Ha Tran Nguyen Phuong | Feed

Today I Learnt

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Warning: This article contains probably 5% important information and 95% rants.

Videos are a ridiculously bad way of teaching others things. Why are people still attending lectures? Reading is 1. Much faster and 2. Refer-able. If I forgot this syntax (and of course I will), I can scan through a page INSTEAD OF LISTENING TO YOU TALK FOR 5 MINUTES JOHN.
- Tutorials are a semi-good way to learn stuff because at the very least you're following along.
- I'm pretty sure being in an active forum for 2 years has at least some influence - I can't watch lectures now. I can't do zoom class. I would zone out in 2 minutes. So I don't even try. Is it better to listen to a zoom class for 45 minutes and forget everything the next hour or to struggle for 5 hours and still don't know where you went wrong? I don't know, you tell me.
Installing packages are a developer nightmare. I would rather fix a bug than try to install Pip and Flask and MySQL any other day.
Getting started with using Flask Python is ridiculously hard, especially when compared to npx create-react-app. What is virtual environment anyways, and why does the yellow squiggly line still exist under my import Flask even though I followed every single StackOverFlow answer for this exact question? Am I missing something or is Visual Studio Code dumb?
- But at least there's no boilerplate that scares the heck out of me like when I first installed React and thought to myself OMG I need to know all of this???
If you are using Flask to create front-end, you're doing it wrong.
- Seriously, why would you? It has the worst syntax ever and confused the freak out of me even though I knew Python for 2 years. Also there's no syntax highlighting which is the worst possible nightmare.
You can have 2! .gitignore and Github would actually ignore the files in them!
Instead of starting a new repository from scratch every single time with Github and reinstalling and reordering all my file, I can simply add a remote origin aka the-second-section-that-has-been-there-all-along-but-I-never-noticed. You live, you learn.
It is ridiculously difficult to install MySQL. Why are you making me suffer when I'm using your product? And at least I'm using MacOS. But that doesn't stop me from searching for MySQL Server so.many.times before realizing I need to install Workbench first. Come on, MySQL Documentation peps! Do better!
I need to have lower expectations of getting started with new technology. Next time I will give myself a solid 1 day just to install things. Anything else is a plus. If it's working it's worth a celebration.
It's really hard to find good tutorials teaching you exactly what you need to know. Especially when I'm at the middle stage like this: every tutorial is either Let's learn JavaScript from start! or Let's use Flask to create template application even though that sucks and no one in the real world actually uses it anyways! or Here's how to use MySQL with no instruction on how to download it because we know if we have to we would struggle too! It took me a solid 5 hours to create a first commit, and now I'm completely exhausted. Mad respect for anyone out there who's trying to learn back end on their own.

Seriously, I am starting to appreciate having guidance/ mentorship so much more now that I'm in the mid-stage, where every tutorial either doesn't exist or is too easy for me. No wonder people say you learn the most in your first internship (maybe except for mine :D). And also high-quality index of good resources. Those are hard to find. And it shouldn't be! If only we are optimizing for the right thing... (I'm talking to you, Google!)

Also a bonus 10, since I was talking with peps at Project Meta today:

The text editor experience can be so much better (and tab and shift tab to indent and un-indent makes everything so much easier). Do better, Wordpress!

Where Insights Come From

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I love reading. I also happen to watch a lot of Youtube. What I've noticed is that I don't stumble upon insights on Youtube the way I do on random blogs or books. This is weird since I usually spend (an embarrassingly) more time on Youtube than reading. Given the sheer amount of exposure, you would expect that I've learnt more from Youtube. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

My theory is, people don't spend as much time thinking about what they are presenting on Youtube as they do writing. Don't get me wrong - Youtube is a lot of work. But to present on the camera means forgoing a well-crafted script to sound natural, and to perhaps replace deeper insights for the sake of algorithms. Meanwhile, when I sit down to write, I am forced to think and rethink my sentences, to write, then delete, then attempt again. Whatever point that could take a person speaking 5 minutes to say, I need to try to do that in 1 sentence. Reading is much harder than watching, after all.

Because of this, unrelated points get sieved out. Insights crystallize. So even though the entertainment value drops by a few points, the real value increases.

This is the first part of creating insights. Writing is an act of introspection, first and foremost. When we write, we write first for yourself. When we talk, we talk to an audience. Writing allows us to immerse in our own thoughts a lot better than speaking does.

But then again, some of my best insights come from talking to others. Hearing another perspective opens a world that I was previously unaware of. I think this value comes from feedback - discovering something the person said, then making the connections with my own context, and sharing this to get more information. We know this when we engage in a meaningful conversation - where one idea gets discussed, dissected, and strengthened as two people take turn to examine it. This is probably the second reason why Youtube falls short as well - we are listening, but we aren't actively creating the connections with our existing context. So even if the person said something insightful, the brain doesn't have enough time to absorb and connect it to the existing network, thus we fail to create meaning.

So insights come from retrospection and feedback. It is a cycle of yin and yang: We think deeply about something, then we throw it out to the world, our neighbor or friend. That insight gets molded and connected with other information, which then becomes the source of information for us to engage in. Then us think again, and share again, and continue on.

