
Wicked - thunk
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/wicked-1.html
======
zb
I was in total agreement up to this point:

 _there really is no 'right' formulation and no 'right' answer. These are
problems that cannot be engineered._

On the contrary, engineering is 100% about addressing these kinds of problems
(not all engineering problems match all 10 criteria, but most match at least
some of them). Those people who think the engineering approach to problems is
"define it, decompose and scope it, solve it, implement it" - or, as we call
it, the Waterfall Method - have mistaken homework problems for engineering
problems. They really have no idea what engineering is.

Then there's this:

 _our biggest challenges are ... issues of communication, coordination, and
cooperation. These are, for the most part, well-studied problems that are not
wicked._

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.

Incidentally, although he inexplicably doesn't link to it, Ritter and Webber's
original paper "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" is quite readable
and well worth the time:
[http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_T...](http://www.uctc.net/mwebber/Rittel+Webber+Dilemmas+General_Theory_of_Planning.pdf)

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dodo53
it feels a bit like: damn those scientists/engineers trying to solve complex
problems with a one one-size-fits-all analytical/reductionist toolbag; some
problems are really hard! What we need is to use our one-size-fits-all
Structured Dialogue Design!

~~~
Confusion
I don't think that's what he is arguing. The problem isn't that scientists
aren't solving problems well enough: the problem is that those solutions don't
get technologized, combined and put to use, through lack of communication,
cooperation and coordination between scientists, other scientists from other
sciences, industry, politicians and some in between.

A staggering amount of knowledge is being produced and most of it sits
gathering dust. We've already reached the point where many new
inventions/discoveries turn out to be rediscoveries of something already
conceived of, or even thoroughly figured out, in the sixties. This happens all
across the sciences, because there is too much relevant information for a
single person, or even a single university department, to know of. We need
tools to help with that.

My God, as I'm writing this I realize this is the most powerfully insightful
thing I've read this year!

~~~
derefr
To put it another way: scientific positivism allows one person, working alone
in a laboratory, to discover something fundamentally new, by simply ratcheting
along in tiny increments from what has already been discovered. This can be
good—something new inevitably gets discovered over time—but it also has a
fundamental weakness, in that most scientists toil in obscurity with the
public never understanding the relevance of their work, and thus never
applying it outside their original domain.

I'm not sure the output of scientific positivism _can_ be well-indexed, to the
point where anyone can find all the relevant pre-existing work they could
build upon in their own: as there is no one big point where something new is
discovered, but rather a lot of little facts and confirmed/refuted hypotheses
that snowball until a meta-analysis of several studies can actually say
something for certain, there's no one thing for a scientific expert
system/communications tool to return to you. I expect, to have such a thing at
scale, we'd need an actual human-level AI that "read" and understood the
significance of every study in every field, and could see all the cross-
correlations.

Before the advent of scientific positivism, though, we had a sort of
ritualized science, where we would get large groups of people all studying one
thing or another, out looking for proof or disproof of whatever particular
thing they currently believed, leaping around wildly in hypothesis-space
rather than just edging forward and taking whatever facts came along. There
would be scientific belief "movements," in the same way that there are
artistic "movements." Because it was ritualized, science was able to be made
an entertaining talk of at the time, similar to celebrity gossip—everyone
would have their own opinion on whether the currently-researched belief held
true or not, and would debate it constantly, increasing public awareness of
the subject; a "named hero" scientist would later come with a sweeping
experiment and prove one or the other group right, and would be heralded by
that group and have some unit of measure, chemical element, or heavenly body
named after them.

Ritualized science didn't necessarily advance human knowledge "as a whole"
very quickly—the iterative assembly-line process we have now seems to work
quite well for that—but it did seem to get each new scientific fact thoroughly
embedded in the public consciousness, because of what is basically good
_social game design_. Perhaps we need some more of that, some hybrid model
where scientists _can_ still be "heroes" with "rivals" in the public eye,
entertaining and informing in conjunction and raised up with social status,
rather than simply workers for government grants raised up only with citations
in journals?

