1. My starting point (by way of wicked policy problems)

The ‘real world’ surely has infinitely more variables than any abstract economic model and their ‘actual’ interrelations are neither known nor, I fear, knowable.

Fritz Machlup, Austrian-American economist

I

When i say concepts like regulation, inequality, and poverty are abstract, I am saying they are not sufficiently differentiated for actionable policy analysis or management. This of course does not mean these abstractions are not otherwise actionable. Ideas about regulation, inequality, and poverty have mattered and the history of ideas is replete with cases where ideas changed our understanding of human events, situations and behavior.

What interest me here, however, are: abstractions actionable with respect to policies and management strategies undertaken right now and here. That is, cases where abstractions have been rendered sufficiently granular for decisionmaking, and where decisions have been taken in light of this actionable granularity.

What then does “actionable granularity” mean?

I have in mind the range of policy analysis and management that exists between the adaptation of policy and management designs to local circumstances and the recognition that systemwide patterns across a diverse set of existing cases inevitably contrast with official and context-specific policy and management designs.

Think here of adapting your systemwide definition of poverty to local circumstances and being cognizant that patterns may well emerge across how really-existing people identify poverty and how these patterns differ from not only system poverty formulae but also localized scenarios based in the formulae.

(In case it needs saying, the preceding two paragraphs are an effort to render my own abstractions of policy and management more granularly helpful.)

II

None of the above points seem controversial to me. Nor should it be assumed I’m privileging one type of abstractions over others. What interests me are some of the implications to be drawn for the practice of policy analysis and management. One seems both obvious and under-acknowledged.

More granularities can also render cases non-actionable for policy and management. Cases that cannot be generalized in terms of being embedded in emerging patterns or identified with localized design scenarios are rightfully called “unique.”

But then a methodological problem is when cases are treated as unique or stand-alone albeit no effort has been made to ascertain (1) systemwide patterns and local contingency scenarios in which the case are embedded along with (2) the practices of adaptation and modification that also emerge along the way with in scenario formulation and pattern recognition. From a policy and management perspective, you can say these pseudo-unique cases have been over-complexified.

III

I stress this point if only because of the messy exceptionalism associated today with “wicked policy problems”. If you think about it, a core problem with wicked policy problems is, well, the concept is not abstract enough.

2. So what? “The root cause” abstracted of contingencies

Contingency is also a way to think about alternatives, and thus adopt a skeptical approach to deterministic discourses.

Éric Monnet, French economist

When it comes to abstracting, we mustn’t forget those who go for “the root cause” in policy messes.

But which root cause? Hegelian estrangement, Marxian false consciousness, Weberian disenchantment, Freudian defense mechanisms, Sartrean bad faith, Orwellian doublethink, Gramscian hegemony, or Goebbels’s Big Lie? Or is the root cause, in that famous “last instance,” Kuhnian paradigms, Foucauldian discipline, or God’s plan or that sure bet, politics/dollars/and jerks—or have I stopped short of the Truly-Rooted Root Cause?

Root-cause explanations exaggerate and pretend an outsized clarity that isn’t there. Root causes are abstractions that wash out the differentiation brought to you by contingencies. It is one thing to say the present advances to the future it renders for itself; it is quite another thing to say the future advances to the contingencies the present affords there but not here.

Let’s see how this works for inequality, regulation and poverty.

3. INEQUALITY: People may be equal like the teeth of a comb, but what about all those different combs?

–It just isn’t that values concerning (in)equality are socially constructed. It’s that the smothering paste of macro-principles cannot stop the bubbling up and surfacing of all those contingent factors that differentiate inequalities for the purposes of really-existing policymaking and management–societal, political, economic, historical, cultural, legal, geographical, governmental, psychological, neurological, technological, religious, and more.

–So what?

The World Bank estimates over 1.5 billion people globally do not have bank accounts, many being the rural poor. Yet having bank accounts ties people into a global financialized capitalism. What, then, has more value? The rural poor with bank accounts or not? Integrated even further into global capitalism or not?

There are, fortunately, those who insist such is not a binary value choice. Many with bank accounts also work to change the upper reaches of financial capital. But there are also those aiming for the lower-reach specifics: Surely, bank accounts work in some instances and even then differently so.