If that sounds unfamiliar, it doesn't. We have all encountered it before, and not even with insights. When I first get started with CSS, I was engaged in pure feedback, but no retrospection. I would copy the code and paste it in, praying that it works. If it doesn't, I would try the next thing on the list. Yet I never stopped to understand CSS under the hood. Only later on, when I was increasingly frustrated with the language, did I take time to learn how it works. And suddenly, everything starts to make sense. I could write code that I could actually understand, which I thought was impossible for a language as complicated as CSS. So even though I had plenty of feedbacks (error messages, StackOverFlow, etc.) I could never fully make sense of what I've learnt.

And vice versa, when I started writing, all of it was private. I never let anyone read what I wrote, beyond the occasional essays for my mom to post on her Facebook (it's a long story). I was confident with my ability to write, yet only when I wrote my personal essay for college did I realize how much more I had to improve. Up until then, all the writing was in my head, for myself. And I love my writing - I could understand exactly what I meant. But that means I would meander unnecessarily, and forgot other important details because they were a given to me. In listening to my friend's feedbacks and drafting the essay multiple times, I finally found a version that, while imperfect, was much better than the original. Had I kept my writings to myself, that transformation, with however introspection, could not have existed.

So to create more insight: sit with your thoughts. Write. Think. Then throw it out and listen to people, intently. Absorb everything you will. Then sit with those thoughts. Try to mold them until you get something new. Repeat the process.

How I Read Blogs

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Something I've noticed myself doing a lot is getting into article wormholes - where, similar to people getting in wormholes on Youtube, I would just read endless articles from an author, until suddenly it's 2 AM and my eyes refuse to open. While it's a fun experience, more often than not I ended up forgetting everything the next day and learnt nothing from it all despite feeling like I'm productive (i.e. productivity porn). Here's what I'm doing to make the experience a bit more useful:

Take notes as I read. Suddenly reading articles become just a tad more painful, which is great because I become more selective with what I read, and also have a vessel for insights.
Take time to paraphrase and link up with topics of interests. This is the foundation of Personal knowledge management for those familiar, but I'm just getting started and exploring how it works for me. So if I read a Paul Graham's article for instance, I would tag it with #startups in Obsidian, and link it to another blog I've read in Nancy Hua's blog. This means later on, I can access these bits of knowledge more easily.
Repeat the process. Overtime I have my own repertoire of knowledge on topics I'm interested in, that will come useful when I need them.

I'm fully aware that it's entirely possible my notes will just be another version of the productivity porn, this time with bi-directional linksTM! But if we think of knowledge as a cycle of discovering => consuming => storing =>repackaging & innovating => sharing and repeat, before I was consuming the content and was fully dependent on my brain to store the process and repackage it. But the brain is horrible at remembering! So when I'm externalizing my storage space, I'm also allowing for the later process, the repackaging and innovating part, to happen easier. The discovery part as well, since technically it's entirely possible for us to "rediscover" knowledge at the exact time when we need them.¹

This also works with Youtube, which I've started for some topics (eg. web development). I still use Youtube mainly as my entertainment source though, so I obviously don't take a lot of notes there. While it's tempting to obsess over every minute of my life trying to make it as productive as possible, (at least at the moment) that's not what I'm trying to do.

Told you I'm into personal knowledge management. If you are a newbie, try out Notion. If you want to get serious, read How to take smart notes, google Zettlekasten, and try Obsidian/ RemNote. Roam Research works too, but it's pricey.
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How To Learn Most Effectively - An Ultra-learning Framework

Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

With 4 months of summer stretching across the horizons, I know I want to embark on a personal learning journey where I can make the most use of my summer. Coincidentally, as I was planning, my friend Esther introduced me to this book, Ultralearning by Scott Young, famous for his MIT challenge where he learnt 4 years of MIT-undergraduate computer science curriculum in a year. Naturally, I was curious not just at his dedication, but his efficiency, and wanted to implement it with my summer plan. After reading and taking notes, I feel the need to share them, so more people can understand the framework, and work on it as well. Thus, I present the following two posts:

In post 1, I will re-structure the framework that was given by Ultralearning and create a checklist as to how to learn most effectively.

In post 2, I will lay out how I plan to apply the Ultralearning principles into my summer plan. This is mostly personal, but I do hope it gives some ideas as to how to apply them in a specific context, outside of learning at school.

These are, by no means, a substitution for the book itself. This is meant as a condense summary to go over after you have finished reading the book, and understand the principles deeply. In many ways, this series is a commitment for me to apply what I have already learnt from the book into real life.

With that in mind, let’s begin.

3 Fundamentals behind Ultralearning

It is hard.
It is self-directed.
It varies.

Number 1 is the most important: this is not going to be easy. It’s not going to give you tips and tricks on how to pass an exam in a night, or master something in two seconds. If you are looking for last-minute tips and tricks, this is not the framework for you. But it is going to be rewarding, to say the least.

Number 2 means, you are in control. You can set the goals and the directions. It means if you succeed, it’s you who claim that success entirely.

Finally, there is no one way of doing this. Common themes emerge, but everyone has a different way of approaching it. There is no right or wrong way. But there are better ways than others.

Principle 1: Metalearning

What it is: Learning about learning. Research on the topic before you start.

Why it’s important: To ensure 1. You are learning the right skills. 2. You are getting the best resources for that skill.

How to do it:

10% rule: Spend roughly 10% of your total learning time doing research
Identify Why you want to learn. For instance, are you learning it for enjoyment, or to further your career?
Identify What you want to learn specifically. Mandarin is vague, speaking Mandarin with a native speaker for 15 minutes is much better.
Interview experts: ask people who are in the position you hope to be in whether what you are learning will be relevant, and how to go about doing it.
Benchmarking — have something to measure your progress. For instance, a school curriculum, or a recording every day.
Emphasize things that align with your goal, and Remove those that don’t. eg. If you want to speak Mandarin, emphasize listening and speaking, and remove writing and reading.
Be flexible — Change your plan as needed.

