On Incentives

 This shouldn't be news, but your boss makes more money than you. The boss' boss, even more. The top boss, it's just absurd; the average CEO makes 364 times what the average worker does. If you work at Walmart, the CEO probably tops your annual salary every hour. Why so high? While we're at it, why do bankers get million-dollar bonuses, even after driving their banks into the ground?

 Well, if you asked one of the top dogs, they'd tell you that they need to pay that much to attract the best and the brightest, that talent follows financial incentive. On the face of it, it almost makes sense-- that the best and brightest minds in the economy will go where they can make the most money for the least effort. This assumes that the best and brightest are somewhat lazy and only motivated by cash; sociologists are still arguing over that, but I'm not qualified to dive into their debates. What I want to ask is whether they really believe that the world really works that way, these men at the levers of power.

 It's a simple question to answer. If we really believe that talent follows the money, we should logically structure our society a certain way; if not, we won't. So, if we really bought into this, how would the world look?

 Well, if you asked most people, I suspect they'd say that a cure for cancer would be a good thing to have. Vital, for many of them. Curing cancer, as it turns out, is harder than running a profitable business. Much harder. Thousands of corporations turn a profit each year, after all, and we've yet to definitively cure a single type of cancer. So to attract the top talent, the best brains, the men and women researching a cure should be paid appropriately, right? Hundreds of times the average CEO pay?
If you want the talent, you've got to pay for it, or so goes CEO-logic. So why do postdocs only make 30-50 thousand dollars? At Stanford , for example. Which I should tell you is not a terribly cash-strapped institution, and have quite competitive pay scales.

 Competitive for research, that is. Not competitive for anything else you have to spend 10 years in school to do. I submit, then, that either North American society cares more about public transit than it does about curing cancer, or we don't really believe in financial incentive.

 Personally, I imagine it's the later, but who knows? Maybe I just care too much about tumorous growths.  If you don't think curing cancer is a high priority, replace it with heart disease, or any other medical problem. Or if you're more concerned with energy than medicine, try that. Whatever your priorities, the paragraphs above stay the same: the research that advances our civilisation doesn't pay like it would if we really needed money to incentivise.

 Of course that's the difference: double my pay, you won't get one iota more work out of me. Pay me like a CEO, and you'll still get the same output: all I can do.* There are other, better motivators than money: there's simple craftsmanship, pride in doing a good job for it's own sake; there's the altruistic drive to do good for your fellow man; there's the selfish desire to go down in history; et cetera.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

 That, I think, is my answer. The world simply does not look like it should if we were only motivated by larges sacks with dollar signs on the side. Nor do I have any experience with individuals who are-- and while anecdotes do not make evidence, a counterexample destroys the rule. And my counter example is this: the best minds I've ever known all work for love, not money.



*In all honesty, if you paid me like a CEO, I'd treat almost all of that salary as a research grant and build some dedicated instruments-- so you might actually see more results from me, but not because I'm any more motivated or working any harder. This isn't how it works with most bankers and CEOs; except for small business owners (who don't make the millions anyway) their immense salaries are never rolled back into the business, even when it is going bankrupt.

