Psychopaths Are Among Us

Here is a bit from an excellent article by William D. Cohan in Bloomberg News:

Did Psychopaths Take Over Wall Street Asylum?: William D. Cohan

It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame.

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”

How do people with such obvious personality flaws make it to the top of seemingly successful corporations? Boddy says psychopaths take advantage of the “relative chaotic nature of the modern corporation,” including “rapid change, constant renewal” and high turnover of “key personnel.” Such circumstances allow them to ascend through a combination of “charm” and “charisma,” which makes “their behaviour invisible” and “makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.”

Go read the whole article because the reporter includes a great deal more detail about Brody's thesis.

I found the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work to be useful in exposing this problem with modern corporations. This book has Robert D. Hare as co-author. It is Hare who developed the Psychopath Check List - Revised (PCL-R) which is the standard instrument for identifying psychopaths.

Bottom line is that these monsters create havoc and ruin many, many lives:

Then, according to Boddy’s “Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis,” these men were “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” to wield “considerable power.”

They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single- minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self- aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.”

Boddy doesn’t name names, but the type of personality he describes is recognizable to all from the financial crisis.

He says the unnamed “they” seem “to be unaffected” by the corporate collapses they cause. These psychopaths “present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events, are very convincing in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.”

And if you need more scare put into you. Here is a bit from an article in The Los Angeles Times by Andrew Malcolm:

Using his law enforcement experience and data drawn from the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, Jim Kouri has collected a series of personality traits common to a couple of professions.

Kouri, who's a vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police, has assembled traits such as superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.

These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.

But -- and here's the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion -- these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)

Yup. Violent homicide aside, our elected officials often show many of the exact same character traits as criminal nut-jobs, who run from police but not for office.

Kouri notes that these criminals are psychologically capable of committing their dirty deeds free of any concern for social, moral or legal consequences and with absolutely no remorse.

"This allCapitol Hill Domeows them to do what they want, whenever they want," he wrote. "Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders."

Good grief! And we not only voted for these people, we're paying their salaries and entrusting them to spend our national treasure in wise ways.

Self-Inflicted Helplessness

The political and monetary authorities have behaved wonderfully since the 2008 collapse. They are shown brilliantly the technique called learned helplessness. Or so the story goes.

In truth, the leaders have simply ignored their responsibility and their capability and are abetted by their enablers, the media. Here's a bit by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog pointing this out:

The Post Wrongly Tells Readers That Central Banks Can't Do More to Boost Growth

In an article about the IMF reversing its pro-austerity stance, the Post told readers:

"Central banks, which have already reduced interest rates to extremely low levels, have little remaining ability to boost economic activity."

This is not true. Central banks could explicitly target higher rates of inflation. This would lower real interest rates and reduce debt burdens. This policy has been advocated by many prominent economists, including Paul Krugman, Ken Rogoff, the former chief economist of the IMF, and Ben Bernanke when he was still a professor at Princeton.

I'm reading Sylvia Nasar's Grand Pursuit and it really, really sad to realize that this same flailing about and impotence in the face of a crying need for action marked the 1930s as it does today. It simply means that tens of millions suffer because the "leaders" can't lead. Instead the leaders are fearful of "little voices" in their heads whispering about dreaded inflation or the need to appease some hidden actor requiring "confidence". Even in the 1930s there were a number of leading economists, Keynes being the preeminent example, who properly diagnosed the situation and gave political and monetary authorities the needed guidance. But then, as now, these "leaders" simply ignored the advice and played their hand as if the economy were a morality play requiring "excesses" to be punished by many, many years of suffering by the innocent, the unemployed workers with absolutely no responsibility for the crash.

David Orrell on the Art & Science of Forecasting

I love to read about "expert opinion" and "forecasting". One of my favourite reads is Dan Gardner's "Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail - and Why We Believe Them Anyway". Here is the author's website for the book. And here is my comment on the book.

David Orrell has written a number of books on economics and in particular the failure of economic models to match reality. I especially enjoy his book Economyths. Here is the author's website and the (author's post on his book.

Here is a presentation by David Orrell for the International Institute of Forecasters entitled "Where's the Puck? 2500 Years of Forecasting". It is a nice survey of the history and failings of forecasting:

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Thinking Like an Engineer

Most people don't know how to quantify their decisions. They think the world is black or white. You are either for or against something.

But there is a different way. You evaluate what an option cost. It is called a cost-benefit analysis. You can use it to evaluate alternatives and come up with a more rational decision, one based on understanding the hidden costs to the decision as well as the hidden benefits.

Here's an example:

Tim Harford's "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure"

This is an excellent survey of adaptation as a strategy to deal with complex environments in which a top-down rational planning simply can't find solutions. There are many excellent stories, but this one bit speaks to me, a 1960s generation person:

When the US Army faced the 'disruptive innovation' of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army's hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, "I'll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine, and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war."

That ranks up there with the infamous statement by a US Major "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." as reported by Peter Arnett.

This book is richly illustrated with examples of how an evolutionary strategy can find a solution where managerial dictum or top-down planning fails miserably. Some of the best examples are from business.

He does a very good job of reviewing:

• The disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and how a bottom-up effort by rebellious colonels and captains finally changed the US military tactics off their dangerous track and toward a more successful approach.


• The regulatory failures and coupled risks that led a meltdown in a constrained "sub-prime real estate" market to the globe straddling collapse of financial markets in 2008. He walks the reader through the failure to listen to whistle-blowers and the reluctance to effectively change the banking rules to prevent another catastrophe.


• The mindless simplifications of a greenhouse gas enthusiast compared to the known complexities of trying to identify a proper "green strategy". He walks through a day's choices of "green alternatives" and shows why each and every one was wrong because the underlying reality is far more complex than the simplistic green enthusiast ever could imagine.