Principle 2: Focus

What it is: The ability to concentrate on the task at hand.

Why it’s important: To do something hard, you need to put efforts in.

How to do it:

Be aware of your procrastination habits: how it arises and why it arises.
Challenge yourself slowly. Have crutches: if you don’t want to start, set a 5-minute timer to do the work at hand. If you are not focused after multiple 5-minute timers, try a 25-minute Pomodoro Technique timer. Build it slowly. Create your rules.
Have an environment that works. This means no distractions (eg. phone notifications), have the right amount of “arousal” — eg. some tasks may work with music, others do not.
Don’t multitask. Do interleave. Don’t try to do 4 things at once. But you can vary 4 different concepts in 1 session instead of focusing on just one.
Use better sources. The more active the source, the better you will learn. Eg. instead of watching a lecture and falling asleep, try the problem sets. Or if lectures are unavoidable, try to create a flowchart as you are watching/listening.
Take a break. A lot of problems get solved when you are not actively thinking about it. Have time for the problem to permeate.

Principle 3: Directness

What it is: Do not just observe, play an active role.

Why it’s important: It’s difficult to transfer knowledge in a new, different context. So whenever possible, learn and apply what you learn straight away.

How to do it:

Project-based learning: eg. Create an app to learn programming.
Immersive learning eg. living in the country you want to learn the language from.
Simulation: Be as close to the real experience as possible. eg. Do a practice test in a timed, closed-book environment. Play chess with a chess clock.
Make it public: Try to set yourself against a public standard, whenever possible. This will also help with principle 6, Feedback.

Principle 4: Drill

What it is: Focus on a particular skill that you are weakest in.

Why it’s important: Usually there is a bottleneck skill that slow your learning down significantly. If you can get better at this skill, you will progress a lot faster.

How to do it:

Time slicing: focus repeatedly on a particular segment eg. repeating the part you are bad at in a piano song.
Isolate and focus on one component. eg. only drawing the eye instead of the whole face
Copy what others have done to focus on the part you want to improve. eg. To improve writing style, copy a paragraph from the author, and try re-writing with your own words. Compare and contrast.
Spend significantly more time in that particular skill when practicing
Prerequisite chaining: Start doing, when you get stuck, go back one step, learn what is needed, and continue. eg. Start programming and integrating other libraries and frameworks along the way.

Principle 5: Retrieval

What it is: Not forgetting what you have learnt (similar to Principle 7, Retention, but this is more focused on the short-term).

Why it’s important: In whatever you learn, you will need to remember things. There are ways to learn and remember better than reading and re-reading.

How to do it:

Flashcards. Mainly for facts. Use Quizlet or Anki
After reading, try write down everything you remember before opening the book. Work well with concepts.
Do it and retrieve along the way eg. writing/ speaking Mandarin after learning the vocabulary.
Instead of writing notes, write questions that you can go back and answer. For big concepts.
Close the book when answering the problem sets.

Principle 6: Feedback

What it is: Whether you have done well, and how you can improve further

Why it’s important: Not all feedbacks are good. But the good ones can help our learning a lot, especially in skills where answers are not clear-cut eg. writing/ public-speaking.

How to do it:

Use outcome feedback where you know your general progress, but don’t know what exactly you are doing better or worse at eg. applause after a performance, as a motivational benchmark and update on your progress
Use informational feedback — where you know what you have done wrong, but not how to fix it eg. people not laughing at your jokes — to look for patterns that you can improve
Find corrective feedback — where you know both what you have done wrong, and how to do it better, and use them as much as possible. Eg. a teacher, mentor, model answer, answers to problem sets, etc.
For metafeedback, when you feel like you’re slowing down, try different studying methods and see which one works.

Principle 7: Retention

What it is: How to make sure you remember — in the long run.

Why it’s important: Forgetting is the default. If you want to remember, you have to work for them.

How to do it:

Spread out your practice. Learn Mandarin 7 hours in a singular day in a week is less effective than 1 hour in 7 days.
Make part of the skill a process — process are easier to remember than facts eg. always start the drawing with a sketch, and you will remember the skill better.
Repeat it more than necessary. Eg. It’s easier to remember Hello, and Thank you in a different language, because it’s repeated so many times.
Create vivid mental pictures to link facts to — see Mnemonics
Understand what you are learning, don’t just try to memorize it. See principle 8: Intuition for more ideas.

Principle 8: Intuition

What it is: Build an understanding focused on principles.

Why it’s important: The best learners do not just apply the skills blindly. They understand how it works. Also, a good foundation and understanding is crucial to your learning progress.

How to do it:

Don’t give up on a hard problem easily. Give yourself a 10-minute timer whenever you feel like give up.
Prove things to yourself instead of copying it from someone else.
Think of concrete examples — the brain works better with concrete examples than with abstract ones. Use analogies.
The Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that when you just start, you will think you are much smarter than you actually are. So ask questions, especially the dumb ones.
The Feynman’s Technique: write down concepts you understand, then start explaining it aloud, as if you’re teaching someone else. Stop when you don’t understand something, go back and try to understand it.
Make something original through brainstorming, visualization, etc.

Principle 9: Experimentation

What it is: Trying out new things — new techniques, resources, etc.

