31 Oct 2024

Against Energy Exceptionalism

There is a strain of thought, common among those who are both technically literate and policy- or economically minded, that energy production and consumption underlies the economy in a fundamental way. Energy, in this view, is afforded status as a special quantity, of greater importance than any other—possibly including capital. This attitude is exemplified in Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works, which begins in Chapter 1 with a focus on energy, energy conservation, and a quote from Robert Ayres:

Simply put, energy is the only truly universal currency […]. [I]t is hard to understand why modern economics […] has largely ignored energy. [Economics assumes] “that energy doesn’t matter (much) because the cost share of energy in the economy is so small that it can be ignored … as if output could be produced by labor and capital alone—or as if energy is merely a form of man-made capital that can be produced (as opposed to extracted) by labor and capital.”

One might take issue with the claim that the share of energy in the economy is indeed small (spending on energy in the U.S. is something like 7% of GDP). More importantly, on the margin, a (hypothetical) low price of energy means precisely that energy should be ignored in economic analysis. Adding or removing a small amount of energy does not much affect any of the economic activities that people are willing to pay for. This is what prices are for: to quantify and communicate the relative importance of goods. As long as the market is behaving close to efficiently and we confine ourselves to “marginal” statements (those concerning small changes from the status quo), the price is the most trustworthy guide.

What about “off the margin”? It’s tempting to conclude that, because energy conservation is a physical law, we can short-circuit difficult economic reasoning by appealing to the flow of energy. But I can’t think of any way in which this makes energy meaningfully unique. Our universe has (assuming the Standard Model) a few other conserved quantities—baryon and lepton numbers in particular—and several more approximately conserved quantities, including isospin and most “element numbers”. Energy is not alone.

Baryon number gives concrete meaning to the intuition that mass is conserved. Mass itself isn’t conserved, being exchangeable with other forms of energy, but in everyday matter:

Estimating mass by multiplying baryon number by the neutron mass gives a figure correct to within 1%, and
Even within that 1%, nuclear masses can’t be modified without extreme expense.

So as far as economics is concerned, mass is conserved. Why do clever, physics-literate economists not tend to talk about the importance of mass in the economy? Certainly most things tend to have mass, and therefore the use of mass is necessary to build anything. It seems to me that this allows stronger statements than energy conservation, since most things we buy don’t store great amounts of energy.

Going further: as far as economically relevant processes are concerned, “element number” is also a conserved quantity, for almost any element. So, for example, iron is conserved almost as precisely as energy is, and any violation of the conservation of “iron number” is not likely to be economically important. Even more, the number of iron atoms on Earth is approximately conserved in a way that the amount of energy on Earth is not.

When people think about natural constraints on the economy in less abstract (or “sophisticated”) terms, the availability of certain elements often plays a central role. See, for instance, modern concerns over the mining and trading of rare-earth elements. This seems reasonable to me. Certainly the fact that energy conservation is afforded a higher status in the Standard Model than “iron conservation”, isn’t a good reason to place more emphasis on energy in analysis of the economy.

The best argument I know of for discussing energy is that in many contexts it is expensive. I agree: and we’re back to the margin!

It helps to make things concrete, and throughout his book (most of which is not, ostensibly, about energy) Smil provides the energy cost of various tasks, so as to convince the reader of the fundamental importance of energy. The quality of these claims varies. A particularly instructive such claim is found at the start of chapter 3:

Producing large, high-purity silicon crystals […] that are cut into wafers is a complex, multi-step, and highly energy-intensive process […].

This process isn’t energy-intensive as a result of any immutable thermodynamic laws yet known. It is simply the process that is known and convenient, and it happens to be an energy-intensive one. No physical law prevents the use (perhaps with tradeoffs, including R&D cost) of a process that consumes less energy. As the price of energy rises, more pressure is put on manufacturers to reduce energy use, and the energy cost of high-purity silicon falls. Absent a good estimation of this elasticity across a range of prices, we learn nothing by thinking about energy that we didn’t already know from looking at current prices.

18 Sep 2024

Plagiarising and Dissembling at the University of Maryland

Another plagiarism affair. This time the culprit is the current president of the University of Maryland, where I received both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. These affairs attract a lot of commentary working to obscure the truth, and I’ve complained before about selective silence, so here is my view of the matter. I view most of this as just “stating the obvious”, but stating the obvious beats not stating the obvious, and nobody else is doing it, so here we are.

The bare claim (which is true and uncontested as far as I can tell): Darryll Pines, now president of the University of Maryland, is one of two authors (with Liming Salvino) on a 2002 paper which contains extensive tracts copied nearly verbatim from a website written circa 1996 by Joshua Altmann. Much the same language was copied again for a 2006 paper. The Daily Wire story (linked at the top) has an image highlighting the copying—it’s remarkably unambiguous. A lot of text was copied, in a way which is not plausibly an accident.

The investigation that led to this discovery on the part of the Daily Wire is pretty transparently motivated by other events. The Daily Wire doesn’t seem to try to hide it: these are described at the end of that article. This does not affect the truth of the claims made (the core parts appear to be uncontested), the seriousness of the accusations (easily overestimated), or the quality of UMD’s response (sub-basement).

The last misdeed was about 18 years ago. At this point in the plagiarism saga I’m much more interested in statistics on what fraction of university presidents or faculty are serial plagiarists, and much less interested in watching journalists dredge up individual incidents and make news out of them.

