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  • Externalised costs and the human on the bicycle

    Remember the most common question the protagonists of the eponymous British sitcom The IT Crowd asked a caller checking why a computer wasn’t working? “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Nine times out of 10, this fixed the problem, whatever it was, and the IT team could get on with its life.

    Around COP26 or so, I acquired a similar habit: every time someone presented something as a model of energy and/or cost efficiency, my first thought was whether they’d included the externalised costs. This is clearly a global problem today yet many people continue to overlook it in contexts big and small. So when I came across a neat graph on Bluesky (shown below), drawn from an old article in Scientific American, I began to wonder if the awesome transportation efficiency of the human on the bicycle (HotB) included the energy costs of making the bicycle as well.

    According to the article, written by an SS Wilson and published in 1973, the HotB required 1-2 calories per gram per km to move around. The next most efficient mover was the salmon, which needed 4 cal/g/km. If the energy costs of making the bicycle are included, the energy cost per g/km would shoot up and, depending on the distance the MotB travels, the total cost may never become fully amortised. (It also matters that the math works out only this way at the scale of the human: anything smaller or bigger and the energy cost increases per unit weight per unit distance.)

    But there’s a problem with this line of thinking. On a more basic level, neither Wilson nor Scientific American intended the graph to be completely accurate or claimed it was backed by any research more than that required to estimate the energy costs of moving different kinds of moving things through some distance. It was a graph to make one limited point. More importantly, it illustrates how externalised costs can become counterproductive if attempts to factor them in are not guided by subjective, qualitative assessments of what we’re arguing for or against.

    Of course the question of external costs is an important one to ask — more so today, when climate commitments and actions are being reinterpreted in dollar figures and quantitative assessments are gaining in prominence as the carbon budget may well have to be strictly rationed among the world’s countries. But whether or not some activity is rendered more or less efficient by factoring in its externalised costs, any human industrial activities — including those to manufacture bicycles — are polluting. There’s no escaping that. And the struggle to mitigate climate change is a struggle to mitigate climate change while ensuring we don’t undermine or compromise the developmental imperative. Otherwise the struggle isn’t one at all.

    Even more importantly, this balancing act isn’t a strategy and isn’t the product of consensus: it’s an implicit and morally and ethically correct assumption, an implicit and inviolable component of global climate mitigation efforts. Put another way, this is how it needs to be. In this milieu, and at a time it’s becoming clear the world’s richer countries have a limit to how much they’re prepared to spend to help poorer countries deal with climate change, the impulse to consider externalised costs can mislead decision-making by making some choices seem more undesirable than they really are.

    Externalised costs are, or ought to be, important when the emissions from some activity don’t stack up commensurately with any social, cultural, and/or political advantages they confer as well. These costs are not always unavoidable nor undesirable, and we need to keep an eye on where we’re drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable costs. The danger is that as richer countries both expect and force poorer ones to make more emissions cuts, the latter may have to adopt more robust quantitative rationales to determine what emissions to cut from which sources and when. Should they include externalised costs, many enterprises that should actually live on may face the axe instead.

    For one, the HotB should be able to continue to ride on.

    Addendum: Here’s an (extended) excerpt from the Scientific American article on where the HotB scores their efficiency gains.

    Before considering these developments in detail it is worth asking why such an apparently simple device as the bicycle should have had such a major effect on the acceleration of technology.The answer surely lies in the sheer humanity of the machine. Its purpose is to make it easier for an individual to move about, and this the bicycle achieves in a way that quite outdoes natural evolution. When one compares the energy consumed in moving a certain distance as a function of body weight for a variety of animals and machines, one finds that an unaided walking man does fairly well (consuming about .75 calorie per gram per kilometer), but he is not as efficient as a horse, a salmon or a jet transport. With the aid of a bicycle, however, the man’s energy consumption for a given distance is reduced to about a fifth (roughly .15 calorie per gram per kilometer). Therefore, apart from increasing his unaided speed by a factor of three or four, the cyclist improves his efficiency rating to No. 1 among moving creatures and machines.

    … The reason for the high energy efficiency of cycling compared with walking appears to lie mainly in the mode of action of the muscles. … the cyclist … saves energy by sitting, thus relieving his leg muscles of their supporting function and accompanying energy consumption. The only reciprocating parts of his body are his knees and thighs; his feet rotate smoothly at a constant speed and the rest of his body is still. Even the acceleration and deceleration of his legs are achieved efficiently, since the strongest muscles are used almost exclusively; the rising leg does not have to be lifted but is raised by the downward thrust of the other leg. The back muscles must be used to support the trunk, but the arms can also help to do this, resulting (in the normal cycling attitude) in a little residual strain on the hands and arms.

    Featured image credit: Luca Zanon/Unsplash.

  • Who’s to blame for the American right’s distrust of science?

    This study unambiguously suggests that scientific journals do the institution of science no favor when they insert themselves so directly in the political debate, especially at a time when trust in the scientific community continues to decline on the right wing.