Why it’s important: 1. The deeper you go, the fewer resources you will have available. You will then need to explore more. 2. Experiments with different methods help you with loopholes that you may have missed. 3. It allows for creativity and originality.

How to do it:

Copy, then recreate eg. Copy code, then try to rewrite it from scratch.
Introduce new constraints eg. Only draw themes around an apple for the next 30 days.
Combine skillsets that you already have eg. Arts and computer science for interactive design, natural science and journalism for science communications
Go to the extreme eg. drawing using only one color

Conclusion

I’m well aware this is a long post. At the same time, I have condensed it as much as possible. My intention is for me and others to have a quick reference point when starting a new learning project, without the need to re-read the book. In addition, as promise at the beginning of the post, this is the checklist for every learning project, lightly edited:

Checklist for your learning project

I want to re-emphasize the fundamentals of the book: It is going to be hard, it is going to be driven by you, and there is no single right way. And if I can add one more, it would be it takes time. Be consistent and you will get there.

Hope you find it as useful as I did. Happy learning!

Will climate change cause humans to go extinct?

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The short answer: Probably not.

The long answer: Probably not, but we don’t know what we don’t know. And currently, we don’t know a lot.

Let’s first clarify what is existential risk.

It is a risk that causes humanity to go extinct, in the same way that dinosaurs did. This is not equivalent to past world wars, epidemics and pandemics or even civilization collapses. It is the entirety of humans wiped out or with no chance of the future, or a very bleak future, like the ones present in dystopian fictions such as 1984.

In his recent book The Precipice, Toby Ord outlines the potential existential risks that humans are facing in the 21st century, which amounts to an odd of 1 in 6 that humankind will go extinct, the equivalent of a roll of a dice.

Here’s a breakdown of the probability we will go extinct, from different causes:

Risks from natural physical catastrophes (total of risks from asteroids, supervolcanoes, etc.) : 1 in 10,000
Risk from naturally arising pandemics: 1 in 10,000
Risk from a nuclear war: 1 in 1,000
Risk from Climate change: 1 in 1,000
Risk from an Engineered pandemics: 1 in 30
Risk from unaligned General Artificial Intelligence: 1 in 10
Unforeseen anthropogenic risks: 1 in 30

Overall risks: 1 in 6

For a detailed analysis, you can get the book here. Link not affiliated, I just really like the book.

Based on this analysis, which summarizes roughly15 years of research, climate change is not our biggest concerns. If you are really worried about humans going extinct, you should be working on preventing unaligned general AI (100 times more important), or preventing an engineered pandemic (30 times more important).

But why is climate change so low on the list? Isn’t it one of the most immediate danger there is in the 21st century? Isn’t there disastrous consequences if we don’t act now?

Yes, yes and yes. But there is more we need to unpack.

Will this dystopian be humanity future?

Why Climate change is (probably) not a existential risk

Firstly, Toby Ord still acknowledges there is a 1 in 1000 chances of climate change being an existential risks, so the odds are not 0. But it is low enough to be negligible.

While Ord did not go indepth in his analysis, in this highly detailed document, researcher John Halstead discusses all the potential ways that a climate change can be an existential risk, and estimate the likelihood of it happening. Using the Equilibrium climate sensitivity and Earth system sensitivity measure, he examines key tipping points, such as the permafrost carbon release and clathrate methane release, effect of mass extinction, ocean acidification, heat stress, water stress, crop reduction and sea level rise.

In all scenarios related to climate system feedback loops and tipping points, especially the ones that are irreversible for millennia, the increase in temperature is actually negligible compared to human sources (for instance, permafrost would cause only an increase in 0.42 degrees Celsius by 2300 at the current rate) or unlikely to happen based on our knowledge of what happens in previous climate eras (eg. although Methane Clathrate could release 50 Gigaton of carbon and cause a 1.75 degree Celsius increase, it would probably take centuries to millennia, during which humans could have enough time to adapt and mitigate the effect).

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*sm8KIIchSd1hri1j

Summary of key feedback loops and tipping points. Source: IPCC, Climate Change: The Physical Science Basis, 526.

Other indirect threats for existential threats were also considered, but found to be unlikely. Species have adapted to much higher temperature change in the past, and paleology has suggested that the primary cause of mass extinctions were often due to volcanic eruption rather than only the increase in CO2. Sea level rise will increase by 1 meter by the end of the millennia, which can be managed and adapted. Similarly, heat stress will be more often, but there is already adaptations like air-conditioning, and water stress can be fixed by desalination. Meanwhile, crops yields, which was modeled by the IPCC model at 5 degree of warming, would generally range from -20% to +10% with adaptation. Furthermore, we can expect increase in yield thanks to technology such as gene editing, improvement in storage, logistics and transportations to reduce food waste, and so on.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*PrVEY-HhtT0-1RUp

Crop yield change prediction by IPCC. Source: IPCC, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 498.

It’s not all black and white

This is not to say climate change won’t be worrisome. It can be 5 times more deadly than the COVID-19 by 2100, due to heat waves, droughts and floods, not to mention creating hundreds of thousands of climate refugees.

By 2060, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly. — Bill Gates

And that’s not to say that it cannot cause an extinction either. Firstly, there is a lot of uncertainties in all climate models, especially for the tail-risk i.e. if we reach an increase of 6 degrees or more. While an increase of 6-degree sounds like a distant future, if we reach 700 ppm CO2 in the air (which is where we are currently headed based on current policy), there is a 1-in-10 chance we might have a warming of 6 degree Celsius.