• He examines nuclear safety and shows how the various catastrophes were waiting to happen because the systems are designed with too much complexity and coupled failure modes.


• He looks at two big oil rig diasters, the Piper Alpha in July 1988, and the Deepwater Horizon in April 2010. He walks through the failure in design and safety systems. He shows why these were accidents waiting to happen.

I like his discussion of Philip Tetlock who did a scientific study of the ability of pundits, gurus, and consultants to provide accurate predictions of the future. In a previous post I reviewed Dan Gardiner's book "Future Babble" that explores this topic more deeply.

I worked in a company where they paid lip service to the idea that "there is no failure, just a learning opportunity" and that projects, especially in the R&D lab, should expect a high failure rate. But in reality, failures were punished, so creativity was suppressed and lessons really weren't learned. Tim Harford gives a glowing review of Google as a learning environment with adaptive engineering practices, but I'm cynical. It is hard for managers to accept failure. Corporations are always going to get atherosclerosis. The big old successful corporations are always going to fall to the young, rising whippersnappers.

I also worked closely with QA (Quality Assurance) people and watched them play their role. In theory they were the frontline defence against obfuscation and deception on the part of managers and teams that are failing but want to pretend that things are going teckety-boo. The org chart showed them reporting independently right up to the CEO to ensure independent and timely information about project problems. But in reality project managers had a "right" to demand issues first be heard by them and they could muscle most QA auditors into silence. Similarly, I was involved in a ISO 9000 initiative within the company and quickly discovered that most of our "learning organization" capabilities, such as our extensive audited written procedures, were in fact window-dressing. In short: it is hard to build and maintain a truly adaptive organization that uses evolutionary strategies for problem-solving. Humans don't like uncertainty and they love hierarchical organizations. I like the message in Tim Harford's book, but I'm sure it will get more lip service than real implementation.

There is much wisdom in the book, much to learn, I strongly recommend it to everyone. It will open your eyes to the complexity that is out there. It will stun you to realize how badly our engineered "safety systems" have failed. And it will give you an appreciation for a need for more experimentation and a healthy acceptance of failure as the technique for learning.

Tim Harford Talks About His New Book

Here is an interview by the Economist magazine with Tim Harford about his new book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure:



The part of the interview about H. R. McMaster is fascinating. Sadly I'm not familiar with his book Dereliction of Duty but it sounds like it might be worth tracking down and reading.

Dan Ariely Talks About his Book

Here is material from Chapter 0 from Dan Ariely's book The Upside of Irrationality. Here he talks about the trick of "reward substitution" to fool ourselves into doing the right thing even if we don't like it and are tempted with short term fun stuff:



And here is another version of the same story but with more details:

The Computers are Taking Over!

How can a book which was originally published in the early 1990s for a price of around $50 become listed by two reputable book vendors in 2011 for a price of over $20 million?

Well... it happens when you let the computers run your world, and sadly we are doing more and more of that. For the gory details, read this post by an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley who was trying to buy the textbook for his lab and discovered this insane pricing:

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

...

The price peaked on April 18th, but on April 19th profnath’s price dropped to $106.23, and bordeebook soon followed suit to the predictable $106.23 * 1.27059 = $134.97. But Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

Having worked in the computer industry for 30 years, I for one will not be happy the day the computers take over. These machines are not like biological machines which have great redundancy and soft failure modes. Computers simply crash. And like the above case, they simply go nuts from time to time. Humans don't have the abililty to program a truly complex system that is meant to be autonomous. The idea that robots can "do their thing" is scary.

On the other hand, it is inevitable that the computers will take over. We are in a headlong rush of technological development and along the way we keep ceding more and more turf to them. The day will come when they are "in charge". Hopefully I won't live long enough to see that day. Don't get me wrong. I love computers. I'm fascinated by them. But I realize how the industry has grown too fast with too little regard for the robust safety needed for truly autonomous decision-making.

The future will be "interesting". That is both a curse and a promise.

Dan Gardner's "Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail -- and Why We Believe Them Anyway"

This is an excellent review of just why we are suckers for doomsday fanatics and inveterate seekers of certainty about the future. He reviews the science, describes why we have a proclivity for prediction, and walks you though a number of examples of famous predictors and their failed predictions. And what is truly mind-boggling, he shows how people continue to believe the predictions in the face of overwhelming evidence of their wrongness.

He divides experts into hedgehogs (who "know" one thing in great depth) and foxes (who know many things, but more importantly know their limits). He shows how hedgehogs dig themselves into a hole with their "predictions" and when caught predicting something that is untrue, they simply continue digging their hole deeper. He explains that foxes are reluctant to predict, hedge their predictions, and are willing to admit to error when their predictions are shown to be untrue.

This book is an excellent antidote to those talking heads that the media loves to put in front of a camera and have them make grand "predictions" about this and that. You will learn why and how you get sucked into their predictions. It isn't simply them bedazzling you. You are built to want the certainty of a "good prediction" about the future. We create these doomsday fanatics and these over-priced sellers of "predictions" about the future.

Here are some interesting bits from the book:

With natural science increasingly aware of the limits of prediction and with prediction even more difficult when people are involved, it would seem obvious that social science -- the study of people -- would follow the lead of natural science and accept that much of what we would like to predict will forever be unpredictable. But that hasn't happened, at least not to the extent it should. In fact, as the Yale University historian John Lewis Gaddis describes in The Landscape of History, "social scientists during the 20th century embraced a Newtonian vision of linear and therefore predictable phenomena even as the natural sciences were abandoning it." Hence, economists issue wonky forecasts, criminologists predict crime trends that don't materialize, and political scientists foresee events that don't happen. And they keep doing it no matter how often they fail.