    This is the surprisingly misguided interpretation, in an article published by Politico, of a study published in Nature Human Behaviour on March 20 that found Trump’s supporters’ trust in the journal Nature tanked after it endorsed Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 US presidential elections.

    “Trust in the scientific community … on the right wing” is on the decline because the right wing wants to bend the rules and processes of the scientific enterprise to fit a worldview in which racism is desirable, vaccine mandates are anti-freedom, it’s okay to force women to have babies they can’t have, sexual harassment is tolerable, eugenics is justifiable, and democratic mandates can be overturned with violence. It’s a worldview in which a conspiracy abounds in every critique, yet the Politico article suggests that when journals “insert themselves so directly in the political debate”, they’re being unfair to the “institution of science”. It doesn’t compute.

    The American’s right’s decision to distrust science is the product of scientists’, and journals’, unwillingness to change what they do and how they do it to fit the right’s cynical requirements as well as to engage with someone who doesn’t come into a conversation being okay with changing their mind as well as often engages in bad-faith tactics designed to subdue, rather than disprove, their interlocutors. See for example the following passage from an excellent April 2013 paper by Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry (that you should also read in full if you’re inclined):

    Believers of the paranormal and supernatural have often tried to turn the tables on skeptics, finding various ways to shift the BoP [burden of proof] back to the latter. In particular, rhetorical moves of the type “you can’t prove it wrong” (Gill 1991; Caso 2002) are unfair requests that fail to appreciate the proper BoP procedure. In some cases, such requests can be straightforwardly fulfilled (e.g., it is very easy to prove that the co-authors of this paper, at this very moment, have far less than $1 M dollar in their pockets), but even then, the skeptic is doing the accuser a favor in taking on a BoP that does not really fall on him (we are under no obligation to empty our pockets after each such gratuitous insinuation). Similarly, if ufologists claim that some crop circle was left by a space ship, the BoP is firmly on their side to come up with extraordinary evidence. If the skeptic chooses to take on their sophistic challenge to “prove that there was no spaceship,” … by way of providing direct or circumstantial evidence that that particular crop circle was in fact a human hoax, they are indulging the believers by taking on a BoP that, rationally speaking, does not pertain to them at all.

    (One of my all-time favourite essays is this by Laurie Penny, on just this topic.)

    There are two fallacies in Politico‘s interpretation. (It’s really an interpretation suggested by the study’s sole author, Stanford University business PhD student Floyd Zhang – “These results suggest that political endorsement by scientific journals can undermine and polarize public confidence in the endorsing journals and the scientific community” – but I blame Politico more for running with this suggestion in such assertive terms.)

    The first is that the scientific community – from the people who conceive of experiments that eventually become written up in papers to the editors of journals that publish them – alone is responsible for increasing or maintaining public trust in science. They are not, but this view straightforwardly arises out of the notion that science is scientists’ business, instead of the “institution” being acknowledged as the public institution that it is (and the democratic institution it ought to be). We might collectively desire higher public trust in science yet we still demand the unqualified freedom to engage with and spread unscientific (or, more specifically, counter-scientific) ideas, to demand solutions to specific problems, to expect scientists to ‘go along’ with the political mandate of the day, and to foist on them the burden of proof to varying degrees in different spheres. This is reminiscent of Ashis Nandy’s conclusion that science has become a reason of state, and is obviously not going to work well.

    By assuming part of the mantle to improve the quality and type of trust in science (tempered by deeper questions about what role we’d like science to play in our societies), we also restore scientists’ freedom to exercise their democratic rights.

    The second fallacy is that science is inherently non-political and that politicising it from this state of ‘purity’ is wrong. Yet both positions are wrong, as the public anti-Trump stances of Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Scientific American, and others demonstrated (and as I have written before here and here, for example). Science is already, and always has been, a politically negotiated enterprise; starting from a position that denies this truth, as the Nature Human Behaviour paper and the Politico article seem to do, is disingenuous and bound to reach conclusions at odds with reality, such as laying the blame for the right’s distrust of science at the feet of an untenable separation of science and politics.

    The Politico article concludes thus*:

    If Nature’s Biden endorsement had little or no effect on readers except to make some Trump supporters disdain Nature in specific and the scientific establishment in general, why did the publication endorse any candidate?

    The publication endorsed any candidate because it could. That’s exactly how it should be.

  • The nomenclature of uncertainty

    The headline of a Nature article published on December 9 reads ‘LIGO black hole echoes hint at general relativity breakdown’. The article is about the prediction of three scientists that, should LIGO find ‘echoes’ of gravitational waves coming from blackhole-mergers, then it could be a sign of quantum-gravity forces at play.

    It’s an exciting development because it presents a simple and currently accessible way of probing the universe for signs of phenomena that show a way to unite quantum physics and general relativity – phenomena that have been traditionally understood to be outside the reach of human experiments until LIGO.

