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Here's an example of the sort of press release that any thinking science writer could and should rip to shreds.
How do we as a society imagine our future? With social and natural environments changing, often quickly, it's difficult to imagine how our society might look a generation or more into the future. How can we then develop robust solutions for the sustainability challenges we face? Courses in sustainability offer insights; still sustainability science remains a developing field of study.We, as a society, do not exist. We are a diverse collection of communities in the lumpiest sense, but each of those communities is also internally diverse. The whole idea of developing robust solutions is nonsense which when examined in any depth turns out to be nothing but stealth advocacy for a narrow set of political preferences justified by sloppy thinking tarted up as science.
The solutions are to be found with practitioners, who live, interact and decide in society, says Arnim Wiek. Wiek collaborates with stakeholders from government, business and civil society to create solutions to sustainability challenges, such as climate change or detrimental urban development.Politics, and nothing else.
One of Wiek's key research strengths is looking forward. For example, in scenario building, a method of complex systems analysis that incorporates the panoply of social, economic and environmental variables within sustainability science to examine potential long-term outcomes, Wiek turns to explore science-based visualizations of future pathways. Such virtualizations draw from an "interdisciplinary suite of methods from sustainability, environmental, decision and computer sciences to gaming, virtualization, education and policy analysis" aimed to enhance the connection between the science and the public.Just like a tele-evangelist weaving fictional narratives of a world to come. It is intellectually bankrupt as well as arrogant to claim to have any clue about long-term outcomes. Sf writers have a better track record, but there are a thousand misses for every hit even there.
"Visualizations of future scenarios are powerful tools for exploring the effects of our everyday actions and decisions. In particular, they allow for in-depth examinations of the critical question: what burdens we are willing to place on future generations?" Wiek says.Nonsense. These folks can't even do a credible hindcast, much less a forecast.
The balance of the press release is about pedagogy - methods that can be used to indoctrinate a new crop of charlatans, and they sound like they might be effective. What is entirely absent is any sense of self-examination.
Half a century, and I'm still waiting for my flying car. Silly bastards couldn't deliver a pizza, let alone the future.
Posted by: Mike Anderson at February 18, 2010 08:08 PMWhat I find disquieting is how much like Nazi or Soviet propaganda these people sound when they rave about "society" and "the future." They're not remotely conscious of the fact that they've become caricatures from Terry Gilliam movies or books by Philip K. Dick, George Orwell, and Ayn Rand. In that regard, these writers were perhaps more accurate than even they thought they would be.
Posted by: Jeffrey at February 18, 2010 09:24 PMI'm eagerly awaiting your analysis of Wieks's bio line which includes the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes (CSPO) and the Decision Theater at ASU.
Posted by: Dave G. at February 19, 2010 10:08 PMHi Dave. While waiting, why not give us your analysis? It might advance the conversation, and you seem to have already done some of the work.
Posted by: back40 at February 20, 2010 09:19 AMHey Gary -- I didn't have a big analysis, I was just amused at the names of the organizations he lists and how ridiculous they look when strung together.
That being said, the "theater" part of his Decision Theater group at ASU seems to be about data visualization, which is a valuable and wicked cool thing.
I have to be careful about mocking such folks because I am attracted to interdisciplinary subjects and have studied and worked at some places with oddball hyphenated names.
It's just that so many of them lack rigor, indulge in intellectual overreach, spout inanities like the press release you dissected, and want to order the rest of us around because "they said so."
Posted by: Dave G. at February 21, 2010 11:43 AMI get that Dave. The thrust of the post was that this is an example of a self serving press release that good journalism would challenge.
However, there is a legitimate discussion about the discipline as a whole and its utility for decision making. As you note, it easily slips into stealth advocacy for unexamined biases, losing its rigor, but short of that there may be some value.
IMV it is seldom used in the more rigorous fashion, perhaps because it is so attractive to charlatans most interested in forms of stealth advocacy having some sort of intellectual cover to fool the rubes.
Posted by: back40 at February 21, 2010 12:02 PMWhat is IMV?
Posted by: Dave G. at February 21, 2010 03:53 PMIn My View.
Posted by: back40 at February 21, 2010 04:31 PM