Robot anarchy

kw: book reviews, science fiction, robots, collections, short stories

In my away-from-other-books times I read The Robot MEGAPACK, which consists of 19 stories. Their publication dates range from 1934 to 1962, clustered a bit in the mid-1950's. Ordinarily I might comment on their length. I think at least one is a novelette, but a quirk of production meant I could only guess. The "pagination" is by section rather than by virtual page (2-3 screens), so for the entire set of stories the page indicator was stuck at "7 of 7". There is another indication that this volume was slapped together a bit too hurriedly. There are typos of the kind that nearly always indicate the text was scanned without adequate proofreading. Things like "dear" for "clear" and a few non-letter characters. Some of these could be handled if the text analysis software had an attached dictionary; some need a human proofreader.

No stories by Isaac Asimov appear. Indeed, these stories show no indication that their authors cared for the Three Laws of Robotics, which were hinted at in "Robbie" in 1940, and formalized in the stories that make up I, Robot (1950). Rather, most of these robots are potentially harmful, and many of them are quite harmful, even deadly. A prime example of the latter would be the "tickler", initially a PDA-like device in "The Creature from Cleveland Depths" (1962) by Fritz Leiber. The device begins as a reminder-and-pager, is soon developed into a smart phone-like device, but then becomes a manipulator of moods (businesses and governments pre-load it with "stimulating, wholesome" stuff that it whispers to you subliminally). As predicted by a co-protagonist, the ticklers are eventually produced with enough brains to become sentient, and even apparently telepathic. The human bodies they control are now enslaved. The denouement is amusing, in a nice twist on the dark direction the story seemed to be following.

In "The Mad Robot" (1944) by William P. McGivern, it is one of the scientists who is insane, not the robots. Robots have been coupled to slivers of brain tissue to improve their cognitive abilities. There is a back door to their programming interface, used by the evil genius to commit occasional mayhem, for reasons he loquaciously describes in a climactic scene. This is the story that I was referring to in my riff on getting to Jupiter in a week. Although the action takes place on Jupiter (how, I don't know, since it lacks a surface, and gravity's force at the top of the visible clouds is about 2.5 G's), it could really have been located anywhere.

Nearly all the robots in these stories are humanoid (as they usually are in nearly all SciFi about robots). However, the needs of industry have mandated that actual robotic equipment is much less general-purpose. Welding robots can't walk around; shelf-loading-and-unloading robots are more like smart forklifts (centrally controlled, though, not autonomous). I'll riff elsewhere why we don't need a "Rosie" like the one in the cartoon show "the Jetsons", so much as a number of more specialized devices.

For me this was pure escapism. I know too much about AI, about actual robots in use, and about the Uncanny Valley that it is better not to approach. But I could suspend all that to enjoy the novel ideas these writers presented. I'm all about ideas.

Science me up a story

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, storytelling, writing, scientific approach

"You can't catch fish with a straight pin." This Evangelical trope about Gospel preaching applies to all storytelling. A fish hook has a bent end and a barb. Author and educator Will Storr writes in The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better that the way our brains work makes us pay attention to stories that hook us and then snag us, while we're bored with what I would call "straight pin" narratives.

There are reasons the ancient Five-Act Play model of telling a story works so well. Author Storr tries to explain them to us. In the process he gets into the metaphysics of how an "I" emerges from the brain in its dark and silent box, the skull. Of course, bereft of communication with "the outside", a brain could do nothing but cogitate on whatever might occupy its memory materials. He tells how the product of all our senses is a "hallucination" (his word) that is a rough map of "the outside". In this conceptual world built of our sense impressions, we are the hero of a continually-running play. We can't abide not being the hero, so change is threatening.

The key to story is that stories are about change. If nothing changes there is no story to tell. Stories that catch our interest, that grip us, that move us, are about changes in persons caused by changes in their circumstances coupled with their reactions thereto, particularly when their control methods fail.

