A wayward math-muddler for bizarre designs, artificial intelligence options, and spotting trends no one wanted; articles on Medium as Anthony Repetto
Anthony Repetto
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Another cross-post from Lesswrong about a detailed example, the entire Sahara:
Thank you for diving into the details with me, and continuing to ask probing questions!
The water brought-in by the Sahara doesn’t depend upon the area of the source; it’s the humidity times the m3 per second arriving. Humidity is low on arrival, reaching only 50% right now in Tunisia, their winter drizzles! The wind speed is roughly 2m/sec coming in from the sea, which is only 172,800m/day of drift. Yet! That sea-breeze is a wall of air a half kilometer high—that is why it can hold quite a bit.
If we need +10% of a 500m tall drift, that’s 50m; if we can use solar concentrators to accelerate convection, we can get away with less. And, we’re allowed to do an initial row that follows the shoreline closely, while a second row is a quarter kilometer inland, running parallel to the shore, where mixing of air lets you add another round of evaporate. So, we could have four rows across the northern edge of the Sahara, each row as thick as it needs to be to hit high humidity, and 10m tall, to send +10% moisture over the entire 9 million km2 of the Sahara.
How much water would we be pumping? The Sahara carries 172,800m/day flow per m2 intake surface x 500m tall x 4,000km coastline at 10g h2o per m3 = 3.5 billion tons per day, a thousand or so dead seas. (About 1.25 Trillion tons a year, enough to cover the 9 Million km2 with 139mm of rain, on average, if it had fallen instead of being sopped-up by adiabatic heat.)
We need 10% of that, or a hundred and eighty dead seas. It seems monstrous, but much of the coastline there is low for miles, so pumping 1 ton to the top of 10m at even just 20% efficiency costs 500kJ. If you want to pump that in a day, using solar, you’ll need 1/4th of a square foot of solar. That 1 ton, if we cross the threshold and it becomes surplus rain, will water 3 square meters their annual budget… and the solar is paying for that amount of irrigation every day; 1,000 m2 of rains from a dinner plate of solar, each year. It’s that energy efficiency, combined with dead simple capital expenditures, which would make something so insane potentially feasible. I’d pick California to try, first!
500kJ per ton, for 350Mil tons per day—that’s 175TJ per day, or 2 GW. That’s a nuclear power plant. To pump enough water, continuously, to irrigate 9 million km2, potentially feeding a billion people, once we dig swales! (Check out Africa’s better-than-trees plan: “Demi-Lune” swales that catch sparse, seasonal rain, to seep into the ground, with minimal tools and labor!)
These details might help see the complexities
[[a cross-post of my comment from the Lesswrong cross-post of the original post, in that thread of comments!]]
Let’s start at a more practical scale: make the Negev Bloom.
The Negev is 12,000 km2, which, if we want grasslands, needs some 300mm extra rain or more each year. That’s 3.6 billion tons per year, or just 10Mt a day. With 20g/m3 humidity, we’ll need passage of 500 billion m3 of air-flow each day. With convection driven by solar concentrators (those same which drive the pumps) to increase wind velocity during the day to 4m/s, across trays stacked 12.5m high, provides 50m3/sec, 4.32 million m3 per day across each meter of intake.
Next, we pump rows inland, as each humid layer rises, to capture drier air as they mix and move-past. Additional solar concentrators power these, and conveniently, the concentrators’ intense heat pushes humid air higher than it would during gentle billowing convection, rising to cool & enter the cloud-cycle faster. We would only be prevented from extending more rows if the elevation rises too high, or we create so much humidity and cloud-cover that our solar concentrators cease. Let’s just say we have four rows.
With 4.32 million m3 per meter of intake width, we’ll need 116,000 meters… that’s only 72 miles. With our four rows, that’s a length of coast 18 miles long. The Gaza Strip is enough to water the Negev.
And, as I mentioned in an earlier response to you, the vast majority of the humidity released by the Persian Gulf, Dead Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean, is being used to fight-against the immense downdraft of adiabatically-heated and ultra-dry upper atmosphere, which is descending because of the boundary between Hadley and Ferrel cells. So, yes, there are billions of tons of water evaporating, and no rain!