Moreover, even if climate change would not cause an existential risk from the physical science side, it can cause massive indirect risks, such as mass migrations, political conflicts and riots. Thus, climate change might not cause humanity to go extinct directly, but the political unrest associated with and accelerated by climate change may cause a nuclear war that wipes out humanities. Or it can lead to national hostility that prevents cooperation to focus on other important risks such as engineered pandemics or unaligned AI.

Thus, climate change may not be an existential risk, but it should be considered as an existential risk factor: its presence may not cause direct human extinction, but increases the chance of humanity going extinct. And that is scary to think about.

What to do about it

Besides the obvious answer of rapid decarbonization, rapid electrification, technology and development for carbon sequestration and storage method, and a whole other that I have listed here, research is especially lacking when it comes to the tail-risk of climate sensitivity, and there is still uncertainty to a lot of the key feedback loops. Torby Ord has listed in his book potential research areas that might be useful to look into:

Possibilities of a Runaway Greenhouse Effect or Moist Greenhouse Effect
Understanding of Permafrost And Methane Clathrate Feedbacks
Understanding of Cloud Feedbacks
Characterize Right-hand Tail Of Climate Sensitivity
Improve our understanding of extreme warming
Investing in Food Substitutes in case of extreme and lasting reduction in world’s ability to supply food

If there’s something the pandemic has taught us, it is both how fragile our systems are, and how we are dependent on forces of natures. If humans want to continue being part of the natural systems, we need to respect, learn from and work in tandem with them. If not, the price we pay might be our entire species existence.

If you want to learn more about this topic, this document and Climate Shock are an excellent start.

Awesome climate solutions that no one seems to be talking about

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

aka Why we should be hopeful about the future.

When we heard of climate change solutions, common things come up: Wind, solar and nuclear. Beyond Meat, Impossible Burgers and other meat alternatives. Electric cars. LED lights. Grow trees. But there are so many other solutions in the sphere that rarely get mentioned, and have substantial impacts on the planet. This article explores just a few that I found to be very promising and under-appreciated. Drawing mainly from Project Drawdown (an awesome organization that everyone should know about) combined with other influences such as Saul Griffith “Solving Climate Change with a Loan”, here’s a few criteria for the solutions:

It is based on technology that already exists. While future technology is cool (think create energy like the sun, or make fuel from air), it is uncertain. From first-prototype to large-scale deployment (1% of a national market), energy technologies in the past requires 20–70 years. While other types of technology timescales might be shorter, we need to be certain that these things work. (that doesn’t mean R&D for new tech is not important, especially in the field of carbon capture and storage because they can reverse the carbon dioxide emission. But we also need to be realistic and not bet on those things)
It has large influence on carbon emissions. Since the world’s current emission is nearly 40 Gigaton/year, a good solution must reduce at least 0.4 Gigaton of CO2/year. While that does not sound like a lot, it is 1% of the global emission on 1 single solution. And the solutions here all have the potential to surpass that requirement.
It needs to be cost-efficient. We are not looking for solutions that might cost us in the long run (eg. refrigerant management). While these policies are important nonetheless, they will more likely require government policies to make it work, which limit the scope of action.

Based on the above criteria, here are 5 solutions that I think we need to discuss more in order to make decarbonization a reality:

Enhanced Weathering

Potential carbon sequestered: 40 Gigaton/year (Yes, the entire world’s emission. Read more below)

Potential profit: ~-480 billion dollars

Now, why did I lay out the ground rule of being cost-efficient and break them in the first solution with a negative number? This is because this solution is the inspiration for me to write this article in the first place.

Current carbon capture and storage (think sucking carbon from the air) cost a lot: $70-$ 80/tonne. Not to mention they often require expensive technology that will require massive scaling. In come enhanced weathering. The idea is, we find a mineral called olivine, crush it up, and lay it in the beaches around the world. The beaches will turn green as a result (like this one that already exist in Hawaii), and the sand would interact with water from waves and carbon dioxide in the air to form carbon-rich sediments that would be sent to the ocean floor, and stay there for millions of years. Naturally, this happen for thousand of years. With humans’ intervention, the whole cycle takes 1–2 years.

Green sand beach (Papakōlea, Hawaii). Photo taken from here.

Here’s the catch: we already have abundant olivine in the world (it is the most abundant mineral in the upper mantle of the Earth). We only need 0.14% of Earth’s shore to offset global emission. More importantly, they cost a lot, lot less than any other carbon capture technology: when scaling up, it will cost roughly $12/tonne. That is a five-fold reduction in carbon storage price. And if we want to offset the entire world’s emission, we will need 480 billion dollars. That may sound like a lot, except it’s only 0.5% global GDP a year. The US currently spends 1.5 times more for military funding.

Why is this better than planting trees? Because 1. We will need a lot more lands for trees to capture the same amount of carbon. 11% of land use will be needed to sequester 2/3rd of current emission. 2. Trees do not sequester carbon dioxide infinitely. They release some carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere when decayed. This approach will sequester carbon dioxide indefinitely.

This solution is undertaken most notably by Project Vesta. They are still in the very early stage, but the technology is there. If this is successful, we will have a lot to be hopeful about.

Girls’ Education and Healthcare

Potential carbon sequestered: 2.8 Gigaton/year (85.4 Gigaton/ 2020–2050)

Potential profit: Not calculated, but potentially trillion of dollars

What does education and healthcare have to do with climate change? And why girls specifically?