For example, most of us know how to handle a rainy day. We look outside, see that rain is falling, so we take an umbrella, a raincoat, perhaps galoshes, and we're usually good to go. We leave early so we won't be late, because we know getting somewhere will take longer in the rain. Now suppose what we see out the window is no ordinary rainstorm, but a historic hurricane, with torrential rainfall in the three-inch-per-hour range and hundred-mph winds. And we absolutely, positively, somebody-will-die-if-we-don't, need to go somewhere. I don't own appropriate gear to venture into such a storm, which would need to include a car that will stay on the road in those conditions. But what if you simply can't go, and somebody really does die as a result. Now what? Do you berate yourself? Commit hara-kiri? Blow it off with an "Oh, well, things happen" attitude? If we have just described Act I and Act II of a 5-Act story, the next three acts will follow a person who changes, or one who does not change, as a result of the foregoing action.

We are resistant to change, particularly change to who we are and how we want to be perceived. We typically can't endure the thought of being seen as "bad." When a big enough change occurs, even a tragedy, it's hard for anyone to come out a true hero.

My wife and I and a dozen others were seriously affected when a close friend and his wife and children died in a carbon monoxide gas poisoning event in their home. Everyone was badly shaken. Some blamed themselves, except among them, nobody (other than my wife and I) even knew that carbon monoxide existed. Some got angry at God, "for letting it happen." Some learned from it and others walled it all off inside themselves. Of the 14 of us, my wife and I and three others did the inside work, the spiritual work, to learn and even gain something valuable from the experience. The rest soon "vanished into the woodwork." None of us 14 knew initially how to cope with such a tragedy. The coping skills we had were inadequate or were dramatically unhelpful. We had to grow and to change…or to decline to do so.

Someone could have written 14 stories about the extended event, or a 14-part story. I could not do so. Having read the book, and having done my best to pay attention, I realized I don't have the right personality or skills to actually craft such a story. I'm a straight-pin kind of man; if I had read this book fifty years ago, perhaps I could have incorporated the author's work into my skill set, but these things take time to learn effectively.

Mr. Storr calls his work "The Sacred Flaw Approach". We are all flawed. Our inadequate coping skills are examples of such flaws. What worked before isn't useful in the new situation. Good stories show us a flawed person, let us observe them in action, bring them into a new situation (often with the opening sentence), let us observe their failure, and then show us how they either permit themselves to change, or deny the change.

When I have counseled others who are struggling to cope, I've told them the definition of a neurosis: a defense or coping mechanism that is out of date. One woman asked, "Am I neurotic, then?" I said, "In that sense we all are." And I remember what the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, "Be transformed by the renewing of the mind." This is the meaning of "repentance," a change of mind. It happens to be just about the hardest thing anyone can do. It was no "easy believe" gospel that Jesus proclaimed, when His first word was "Repent." So the kind of stories that this book analyzes come down to practical repentance when the old ways stop working…or to failure to repent.

The book's four chapters, and 40 sub-chapters, discuss all the pieces. The extended Appendix details a kind of recipe for the 5-Act story, and uses the book The Godfather by Mario Puzo to brilliantly show how it fits that formula (the film is simplified and takes a sidestep, which actually enhances the story's power). One could have as easily used Jurassic Park; a colleague of mine many years ago had been the college roommate of Michael Crichton, who at that time was building his skills and methods for writing, and he told some of us the formula Crichton used for his books.

So we are all control freaks, and when our control methods fail, we may grow or we may descend into depression and obscurity, the true opposite of a happy ending. The best stories, according to Will Storr, tell of someone who is faced with such a transition, however it may turn out.

Another couple of days of Russian snooping

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning

I noticed when I added a book review yesterday that there had been a sudden burst of interest, from Russia as usual. Today I find it is still going on. Here's the hourly plot for today:

This adds up to more than 900 hits in the past 24 hours, just from Russia, and the usual 50-70 hits from everyone else. Here is the world chart for the past week:

Take away the Russian activity, and we have a fairly normal week, with around 400 hits.

Outside the U.S., Europe (exclusive of Russia) has a lot of hits, then Australia and Canada. South America (mainly Brazil) and the rest are in "Other", which I didn't look into.

To Jupiter in a Week?

 kw: analytical projects, space travel, solar system

I began reading a bit of space opera from the early 1950's, in which a space pilot goes from Earth to Jupiter in seven days. I wondered how that would be possible. My first thought was, "Jupiter is around half a billion miles away. What does it take to speed up to around 70 million miles/day (~3 million mph)?"

