Happy New Year. This post is by Lizzie.
Over the end-of-year holiday period, I always get the distinct impression that most journalists are on holiday too. I felt this more acutely when I found an “urgent” media request in my inbox when I returned to it after a few days away. Someone at a major reputable news outlet wrote:
We are doing a short story on how the climate crisis is causing certain grapes, used in almost all champagne, to be on the brink of extinction. We were hoping to do a quick interview with you on the topic….Our deadline is asap, as we plan to run this story on New Years.
It was late on 30 December so I had missed helping them but still had to reply that I hoped that found some better information because ‘the climate crisis is causing certain grapes, used in almost all champagne, to be on the brink of extinction’ was not good information in my not-so-entirely-humble opinion as I study this and can think of zero-zilch-nada evidence to support this.
This sounded like insane news I would expect from more insane media outlets. I tracked down what I assume was the lead they were following (see here), and found it seems to relate to some AI start-up I will not do the service of mentioning that is just looking for more press. They seem to put out splashy sounding agricultural press releases often — and so they must have put out one about Champagne grapes being on the brink of extinction to go with New Year’s.
I am on a bad roll with AI just now, or — more exactly — the intersection of human standards and AI. There’s no good science that “the climate crisis is causing certain grapes, used in almost all champagne, to be on the brink of extinction.” The whole idea of this is offensive to me when human actions are actually driving species extinct. And it ignores tons of science on winegrapes and the reality that they’re pretty easy to grow (growing excellent ones? Harder). So, poor form on the part of the zero-standards-for-our-science AI startup. But I am more horrified by the media outlets that cannot see through this. I am sure they’re inundated with lots of crazy bogus stories every day, but I thought that their job was to report on ones that matter and they hopefully have some evidence are true.
What did they do instead of that? They gave a platform to a “a highly adaptable marketing manager and content creator” to talk about some bogus “study” and a few soundbites to a colleague of mine who actually knew the science (Ben Cook from NASA).
Welcome to our shitty future, same as the shitty past only with exponentially growing hype.
Incidentally this is what you get when you engineer the financial system to shift monetary value to a tiny minority of people. Those people can’t possibly evaluate the millions of reasonable projects people need funds for so everything is the most hypiest garbage just to try to get attention from one of the 150 people in the world who can make calls on which projects get funded.
Two possibilities that I can’t decide between:
1. The journalists who contacted you actually believe something as nonsensical as “the climate crisis is causing certain grapes, used in almost all champagne, to be on the brink of extinction.” This is plausible given the astonishing lack of scientific literacy among journalists. (Valiant efforts to remedy this haven’t made a lot of progress, unfortunately.)
2. The journalists who contacted you don’t actually believe this, but have been trained to express themselves only in terms of hyperbolic clickbait. This is plausible given what we see from most media.
I’m skeptical, though, that AI has anything to do with this, except perhaps to speed up the production of nonsense.
I definitely share your view that “The whole idea of this is offensive to me when human actions are actually driving species extinct.” Plus, idiocy like this feeds rejection of real climate science.
Raghu:
Sadly, while I was originally an advocate of AI, I have come to see the real problem with AI: stupid people will misrepresent it’s capability, just as they do with everything, and in doing so undermine public confidence in it’s utility – if not the utility itself.
Presuming that intelligence has a gaussian distribution the number of people below the second standard deviation is much larger than the number of people above it.
Chipmunk:
Yes, the problem that people will misrepresent and misunderstand the capability of AI: that’s what Gary Smith has been talking about for awhile.
Also, I don’t think your second paragraph makes a lot of sense in this context!
The longer I teach and the longer I am exposed to the world around me, the more I believe the distribution of intelligence (whatever that is – I am inclined to use common sense or wisdom rather than intelligence) is bimodal, far from Gaussian. I know we have tests designed to produce normal-like distributions, but my experiences increasingly make me see bi-modally. However, the bimodal distribution does not align with party (D or R is the US), as I see bimodal distributions within each.
