
Wicked problem - ivankirigin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
======
acidburnNSA
Alvin Weinberg published his "Science and Trans-Science" article on roughly
this topic in 1972 [1].

He said: "Many of the issues that lie at the interface between science and
politics involve questions that can be stated in scientific terms but that are
in principle beyond the proficiency of science to answer."

"The protagonists often ask for the impossible: scientific answers to
questions that are trans-scientific"

Pretty good stuff.

[1]
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/177/4045/211.full...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/177/4045/211.full.pdf)

~~~
bjt2n3904
Absolutely fantastic article.

The protagonists, in my experience, don't understand this nuance very well,
and are quick to label you as "anti-science".

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mkchoi212
How is the AIDS pandemic an example of a wicked problem?

One of the definitions of a wicked problem is "Wicked problems have no
stopping rule.". But the stopping rule for the AIDS pandemic seems to be
creating a cure for AIDS / eliminating all cases of AIDS.

Am I missing something really obvious here??

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myhf
If you are operating within the scope of a single country, eliminating all
cases within that country would not be a stopping rule.

~~~
TeMPOraL
But that itself doesn't make it a wicked problem. It means the solution needs
to involve broadening the scope of your operations. In case of AIDS, it would
be an international cooperation.

A real-life example is the efforts to eradicate smallpox and polio; the first
one succeeded, the second one was almost done but hit some serious problems
with international cooperation - regardless, this demonstrates the problem,
while hard, isn't wicked.

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invalidOrTaken
Has recently been popularized by the book _Range_ , for which I'm grateful,
because now I can talk about this stuff with my family.

There is also something of a "wicked problem of wicked problems," which is
that wicked problems are very hard to talk about---one of their survival
traits is that they're unappealing to talk about, because by definition you
can't "solve" them easily.

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motohagiography
I work in the domain of these wicked problems, and they usually reduce to
Taleb's no "skin in the game." The necessary condition for one is that someone
has power from some exogenous source, but without accountability.

You can in fact identify wicked problems as an epi-phenomenon of the
strategies of the players, who give away their intent in early rounds. The
only solutions are an equilibrium of interests.

It's a condition of bureaucracies, politics, and anything outside markets and
hierarchies where you can resolve things with a clear price or authority. They
are a peculiar game form that has no winners.

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AA-BA-94-2A-56
The fact that a problem is a wicked problem does not justify inaction, in my
opinion.

I’ve had (stupid) friends argue that because income inequality is a wicked
problem, we should do away with a social safety net for the poor.

Obviously we can’t this issue 100 per cent, but the difference in trying to
solve it is better quality of life, lessened crime, happier populace, more
people ready for work, and lower mortality rate.

It’s great to identify something as a Wicked problem, but that should never
stop you from attempting to solving it.

~~~
83457
Everyone dies and we can't prevent that so we should do away with hospitals.
Just bring up some issue that affects them and suddenly they will be
disagreeing.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Then fine. Go with the Buddhist standard, and the goal is to reduce suffering.

I would say that's one of those simple rules with extraordinarily complex, but
overall very good outcomes.

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kangnkodos
In Boston, people call this type of of problem a "wicked bad problem".

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arawde
not a "wicked hahd problem"?

~~~
munk-a
Oh, and let's not forget the advanced form of this problem - the "supah wick'd
hahd prahblem"... for general information "wicked" is usually a single
syllable in Boston.

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jadbox
I'm really happy this topic is surfancing on HN as I've made it my mission to
build experiments to try to tackle social wicked problems.

Dinnertable Chat is an online chatroulette-style conference matchmaking system
based on mixing people based on same and different viewpoints. The same idea
could be used to mix people on any category (by skill, field, etc):
[https://www.dinnertable.chat/about](https://www.dinnertable.chat/about)

The Mix Opinions service matches people in physical spaces by dividing people
up into groups, such that each group has maximized viewpoint diversity of each
of the members. I could also adapt this to be applied to online conferencing
and maximize on both diversity as well as interests (based on weights).
[https://www.mixopinions.com/](https://www.mixopinions.com/)

Some of the philosophy of why I was focusing on 'mixed viewpoint' conference
software:
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q5KWhxhBMLWSvrYoEoWP...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q5KWhxhBMLWSvrYoEoWPWAO-
YqgPwGRakvRNUnxtz1M/edit?usp=sharing)

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ssivark
Just this week I was reading “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” by Christopher
Alexander (CA), which in someways kickstarted the “design thinking” craze.
Later on, CA recanted many of his ideas about the systematization of design,
and converged with Rittel regarding “wicked problems”. That said, the first
half of the above book is still a fantastic read on why wicked problems tend
to be hard when attempted in “self conscious mode”. One of the most thoughtful
pieces I’ve read in a while... and it’s an intuitive, breezy and relatively
short (for a book) read.