For perspective: About fifteen years ago, the New Horizons spacecraft was launched from Earth and boosted to a speed of about 45 km/s (about 100,000 mph). Thirteen months later it approached Jupiter, still going just under 20 km/s, and was directed into a slingshot flyby that boosted its speed to about 22.5 km/s.

From this point we go metric. Jupiter's distance from Earth varies between 588 and 968 million kilometers (Mkm). For what it is worth, when Earth is at quadrature with Jupiter, one can gain an extra 30 km/s of takeoff speed, and at that point the distance is near the average of about 780 Mkm. For this analysis I'll be dividing by 7 and by two numbers divisible by 3, and to have an even-numbered result, I'll pick a distance that is divisible by 126 million (126=9x7x2). I chose 126x6 = 756 Mkm.

First simple analysis: 756/7 = 108. Thus, average speed needs to be 108 Mkm/day or 1,250 km/s. That's almost 28 times as fast as the starting speed of New Horizons (Clearly, science fiction writers in the pre-Sputnik days expected great advances in rocket fuel technology). Suppose the rocket can accelerate at 1G for as long as needed. How long does it take to get up to 1,250,000 m/s?

Basic velocity formulas:

• 1G acceleration (a) = 9.8 m/s²
• Velocity (v) = 9.8*t m/s
• Distance in time t = 4.9*t² m

Turn the second formula around: t = v/9.8, which comes to 1,250,000/9.8 = 127,550 sec = 35.43 hours. It takes about a day and a half to get up to speed. Without going into detail, this means that actual travel time would be more like 8.5 days. But this puts us in the right ballpark.

Let us figure what acceleration is needed to go half the distance at constant acceleration, then turn around and slow down in the same amount of time and distance. Half the distance is 378 Mkm. Solve the third equation for a, the acceleration needed to go 378 Mkm in 3.5 days, or 84 hours, or 302,400 seconds: a = 2*dist/t², which comes to 8.27 m/s². That is about 0.84 G. With that level of acceleration, our pilot can have the comfort of a near-1G environment for the whole trip, except for turnaround at the midpoint, and other maneuvers at both ends. Peak speed would be 8.27*302,400 = 2.7 million m/s or 2,700 km/s, or more than twice the average speed.

So there we have it. We just need a fuel-&-engine system that can accelerate at near-one-G for a total of a week, and repeat the performance for the return trip.

A secondary consideration is, what would be the consequences of hitting a dust particle, or worse, a sand-size particle, at a speed of 2,700 km/s? An average grain of beach or dune sand is half a mm across and weighs about 180 micrograms (µg). 180 µg is 180 billionths of a kg, the unit we need to calculate energy. Silt particles are 1/100 the diameter and weigh one millionth as much, or 180 trillionths of a gram.

Let's start with a sand grain. Kinetic energy E = m*v²/2, or 0.000 000 18*(2,700,000)²/2 = 656 thousand joules; a joule is a watt-second, so this comes to 182 watt-hours. This is the energy of a 1 kg mass at a speed of 1,150 m/s, a little faster than the bullet from an AR-15 rifle, but that bullet weighs only about 4 grams. This sand grain deposits the energy of 250 rifle rounds in an area half a millimeter across. That would melt a chunk of armor plate and make a hole you can stick your finger in. The ship's pilot would feel a bit of a jerk from the impact.

A grain of silt or dust, with one-millionth the weight, has one-millionth the kinetic energy, which comes to 2/3 of a joule. It doesn't sound like much, but that's the energy of a BB dropped about a foot. You'd hear it. It would strike off a bit of material, which a BB wouldn't do. Intermediate-sized grains would do correspondingly more damage. Sand size grains are very scarce in the asteroid belt, but silt-size grains are probably abundant enough that the wear on forward armor would be significant.

So, as enjoyable as such tales are, with people bombing around the solar system as though one were driving from Idaho to Florida, there's a lot of reality in between where we are now and the technology needed to accomplish it.

The buck stops in the blubber

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, whales, ecology, environmentalism, pollution

A few years ago a half-grown humpback whale died in Delaware Bay and washed ashore near one of the little towns that are scattered along the shoreline. The Fish & Wildlife service soon found a more out-of-the-way place to take it, and towed the body there, using a tractor and nylon straps to pull it fully onto the shore. The body was 37 feet long and weighed about 16 tons, which is rather emaciated; a healthy humpback this length weighs closer to 20 tons. The curators from the Delaware Museum of Natural History "visited" the remains over the winter, when the smell was less, although the flesh had not yet all rotted away. A year later they organized a field trip for some of us to see the skeleton, now nearly flesh-free.

