I

For G.L.S. Shackle, British economist, possibility inverts surprise: The larger one’s surprise that something will happen, the less possible it is from the perspective of the person concerned. To ask what would be the biggest surprise in Global Climate Change (GCC) is to ask what would be the most counter-expected or unexpected event with respect to it. When I do ask, I’m told the most surprising eventuality would be things become far worse far faster, but in unimaginable ways.

But wouldn’t the total surprise be instead: Most everyone most everywhere benefits as a result of GCC? This would have to mean more than producing local sites of net benefit, i.e.,  some countries, regions or people benefit in aggregate from climate change, while most do not. Rather, the greatest surprise here would be that “business as usual” in intervening in climate change makes things better for far more people and the planet than currently supposed. The real surprise would be if we managed our way through GCC with no more than the counter-measures already underway or in the pipeline (business as usual of course does not mean do-nothing).

For Shackle, the more surprising, the less possible. How then could such a counter-expected event about GCC even be possible?

One answer is that of well-known philosopher of science, Roy Bhaskar: While the world is real, it is more complexly real than humans with their instruments can cognitively grasp. Should climate change be real in Bhaskar sense, its reality must as well be more differentiated than uniform, unknowable and not just unknown, more immanent or emergent than fixed, right? In this view (and again it is a possibility only) it is unrealistic to assume surprise (and so, necessarily, knowledge) is even on net, negative. Surprise is only negative if resilience cannot incorporate unpredictability, including randomness, as a resource.

II

It’s long been recognized that large complex systems are surprising even to their managers and real-time operators. The unexpected often happens. Even the most experienced operators, who say little shocks them by this point, find themselves wondering how this happened, now.

This is a very suggestive finding in my view. The financing and construction of homes and flats in the San Francisco Bay Area is a complex housing sector. All manner of politicians, regulators, investors, advocacy groups, developers, jurisdictions, localities and residents interact, and this unsettled and unsettling variety is itself often pointed to as proof-positive of the complexity. In this sector, everyone has stories to tell about the unexpected I’ve been told.

What if then we recast the stakeholder complexity in terms of the surprises experienced by those involved? Instead of housing prices going, we talk about: COVID comes, things shut down including construction, and yet the price of lumber skyrockets in ways that shock even those in the know (think supply chain interruptions).

So what? This implies unexpected ripple effects by way of inter-linked surprises, which in turn raise at least one methodological question (surprising to me, anyway): When it comes to this construction sector in the Bay Area, is it better to say we have networks or communities of surprises?

As long as the design of laws, policies and regulations are based in a priori principles (inevitable to my mind) and as long as better practices that emerge across a run of cases cannot be distilled into principles without a paralyzing loss of relevant information for policy, law and regulation (inevitable to my mind), macro-design remains a starting point for reliable behavior in a messy policy world, but never its end.

When it comes to reliability, it is important to note that there is always a gap between macro-principle and better practices, as each reflects different knowledge bases (more deductive in the former, more inductive in the latter). Plato is surely right if he asked as reported, “Are we on our way to or from first principles?”

One example is the difference between the principle of trans-substantivity in US federal civil procedures and the set of evolving common law precedents. Common law has to take the substance of the case into account (in fact, common law is characterized by substance-specific procedures). Trans-substantivity in Federal Civil Procedures, on the other hand, is the principle that a set of procedures apply equally to all cases regardless of the substance. It is not surprising that the macro-principle of trans-substantivity has remained under constant criticism for not taking into account context.

Or to put it the point here the other way around, macro-design for reliability that resists any kind of pressure to be operationally modified in light of the cases at hand is best thought of not as design but as surface pieties so void of content as to be outside any knowledge base for reliability with which humans are acquainted.

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Source

D. Marcus (2010). The past, present, and future of trans-substantivity in Federal Civil Procedure. DePaul Law Review 59 371 (https://via.library.depaul.edu/law-review/vol59/iss2/6)

I

Only from the position of macro-design can you argue from first principles to fixed conclusions. So, when I’m told that macro-principle also governs really-existing micro-operations (think: universal human rights applying equally to each and every individual across the planet), I’m left wondering: Just how does this work?

Such is why “design” is a trigger-word for me. Anyone who has tried to operationalize a project plan or blueprint—today’s version of clockmaker God and the echt rational—knows how contingency and context get in the way of plug-and-play implementation and any such arrow-straight causality.

Nothing, though, stops some principles being grounded explicitly in and around how things do work. In my field, policy analysis and management, I can think of three.

First—as a matter of principle—every design proposal must pass the ‘‘reliability matters’’ test. Would the proposal, when implemented, reduce the task volatility that managers face? Does it increase their options to respond to volatility? Does it increase their maneuverability in responding to different, often unpredictable or uncontrollable, performance conditions?

The test of efficacy here is not ‘‘Have we designed a system that can be controlled?,’’ but rather ‘‘Is this a system we can manage to redesign when needed?’’