A few things:

Girls’ have lower access to education and healthcare globally compared to boys.
Women are disproportionately affected by climate change.
Girls’ access to education and healthcare are directly linked to upward economic mobility. Wealthier families have fewer and healthier children.
Affordable and accessible family planning will allow women to choose when they want to get pregnant, thus resulting in lower birth rate and smaller population.

To sustain the world, we need a sustainable population. While population is no longer growing exponentially (a new report says it will only be 8.8 billion), this is largely driven by women’s education and attending the workforce, and having more freedom in choosing when they want to have a kid. We need to ensure this freedom extends to all girls around the world, not just in developed countries.

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We need more education for girls. Photo taken from here.

In addition to carbon reduction, this solution reduces inequality, increases countries’ growth (with more educated and healthy people in the workforce) and leads to happier lives. Who would have thought such a simple action can have so many positive second-order effects? 😉

Bamboo Plantation

Potential carbon sequestered: 0.27–0.7 Gigaton/year (8.27–21.31 Gigaton/ 2020–2050)

Potential profit: 1.71–4.35 trillion dollars

Bamboo are not just for pandas! They are used for a variety of different things: from the classical zero-waste cutlery sets, wall dividers commonly seen in Japanese movies, to different uses in construction, culinary, weaponry and so on. It has long been a respected symbol in Asian culture, and we have now recognized its climate change potential.

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Bamboo sequesters more carbon than many other trees. Photo taken from here.

For one, bamboo is a grass, which means they can grow faster and sequester more carbon dioxide from the air than any other trees. They can also thrive on degraded land that are inhospitable for many. Their structure also allow for lower rate of degradation compared to other plants, thus they could hold on to the carbon for a longer time. All of this makes bamboos one of the most effective ways to sequester carbon dioxide from the air in the fastest period of time, at least, on land.

Better Farming Practices

Potential carbon sequestered: 1.8–3.3 Gigaton/year

Potential profits: 3.6–6.6 trillion dollars

Admittedly, the title is a bit vague. And it also includes many different practices inside. But here’s the gist:

We have been farming unsustainably since the Green Revolution. We have used too much fertilizer and pesticide, and while they increase yield in the short run, they also degrade the land and lower yield in the long run. Meanwhile, the mono crop culture (using an entire piece of land for only 1 type of products) while efficient, is highly vulnerable to diseases. The treatment of farmed animals are simply horrific.
Agriculture accounts for 24% of global emissions. While most of it comes from animals (specifically beef, pork and lamb), some plants are also the culprits (did you know rice paddy fields release methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide?). Furthermore, farming plants can also be used to sequestered carbon dioxide.
There are already ways for us to use less water, less fertilizer, less pesticides, WHILE increasing yield and decreasing our carbon dioxide emission. They also allow for better adaptation to our already changing climate. Some doesn’t even require initial cost — it’s completely free to implement. It’s a complete win-win.

What are some of these farming practices?

Silvopasture — one of many sustainable farming practices. Photo taken from here.

Grow rice better: System of Rice Intensification increases yield by 50–100%, double farm incomes, and “is exceedingly doable for smallholder farmers” while decreasing methane production.
Have trees while you grow livestock: Instead of grasslands, silvopasture reduce the need for feed, fertilizer, herbicides, increases soil fertility and create more resilient farmlands. It requires higher up-front cost, but has massive profit over time. Furthermore, pastures and trees together sequester 5–10 times more carbon than those that are treeless.
Age-old conservation farming techniques: diverse crop, creating their own pesticides and fertilizers, and increase crop rotation, maintain crop cover all increase the carbon sequestered and the land more resilient.
Grow more avocado and banana trees! Instead of annual crops (like rice and wheats, which is produced annually and cut down after they are harvested), if farmers grow more perennial crops that are trees with fruits harvested yearly, more carbon will be stored. These staple tree crops will also reduce soil erosion, fertilizer and pesticide needs, and more. There’s now more reason to eat avocados!

Financial services

Potential carbon sequestered: Unknown

Potential profit: Not calculated

This is the part often missing from climate conversation: we need money to make this happen, loans in particular. Many of the best farming practices require upfront costs, which poor farmers cannot afford. Other requires financing to scale up production to meet with growing needs (bamboo production, enhanced weathering). And financing can create second and third-order effects (eg. a family with enough money will be more likely to enroll their daughters in schools). And many other solutions not mentioned here (eg. solar rooftops) require home investments.

Thus, we need better loans. Microfinances, for instance, provides loans to low-income people usually with no access to financial services, thus allowing them to have enough money to start a business, pay an unexpected cost, and so on. Other financial methods could work. For instance, SolarCity would install solar rooftops in households with no cost upfront, and would sell the energy back to the consumer at a lower rate than normal utility. We could extend that to a similar service for farming practices, for instance, where farmers would pay no upfront cost for implementing more sustainable solutions, instead pay in installment through part of the increased profit every year.

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A new model of solar panels from Tesla, now the parent company of SolarCity. Image taken from here.

The point is, to make this change happen, we need a way to finance people better, and not just depend on rich people’s good will. Lucky for us, there are already myriads of potential solutions.

Conclusion

This article aims to achieve one thing: inspire hope. Knowing that there’s a future where not only is the climate crisis solved, but also enhances everything currently, is great. Knowing that we live in that future, and can make it happen, is inspiring. Whether this article makes your day a little bit brighter, helps you feel better eating bananas and avocados, or start out a project for more changes, it is a win for the planet.