One of my personal favourites, Paul Ehrlich, founder in the late 1960s of ZPG and author of a number of doomsday books including his most famous The Population Bomb, is featured in this book and covered in several sections. Here is a bit:

Paul Ehrlich was also emboldened by the way things were going and he published a string of jeremiads, each more certain of worse disasters than the last. "In the early 1970s, the leading edge of the age of scarcity arrived," he wrote in 1974's The End of Affluence. "With it came a clearer look at the future, revealing more of the nature of the dark age to come." Of course there would be mass starvation in the 1970s -- "or, at the latest, the 1980s." Shortages "will become more frequent and more severe," he wrote. "We are facing, within the next three decades, the disintegration of nation-states infected with growthmania." Only the abandonment of growth-based economics and other radical changes offered any hope of survival. And some countries were doomed no matter what they did. India was among the walking dead. Ehrlich was sure. "A run of miraculously good weather might delay it -- perhaps for a decade, maybe even to the end of the century -- but the train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation is already in motion." Japan is almost certainly "a dying giant." Same for Brazil. The united Kingdom was only slightly better off. The mere continuation of current trends will ensure that "by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people, of little or no concern to the other 5-7 billion people of a sick world," he wrote in an earlier paper. Of course, it could be worse than that: Thermonuclear war or some variety of eco-catastrophe were distinct possibilities. "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that the average Briton would be a distinctly lower than it is today." Not that Americans are in any position to gloat, Ehrlich cautioned. The United States is entering "the most difficult period ever faced by industrialized society." This dark new age may well see the end of civilization. Ehrlich noted that those in the burgeoning "survivalist" movement were stockpiling supplies in wilderness cabins -- "a very intelligent choice for some people" -- but he and his wife had decided to stay put. "We enjoy our friends and our work too much to move to a remote spot and state farming and hoarding." Ehrlich wrote. "If society goes, we will go with it."

He looks into the underlying psychology that fuels our need for predictions and the cognitive biases that make us susceptible:

In contrast, the gloom-mongers have it easy. Their predictions are supported by our intuitive pessimism, so they feel right to us. And that conclusion is bolstered by our attraction to certainty. As strange as it sounds we want to believe the expert predicting a dark future is exactly right, because knowing that the future will be dark is less tormenting than suspecting it. Certainty is always preferable to uncertainty, even when what's certain is disaster.

And here is our real Achilles' heel:

The media superstars who tell us what will and won't happen are an overwhelmingly confident bunch. Talking heads on business shows are particularly cock-sure but the other pundits who engage in prognostication -- whether futurists, newspaper columnists, or the sages on television who tell us the fate of politicians and nations -- share the same fundamental characteristics. They are articulate, enthusiastic, and authoritative. Often, they are charming and funny. Their appearance commonly matches the role they play, whether it's a Wall Street sharpie or a foreign affairs maven. They commonly see things through a single analytical lens, which helps them come up with simple, clear, conclusive, and compelling explanations for what is happening and what will happen.

They do not suffer doubts. They do not acknowledge mistakes. And they never say, "I don't know."

They are, in this book's terms, hedgehogs. Their kind dominates the op-ed pages of newspapers, pundit panels, lecture circuits, and best-seller lists.

Now, if this is true, and if it's also true that the predictions of hedgehogs are even less accurate than those of the average expert -- who does as well as a flipped coin remember -- then a disturbing conclusion should follow. The experts who dominate the media won't be the most accurate. In fact, they will be the least accurate. And that is precisely why to measure the fame of each of his 284 experts, Tetlock found that the more famous the expert, the worse he did.

The result may seem more than a little bizarre. Predictions are a big part of what media experts do, after all. Surely experts who consistently deliver lousy results will be weeded out, while the expert who does better than average will be rewarded with a spot on the talking-head shows and all that goes with it. The cream should rise, and yet, it doesn't. In the world of expert opinions, the cream sinks. What rises is the stuff that should be, but isn't, skimmed off and thrown away.

How is this possible? Very simply, it's what people want. Or to put it in economic terms, its supply and demand: We demand it; they supply.

Gardner is referencing a scientific study by Tetlock that investigated the quality of predictions by experts. He goes on to explain why and how we demand these inaccurate experts.

Here's an example of one psychological reason why we cling to bad predictions: confirmation bias:

After Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor, General John DeWitt was sure American citizens of Japaneses origin would unleash a wave of sabotage. They must be rounded up and imprisoned, he insisted. When time passed and there was no sabotage, DeWitt didn't reconsider. "The very fact that no sabotage has taken place is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken," he declared. As the reader may realize, DeWitt's reasoning is an extreme example of the "confirmation bias" discussed earlier.

He ends the book by trying to give the reader a guide to deal with the gloomy doomsters that proliferate in the media:

Skepticism is a good idea at all times but when the news is especially tumultuous and nervous references to uncertainty are sprouting like weeds on the roof of an abandoned factory, it is essnetial. The 1970s were one such time. As I write, we are in another.

The crash of 2008 was s shock. The global recession of 2009 was a torment. Unemployment is high, economics weak, and government debt steadily mounts. The media are filled with experts telling us what comes next. We watch, frightened and fascinated, like the audience of a horror movie. We want to know. We must know.

For the moment, what the experts are saying is, in an odd way, reassuring. It's bleak, to be sure. But it's not apocalyptic, which is a big improvement over what they were saying when the crash was accelerating and the gloomier forecasters, such as former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead, were warning it would be "worse than the Great Depression." To date, things aren't worse than the Great Depression, nor are they remotely as bad as the Great Depression. Naturally, the gloomsters would be sure to add "so far." And they would be right. Things change. The situation may get very much worse. Of course it may also go in the other direction, slowly or suddenly, modestly or sharply. The range of possible futures is vast.

This book is a fun read and very informative. It is an excellent prophylactic to the crazies who want to worm their way into your mind and turn you into some end-of-the-world cult member. Read it!