–Insisting on case-by-case comparisons looks to be weak beer. That is, until you realize the self-harm inflicted when political possibilities are foreclosed by any macro policy narrative that abstracts the world into one that is colonized everywhere or all the time by capitalisms and their inequalities.

4. REGULATION: Learning about regulation from The Financial Times

Re-regulation of banking after a financial crisis adds significant costs to the economy and thus reduces growth, while the pre-crisis light-touch regulation undermines the very financial infrastructure necessary for economic growth.

What were indicators of positive economic growth under lighter-touch regulation—e.g., rapid uptake in home mortgages before 2008—were indicators of regulatory failure later on. Mortgages were a relatively safe asset for banks to own, until they were the source of unimaginable losses.

Overregulation is nowhere better illustrated than in comparing the nearly 2000 pages of Dodd-Frank legislation in response to the last financial crisis and the less than 20 pages of the Depression’s Glass-Steagall Act—but under no circumstances are our regulators to repeat the 1930s! Whatever, those who lobby for simplifying regulation end up making it more complex.

It’s a bad thing for regulation to try to squeeze too much risk and complexity out of banking, especially when fresh risk reduction—less leverage, more capital reserves—is itself too risky a strategy. Regulation discourages risk taking and only with risk taking do we have innovation, except when too much innovation and risk taking are encouraged as in the (re-)deregulated finance sector.

New financial instruments (one thinks of credit default derivatives) flowed to where they were not regulated, but regulated financial instruments always increase opportunities for perverse arbitrage and loopholes.

Regulators must always have the best information, even when those regulated—the banks and investment firms—haven’t a clue as to their current real-time positions. Regulators will never have the capacity to know the real-time positions of actual firms, except in those cases where firms, like Lehman Brothers, insisted regulators did have the real-time information.

Global business and supply chains are great, except when the firms are too big to fail. Country defaults are horrible, except where they work through being regulated de jure as in Argentina or de facto as in Mexico at one point.

Global markets are a permanent fact of life, but we must never suppose that the drive to regulate them for the better is just as permanent. Markets are best at price discovery, except where market efficiencies are realized because of lack of transparent discovery, as in unregulated dark pools.

In sum, what I’ve learned from the Financial Times is that always-late capitalism is in crisis because of the always-shambolic abstraction of regulation.

5. POVERTY: A question about Bt cotton

As I remember the too-ing and fro-ing over the introduction of Bt cotton in India, saving on insecticides was the putative plus and runaway GM crops the putative negative. In advance of actual evidence, the controversy struck me then as unhelpfully abstract.

All this came back to me when I read the following passage describing a recent conference paper on Bt cotton:

Ambarish Karamchedu presented on Dried up Bt cotton narratives: climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India. Proponents of this ‘technical fix’ position GMO crops as a triple win. India has semi-arid and arid areas where rural poverty is concentrated, with an intense monsoon season (3-4 months), making farming a challenge. BT cotton introduced around 1995, thrives here. India is the biggest cotton cultivator and Bt cotton is grown by 7 million smallholder farmers, 66 percent in semi-arid areas with poor soils and low rainfall prone to monsoon. In Telangana, 65% of farmers across all classes produce BT cotton, with good harvests for 5 years, after which they decline. Failure of farmers who face increased input prices have to resort to non-farm incomes. The triple win technological fix narrative perpetuates and exacerbates the problems it seeks to solve, and benefits farmer institutions rather than enriching farmer knowledge and practice.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VfvjJlxB9VPKQj55dNbZ_VH6oPi2IEVd

It’s that “with good harvests for 5 years, after which they decline” that grabbed my attention. Did anyone predict that particular event happening, be they proponents or opponents of Bt cotton?

This matters because in the absence of any such prediction, why not also conclude: “Well, five years is five years more than expected?” Even contingencies can be positive for the poor, right?

UPSHOT: In other words, few seem prepared to admit that the bleak state of affairs attributed to regulation, inequality and poverty is no more or less an abstraction than are the latter.

I

Let’s start with the current policy narrative about how intractable it is and will be to regulate the use of Generative AI, globally or not:

. . .while global regulatory solutions might [be] desirable, we also have to consider the standard or level of protection that these solutions can afford. Under the political reality of treaty negotiation, the more seats there are around the table, the more compromises will have to be sought. Such compromises often lead to lowering the level of protection. While this trade-off might be necessary to ensure that more individuals across the globe can benefit from a certain level of protection, this also results in a challenging and even paradoxical position where, simultaneously, more voices around the table push for further consensus on regulations, while many voices still remain completely excluded from the debate.

https://dataethics.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Generating-AI.pdf

Now let’s get to the reasons why this kind of reasoning is misleading.