Have thoughts? Things that I miss out? Let me know in the comment, or email me at tnp_ha@minerva.kgi.edu.

Other cool things that don’t make the cut, mainly because their potential is less than 0.4 Gigaton, or have not been analyzed:

Seaweed Farming: can capture up to 0.2 Gigaton/year, can create a more sustainable bio-fuel through shorter life cycle, can be fed to cows which cause them to release less methane. Super super cool, but the research I could found only report on direct carbon sequestration, not second or third-order effect (eg. reducing methane production in cows).
Living Buildings: Buildings that are net-positive in energy (creates more energy than they use through renewables), water (only use onsite water through catching rainwater, reusing greywater, etc.), waste (eliminate materials that cause pollutions, resource depletion, etc.), with access to nature and is a place of equity and beauty.
Ground-source heat pumps: Instead of using energy to expel hot air out of the room into the air, the heat pumps go to the ground, where temperature stays relatively constant all the time, and transfer the heat to or from the ground. This is much more energy-efficient than air-source heat pump.
A project that tries to bring the wooly mammoth back to the 21st century to deal with Arctic permafrost.

The Black Swan & Events That Change The World

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The most convincing argument I found for climate change comes not from scientific journals or long-written books on the climate crisis, but from a book that primarily deals with philosophy, statistics and economics.

The Black Swan: The Impacts of the Highly Improbable, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, deals with a class of rare, but highly consequential events; for instance, the banking collapse in 2008, and the 9/11 attack in 2001. Despite Taleb only mentioning briefly about the climate while spending the majority of the book dealing with consequences in economics and finances, his findings are rather alarming with regards to climate change. In breaking down the key ideas of Taleb’s book, I want to address and expand its implications on the climate, and why it demands more action than ever before.

Climate change is an Extremistan event.

First, a distinction between Extremistan and Mediocristan events:

Mediocristan events are events that are mostly predictable. They follow the famous Gaussian bell curve, and wide fluctuations are rarely known. For instance, it is impossible to find someone whose height is above 3 meters, or who weighs more than 500 kilograms. The extremes are not far away from the average. And most people fall within the middle of the curve, the average. So a singular tall person won’t topple over the change in the average height of 100 people. Similarly, a Mediocristan event is one that follows a bell curve, for instance, flipping a fair coin 50 times and chances of you getting 50 heads is 0.5⁵⁰ = 0.0000000000000008. These events are often found in the physical, or biological world, and are in the “safe” zones, where we need not worry about.

Extremistan events are the opposite: there can exist much larger fluctuations, and the impact of one large event can tower over many others. Imagine 99 average people standing in the stadium with Bill Gates. They will be, on average, a billionaire! In this case,

The average is not the middle, but at the very end of the curve.
One event can be larger than others in many orders of magnitude.
This means they can influence others to the extreme that the majority impacts become worthless.

We see this in other social aspects like book sales, scientific journals, or even market fluctuations. They are where the Black Swans reside, both the positive Black Swans (the ability to be richer than Bill Gates!) and negative ones (the market crashing overnight).

Figure 1: Graph on the left is a typical normal distribution, like a Mediocristan event, with most observations in the middle. The graph on the right is a power law distribution, mostly found in Extremistan events, where most observations are on the lower end and very few people on the higher value. Taken from link.

While it’s easy to dismiss the environment as Mediocristan, many environmental events are part of the Extremistan. Life on Earth is generally sustained with the exception of five major extinctions that wipe out 99.9% of organisms that has ever lived on Earth. Wildfires and floods are regular, but once in a while an extreme one can wipe out an entire town, or an entire country. Even the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic result from a mutation, another occurrence of nature changing it up. Our planet, as a complex tangled web of multiple levels of interactions, is full of Extremistan events, where a singular occurrence can balance out millions of other small ones. And that’s not good news for us.

Model predictions are unreliable.

Another problem with the Black Swan is they represent uncertainty — unknown unknown. By definition, we cannot know what that Black Swan is, or when it will come. Thus, no model can come close to predicting any changes that would come to shape our future. Think of the financial crisis in 2008, or the 9/11 attack — almost no one could have predicted such a change. And relying on the past is both unreliable and dangerous.

Taleb illustrates this problem of induction best with the Turkey story. Think of a turkey living in a cage and being fed every day. With each passing day, its confidence that it is living tomorrow will increase. Moreover, its trust for the human will increase. It will continue to rise until something unexpected happened — being killed on Thanksgiving. And believe it or not, we are all turkeys.

Figure 2: The story of a turkey. Taken from link.

What this story illustrates is, the past is not indicative of the future. We can have many instances to prove something true, but all it takes is one instance to prove it wrong. Induction is not reliable. Thus, using past models to predict future performances is not reliable. This means most model predictions have very, very limited predicting capacity.

Taleb mainly focuses on financial prediction models in his book, but I would argue this applies just as much to climate prediction model. Both represent a complex system that is similar to a black box, with many hidden connections and threads that we can never fully detangle. This means past performance is no where indicative of the future, and that is especially true for climate change model. What does this mean?

Climate models that rely on the past cannot be 100% accurate. It is an estimation, and a poor one, at best.

