On the causes of the Cerro Grande fire

I read a very interesting book on the Cerro Grande fire, a prescribed fire that got out of hand and torched the homes of over 400 Los Alamos families in the spring of 2000. I was in college at the time. The book is: Inferno by Committee: A History of the Cerro Grande (Los Alamos) Fire, America’s Worst Prescribed Fire Disaster.

It was a really interesting read, albeit somewhat infuriating at times. The following is the book’s interpretation of events, which I found quite persuasive.

The central question: “What caused the Cerro Grande fire?”

Notably, the question “what started the Cerro Grande fire?” is of pretty much no consequence. It is true that the Park Service made some mistakes with the prescribed fire, and the Forest Service exacerbated these mistakes, leading to Cerro Grande escaping control. But this is essentially irrelevent – what we really care about is: “Why was the the fire so destructive, and why were so many homes lost?”

A big fire in Los Alamos was inevitable, and it was only bad luck that it was a prescribed burn that started it. (The Dome Fire of 1996 very nearly came into town in essentially the same way that Cerro Grande did, and the Las Conchas fire of this year would probably have come into town if not for the fuel removal by Cerro Grande.)

The official investigations focused almost exclusively on why the fire started, rather than the bigger picture. In particular, a hasty and incompetent witch hunt that released its “findings” only a week after the fire passed through town (while it was in fact still burning in other locations) defined the popular understanding of the fire’s causes with falsehoods that still form the conventional wisdom today.

Anyway, the answers are:

The fire was so destructive because the fuel load in the forests surrounding Los Alamos was far in excess of what is healthy for a dry, Southwestern ponderosa pine forest. A healthy ponderosa forest has remarkably few trees, just a few dozen per acre, with grassy meadows beneath the trees, and it burns at a low intensity every 10-15 years.

Instead, a policy of overgrazing, logging, and fire suppression left the forests with up to tens of thousands of trees per acre and a thick layer of dropped pine needles on the ground – a huge quantity of fuel just waiting for a fire and some wind. And the Forest Service was largely uninterested in forest health and fire preparation, preferring to focus on resource extraction (mostly logging) that actually lost money for the U.S. government.

So many homes were lost because of poor preparation. The wind-driven crown fire largely missed the town; most of the burned homes were ignited by either ground fire or embers falling from the sky, which are relatively straightforward to prepare for.

Residents generally failed to prepare in the years before the fire: for example, they did not keep vegetation away from buildings, remove pine needle accumulation from yards, or install fire-resistant roofing. Further, and inexplicably, firefighters failed to bulldoze a fire break around the west side of town when they had the opportunity – during two days of calm weather, the fire paused on the south side of Los Alamos Canyon, and bulldozers were in town and ready to go during those two days.

Either or both of these actions could have saved the bulk of the homes that were lost. The would have reduced the number of structure fires in town, and that would have freed firefighting resources to deal with more effectively with the structure fires that did start.

Book Review: Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth

I really wanted to like this book. Caving is fascinating, and reading about it is utterly engrossing to me, perhaps more so than any other type of adventure writing. And, there aren't anywhere near enough caving books. Unfortunately, this particular caving book (by James Tabor) suffers from pervasive crappiness and fundamental errors which could easily have been avoided.

First, the style is needlessly sensationalistic and breathless. Did Tabor and his editors somehow think that a caving book would not sell if they didn't pump up an already complex and fascinating sport to the point of self-parody? It's a real bummer.

Second, the book contains numerous significant errors. For example:

1. The book misuses the word sump. The correct definition is: a submerged passage. Tabor seems to use it to indicate any cave lake.
2. All the photos in the color plates are listed as "copyright 2010". That is not how copyright works – a photo is copyrighted as of the date it was taken.
3. The whole premise of the book is the search for the deepest cave that could possibly be. First off, that's a ridiculous premise; establishing a cave as the deepest possible rather than simply the deepest known would be extremely difficult and would certainly take years for the community to accept the claim. Second, the book itself claims both that this ultimate (i.e., unbreakable) record was reached ("they had made the last great terrestrial discovery", page 246; "October 18, 2004: Bottom of the world, 6,825 feet deep" on the last color plate) and also that it was broken ("In August 2006, ... pushed its ultimate depth to 7,188 feet"). How anyone can make such a blatant, fundamental error and call themselves a journalist is beyond me.

Bottom line, if you are desperate for any caving book you can get your hands on, like me, you will probably want to read this book. But it's not very good. And, if you are looking for someone to write a book about your adventures, find a different author.

Book Review: What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

It's particularly galling to me when arguments that I find convincing are filled with unnecessary sloppy thinking. This book was thus quite disappointing.

For example, one of the statistics breathlessly cited in the introduction was that of purchased items, only 1% are still in use six months after the purchase. The conclusion drawn is that 99% of items are thrown away. But, what about things that by definition are consumable, such as food? This sort of uncritical analysis is pervasive in the book.