Lunar vs. NEO Resources

     Last time we saw that there are Near Earth Asteroids which are quite alot easier to get to than the Moon. Today, I'll discuss why, even if the accessibilities were reversed, there's little worth going to the Moon for-- and plenty in the asteroids.
     So what's the Moon made of, anyway? Well, rock, obviously. Just rock, in fact. No ore. "Ore" is what we call rock concentrated enough in useful minerals to be worth mining-- and we've never found any on the Moon. Moonrocks, like the rocks on Earth, are mostly silicon, aluminum and titanium oxides: SiO2, Al2O3, and TiO2. Yes, oxygen, wonderful! Except that those are some of the strongest chemical bonds nature makes. To get something useful out of the lunar rock, you first have to collect it and crush it, and somehow separate grains of SiO2 from Al2O3 and TiO2. Then you have to melt the rock. Melting rock is not trivial, but you can do it; 1600C is possible with a solar a mirror on the airless moon, except during the 2 weeks of lunar night. Then you have to electrolyze the molten rock (and no, you won't be getting those electrodes back)-- run a current through it to get metal ions plated to one electrode, and oxygen bubbling off at the other. This takes a terrific amount of power--13 600W*h/kg per pound, for Aluminum. This is how that's done on Earth, and it doesn't get much better for the other metals. Now imagine moving all the equipment and reaction mass to run that process up on existing rockets. And you're still not done! You still need to cast/mill/machine/finish whatever you're making out of the aluminum, if you can avoid the omnipresent dust. If it didn't break your big, heavy open pit mining equipment.
          Now, it's not that it's not doable. There's even water, some, for your moon miners down at the poles (in cryogenic cold deeper than anything our equipment has been tested at, where ice is just another rock) -- but the ice comes from comets, so why not just cut out the middle-man and go to the source?
         And if you want metals, M-type asteroids are the richest ore bodies anyone could imagine--just hunks of stainless steel, floating in space. Mostly Iron (92%), but ~10% Nickel and upto 20ppm platinum group metals; which isn't much but it's better than the output of most terrestrial mines. Most of the transition group metals are represented--including gallium and arsenic, if you want to make solar cells.
        How do you get that purified, then? Isn't it as hard as refining on the moon? In a word, no. Here's a video:

Okay, yes, melting. Bring a mirror
         Giant mirrors are easy when there's no gravity; tinfoil will do. Tinfoil is massively overbuilt, in fact. We can thin it out to a few atoms thick and be fine. Such mirrors aren't too hard to manufacture in space--it's far easier there than on Earth, in fact. For a suboptimal, tinfoil-type mirror, just spin your molten asteroid fast enough and it'll flatten to a disk, like tossing god's own pizza dough. Or do this: add ice, or a puff of air, and your molten asteroid *foops* out into a spherical shell. Just add gas and instant-- what? Fuel tank? Space station? Split it in half and you have two spherical mirrors you can use to focus in on another asteroid.
            Making a space station from a NEO is three steps: 1) Melt, 2) *foop*, 3)fill it with your stuff.
On the moon, we
1) Harvest rock; 2) crush ; 3)sort ; 4) refine ; 5) actually machine the metal-- which is, of course, a complicated multi-step process even here on Earth. Being on the moon doesn't make it any easier. Being on the moon doesn't make much of anything easier. Free space, in zero-g? Glass blowing huge structures from molten asteroids; growing better crystals-- any number of industrial applications. That's industry, though. What about the stuff of life?
               The Moon may have a little water at the poles, but it has nothing else we need: carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. How many rockets are you willing to devote to bags of fertilizer to feed your moonbase before you give up? C-type asteroids are expected to be rich in all these things-- including being heavily hydrated, some up to 20% water by mass. Just heat (solar mirrors again) to drive off the water and other volatiles. Some of the clay minerals in these things (which you can get by centrifuge, again) might make half-decent fertilizers on their own; others may need some chemical processing. The carbon is in long-chain, coal-like hydrocarbons which, while good feedstock for plastic-making, might need some work as plant food. Regardless, though, it's a heck of alot easier than bringing it up from Earth, which you'd have to do for your moonbase-- unless you're supplying a moonbase from the Asteroids? At which point I have to ask why you even bother. If you really want the aluminum, silicon, and titanium oxides found in moon rocks, we can get those for you too.

.

Lunar vs. NEO Accessibility

      The Moon is big, beautiful, and often visible; in sight, and in mind. That's the only way I can explain my fellow Planetary Scientists' and Space Enthusiasts' obsession with the place.
       Yes, it's close as the crow flies--but the geography of the solar system is not one of straight line distance, but of speed. On Earth, distance and energy expenditure correlate; you have to work harder to go further because you're fighting friction. In space, that's not a problem. You can coast clear across the solar system, once you get going. (the Pioneers, Voyagers, and New Horizons all did.) The constraint is that you have to match speeds to get into the same orbit as the object you want to visit. The bigger the change in velocity (delta-v) the harder your rocket has to work--you need more fuel, and more fuel to carry that fuel, and so on, and so on. Delta-v measures the energy needed to make the trip, and that's what matters.
        When you consider the geography of speed, the solar system looks somewhat different. Most notably, the moon is dethroned.

