistic failure is to be expected these days, and NASA scientists say stupid things all the goddamned time. Still, reading the paper itself was informative. Had anybody bothered to do so, the story would have been murdered in infancy. It’s one of the godawful silliest things I have ever read.

There is a fairly standard model from ecology called the “predator prey” model. Predator/prey models were  mostly developed to model exactly what it sounds like: things like wolf and moose populations in a National Park. The model makes assumptions (that predators are always hungry,  the prey will never die of old age, and  there are no other predators or prey available, for just a few examples of the limitations of the model), but if you set these equations up right, and the parameters and conditions are non-degenerate, it can model reality reasonably well. It’s really no good for predicting things, but it’s OK for modeling things and understanding how nature works.  The equations look like this, where is the predator population, is the prey population and is predator birth rate, is the predator death rate, is the prey’s birth rate, and is the predation rate; all rates are constant.

The predator/prey model is elegant, concise, and in some limited circumstances, occasionally maps onto reality. It is, of course, a model; there is no real reason to model things using this set of differential equations, and a lot of reasons not to. But sometimes it is useful. Like most good models, it is simple and doesn’t have too many parameters. Everything can be measured, and interesting dynamics result; dynamics that we can observe in nature.

The authors of this doom-mongering paper  have  transformed that relatively simple set of equations; a set of equations which, mind you, produces some fairly complicated nonlinear dynamics, into this rather un-handy mess, known as HANDY (for “Human And Nature DYnamics”):

In this set of equations, is the productive peasant population, are the population of parasitic elites, is “natural resources” and is “wealth.” is a “saturation of regrowth of nature rate.” is an “exponential growth of nature rate.” is a “depletion of nature” rate term. are wealth consumption rates.

to make it even more complex: are all functions of

is some threshhold wealth function, below which you starve, and allegedly is supposed to be a minimum consumption per capita, but it really makes no sense based on the equations. is some kind of subsistence level of wealth and is the multiple of subsistence that elites take.

Instead of contenting themselves with constant predation or death rates, this train-wreck insists on making them the following:

Where are constants for a normal death rate and a death rate where you have a high death rate, where, and I quote the paper directly: “when the accumulated wealth has been used up and the population starves.”

It’s worth a look at what they’re implicitly modeling here by adding all this obfuscatory complexity. All of the following assumptions are made by this model. Very few of them are true in reality. Most of these assumptions are designed to get the answer they did.

1. The natural resources of the earth is well modeled by the prey equation
2. The natural resources of the earth regenerate themselves via a logistic function
3. There are two classes of humans
4. There is a thing called “wealth” that is consumed by the two classes of humans at different rates
5. The elite class of humans preys on the peasants and produces nothing
6. The peasant class is all equally productive
7. Wealth comes from peasants exploiting nature
8. Elites all have times a subsistence income, rather than a smooth distribution of incomes
9. Peasants all have , a subsistence income, rather than a smooth distribution of incomes
10. An extra variable called “wealth” is needed to make sense of these dynamics, and this variable maps onto the thing known in common parlance as “wealth.”
11. The wealth factor could sustain a human society for centuries after ecological collapse (page 18)
12. Death rates increase as natural resources are consumed at a faster rate (everything about modern civilization indicates the exact opposite is true)
13. The peasants get nothing from the elites except population control
14. Technological change is irrelevant (yes, they argue this; page 7)
15. This ridiculous spaghetti of differential equations actually models something corresponding to Human Civilization

There are more assumptions than this, but you get the idea: this model is ridiculous, over parameterized, and designed to get the answers that they did. If you assume parasitic non-productive elites, you get the situation where social stratification can help “cause” collapse. Of course, if you assume parasitic non-productive elites, you’re assuming all kinds of ideological nonsense that doesn’t map well onto reality.

If you assume natural resources also act like prey, you can get situations where the natural resources collapse, then the society collapses. This is no big surprise, and you don’t need these obfuscatory complications to say this: it’s in the predator-prey equations already. Why didn’t they just model humanity and nature as simple “predator/prey” above? I am guessing, because nobody would buy it if you say things that simply, and it wouldn’t be an original paper. It also doesn’t allow them to pontificate on egalitarian societies.

As for the additional “wealth” factor these clowns use to distinguish themselves from an earlier bad model; as far as I can tell, the only purpose served by this degree of freedom is making it easier to mine way more natural resources than we actually need to support a population (something that wouldn’t happen in a standard predator-prey model). It also doesn’t make any sense, modeled in this way, unless you believe grain silos contain centuries worth of corn, or that people can eat skyscrapers. That’s how their wealth equations work; they actually assume you can eat wealth.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed: Guardian columnist who broke this story

I actually feel a bit sorry for these guys, even though they are unashamed quacks. They didn’t ask to become this famous. Somehow the zeitgeist and some imbecile activist newspaper reporter decided to make them famous as people who are really bad at modeling anything. God help these people if they attempt to model something real, like chemical reaction dynamics, or, say, the earth’s atmosphere.

Returning to the mendacious loon, Ahmed, who brought this paper to world fame and attention. He asserts that the paper actually compares historical civilizations using this model. It does nothing of the sort. The paper mentions historical civilizations, but they don’t even make legalistic arguments that, say, the ancient Egyptians, whose civilization lasted for thousands of years, somehow follow these equations.  All they say is, ancient cultures were cyclical; they rise and fall; something everyone has known from the time of Heraclitus. Cyclical behavior does not imply this complex pastiche of differential equations; there are cyclical behaviors in nature which can’t be modeled by any differential equations. Finally, Ahmed asserts that the model predicts things. It doesn’t; nor does it claim to. It claims to model things. Modeling things and predicting things are very different.

The model itself was bad enough. What the activist-reporter said about it is inexcusable. The fact that everyone credulously picked up on this nonsense without questioning how Nafeez Ahmed made his living is even worse. Science by activist press release. Yeah, thanks a lot, “science journalists.” Nobody even noticed the clown who broke this story is a goddamned 911 truther.

A more reliable narrator than the Ahmed bozo who broke this story

I find all this intensely sad. I’m sad for the boobs who wasted their lives cranking out a model this useless. I’m sad for our civilization that it is possible to make a living publishing rubbish, and that talented people can’t make a living doing interesting and correct research which will benefit humanity. I’m also sad that journalists aren’t fired over their credulity regarding this fraud. I’m sad that ideological hogwash is published in all the papers as some kind of scientific truth, while nobody notices simple things, like the fact that the world fisheries are presently undergoing collapse, or the fact that there are no more rhinos because Chinese people haven’t discovered viagra yet.

I’m also sad that people are so obsessed with the end of the world. Maybe some day we’ll experience some kind of ecological apocalypse, or the imbeciles in the White House will nuke the slightly less stupid cavemen in the Kremlin. Chances are pretty good though, that before these things happen, we will all be dead. Wiser men than me have pointed out that anxiety about the end of the world is a sort of transference for anxiety about their own impending demise. As Spengler put it, “perhaps it is not the end of the world, but just the end of you.”