I'm sorry, but studying category theory to save the planet sounds like something straight from 'the Onion'.
For sure there are topics that (IMO) are worth studying to save the planet, i.e. physics, physics of the atmosphere, geology, material science, chemistry, etc, etc, but category theory would be pretty low on the list. (it's certainly worth studying on its own, but putting a 'saving the planet' badge on it sounds disingenuous to me)
Well it can't hurt. I remember reading an article about how Germany -- a water rich nation -- has a society of extreme water-masochism in order to "save the planet". People turn off the shower as they lather their hair, they save bathtub water for other uses. All despite being a wet country that sends most of the water into the ocean every year.
It's gotten so bad that utilities are fighting the problem of drying out pipes and have to spend money unplugging clogged sewer lines that don't have enough water in them. But no amount of reasoning helps, the people see stories of thirsty children in Africa and decide the best thing they can do is to take shorter showers, and re-use water from cooking to gardening. Meanwhile Germany only uses 2.7 percent of its available drinking water. When asked why they do this, answers range from "It's for the environment. And the children." to "I feel sorry for the water."[1]
So on the long list of crazy things that people do to "save the planet", studying math is quite beneficial.
That's a cute story, but mostly, the WSJ is absolutely full of it.
Germany had 9 out of the ten last seasons net-dry. It lost 700,000 acres of forest in the last three years due to lack of water. Spruces in lower-lying regions are pretty much done for Shipping on the river Rhine had to be restricted due to low water.
Germany is mostly still OK - you see most of the effects in regions with sandy soils, where water isn't retained long enough. (E.g a lot of the eastern parts) And, like everywhere around climate change, the "consumer efforts" are mostly existing to distract from the major sources of problems. (For water, in Germany, that would be electricity generation and the need for coolant)
The "water masochism" is a deflection by politicians, rooted in a real problem.
You know the WSJ is lying when their sublede contains "criticized by some". It's the traditional unattributed quote that's mostly made up.
I'd wager that the participants average funding will increase.
If you read journal articles, etc. you'll find a truly surprising number go out of their way to mention climate change, green initiatives, etc. when they lack good reason to do so. In particular, these words will take places of honour in the abstract or even the title while the rest of the article pays them scant and passing notice.
Why do this? Funding. Every generation of science has it's magical buzzwords. Most recognize them for what they are but, when the people with money can't decide on a difference in merit between what you're doing and what your competitors are doing, buzzwords can make the difference.
Is this another case of buzzword fund-farming? I'm not qualified to say, and you'd probably need to ask the participants in this initiative to track down somebody who is. That's why this sort of thing is so hard to stop.
All engineers have a strong math foundation in their cursus. It's easier to recycle a mathematician into a physicist than an historian or a psychologist.
Better math and even computation doesn't necessarily help in some cases. Take for instance the problem of making better solar cells and batteries.
We can't necessarily make a mathematical model useful for understanding the processes that happen during the manufacturing and operation of solar cells/batteries. In fact in many cases determining just what processes are happening is a problem in and of itself. We don't necessarily understand how batteries degrade or why adding a certain component or using a certain process makes batteries degrade less. Determining this often can only be done with real world experimentation.
One problem relevant to making organic solar cells is determining how organic constituents crystallize. A talk I saw looked into doing this computationally, but claimed it to be intractable. The problem was that the same compound, but with a different isotopic composition crystallized completely differently. This meant that nuclear motion mattered and that the already computationally expensive crystallization sim being done needed to be made orders of magnitude more computationally expensive to get useful results.
This isn't to say that math isn't useful, it's just that math isn't necessarily as useful when real world experimentation is necessary. That being said, math can still be quite effective in the natural sciences.
> Better math and even computation doesn't necessarily help in some cases
It is my impression that, at least on the topic of climate modelling, climate change denialism (which, frankly, is less and less common among educated population) was sustained by the rhetoric about models not being certain about linking anthropic change and its effects.
So at least here I see that better understanding (accuracy/reliability) about the climate system (which the azimuth group claims to have contributed to, if I remember correctly) might have a direct effect on, at least, social perception of the uncertainty surrounding science...
> Better math and even computation doesn't necessarily help in some cases.
> We don't necessarily understand how batteries degrade or why adding a certain component or using a certain process makes batteries degrade less.
It sounds like you're saying that better mathematical models can't possibly help because our current mathematical models aren't good enough. Huh? Isn't better theory exactly the answer to "how" and "why" questions? Why would you not want to improve the theory because the theory isn't good enough? Better theory is how you explain and guide real-world experimentation. Plenty of completely intractable problems have suddenly become quite tractable with better math.
