Month: September 2007

Consequentialism and ‘public service’ ethics

Bunker control panel

I spent the last two days at a mandatory orientation to the public service. The bits about the structure of government (role of the PCO and Treasury Board, for instance) were quite useful. The bits of values and ethics much less so, largely because of how artificially precise they try to make it. For instance, they define four ‘families’ of personal values. These map one-to-one to four ‘public service’ values. It is not clear that the four sets are well defined, nor that the mapping is as clear or automatic as is posited.

The fourth ‘family’ is especially odd. It basically centres around the rejection of the phrase ‘the end justifies the means.’ What they mean by this, essentially, is not to circumvent procedures that exist for good reasons to achieve some narrow objective. What seems foolish about it is the fact that the ethical yardstick remains the ends. It is inappropriate to fast-track an excellent seeming job candidate past normal checks because of the risk that your intuition is wrong, and the possibility doing so will undermine the system. Both objections are ultimately based on a comparison between two sets of means (sloppy and rigorous) and two sets of outcomes. It is also quite plausible that situations exist where rejecting the normal procedure is the best ethical option: if you have a frigate with broken engines being fired upon, it makes sense to be more slipshod than usual in the quality of your repairs.Of course, there are also lots of situations where following protocol rigidly even when under fire (literally or metaphorically) produces your best chances of success.

As such, it as fairer to say that ‘the set of all ends justifies the means.’ There are lots of good arguments for rules (they are efficient, clear, and transparent) but the reason these properties are desirable is because of the ends they eventually produce.

The monthly and the bi-weekly

Every second Wednesday, I expect Ottawa experiences a marked uptick in consumer spending as all the civil servants get paid simultaneously. This may prove especially true next month, due to a quirk in financial timetables. Since paycheques are issued every two weeks, there are always at least two in a month. Twice a year, however, there will be a month where people get three paycheques. Most people, I expect, deal primarily with expenses that run month to month: rent, credit card bills, and the like. As such, that third paycheque seems like a kind of windfall.

Thought of in this way, the question that comes to mind is how to deal with the ‘surplus.’ The most conservative option would be to put it toward my student loan payments. An alternative is to put it into general savings, as a hedge against future financial needs. A final and more appealing option would be to spend it on a big purchase. My iBook is suffering more and more acutely with the pasage of time. Despite the upgrade to 1.25 GB of RAM, it now takes more than 20 minutes to boot up (I never shut it down, if I can avoid it). It also has trouble accessing the web, playing music, and keeping track of email at the same time. A new MacBook might be an excellent way to help ease myself into Ottawa’s winter chill…

Dr. Strangelove in a nuclear bunker

Marc Gurstein rides the bomb

After today’s orientation, I went with some friends to see Dr. Strangelove in the Diefenbunker – the infamous Canadian nuclear shelter, built to protect top Canadian military and civilian leadership in the event of nuclear war. Diefenbunker is actually a general term for shelters of the type: the one near Ottawa is called CFS Carp. Apparently, there is also one in Nanaimo, B.C. One odd thing is that the shelter has a multi-room suite for the Governor General. Presumably, Canada would not have much need for a local representative of the Queen, after the actual Queen’s entire realm is reduced to a burnt, radioactive plain.

Tonight’s film was followed up by Pho with three fellow employees of the federal government. It was all a distinct social step forward, and Ashley Thorvaldson deserves credit for organizing the expedition.

You can read about the Cold War movies events on the website of the Diefenbunker Museum.

The folly of Apollo redux

In an earlier post, I discussed the wastefulness of manned spaceflight. In particular, plans to return to the Moon or go to Mars cannot be justified in any sensible cost-benefit analysis. The cost is high, and the main benefit seems to be national prestige. Human spaceflight is essentially defended in a circular way: we need to undertake it so that we can learn how human beings function in space.

A post on Gristmill captures it well:

Let me be clear. There is a 0 percent chance that this Moon base or anything like it will ever be built, for the following reason: the moon missions in the ’60s and early ’70s cost something like $100 billion in today’s dollars. There is no way that setting up a semipermanent lunar base will be anything other than many times more expensive. That would put the total cost at one to a few trillion dollars.

Assuming that this taxpayer money needs to be lavished on big aerospace firms like Lockheed anyhow, it would be much better spent on satellites for the study of our planet (Some comprehensive temperature data for Antarctica, perhaps? Some RADAR analysis of the Greenland icecap? Some salaries for people studying climatic feedbacks?) or on robotic missions to objects of interest in the solar system.

Liability and computer security

One of the major points of intersection between law and economics is liability. By setting the rules about who can sue brake manufacturers, in what circumstances, and to what extent, lawmakers help to set the incentives for quality control within that industry. By establishing what constitutes negligence in different areas, the law tries to balance efficiency (encouraging cost-effective mitigation on the part of whoever can do it most cheaply) with equity.

I wonder whether this could be used, to some extent, to combat the botnets that have helped to make the internet such a dangerous place. In brief, a botnet consists of ordinary computers that have been taken over by a virus. While they don’t seem to have been altered, from the perspective of users, they can be maliciously employed by remote control to send spam, attack websites, carry out illegal transactions, and so forth. There are millions of such computers, largely because so many unprotected PCs with incautious and ignorant users are connected constantly to broadband connections.