Object.........................delta-v from LEO(km/s)

• Theoretical Earth Trojans.....3.27

• Asteroid 2006 RH120...........3.820

  • 1152 known asteroids    <5.93
    
    

• Lunar Surface.................5.93

• Mars..........................6.3 

      The "closest" objects, the ones easiest to get to via rocket are actually Near-Earth-Asteroids. (NEAs) If the Moon is no longer the easiest, most accessible target, then what advantage does it have left?
      Well, the Moon does still win on trip time--it only takes 3 days, vs. months on the low-energy trajectories to NEAs. When you're launching people who need to eat and breathe over the round trip, that does simplify things. Unfortunately, that's all the moon's got.
        To land safely and return from the surface of the moon, you'll always need powerful, heavy rockets-- and that adds expense. Otherwise, you're helpless against lunar gravity and go splat. (Lithobreaking is normally ill-advised.) To get to NEAs, you don't need, or even want rockets; you can sail -- and using solar, electric or magnetic sails,  you free yourself from carrying all the rocket fuel to get from A-to-B. In a manned mission, that should more than make up for the extra consumables needed for the trip. Sailing also cuts transit times dramatically, eking into the Moon's one advantage.
         And then, the importance of that advantage is often overstated. Much ado is made of long voyages: the gravity, the radiation, the psychology. Gravity is easy: spin the ship. Radiation's risks are overstated, and can be shielded against. As for the psychology, those who argue there must have a short sense of history.  Long voyages were the norm for most of human history, not the exception. In the age if sail, it took months to cross oceans. Before railways, it took just as long to cross continents. Yes, we're used to jetting hitther and thither and never being more than a day or two away from anything in this modern world, but I don't believe it requires a superhuman constitution to abandon that luxury. Even now, mariners in the world's navies face multi-month deployments on duty; modern nuclear subs are expected to remain submerged for 3 months in peacetime, and indefinitely during time of war. There was a time, before radio and road and rail, when every hamlet in the north became an isolated outpost for winter; these conditions still prevail (excepting radio) in Antarctica, and it seems to do little harm.
        The long trip is irrelevant. Asteroids are easier to get to.

         And when we do get there, we'll find the resources available far more welcoming and useful than we would on the Moon.
But I've bashed the poor lunatics enough for one day; the resource rant can wait for next week.

The Profit Motive

As Dr. Brin would say, "the political lamp is lit."
I'm inspired to write this in part by the continued discussions at Contrary Brin, and by an essay/open letter from legendary game developer and rocket builder John Carmack.
Now, Carmack is an intelligent man, and far more accomplished than I am, let's just get that out of the way. On the whole, I don't disagree with him, except for one line:
"Without the goal and scorecard of profit, it is hard to even make value judgments between people and programs, so there are few checks against mounting inefficiency and abject failure, let alone evolution towards improvement."

 There, I could not disagree more, for various reasons. The first, and most obvious, is that the government is in the business of providing services that aren't, in general, profitable. You think the transcontinental highway system could ever pull a profit, if run as a business? One can argue that the economic activity generated thereby has more than paid for their construction (depending how you factor the externalities of it), but... that's not how a business works. John Carmack's rockets have to make money for John Carmack, not society as a whole, and that makes a big difference. It's cliched, but how do you calculate the "profit" in saving a life? 

Listen, I have no problems with the free market. The freer the better, I say! Ideally, we'd have as many transactions as possible in a market free of oligarchy and monopoly, as well as unfair or unnecessary government meddling. What regulations count as fair and necessary is a debate for another day. Right now, I want to take on the gold standard of the capitalist economy: the profit motive. There is something seriously wrong with the profit motive.

People have tried to calculate the profit in saving lives. The Ford Motor Company did, once. In the 1970s, they produced a small car whose name lives in infamy: the Pinto. The Pinto was a nice little car, with one small flaw: in a rear-end collision, the fuel system tended to explode. Ford knew. They knew! They deliberately put a death trap onto the market, because they'd calculated that actually fixing the problem would cost more than paying damages to burn victims and bereaved families. They sold an exploding car, because that was more profitable than making it safe.

That's what's wrong with the profit motive.

Ford's is hardly the only example. There are companies which willfully break the law and dump toxic chemicals, because the fees and lawsuits they'd pay if caught don't cost enough to offset the profit of polluting. Chinese companies making baby formula found a novel cost-reducing measure: in the name of profit, they poisoned thousands of children.

