Over the weekend I caught a segment on wallaby sightings in Britain. It seems they've been zoos and private collections since the 1930s. They're talented escape artists and many were turned out to the countryside during WWII. Over the years there would be sightings for a year or two and then the individual would vanish. In recent years a change has taken place and sightings are more common. An attempt to make a census suggests there may be two breeding populations. Momma wallabies with joeys in their pouches...
In the past twenty years Britain's climate taken a major shift. Indeed the South of England is climatically similar to wallaby-rich Tasmania. British wallabies have few natural predators and Brits tend to love cute furry animals. It looks like they have a shot at success.
Climate change. The impact has been making marks in places we haven't thought about as well as the obvious ones we have. This one isn't too big, but it's an easy to understand example. There are millions of others that quickly get to wicked complexity. Mass migration, pandemics (loss of habitat is probably partly responsible for some epidemics and clearly pandemics are possible), the list of possibilities is huge. So how do you begin to think about this class of problem?
The underlying physics is straightforward and known at a coarse level for about fifty years. Thirty years ago it became clear global warming was a serious threat although it was difficult to gauge the impact. Since then the science has become much more refined - essentially settled - and many of us became alarmed. My conversion was about twenty years ago. At the time I thought education would be a powerful tool and titled at those windmills for about eight years. I didn't realize how interconnected and nonlinear social and economic issues were. How do you communicate, how do you change minds, what is important to people? Next regions are all different. Mix in how our brains are wired and an existential problem candidate becomes difficult to make meaningful headway on.
How do you work on fundamentally difficult problems - those that are complex and non-linear? People in my field deal with problems that tend to be much simpler, but are often too difficult to approach directly. Early on you try to make the problem as simple as possible. Very rough calculations often done mostly in your head or maybe a few scribbles with a stick of chalk. The idea is to throw out a lot of bad approaches and find a few that make sense. It's playful and even exhilarating with the right people. Then you see if you can break the problem in components. It only works if the problem is decomposable with weakly interacting components. Many problems aren't like that - the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. There are Nobel Prizes that have been awarded to people who have figured out clever hacks so you know how and when simple approximations can be made.
Moving up to the next level of difficulty often makes careful study prone to error or even impossible. Sometimes a way forward is possible. A rough out of focus answer may give you the information you need to move forward. This type of integrated thinking, Murray Gell-Mann called it a coarse look at the whole or CLAW, is rare. I've been part of three studies that used the approach. Getting a diverse mix of people who are known to have the ability to listen to each other is important. You need a few core experts and a mixture of generalists who recognize and build connections. One group had a historian, psychologist, two sociologists, mathematician, two climate experts, a meteorologist, a rabbi, two computer scientists, a forestry expert, two oceanographers, a poet and a few others including myself. (we needed a musician and chef :-) The project required two days a week face to face for two months with lots of homework. I think we had some important insights even if they were fuzzier than most of us were accustomed to.
There aren't many places with the structure to do this kind of coarsely focused work. Those that do may not be as diverse as they need to be. That said I think this can be done on a smaller scale - even with just two or three people. Perhaps companies, government organizations and NGOs might think about tapping the power of internal diversity. The warning is that you don't want to build internal think tanks (or even hire external ones) as that has problems of it's own. (lots of horror stories from a couple of companies I know.)
A few notes from the groups I've been part of. Counterfactuals are extremely important. Looking at low probability, but desirable outcomes may give some insight into how to make them happen. They can also reveal landmines you hadn't considered. The diversity of metrics used by others can help inform your own work later on. Picking the right people is difficult. The success of the effort depends on it as much as anything. Understanding a bit of history can be very important. And finally a comment on simplification - the coarse graining. It needs to be discovered than imposed and that takes awhile. A few days of conventional "brainstorming" isn't going to cut it.
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