Making relative decisions to stay ahead of the game.

A Byzantine fault (also interactive consistency, source congruency, error avalanche, Byzantine agreement problem, Byzantine generals problem, and Byzantine failure) is a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine Generals Problem", developed to describe a situation in which, in order to avoid catastrophic failure of the system, the system's actors must agree on a concerted strategy, but some of these actors are unreliable.

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The Byzantine Generals Problem is a game theory problem, which describes the difficulty decentralized parties have in arriving at consensus without relying on a trusted central party. In a network where no member can verify the identity of other members, how can members collectively agree on a certain truth?

The game theory analogy behind the Byzantine Generals Problem is that several generals are besieging Byzantium. They have surrounded the city, but they must collectively decide when to attack. If all generals attack at the same time, they will win, but if they attack at different times, they will lose. The generals have no secure communication channels with one another because any messages they send or receive may have been intercepted or deceptively sent by Byzantium’s defenders. How can the generals organize to attack at the same time?

Centralized and Decentralized Systems
Only decentralized systems face the Byzantine Generals problem, as they have no reliable source of information and no way of verifying the information they receive from other members of the network. In centralized systems, an authority is trusted to publish true information and prevent false or fraudulent information from being spread throughout the network.

For example, in the traditional financial system, banks are trusted to show clients their balances and transaction histories in an honest manner. If a bank did attempt to lie or defraud their customers, a central bank or government is trusted to rectify the breach of trust.

Centralized systems do not solve the Byzantine Generals problem, which requires that truth be established trustlessly. Rather, they sacrifice trustlessness for efficiency and choose not to face the problem at all. However, centralized systems are vulnerable to corruption by the central authority.

Read more: https://river.com/learn/what-is-the-byzantine-generals-problem/#the-byzantine-generals-problem

It has been proposed by some “problem solvers” that the solution to the Byzantine Generals dilemma is for 67 per cent (66.66666….%) of Generals acting at the same time to be successful. In statistical safety measure this is often rounded to 70 per cent. At this stage, I have no clue how the Covid health experts come to a figure of 70 per cent vaccination to reopen the economies, but my guess would be on them having adopted the “Byzantine Generals problem” solution, because we cannot hope for 100 per cent. It is not fool proof though. “the enemy can be “underestimated” or can disrupt the Generals assault. This does not also mean that the Generals in the assault cannot be corrupted individually. Thus at some point we have to make decisions on how many people could die from our decisions. This makes for difficult and often contradictory choices.

In other situation, as we have mentioned many times before, we do not attack an enemy, the strength of which we do not know… We need “intelligence”. But we also know that in the case of the war on Saddam, the intelligence can be corrupted and manufactured to suit our intent. 

One can see the dilemma (and responsibilty reduction) in the US bombing of an IS-K car in Kabul. Is the “intelligence” reliable? The car is hit by a bomb. How many people are doing to die? Is it a consideration? How much explosive is in the car? How many lives have been saved by bombing the car? How can we blame the bombs in the car for the “extra” damage to civilians?

In regard to Covid-19 and global warming, the situations are similar. Do we over-react or under-react and let things be… How do we play the odds?

GL. 

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Wealthy nations must do much more, much faster 

The UN General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and the climate conference (COP26) in Glasgow, UK. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we—the editors of health journals worldwide—call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health.

Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.1 The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.23 Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.

Reflecting the severity of the moment, this editorial appears in health journals across the world. We are united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory.

The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established.2 Indeed, no temperature rise is “safe.” In the past 20 years, heat related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.4 Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.56 Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities, and those with underlying health problems.24

Global heating is also contributing to the decline in global yield potential for major crops, falling by 1.8-5.6% since 1981; this, together with the effects of extreme weather and soil depletion, is hampering efforts to reduce undernutrition.4 Thriving ecosystems are essential to human health, and the widespread destruction of nature, including habitats and species, is eroding water and food security and increasing the chance of pandemics.378

The consequences of the environmental crisis fall disproportionately on those countries and communities that have contributed least to the problem and are least able to mitigate the harms. Yet no country, no matter how wealthy, can shield itself from these impacts. Allowing the consequences to fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable will breed more conflict, food insecurity, forced displacement, and zoonotic disease—with severe implications for all countries and communities. As with the covid-19 pandemic, we are globally as strong as our weakest member.