Yet, we know from geological records as recent as 9,000 bc, the Sahara was wet, with vast lakes—because of a slight increase in humidity above the threshold for accumulation. The deserts are not ‘infinitely’ dry, such that all water never results in rain. Rather, they are just below a ‘threshold’, with water added by evaporation in huge amounts, and a slightly huger amount being taken away by adiabatic downdraft. If we add just a portion of humidity, we are doing exactly what occurred across the Sahara repeatedly, and it led to accumulation, because it was enough to cross the desiccation threshold. Our own soil records prove that the desert can be green, with just a little more water than it currently evaporates.
We have repeated evidence of good designs being ignored for a decade or more; hence the Silicon Valley axiom: “10 years ahead of time is as good as wrong.” Similarly, good designs can be appallingly simple, and go unnoticed—for example, Torggler’s swinging-door design (watch on YouTube; there is no way to explain it properly, because it is so bizarrely simple).
Another example is the original river-clean-up buoy-net system, debuted decades ago, and promptly ignored, despite grabbing all the plastic before it entered the ocean. We continued to hope for ‘something to clean up the plastic’ and grasped, later, at the Ocean Clean-Up guy who gave a TED talk. He got millions of dollars, and eventually he heard about the river-scooping buoy bot, and he began promoting it. Without that TED-talker’s promotion, it’s likely we’d all still not know about the more-effective and simpler and safer river-bot. This happens all the time.
Similarly, in 2007, Leapfrog licensed from Anoto a unique dot-pattern, to print on regular paper (tiny dots, you can’t see) such that an optic on a ‘pen’ could read the coordinates, and use an on-board computer and audio to output based upon what it saw you writing. So, you could draw a drum set, and tap each drum to hear it play. Leapfrog was making kid’s workbooks and tailored software. I told them to put the dots on clear adhesive plastic, to convert any existing computer screen into a touchscreen. I faxed them my details, granted them license (they held all the others, and I didn’t want to compete), and they proceeded to ignore me for six years. Leapfrog spun-off the pen and dots, to Livescribe, who was still stuck on how ‘paper is the answer’. By 2013, they’d licensed my touchscreen to Panasonic, who bottled it up inside their $400 tablet that wowed the Germany Electronics Expo with its artistic precision. Artistic precision you could have had in 2007, and you still can’t, because Panasonic is camping on the license.
Don’t pretend that every simple idea must have already been discovered, or must obviously come into use, if it is known. Human reticence to new ideas is often the bigger barrier.
The primary reason no one already mentioned such a solution is: you can’t capture the water. Just like Tesla’s hope for free energy, rain from the sky is difficult to market. Yet, I propose it for the governments who have viable lands; they would see tax returns which would make it valuable, as long as it rained in some of the desert.
Make the Drought Evaporate!
Here are the less contentious parts, I hope?
“Ben Delo’s involvement with EA just quietly stopped being talked about without any kind of public reflection on what could be done better moving forwards.”
“Failing to share information because you suspect it will make me less supportive or more critical of your views, decisions, or actions smells of overconfidence and makes you difficult to trust, and this has regularly happened to me in my engagement with EA.”
Yes, exactly. Thank you! EA Berkeley had to remove their leader just two years ago, for reasons that none of the membership there is willing to even mention—which makes it sound particularly bad, which means that ‘the fact that EA is keeping that bad stuff hidden’ is even worse.
Similarly, EA Berkeley members were targeted by a higher-up for blacklisting, and mentioned such in emails to me, only to go silent on the matter until I brought-up the blacklisting as an issue on their slack. At that point, they mentioned that “we’ve been in private talks with the Blacklister, asking them to stop their behavior”—nothing public until absolutely necessary.
The EA houses in Berkeley, who are a magnet for EA Berkeley campus members to move-into (most residents are post-grads who were EA Berkeley prior to graduation and moving into the EA house), had repeatedly splurged unnecessarily, and when I pointed this out, the near-universal response on the EA Berkeley slack was ‘well, that’s them, not us. We’re not responsible for anyone else in our org if they’re committing petty fraud.’ The slack poster Charles He even suggested that I be banned from their slack, for ‘disrupting’ things by bringing-up their bad behavior!