    The details of the pre-print paper the three scientists uploaded on arXiv were covered by a number of outlets, including The Wire. And The Wire‘s and Forbes‘s headlines were both questions: ‘Has LIGO already discovered evidence for quantum gravity?’ and ‘Has LIGO actually proved Einstein wrong – and found signs of quantum gravity?’, respectively. Other headlines include:

    • Gravitational wave echoes might have just caused Einstein’s general theory of relativity to break down – IB Times
    • A new discovery is challenging Einstein’s theory of relativity – Futurism
    • Echoes in gravitational waves hint at a breakdown of Einstein’s general relativity – Science Alert
    • Einstein’s theory of relativity is 100 years old, but may not last – Inverse

    The headlines are relevant because: Though the body of a piece has the space to craft what nuance it needs to present the peg, the headline must cut to it as quickly and crisply as possible – while also catching the eye of a potential reader on the social media, an arena where all readers are being inundated with headlines vying for attention.

    For example, with the quantum gravity pre-print paper, the headline has two specific responsibilities:

    1. To be cognisant of the fact that scientists have found gravitational-wave echoes in LIGO data at the 2.9-sigma level of statistical significance. Note that 2.9 sigma is evidently short of the threshold at which some data counts as scientific evidence (and well short of that at which it counts as scientific fact – at least in high-energy physics). Nonetheless, it still presents a 1-in-270 chance of, as I’ve become fond of saying, an exciting thesis.
    2. To make reading the article (which follows from the headline) seem like it might be time well spent. This isn’t exactly the same as catching a reader’s attention; instead, it comprises catching one’s attention and subsequently holding and justifying it continuously. In other words, the headline shouldn’t mislead, misguide or misinform, as well as remain constantly faithful to the excitement it harbours.

    Now, the thing about covering scientific developments from around the world and then comparing one’s coverage to those from Europe or the USA is that, for publications in those countries, what an Indian writer might see as an international development is in fact a domestic development. So Nature, Scientific American, Forbes, Futurism, etc. are effectively touting local accomplishments that are immediately relevant to their readers. The Wire, on the other hand, has to bank on the ‘universal’ aspect and by extension on themes of global awareness, history and the potential internationality of Big Science.

    This is why a reference to Einstein in the headline helps: everyone knows him. More importantly, everyone was recently made aware of how right his theories have been since they were formulated a century ago. So the idea of proving Einstein wrong – as The Wire‘s headline read – is eye-catching. Second, phrasing the headline as a question is a matter of convenience: because the quasi-discovery has a statistical significance of only 2.9 sigma, a question signals doubt.

    But if you argued that a question is also a cop-out, I’d agree. A question in a headline can be interpreted in two ways: either as a question that has not been answered yet but ought to be or as a question that is answered in the body. More often than not and especially in the click-bait era, question-headlines are understood to be of the latter kind. This is why I changed The Wire copy’s headline from ‘What if LIGO actually proved Einstein wrong…’ to ‘Has LIGO actually proved Einstein wrong…’.

    More importantly, the question is an escapism at least to me because it doesn’t accurately reflect the development itself. If one accounts for the fact that the pre-print paper explicitly states that gravitational-wave echoes have been found in LIGO data only at 2.9 sigma, there is no question: LIGO has not proved Einstein wrong, and this is established at the outset.

    Rather, the peg in this case is – for example – that physicists have proposed a way to look for evidence of quantum gravity using an experiment that is already running. This then could make for an article about the different kinds of physics that rule at different energy levels in the universe, and what levels of access humanity has to each.

    So this story, and many others like it in the past year that all dealt with observations falling short of the evidence threshold but which have been worth writing about simply because of the desperation behind them, have – or could have – prompted science writers to think about the language they use. For example, the operative words/clause in the respective headlines listed above are:

    • Nature – hint
    • IB Times – might have just caused
    • Futurism – challenging
    • Science Alert – hint
    • Inverse – may not

    Granted that an informed skepticism is healthy for science and that all science writers must remain as familiar with this notion as with the language of doubt, uncertainty, probability (and wave physics, it seems). But it still is likely the case that writers grappling with high-energy physics have to be more familiar than others, dealing as the latest research does with – yes – hope and desperation.

    Ultimately, I may not be the perfect judge of what words work best when it comes to the fidelity of syntax to sentiment; that’s why I used a question for a headline in the first place! But I’m very interested in knowing how writers choose and have been choosing their words, if there’s any friction at all (in the larger scheme) between the choice of words and the prevailing sentiments, and the best ways to deal with such situations.

    PS: If you’re interested, here’s a piece in which I struggled for a bit to get the words right (and finally had to resort to using single-quotes).

    Featured image credit: bongonian/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

  • SciAm’s new blog on the block!

    Scientific American has announced the introduction of a new blog, Critical Opalescence, edited by senior editor George Musser. It will focus on the quirky and the fascinating, attempting to revive interest in forgotten papers, explain usually complex phenomena, and generally potter around with interesting inventions and discoveries.