If you want to read about modern day hedgehogs whose "predictions" have big consequences for us, read this bit by Paul Krugman about bond vigilantes and here where he points out those who see any rise in inflation as a sign of hyperinflation and a debasement of the currency. Sadly these "experts" are forcing governments around the world, in the midst of the Great Recession, to take on austerity programs similar to FDR's in 1936 that led to the great 1937 recession within the Great Depression.

Japanese Dysfunction

Sadly, the inept and incredibly slow response of the Japanese government and Tepco, the nuclear reactor operator, means that the world is getting dosed unnecessarily by radiation. Right now the amount of Cesium-137 released by Fukushima is equivalent to what was released by Chernobyl. But Chernobyl was one reactor while Fukushima is 4 reactors and 4 piles of spent fuel (more details here). Chernobyl was one bad explosion, Fukushima is a simmering situation with many small explosions and apparently no end in sight. It is a ticking timebomb slowly releasing many, many times more radioactivity than Chernobyl.

You would think that Japan's government and Tepco would be expediting everything possible to contain the leak. But they aren't. That's because of the dysfunctional Japanese culture of "saving face" and an unwillingness to admit problems or the need for help.

Here's a bit from a post by Robert X. Cringely that explains:

In this nuclear accident the situation is complicated by an extra party — Tokyo Electric Power Company — with its corporate personality and internal agendas. TEPCO is embarrassed by this accident. Embarrassment, either corporate or personal, is a huge deal in Japan. It’s not like they can just give up their corporate face for a few weeks or months while necessary things get done. I saw a similar unwillingness to squarely face reality at General Public Utilities back at Three Mile Island in 1979. In both corporate cultures there was too much emphasis on political damage control — emphasis that often comes at the expense of good engineering.

If a nuclear plant manager is worried too much about his job he isn’t worried enough about his reactor.

TEPCO just this morning announced that four of the six Daiichi reactors can never be repaired. I wrote that right here less than 24 hours after the earthquake and tsunami before the emergency batteries had even run out. It was instantly obvious to even a moderately informed observer like me, yet why did TEPCO take two weeks to come to the same conclusion? Internal politics, which can only increase public danger.

But wait, there’s more! Now we have reports of water contaminated with plutonium at the plant and possible plutonium ground water contamination. Radioactive cesium and iodine are bad enough, though that water can be stored in pools for a few months while the radiation decays then carefully diluted for disposal. But plutonium contamination is forever — at least 10,000 years.

There are right now two plutonium remediation technologies on offer to the Japanese government and TEPCO that I know about — one from Russia and one from the USA. One approach uses nanotech and the other uses biotech but both are novel and unique. Both have been offered to the Japanese through government channels and in both cases the Japanese government or TEPCO have yet to respond.

I know about these technologies because the Russian one is represented by a friend of mine and the American one comes from a Startup America company so I took it straight to the White House myself.

I think it would be smart for TEPCO to adopt both technologies in case one works better than the other. But my sense is that if an answer ever comes from Japan it will be months from now and will probably be “no thanks.”

Think about this as you read about that plutonium-contaminated water, because it is going to be in the news for years to come. If only there had been a technology available to clean up that stuff early in the crisis, the pundits will say, lives could have been saved. There was such a technology available — two of them in fact.

Sadly, 6.4 billion people are going to pay the price for the idiot social culture of "face saving" going on in Japan. Normally I would say "let each culture do its thing". But if their "thing" is to poison the world for the rest of us, then I think maybe the UN Security Council should hold a meeting and decide to send in troops and install an efficient decision process and an effective management system to deal with the crisis. The rest of the world shouldn't have to pay for the "niceties" of Japanese culture.

As Cringely points out, the leakage of plutonium is essentially "forever" since it takes over 30,000 years to reduce the radioactivity by half. Human civilization is only 10,000 years old. That is forever. And we are paying this price because of stupidity and unwillingness to get the job done by a culture which has shot itself in the foot and continues to refuse to admit it and seek the help proffered by the rest of the world. Tragic!

What the Japanese Won't Admit about Fukushima

I don't understand "message control". It always blows up and makes you look bad, but every government and large corporation religiously practice message control in the hopes that people are idiots and will simply buy the story being retailed and never bother to find out the truth.

Here's the truth about Fukushima as published in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site.

The warning follows an analysis by a leading US expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it.

Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have "lost the race" to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.

...

"The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell," Lahey said. "I hope I am wrong, but that is certainly what the evidence is pointing towards."

The major concern when molten fuel breaches a containment vessel is that it reacts with the concrete floor of the drywell underneath, releasing radioactive gases into the surrounding area. At Fukushima, the drywell has been flooded with seawater, which will cool any molten fuel that escapes from the reactor and reduce the amount of radioactive gas released.

Lahey said: "It won't come out as one big glob; it'll come out like lava, and that is good because it's easier to cool."

The drywell is surrounded by a secondary steel-and-concrete structure designed to keep radioactive material from escaping into the environment. But an earlier hydrogen explosion at the reactor may have damaged this.

"The reason we are concerned is that they are detecting water outside the containment area that is highly radioactive and it can only have come from the reactor core," Lahey added. "It's not going to be anything like Chernobyl, where it went up with a big fire and steam explosion, but it's not going to be good news for the environment."

...

In the light of the Fukushima crisis, Lahey said all countries with nuclear power stations should have "Swat teams" of nuclear reactor safety experts on standby to give swift advice to the authorities in times of emergency, with international groups co-ordinated by the International Atomic Energy Authority.

There is much more detail worth reading in this article. Go read the whole article.

I'm surprised that there isn't already an international "swat team" to advice governments. I'm even more surprised the Japan has not replaced the incompetent "management" at Tepco with experts who can direct the containment and shutdown of Fukushima and undertake the necessary evaluation of all other reactors in Japan to decide on what needs to be shutdown, what needs safety upgrades, and what meets proper safety standards. I understand that Japan is a "consensus" society which can paralyze decision-making, but there are situations where you have to act and get consensus later otherwise the cost is astronomical. I would think a core meltdown is one of them. But apparently this truth has not yet dawned on Japanese officials.

