–“Also in cases where the outcome to be predicted is a numerical value (e.g., a risk score), a prediction can be easily translated into a discrete scale (e.g., low – medium – high risk).”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE WHO RESPECTS COMPLEXITY WOULD MAKE A DECISION BASED ON ONE NUMBER ONLY.

–“The fundamental problem with making climate change a security issue is that it responds to a crisis caused by systemic injustice with ‘security’ solutions, hardwired in an ideology and institutions designed to seek control and continuity. At a time when limiting climate change and ensuring a just transition requires a radical redistribution of power and wealth, a security approach seeks to perpetuate the status quo.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE SHOULD BELIEVE RADICAL REDISTRIBUTION WOULD “CONTROL” CLIMATE CHANGE BY OTHER MEANS.

–“Suspend and cancel debt payments when a climate extreme event takes place, so countries have the resources they need for emergency response and reconstruction without going into more debt.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE CAN DEFINITIVELY SAY JUST WHAT SUCH AN EVENT IS TODAY.

–“The combined effect of these interventions is a precarious economic edifice built upon stagnant growth, sapped productivity and monopsony power, with consumption driven by high levels of household debt.”

TRUE AS FAR AS IT GOES, BUT NO ONE ARGUES AGAINST THE LATTER’S DECREASE IN CONSUMPTION INEQUALITY–OR DO THEY?

---

Sources.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-024-01886-3

https://www.tni.org/en/publication/primer-on-climate-security#4

https://climatenetwork.org/resource/debt-and-climate-crises/

https://www.cunylawreview.org/the-pitfalls-of-liberalism-at-large-democracy-the-administrative-state-liberalisms-undying-support-of-the-united-states-political-economy/

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii147/articles/cedric-durand-landscapes-of-capital

The article starts with:

Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome. This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it—its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The article ends:

For those of us who have never doubted that humans are socially constituted and that they use their socially and, thus, ideologically constituted habits of thought and praxis to enact and unwittingly constrain their lives, the post-structuralist proposition to turn this fundamental dilemma into a fixed and totalizing foundation of social life hardly constitutes a welcome breakthrough in the conversation about human agency, resistance, and struggle. What it does instead is to cut off the critical conversation about radical—that is, ideologically and structurally consequential—forms of social being. It does it by turning the question whether and under what historical circumstances humans can disengage from unwitting and ideological constraints that their societies impose on their social and cognitive life into a conceptual nonstarter. I end this article with this question in order to put it back on the historians’ agenda.

In between these two paragraphs, historian Anna Krylova provides the most forensically incisive critique I’ve read about this kind of historiographical analysis.

Anna Krylova (2024). ‘Foucault, Post-structuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History”’. Modern Intellectual History: 1–23 (accessed online on October 2 2024 at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/foucault-poststructuralism-and-the-fixed-openness-of-history/EC9D3735BB7929416001A670E8C8601D)

(For other views on the more nuanced forms of contingency and human agency, see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/06/19/what-if-the-root-cause-is-more-contingency/ and https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/05/08/human-agency-as-the-worlds-global-counternarrative-with-examples/)

When it comes to the crisis management literature, leadership is largely top down (officials direct) or bottom up (self-organizing crisis response), where networks are said to be vertical (hierarchical and chain of command) or horizontal (laterally interacting, official and unofficial).

We add a third category: control rooms. And not just in terms of Incident Command Centers during the emergency but already-existing infrastructure control rooms whose staff continue to operate during the emergency.

Paul Schulman and I argue infrastructure control rooms are a unique organizational formation meriting society protection, even during (especially during) continued turbulence. They have evolved to take hard systemwide decisions under difficult conditions that require a decision, now. Adding this third is to insist on real-time large-system management as the prevention of major failures and thus crises that would have happened had not control room managers, operators and support staff prevented them.

More, a major reason for this high reliability management in a large socio-technical system is to ensure that when errors do happen, they are less likely to be because of this management than to have been forced by other factors, particularly exogenous shocks. High reliability management seeks to isolate the field of blame and root causes, not least of which relate to “bad leadership.”

I

Simon Pierre Boulanger Martel et al. (2024) “Peace with Adjectives: Conceptual Fragmentation or Conceptual Innovation?” International Studies Review (https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viae014) identifies the following varieties of peace in their review of the literature, 1969 – 2022:

adversarial peace, autonomous peace, bellicose peace, cold peace, conditional peace, contested peace, cooperative peace, dictatorial peach, elusive peace, fearful peace, hybrid peace, illiberal peace, illegal peach, insecure peace, militarized peace, normal peace, partial peace, precarious peace, polarized peace, regional peace, restored peace, restricted peace, territorial peace, tyrannical peace, unjust peace, unresolved peace, unstable peace, victor’s peace, violent peace, warm peace. . .