Here’s Rittel’s seminal paper on problems with the “planning/design“ approach
towards wicked problems:
[https://archive.epa.gov/reg3esd1/data/web/pdf/rittel%2bwebbe...](https://archive.epa.gov/reg3esd1/data/web/pdf/rittel%2bwebber%2bdilemmas%2bgeneral_theory_of_planning.pdf)

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aaron695
It's a great example because of a totally stupid name, a really important
concept isn't being adequately explained or understood.

Meaningless garbage like "Black Swan" is spouted all the time and sets people
back, just because it's a cool name with a cool story

Yet Wicked problems are our most important issues at Micro and Macro levels,
you will have this problem, but people can't tackle them properly because we
haven't abstracted the framework in a cool way.

I also think the definition needs to be tightened. But I honestly think no one
wants to work in a meta field called 'Wicked problems'

I wonder if in other languages this is tackled better?

~~~
Forge36
I swore these were called "hard problems" based on the rough definition: it's
a problem whose solution only becomes obvious after a failed attempt at
finding the solution.

This fits nicely with the PDF text post also currently on the front page. The
best solution for exporting the output text is simply to OCR what is visually
seen as an image even though the text is present in the data (because white
text on a white background wouldn't be wanted by most users) Therin: The
solution also changes based on use case!

~~~
aaron695
> it's a problem whose solution only becomes obvious after a failed attempt

I think if the solution ever become obvious it's not a wicked problem.

You can solve them sometimes, but they involve large amounts of waste and
time. And you never know how to have done them better.

That's my understanding.

My starting solution to the PDF is to give the user both OCR and text and let
them chose. I don't think it's Wicked, but I do think no one is solving it
properly along clearly viable lines.

I also think there is a clear solution to force companies to convert PDF's to
text properly. So even at a higher level I don't think it's Wicked, just the
culture is not correct.

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c3534l
This seemed like an interesting concept, but the list of examples was
underwhelming. It can be boiled down to "problems that can be mitigated, but
not solved." Which is just kind of a dull thing to name. Given the
description, it sounded like this was an article about paradoxical problems in
optimization, or sort of real-life examples of the liars paradox. Instead,
it's a class of problems that may be interesting in their own right, but the
part they have in common isn't.

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hirundo
Wickedness in a problem domain is an argument for a competitive, decentralized
approach, in order to more rapidly search a larger solution space. Yet instead
we seem to demand gordian or manichean solutions and strong centralized
institutions to implement them. When the trains don't run on time, instead of
seeking out a fray of Dagny Taggarts, we look for one Mussolini. And so wicked
(hard) social problems beget disproportionately wicked (counter productive)
answers.

~~~
kiliantics
You are framing this as an either-or situation but, if you read the wiki page,
there are _3_ strategies to dealing with wicked problems and you missed the
"collaborative" category.

It's clear the authoritative "mussolini" solution is undesirable from a
liberal perspective in which we prefer to have a shared say over how we
organise things. However, it's also increasingly clear that the way we
implement the competitive strategy -- you so aptly suggest the Ayn Rand
protagonist as the better option -- is also flawed and incapable of solving
these difficult problems. The nature of modern capitalism is to tend toward
monopolistic/oligopolistic dynamics in the market, which ultimately leads to a
concentration of power and a lack of shared control over such issues. Our
economy has only ever made our impact on the environment worse and worse, and
is driving us ever closer to catastrophic climate change. Not to mention other
examples, such as healthcare, etc.

Why not try something "collaborative", where instead of hoping for either a
top-down governmental, or top-down corporate solution to problems, we truly
decentralise power and give all people agency and freedom to live in this
world? For instance, if we stopped letting the profit motive squeeze us for
every possible thing, people would have more free time with lower living
expenses and less demanding jobs, and could spend more time
repairing/restoring possessions, rather than buying new, or gardening and
cooking, rather than eating out, or cycling everywhere, rather than taking
cars.