EA definitely has a brand they’re protecting, and other posters seem to be bumping into other icky spots under the surface, too! (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eoLwR3y2gcZ8wgECc/hubris-and-coldness-within-ea-my-experience) & “Power dynamics: What procedures exist for protecting parties in asymmetric power relationships? Are there adequate opportunities for anonymous complaints or concerns to be raised? How are high-status individuals held accountable in the event of wrongdoing?” from (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sEpWkCvvJfoEbhnsd/the-ftx-crisis-highlights-a-deeper-cultural-problem-within)
Further: when I have posted new ideas on this forum, I was repeatedly strawmanned by EA members until other members eventually pointed-out that I was being strawmanned, and those who did so never admitted and apologized; they just downvoted every comment I made, as a team. EA protects the trolls who downvote-mafia and misrepresent, while looking for reasons to exclude ‘non-aligned views’.
Oh, no—not ‘because-dating-already’, nor as a favor, nor her aspiring to use beauty, or being unqualified. Rather, if people doing the hiring are selecting among excellent candidates, yet their selection favors people who those same authorities hope to try dating. It’s the hirer, not the one hired, who I call into question; as I said originally “hoping to hire-in” which places agency and blame with those being biased in their hiring.
Also, I don’t expect a flat ‘gender disparity’ to be indicative of this sort of hiring—rather, internal measure of co-worker and boss relationships would show if the social graph is incestuous. And, though it isn’t reasonable to say “the funder of a charity was hiring inappropriately, so the charity must also be doing so,”—and, at the same time, “a bunch of young college kids with money who all live and hang out together, dating each other,” is the shared characteristic that I argue warrants inclusion of that risk.
Thank you! You are welcome to check—the dismissals had begun, in multiple threads, before a peep from me; they were the initial replies. I became hot in response, only then, which your forum abhors—and I understand that I am downvoted for it! I don’t expect you to give me a soap-box in your living room, when I keep offending you.
I can also drop my guise, which I understand if you find doubly offensive: a troll-trap.
After being misrepresented repeatedly, this time I intentionally included the word ‘nerd’, to see if that would be enough to ignore the other points—YET! I didn’t expect that you would take my critique of hiring as a strike against the woman, who is a thoughtful and diligent member of your community, and would definitely do an excellent job assisting! I’m glad to speak in her favor—the question was why, with her quick hire, others languished in comparison? And I pointed to the risk of men in power pulling a 1950′s-style ‘I get $90k as researcher, and I date my $50k secretary’. THAT is where my heart-strings leapt to shout!
“I can also see it being possible that you bumped into situations where people were trying to sort out interpersonal issues privately, and you got wind of it and tried to make it public.”
Thank you for responding! And, no, that is not accurate. The leader of EA Berkeley was ousted; that’s not an ‘interpersonal issue, privately’. That’s the organization wanting to protect a brand by leaving their problems unmentioned, which is exactly the dishonesty part. I believe I’ve rebutted your argument—unless you have more to add?
Additionally, I understand if you took offense that I said ‘nerd’ - I’m happy to apologize to anyone in the Berkeley group who was offended or hurt, in person, with anyone else present they wish. Unfortunately, with Bankman’s incestuous corporate structure updating my assumptions, I do believe it is right to ask: are they dating their PAs? That’s a question for internal review, privacy, yet the statistical results should be public.
Thank you again for engaging with a rebuttal!
In other threads, my arguments were repeatedly misrepresented or unaddressed, while comments consisted of ‘we shouldn’t fund this, it’s not appropriate’ when I specified at the outset that I was not seeking funding; ‘this should be posted somewhere else’, etc. And only in a few instances, out of dozens of responses, have EA commenters addressed the substance of what I wrote.
Behaving decently is nice; that doesn’t remove the point I was asking about: ignoring the other arguments I brought-up. It seems, repeatedly, that the call of appropriateness is used to ignore the substance of the other arguments; which continues to be the case, in this thread.
Does that absolve EA of the other points? Finding a flaw with the speaker or one of their points, to ignore the rest of the argument, seems to be a pattern amongst forum-commenters here—followed by mass downvotes.
I’d also like to ask clarification about your last sentence: I said ‘nerds’, and that may be what you found particularly offensive, there; or, that I hypothesize that men in those organizations are hiring hoping for a date? I am not attempting to ‘blame a woman’ for getting a job, by the way—I am pointing to the people who are doing the hiring for potentially selfish reasons.
Well, there’s a simple empirical measure, rather than relying on whether an argument is approved-of or not: Do any of them date? Are they hoping to keep that fact hidden?
