Month: April 2010

Psychology of language learning

Continuing with the introductory psychology course I mentioned earlier, I have gotten to the section on language. A few of the things mentioned in it seem to have quite a bit of practical importance:

  • Elaborate language learning tools like flashcards are pointless, for teaching children language.
  • Pre-pubescent children are fundamentally more capable of learning languages than people beyond puberty, who will likely never be able to speak new languages without an accent.
  • Children learning two languages at once learn both just as fast as children learning only one or the other.
  • Being intelligent and social is not sufficient for a being to be capable of learning language. For instance, mutations in certain human genes can prevent people from ever being able to speak or understand language.
  • There is a strong genetic component in the ability people have to learn languages; those with parents skilled in the task are likely to be skilled as well.

The take-home message seems to be that if you want to give a child linguistic advantages, expose them to two or more useful languages as young as possible.

Oliver Twist

The latest audiobook I have worked by way through in snatches while walking or taking the bus was Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. The version I listened to was provided by the same University of Southern Florida program I mentioned previously. The files are available for free online.

The book is a decidedly interesting one, and an worthwhile commentary on such matters as class relations and the nature of crime. At the very least, it is worth listening to or reading the first few chapters. They are an excellent satirical denunciation of the English Poor Laws, which I would say has contemporary relevance as well:

For the next eight or ten months, Oliver was the victim of a systematic course of treachery and deception. He was brought up by hand. The hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities. The parish authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities, whether there was no female then domiciled in ‘the house’ who was in a situation to impart to Oliver Twist, the consolation and nourishment of which he stood in need. The workhouse authorities replied with humility, that there was not. Upon this, the parish authorities magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be ‘farmed,’ or, in other words, that he should be dispatched to a branch-workhouse some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female, who received the culprits at and for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week. Sevenpence-halfpenny’s worth per week is a good round diet for a child; a great deal may be got for sevenpence-halfpenny, quite enough to overload its stomach, and make it uncomfortable. The elderly female was a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children; and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself. So, she appropriated the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own use, and consigned the rising parochial generation to even a shorter allowance than was originally provided for them. Thereby finding in the lowest depth a deeper still; and proving herself a very great experimental philosopher.

Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher who had a great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died, four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable bait of air. Unfortunately for, the experimental philosophy of the female to whose protecting care Oliver Twist was delivered over, a similar result usually attended the operation of her system; for at the very moment when the child had contrived to exist upon the smallest possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was usually summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers it had never known in this.

This sort of treatment is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift, and seems to be quite an effective form of social criticism. Rather than make a direct argument that a particular approach is unethical, you can defend the approach in such a preposterous way as to convey that message indirectly.

One thing I found odd about listening to the book was the antisemitic treatment of the character Fagin. Fagin is very frequently referred to as “The Jew” and it is at least implied that part of the reason for his criminal and unethical behaviour is tied to his Judaism. As a child, I was never exposed to any writing in which a character was portrayed as especially wicked, partly as a result of being Jewish. Indeed, I came across the concept of antisemitism academically long before I saw any examples of it in fiction or real world discourses. Possibly because of that, it has always struck me as an absurd point of view. I wonder whether exposing children to books like Oliver Twist subtly pre-conditions them to find antisemitism a plausible point of view.

Normally, I am very much of the view that censorship is an odious practice, even when supposedly done for the benefit of children. That being said, it does seem regrettable that literature might act as a vector for the transmission of baseless ideas from one generation and set of social circumstances to another.

Efficient social housing

Here is a nice idea, social housing developments designed with an eye turned towards energy efficiency:

The boiler room houses a microturbine system, which generates energy for electricity and heat. It reuses heat that would otherwise be lost to the atmosphere, reducing carbon emissions while also cutting costs…

Enterprise [Community Partners] believes “green” and “affordable” are one and the same. It has created a national framework for healthy, efficient, environmentally clever and affordable homes which it calls the Green Communities Criteria. These criteria include water conservation, energy efficiency and the use of environmentally-friendly building materials. The criteria are aligned with LEED, a green rating system. Meeting the criteria increases housing construction costs by 2%, which is rapidly paid back by lower running costs. Even the positioning of a window to optimise daylight can help save energy.

To me, this seems like another example of the market ordinarily caring too much about up-front costs, and not enough about total cost of ownership.

If the ordinary building code was altered so as to make new buildings significantly more efficient, at an increased cost of about 2%, it seems likely that both the residents and the planet would benefit in the long run.

Back up genes from endangered species

Out in Svalbard there is a seed bank, buried in the permafrost. The idea is that it will serve as a refuge for plant species that may vanish elsewhere, perhaps because industrial monocrops (fields where only a single species is intentionally cultivated by industrial means) continue to expand as the key element of modern agriculture.