II

Put aside the quote’s could-isms of the “can’s” and “might’s” that logically and empirically entail “it also might not”. Put aside the fact that “compromises often lead to lowering of the level of protection” actually means: Whether or not standards of protection are lowered depends on a case by case determination.

Focus instead on that assumption that it’s all about the regulator of record when it comes to Generative AI. God help us all, if that were true.

Fortunately, that cannot be true everywhere and in the same senses that matter when it comes to Generative AI.

We know, for example, that when it comes to critical infrastructures (which is and will be a major Generative AI adopter), regulatory functions must be dispersed beyond the regulator of record (e.g., infrastructure control rooms and support staff discover and correct for inevitable error by the regulator of record). [https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/10/01/when-it-comes-to-societys-critical-infrastructures-regulatory-functions-are-dispersed-beyond-the-regulator-of-record/]

We know that these real-time corrections for lapses by the regulator of record (i.e., the more regulators of record try to be comprehensive, the more they miss in dynamically changing conditions) are part and parcel of infrastructure control rooms as a unique organizational formation to address real-time contingencies, in this case with respect to Generative AI in actual use. In fact, the evolutionary advantage of infrastructure control rooms lies in the skills and expertise of its operators to operationally redesign in real time what is otherwise inadequate regulation and technology. [https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2023/05/24/a-national-academy-of-reliable-infrastructure-management-2/]

And in related fashion, we know that 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 often go beyond their official duties). Whatever the societal values with respect to Generative AI, their differentiation through and by critical infrastructures is happening. [https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2022/04/16/critical-infrastructures-regulate-differently-than-government/]

III

So what?

Please then, more realism when it comes to regulating Generative AI! To the extent the preceding quote is today’s policy narrative, the sooner really-existing regulatory counternarratives are examined the better.

Sources. Published versions detailing the above claims and relevant cases can be found in

Re infrastructure control rooms as a unique organizational formation and the need for dispersed regulatory functions: Roe, E. and Schulman, P.R. (2016) Reliability and Risk, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press

Re evolutionary advantage in redesigning defective technology and regulation: Roe, E. (2021). “A National Academy of Reliable Infrastructure Management.” Issues in Science and Technology (accessed online at https://issues.org/national-academy-reliable-infrastructure-management-roe/; updated most recently in Roe, E. and Schulman, P.R. (2023). “An interconnectivity framework for analyzing and demarcating real-time operations across critical infrastructures and over time.” Safety Science (accessed online at https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1hl653IVV9uro7)

Re infrastructure differentiation of societal values: Roe, E. (2023) When Complex is as Simple as it Gets: Guide for Recasting Policy and Management in the Anthropocene, IDS Working Paper 589, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/IDS.2023.025

For example, Baldaro (2020) explores security region-building in the Sahel from three different local perspectives – armed Islamist groups, political elites, and local populations – showing that the first views the West as the security threat, the second uses security-focused regional organization-building (G5 Sahel) to ensure regime security through extracting rents from international aid, while, for the third, regional circulation and mobility are crucial for securing livelihoods. Some of these agendas are aligned, while others conflict with Western interventions, and studies have shown that if Western interven- ers are not mindful of local contexts, ‘hybrid security governance’ and patronage politics may become entrenched, rather than ‘democratized’, through Western security assistance (Raineri and Strazzari, 2019).

Such in-depth and ethnographic studies are crucial for understanding various contexts, as well as for concept-building ‘from the periphery’ (Hönke and Müller, 2012). However, we also argue that this is not sufficient, as the local perspective gives too little attention to transnational entanglements other than with the West – and therefore misses crucial aspects of the making of (in)security in the Sahel. We therefore turn our attention to other actors than the usual Western suspects or their local beneficiaries. (my bold)

[By way of example,] scholars have focused mostly either on Western interveners of different kinds (e.g. the French military operations, security professionals from UN and EU missions, NGOs, development actors, researchers) or on a variety of local actors (e.g. state actors, security professionals, smugglers, armed groups, migrants) or security objects (mostly European border security technologies, boats, police vehicles, and so on). However, these are not the only actors or objects that are part of Sahelian (in)security assemblages: indeed, a range of transnational entanglements – which bring with them other actors, objects, practices, ideas, and rationalities from other parts of the world than Europe and Africa – are missing from this analysis.