Dale, I personally think it’s long tailed to the right. Once you get above the 90th percentile or some other high percentile, the intelligence of the top group extends way way out to the right, so that it seems bimodal… There are people who really “get it” and can do a wide variety of things that others, even others with MDs or PhDs can’t even conceive of. You can get a PhD with intelligence levels that aren’t very far from average for the general polulation. But the creativity and capability of the top say 1% is 10x that of people at say the 90%tile.
If there were some kind of “productivity of intelligence” scale, you might define 1 as the median, 1.2 would be the 75th percentile, 2 might be the 90th, and 25 would be the 99.9th so one in a thousand people can do stuff that just blows the usual “smart people” out of the water.
Typically these high functioning people are not publicly visible.
(I’m aware that intellectual capability is multidimensional but I do think the first principal component is worthwhile to call “intelligence” it’s a meaningful word)
Daniel
Your long right sided tail might have a mode in it. I guess any sort of multiple choice timed exam is going to generate a unimodal distribution, but as soon as we start talking about other dimensions (such as attitude, discipline, perseverance, etc.) I think there may well be two modes in the distribution – but when the right hand mode is small relative to the left one, the distribution may well look just skewed to the right.
Dale, sure, maybe there is a modal level for the upper tail, it just looks very flat compared to the whole curve.
You can use a climate-controlled greenhouse to grow just about anything; also I’m sure there are still many places in the world — even in France — that have the necessary climate for whatever kind of grape we are supposedly talking about. Move a few hundred miles north, or a thousand meters upslope, and you’re back in cooler temperatures.
But…wait a second, if you move out of the Champagne region then you aren’t making Champagne, you’re making ‘sparkling wine.’ It does seem possible that some heat-intolerant grape varieties could be rendered commercially non-viable in Champagne (the region), since it isn’t cost-effective to grow wine grapes in a climate-controlled greenhouse.
I’m sure I could search at this point and find the news articles Lizzie is worried about, but it’s more fun to speculate here than to check and know for sure: I’m guessing the story is that grape varieties that are traditionally used to make Champagne are not growing as well in that region, and that these AI clowns are forecasting that to continue to worsen. But I’m not sure why you would need AI to determine that.
Phil:
To continue with the last sentence of your comment: you don’t need AI to determine that. The “needs” here go as follows:
– The news media “needs” press releases to provide them with material.
– Companies “need” the news media to attract attention and give them legitimacy for potential funders.
You called???
Cory Doctrow has an article about the crash of the current AI bubble. This may (slightly) predate the NYT civil suit against OpenAI, which I’m hoping will hasten the collapse of said fraud-filled bubble. (It actually has some interesting analyses of bubbles and their aftermaths. It’s not just David-in-Tokyo style ranting. Really. It isn’t. I promise.)
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
I hope you all are having a less exciting 2024 than we are here: Jan. 1 saw a nasty earthquake and Jan. 2 a horrendously fiery Airbus crash from which (the news insists) everyone was evacuated safely.
David:
Interesting to read Doctorow’s article and the comments, and to juxtapose that with a polemic on the other side, for example from the Marginal Revolution bloggers. On both sides, a lot of the arguments seem to follow left-right politics, but the points being raised are real.
I don’t exactly agree completely with Doctorows ideas about solutions but as far as I can see he’s the only one talking about the actual problems. I read his stuff a lot. I recommend his blog
https://pluralistic.net/
I read two articles based on the press release and the point comes out in the second half of each article: it is not that the grapes, themselves, are going extinct, but that it is increasingly difficult to find optimal growth conditions in the Champagne region. The articles even make clear that it will be possible to find new optimal conditions farther north or upslope, but it can’t be called Champagne. I don’t know the data, but it seems like a fairly reasonable argument. Of course, the data is coming from a private corporation and not from any peer-reviewed study.
Champagne gets to decide what grapes are `Champagne’ grapes, so if they do switch grape varieties there would still be `Champagne’ grape varieties. Same for Bordeaux (which has local trials: https://www.agrisource.org/fr/7_113/5c332f5d07c805cd14cf5bf6/VitAdapt.html) and other regions. Further, I suspect what is or is not a `Champagne’ variety has likely shifted lots over a longer timescale. Almost all of France was replanted after Phylloxera wiped out most vines starting in the 1860s — and some time well after that is probably when the current set of varieties got entrenched.
