Getting the Big Picture: Timeframes and Critical Dependencies

AJM’s Editorial Comment: This page was produced in 2015; advances in energy production and different energy solutions can have a strong, mitigating impact on some of the arguments advanced here from a few years ago.

One of the most important things that we can do is develop a large-scale, widely-encompassing world view.

Kurzweill and others have addressed the technological (and/or mathematical) singularity. This is one big factor impacting any predictions that last longer than a few years.

On the same scale, we need to look at the overall human condition.

By now, we are largely agreed that as a species, we are facing huge challenges that will only get bigger. We are dealing with the increasing prospect of resource scarcity, coupled with a growing amount of environmental toxicity – toxicity that we ourselves have produced. The combination, as we all know from our general reading, is like growing bacteria in a petri dish. At some point, the massively-reproducing bacteria colonies run out of food, and wallow in their own waste. A population growth surge ends in sudden die-off.

As predictive analysts, we need to be aware of the big picture:

1. What depends on what? – discerning the major building-blocks for model building,
2. What are the more subtle interdependencies? – with a view to that which must be incorporated into a zero-order and first-order model, and which can be deferred until later, and
3. What are the crucial timeframes? – are we talking months, years, or decades?

 

I like all my students to start with the very sobering blogpost by Paul Chefurka, Population: The Elephant in the Room.

This post (and actually a series of posts, with a full-scale model) introduces two crucial topics:

1. The carrying capacity of the earth – how many people this planet can actually support, and
2. The dependence of carrying capacity on oil production.

Now, I won’t say that Paul’s work is outdated – rather that the timeframes that he’s working with should be extended, due to recent discoveries of major oil reserves in West Texas and the Bakken, as well as oil-rich resources in the Arctic and elsewhere.

Paul’s model places the carrying capacity of the earth for supporting our (very large) population as direct function of oil production.

There’s a very real chance that Paul’s entire model will become outdated, if we can remove ourselves from dependence on petroleum products. However, these products support agriculture (fertilizers) as well as energy, so even improvements in our energy infrastructure leave us needing petroleum-based products just to produce food at the capacities that we’ve become used to.

For now, it is worthwhile to note: The projected carrying capacity of this planet is one of those cases where the global model is not as useful as a composite of regional models.

Simply put, what happens in North America will not be the same as what happens in North Africa. Different populations, cultures and infrastructures, resources, and geographic boundaries all contribute.

Thus, one of the things we need to learn – as predictive analysts – is: what is the right decomposition level for modeling something? We’ll take this on during class, and I’ll address this topic in some blogposts. (Links will be published HERE when they are written.)

For now, we need to start building an overall awareness – an internal model – of what the big variables are. We need to cultivate a gut sense of what is independent, what is dependent. What portions of the problem we can segment out and model with some degree of isolation; meaning whether or not various model components are tightly or loosely coupled. We need to identify timeframes for crucial variable evolutions, and identify factors that influence those timeframes.

This obviously entails a great deal of reading, reflection, and study.

Even more than reading the basic materials, we need to situate them in a broader, well-shaped world-view.

We need to understand geology and geography, social and political structures, ecology and world finance. (And I’m writing this as someone who cut her teeth on math, physics, and chemistry – my Ph.D. is physical chemistry – so for me to be recommending reads in, say, socio-politics is going over to the dark side.)

I encourage all my students to continuously maintain world-knowledge by reading the kinds of well-researched and thought-provoking articles that show up in journals such as:

• The Economist – free online access to its most recent articles,
• The Atlantic Monthly – also online access to recent articles, and
• Barron’s – for really good financial analysis, and which does not provide free access to anything, but offers a reasonable subscription fee.