As a general rule I’m in favor of social conventions akin to statutes of limitations. As in this case, the accused likely do not have clear memory of the work surrounding the paper, and have no hope of mounting an effective defense. That being said, the papers in question should be withdrawn. The statements so far from the university and from Pines indicate that this process has not yet begun.

Articles like these often ask “what if a student did this?”, and then look to the relevant university’s code of conduct for guidance and a point of comparison. This misses a bigger picture, unfamiliar to most readers. Standards around “academic honesty” are decided in large part by game-theoretic considerations. The difficulty of catching a cheater, and the added difficulty (and expense) of actually pursuing meaningful consequences, result in practice in a sort of bizarre negotiation between instructor and student. It is unlikely that official sanctions will be brought to bear, so to achieve a reasonable equilibrium the school ends up defining “academic dishonesty” as broadly as possible, often with disproportionately severe punishments in store. Looking to such policies to get an accurate view of actual norms is likely to mislead!

With all that in mind, a minimally virtuous yet realistic response, from either Pines himself or university leadership collectively, might consist of the following, all done publicly:

An acknowledgment of some wrongdoing with a brief apology;
A request to the journal (of Sound and Vibration) to withdraw the 2006 paper;
Strenuous objection to the practice of dredging crimes from the past;
And an ad hominem regarding the journalist’s motivations.

For an 18-year-old sin, it’s hard to expect much more. Apologize and make amends for the unambiguous parts, insult the journalist, and move on.

But some institutions seem to consider it a matter of principle that they must never be seen as subject to reasonable moral or ethical standards. So instead of anything that might be mistaken for honesty, we have the following from UMD’s Chief Communications Officer (quoted from the Daily Wire article above):

It is not uncommon for historical and technical reviews to use recurrent language to provide a framework for past work. Establishing this shared understanding in the scientific community is what allows for applications of new technology, which is what Dr. Pines and Dr. Salvino explored in testing a new application of the Hilbert phase. The use of customary or common language in introductory material does not speak to the integrity of the data or the veracity of the findings.

I wouldn’t have felt the need to write anything but for this quote. UMD leadship is suggesting that the copying is consistent with academic norms. This is false.

It is indeed true that it is common for “review” sections of papers in one field to be strikingly similar. This is especially true when you consider a series of papers all written by the same author. I don’t recall seeing this happen, but I personally wouldn’t seriously fault an author for having the same couple paragraphs appear roughly verbatim in review sections of a few different papers. Even if this does violate official policies of various institutions (which typically take a strong stance against “self-plagiarism”), I suspect that most of my colleagues wouldn’t view this as a particularly serious misdeed either. (Among other things, it is plausibly accidental.)

But that isn’t remotely what Drs. Pines and Salvino are accused off! One of them copied, apparently from a random website on the internet, apparently without any attribution, of order 10 paragraphs. The extenuating circumstance is that it is “just background material”: Pines is not accused of stealing ideas, which would certainly be worse. But stealing writing in this fashion is straightforwardly against academic norms. Even in science and engineering, academic works are often cited for the strength of their exposition as much as the novelty of the ideas (in partial recognition of the importance of good explanations). The two papers in question have garnered more than 250 citations (by Google Scholar count); the plagiarized work is a website that appears to have been cited all of once.

Returning to that quote, consider the last sentence:

The use of customary or common language in introductory material does not speak to the integrity of the data or the veracity of the findings.

The writing of the plagiarized can only be said to be “customary or common” if copying that language was standard practice. You can test this by googling a sufficiently long quote from the plagiarized section and seeing what comes up. I get the original University of Padua site, and pirated copies of Pines’s papers.

The span of time makes the act of copying a murky affair. I know academics who can’t remember what’s in papers they wrote five years ago (at the level of, you show them the paper and ask “who are the authors?”, and they start guessing random other people). Expecting clarity on what happened eighteen years ago is unrealistic, and pretty transparently a pretext for an otherwise-motivated hit piece. But this statement from UMD leadership, dishonest about norms and dishonest about the nature of the copying, is from yesterday. The people behind this statement should not be involved in the administration of a university.

As I post this, Pines has apparently sent an email to faculty, not yet publicly available in its entirely. The quotes that are available are not sufficiently contextualized for me to be sure I understand what he’s saying. Should he choose to back the perspective that copying paragraphs wholesale without attribution is consistent with academic norms (and basic decency), he should be removed from leadership.

I have long believed that, in the face of the many difficulties in imposing reasonable penalties on the dishonest, we can at least make fun of them for being bad at it. So now for some entertainment (apparently missed by the Daily Wire).

Consider Section 2.1.1 of the 2002 paper. It is one paragraph, and here are four sentences in the middle:

Time synchronous averaging uses the average of the signal over a large number of cycles, synchronous to the running speed of the machine. This attenuates any contributions due to noise or non-synchronous vibrations. The auto-correlation function is the average of the product. Application of the auto-correlation function on the time series allows us to indirectly obtain information about the frequencies present in the signal.

One of these sentences makes no sense. What product?

Here’s a screenshot of the relevant page of the plagiarized website:

Ah. The equation is an image. If you attempt to copy-paste an image into most text editors (certainly circa 2000), it simply doesn’t appear. And if you don’t read the resulting text, you don’t notice that key content is missing.

If you have had “detect undergraduate cheaters” as part of your job description in the past, this pattern will be familiar. Undergrads are not good at copy-pasting. Neither, apparently, is this duo.

Ineffective Theory

Recommended Reading

Against Energy Exceptionalism

Plagiarising and Dissembling at the University of Maryland