An example of the type of error made by those who don't have an accurate and useful understanding of the world, those who don't understand the sources of social wisdom or the disordering effects of design, comes from this essay, Shaping the Future. [via BaySense]

In everyday life, responsible people look out for the long term despite the needs of the here and now: we do homework, we save for retirement, we take out insurance. The same principles should surely apply to society as a whole. But how can leaders weigh the present against the future? How can they avoid being paralyzed by scientific uncertainty?

This is an example of the mistake noted in Disordered by Design.

The very act of framing issues or describing problems as “social” entails thinking of society (usually in the form of a country) as the relevant unit upon which analysis is to be directed – as the relevant unit upon which corrective action is to be taken. Once this step is taken, it’s easy to stumble into the presumption that action must be taken by government, for government is the only institution that claims for itself the authority and the ability to act on society as a whole.

This defect of analysis if often abetted by selective use of data, especially history when social policy is the subject. For example:

National economic policy is one example. Concepts introduced by analysts in the 1930s and 1940s--unemployment rate, current-account deficit and gross national product--are now commonplace. For the most part, governments have learned to avoid the radical boom-and-bust cycles that were common in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

But they created the stagflation "malaise" of the 1970s. That, combined with the complete collapse of economic planning in socialist countries, gave careful thinkers a healthy respect for the complexity of these issues and insight into the naivety of the Keynesian economics introduced in the 1930s and 1940s.

The trouble now is that the world faces a number of challenges, both long- and short-term, that are far from well understood: how to preserve the environment, ensure the future of Social Security, guard against terrorism and manage the effects of novel technology. These problems are simply too complex and contingent for scientists to make definitive predictions. In the presence of such deep uncertainty, the machinery of prediction and decision making seizes up.

This isn't new trouble, it's the same old trouble, and a great deal of the confusion comes from the tendency to anthropomophize, first national societies and now the whole world. Seeming paradoxes and conflicts are illusions created by this false view.

Striking a balance between the economy and the environment is one leading example of the difficulty in using science to inform long-term decisions. In his 2002 book The Future of Life, Edward O. Wilson described the debate between economists and environmental scientists [see "The Bottleneck," by Edward O. Wilson; Scientific American, February 2002]. The former group frequently argues that present policies will guide society successfully through the coming century. Technological innovation will reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency, and changes in commodity prices will ensure timely switching from scarce to more plentiful resources. The latter group argues that society's present course will prove unsustainable. By the time the signs of environmental stress become unambiguous, society may have passed the point of easy recovery. Better to apply the brakes now rather than jam them on later when it may be too late.

This is a false conflict created by seeing "society" as the unit of action. In reality individuals and groups in both private and government roles using information easily available to them take independent action in a piecemeal fashion. With hindsight and distance it appears that "society" took action but this is just a convenient way to talk about the aggregate effects of myriad small and uncoordinated acts that together seem to be ordered behavior. Historians may simplify the tale and omit inconvenient contrary parts, as was done above in describing the effects of Keynesian economics, but this isn't how things actually happen. Attempting to shape futures based on these false views of the past simply fail.

Our approach is to look not for optimal strategies but for robust ones. A robust strategy performs well when compared with the alternatives across a wide range of plausible futures. It need not be the optimal strategy in any future; it will, however, yield satisfactory outcomes in both easy-to-envision futures and hard-to-anticipate contingencies.

This approach replicates the way people often reason about complicated and uncertain decisions in everyday life. The late Herbert A. Simon, a cognitive scientist and Nobel laureate who pioneered in the 1950s the study of how people make real-world decisions, observed that they seldom optimize. Rather they seek strategies that will work well enough, that include hedges against various potential outcomes and that are adaptive. Tomorrow will bring information unavailable today; therefore, people plan on revising their plans.

Incorporating robustness and adaptability into formal decision analysis used to be impossible because of the complexity and vast number of required calculations. Technology has overcome these hurdles. Confronting deep uncertainty requires more than raw computational power, though. The computers have to be used differently. Traditional predict-then-act methods treat the computer as a glorified calculator. Analysts select the model and specify the assumptions; the computer then calculates the optimal strategy implied by these inputs.

In contrast, for robust decision making the computer is integral to the reasoning process. It stress-tests candidate strategies, searching for plausible scenarios that could defeat them. Robust decision making interactively combines the complementary abilities of humans and machines. People excel at seeking patterns, drawing inferences and framing new questions. But they can fail to recognize inconvenient facts and can lose track of how long chains of causes relate to effects. The machine ensures that all claims about strategies are consistent with the data and can reveal scenarios that challenge people's cherished assumptions. No strategy is completely immune to uncertainty, but the computer helps decision makers exploit whatever information they do have to make choices that can endure a wide range of trends and surprises.

When the fundamental confusion of anthropomorphizing societies is ignored this is the type of idea that is pursued. It is a tarted up version of what has been called The Art of the Long View. It fails to grapple with the Knowledge Problem, the absolute certainty that things are not as they seem, that we don't know how things work or even what the "things" are. We continuously learn more about how things work as well as discovering new things. When this fact is included in long view thinking it is obvious that a Science of the Long View is needed rather than an Art. Science is modest, experimental, and proceeds by stepwise refinement incorporating feedback from previous experiment. It progresses because the scientific community is diverse and independent, pursuing many simultaneous experiments and sharing results of both success and failure widely. The decisions about which experiments to conduct are made largely by the scientists themselves though the need for funding introduces a crippling level of bureaucratic control that diminishes but does not defeat the robust results of scientific independence.

Past failures of prediction should humble anyone who claims to see a clear course into the decades ahead. Paradoxically, though, our greatest possible influence in shaping the future may extend precisely over those timescales where our gaze becomes most dim. We often have little effect on a predictable, near-term future subject to well-understood forces. Where the future is ill defined, unpredictable and hardest to see, our actions today may well have their most profound effects. New tools can help us chart the right course.

No, they can't. This is an illusion created by the god like omnipotence of playing at scenario development and modelling. It isn't that new and better tools aren't useful, it's that they help "them" rather than "us" make better decisions though "they" will all make different decisions. Once we drop the illusion created by anthropomorphizing society and see society, especially global society, as it really is it is obvious that such tools are only usefully applied by individuals and small groups and that the course of society is the aggregate course of all the individuals. Failure to grasp this leads to nonsensical views. Failure to enable independent decision makers results in degradation or collapse due to the dumbing down effect of group and consensual behavior.

The Independent Cacophony of real world individuals and groups equipped with fine tools and good information gives the best results. It is important to grasp this precisely because the world is filling up and the consequences of big mistakes are proportionately larger. The disasters in Europe, China, Russia and India of the twentieth century resulting from arrogant planning and regulated action by oppressive governments, though dire, didn't wreck the whole world. The collapse of their societies and the hundreds of millions killed as well as the massive environmental degradation didn't cause global collapse. The new breed of naive planners is trying to make global collapse possible by eliminating the default independence and diversity of the world in the era of relative isolation resulting from slow transportation and communication as well as deep political and cultural division that precluded close collaboration. We've been there, done that, and seen the results. The efforts of the grand thinkers must be thwarted precisely because the stakes are now so large. When their naive ideas fail it won't be just a nation that collapses, it will be our one and only world. They only way we can be that dumb is if we are dumbed down by consensus.

» Tough Calls from Crumb Trail
A series of posts at M&M grapple with the scope, scale and methods of decision making appropriate and effective for current issues. See Disordered by Design, Independent Cacophony and Shapeless Futures if you have some time to kill. Follow......[read more]
Tracked: March 30, 2005 01:34 PM