Current climate models take into account records of climate in the past, and how the climate as a whole has transformed given such temperature change. Most predictions are based on what we know about Earth’s response millions of years ago, when carbon dioxide levels was around the same. However, we are adding carbon dioxide to the air at an unprecedented level, and we are changing the landscapes of the Earth and its species in order of magnitude. Thus, there is high uncertainty that the climate will respond in the same way.

There might be missing links that cause further changes. We need to be preparing for the worst estimate, and perhaps even more.

All models so far are based on what we have already known about the climate. But there are still many other missing links. For instance, permafrost melting in the Arctic means releasing trapped carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and accelerating global warming further. And this is a positive feedback loop, where the hotter the temperature, the more melting, the more carbon dioxide and the hotter the temperature. Once it is set in motion, it’s hard to go back.

Current climate models, while do account for some forms of carbon cycle feedbacks, have not updated their result with the best model available, thus reducing the actual variations and uncertainty. Not to mention there can still be more feedback loops that scientists have yet to account for.

Any models that deal with the indirect consequences of climate change are already underestimating their influences, and will continue to do so.

Climate change is tangled in so many aspects of our lives. It is directly responsible for the recent bushfire in Australia, due to drier climate, causing 1,558 homes to be destroyed and 7.9 million acres of forests to be burned. But it is also an indirect cause to the rise of Coronavirus, where death toll is at 200,000 and is on the rise, as higher temperature means pathogens that survive the heat can more easily infect people. Permafrost melting can release microbes that can be deadly towards humans, releasing another wave of disease. How many other missing links have we not identified yet? And how can we be sure that any model at all will be accurate?

The takeaway message here is not to ignore climate scientists. Rather, it is to be aware that perhaps our worst case scenario is not the worst yet, and we are probably underestimating the influences of climate change on all aspects of our lives. And that means we need to react, fast.

There is no Barbell Strategy our way out.

The conclusion most people have from Taleb’s Black Swan is the famous Barbell strategy: play it really, really safe 80–90% of the time, and for the remaining 10–20%, bet on something that can easily expose you to the positive Black Swan. For instance, work in a stable job for most of your days, but spend time on the weekend writing a novel. Or invest 80–90% of your stock in extremely safe treasury bills, and 10–20% to new start-ups with potential for exponential growth and payoff. Have a safety net, and expose yourself to the risks with the biggest payoffs.

Figure 3. The Barbell strategy, in the context of investment. Image taken from link.

But many people are also missing an important caveat. This is in dealing with positive Black Swans. Taleb’s strategy for dealing with negative Black Swan is to avoid them as much as possible. In the context of jobs, it means not to be in the insurance business that deals with extreme events. In the context of government, it means building a robust society that allows for unsustainable things to fail fast, instead of reaching a bubble where it would pop.

And this is what worries me the most. Unlike man-made crises, climate change is literally impossible to avoid. We are going to feel the impacts every step of the way, because we do not have capacity to avoid its consequences. The most we can do, and are trying to do, is to identify as many Black Swans as possible, and to prepare for them. But if we continue to be ignorant, there are looming dangers in every corner. And when a Black Swan hits, the impacts could be in order of magnitude.

Conclusion

2020 saw the novel Coronavirus, and with it the secondary and tertiary effects of borders closing, social distancing, job losses and, ironically, the rise of distrust and hate crime. Some may argue that Coronavirus is not a Black Swan (with warnings in as early as 2015 by major voices like Bill Gates), but it is certain that its secondary and tertiary effects consist of many novelties that we unprepared for. The same goes for climate change. We may be well aware of what 2 degree of warming does to the natural environment, but we are far from certain what it will do to humanity as a whole. And that is concerning.

After all this pessimistic thought, I feel compelled for a call to action. But the truth is I am also not sure, and still figuring out how to deal with this issue effectively. The most practical ways I can think of right now is to:

Work in research/government policies/companies dealing with these big, existential issues.
Donate to effective charities that are helping with climate change. Reforestation, in particular, has been discovered to have much larger impacts on climate regulations than previously thought. Create robustness in the system.
Getting involved with activism and advocacy. Be careful with where you spend your money, your time and your life. Be aware.
Enjoy life right now, because if our days are numbered, then we might as well make the best out of it while it lasts.

Book Recommendations

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A list of books I love. To have updates on my readings, reviews & books read, follow me on Goodreads.

Ha Tran Nguyen Phuong | Feed

Today I Learnt

Where Insights Come From

How I Read Blogs

How To Learn Most Effectively - An Ultra-learning Framework

3 Fundamentals behind Ultralearning

Principle 1: Metalearning

Principle 2: Focus

Principle 3: Directness

Principle 4: Drill

Principle 5: Retrieval

Principle 6: Feedback

Principle 7: Retention

Principle 8: Intuition

Principle 9: Experimentation

Conclusion

Will climate change cause humans to go extinct?

Let’s first clarify what is existential risk.

Why Climate change is (probably) not a existential risk

It’s not all black and white

What to do about it

Awesome climate solutions that no one seems to be talking about

Enhanced Weathering

Girls’ Education and Healthcare

Bamboo Plantation

Better Farming Practices

Financial services

Conclusion

The Black Swan & Events That Change The World

Climate change is an Extremistan event.

Model predictions are unreliable.

There is no Barbell Strategy our way out.

Conclusion

Book Recommendations

🌏 World View

🧬 Life & Philosophy

🎨 Design

🌡️ Climate

🧑🏻 Autobiography

⚒️ Productivity

💼 Business & Start-ups

🥕 Health & Fitness

☁️ Fiction