Perhaps there should be a scientific and conservational project to collect just the genes of some of the great many species our species is putting into peril: everything from primates to mycorrhizal fungi to marine bacteria. The data could be stored, and maybe put to use at some distant point where humanity at large decides that it is better to carefully revive species than to indifferently exterminate them.

For many creatures, the genes alone won’t really be enough, regardless of how good at cloning we become. An elephant or a chimp built up alone from cells would never really become and elephant or chimp as they exist today. Whether those alive now are socialized in a natural or an artificial environment, they will have had some context-sensitive socialization, which subsequently affected their mental life. It is plausible to say that elephants or chimps raised among their peers, living in the way they did thousands of years ago, will develop mentally in a manner that is profoundly different from elephants or chimps in captivity today, much less solitary cloned beings in the future. Those beings will be weird social misfit representatives of those species.

Still, it is better to have misfits than nothing at all. If there is anything human beings should really devote themselves to backing up with a cautious eye turned towards an uncertain future, it seems far more likely to be the genes of species our descendants may not be fortunate enough to know than the Hollywood movies that probably account for a significant proportion of all the world’s hard drives.

CRU exonerated again

As was the case with an earlier review by British Members of Parliament, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been cleared of wrongdoing for a second time. An independent panel chaired by Lord Oxburgh found no evidence of scientific malpractice, though it did encourage the CRU to work more with statisticians in the future.

The full report is here: Report of the International Panel set up by the University of East Anglia to examine the research of the Climatic Research Unit.

Once again, the message seems to be that whatever flaws existed within the CRU do not undermine it fundamentally as an institution, and certainly do not call climate science overall into question. Hopefully, that result will percolate through the media. In the end, I fear, these reviews will get a lot less public attention than the earliest breathless claims of climate change deniers that these emails somehow proved climate change to be a hoax or a fraud.

Krugman on climate economics

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has written an excellent introductory article on climate and environmental economics, for The New York Times: Building a Green Economy. The piece is a combination of a non-technical introduction and a kind of literature review. His basic thesis is:

In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.

I agree that the latter disagreements exist, and I agree with Krugman that what we know about the climate system justifies aggressive action to reduce and eventually eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, the non-trivial danger of catastrophic outcomes is a strong justification for precautionary action.

The article includes a concise explanation of Pigovian taxes, of which carbon taxes are a sub-category:

What Pigou enunciated was a principle: economic activities that impose unrequited costs on other people should not always be banned, but they should be discouraged. And the right way to curb an activity, in most cases, is to put a price on it. So Pigou proposed that people who generate negative externalities should have to pay a fee reflecting the costs they impose on others — what has come to be known as a Pigovian tax. The simplest version of a Pigovian tax is an effluent fee: anyone who dumps pollutants into a river, or emits them into the air, must pay a sum proportional to the amount dumped.

Note that as discussed here before, such taxes may be technical mechanisms, but they do not eliminate the need to make ethical choices. Just because a company has been burning coal for decades doesn’t mean it has the right to continue doing so, particularly as new information on why its use is harmful comes to light. By the same token, it is not an ethically neutral choice to say that people who have enjoyed a clean river have the right for it to remain unpolluted. There are many bases on which claims can be made: historical precedent, need, prior agreements, overall welfare, etc. Economics alone cannot provide a solution.

The article also covers cap-and-trade systems, and the ways in which they are similar to and different from carbon taxes; the importance of whether permits are auctioned or not; how even strong mitigation policies would only cost 1-3% of the global domestic product; the importance of major emerging economies taking action; carbon tariffs as a way of encouraging that; the sustantial costs of inaction; the signicance of catatrophic risks (“it’s the nonnegligible probability of utter disaster that should dominate our policy analysis”); a non-mathematical discussion of discount rates; and the status and prospects of climate legislation in the United States.

In short, the article touches on a great many topics that have been discussed here previously, and generally reaches rather similar conclusions to mine and those of most of this site’s commentors. One slightly annoying thing about the piece is that is discusses temperatures using the idiotic Fahrenheit scale, but I suppose that is to be expected when writing for an American audience. Another strange thing about the article is how Krugman fails to mention any of the co-benefits that accompany moving beyond fossil fuels: from reduced air and water pollution to lessened geopolitical dependency.

One of the best things about the piece is how is openly recognizes the seriousness of the problem we are addressing:

We’re not talking about a few more hot days in the summer and a bit less snow in the winter; we’re talking about massively disruptive events, like the transformation of the Southwestern United States into a permanent dust bowl over the next few decades.