[In particular], quotidian material infrastructures have crucial importance for the constitution of global politics, and the focus is then on the artifacts by which these actors become entangled (Salter, 2015, 2016). In our research, we focus on the materiality of transport infrastructures and logistics as sites where entanglements between geographically dispersed actors emerged. As our analysis will show, infrastructure serves multiple purposes that blur the distinction between trade, humanitarianism, and security – thereby nuancing the concept of security (Ziadah, 2019a).

[Again by way of example,] Turkish interviewees emphasize that Turkey is not engaging in the Sahel to counter France or the UAE, as is often purported in the press, but rather owing to its own interests (Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean) and the security interests of Sahelian countries (Interviews 5, 6 and 7). Turkish military relations with Sahelian countries are mainly bilateral, and Turkey has concluded military and security cooperation agree- ments with Niger (2020, 2013), Chad (2019), Burkina Faso (2019), Senegal (2022), and the other West African countries Togo (2021) and Nigeria (2021) (Biedermann, 2019; Gbadamosi, 2022; Özkan and Kanté, 2022). In the case of Niger, the security agreement from 2020 stipulates military training such as education and courses at military schools and centers; on-the-job training; mutual personnel exchange, including that of advisers and units; joint exercises as observer; operations other than war (i.e. peacekeeping and humanitarian aid operations); language courses; military history archives, publication, and museology; cooperation and training in logistical matters; and training/exchange in military intelligence, communications, electronics systems and warfare, cyber-defense matters, and defense against mines and explosives. According to several Turkish interviewees, this security agreement suggests that Turkey wishes to replicate its East Africa policy in the Sahel, which has included the training of Somalian security forces and police, and that it is also looking for the possibility of opening a military base in Niger in addition to the ones in Qatar, Libya, and Somalia (Interviews 5, 6 and 7).

SO WHAT?

[These developments] introduce new material artifacts, rationalities, resources, and connections independently of Western agendas. Taken together, these transnational entanglements that we have documented complement rather than radically challenge existing accounts of the production of (in)security in the Sahel: they point to the persistent need to embed analyses of Western interventions and their various local responses in larger, transnational frames that also account for South–South linkages and circulations in the making of contemporary (in)securities. (my bold)

That is, can we rethink pastoralist migrations across Sahelian borders as South-South linkages in just such ways?

Source.

E.M. Stambøl and T. Berger (2923). “Transnationally entangled (in)securities: The UAE, Turkey, and the Saharan political economy of danger.” Security Dialogue 54(5): 493–514 (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/09670106231186942)

–For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 18^th century German Enlightener, the point is not for the sculptor or painter to portray a crisis at its climax, when visualizing a single moment. Better to choose a moment before or after the apex of destruction, so as to allow the viewers’ imaginations freer rein over what is to come. That way, Lessing argues, the narrative continues in an arc of reflection that is not cut short by any climax’s overpowering intensity:

[S]ince the works of both the painter and the sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated. . .it is evident that the single moment and the point of view from which the whole scene is presented cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which allows the imagination free play is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imagination, the more must think we see. In the full trajectory of an effect, no point is less suitable for this than its climax. There is nothing beyond this, and to present to the eye what is most extreme is to bind the wings of fancy and constrain it, since it cannot. . .shun[ ] the visible fullness already presented as a limit beyond which it cannot go.

Instead of picturing Ajax at the height of his rage and slaughter, better he be depicted afterwards in the full realization of what he has done and in the despair leading him to what must come next.

–One problem with today’s crisis scenarios is the preoccupation with or fixation on a visualized climax. Obviously post-apocalypse can be pictured as even deadlier, but the point holds: In today’s catastrophe scenarios, the worst is imagined and imagination stalls there–like shining deer at night–in the glare of it all. Our unrelieved stream of crisis scenarios is itself proof of imaginations’ inability to let a prophesied climax do all the talking.

–What to do?