Second—as a matter of principle—any macro-design that compels its professionals to work for an extended or indefinite period of time in a task environment outside their domain of competence cannot be expected to produce reliable services. A crisis of course can push real-time professionals to work beyond the limits of the known, even of the knowable—but management professionalism can’t make the coping professional as well.

Third, as a matter of principle, management alternatives exist because society and economy are complex, i.e., because problems are complex, they can be recast differently.

II

So what?

The three principles taken together insist that system designers learn about contingencies that cannot be planned for, but which must be managed in real time, and often only then case by case. This means that the responsibility and duty of real-time veto over infrastructure design and technology moves from the designers/planners to its operators/managers–when high reliability is the mandate.

You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet. . .It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.

I want to suggest that Global Climate Change (GCC) isn’t just a bad mess; it’s a spectacularly, can’t-keep-our-eyes-off-it, awful mess of doing things wrong, again and again. It’s a hot mess–both senses of the term–now sprawled all over place and time. It is inextricably part and parcel of “living way too expansively, generously.”

GCC’s the demonstration of a stunningly profligate human nature. You see the sheer sprawl of it all in the epigraph, Philip Roth’s rant from American Pastoral. So too the elder statesman in T.S. Eliot’s eponymous play admits,

The many many mistakes I have made
My whole life through, mistake upon mistake,
The mistaken attempts to correct mistakes
By methods which proved to be equally mistaken.

That missing comma between “many many” demonstrates the excess: After a point, we no longer pause, our words and actions rushing ahead. (That the wildly different Philip Roth and T.S. Eliot are together on this point indicates the very real mess it is.)

That earlier word, sprawl, takes us to a more magnanimous view of what is going on, as in Les Murray’s “The Quality of Sprawl”:

Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home…

This extravagance and profligacy–the waste–are not an ornery contrarianism. For poet, Robert Frost, “waste is another name for generosity of not always being intent on our own advantage”. If I had my druthers, rename it, Global Climate Sprawl.

I

A form of societal regulation occurs when critical infrastructures, like energy and water, prioritize systemwide reliability and safety as social values in real time. Importantly, these values are further differentiated within infrastructures.

Consider the commonplace that regulatory compliance is “the baseline for risk mitigation in infrastructures.” There is no reason to assume that compliance is the same baseline for, inter alios, the infrastructure’s micro-operators on the ground, including the eyes-and-ears field staff; the infrastructure’s headquarters’ compliance staff responsible for monitoring industry practices for meeting government mandates; the senior officials in the infrastructure who see the need for more enterprise risk management; and, last but never least, the infrastructure’s reliability professionals—its real-time control room operators, should they exist, and immediate support staff— in the middle of all this, especially in their role of surmounting any stickiness by way of official procedures and protocols undermining real-time system reliability.

To put it another way, where highly reliable infrastructures matter to a society, it must be expected that the social values reflected through these infrastructures differ by staff and their duties/responsibilities (e.g., responsibilities of control room operators necessarily go beyond their official duties).

II

So what? It’s routine but stops short of the truth to say that “government” has allocative, distributive, regulatory and stabilization functions. In truth, critical infrastructures are their own allocative, distributive, regulatory and stabilizing mechanisms for generating and distributing societal safety and security.

Yes, government relies on infrastructures to meet its own functions and, yes, there is an overlap and dependency between both. Few, however, think to ask, let alone study, how critical infrastructures—many of which are privately owned or managed in the US—independently affect society-wide risks, social values and societal regulation.

Dystopias are tropes of contaminated possibilities. Tropes about how more things go straight-out, hair-raisingly wrong, about how it’s easier to mismanage than to manage. Collapse is more certain than not; negative externalities are to be expected, positive ones no way.

Probabilities of failure cascades flip to 1.0 in record time. We must manage the planet’s resources better, but no one can expect technology to help. So much is uncertain that anything is possible, and thus–“thus”?–everything is at risk.

This—manifold anxiety, existential panic, dog-whistle alarmism—contaminates realism.

But what realism am I talking about? None of this catastrophizing includes the everyday saves of those who avoid large infrastructure failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened. But why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important?

Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society draws for operational redesign needed because of the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for restoration and recovery. Needed, that is, in order to compensate for other defective possibilities that pass for realism.

Source

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/11/27/booker-winner-prophet-song/

Much has been made of the distinction between Type I or System 1 thinking—it is nonconscious and all but automatic, rooted in fear and emotion—in comparison to Type II or System 2 thinking that is conscious, deliberative, and not rooted in emotion or instinct.

I’m asking you now to recast conscious deliberation and analysis as positive distractions, that is, diversions from acting otherwise stereotypically or worse, where we are more likely to revert to the latter when responding to unknown unknowns, inexperience and/or great difficulties.

The premise here is that we are positively distracted from ingrained preoccupations when distracted by hesitations, scruples, ambivalences and reflections on: what we know and do not know; what we experience as unavoidable inexperience; and what we come to know as the very different kinds of difficulty.

So? Boris Pasternak, the poet, is reported to have said that life creates events to distract our attention away from it, so that we can get on with work that cannot be accomplished any other way.

I

The considerable strengths of centralized operations rooms in our major critical infrastructures are at the same time blind spots in society’s expectations concerning these infrastructures.

