Earth Hour

Looks like Earth Hour got lots of unwarranted negative attention because its idea ended up being misunderstood. While the original purpose is clearly stated as being to raise awareness, the media seems to have largely presented it as a collective energy-saving effort of sorts. Even the most numbers-blind eco-zombies should be able to tell that tiny energy savings for one hour per year should not make a difference. And that was certainly noticed by the passive aggressors seen commenting every new story on the subject, who were all too eager to label Earth Hour as another example of environmentalist stupidity.

I am usually don't care for publicity stunts like this, but I rather like the concept of Earth Hour. It is a rare example of public awareness event that goes straight to the point without being overly intrusive or trying to use a popular theme to sell a political agenda (the Buy Nothing Day being an example of a repulsive campaign of the latter kind). The way I see it, what Earth Hour asks you to do is:

1. Turn off as many lights as you can while still being comfortable, or perhaps some more.
2. Consider which lights were actually necessary.
3. When the hour is over, rethink which lights you actually need to turn back on.

The point is to assess how much, and what kind of, use of energy (or other resources, for that matter) contributes to one's own quality of life. Much of our current consumption actually has a minimal effect on it, instead being caused by the combination of the convenience of not caring about waste, and cheap the cost of energy. Unfortunately, forcing people to actually reconsider energy use by rising costs would probably require very steep increases in prices, which would make many actually important energy-requiring things prohibitively expensive. For example, most people would think that refrigerators are well used 24-hour electricity (although it's debatable if cooling 20 °C indoor air makes sense in a country with average outdoor temperatures about the same as the fridge). If we assume that with energy costing 10 times as much as it does now, people would cut their energy spending by half, electricity bills would still go up by a factor of five. This would tempt many to save on the important things as well, including those that affect health, and thus the policy would backfire in public healthcare costs. In any case, while we may well have to eventually compromise on our standard of living to keep sustainable, we might as well start with cutting the wasteful stuff first.

Saturday's party was a good example of how people would deal with parts 1 and 3 of the list above without having to be too conscious about part 2. Lights went off at 8:30 with the lighting of a few candles, people would turn them on to use the bathroom and for other essential things, and nobody felt the need to rush back to the light switch at 9:30. The majority of the lights remained off for most of the evening - I'm sure we weren't the only place to have this effect. And as long as there was anybody to whom that realization gave reason to reconsider their habits with energy, Earth Hour has served its purpose.

Randomness and luck

Did you unwittingly save or take a life yesterday? How about last month? Or, for that matter, during all your previous life? The short answer to the last question, justified by the famous butterfly effect metaphor, is "yes". The longer is "quite probably, but in practice, it's impossible to tell". The indirect consequences of one's actions, as well as the indirect causes of any observed event, will typically remain unknown, and practically also unknowable. Events that are behind a long enough chain of causal relations are treated as effectively random, as far as the subject is concerned. The natural question then is: what is randomness from a human perspective, and how does that affect our decisions?

Discussion of randomness with anyone vaguely familiar with physics concepts nearly invariably comes down to pointless arguments about free will and the nature of quantum randomness. Surely (as pointed out by Philip Ball in the book Critical Mass), there is a profound philosophical difference between things being unknowable in principle and in practice. But while quantum mechanics does seem seem to indicate that there is true randomness in nature, these concept are luckily irrelevant to the principal point. Indeed, physicists have dealt with the mathematics of random events even in the era of pure mechanistic determinism.

The most significant principle of the field of statistical mechanics is that when we do not or cannot know the state of a particular process exactly (such as the location and speed of every gas molecule in a box), we can nevertheless model it as a random process with some degree of uncertainty. Furthermore, given a lack of information, we have no other choice than to accept a level of randomness in our model.

Inverting the above logic, one can take it a step further and define subjective randomness as lack of information. That is, the less one knows about something, the more random he can consider it. This definition makes an interesting change to the whole concept of randomness as it is suddenly transformed (one might say "demoted") from a purely mathematical concept to a subjective phenomenon. Since the amount of information about a topic varies between people, so does the subjective randomness. Televised poker games are a good example: the spectators who see all players' cards have more information and thus less randomness in the game than the players. There is still some excitement left for the TV watchers as well, as they don't know the full contents of the deck or the decisions made by the participants.

While this concept works well even at the extremes of the amount of uncertainty, they are not the interesting cases: the full-information case is one of determinism (which is boring), and the no-information case implies total subjective randomness - pure random noise (which is irrelevant). As is often the case, the most interesting things happen in the transition zone. This is where people make, often unconsciously, decisions based on statistical models of events that are, at least in principle, completely predictable (in the poker games, the broadcasters do their best to keep the viewers' interest up by giving them just the right amount of information to keep it interesting).

If the amount of information available on a subject is perceived as determining the degree of randomness, one could as well give a sort of a Bayesian treatment to two randomness-related everyday concepts. Firstly, odds are the a priori probability, the individual's estimate of the probability of something happening before the event. Secondly, luck can very well be said to exist, and without any supernatural notions - but only in the a posteriori sense, or after the fact. Luck is then consistent with the information theory concept of self-information, or the amount of "surprise" presented by the result of a random event. Small surprise value implies neutral luck, while good or bad luck are related to high surprise value combined with an estimate of the favourability of the outcome.

Of course, nobody uses such involved definitions in their everyday lives. Still, this line of thinking can make it clearer to see how people make decisions subconsciously, based on personal estimates of odds. It also highlights the importance of clear thinking and the dangers of prejudice (that is, flawed estimation due to personal bias) in decision-making where probability and risk are weighed.

Further reading: Philip Ball, "Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another" (2004), ISBN 0-434-01135-5.