Scott Adams on Libya

I enjoy Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoons. I usually like his posts on his blogs, but on occasion I get infuriated with this libertarian nuttiness. But this one today has me thinking. I'm one of the ones in the middle who think it was good to help the Libyans, but Scott Adams pretty well takes me down and rubs my nose in my weak reasoning. Oh well...

From Scott Adams' blog:

Remind me again why we're bombing Libya? Let's run through the possibilities.

Humanitarian Reasons: No one believes this is the most effective way to save lives in other countries, unless Libyan lives are somehow more valuable than, for example, other African lives. The price for missiles alone on the first day of attacks is estimated at $100 million. For that amount of money we could buy a lot of water purifiers, food, and vaccinations. When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation starts attacking Libya, I'll believe that bombing is a good humanitarian investment.

Getting rid of a Dangerous Dictator: Isn't Libya the country that renounced nuclear weapons and apparently meant it? Gaddafi's Western-influenced son, who doesn't seem crazy, has apparently taken an increasingly active role in government. That was a good sign for sane leadership in the future. And compared to other Muslim countries in the neighborhood, Libya is relatively good on women's rights.

Supporting Democratic Movements: Sounds good in principle, but do the member states of the Arab League, who originally supported the military action, understand that they're next? That doesn't pass the sniff test.

Oil: You can never rule out oil as a motive for war. But if the military was doing the bidding of the oil companies, we'd be attacking Saudi Arabia.

Terrorism: You don't reduce terrorism by bombing a Muslim country that didn't start a fight with you.

My theory is that the military action in Libya is the first phase of war with Iran. It sends a signal to the young people in Iran that if they organize a popular uprising against their own regime, they will get military support of the same sort they are seeing in Libya. You might argue that we're sending that same message to every dictator in the region. But remember that the Arab League supported military action in Libya, and that group includes a lot of dictators. Iran is obviously not part of the Arab League, given that being Arab is sort of a requirement for the club. My conclusion is that the no-fly zone in Libya is intended as a message for the young people in Iran. The world has a far bigger strategic interest in Iran than Libya.

Here I remind you that cartoonists don't know much about world affairs. You'll see more insightful ideas in the comments below. I'm just getting the ball rolling.

I admit I hadn't thought of the Iran angle. I bought the "humanitarian" argument, but I also bought the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse for Iraq. I did realize that oil probably played a role and explained why Libya but not Yemen or Bahrain.

I hate to think I get suckered by these "causes" but it looks like I have been taken again. What Scott Adams points out is that I didn't do the necessary due dilligance and examine the "costs" of the humanitarian mission. He's right. There are lots of other missions that would save more lives much cheaper.

I admit that I'm a sucker for wanting to help people in need and I'm weak on the cold-hearted calculations. I'm like the guy who sees somebody drowning and even if I don't know how to swim I jump in to "save" the drowning person. It is just my impulse. It is built into me.

Scott Adams would see the person drowning and look around and see if he can get off the hook because somebody else will jump in. Failing that, Scott would check his billfold to see if he could maybe bribe somebody else to jump in -- and risk their life -- to save the drowning person. Failing that. Scott would made the trade-off of personal risk to benefits from saving the drowning person. I'm guessing that Scott would end up walking along the water's edge shouting encouraging words. His calculation would be "if I save the guy I get patted on the back and maybe get to shake the mayor's hand. but I risk paying in infinite penalty of dying, if I stand on the shore and shout encouragement then I get points for "helping" but I don't have any personal downside in terms of risk to myself". That kind of calculation is rational, but it leaves me cold.

The interesting fact is that Scott Adams plays a better evolutionary game than I do. I blindly run risks that jeopardize my ability to keep my germ line going. He rationally plans his actions to maintain a maximum genetic viability. I'm a branch on the tree of life that will end. He is a branch that will bear many smaller branches and reach far into the future.

Charlie Sheen Feels Slimed and Trapped

I imagine Charlie Sheen -- after his various rants this week -- feels somewhat like the following:



A normal person view themselves as their own worst enemy and feel "slimed" and "trapped" and about to be "feasted upon" by this velvet worm. But Charlie Sheen is a cricket, standing tall, talking about
"tiger blood" and being an "Adonis".

He doesn't realize that something worse than guys in white suits with butterfly nets are coming to get him... He has been slimed by the Giant Velvet Worm (the media) that is now feasts upon him!

I don't know Charlie Sheen, but he needs some help. He needs real friends and not the two bimbos, the "goddesses", that are hanging out at his house. He needs to listen to his lawyer. He needs to get psychiatric help. He needs to realize that he is as trapped as that cricket in the above video.

How Humans Think

We certainly don't think rationally. He use techniques and rules of thumb that simplify and speed up our decisions. Sometimes we use techniques that are just plain wrong: these are the "cognitive illusions" that result in our making consistently wrong decisions.

Here is an example of one called the Allais Paradox. It is presented by Jonah Lehrer in his blog The Frontal Cortex:

Suppose somebody offered you a choice between two different vacations. Vacation number one gives you a 50 percent chance of winning a three-week tour of England, France and Italy. Vacation number two offers you a one-week tour of England for sure.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people (typically over 80 percent) prefer the one-week tour of England. We almost always choose certainty over risk, and are willing to trade two weeks of vacation for the guarantee of a one-week vacation. A sure thing just seems better than a gamble that might leave us with nothing. But how about this wager:

Vacation number one offers you a 5 percent chance of winning a three week tour of England, France and Italy. Vacation number two gives you a 10 percent chance of winning a one week tour of England.

In this case, most people choose the three-week trip. We figure both vacations are unlikely to happen, so we might as well go for broke on the grand European tour. (People act the same way with lotteries: we typically buy the ticket for the biggest possible prize, regardless of the odds.)