As it stands, there is some chance that an individual computer owner will face legal consequences if their machine is used maliciously in this way. What would be a lot more efficient would be to pass part of the responsibility to internet service providers. That is to say, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) whose networks transmit spam or viruses outwards could be sued by those harmed as a result. These firms have the staff, expertise, and network control. Given the right incentives, they could require users to use up-to-date antivirus software that they would provide. They could also screen incoming and outgoing network traffic for viruses and botnet control signals. They could, in short, become more like the IT department at an office. ISPs with such obligations would then lean on the makers of software and operating systems, forcing them to build more secure products.

As Bruce Schneier has repeatedly argued, hoping to educate users as a means of creating overall security is probably doomed. People don’t have the interest or the incentives to learn and the technology and threats change to quickly. To do a better job of combating them, our strategies should change as well.

Candidate bicycle located

Ottawa tower block

I found a possible bike this evening: a Trek 7.3 FX hybrid. Originally $619.99, it is on sale for $439.99. I would probably have bought it tonight if there had been time to test it out before the shop closed. As it is, I will have some time to research it before I go give it a test ride on Thursday (mandatory orientations are happening for me tomorrow and Wednesday, on the opposite side of town).

The bike has Shimano Deore components, which the salesman tells me are the 6th of eight levels of quality sold on hybrids. It is quite light and seems well constructed. The place promises free repairs and tune-ups for a year, as well as an unspecified discount on a helmet, lock, and pump.

This is the last one available with a 20″ frame, which I am told would suit me better than the 22″. Hopefully, nobody will snap it up before me.

HCFC phaseout

While international negotiations on climate change don’t seem to be going anywhere at the moment, some further tightening has been agreed within the regime that combats substances that deplete the ozone layer (the Vienna Convention and Montreal Protocol). The parties have decided to speed up the elimination of hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), which were permitted as temporary substitutes for the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that destroy ozone most energetically.

The BBC reports that:

The US administration says the new deal will be twice as effective as the Kyoto Protocol in controlling greenhouse gas emissions.

This seems quite implausible to me. HFCs, PFCs, and SF6 collectively contribute about 1% of anthropogenic warming. As such, their complete elimination would have a fairlylimited effect. In addition, the Vienna Convention process always envisioned their elimination, so there is nothing substantially new about this announcement, other than the timing. An agreement for eliminating HCFCs has been in place since 1992:

1996 – production freeze
2004 – 35% reduction
2010 – 65% reduction
2015 – 90% reduction
2020 – 99.5% reduction
2030 – elimination

While it does seem that this timeline isn’t being followed, it remains to be seen whether this new announcement will have any effect on that.

The Kyoto Protocol targets a six different greenhouse gases, most importantly the carbon dioxide that constitutes 77% of anthropogenic climate change. If it had succeeded at reducing emissions among Annex I signatories by 5.2%, as planned, it would have been both a significant contribution and an important starting point.

None of this is to say that we shouldn’t welcome the HCFC phaseout. If nothing else, it should help with the recovery of the ozone layer. We just need to be cautious about accepting statements like the one quoted.

New climate change site from Nature

Nature, the respected scientific journal, has a new climate change portal full of free content. A free issue in the Nature Collections series on Energy is available as a PDF.

When relatively exlusive publications try to open themselves to a more general audience, the results can be interesting. In trunks back in North Vancouver, I have hundreds of issues of The Economist where all the images are black and white, and the pages are just columns of text sometimes accented in red. In the previous span where I subscribed to Scientific American they also made a big shift towards the mainstream. I doubt that Nature will undertake such a shift. It is, after all, a peer reviewed scientific journal, but it will be interesting to see whether their attempts to promote the visibility of some scientific data and analysis will shift the overall journalistic picture of climate change at all.

Oryx and Crake

Fire truck valves

Margaret Atwood‘s novel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, portrays a future characterized by the massive expansion of human capabilities in genetic engineering and biotechnology. As such, it bears some resemblance to Neal Stephenson‘s The Diamond Age, which ponders what massive advances in material science could do, and posits similar stratification by class. Of course, biotechnology is an area more likely to raise ethical hackles and engage with the intuitions people have about what constitutes the ethical use of science.

Atwood does her best to provoke many such thoughts: bringing up food ethics, that of corporations, reproductive ethics, and survivor ethics (the last time period depicted is essentially post-apocalyptic). The degree to which this is brought about by a combination of simple greed, logic limited by one’s own circumstances, and unintended consequences certainly has a plausible feel to it.

The book is well constructed and compelling, obviously the work of someone who is an experienced storyteller. From a technical angle, it is also more plausible than most science fiction. It is difficult to identify any element that is highly likely to be impossible for humanity to ever do, if desired. That, of course, contributes to the chilling effect, as the consequences for some such actions unfold.

All in all, I don’t think the book has a straightforwardly anti-technological bent. It is more a cautionary tale about what can occur in the absence of moral consideration and concomitant regulation. Given how the regulation of biotechnology is such a contemporary issue (stem cells, hybrid embryos, genetic discrimination, etc), Atwood has written something that speaks to some of the more important ethical discussions occurring today.

I recommend the book without reservation, with the warning that readers may find themselves disturbed by how possible it all seems.