This is one of my colleagues from the museum next to the remains. About half of the skeleton is shown in this photo; the skull is to the right. You can see that, even in this rather small whale, the vertebrae are 2-3 feet (a little under a meter) across. A few ribs show.

Almost another year later the museum received permission to collect the skull, some vertebrae, and the bones of a flipper. A shed was built to house the remains, which were brought into it late in 2018. I took this photo from the door to the shed. One of the long jaw bones is on the left; its opposite number was carried off by someone before our visit the prior year. If the museum decides to put the skull on display, the remaining jawbone can be scanned and a mirror-image duplicate can be 3D printed.

There was still quite an oily smell about it in 2018. It takes years for all the oily material in the bones to either rot away or leak out and evaporate.

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs, begins with the story of her visit to a dying humpback whale near her home in Australia. I am not sure what I was expecting when I checked out the book; I should have been wise enough to expect a very environmentalist tone, particularly from someone who is probably a younger member of the X generation.

The book's chapters each have a subject, but the subjects are secondary to the overall theme, which is introduced on page 47, where a word that is new to me, and to most of us I reckon, is defined: defaunation. If you know that "fauna" refers to animal life, the word defines itself as the removal of animal life. The whales are harbinger species, and their downfall portends the general downfall of everything. It is happening all around us, but most people don't notice.

Some of us have lived long enough to remember very noisy Spring and Summer mornings, with dozens of species of birds singing their territorial songs. Our family lived in Sandusky, Ohio in the early 1960's. The southern shore of Lake Erie, from Cleveland westward to Toledo, and around the tip of the lake, is a concentrating flyway for songbird migration, so the morning chorus was very intense. These days, although I live under one of the East Coast flyways, the morning chorus is pretty, but quite "thin" by comparison; I seldom hear more than four species. Ms Giggs also points out that, in her lifetime (perhaps half of mine), the level of splatter on car windshields has dropped almost to nothing. I do remember that on road trips my Dad allowed for a stop every hour to clean the windshield and the grille. We didn't even try taking road trips during the heavy grasshopper and locust season of midsummer! Now when my wife and I drive from near Philadelphia to the town near Cleveland where some relatives live, we don't need to clean until the end, when we wipe off the remains of half a dozen insects at most.

Some species of whale are verified to live 200 years or longer. That means that some "pod elders" may remember the decades of intense whaling that they managed to survive. I suspect they also find the ocean as comparatively voiceless as I find a modern Spring morning. Whales communicate over hundreds to thousands of miles, and the enchanting (to us) "songs" of the humpbacks are just one version of their globe-spanning conversations. But voiceless doesn't mean silent. The thrum of a 50,000 horsepower engine driving a supertanker or container ship fills an entire ocean—yes, even the mighty Pacific—with noise that causes the whales to lower the pitch of their voices. Lower pitch travels farther, and engine noise has a higher pitch. Even when they do that, thousand-mile "gossip" just isn't happening any more. In most of the seas, the whales can hear each other "only" 100-200 miles away. You might say, as we humans have globalized electronic dating, "swiping" Tinder profiles from anywhere on Earth, we have crippled the water-borne Tinder that whales were using to find mates, at a time when there are fewer mates to find.

Just by the way, there are 770 supertankers and more than 5,200 container ships in operation, nearly all of them on the move nearly all the time. Their combined engine power is about 300 million horsepower. The fuel they burn is many times as polluting as gasoline. A container ship is how the rubber ducky made it from China to your bathtub.

Speaking of pollution, whales are also great concentrators of waterborne pollution. Their prey are polluted, no matter where on earth they may be. Many common pollutants are oil-soluble so they wind up in the blubber. While that means the whale is somewhat protected from adverse effects from those pollutants, when a whale dies, not from whaling but in the ocean, its blubber is the first thing to be eaten by an enormous number of scavenging organisms, all of which concentrate the stuff even further. People are also affected, some directly. The author tells of Inuit women, who eat a lot of whale blubber in the winter, when you need a fatty diet just to keep from freezing: their breast milk is so contaminated that, if they pump it into a jar, it would be illegal to carry across a state line. For that matter, most beached whales now must be treated like toxic waste!