Go read the whole post to understand why we fall into this trap. You can also look at the Wikipedia entry for other details.

Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner's "Superfreakonomics"

This book was far better than I was led to believe by reviews. The reviews made it seem that this book took outrageously ideological views, unacceptable views, and flaunted common sense and decency. That just isn't true. They made it sound like the authors were fanatical climate change deniers. They aren't. It made them out as some kind of grotesque "engineer the earth at whatever cost" crazies. They aren't.

To get a taste of the book:

... Myhrvold fears that even IV's [Intellectual Ventures] gentlest proposals will find little favor within certain environmentalist circles. To him, this doesn't compute.

"If you believe that the scary stories could be true, or even possible, then you should also admit that relying only on reducing carbon dioxide emissions is not a very good answer," he says. In other words: it's illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing new carbon emissions. "The scary scenarios could occur even if we make herculean efforts to reduce our emissions, in which case, the only real answer is geoengineering."

Al Gore, meanwhile, counters with his own logic. "If we don't know enough to stop putting 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere every day," he says, "how in God's name can we know enough to precisely counteract that?"

But if you think like a cold-blooded economist instead of a warm-hearted humanist, Gore's reasoning doesn't track. It's not that we don't know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. We don't want to stop, or aren't willing to pay the price.

Most pollution, remember, is a negative externality of our consumption. As had as engineering or physics may be, getting human beings to change their behavior is probably harder. At present, the rewwards for limiting consumption are weak, as are the penalties for overconsuming. Gore and other environmentalists are pleading for humankind to consume less and therefore pollute less, and that is a noble invitation. But as incentives go, it's not a very strong one.

Let me translate for you: Gore is the Jimmy Swaggart of environmentalists. He has no problem preaching at you, but he hasn't cut his carbon footprint (he owns to very large mansions and runs floodlights to make sure his neighbors are aware of these imposing structures). He wants you to do as he says, not as he does. He, like most of the global warming industry, thinks nothing of jet-setting around the world to tell others to cut carbon emissions. What Levitt and Dubner point out: economics allows you to understand that you won't change human behaviour with preaching. You need to change the incentives. People respond to incentives.

I found this book to be a worthy successor of its predecessor, Freakonomics. It includes many, many insightful examples from economics to help you understand many aspects of life that you wouldn't think of as the normal subject matter of economics. The book is delightful. It is an eye-opener. It is well worth reading.

Brainless Decision-Making

Ed Yong's blog at Discover magazine has an interesting post on slime mold and its decision-making capability. You may be shocked -- I certainly was -- to discover that slime mold with no brain uses a similar decision-making technique to what humans do when offered choices...

A couple arrive at a fancy restaurant and they’re offered the wine list. This establishment only has two bottles on offer, one costing £5 and the other costing £25. The second bottle seems too expensive and the diners select the cheaper one. The next week, they return. Now, there’s a third bottle on the list but it’s a vintage, priced at a staggering £1,000. Suddenly, the £25 bottle doesn’t seem all that expensive, and this time, the diners choose it instead.
Businesses use this tactic all the time – an extremely expensive option is used to make mid-range ones suddenly seem like attractive buys. The strategy only works because humans like to compare our options, rather than paying attention to their absolute values. In the wine example, the existence of the third bottle shouldn’t matter – the £25 option costs the same amount either way, but in one scenario it looks like a rip-off and in another, it looks like a steal. The simple fact is that to us, a thing’s value depends on the things around it. Economists often refer to this as “irrational”.
But if that’s the case, we’re not alone in our folly. Other animals, from birds to bees, make choices in the same way. Now, Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman from the University of Sydney, have found the same style of decision-making in a creature that’s completely unlike any of these animals – the slime mould, Physarum polycephalum. It’s a single-celled, amoeba-like creature that doesn’t have a brain.

Go read the rest of the post to discover the details of the experiments. They are fascinating... and humbling. Science has so many ways to chip away at our ego that wants so badly to tell us that we are "special".

At the posting, Ed Yong includes this video of an experiment with slime mold. This particular slime mold showed craftiness but also a bludering inability to find its food...

Information Gloom and Doom

There is a personality type that worries too much, that sees the future as threatening, and wants to stop everything.

Here's a bit from a posting by Steven Pinker on the Edge web site that puts the fear of "information overload" nicely.

You'll be amazed at the number of things you remember that never happened, at the number of facts you were certain of that are plainly false. Everyday conversation, even among educated people, is largely grounded in urban legends and misremembered half-truths. It makes you wonder about the soundness of conventional wisdom and democratic decision-making — and whether the increasing availability of fact-checking on demand might improve them.

I mention this because so many discussions of the effects of new information technologies take the status quo as self-evidently good and bemoan how intellectual standards are being corroded (the "google-makes-us-stoopid" mindset). They fall into the tradition of other technologically driven moral panics of the past two centuries, like the fears that the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the postcard, radio, and so on, would spell the end of civilized society.

Other commentaries are nonjudgmentally fatalistic, and assume that we’re powerless to evaluate or steer the effects of those technologies — that the Internet has a mind and a will of its own that’s supplanting the human counterparts. But you don’t have to believe in "free will" in the sense of an immaterial soul to believe in "free will" in the sense of a goal-directed, intermittently unified, knowledge-sensitive decision-making system. Natural selection has wired that functionality into the human prefrontal cortex, and as long as the internet is a decentralized network, any analogies to human intentionality are going to be superficial.

Here's his antidote the this chronic pessimism about "information overload" leading to our doom:

One way to attain this objectivity is to run the clock backwards and imagine that old technologies are new and vice-versa. Suppose someone announced: "Here is a development that will replace the way you’ve been doing things. From now on, you won’t be able to use Wikipedia. Instead you’ll use an invention called The Encyclopedia Britannica. You pay several thousand dollars for a shelf-groaning collection of hard copies whose articles are restricted to academic topics, commissioned by a small committee, written by a single author, searchable only by their titles, and never change until you throw the entire set and buy new ones." Would anyone argue that this scenario would make us collectively smarter?