AND THERE IS ALSO

agonistic peace, civil peace, consolidated peace, constitutional peace, everyday peace, inclusive peace, institutional peace, just peace, legitimate peace, liberal peace, local peace, maximal peace, negative peace, participatory peace, quality peace, relational peace, republican peace, sovereign peace, stable peace, strong peace, sustainable peace, a different territorial peace, world peace. . .

AND THEN

climate resilient peace/intersectional positive peace, decolonial peace, emancipatory peace, feminist peace, gender-just peace, positive peace, post-liberal peace, transrational peace. . .

The authors understandably ask–

For example, how does a case of insecure peace (Höglund and Söderberg Kovacs 2010) differ from a case of precarious peace (Maher and Thomson 2018)? And is feminist peace (Paarlberg-Kvam 2019) the same as gender-just peace (Björkdahl 2012), or do these concepts denote different understandings of the meaning of peace?

–noting, anyway, “the lack of minimal agreement on the core features of peace. . .”

II

The more differentiation of what is and is not peace, the better in my view. The world is that complex. And yet it is difficult to gainsay one of the authors’ conclusions:

There are structural incentives for scholars to coin new terms to improve their publication and citation rates, and less incentives to allocate time for thorough reading and engagement with existing scholarly work. . .While it is not easy, especially for early-career scholars, to challenge the dominant structures of academic career-making, we would nevertheless like to end with a small call for resistance to the logic of individualized output optimization in favor of more collective, dialogical, and cumulative knowledge production.

In its current state of the art, AI seems not compatible with human creativity, as Felin and Holweg (2024: 28) exemplify with the invention of aviation: given all empirical evidence available at the end of the nineteenth century, AI will not have been able to “predict” the development of the aerospace industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. . .

Félix‐Fernando Muñoz (2024). “The coevolution of technology, markets, and culture: the challenging case of AI.” Review of Evolutionary Political Economy (acccessed on line at https://doi.org/10.1007/s43253-024-00126-0)

I quote at some length from the Felin and Holweg (2024) just referenced:

So, what was the evidence for the plausibility of human powered flight at the time [in the late 1800s and the early 1900s]? The most obvious datapoint at the time was that human powered flight was not a reality. This alone, of course, would not negate the possibility. So, one might want to look at all the data related to human flight attempts to assess its plausibility. Here we would find that humans have tried to build flying machines for centuries, and flight-related trials had in fact radically accelerated during the 19th century. All of these trials of flight could be seen as the data and evidence we should use to update our beliefs about the implausibility of flight. All of the evidence clearly suggested that a belief in human powered flight was delusional. A delusion can readily be defined as having a belief contrary to evidence and reality (Pinker, 2021; Scheffer, 2022): a belief that does not align with accepted facts. In fact, the DSM-4/5—the authoritative manual for mental disorders—defines delusions as “false beliefs due to incorrect inference about external reality” or “fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence.”

Notice that many people at the time—naïvely, it was thought—pointed to birds as evidence for the belief that humans might also fly. This was a common argument. But the idea that bird flight somehow provided hope and evidence for the plausibility of human flight was seen as delusional by scientists and put to bed by the prominent scientist Joseph LeConte. He argued that flight was “impossible, in spite of the testimony of birds” (1888: 69). Like a good scientist and Bayesian, LeConte appealed to the data to support his claim. He looked at bird species—those that fly and those that do not—and concluded “there is a limit of size and weight of a flying animal.” According to LeConte, weight was the critical determinant of flight. With his data, he clearly pointed out that no bird above the weight of 50 pounds is able to fly, and thus concluded that therefore humans cannot fly. After all, large birds like ostriches and emus are flightless. And even the largest flying birds, he argued—like turkeys and bustards—“rise with difficulty” and “are evidently near the limit” (LeConte, 1888; 69-76). . . .

The emphasis that LeConte placed on the weight of birds to disprove the possibility of human powered flight highlights one of the problems with data and belief updating based on evidence. It is hard to know what data and evidence might be relevant for a given belief or hypothesis. The problem is—as succinctly put by [Karl] Polanyi—that “things are not labeled evidence in nature” (1957: 31). Is the fact that small birds can fly and large birds cannot fly relevant to the question of whether humans can fly? What is the relevant data and evidence in this context? Did flight have something to do with weight, size, or with other features like wings? Did it have something to do with the “flapping” of wings (as Jacob Degen hypothesized)? Or did it have something to do with wing shape, wing size, or wing weight?19 Perhaps feathers are critical to flight. In short, it is hard to know what data might be relevant and useful. . . .