Sloppy arguments like this are unnecessary for making our case (which I agree with!) and make us look bad.

I'm not going to finish the book, so it won't show up with an "NR" rating, but I wanted to take this opportunity to complain about it.

Economics Is Bullshit

I recently read a very interesting and powerful book, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Basically, it's an accessible tour through all the science that shows -- contrary to the basic assumption of standard economic theory, which underpins basically everything we do as a modern financial and political society -- that people do not act rationally when making decisions. We can pretend they do, and make policy decisions accordingly, or we can look at the science, which says they don't, and make policy decisions accordingly.

From the last chapter:

Standard economics assume that we are rational -- that we know all the pertinent information about our decisions, that we can calculate the value of the different options we face, and that we are cognitively unhindered in weighing the ramifications of each potential choice.... [T]he standard economics perspective suggests that we will quickly learn from our mistakes either on our own or with the help of "market forces." On the basis of these assumptions, economists draw far-reaching conclusions about everything from shopping trends to law to public policy.

But, as the results presented in this book (and others) show, we are all far less rational in our decision making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless -- they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains. So wouldn't it make sense to modify standard economics and move avail from naive psychology, which often fails the tests of reason, introspection, and -- most important -- empirical scrutiny?

Wouldn't economics make a lot more sense if it were based on how people actually behave, instead of how they should behave?

Now, the books doesn't argue against standard economics quite as vigorously as the title of this post does... but with billions of dollars of self-interest (i.e., greed) slobbering over the bogus notion of people as consistently rational actors, I think it's time to strongly advocate for reality.

Review: Why We Make Mistakes

I read a truly remarkable book this weekend: Why We Make Mistakes, by Joseph T. Hallinan.

Everyone knows that people make mistakes. But, I hadn't realized how truly and grossly fallible we are. The book contains many easy-to-digest examples, like how doctors' sloppy handwriting kills thousands of people a year (because it leads to mistakes in dispensing drugs).

Here's a good summary quotation, from the conclusion:

There is an emerging consensus among some psychologists human decision making operates on two levels -- one more rational, one more visceral -- and that these two constantly trade off. [...] Many of our mistakes appear to happen when we are operating on one condition but think we are operating in the other. We may think, for instance, that our decision to take out a loan was dictated by financial considerations alone, only to learn that we were influenced by that picture of a pretty woman. [...]

If this emerging view is accurate, it helps explain why some types of error-prone behaviors are so hard to eliminate: we think we're being rational when we're being visceral, and vice versa. When a mistake does happen, we often end up blaming the wrong cause.... We don't learn from experience, because we're not sure which experience to learn from.

To make matters worse, [... often,] when we are right (and let's not forget, we are right a lot of the time), we tend to attribute our rightness to skill in whatever it is we're right about; but when we're wrong -- that we attribute to chance.

Fortunately, the book also offers advice on how you, personally, can reduce your error rate and become more effective at your tasks. Here is a summary:

• "Think small." Minor changes can have major effects.
• Calibrate yourself, to reduce overconfidence. Keep track of your successes and your failures, the things you choose to do and the things you chose not to do. Be aware that you are susceptible to hindsight bias -- i.e., you remember being more right that you actually were.
• "Think negatively." The devil's advocate will help protect you against overconfidence.
• Have uninvolved third parties check your work. People like you or close to the work may be subject to the same biases that you are and may make the same oversights.
  
• Multitasking doesn't work; distraction leads to more errors. Also, multitasking can make each of the multiple tasks go so much slower it would have been faster to simply tackle them sequentially.
  
• Use anecdotes with great care: they are extremely persuasive, much more so than systematically aggregated data, but they are not representative, as well-collected and well-analyzed data are. Thus, if anecdotes are not carefully selected (and perhaps even if they are), people will absorb the wrong lessons from your work.
• "Get some sleep." Insufficient sleep (and a huge fraction of Americans don't get enough sleep), even a modest sleep debt, leads to meaningfully reduced cognitive ability. (See Sleep Thieves, by Stanley Coren.)
  
• Be happy. Happy people are more creative and better problem solvers.
• Financial incentives are ineffective in generating better creative work.
  

The book reinforced the notion that's been growing for me as I acquire more and more education (22 years of it so far, oof): that however knowledgable or skilled I am, there is far, far, far more about which I am ignorant and incompetent, and it's often unclear where the boundaries lie. Thus, it leads to better work when I recognize and plan for the ignorance and incompetence -- when I work around or change my limits when I know where they are (the known unknowns), and work diligently and open-mindedly to discover the limits I may not yet be aware of (the unknown unknowns).

The book has a website and a blog.

Anyway, I strongly recommend that you go out and read this book, right away. It will make you a better person.