The "Save the Whale" efforts that began in the 1970's have ironically saved them but not their environment. On the first Earth Day in 1970 (51 years ago this coming Thursday) nobody dreamed that the oceans would be filled with ships powered by 50,000 hp engines, ships that would outnumber some of the species of remaining whale! There are less than 400 northern right whales alive today, though most other species number in the tens of thousands to a quarter million or more. But most species of large whale were hunted down to populations of less than 1,000 by the 1920's to the 1960's. That cluster of population bottlenecks is in itself a great risk to the existing whales. Less genetic diversity results in greater susceptibility to diseases, for example.

This is not a happy book. The outlook for whales may be better than it was half a century ago, but the picture is still not rosy. I can't predict what the future holds, but a book like this is sobering, and may motivate some, at least, to drive even more toward a planet that is safer for both whales and people.

A third MEGAPACK

kw: book reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, short stories, space opera, space aliens

My original purchase from the MEGAPACK® series included three e-books. I already finished and reviewed two of them. This is the third. Like other early volumes in the series, it is titled The 13th Science Fiction Megapack. Later collections of classics have a theme or author as a focus. This volume contains 26 stories, eleven published in 1963, and the rest scattered from 1930 to 2010. All were new to me.

A goodly proportion of the stories experiment with taking the alien's eye view. Two of these, sitting back-to-back, are "The God-Plllnk" by Jerome Bixby and "A Guest of Ganymede" by C.C. MacApp, both published in 1963. In both stories, the invaders from Earth are either consumed or subsumed. Sobering.

Others take a recent discovery or trend then present and extend it. One of these, "Steak Tartare and the Cats of Gari Babakin Station", by Mary A. Turzillo, published in 2009, riffs on the effects of infection by Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that afflicts cats and eventually nearly everyone who owns a cat. With just a little studied exaggeration, and imputing to Toxoplasma characteristics of a few other parasites, including the one that turns rats from cat-fearing to cat-seeking, we find an entertaining tale of psychology and motivation. The cats and their "guests" take over Mars.

From time to time writers tackle the possible interactions between archaic humans and Neanderthals, some 30,000 years ago or more. "The Day is Done" by Lester del Rey, published in 1939 is one of the earliest and best. (My second-favorite, "The Ugly Little Boy" by Isaac Asimov, is from 1958). del Rey's very moving story is set as the last of the Neanderthals are vanishing.

One of the stories of 1963, "The Girl in His Mind" by Robert F. Young, is based on a sort of dream "technology" that seems to foreshadow a dreamland called "the Commons" in stories by Matthew Hughes (see this review from 2006). In both 1963 and 2006, the writers take lucid dreaming a few quantum leaps beyond anything actual lucid dreamers (such as myself) experience. Lucid dreaming as we know it permits the dreamer to have some control over the story line and content of a dream. In my case, most frequently, I "stick a toe" into a dream that presents itself, and if I don't like where it may go, I open my eyes briefly and banish it. Once a dream starts up that I am more happy with, I let myself fall the rest of the way to sleep. Often, but not always, I know I am in a dream and I direct it more to my liking. Other times, I have "ordinary" dreams, that just happen with me as more of an observer than a participant. Any of this is a far cry from the long quests described by authors Young and Hughes.

I think I enjoy classic science fiction so much more than most "modern" writing because the authors aren't grinding an axe, at least not in the overt way that is nearly universal today, which is why I read so little modern science fiction. Writers of the world: present your views and your reasoning; do not attempt to impose them or shame your readers – I am shameless anyway, and I'll shame you right back!

Favorites of a Grand Master

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, collections

If you know who Ben Bova is, no introduction is needed. If not, I cannot presume to provide one that is adequate. Once called "the last of the great pulp fiction writers," he shaped science fiction as a genre beginning late in the "Golden Era", around 1960, and continuing until his death in 2020. His last book (of 120), published in 2020, is Ben Bova: My Favorites.

Fourteen short stories, fourteen quite diverse topics. Lengths range from 8 to 42 pages. A couple are space opera, with spaceships that fit in the same conceptual space as automobiles; they just need to get you somewhere. A few are alternative history, including the only story with aliens, "The Great Moon Hoax, or, a Princess of Mars," in which not only do Martians help NASA fake the surveillance of Mars and Venus, but also to confine Moon landings to places that won't expose them…and, just by the way, a couple of other big things are faked also, but I don't have the heart to do that level of spoiler.