Any disappointment that one or more revolts–Occupy, Yellow Vests, Hong Kong protests, Arab Spring, the Extinction Rebellion–have not (yet) culminated into “far-reaching substantive change” is but one scenario only. More, the climax scenario may not be the most fruitful, suggestive moment to focus on anyway, let alone be overawed by.

The entire point of revolt may be revolts. As one European commentator put it when also writing about revolts,

In other words, protests have an autonomy — an autonomy that we risk losing when we necessarily think of dissident protest in terms of a continuum of existing (or absent) political organizations.

https://illwill.com/the-movement-of-refusal

Principal source

Gaiger, J. (2017). Transparency and imaginative engagement: Material as medium in Lessing’s Laocoon. In: A. Lifschitz and M. Squire (eds) (2017). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK: 279 – 305.

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I

The opposite of peace is not-peace. War then is one type of not-peace, not all of it.

A better question, I think, is: What is neither peace nor not-peace? One answer: A state of being where nothing has been concluded about it either way. Nothing constitutes a binary to be experienced as peace and not-peace.

What terms do we give to conditions that aren’t concluded or concludable? Here, I also think, we confront the same problem associated with consciousness: As consciousness is very difficult to define and isolate, we instead give examples of what it is like to experience something.

And when you think about it, the examples are many, in fact so many that some have yet to be discussed.

II

This means in illustrating the multitude of what is neither peace nor not-peace, I can start almost anywhere. (That’s the great opportunity in complexity.)

For me, right now, what do the war dead say about wars? Well, to this atheist, the dead aren’t saying anything. Even when I memorialize the corpses as an argument against warfare, the dead still aren’t talking.

But, that’s too conclusive, right?

Any such determination is not part of the neither-nor inconclusiveness. The point of being neither peace nor not-peace is that the war dead are an entirely different matter, and that matter can’t be talked about in ways that we can talk about “peace” and “not-peace.”

So stated, this also opens the huge canvas of examples.

III

For instance, I’m free to talk about the war dead in what has been called infrathin. Infrathin is a French coinage for any concept that is impossible to define and for which one can only give cases of. Repeatedly mentioned are the warmth of a seat just left, tobacco smoke that also smells of the mouth exhaling it; and the momentum in taking a minute of silence.

To my mind, the war dead are the infrathin of an indescribable ether around and in between us and not-us. Ether, you may know, has been proven to be an unscientific concept. Exactly my point.

This ether that is the war dead isn’t something we breath in and out, but rather it is “something” like our bodies being semi-permeable to the other bodies, consciously–just like consciousness.

IV

An example?

It is reported that Dante finished the Paradiso just before he died of malaria on September 14, 1321. That experience was of course before our experience with the war on malaria.

Novelist E.M. Forster’s exhortation: “Only connect!” Literary critic Frederic Jameson’s exhortation: “Always historicize!”

Well, yes and no. . .The ethnographer and writer, Michel Leiris, writes about the need “to merge the yes and the no.” “Between yes and no” is the title of an early essay by Camus. The work of Elizabeth Bishop was “perhaps more a quiet no than a great big yes,” according to another poet. More severe, “Herman Melville praised Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‘He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie’”, records the critic, Christopher Ricks, who then asks: “But what about saying, ‘Yes, but…?’”

Ricks is spot-on. In the same way as dark energy and dark matter are said to make up the vast portion of the universe, politics, policy and management are grasped only because of–not in spite of–the not-knowing, difficulty and inexperience, all around and in between. I wonder if this might be how best to read the famous last sentence in James Joyce’s Ulysses: “yes I said yes I will Yes.”

So what?

To govern, they say, is to choose. But choose between an irresistible-Yes and an unmovable-No? Better to say: No one governs innocently, yes?

–I have a fantasy about supply and demand, provoked by all those graphs like the one below from Wikipedia:

That is: Imagine demand and supply curves shifting downwards, say, with equilibrium price P* and quantity Q* shifting down with them. At some point, say the two curves intersect the horizontal axis (as with the dotted Supply 1 curve in the figure), producing two quantities, Qs < Q*.

–But at that point, Qs must be the quantity supplied even when price is zero. To put it another way, a portion of the quantity demanded is actually provided at no price because of, say, intrinsic motivation, or suppliers are confused, or everyone got just lucky.

I’d like to think that is the good mess waiting in every partial (!) equilibrium analysis.