(Also, it’s not clear to me that anyone really knows what ‘optimal’ conditions are for Champagne wines.)
It’s a reasonable argument if “It’s only champagne if it’s from the Champagne region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling wine” is a reasonable position.
To me, that’s protectionist elitist nonsense designed to create a monopolistic setting to inflate prices and siphon money from credulous spendthrifts accept anything said with a continental European accent. So I don’t think it’s a reasonable argument. But if you’re this kind of person,
https://youtu.be/_0zr2sXszYM?si=K1WcKl7dBrNrfcc5&t=42
sure it’s a reasonable argument.
On the one hand, I think it’s ridiculous to pay more for “Champagne” just because it’s from that region. So, yeah, to the extent that champagne from Champagne carries a premium, that’s dumb.
On the other hand, I think you shouldn’t be able to put “Made in the U.S.A.” on a product that isn’t substantially made in the U.S.A. People can decide for themselves whether they’re willing to pay more for products like that. Similarly, I don’t have a problem with Champagne defending their appellation d’origine contrôlée, and if the people in that region are afraid they won’t be able to produce good sparkling wine there anymore then I can see why that’s a problem for them.
Lizzie, based on my unquestionable expertise when it comes to the rules around Champagne — earned by a solid four minutes of ‘research’ in the internet — I know that way back in 1938 it was agreed by the great powers who set the Champagne rules that Champagne can only be produced from seven varieties of grape…and that four of those were no longer allowed to be planted after that year. At this point only a handful of producers are still using those grapes, from very old vines of which there are fewer every year. You’re correct, of course, that those same powers could redefine champagne to use other grapes, but I can see why that would be a huge marketing problem for them: after all, if they’ve been claiming for 90 years that champagne is only worthy of the name if it is made from one of those grapes, then what kind of rancid swill are they trying to push on us now that they can’t grow those varieties anymore? Don’t try to tell me those varieties aren’t so special after all…why, that would be the very definition of ‘sour grapes.’
Somebody:
I used to think the way you did, that the whole Champagne thing was a big joke, something about wine snobs, “protectionist elite nonsense.” But then I read the second paragraph of Phil’s comment, and . . . I think Phil’s right.
To transfer to a U.S. example, you can’t just slap the McDonalds name on your hamburger unless it’s produced by a McDonalds brand restaurant, and that holds even if you use the same ingredients and the same cooking process as McDonalds. Indeed, in different places McDonalds uses different ingredients and processes, but they’re still all called McDonalds burgers because that’s who owns the trademark. You can’t just call your sweet beverage Coca-Cola even if you replicate the famous formula etc. And so on. Why? It’s their brand and they get to control it. Them’s the rules. So fair enough that these rules apply to Champagne as well.
As Phil also says, there may be no good reason for people to pay a premium for that . . . then again, people pay a premium for Coca-Cola. To flip it around, people will often refer to cola drinks as Cokes even if they’re not officially Coke, in the same way that people will refer to sparkling wine as Champagne even if it’s not officially. Somehow the champagne thing has become a punch line, but, yeah, it just seems like another example of a trademark.
The same laws protect products such as Stilton cheese and Melton Mowbray pork pies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_traditional_specialities_in_the_European_Union
If any large company were allowed to produce these things in any location (presumably a cheaper one, without the same conditions on production standards) then there would be little hope of the small traditional producers competing. The aim is to protect cultural heritage rather than be elitist.
Well, if it’s just about their legal right to protect their brand, they don’t actually have that right in the United States. Many California champagne producers are allowed to call their products “California Champagne.” To the extent that there are legal protections in the US, they certainly aren’t trademarks because CVIC couldn’t win a trademark case because their argument is stupid. I’m in the United States, so…
If it’s about being misleading, I’d argue the opposite. Champagne is, to most English speakers, just a word for sweet sparkling wine with a cork that pops off. This was the case *before* the champagne Illuminati established itself, certainly before their dictatorship spread to the English-speaking world. To take a word that already has a meaning established with the public, then try and impose a more specific meaning using the weight of legal repercussions, that’s creating confusion. Which is why CVIC couldn’t earn an American trademark.