One touching story is titled "Muzhestvo". We learn at the end what the word means, and why it is important. This didn't have to be a science fiction story, but in that setting it is fitting.

However, without pointing fingers, even though Bova has now passed away, a few stories are definitely not among my favorites. They are just crass; he had an axe to grind, and no writer is helped by grinding his axe in public.

That's enough from me. Whether you'd agree with which stories I might like or not like, this book is definitely worth reading.

Seeing farther, maybe

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, forecasting, disciplines

Forecasting means different things in different realms. "Prediction is hard", said Yogi Berra, "especially about the future." If you're on a high hillside, looking down at a bend in a river, and a canoeist is paddling industriously downstream, you can see pretty well what he has in store, at least for the next few hundred yards. If there's a waterfall around the bend, it isn't hard to predict that he'll be in trouble if he doesn't soon pull to shore. But there's another factor: You don't know his plan. He may know the waterfall is there, and he is either planning to go ashore and portage around it, or he may have a plan for going over, either because he's really good at riding the rapids, or because he is suicidal. He may not know it is there, and is just exploring, in which case you can hope he has good hearing. Perhaps you can think of other possibilities.

Suppose instead you were asked, "How likely is it that Iran will produce a nuclear weapon in the coming 12 months?" Assuming you can find people without a political investment in that question, and you ask ten of them this question, will you get similar answers, or will they range from, "No way, nohow!" to "I am certain they will."? You may get at least one person who says, "Maybe." I think you are most likely to hear, "How should I know?"…but there I am, making a sort of forecast myself!

Then there is the weather, and there is the climate. When a weather forecaster says, "70% chance of rain tomorrow," what does it mean? Is she talking about your city, your neighborhood, or the whole state (easier to contemplate about Rhode Island than about Texas!)? Let's assume it is a local forecast. Decades ago a weatherman explained on a radio program, "70% chance of rain means that 70% of the area will get rained on." I wonder if that is still true? In these days of supercomputers producing a fresh forecast over the whole earth about every hour, it may mean something else. For example, it may mean that when they run the forecasting software over and over again with tiny adjustments to the initial conditions, 70% of them predict rain in "your area". Or it may mean, of the several hundred supercomputers being used with numerous versions of the modeling software, 70% of them predict rain. Or it may still mean "It will rain over 70% of the several square miles surrounding such-and-such a place."

That last version, akin to the version of half a century ago, is probably still what they mean. The prediction is often based on a squall line passing through. A loose squall line will produce a string of small storms that drop rain for a few miles between formation and dissipation. That might mean 30% to 50% of the area will get rained on. A tighter line will have larger storms, closer together, and we're in the 70% range. A heavy squall line will bring rain almost everywhere, and the forecast is 100% rain.

What about climate? It is the average of "weather" over a period of decades. You can't tell from one year to the next whether changing weather patterns mean the climate is getting warmer or cooler, dryer or wetter. I recently saw an article about cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan. They are blooming early this year, during the first week of April (today, the 7th is the expected peak). The article stated that the "usual" peak is between April 10-17. Of course, "global warming" was mentioned. That's funny. Kyoto is south of Tokyo and warmer, and the cherry trees there bloom a few days earlier. We visited the Tokyo area from March 28 to April 11, 1992. The peak of the cherry blossoms was March 31. I presume the peak in Kyoto was closer to March 25. With that in mind, if this year's peak in Kyoto is more than a week later than the peak thirty years ago, neither datum means much about a changing climate.

Back to Iran. There is a reason for stating the question like I did, particularly "in the coming 12 months". The political winds are shifty. If the time frame were 10 years, the answers would, I hope, be different (maybe not!), and much less certain. Too many things can happen in a decade. Lots happens in just one year! But the study and research one would need to do to answer that question are, just barely, possible. Having studied and formed an answer, though, how good is it?