> Programming with category theory. Category theory has a deep application in the study of functional programming languages. We hosted discussions for an MIT course on this topic, and encourage their continuation in the present.
What does this have to do with "saving the planet"?
The beauty of Category Theory draws brilliant mathematicians away from hedge funds and other industries which promote the excess carbon-producing status-quo. Spending all day proving theorems on a chalkboard is essentially carbon-neutral.
Milewski is fine, but Fong/Spivak are the kind of people that usually overpromise/underdeliver, so this seems to me like someone's effort to attract grant money and not much more.
Smart contracts will require heavy duty mathematics. There is work nearing release which would employ Haskell in this capacity.
These contracts are going to live in a very complex environment and have network effects which approximate a semantic web or a global narrow AI. My own angle on this stuff is collecting environmental information from bird calls heard by smartphones. This could alert us to sudden ecological changes.
In my view John is an exceptional educator, inspiring, energetic and accommodating to many people.
I do think, however, his 'save the planet' efforts are misplaced. I think the mathematical tooling and theoretical machinery to help technical initiatives in planet saving -- exists.
What does not exist is honesty in country/world wide policy making.
Every crook wants to be viewed as 'idea generator', planet-saving-angel -- as long as tax money get diverted to whatever causes -- through their 'sinks and facets' of control.
I am not advocating to give up -- I am advocating to use talents that these folks have to figure out how to achieve transparency in political, contractual system of incentives.
If they would work with investigative journalism to find who the crooks are, how they divert public money, how they have selective outrage against one entity, but not another doing similar things -- that were the focus should be.
Well, one of the possible applications is game theory. Maybe these techniques could be used to design incentive structure that work. This of course is very loose reasoning on my part as I don't really know the details.
The research areas listed on the homepage don't really give me the impression of people seriously interested in contributing to "saving the planet" in an applied and topical fashion...
My understanding is that this project is more of a way for established researchers in a very theoretical field to start thinking about climate while using their existing skill sets to contribute.
If you want to study category theory with people online, I recommend the Zulip Channel: https://categorytheory.zulipchat.com/
(you can DM me for an invite). Still, I don't understand how this is in anyway related to "saving the planet". It seems chemistry, material science or mechanical engineering would be much more promising directions..
Time is a scarce resource. If you want to solve something, the most straightforward path is to attack the core of the problem. In the time that an average person spent to understand what a monad is, another average person may have already found a way to scale direct air capture by 10x or more.
This does not mean one shouldn't study category theory; but one should study it for its own merit, not under the illusion that it is an effective way to "save the planet."
Even if some physical/scientific solution was discovered, still remaining is the issue of politician and public (voting, lifestyle) support, much like we see with vaccines. Running a study of that in parallel with scientific studies seems like the logical thing to do, yet another lesson we didn't learn from covid I guess.
What about engineering social attractors so that people just move away from their habits and start doing things differently ? availability, social mirroring can be leveraged to migrate people from one lifestyle to another, without relying on policies.
After all marketing is all about making the masses move a certain way..
Sounds good. Sadly, there's this thing called "hyper-stimulus" - someone mentioned recently "Infinite Jest" and the desire to watch a particular video over and over again. I do think the fear of this thought played a deep role in DFW's desperation.
All this to say: some social attractors are way more attractive than others (that's why they are "dark" patterns). Only physical constrains will do the trick, I'm afraid.
That sounds like an excellent start to me, what other techniques might be out there though? If we never look (as advertisers have done with marketing products in order to accomplish their goal: make people buy their products), we may never know.
Readit News
It's gotten so bad that utilities are fighting the problem of drying out pipes and have to spend money unplugging clogged sewer lines that don't have enough water in them. But no amount of reasoning helps, the people see stories of thirsty children in Africa and decide the best thing they can do is to take shorter showers, and re-use water from cooking to gardening. Meanwhile Germany only uses 2.7 percent of its available drinking water. When asked why they do this, answers range from "It's for the environment. And the children." to "I feel sorry for the water."[1]
So on the long list of crazy things that people do to "save the planet", studying math is quite beneficial.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/theres-too-much-water-in-german...
Germany had 9 out of the ten last seasons net-dry. It lost 700,000 acres of forest in the last three years due to lack of water. Spruces in lower-lying regions are pretty much done for Shipping on the river Rhine had to be restricted due to low water.