Yes, control rooms represent unique system knowledge, but that real-time knowledge cannot be conveyed or distilled for the public or for experts committed to checklists and protocols.

Yes, their skills and requirements are so knowledge-intensive as to make control operators professionals in their own right, but that means they also cannot be expected to know the requirements of other control rooms with in the same breadth and depth.

Yes, they are virtuosi in managing real time–and it is true that professionals who cannot manage the short-term should not be expected to manage for the long term–but reliability professionals are the first to recognize the need for longer-term planning and analysis.

Yes, control rooms are central to intra- and interinfrastructural reliability, but some critical infrastructures under mandates for high reliability do not have control rooms.

II
All this has at least one major implication:

Yes, the evolutionary advantage of control room operators is the operational redesign of inevitably defective technology and regulation so as to ensure system reliability in real time; no guarantees, of course! This however does not make them experts in repurposing infrastructures when it comes to adding new services or creating new infrastructures to provide the same service.

The prime minister of Japan during the Fukushima disaster concluded: “Experiencing the accident convinced me that the best way to make nuclear plants safe is not to rely on them, but rather to get rid of them”. And that is what Germany was to do under its Energiewende, the energy transition (transformation?) from nuclear to renewable resources.

The question then is this: How to make any such transition highly reliable? If the aim is high reliability, answers must pivot around the respective real-time control room operators.

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I

Michelangelo put the carver’s task as liberating form from the surrounding stone. The self is the revealed form that already exists, when the surplusage is chipped away.

Adrian Stokes, art critic, took the distinction and extended it. For Stokes, the modeler fashions the self in contrast to the carver. The clay modeler has the more labile enterprise of molding, where the form is “not uncovered but created.” “The modeler realizes his design with clay. Unlike the carver, he does not envisage that the conception is enclosed in his raw material.” In comparison to stone, “the plastic material has no ‘rights’ of its own. . .Modeling is a much more ‘free’ activity than carving”. (Think of “modeling” not as computer simulation but as Stokes did, molding).

II

Adam Phillips, the essayist and therapist, returns to Stokes’s distinction as two distinct approaches to an individual’s selfhood and experience: “It is as though there are things that are always already there which we may or may not find; and there are things which we make, which we put there and by so doing add something to the world that wasn’t there previously”.

What interests Phillips is that “[e]ach of these two versions involves us in telling a different kind of story about the self”. The modeler “uses his art to expose, to extend, to fashion himself”, while the carver abstains from promoting the self in favor of responding to the otherness of the object. Yet in both, a version of the self is operating—“the carver forgets himself…the modeler endorses himself”.

The difficulty with the carver is that, in seeing herself as deferring to what is already there, she renders herself oddly immune to criticism by a world that responds to her acts nevertheless; it is as if she submerges her own egotism in the name of making what is revealed wholly visible as its own, regardless.

The difficulty with the molder (our modeler) is the reverse. It is her hubris, her own truth that is imposed upon a seemingly moldable reality. She acts as if reality is worse off for not having this truth.

III

What works better, carving or modeling? It is premature to choose between the two versions of self when other selves exist from which to (s)elect. To carving stone and modeling clay, we must at least add improvising the self from what is at hand, which involves something different—good enough but in ways that matter better still than stone, clay and equivalent.

What Phillips calls “the contingent self” is one who makes use of luck, accident, and coincidence that befall him or her. S/he improvises a life within a network of others that improvises him/her. (This, of course, is also a weak-spot of the contingent self who is always, if you will, being prepped for more surgery.)

Now, of course, there are those who promise to mold or carve the Anthropocene into the preferred selves. My bet, though, is on the improvisers,

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Principal sources

Phillips, A. (1994). On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.

————– (2004). On not making it up, Or the varieties of creative experience. Salmagundi, no. 143 (Summer): 56-75.

Stokes, A.  (1978). The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, Volume I: 1930-1937, Thames and Hudson: GB.

Attempting to enact political and economic transformation without infrastructure support – without a way of pumping water, growing food, or delivering healthcare – is like doing origami with smoke. No matter how ambitious your scheme, how virtuosic your technique, the folds vanish as soon as you make them. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8414030/

You needn’t be clairvoyant to realize that the energy transition–whether in its reformist or radical versions–means a host of second chances for critical infrastructures and their provision of reliable services.

With or without Stop-Oil, infrastructures will remain central to energy provision and interconnectivity; with or without Sustainability, reliability will be demanded across that interconnected provision. Yes, of course, technologies and system configurations will change, but even the keywords of the radical versions–transformative, emancipatory–are redolent with the promise of second chances along the way. So too then for the concepts and practices of infrastructure and reliability.

So what? For one thing the Climate Emergency portends all manner of illiquidity, not least of which are today’s critical infrastructures being tomorrow’s stranded assets. But “stranded” underscores the place-based character of the assets. Stranded also implies the possibility of other uses for the infrastructure. Stranded, in other words, means taking the places for second chances very seriously.

Will the energy transition(s) be granular enough to do so?