In any case, when someone writes an article “champagne grapes are going extinct because of global warming” and that “champagne as we know it will be no more”, they’re obviously suggesting champagne as a product category defined by its actual inputs and qualities. In the PDO sense, champagne grapes are whatever CVIC says they are, so they pretty much can’t go extinct. If Bayer decided to rename Aspirin to assprint and I wrote an article titled “Aspirin is about to become impossible to find”, I’d be rightfully accused of clickbait fearmongering.
If the small traditional producers couldn’t get enough people to buy their product without the weight of international regulatory agencies, they should probably go out of business. These aren’t public goods, there aren’t externalities, these people want to spend their time doing nobody else cares about, and you’re saying that we should basically be obligated to pay them money to do so. For context, I buy the microbrews and the D.O.P. certified tomatoes, I don’t generally buy bread at the supermarket because I believe in the virtues of freshness and small-batch hand production, I drive around small Northeastern farms for hours every fall looking for heritage apples like Cox’s Orange Pippin. But if these products didn’t have different qualities, I wouldn’t do those things. I certainly don’t think the government should step in to force these products onto more store shelves to make my life more convenient.
The méthode champenoise wasn’t handed down to us by God; traditions evolve in time through free experimentation. To then artificially freeze a tradition at a moment in time is a non-traditional perversion. Some might even say a gateway to fascism. I wouldn’t, because that’s stupid. But I thought it, because that’s how strongly I feel.
I think there’s a connection to the “Market for Lemons” idea that Daniel Lakeland brought up six months ago or so, referring to a paper by George Akerlof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
The producers of genuine champagne — that is, it comes from the Champagne region, and is produced with one of the allowed grapes (none of which are ‘champagne grapes’, by the way, that’s a different variety that is not used to make champagne) — would have us believe that real “champagne” guarantees a certain level of quality and a certain range of flavors, whereas “sparkling wine” does not guarantee any of that. Is that actually true? I dunno, but it might be. Perhaps if you buy champagne you are sure to be buying something that is at least pretty good, and that’s not true if you buy other sparkling wine.
Nowadays stuff like that doesn’t matter so much, I think: when you’re browsing the wine shop and you see some sparkling wine on the shelf you can just pull out your phone and read some reviews. But I’m not sure this was nonsense twenty years ago and more.
If there are, or were, people claiming that only true champagne could possibly be any good, then yeah, that’s elitist nonsense. It’s hard for me to believe anyone would really think that the grapes ten yards past the border of the region couldn’t possibly make good sparkling wine, but maybe people did claim that, I dunno.
But if people merely claimed that buying champagne guaranteed that you weren’t buying a below-average product…well, maybe that wasn’t true, I have no idea, but at least you were getting the kind of grapes you expected that were grown in soils proven to be able to produce a good product, and that’s not nothing.
Somebody wrote: ‘If the small traditional producers couldn’t get enough people to buy their product without the weight of international regulatory agencies, they should probably go out of business’ etc etc.
Cheddar cheese is not a protected name as is it viewed as a generic term for cheese. What this translates to over time is huge amounts of inedible rubber-like dairy product being produced with the name cheddar which bears absolutely no resemblence to traditional farmhouse cheddar. Obviously, this is about taste so everyone is entitled to their own opinion. However, at least when you buy a protected product you know you are getting something that has the form and taste that is distinctive and not generic. And that is the point – as you say: these things do have different qualities that would be lost if not protected.
I’m afraid you’re showing you don’t know much about cheese!
1. I rarely see the stuff you’re referring to sold as “cheddar” these days, mostly “American cheese” or “singles”.
2. Good cheddar is not being lost, it’s thriving! Your fears are unfounded! Stateside, there are pretty good national brands like tillamook and vermont cheese company, and great artisinal stuff from producers like Jacob’s creamery and Wisconsin cheese market. And of course, you can find it at your local farmers market.