Rises above 1.5°C increase the chance of reaching tipping points in natural systems that could lock the world into an acutely unstable state. This would critically impair our ability to mitigate harms and to prevent catastrophic, runaway environmental change.910

Encouragingly, many governments, financial institutions, and businesses are setting targets to reach net-zero emissions, including targets for 2030. The cost of renewable energy is dropping rapidly. Many countries are aiming to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030.11

These promises are not enough. Targets are easy to set and hard to achieve. They are yet to be matched with credible short and longer term plans to accelerate cleaner technologies and transform societies. Emissions reduction plans do not adequately incorporate health considerations.12 Concern is growing that temperature rises above 1.5°C are beginning to be seen as inevitable, or even acceptable, to powerful members of the global community.13 Relatedly, current strategies for reducing emissions to net zero by the middle of the century implausibly assume that the world will acquire great capabilities to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.1415

This insufficient action means that temperature increases are likely to be well in excess of 2°C,16 a catastrophic outcome for health and environmental stability. Critically, the destruction of nature does not have parity of esteem with the climate element of the crisis, and every single global target to restore biodiversity loss by 2020 was missed.17 This is an overall environmental crisis.18

Health professionals are united with environmental scientists, businesses, and many others in rejecting that this outcome is inevitable. More can and must be done now—in Glasgow and Kunming—and in the immediate years that follow. We join health professionals worldwide who have already supported calls for rapid action.119

Equity must be at the centre of the global response. Contributing a fair share to the global effort means that reduction commitments must account for the cumulative, historical contribution each country has made to emissions, as well as its current emissions and capacity to respond. Wealthier countries will have to cut emissions more quickly, making reductions by 2030 beyond those currently proposed2021 and reaching net-zero emissions before 2050. Similar targets and emergency action are needed for biodiversity loss and the wider destruction of the natural world.

To achieve these targets, governments must make fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organised and how we live. The current strategy of encouraging markets to swap dirty for cleaner technologies is not enough. Governments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more. Global coordination is needed to ensure that the rush for cleaner technologies does not come at the cost of more environmental destruction and human exploitation.

Many governments met the threat of the covid-19 pandemic with unprecedented funding. The environmental crisis demands a similar emergency response. Huge investment will be needed, beyond what is being considered or delivered anywhere in the world. But such investments will produce huge positive health and economic outcomes. These include high quality jobs, reduced air pollution, increased physical activity, and improved housing and diet. Better air quality alone would realise health benefits that easily offset the global costs of emissions reductions.22

These measures will also improve the social and economic determinants of health, the poor state of which may have made populations more vulnerable to the covid-19 pandemic.23 But the changes cannot be achieved through a return to damaging austerity policies or the continuation of the large inequalities of wealth and power within and between countries.

In particular, countries that have disproportionately created the environmental crisis must do more to support low and middle income countries to build cleaner, healthier, and more resilient societies. High income countries must meet and go beyond their outstanding commitment to provide $100bn a year, making up for any shortfall in 2020 and increasing contributions to and beyond 2025. Funding must be equally split between mitigation and adaptation, including improving the resilience of health systems.

Financing should be through grants rather than loans, building local capabilities and truly empowering communities, and should come alongside forgiving large debts, which constrain the agency of so many low income countries. Additional funding must be marshalled to compensate for inevitable loss and damage caused by the consequences of the environmental crisis.

As health professionals, we must do all we can to aid the transition to a sustainable, fairer, resilient, and healthier world. Alongside acting to reduce the harm from the environmental crisis, we should proactively contribute to global prevention of further damage and action on the root causes of the crisis. We must hold global leaders to account and continue to educate others about the health risks of the crisis. We must join in the work to achieve environmentally sustainable health systems before 2040, recognising that this will mean changing clinical practice. Health institutions have already divested more than $42bn of assets from fossil fuels; others should join them.4

The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C and to restore nature. Urgent, society-wide changes must be made and will lead to a fairer and healthier world. We, as editors of health journals, call for governments and other leaders to act, marking 2021 as the year that the world finally changes course.

This editorial is being published simultaneously in many international journals. Please see the full list here: https://www.bmj.com/content/full-list-authors-and-signatories-climate-emergency-editorial-september-2021

• Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare the following: FG serves on the executive committee for the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change and is a trustee of the Eden Project. RS is the chair of Patients Know Best, has stock in UnitedHealth Group, has done consultancy work for Oxford Pharmagenesis, and is chair of the Lancet commission on the value of death. 

• Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

1. Lukoye Atwoli, editor in chief1,  
2. Abdullah H Baqui, editor in chief2,  
3. Thomas Benfield, editor in chief3,  
4. Raffaella Bosurgi, editor in chief4,  
5. Fiona Godlee, editor in chief5,  
6. Stephen Hancocks, editor in chief6,  
7. Richard Horton, editor in chief7,  
8. Laurie Laybourn-Langton, senior adviser8,  
9. Carlos Augusto Monteiro, editor in chief9,  
10. Ian Norman, editor in chief10,  
11. Kirsten Patrick, interim editor in chief11,  
12. Nigel Praities, executive editor12,  
13. Marcel G M Olde Rikkert, editor in chief13,  
14. Eric J Rubin, editor in chief14,  
15. Peush Sahni, editor in chief15,  
16. Richard Smith, chair8,  
17. Nicholas J Talley, editor in chief16,  
18. Sue Turale, editor in chief17,  
19. Damián Vázquez, editor in chief18

Read more:

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1734

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