“Ben Delo’s involvement with EA just quietly stopped being talked about without any kind of public reflection on what could be done better moving forwards.”
“Failing to share information because you suspect it will make me less supportive or more critical of your views, decisions, or actions smells of overconfidence and makes you difficult to trust, and this has regularly happened to me in my engagement with EA.”
Yes, exactly. Thank you! EA Berkeley had to remove their leader just two years ago, for reasons that none of the membership there is willing to even mention—which makes it sound particularly bad, which means that ‘the fact that EA is keeping that bad stuff hidden’ is even worse.
Similarly, EA Berkeley members were targeted by a higher-up for blacklisting, and mentioned such in emails to me, only to go silent on the matter until I brought-up the blacklisting as an issue on their slack. At that point, they mentioned that “we’ve been in private talks with the Blacklister, asking them to stop their behavior”—nothing public until absolutely necessary.
The EA houses in Berkeley, who are a magnet for EA Berkeley campus members to move-into (most residents are post-grads who were EA Berkeley prior to graduation and moving into the EA house), had repeatedly splurged unnecessarily, and when I pointed this out, the near-universal response on the EA Berkeley slack was ‘well, that’s them, not us. We’re not responsible for anyone else in our org if they’re committing petty fraud.’ The slack poster Charles He even suggested that I be banned from their slack, for ‘disrupting’ things by bringing-up their bad behavior!
EA definitely has a brand they’re protecting, and other posters seem to be bumping into other icky spots under the surface, too! (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/eoLwR3y2gcZ8wgECc/hubris-and-coldness-within-ea-my-experience) & “Power dynamics: What procedures exist for protecting parties in asymmetric power relationships? Are there adequate opportunities for anonymous complaints or concerns to be raised? How are high-status individuals held accountable in the event of wrongdoing?” from (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sEpWkCvvJfoEbhnsd/the-ftx-crisis-highlights-a-deeper-cultural-problem-within)
Further: when I have posted new ideas on this forum, I was repeatedly strawmanned by EA members until other members eventually pointed-out that I was being strawmanned, and those who did so never admitted and apologized; they just downvoted every comment I made, as a team. EA protects the trolls who downvote-mafia and misrepresent, while looking for reasons to exclude ‘non-aligned views’.
I also wonder about the hiring for AI Safety, here in the Bay: after talking to people who struggled to get hired as a PA in AI Safety, despite a background in CS and an interest in AI and safety for 5 years… while a pretty girl with a psych background got hired as PA immediately, multiple offers? It sounds like the nerds at Berkeley are hoping to hire-in a Bankman-sized polycule as PAs.
Moderation of the boards, to point-out misrepresentations and fallacies, would put it on par with the philosophy message board I moderated in the 90s. New folks shouldn’t have to defend themselves from EA regulars’ misrepresentations.
And, the selection of judges seems an arcane cabal… did you notice the irony, that your own, privately selected judges are the ones who determine if critique of themselves is valid? That’s equivalent to being “judge in your own trial”.
I also fear that, by offering a prize to the ‘best’, you are then able to disregard all those who ‘didn’t make the prize-threshold’. You gave only two months for it, while other organizations have a suggestion box that is always available, without judges dismissing all but the ‘best’.
Oh, darn—I can’t tell you this stuff, because you had already closed the contest by the time word of it had trickled to me.
Thank you for your detailed critique! I’m glad to hear firm arguments—we are two halves of progress, Speculator and Skeptic. Isn’t the Constitution the means by which the Government inherits the Will of the People? Such that, though the oath is directly to the Constitution, it is ultimately to the People? The founders didn’t want a direct link, due to the whims of the majority and the moment… yet, we are not slaves to our own Constitution, instead its recipient?
Hmm… I suppose we’re looking at the “preferred agent” as different members: I think of the People as the privileged agents, with statesmen taking an oath to those People, which seems to be a breach of their oath of office if they intentionally misrepresent their goals in office. You favor the statesmen, even when the evidence of history is that voters are repeatedly fooled because there is no reliable account of politicians’ actions?
[Also, the existence of Representative government, by the way, is the admission that each voter not be burdened with every task of verification, and this seems to be another instance of that.]