Germany is mostly still OK - you see most of the effects in regions with sandy soils, where water isn't retained long enough. (E.g a lot of the eastern parts) And, like everywhere around climate change, the "consumer efforts" are mostly existing to distract from the major sources of problems. (For water, in Germany, that would be electricity generation and the need for coolant)
The "water masochism" is a deflection by politicians, rooted in a real problem.
You know the WSJ is lying when their sublede contains "criticized by some". It's the traditional unattributed quote that's mostly made up.
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/complex-adap...
Dead Comment
If you read journal articles, etc. you'll find a truly surprising number go out of their way to mention climate change, green initiatives, etc. when they lack good reason to do so. In particular, these words will take places of honour in the abstract or even the title while the rest of the article pays them scant and passing notice.
Why do this? Funding. Every generation of science has it's magical buzzwords. Most recognize them for what they are but, when the people with money can't decide on a difference in merit between what you're doing and what your competitors are doing, buzzwords can make the difference.
Is this another case of buzzword fund-farming? I'm not qualified to say, and you'd probably need to ask the participants in this initiative to track down somebody who is. That's why this sort of thing is so hard to stop.
We can't necessarily make a mathematical model useful for understanding the processes that happen during the manufacturing and operation of solar cells/batteries. In fact in many cases determining just what processes are happening is a problem in and of itself. We don't necessarily understand how batteries degrade or why adding a certain component or using a certain process makes batteries degrade less. Determining this often can only be done with real world experimentation.
One problem relevant to making organic solar cells is determining how organic constituents crystallize. A talk I saw looked into doing this computationally, but claimed it to be intractable. The problem was that the same compound, but with a different isotopic composition crystallized completely differently. This meant that nuclear motion mattered and that the already computationally expensive crystallization sim being done needed to be made orders of magnitude more computationally expensive to get useful results.
This isn't to say that math isn't useful, it's just that math isn't necessarily as useful when real world experimentation is necessary. That being said, math can still be quite effective in the natural sciences.
It is my impression that, at least on the topic of climate modelling, climate change denialism (which, frankly, is less and less common among educated population) was sustained by the rhetoric about models not being certain about linking anthropic change and its effects.
So at least here I see that better understanding (accuracy/reliability) about the climate system (which the azimuth group claims to have contributed to, if I remember correctly) might have a direct effect on, at least, social perception of the uncertainty surrounding science...
Dead Comment
https://www.dal.ca/diff/dahn/research/adv_diagnostics.html
> We don't necessarily understand how batteries degrade or why adding a certain component or using a certain process makes batteries degrade less.
It sounds like you're saying that better mathematical models can't possibly help because our current mathematical models aren't good enough. Huh? Isn't better theory exactly the answer to "how" and "why" questions? Why would you not want to improve the theory because the theory isn't good enough? Better theory is how you explain and guide real-world experimentation. Plenty of completely intractable problems have suddenly become quite tractable with better math.
What does this have to do with "saving the planet"?
I’m like 95% joking.
Deleted Comment
Also, from the people at MIT: https://forum.azimuthproject.org/categories/mit-2020%3A-lect...
From my experience in the field,
Milewski is fine, but Fong/Spivak are the kind of people that usually overpromise/underdeliver, so this seems to me like someone's effort to attract grant money and not much more.
These contracts are going to live in a very complex environment and have network effects which approximate a semantic web or a global narrow AI. My own angle on this stuff is collecting environmental information from bird calls heard by smartphones. This could alert us to sudden ecological changes.
[1] https://math.ucr.edu/home//baez/theoretical/theoretical_web....
In my view John is an exceptional educator, inspiring, energetic and accommodating to many people.
I do think, however, his 'save the planet' efforts are misplaced. I think the mathematical tooling and theoretical machinery to help technical initiatives in planet saving -- exists.
What does not exist is honesty in country/world wide policy making.
Every crook wants to be viewed as 'idea generator', planet-saving-angel -- as long as tax money get diverted to whatever causes -- through their 'sinks and facets' of control.
I am not advocating to give up -- I am advocating to use talents that these folks have to figure out how to achieve transparency in political, contractual system of incentives.
If they would work with investigative journalism to find who the crooks are, how they divert public money, how they have selective outrage against one entity, but not another doing similar things -- that were the focus should be.
Then you can predict a crisis with your esoteric model, use that to justify forcing your political choices on others, and shame anyone who disagrees!
This does not mean one shouldn't study category theory; but one should study it for its own merit, not under the illusion that it is an effective way to "save the planet."
After all marketing is all about making the masses move a certain way..
All this to say: some social attractors are way more attractive than others (that's why they are "dark" patterns). Only physical constrains will do the trick, I'm afraid.