That's where profit takes us.

If you're following the profit motive, you're doing as shabby a job as possible for as much money as you can. That's not reductio-ad-absurdum, either. That is what happens in the real world. 

Why do we base our entire economy on ripping people off? 

Yes, we can combat the shaddiness of profit-driven product development with government regulation-- that's why you can drink milk in Canada, the US, and Europe without worrying about melamine. But isn't there another way?

Imagine a different sort of market. Today, Ford might build automobiles, but their real business is producing profit for the shareholders. Instead, imagine a company whose business really is building automobiles. Imagine a company that isn't run by MBAs, that doesn't calculate how many bereavement suits balances the cost of fixing a fuel tank. Instead, imagine a company run by workers and engineers who just want to build the best damn car they can.
Just imagine.
Instead of chasing the almighty dollar, someone tries to build for quality instead. Instead of building a car designed to fall apart after the warranty term, they would build a car that lasts. A car that's safe, not because they might sell a few more that way, but because it's the right thing to do.
Imagine a free market that rewards craftsmanship over cost-cutting. That rewards integrity over dishonesty. A market makes that corporate persons act like decent human beings, rather than sociopaths. That rewards good over evil.
Is it possible?
Why the hell not?

It's up to us, after all. We are the actors in the free market. We could form a Car Construction Co-operative, a non-profit to build the automobile I described. We could make it open source. We could make it lean, green, mean, and make it last a lifetime. We could apply that principle to every poison-coated piece of crap coming out of China.  We could revive manufacturing in North America.


Well, we could try. Say what you will, it's a free country; you cannot say we couldn't try. The argument is: could we compete?

I'd like to think so, even given the immense advantages held by our competition. I'd like to think, that given the choice, people will chose good over evil. I'd like to think that We The People, we the working people, the people of Main St., "the builders, the doers, the makers of things," can stand tall and wrest control of our destiny from the stuffed suits and the bean counters on Wall St.
I'd really like to think so, or else I might have to grow a beard.

... the funny thing is, John Carmack isn't one of those suits. The man clearly isn't driven by profit: he makes rockets and videogames. He makes ROCKETS, and VIDEOGAMES. Those aren't the career choices of a man trying to maximize monetary profits. What I don't know is, if John isn't driven by profit in his personal life, he feels our society as a whole should be. I know that it is, and I know it would be hard to change, but can anyone tell me why it should be?

Thanksgiving Week Reviews 3

What media am I thankful for tonight?
1632.
The whole damn thing --  every single novel, every single story.
If you have any time on your hands, the sheer size of this shared universe is one of the wonderful things about it. If you don't, then there's something saved to read for vacation.
Like any good pusher, author/editor Eric Flint offers the first hit free. Now, I don't like to stare at glowing rectangles for extended periods; I find LCDs hard on the eyes for reading. Given this, I still read all 597 pages of 1632 in one sitting. As much as my bleary eyes ached, I couldn't put it down! As soon as I found it in paperback, I read it again. And again-- the first novel in the series is Eric Flint's magnum opus, and something I still regularly reread. The premise seems ridiculous, at first, but like HP:MOR the book does not just rise above the premise: soars beyond it at escape velocity.
In 1632, a West Virginia coal town is mysteriously transported back in time to Germany in the Year of Our Lord 1631. The 3000 hillbillies find themselves dropped into the middle of the 30 Year's War-- the worst Europe would face, before the 20th Century.
Hillbillies. Time travel. An American flag billowing across the cover. That sounds like it could be as much of a disaster as "Ender Wiggins goes to Hogwarts," couldn't it? In the right hands, there are no bad ideas. This book is nothing short of brilliant. The series continues that tradition with a retinue of authors who, while perhaps not quite the virtuosoes in language (or storytelling, in the case of Virginia de Marce, but she's learning too) that Eric Flint proved himself to be in the first novel, with stories that span Europe.
Like HP:MOR, these are stories that teach. That fanfic teaches rationalism; this teaches history and political science. History is not viewed through the tunnel vision you normally get in such works, however-- the Great Man theory of history is either completely ignored or vastly expanded. Every character is the Great Man; every person from a mercenary camp whore and the geeks at the high school to the Holy Roman Emperor has a role in building the new Europe. This breathes a much greater realism than you see in much historical fiction, or indeed, much fiction and even many history texts, where the action only follows the main characters.
Oh, yes, it gets hard to keep track sometimes. The same is true of Tolstoy. With the 1632 series, however, the number of characters in any one story or novel is kept to a fairly manageable level for an epic; there are simply a great many stories. The same is certainly not true for Tolstoy.
War and Peace? Not today.
Today, I'm thankful for 1632.