So, what might happen if we weight our beliefs about the plausibility of human flight by focusing on reliable, scientific sources and consensus? In most instances, this is a rational strategy. However, updating our belief on this basis when it comes to heavier-than- air flight during this time period would further reinforce the conclusion that human powered flight was delusional and impossible. . . .

In the case of human flight, the data, evidence, and scientific consensus were firmly against the possibility. No rational Bayesian should have believed in heavier- than-air flight. . . .

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4737265 (my bold)

Why would we belleve today’s AI would have done any better then with that information?

I

Many people would probably think that writing down what they already think is an important part of any policy analysis. It’s a commonplace among many different types of authors, however, that they don’t know what they think until they actually write it down.

“My writings, in prose and verse, may or may not have surprised other people; but I know that they always, on first sight, surprise myself,” writes T.S. Eliot. Chimes in political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, “I do not know what I think until I have tried to write it”. “Therefore, till my work is finished, I never know exactly what result I shall reach, or if I shall arrive at any”, penned Alex de Tocqueville, historian, to philosopher John Stuart Mill. “You never know what you’re filming until later”, remarks a narrator in Chris Marker’s 1977 film Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge. A well-known curator admits, “But then, often when I sit down to write the catalogue text, I discover that it’s actually about something else”. J.M. Coetzee, Nobel novelist, manages to make all this sound quite known: “Truth is something that comes in the process of writing, or comes from the process of writing”.

So too I argue for policy analysts writing up their analyses. But a caveat is needed: Analyses come via many different genres, and not all are conducive to surprising oneself with respect to what one really thinks given the evidence now in front of him or her.

II

Such is the point made by contemporary art critic, Sean Tatol, in a recent edited panel exchange: “When I’m writing, I’m in the process of writing down my thoughts either to formulate something that I haven’t thought of before or to come to a conclusion that’s a surprise to me. That sense of development in thought is, I think, to me the most gratifying. But I think in terms of my short-form reviews that happens very seldom.”

Policy analysts as well have their short-form modes. But one cannot generalize here. The email may well be more surprising for analytical purposes than that article. Two policy briefs, one by a policy advocate who already knows the answer before touching fingers to keyboard, and the other by the policy analyst who holds off rewriting until seeing what they’ve first typed, are quite different matters.

The moral of this story is unexceptionable but worth repeating: The more genres that the policy analyst has access to and is adept in, the more likely that catalyst of analytic surprise is to be found.

---

Sources

https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQPLML9A6bY

For some time, we’ve had posed to us the binaries of civilization or barbarism along with socialism or barbarism. Later choices included progress or barbarism, capitalism or barbarism, liberalism or barbarism. More recent are: degrowth or barbarism, anti-Zionism or barbarism, anti-racist feminism or barbarism, climate justice or barbarism, and digital socialism or digital barbarism.

What an odd way to keep alive the notion that civilization changes because barbarism doesn’t.

Proposition 1: The more services demanded from a single resource, the greater the demand for reliability in each service but the messier it is to ensure that reliability (reliability defined as that safe and continuous provision of a vital service).

The more we rely on firefighters, the more services we demand from them. First, crews responded to fires; then they had to respond to other emergency calls. Power lines are expected to carry not just electricity, but broadband internet services. Banks provided accounts and loans; then we required they source other financial instruments. During service expansions, reliability mandates and service provision suffer growing pains and things get messier.

Proposition 2: The messier it is to provide multiple reliable services from a single resource, the more the services are provided reliably, if at all, in real time only, as performance standards are clearest then.

Police now respond immediately only to 911 calls for activity in progress. The bank shifts from waiting lines in front of few tellers to smaller lines at many outside ATMs. Performance criteria are more evident in real time: Is the cash right at hand, did the police come at once, did you get your emergency care now?

Proposition 3: More services being reliably provided in real time, however, increases the likelihood that new services will be demanded from that single resource, rendering it more difficult to ensure any of the services is reliably provided, right now.

Back at that ATM: Before, it provided cash and deposit services; then it became a one-stop for other transactions, ranging from recharging your cellphone, through paying your bills and buying stamps, to booking rail tickets. Conditions get even messier when the multi-purpose ATM (and others nearby) are out of order, and none of the now-expanded services are available. It’s the same with your cellphone when reception is unavailable.

Proposition 4: The more the services and the messier the real-time management, the greater the pressure to decouple one or more services from the resource and the more likely a new resource will be found/created to provide the decoupled service reliably.

Smartphones are no longer just mobile versions of fixed-line telephones, but altogether different mechanisms with added services. Banks long ago ceased to source financial services sector on their own; all manner of novel financial transactions are provided outside the official banking sector.

