Shalin Shekhar Mangar › Likes

tsk first thing we should do is what we already can do,...everything else is just blabla. the usa needs to get their stuff together and start modernizing. - Chris Hofmann

I'm going to go out on a limb here and disagree with both Bill Gates and Peter Norvig. First of all, it's vastly oversimplifying things to say that "the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050." What matters is not just the long-term rate of CO2 emissions but the amount of CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere. If we don't achieve a 30% reduction by 2025, we'll need to achieve a 90% reduction by 2050 to make up for it. (Numbers are completely made up, but you get the idea.) - Jim Norris

Second, the relevant innovations are not likely to be in the form of zero-marginal-cost Windows service packs. Both transportation and electricity generation are hugely capital intensive, so there's going to be a long lag time between when some new approach gets discovered in a lab and when the last coal power plant is replaced by a magical midichlorian-fueled plant. Any efficiency improvements on the usage side will dramatically shorten the time it takes for new technologies to replace old ones. - Jim Norris

"My point is not to denigrate efficiency. Slowing the growth of CO2 ppm is of course a good thing. And there are of course lots of cheap, and in many cases self-funding efficiency gains to be made. We should at the least fix market barriers and dysfunctions that prevent these gains from being realized. " - Mona Nomura

Third, innovation in power generation doesn't appear to have a constant rate of progress a la Moore's law—there's no clear reason to expect it to happen by 2050 but not by 2025. In fact, a lot of the necessary technologies (renewable electricity generation, plug-in hybrid cars) are already around today, and I think it would be a mistake to not pursue them because something better might... more... - Jim Norris

And I find it hard to believe that Huffington Post articles would be a better way to "make it clear to people what really matters" and avoid the danger that "people will think they just need to do a little bit and things will be fine" than actually investing in things that make a concrete difference today, or implementing a cap-and-trade or carbon-tax system that aligns economic... more... - Jim Norris

So what exactly is Gates arguing for, and against? He's for a "distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement" but against talk about "renewable portfolios[…] and cap and trade", the kinds of distributed systems and government encouragements that would make investments in innovation actually pay off? He's afraid that "people will think... more... - Jim Norris

It just sounds like he's shooting down a straw man and putting up a deus-ex-machina in its place. Maybe it just sounds that way to me though. As with plug-in hybrids, your mileage may vary. - Jim Norris

I don't know about you, but I always get my science advice from the HuffPo. Especially medical science. - Mr. Gunn

HuffPo just reposted from gatesnotes http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Thinkin... ...and at this point, awareness is key. Publishing on HuffPo and the public sharing the pieces across respective networks is better than nothing. Especially, when we take into account the US' participation towards an international political framework; specifically, G8. - Mona Nomura

Gates didn't say "no insulation", he said "not just insulation". I took his argument to be an instance of Amdahl's Law: if we want to get to an 80% improvement, don't concentrate on an area that only accounts for a small percentage of the overall problem. - Peter Norvig

From my perspective, which is objective and unbiased, Gates sees environmental advocates pushing solutions like home insulation and proper tire inflation as not particularly helpful and distracting from the bigger problems. I've never gotten the impression anywhere that we were concentrating on insulation as a big part of the solution; rather it's a technologically simple remediation... more... - Jim Norris

But it's not the 80% solution, and I don't know of anyone claiming that it would be. Beyond those low-or-negative-cost 20% measures, the possibilities are less certain. I think there's a pretty broad consensus that we'll need both short-term/cheap/safe/incremental and long-term/expensive/risky/innovative measures. I think Gates has a point that we need to be concentrating on the latter... more... - Jim Norris

Since we have and we'll need both short- and long-term efforts, if Gates thinks that we're taking the wrong approach for the 2050+ date, it would make a lot more sense for him to criticize our current long-term strategy that he wants to change, rather than the short-term strategy that is mostly irrelevant. Maybe we focus on the short-term because that's what we can watch being done now... more... - Jim Norris

His "bold new plan" boils down to "a distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement". That is rather vague but useful starting point. Right now we have at least one system that works this way: the so-called free market, wherein people are endowed with the right to take their own pursuit of ecological happiness, and successful... more... - Jim Norris

I don't get it - Jesse Stay

There are O(log(n)) kinds of people in this world. - Kevin Fox

You guys are starting to sound like Google employees ;-) - Jesse Stay

Recovering Google employees. ;-) - Kevin Fox

I suspect with Principal Component Analysis or Bloom filters you could find interesting subsets - Kevin Marks

Good point. I bet you could make an awesome dating site that clustered people based on which jokes they find funny instead of some boring personality profile. - Paul Buchheit

That would be an awesome Facebook app - hmmm... - Jesse Stay

I'm not sure that I would like people with my sense of humor. Though I might like people who wouldn't like people with their own sense of humor. - Kevin Fox

You could do some really interesting things on Facebook with this - have people take a quiz of jokes and select the ones they like, then show them the friends that like the same jokes. They then get to decide if they like, or dislike those types of friends. You then get smarter the next time - they use the app more because they want the app to get smarter. - Jesse Stay