~~~
hirundo
Because private property is the sin qua non of decentralized decision making.
It is in fact a bundle of rights to make your own decisions about the
disposition of things. Anything short of it is also less decentralized.
Collaboration with less competition has fewer independent decision makers, and
therefore searches the solution space more slowly.

Creative destruction is ugly as hell. It incorporates all of evil. But it is
also the engine of adaptation; the inverse of lithification. To the extent
that we limit it, we limit the parallelism of adaptation. The fact that
businesses can be so easily destroyed outweighs all of their manifest
ugliness. Very few noncompetitive institutions have that feature. Fast search
means rapid destruction and creation.

There is a very real human cost to that, and many, maybe most people will
never be convinced that it's worth it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Talking about minutiae of capitalism here is sort of detracting from the core
issue (that also underlies the problems of capitalism).

The core problem is: humans can't coordinate at scale. Working together
towards a shared goal comes naturally to us when we're in small, tightly-knit
groups. The larger the group, the harder it gets. Once the group reaches
~hundred members[0], coordination generally collapses, and the group succumbs
to the usual breed of prisonner-dilemma's-like problems. Or, it develops a
governance structure.

If you look at history of civilization through the lens of coordination,
you'll notice that all the governance structures, all the economies, up to and
including democracy and the free market, are essentially a mechanism of
coordinating larger and larger amounts of people. A government cuts trough
prisonner-dilemma's-like problems. Its hierarchical nature lets direct
coordination costs scale as O(n log n) instead of O(n^2) - but that's still
not efficient enough for smaller and more localized problems. There, markets
come to the rescue: they let people coordinate on smaller and more local
issues, often without even explicitly noticing them - all gets handled by the
feedback loops around prices.

The core observation here being: the market works at efficiently coordinating
groups of people with diverse interests and smaller, more localized problems.
It _absolutely sucks_ at responding to a problem requiring to coordinate large
groups of people. That's where you want the top-down solution. It's reasonable
to look up to the government to solve a coordination problem below its
level[1], _that 's what governments are for_.

\--

(And you do need both a government and a market to limit each other's power.
For instance, you mention that "businesses can be so easily destroyed". That
only holds true in a spherical-cow free market that never existed. One of the
features of capitalism is that profit compounds; a successful company has more
resources to protect itself from its competition, ensuring further success. A
successful company can't be easily destroyed.

The end-goal of competing businesses is monopoly, but society needs the
competition, not the victory - so you need the government to ensure the
victors get struck down and competition continues.)

\--

[0] - Dunbar number is ~150, which may or may not be a coincident.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

[1] - Governments have their own coordination problems at the international
level; geopolitics is essentially a completely unregulated free market.

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tantalor
Is telling whether something is a wicked problem a wicked problem?

~~~
IshKebab
Based on this Wikipedia article, yes and no. It has multiple conflicting and
vague definitions for whatever the hell a "wicked problem" is. It's like they
read the definition of REST and thought "I think we can go vaguer".

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DoreenMichele
I imagine in many cases, if you solved it, you wouldn't really get credit and
history would just sort of shrug and forget it was ever an issue.

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hosh
Which cynefin (domain) would this belong to? Does it describe a class of
problems that is not easily categorized within the Cynefin framework?

~~~
aalhour
As per Dave Snowden, Wicked Problems lie in the Unordered side of Cynefin and
mainly in the Complex domain (if they come from sociology).

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dr_dshiv
I really get irritated by the use of the term. I've heard it too much in the
wrong situations. Use with caution.

~~~
munk-a
As a person who grew up in Boston, it is a really confusing term due to just
sounding like a generally hard problem... which appears to be a pretty decent
approximation of the term. The examples given in this article provide both
clarity and additional confusion with a focus on being large uncertain (and
thus generally hard to solve) problems.

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svnpenn
As I have gotten older I try to recognize these when they present themselves,
and proceed to avoid them at all costs.