Thanksgiving Week Reviews 2

Today, I am thankful for Low-tech Magazine, and its little brother, No Tech Magazine. In our gadget-happy society, where a man's worth is measured by the age of his iPhone, these skeptical publications come as a breath of fresh air. Not that they are written by Luddites, by any means; simply put :
"Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society."
 The author, Kris De Decker, recognizes that the development of modern technology has been based on a series of choices; each new idea represents a fork in the road. De Decker casts his eyes backwards, and examines the road not taken. From sailing ships to turn-of-the-century electric cars and propeller planes of the 1950s, the case is strongly made that if we could have chosen differently and built a cleaner, greener, more efficient future--and we still can!  Why not a subway for cargo? Why flush thousands of gallons of water when you could have a 19th century vacuum flush toilet bring your manure straight to the farm? While, in general, Low-tech Magazine offers well-considered essays painting pictures of the tech that never was or should be again, No Tech Magazine is a compendium of links and blurbs on the topic at hand. Want a 19th century book on bicycle design and construction? (and who doesn't?) Exploded views of the new 1909 model autos? All this and more to fascinate the mind and titillate the senses at No Tech Magazine.
For which I am thankful, because where else could I learn that carrier pidgons are faster than the Internet?

Thanksgiving Week Reviews 1

Last weekend was the Canadian thanksgiving festival, and to celebrate, I'll be posting reviews of books, websites and other media that I am truly thankful exist.
My first item is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Yes, it's fan fiction.
Yes, it's fan fiction for a children's book.
So what? As the old saw says, don't judge a book by its cover. It might be fan fiction, but this is one of the most original and entertaining stories I have read, period. Now, I have to admit, I'm not normally a fan of the fantasy genre--HP:MOR supplanted Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" as my favourite work of fantasy, and one thing they have in common that most works in the genre do not is a burning desire to make sense. Nuts-and-bolts fantasy. Fantasy-as-sci-fi. Not to riff too hard on fantasy, but in most stories "A wizard did it" is speckle troweled hastily over plot holes. In Methods of Rationality, "A wizard did it" is only the beginning; the next logical question "Okay, how?" and a science-nerd version of Harry Potter's attempts to answer it form a good part of the plot.
I'm not going to be the first one to call this "Ender Wiggin Goes to Hogwarts"-- but that's a pithy label that doesn't really do the fic justice. Because while HP:MOR contains everything awesome that implies, it has none of the downsides, and in spite of the borrowed/reworked setting (like anybody has ever done that before) this is an original work. The characters borrow from cannon originals, but only as archtypes--those that get screen time are deep and fully fleshed, probably more than Rowling's versions simply because this work is not for children.
I have to admit, I never actually read the original novels. Like the Harry of this reboot*, I was too busy reading science and classic sci-fi to "stoop" to a novel aimed at my actual age group when the first Harry Potter hit the shelves. Even then, I was probably too old to enjoy them. Now, I can, in deliciously rationalist flavour.
Rationalist? Yes. The author,  Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, is a student of rational thinking, and is using this work to advance his ideas. The fic is not only entertaining, it is educational! No, this is not a thinly disguised treatise on how to think. It is a very rich work in which you might also pick up some pointers on how to control your brain and its natural tendencies to err. There are declamations, there are lectures, and there are lessons about human rationality in this work, yes, but they don't detract from it. Yudkowsky handles his sermons at least as well (and often better) than Heinlein ever did--and these sermons are useful lessons in science, not inconsistent politicking. 
So thank you, Universe, for producing Eliezer Yudkowsky and putting enough raw imagination in his rationalist brain to produce the stellar Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.


*Except for Harry being way smarter than me, I identify with this character better than anyone in any fiction I've read in years.