As a screwy tangent: perhaps this could even be a facade on top of current
science, a sort of staggered release of scientific knowledge in high-assurance
bursts, with the rest of the "development" going on in some scientific "closed
alpha" where the public wouldn't be constantly bombarded with overzealous
summations every time the ratchet was turned (basically a justification for
Yudkowsky's "Bayesian Conspiracy.") When a scientific hypothesis was made
theory, it would be handed off on stone tablets to a researcher well-trained
in rhetoric with a nice-sounding last name, and they would become, to the
public, "the one who discovered the theory of X." Only the conspiracy would
know that it was the work of thousands.

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msluyter
"What we need, in other words, is a Facebook for collaborative decision-
making: an app built to compensate for the most egregious cognitive biases and
behaviours that derail us when we get together to think in groups."

I think what he's referring to may have already been proposed by Robin Hanson
in the form of "Futarchy," a system of government that uses prediction markets
to enact laws:

<http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html>

~~~
khafra
The sole reason I'd like to get leadership in some group with a goal is to
implement futarchy and see how it works.

That said, there are other frameworks built to improve collaborative decision-
making. I also like the Persian method: If an idea comes up while the group is
drinking together, discuss it sober as well, and vice-versa. Only implement
ideas that meet approval both times.

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AndrewO
Anyone else having trouble finding a good definition of "Structured Dialogic
Design"? Apparently it's been used in the Cypriot peace process, but I can't
find a good description of how it differs from "getting a bunch of people in a
room to talk about a problem".

I'm hoping he threw that term out as a teaser for part 2.

~~~
praptak
There's a link to a subpage of <http://dialogicdesignscience.wikispaces.com/>
in the article.

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hendler
Some projects I've done failed precisely because of a desire to tackle wicked
problems. When I heard that I wanted to "boil oceans", it was an apt
criticism. However, I learned a lot.

The article need not be taken as a criticism of engineering or scientific
reductionism. These approaches to problem solving are correct for certain
phases of tackling a problem (like implementation).

The problem we collectively have with wicked problems is that they are vastly
interconnected, and so many small moving parts rapidly changing that we
collectively can not keep up. Even if climate is slow moving, all the parts
that affect it are not, and we are not fast enough or smart enough to keep up.

It is our self-righteous stance against nature that helps us survive, but
admitting that a problem is bigger than us isn't ... natural.

My belief/hope is that computers will increasingly tackle wicked problems.

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mchusma
I actually like this idea of an app to help craft arguments, but needs to be
implemented on a smaller scale. Just a tool to help identify common logical
fallacies would be pretty useful. Might be a way to ultimately leverage IBM's
Watson technology, analyzing semantics to determine likely logical fallacies
or cognitive biases.

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praptak
_"[...] surely we can build a simple app that everybody can use that does even
one useful thing, like, say, mitigate the Erroneous Priorities Effect when
you're attending a meeting."_

This, I believe is a good old engineering problem. The hard (maybe not wicked)
problem is getting people to use it. Ah yes, and if you really want to help
solve the wicked problems, it can't just be _any_ people but rather those who
make/influence important decisions.

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samlevine
>Climate change is a great example of a wicked problem: Quick, somebody tell
me what the acceptable maximum amount of CO2 in the atmosphere should be, in
parts-per-milion! Provide me with the answer to that question, and you win a
pony!

We don't know. At some point 450ppm was considered acceptable, but at this
point the maximum acceptable level may well be 350ppm (pre-industrial
revolution it was around 275ppm).

Right now we're at around 390ppm, so whatever it ends up being we have to
reduce emissions from their current levels on at least a per-capita basis if
not overall.

~~~
fraserharris
"We don't know" is the answer he is looking for to his rhetorical question.
It's a value judgement. The island nations that are losing land to rising
oceans have a very different idea of what is acceptable to northern nations
enjoying longer growing seasons and milder weather.

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indrax
Web search is the same way.

This sounds like a lot of meta-level confusion.