And here is his evaluation of our future in this world of "information overload"...

For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress.

I'm with Steven Pinker. Today is infinitely preferable to the past. Much more information is at my fingertips and I have learned tricks to "surf" this tsunami of information to find great quality stuff of specific interest to me. I have no fear of the future. I can look back over 50 years and say "my future turned out great!" What I had access to in 1960 is pitiful to what I work with today.

By the way, that issue of Edge is full of other interesting people and their viewpoint on the issue of "information overload". Go read it.

Finally, here is the video interview with Frank Schirrmacher that poses the worry about "information overload":

Abundance of Caution as a Fool's Game

Here is a bit from a post by Geoffrey Styles in his Energy Outlook blog:

When you parse through this document and examine the evidence that's been made available so far concerning the causes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and spill, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the main driver behind the moratorium is not technological, or even necessarily environmental, given the extremely low risks of a similar event occurring from a properly managed rig equipped with a properly-maintained blowout preventer. It seems due at least to "an abundance of caution"--that lovely phrase we have heard several times this week--if not ultimately from hard-nosed political considerations. If I were a President whose party was facing a tough mid-term election, I'd be tempted to eliminate any possible risk of another blowout between now and November 2, too.

The problem with that approach is that the administration won't pay the short-term price for that abundance of caution. That burden falls on the economy of the region, which has already been affected by the spill, on the domestic drilling industry--a vital national asset, not just a bunch of corporations--and its employees, and eventually on the entire US, as our domestic energy supply will again begin to dwindle. According to a new study, the economic impact of the moratorium already extends well beyond the region, because offshore oil workers, who typically work two weeks on and two weeks off, live all over the country, apparently in more than two-thirds of Congressional districts. Yet while unemployed oil workers might at least be covered by the $100 million fund that BP set aside for that purpose at the administration's request, the local businesses that employ many of them need help with more than just meeting payroll, if they are to survive until the end of the moratorium, whenever that might be. That's not BP's responsibility; it's the direct responsibility of the government that has taken a calculated decision to impose a blanket moratorium on the entire industry, rather than on individual bad actors.

Meanwhile, aside from OPEC, an indirect beneficiary of the moratorium that understands very well that when you stop drilling your existing production begins to fall away, there is at least one direct beneficiary that is about to take advantage of the opportunity the ban has created. Brazil has discovered enormous offshore oil reserves in the deep waters of the Santos Basin and elsewhere along its lengthy coastline. As I've noted before, it's the exploitation of these resources, rather than its effective but comparatively-small cane ethanol program, that has made Brazil energy independent and is turning it into one of the most important new oil exporters in the world, including to the US. Until recently, the companies exploring for oil off the coast of Brazil faced the same problems that Gulf Coast drillers did, of high rig rental costs and a long queue for hiring them. Our response to Deepwater Horizon is mitigating both issues. So while it might be promoting safer drilling in the Gulf, one of the unintended consequences of the suspension of drilling here is that it will simultaneously create a greater need for the US to import oil, while ensuring that countries like Brazil will have more of it to sell us, sooner than otherwise and at a bigger profit.

Most people are fully capable of making a mess of things, but it takes a politician to create a spectacular mess of things. Obama's administration shot itself in the foot by closing down deepwater drilling out of "caution". (As Styles suggests, the real "caution" is over having another mess before the next election.) That caution makes sense if there were a puzzle over the catastrophe. But it has been evident from the initial event -- together with BP's impressively outrageous track record of corner-cutting and mismanagement -- that there was no mystery in this oil leak. It was decisions on the platform that created the problem. It didn't require shutting down the industry to "give time" for an investigation.

I'm not impressed by the Obama administration. They guy came in with so much promise, but his delivery has been fair to mediocre. I would give him a C+ as a grade. (He's head and shoulders over George Bush who merits a full-fledged F grade for the disaster he created from 2001 thru 2008.)

Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons' "The Invisible Gorilla"

This is an excellent popularization of cognitive science. These authors have stunning examples to present the underlying science. The book is full of delightful insights on how we fool ourselves about our "abilities". It is a good antidote to overconfidence.

Here's the argument of the book in a nutshell taken from the conclusion:

... common sense has another name: intuition. What we intuitively accept and believe is derived from what we collectively assume and understand, and intuition influences our decisions automatically and without reflection. Intuition tells us that we pay attention to more than we do, that our memories are more detailed and robust than they are, that confident people are competent people, that we know more than we really do, that coincidences and correlations demonstrate causation, and that our brains have vast reserves of power that are easy to unlock. But in all these cases, our intuitions are wrong, and they can cost us our fortunes, our health, and even our lives if we follow them blindly.

The book attempt to educate the reader into what science does know about our mind and its capabilities. The goal is to rein in the illusions we have about ourselves. These authors are not dogmatic. They are open to other viewpoints and recognize the complexity of the field. I enjoy how they handled Malcolm Gladwell with his intuitive decision making as expressed in the book Blink:

... just as Gladwell's kouros story does not prove that intuition trumps analysis, our Wise story does not prove that analysis always trumps intuition. Intuition has its uses, but we don't think it should be exalted above analysis without good evidence that it is truly superior. The key to successful decision-making, we believe, is knowing when to trust your intuition and when to be wary of it and do the hard work of thinking things through.

Here's their website about the book: http://www.invisiblegorilla.com/. At this site you can follow a blog look at other material. I especially enjoy the set of videos they have made available...

Here's the eponymous video:



Here's one that shows that you don't "see" what is right in front of your eyes:



There are six more videos at the the book's site. Watch them!