Too many recent journalistic accounts and government announcements have affirmed the strength of climate science, without elaborating on what that means, and the type and scale of actions that compels.

The piece is probably worth reading for anybody who doesn’t feel like they have a basic understanding of environmental economics, and their relation to climate policy.

Proposed pumped hydroelectric storage in Australia

Over at BraveNewClimate, there are some plans and cost estimates for a large (9 gigawatt) pumped hydroelectric storage facility in Australia. Two reservoirs separated by 875m of elevation would be joined with a 53km pipe. The total estimated cost is $6.6 billion, or about $744 per kilowatt of storage. That is a pretty expensive proposition, given energy prices today. That being said, such storage facilities are likely to be essential for increasing the share of total energy usage that comes from renewables, across the medium-to-long term. Right now, most Australian electricity is generated by burning coal.

I wrote previously about a similar facility in Wales.

Psychological dualism

There is a distinction drawn in theories about the human mind between ‘monist’ and ‘dualist’ understandings of how it works. Dualists, like Descartes, see the mind as essentially separate from the body. Monists believe that “the mind is what the brain does,” and that there is no distinction between the two.

The position of the two views in society is an odd one, as an excellent Paul Bloom lecture discusses. We can readily understand situations that presume dualism: the continued life of the soul after death, the idea that the mind of one person could be transferred into another person or animal, etc.

Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, Homer described the fate of the companions of Odysseus who were transformed by a witch into pigs. Actually, that’s not quite right. She didn’t turn them into pigs. She did something worse. She stuck them in the bodies of pigs. They had the head and voice and bristles and body of swine but their minds remained unchanged as before, so they were penned there weeping. And we are invited to imagine the fate of again finding ourselves in the bodies of other creatures and, if you can imagine this, this is because you are imagining what you are as separate from the body that you reside in.

Clearly, we are able to imagine minds that would remain essentially unchanged, even when altered into a radically different physical form.

At the same time at dualism seems to make intuitive sense to people, all the physical evidence we have is on the side of a monist view, in which ‘mind’ arises from the physical properties of body:

Somebody who hold a–held a dualist view that said that what we do and what we decide and what we think and what we want are all have nothing to do with the physical world, would be embarrassed by the fact that the brain seems to correspond in intricate and elaborate ways to our mental life.

…

Somebody with a severe and profound loss of mental faculties–the deficit will be shown correspondingly in her brain. Studies using imaging techniques like CAT scans, PET, and fMRI, illustrate that different parts of the brain are active during different parts of mental life. For instance, the difference between seeing words, hearing words, reading words and generating words can correspond to different aspects of what part of your brain is active. To some extent, if we put you in an fMRI scanner and observed what you’re doing in real time, by looking at the activity patterns in your brain we can tell whether you are thinking about music or thinking about sex. To some extent we can tell whether you’re solving a moral dilemma versus something else. And this is no surprise if what we are is the workings of our physical brains, but it is extremely difficult to explain if one is a dualist.

The lecture includes many other examples showing why monism and the world as we observe it seem to mesh.

To me, the importance of this seems to go beyond settling scientific and/or metaphysical questions. It certainly seems plausible that beings that intuitively perceive themselves as essentially independent from physical reality will develop high-level theories about the world that take that into account, in areas as diverse as their religious, political, and moral views. By the same token, if one view really is far more defensible than the other, on the basis of observations and experiments we perform, that quite possibly has moral and political implications. It is all quite interesting, in any case, and I recommend that people consider watching the lecture series. The videos, transcripts, and slides are all available for free online.

Climate Change Accountability Act vote

This Wednesday, Bill C-311 (Climate Change Accountability Act) will be debated at Report Stage. This NDP-sponsored bill includes targets of a 25% reduction in emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% below by 2050. It also obliges the government to produce an emissions target plan for 2015, 2020, 2025, 2030, 2035, 2040 and 2045.

I don’t know that the bill’s prospects for passing are, but it seems likely to have little effect in any case. Parliament previously passed the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act, in the face of government opposition. The government refused to alter its climate change mitigation plans in response, and the Supreme Court Federal Court of Appeal ruled that the law was ‘not justiciable’ and therefore not for the courts to enforce.

The only importance this bill seems likely to have is a mild and symbolic one. If it passes, it will show continued dissatisfaction on the part of opposition parties about the government’s climate plan. If it fails, it risks showing the opposition parties divided on the issue, or unwilling to make it a priority.

[Update: 13 April 2010] This post originally made reference to the Supreme Court of Canada, whereas it should have made reference to the Federal Court.

[Update: 15 April 2010] The bill passed the Report Stage and will go to Third Reading, probably via committee. The motion to send it to Third Reading passed by 155 to 137.