It’s easier to rationalize that humans invented logic in order that we can dispense with it at any time than it is to rationalize the sockets of power.

–Given the centerstage that improvisational behavior has in establishing and maintaining interconnectivity between infrastructures during shocks, it is unreasonable to assume that infrastructure operators and emergency managers can un-learn and un-experience cases where even the best plans did not mitigate the disaster as it unfolded.

–“I can’t say enough good things about planning and how important it is,” a state emergency manager in the Pacific Northwest told us.

“But you realize the gaps in plans when you’re dealing with such catastrophic events that we’ve dealt with in the past 18 months to two years…There’s a lot that needs to be decided on the fly because it hasn’t been planned for or it’s not going to work, the plan didn’t consider all the factors because every emergency is different”.

–The preceding seems obvious, but the implications aren’t as readily recognized. For one thing, it implies that there isn’t a “life cycle” of a critical infrastructure, if by that is meant one stage follows another until it, the single now-mature infrastructure, is superseded by something better. Infrastructures are like other complex organizations in that they shift in response to changes in their wider task environments, include sudden changes. That again implies the centrality of improvisation.

–“What does success look like?” a senior state emergency manager asked rhetorically, and answered: “Success in every disaster is that you didn’t have to get improvisational immediately. You can rely on prior relationships and set up a framework for improvisation and creativity.”

Success, in other words, is when pre-existing interconnectivity between critical infrastructures does not altogether disappear, however reconfigured. Otherwise, the interconnectivity would have to be improvised by micro-coordinating to match just-now demands with just-now capabilities. It is a shared error not to recognized the latter for emergency preparedness and management.

Could-isms

Our expert-interview exercise with leading thinkers on the topic revealed how climate technologies can potentially propagate very different types of conflict at different scales and among diverse political actors. Conflict and war could be pursued intentionally (direct targeted deployment, especially weather-modification efforts targeting key resources such as fishing, agriculture, or forests) or result accidently (unintended collateral damage during existing conflicts or even owing to miscalculation). Conflict could be over material resources (mines or technology supply chains) or even immaterial resources (patents, soft- ware, control systems prone to hacking). The protagonists of conflict could be unilateral (a state, a populist leader, a billionaire) or multi- lateral in nature (via cartels and clubs, a new “Green OPEC”). Research and deployment could exacerbate ongoing instability and conflict, or cause and contribute to entirely new conflicts. Militarization could be over perceptions of unauthorized or destabilizing deployment (India worrying that China has utilized it to affect the monsoon cycle), or to enforce deployment or deter noncompliance (militaries sent in to protect carbon reservoirs or large-scale afforestation or ecosystem projects). Conflict potential could involve a catastrophic, one-off event such as a great power war or nuclear war, or instead a more chronic and recurring series of events, such as heightening tensions in the global political system to the point of miscalculation, counter-geoengineering, permissive tolerance and brinksmanship. . . .

States and actors will need to proceed even more cautiously in the future if they are to avoid making these predictions into reality, and more effective governance architectures may be warranted to constrain rather than enable deployment, particularly in cases that might lead to spiralling, retaliatory developments toward greater conflict. After all, to address the wicked problem of climate change while creating more pernicious political problems that damage our collective security is a future we must avoid.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X22002255 (my bolds)

Let’s be clear: All such “could’s-as-possibilities” do not add up to one single “must-as-necessity.”

May-isms

Intuitively, stronger interactions between systems may be expected to increase the numbers of drivers of any one system, change driver behaviour and generate more system noise. As a result, we would anticipate that higher levels of stress, more drivers and noise may bring forward threshold-dependent changes more quickly. For any particular system (for example, the Amazon forest) it is possible to envisage a time sequence that starts with one main driver (for example, deforestation), then multiple drivers (for example, deforestation plus global warming), more noise through extreme events (for example, more droughts and wildfires), with additional feedback mechanisms that enhance the drivers (for example, diminished internal water cycle and more severe droughts). A vortex could therefore emerge, with drivers generating noisier systems as climate variability and the incidence of extreme events increases.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-023-01157-x (my bolds)

Yes, that may, might, could happen. Or not.

Upshot

The only way “could or may” leads to “must” would mean that each article and like ones began with “must avoid this or that” and then proceeded to demonstrate how to undertake really-existing error avoidance with respect to the could-events and might-be’s.