3. The hatred for the tasteless plastic wrapped stuff really blinds you to the possibilities. Tasteless, yeah it is, but it has a quality traditional cheeses do not. It melts smoothly. It has that homogenous taste because it’s a blend of left over cheese bits, and it’s made by melting them all together. To get them to melt together, they use an emulsifier like sodium citrate. This means it creates a great binding texture for sandwiches like chopped cheeses and burgers, and my ideal mac and cheese uses a couple of singles for emulsification along with some higher quality sharp cheddar or gruyere for the actual taste and smell of cheese. It creates a cheese sauce that’s edible for longer than 10 minutes after cooking like, say, cacio e pepe, great for potlucks. Now, if you were to be precious about how “ackshually, American cheese isn’t cheese” and asked the government to step in and stop them, the chopped cheese might never happen!
That’s fair comment – I really am quite ignorant about American cheese. I am, however, very glad to know that good quality cheddar is doing well that side of the sea.
In our highly competitive and efficient society, if you are the journalism track, you don’t have much spare time for thinking about science, statistics, or learning to use arcane open-source software
At most schools, including mine, journalism is not seen as a particularly challenging or competitive major. The lack of learning about science and statistics arises because these are not valued, not because of a lack of time. (We have wonderful journalism faculty at the University of Oregon who do care about science communication, by the way; by “valued” in the last sentence, I mean by the market for journalists and by the current state of the field.) Of course, practicing journalists probably have little spare time, but their habits are probably ingrained by then.
I briefly had a joint appointment in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern (which ranks as #1 journalism program in US, so it’s about the most competitive major on campus). So I taught data science once a year for a couple years to journalism undergrads and my sense was that though they have some interest in learning to work with data, its definitely not what is selected for when they are admitted and takes second priority to basic programming skills. They want to learn to code first. There are some exceptions though – the students in the sports journalism track tended to perform fairly well in my course, as did the joint majors with stats or econ, not surprisingly. Compared to CS undergrads (which are also very strong at Northwestern), I found the journalism students to be more philosophically mature, e.g., when you get them thinking about a topic like uncertainty communication they were much more eloquent, most just didn’t seem to have the drive to go very deep in anything quantitative. I spent some time talking to the science journalism faculty, who seemed great, but apparently there is a lot to teach about science journalism that doesn’t involve interpreting data and statistics.
In reply to Phil’s query I have lots of thoughts and hypotheses on what will happen to Champagne and other winegrowing regions, but there’s too many pieces in the model (and the model needs a time component) — so I don’t know. I do think whatever model we have of what will happen needs to consider that every region is warming and shifting — so there’s no one region that consumers can go drink wine from and expect it won’t change (including, perhaps especially, the new regions) … and that regions built on blends (much of Europe beyond Burgundy) will be in a better position than places that for example, have built themselves around Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot noir or similar. (Now I really must stop procrastinating and work on a syllabus.)
I think that for the wine consumer who isn’t obsessed with individual labels or regions I don’t expect much to change: however the climate changes I’m sure there will be plenty of places to grow grapes that make good wine. There might be some issues with optimizing the combination of grapes, pruning methods, lees protocol, etc., since those often take years or decades to dial in I think, and with the changing climate you’ll always be chasing the changes — but hey, maybe AI can speed up that optimization process ;) There might be fewer “great” wines if those are big issues, but I’m sure there will be plenty of good wine to go around for those of us who are content with ‘good’.
But from the standpoint of an individual vineyard or a region, I can see how these changes could be really problematic. You’ve got a vineyard full of Pinot Noir grapes and every year they’re doing worse in some way…at some point you’re going to have to pull them all out and plant something else, that’s a big deal. Still, it’s not qualitatively different from what happens when wine fashions or tastes change and a vineyard finds that their grapes are no longer the ones in demand. Probably some readers of this blog are too young to remember the merlot crash of 2004-2008, when merlot went from being one of the most popular wines to being suddenly out of favor, perhaps in part because of the movie “Sideways”, in which a wine snob mocks the wine as being unsophisticated compared to the majestic pinot noir. (Or something; I haven’t seen the movie in 17 years). Oh, hey, here’s an NPR story about this very thing: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/07/05/535038513/the-sideways-effect-how-a-wine-obsessed-film-reshaped-the-industry
Can we trust that reporting to give us the whole story? Who knows. It reads like an ad for the Northern California wine industry; I suspectit was prompted by a wine industry press release.
Now it’s my turn to stop procrastinating!