Yep... I flubbed the "gorilla" test (first video) (and I was duped by all the other tests, wow!). Sure I was incredulous when I was first shown the "invisible gorilla" video. How could I miss something that obvious. But... I did. I love it when something this simple can point up human "frailties" that we all believe ourselves to not have. Well, the book is jam-packed with similar examples. Lots of curious and interesting and utterly flabbergasting displays of human hubris in the face our of puny mental abilities. Read it and be humiliated. But... become wiser. As Socrates said "Know thyself!"

Update 2010oct08: Ernest Davis, professor of computer science at New York University. He is the author of Representations of Commonsense Knowledge (1990) and Representing and Acquiring Geographic Knowledge (1986), has a detailed review of The Invisible Gorilla here. Unfortunately Davis is a hostile reviewer:

Unfortunately, even in these early chapters the quality of the evidence presented is very uneven, and some of the arguments made are weak. The authors discuss at some length the Joshua Bell stunt in which the violinist played his Stradivarius at a subway entrance and was ignored by all but a few of the passersby. The authors analyze this in terms of the illusion of attention, but there is no reason whatever to suppose that Bell was invisible to the commuters in the sense that the gorilla was invisible to the subjects watching the basketball video. All the Bell “experiment” proves is that commuters hurrying home are generally not at leisure to stop and listen to a violin recital. At most, it sheds a sad light on the pressures of life in the 21st century.

I disagree. The Bell "stunt" is a fine example of how a "prepared" mind will see something which an unprepared mind won't. When you go to a Joshua Bell concert, you are prepared to hear a world class violinist. When you are rushing home on a subway you don't expect and therefore don't attend to music from a street musician with the expectation that this is a world class performance. And guess what? You won't notice that it is a world class performance!

I find it funny that Davis acts as a stereotypical academic. He vigorously attacks his "opponent" for minor slipshod steps in reasoning while ignoring his own rather haphazard "reasoning". For example:

Much of the chapter is given over to decrying parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated because of the supposed relation to autism. Chabris and Simons characterize this decision entirely as an instance of the illusion of cause. Certainly, cognitive illusions play a role, but many other factors are involved, including a well-founded public distrust of the pharmaceutical industry.

Wow! He proceeds this with a quibble over a claim by Chabris and Simons that you need experiments to distinguish cause and effect. He is right to point out that this claim is overly broad. But Davis in the very next paragraph (the one above) makes a much broader completely unsubstantiated claim: "a well-founded public distrust of the pharmaceutical industry", is Davis really going to stand behind that claim? Where's the evidence and logic to such a sweeping claim? A wonderful example of a pot calling a kettle black!

I find the review interesting because it is helpful to look at negative as well as positive reviews. You can often learn more from opponents more than supporters. Davis makes some good points, but he is what I call a "typical academic" in his eagerness to overplay his hand using a hyper-critical approach. It is a little off-putting, but not enough to say "don't read the review".

I don't mind Davis being so negative, but I prefer to focus on the positive. Chabris and Simons have written an excellent book for the educated public. They should be congratulated for it, not raked over the coals of hyper-critical nit-picking academic squabbling. The book is valuable for any general reader. It is worth your time. Read it! Look at Davis' criticisms to get a peek at some cautions about taking Chabris and Simons too enthusiastically and too far. But don't let Davis prevent you from reading this book!

A Culture of Uninformed "Safety"

The problem with a lot of people is that they don't use their noggin for thinking. We all want to be "safe" but there is no such thing as "absolute" safety. Unfortunately, Obama has shut down offshore oil until it is "absolutely safe". An impossible goal. Here's a bit from a posting by Paul Driessen on Anthony Watts' Watts' Up With That? blog:

The President said he can no longer support new drilling unless industry can prove it will be “absolutely safe.” This avoidable environmental disaster happened because BP, its contractors and MMS regulators did not follow procedures or respond properly to tests and warning signs, indicating critical trouble was brewing downhole. But if “absolute safety” is to decide activities and technologies, America will come to a standstill in the absence of impossible-to-obtain proof that nothing will ever go wrong, no one will ever screw up, and no technology will ever malfunction.

Oil tankers sometimes run aground, unleashing their black cargo on our shores. Will oil imports now be banned, as well? Over 42,000 Americans died in car accidents last year. Will highways and city streets be closed to vehicles? Airports, trains and subways? Wind turbines kill 3,000 eagles and other raptors every year, plus 100,000 to 300,000 other birds and bats. Will they be shut down until that carnage ends?

I don't know how much of a right wing crazy Paul Driessen is, but this blurb about him sounds reasonable to me:

A former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth, he abandoned their cause when he recognized that the environmental movement had become intolerant in its views, inflexible in its demands, unwilling to recognize our tremendous strides in protecting the environment, and insensitive to the needs of billions of people who lack the food, electricity, safe water, healthcare and other basic necessities that we take for granted.

In short, his heart was in the right place, but he was smart enough to catch on that his favourite causes were overtaken by crazed fanatics. That's a good sign. It is a sign of a man who can think for himself.

Driessen asks some good questions:

Companies have been drilling in deep waters, because most onshore and shallow water areas are off limits. Will we now open the ANWR, Alaska National Petroleum Reserve, Rockies and near-shore OCS to drilling – where access and development are easier, and accidents (that we hope, and industry must ensure, never happen again) can be fixed and cleaned up far more easily than in mile-deep waters?

Will President Obama lift his OCS moratorium (which even his independent safety experts opposed), before it further devastates the battered Gulf economy, rigs head overseas, and thousands of experienced workers permanently leave the industry for other lines of work?

But I'm leery of him because I think he is a shill for big energy companies. The issues are complex. I end up caught in the middle with sympathies for both sides, but bitter disagreements with both sides. Tough issues mean tough negotiating and accepting a less than perfect compromise.