"How good is it?" is the subject of the work of Professor Philip E. Tetlock. He has conducted experiments with numerous forecasters for the past few decades, and has discovered factors that make some people better than others at it. Some are "superforecasters", and with Dan Gardner, he was written Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

It so happens that superforecasters have certain characteristics. Super-intelligence is not one of them. Of course, they are intelligent, but the important factors include the humility to question their own assumptions and premises, the willingness to break out of false dichotomies, and the diligence to do lots of study and research. The book has a couple of lists of these factors, which in themselves constitute a good introduction to learning to make better predictions…if you're willing to do the work.

We have to forecast to be able to plan. I have two friends I should mention here. One expects the country to descend into anarchy, and soon. It's not just about President Biden, because he expected the same thing when Donald Trump was President. This conviction colors his thinking. His long-range plans include getting rich enough quickly enough to afford land in some out-of-the way place.

The other friend is older and has a longer view. Remembering the decades of the Vietnam War, and the times that preceded it, and those that came after, he is more optimistic. He also likes suburban living. His long-range plans are very different, including his expectation of a long retirement filled with volunteering and service. If you were to place these two men in almost any situation you choose, unless you know their backgrounds and attitudes rather well, it would make no use to make forecasts about the situation itself. Their own internal landscape would be more important than the external. I dare say, if you were told just one thing about these two men, that one is a paranoid prepper, the other a contented suburbanite, it could greatly improve the accuracy of your forecast. Maybe.

That is a big maybe. Dr. Tetlock found that for most people, if someone had already researched a situation and made a prediction, new information was unlikely to have much effect. Superforecasters, by contrast, would frequently incorporate new information and revise a forecast. Some would do so daily or oftener.

It is helpful to remember that forecasting is like other skills, that practice is needed. To learn to forecast, make lots of forecasts. BUT make them in a particular way: the result needs to be quantifiable. Don't say, "There is a significant chance of X happening." To you, "significant" may mean "a 75% or better likelihood", to someone else, 15%, and to others, as little as 5% or even less. If 75% is what you mean, state it that way. Then keep score. One result isn't too useful. It takes three to see the inkling of a trend, and twelve to begin to do decent statistics. The book contains basic instructions on calculating a Brier Score, a measure of a forecaster's accuracy. It is also useful to learn to use Bayesian methods of revising a prediction. Superforecasters that revised their estimates didn't indulge in large adjustments; they were more likely to change a 40% likelihood to 42% or 37%.

It is also helpful to know that these methods are all about the "what" and sometimes the "how" of something. The "why" of something is outside the realm of science or technology. It is frequently more of a theological matter.

Dr. Tetlock is noble enough to introduce a monkey wrench into this whole matter, by discussing his relationship with Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, a book I reviewed in 2007. The idea of a Black Swan is something nobody could have predicted, but it changes everything. Fourteen years ago I was quite taken with the notion. Now I have a more nuanced view. Dr. Taleb contends that because Black Swans can't be predicted, one cannot account for them, and because they matter more than other events, nothing that can be predicted is going to matter enough.

One of the conceptual ills we encounter is either-or thinking. The idea that Black Swans make forecasting useless is either-or thinking. A superforecaster will weigh the possible influence of something unprecedented throwing everything else out the window, without needing to know just what that might be. This is the realm of the "unknown unknowns" of Donald Rumsfeld. This is also why, as stated in The Art of War (I paraphrase), "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." Yet a good battle plan puts you in a position to re-evaluate and succeed anyway. I find it fascinating that neither Dr. Tetlock nor Dr. Taleb points out that as historical Black Swan examples accumulate, they allow us to re-adjust our knowledge of the expected range of possibilities, to take a better view of the distribution of possible events, and so make better forecasts and more robust plans. We just need to have or to gain the wisdom to discern whether a particular Black Swan is truly unprecedented, or if it is a case of an extreme event that happens more frequently than we'd been led to believe.

For example, the original Black Swans were discovered in Australia in 1697. They were not new to Australians, of course. They were new to Europeans, who knew only white swans. The Western white swan, Cygnus olor, and the Asian black swan, Cygnus atratus, are related species in the genus Cygnus, but have been separated by half a world for tens of thousands of years. There are four other species in the genus Cygnus, including the black-necked swan, C. melancoryphus. Its existence could have clued the Europeans into the possibility that swans somewhere else on Earth could be black, but it did not.