Proposition 5: The more reliably the service is provided from the new resource, the greater the pressure to demand more services from that resource. . . and so the dynamic continues.

Should it need saying, it is not obvious what new or more differentiated resources, if any, will emerge nor is there anything inevitable about the propositional dynamic. What can be said, though, is that you’re in it for life when it comes to managing mess-and-reliability.

I

I type “collapse of pastoralist societies?” into Google search and get this AI-generated answer:

Pastoralist societies have been declining for a variety of reasons, including: 

• Loss of land: Pastoralists have lost access to land due to the development of large-scale cultivation and irrigation, the establishment of nature reserves and game parks, and the imposition of national boundaries. 
• Climate change: Climate change has threatened the availability of water and arable land, which are critical for pastoralism. 
• Government policies: Governments have expropriated land from pastoralists, and converted communal property systems to open access situations. 
• Migration: Some pastoralists have moved to populous areas to pursue education, abandoning traditional lifestyles. 
• Conflict: Conflict, disease, drought, and famine have particularly affected vulnerable pastoralist communities. 
• Arms proliferation: Arms proliferation has significantly altered the pastoralism landscape. 
• Lack of government support: Pastoral communities receive little support from their governments. 

No surprises here. This is the gist of the literature I read. But an obvious question remains: How many of the pastoralists affected see collapse in the same way or for the same reasons?

I don’t know their number, but I most certainly see how some herders might believe their pastoralist systems are collapsing but still adhere to a very different narrative of what is going on and being responded to.

To see how and why, let’s turn to a recent article that describes the opposite case: Urban people who see it inevitable that modern societies are collapsing and who respond differently.

II

In his 2024 preprint, “The conviction of the inevitable: Collapsism and collective action in contemporary rural France,” Jérôme Tournadre, a political scientist and sociologist, wonders why some people who are absolutely convinced on the inevitability of collapse in modern (“thermo-industrial”) societies–for them, it’s self-evident the collapse is well underway–nonetheless respond by moving to the countryside and acting neither fatalistically nor apathetically but collectively and differently together.

You might think those different ways included “back to nature” and eschewing all things modern and technological. But no, and here is where it gets interesting for pastoralist comparison:

Sophie, for example, has no trouble using a thermal brush cutter when it comes to freeing agricultural commons from overly invasive vegetation. Alex earns a little money by occasionally installing photovoltaic panels for individuals. However, he does not see the need to use it at home insofar as his connection to the electricity grid satisfies him. Similarly, if the members of the neo-village [one of the research sites] have chosen to gradually do without cars, it is not to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions but, above all, to no longer depend on oil that is bound to become rare or to lose its usefulness in a collapsed world. This logic obviously leads them to use bicycles but also to learn how to handle and maintain tools such as the scythe, the lumberjack’s handsaw or the Japanese saw that is supposed to replace both the chainsaw and the jigsaw. The acquisition of new skills is in any case a central ambition within these collective actions, which endeavour to break away from the specialization found in industrial civilization and develop a versatility more in line with troubled times: knowing how to milk goats and process their milk, graft fruit trees, recognize wild plants and mushrooms, etc.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14661381241266936

Now turn the quote inside out for pastoralists. I don’t think it is generalizable, but say you do find pastoralists who are convinced that their systems are collapsing. More and in their own terms, that collapse is inevitable.

So what?

So, yes you see them learning to use all manner of saws and acquiring new skills, while at the same time continuing to milk the goats and process milk and collect local herbs. Yes, you see them cutting firewood for burning but relying on electricity where available. Yes, you see them undertaking money-paying jobs off-site. Yes, you see them breaking away from the specializations of pastoralism and developing more versatility and options in their also troubled times.

Yes, there are also alarming turnabouts in contemporary pastoralist societies as well, but as Tournadre and other colleagues put it, this is an “alarmed reflexivity.” Some pastoralists, like some urbanites, are alarmed by events in their respective systems. But their response is a more nuanced voice than it is outright exit. They are like whistleblowers who still live amongst us: “Something’s wrong here and it has to change and here’s what I have to say and am doing.”

Hardly the negative narratives and critiques AI has been trained on.

Empirical research into the evolution of cloud platforms is a challenge, as computational ecosystems are not only rather complex and opaque, but are also subject to continuous change.

https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/platform-power-ai-evolution-cloud-infrastructures

Contrast such a notion of, say, ChatGPT, to that of the more conventional “black box.” If humans can only know that which they create (and here too no assurances), then by definition we have a better chance of understanding those black boxes of algorithms we created (as with much of geometry) than those opaque ecosystems, important parts of which we did not create.

Now, of course, modelers think nothing unique about representing ecosystems, but that is more akin to landscaping or remolding than they admit.