When someone offers “what if we measure, to verify their claim?”—that is what destroys democracy, by limiting the speech of active politicians. Is that correct? Because it seems that “allowing politicians to lie on campaign to voters, thereby deceiving them in their vote and making that vote a lie” seems worse than limiting candidates’ extravagant claims , only.
Thank you!
1. Keeping promises is hard, being truthful seems to be hard to them… I’m not sure why their relative difficulty makes any difference? Could you outline the steps in that argument a bit more?
2. If the amendment operates by criteria, rather than dictate, it’s aligned with what I originally described. For example, “Make Everything Fantastic” would only be rated true if nothing declined. There are objective metrics for these things, and in those cases of ambiguity, you side on “broken promise” for safety. I don’t pretend to have perfect mechanism design on my first try, either—that’s why I shared a rough thought which might be developed further. I value investigating questions like “what is the repercussion of not admitting a broken promise?” Yet, the existence of such questions does not invalidate the task. It might be worth looking into. Do you see that?
3. Again, I’m missing your arguments. You’re making a claim, and then stating its consequent, without stating its necessary cause(s). What makes this intractable? Leaving-out your arguments implies that you assume you are right, which isn’t the “Scout’s Mindset” that I heard about...
Whoo. Last cross-post for the night, I think I’ve responded to the major points… and I hope this shows a bit more of the complexity underneath my simplistic presentation!
How quickly it rains down depends on a few factors, and we can tip those in our favor:
--> Humid Rise—humidity (just the h2o molecule) is only 18g/mol, while oxygen molecules are 32g/mol, so humid air is quite buoyant! Especially considering that water vapor reflects heat (infrared) back to the ground, creating a heat bulge beneath it. The result is that, once humidity begins to rise, it naturally pulls air in from all around it, along the ground. It begins to drive convection. Yet! That humid rise is normally billowy and easily dispersed by cross-breezes, which means that the humidity cannot rise high quickly; it mostly travels far overland, or stays in place. Your rain wanders to an unexpected location! We want to form rain clouds nearby, instead, so we need that humidity to rise really high, quickly, without being torn apart by cross-breezes. That’s where the solar concentrators help, with their tall tower at 1200C and radiant, they blast infrared into all the water vapor around them, pummeling a plume high up, carrying that vapor. Up high enough, the air pressure drops, which is key for causing a rapid cooling, and the formation of nice heavy clouds. The faster we take air from the ground up to a few kilometers, the more water it’ll still be holding. [[Only a fraction of one gram per m3 is needed for the thinnest clouds, but we could toss a few grams up and it’ll come down soon. We want the water to rain, evaporate, and rain down again, in as many cycles as it can. That gives plants time to grab it, in numerous locations, as well as time for the ground to catch some.]] When we look at water-demand for plants in the wild vs. water-resilient greenhouses, we can drop water demand ten-fold because nine-tenths of the water was lost in the leaves to evapotranspiration! As a result, if that leaf-sweat keeps rising and falling as rain as it travels further South, then the same bucket of water ends up getting ten times the use (assuming ground water is eventually used, as well).
--> Albedo—the desert rock is pretty bright, so the addition of vegetation and especially any water-bodies (!) will multiply the solar absorption, which will drive that heat-bulge and evaporation for humidity-buoyancy, to help loft water vapor and form clouds. This is how the Amazon does it—most of her clouds are her armpit fog, caused by solar-to-thermal foliage!
--> Vortices—the solar concentrators themselves can be rigged with a few flanges, to nudge their inflowing convection as it quickens toward the center, to spin that up-draft, helping it stay coherent and push higher, for rains nearby. Any Youtube video on Rocket Stoves by Robert Murray-Smith is best for enjoying such a vortex!
--> Swales—I love swales. I’ve been preaching swales since 2010. I heard, almost immediately, when Sepp Holzer started pitching his “crater gardens” … which were dug by an excavator, four feet deep. I was aghast—my favorite swales are micro-swales, a few inches deep, in flakey soils that rain seasonally, to catch it as it dribbles. That’s what they’re doing in the Sahel, south of Sahara, to stop the deserts. By halting the flow of water along the ground, keeping it for seep, roots, and another evaporation, you prolong the residence-time of each ton of water, leading to a greater equilibrium stock—that is, a high normal lake line, because each ton of water rarely ever leaves.
And, as to infrastructure before success—California could probably boost rains enough to help farmers and forests, here, without needing to conquer an entire desert the size of Europe!