Other examples used to illustrate Black Swans include stock market booms and busts, and extreme flooding events.  Just last year I discussed a series of mega-floods that caused large boulders to move across a flood plain south of Sturgis, SD. The context, however, was discussing a new way to analyze daily (or weekly or even monthly) changes in the price of stocks. Considering the floods, I realize that the extreme flooding events in the Black Hills may not be extreme examples of the usual flood frequency regime. They are just as likely to be symptoms of extreme weather events that just "work differently" from the ones that occur yearly and decade-to-decade. It wasn't just a thousand-year flood that moved 20-ton boulders half a mile or more. It may have been a 5,000-year flood, except that this happened twenty times in 5,000 years. So something different was happening, and I don't really know what it was. However, we now know that floods of that magnitude occurred about every 250 years in the past, so it's best to take that into account if you want to build anything on the outwash plain east of the Black Hills.

How could you become a superforecaster? An appendix in the book describes the basic skills, and another invites any reader to join the Good Judgment Project, at www.goodjudgment.com. Enjoy!

Cyril may have died too young

kw: book reviews, science fiction, megapack series, anthologies, short stories, collections

Cyril M Kornbluth didn't have a middle name, but his friends have written that his use of "M" was a tribute to his wife Mary. This wasn't his only quirk, but this piece isn't mainly about him but about what he wrote. He died at the age of 34, of a heart attack, after shoveling snow and then running to catch a train. During the nineteen years during which published stories and novels, his writing was characterized by sideways thinking that still stands out. He published nearly ninety stories, nine novels, and seven works of non-fiction.

The e-book The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack: Featuring the Classic Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth contains 18 of his stories, a sci-fi novella The Syndic, and a non-science fiction novella The Naked Storm. I did not read The Naked Storm, the longest piece in the collection at 179 "pages". From the outset it began to go in a disturbing direction, so I skipped it. The total volume contains 868 "pages", about twenty of which are devoted to advertising for the Megapack series, so there was plenty of other material for me to enjoy. Note: On my phone, with the type size I like to use, a "page" includes between two and four screens, because page counts shown in a footer are based on whatever publication the series publishers scanned, whether a paperback or an octavo volume.

In the 1950's, just before I began reading a lot of science fiction, Galaxy was one of numerous "pulp" magazines full of space opera, which has a special place in my heart. Kornbluth was a mainstay of the genre, and in this issue he wrote as Cyril Judd, one of his many pen names.

I encountered a few old friends in this Megapack, including "The Marching Morons", based on the observation that people with more education and intelligence tend to have fewer children. In 1951, when Earth's population was about 2.6 billion, Kornbluth imagined a "far future" era with twice that population, most of whom would be idiots; he surmised an average IQ of about 45. The teeming billions are cared for by a small, decreasing number of intelligent folk, who seek ways to remedy the situation. It is still worth reading, even though population zoomed past 5.2 billion in 1990, and is presently pushing 7.7 billion. Average IQ also hasn't dropped precipitously, but CQ ("caring quotient", as in "Why should I care?") is much lower in the present generation, at least in affluent societies. I wonder what Kornbluth might write about that?

I had also read "The Syndic" long, long ago, so long that it was almost a new book to me. It contains a powerful idea, stated by the rather philosophical F.W. Taylor, Godfather of The Syndic and uncle of the protagonist:

"A strange thing—people always think that each exchange of power is the last that will ever take place."

A story left nearly finished when Kornbluth died, tidied up and finished by Frederick Pohl and published in June 1958, is "Shark Ship". It posits a different "solution" to the dilemma of a planet over-filled with people: convoys of ships that sail the seas, forever excluded from land-based society, catching and living upon plankton. The rigid society that must result is too fragile to survive when one ship loses its net, unless the unfortunate ship and the thousands aboard it are shunned and left to die of starvation. The story ends shortly after the ship diverts to approach land, to see if there is a new way of life possible there; the land is nearly abandoned, and there is hope. This has the flavor of a good beginning to a novel, but the author didn't live to develop it. The rather neat wrap-up is apparently Pohl's work. 

This and other stories indicate that Kornbluth had a rather pessimistic view of the coming decades and centuries. Did he die too young? Were he living he'd be 97. Even had he lived "three score and ten", it would have been until 1993, and a very different sort of science fiction was in vogue then. Maybe he'd have reveled in it, and become as productive as Asimov. Or, maybe it is best that he went when he did, a man already a little out of his element.