The possible unexpected consequences of intervention

Justin Boland:

January 24th, 2013 at 3:26 pm

Is it ever possible to “soberly consider the possible unexpected consequences” of anything?
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Yes, and with some degree of rigor, too. The intelligence community has created an array of structured techniques for this. It is unfortunate that American students are not taught to think at any point in their curriculum — I myself only discovered Bayesian reasoning last year, and ACH techniques a couple years before that.
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Although it’s usually only mined for conspiracy theory, the work of Stanford Research Institute and RAND in “soberly considering the possible unexpected consequences” is full of great stories, ideas and novel-sized personalities.

larrydunbar:

January 24th, 2013 at 7:21 pm

“The intelligence community has created an array of structured techniques for this.”

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And they are all structured as butterfly wings 🙂 

Justin Boland:

January 24th, 2013 at 8:08 pm

Larry, the flight path of your joke was at an altitude far in excess of my skull’s current disposition. I suspect that was the point, though.

Charles Cameron:

January 24th, 2013 at 9:43 pm

I’m bringing this comment by Derek Robinson across from G+:

A wonderful offering Charles, mucho gracias. The suggestion that Mr. Rumsfeld’s famous remark lacked “unknown known” to complete the tableau ( + + ) ( + – ) ( – + ) ( – – ) was illuminating, I see a parallel with what statisticians call “false negatives”, aka “negative hallucinations” – not seeing something that is really there, which has been termed “change blindness”. The great mother of all such blind spots would be neglect of our own role in perception. Like Einstein said, “It is the theory that determines what we see.” Nor would there be any “objective” position to be had, unless perhaps Nicholas Cusanus’ asymptotic conjunction of opposites “at infinity.” The present context or frame, as ground, is always eclipsed by the figure or focal object occupying the center of awareness. Here I’d cite Michael Polanyi’s useful binaries “attending from” and “attending to”, paralleling Richard Lanham’s “looking at” the form of expression, vs. “looking through” the form (made invisible and subsidiary through habit) to its meaning – colored as it invariably must be by everything which remains implicit, oblique, contextual, allusive. Rhetoric, poetry, art .. benefits of the classical liberal or Renaissance humanist education. As Blake says, “God keep us from Single Vision and Newton’s sleep!”

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[ “tableau” corrected according to Derek’s latest emailed comment ]

larrydunbar:

January 24th, 2013 at 9:47 pm

Sorry, that wasn’t the point. I was thinking that you are right they have an array of structures, but they must be similar in structure as butterfly wings, and the technique is similar as observing those butterfly wings flapping in South America, and understanding the flapping is going to cause a hurricane somewhere. 

Charles Cameron:

January 24th, 2013 at 10:39 pm

Hi, Justin:
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I guess a lot depends on what you and I each mean by “unexpected”.   I don’t think ACH works to dispel deep-seated group-think, does it?  I’m thinking of things like the idea pre-Pasteur that “microbes” might be involved in disease processes, of the likelihood of personal computers around the time that Watson predicted the world might need six of his huge machines…
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My personal hobby-horse, as you know, is apocalyptic movements — but would ACH or Bayesian analysis have predicted that hundreds of Hmong Christians might be massacred and their pastors beheaded in the aftermath of a California-based {edited to add: end times] preacher in 2011, or that a Malaysian Islamic sect would gather “a huge cache of swords, gunpowder and other weaponry” in preparation for the 2012 end of the Mayan calendar cycle?
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What about the current “jihad” turning into a full-fledged Mahdist movement?  Would that include a sweep down from Pakistan into India (the Ghazwa-e-Hind)?  Pakistani nukes falling into Mahdist hands?  What would the impact be in Europe, Israel, the US, Nigeria? I’ve been trying to track this stuff for a decade or more, and I still wouldn’t know how to write anything more than the bare bones of a scenario set…
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I’m probably expressing myself poorly — “anything” is a pretty vague term. I guess what I’m after is big surprises from outside the entire cultural mindset… 

Justin Boland:

January 25th, 2013 at 1:59 am

Appreciate the brainfood, as always.
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All tools can be poorly used, and in the real world, perhaps they mostly are. I do think that the efficacy of Bayes depends a great deal on who is applying it and how. (In most respects, my interests abide on the Qualitative side of the fence, too.) While Operations Research could be reduced to binders full of checklists and flowcharts, it was still exceptional human beings who got the best results. Same goes for baseball.
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One of my personal hobby-horse concepts is exploratory vs. confirmatory research & thinking patterns. My favorite part of that paradox is how easy — and rhetorically “true” — it is to dismiss exploratory work as mere tautology, Excel work for interns. Yet there’s still so much demand for thinkers like Edward Tufte or Nathan Yau, and so much power in those animated presentations that Hans Rosling does around the world these days.
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I revel in the unexpected wrinkles you’re bringing up as examples, though, and happily concede there is no reliable means of predicting such events. Still, we primates do have a solid grasp of the fundamental constraints and cycles that shape our human lives. I suspect that as available data continues to scale up and go public, exploratory approaches will continue to yield strange surprises.
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I was probably expressing myself poorly, too: I just wanted to convey that “blowback” is not news to anyone in any hemisphere in 2013 and should be an integral part of these simulation, war gaming, think tanking exercises by now. You are too right that the “structured tools” I was referring to are generally applied in the service of predetermined conclusions. I’m just wary of quantum post-modernism as escape clause for willful negligence.

Justin Boland:

January 29th, 2013 at 2:47 pm

Still chewing on this, can’t help it.
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In order for humans to learn from history, it has to actually be available to us. That’s really not the case with the consequences of state decisions. Mao’s Great Famine still hasn’t even been acknowledged as a fact by the CPC, and it’s equally impossible to get an independent evaluation of the SOF experiments in the GWOT. (I don’t see this as a matter of ideology, just struture. Not implying some occult isomorphism between China and the Pentagon.) We are simply told that it is working, a relationship that pretty much defines the political role of the American citizen these days.
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The mystery isn’t just a matter of inherent complexity, it’s also a matter of deliberate obfuscation. Our understanding of consequences, long-term, second-order, real-world, could be greatly enhanced by more honest and transparent leadership and more available data. Of course, those circumstances are so far removed from reality I’m doing a thought experiment in an alternate Universe now.