Strategic, non-domain-specific, complex, chaotic, loosely coupled systems

Both points well taken but I think there is a much larger issue here.

Thanks to Robert Higgs for bolstering my point that "listen to the epidemiologists!" is actually not the entirety of what we should be doing pic.twitter.com/p1lCF1kTTd

— Tom Woods (@ThomasEWoods) April 24, 2020

Click for the thread.

One of our challenges is that we still, in our national conversations, tend to be speak deterministically, tactically, and as if there are singular answers. I refer to these as tactical, domain-specific conversations about tactical, domain-specific problems for which there are identifiable solutions. It is part of the very DNA of media to think and report in this fashion. Their whole history is asking “who,” “what,” “where,” when,” “why” and “how.” If you ask those questions about tactical, domain specific problems, you get useful answers.

Why won't my car start? Who voted for this legislation? When was that equipment available? - tactical, domain-specific questions, the answer to which has specific value. And because they are tactical, domain-specific questions, not only are the answer knowable, but they are known by single individuals. You co to the mechanic about your car. You go to the secretary of the legislature for who voted. You go to the supplier or receiver for when the equipment was available.

When we lived with simple technology in small communities with few logistical or other ties to others - the world was dominated by tactical, domain-specific questions.

In contrast, the world we live in is dominated by issues which are strategic (long-term, future oriented) and products of complex, chaotic, loosely coupled systems. In a pandemic you can't go to an expert for an answer. You have to go to the epidemiologist, the economist, the logistics executive, the business leaders, the finance experts, etc.

You can get hundreds of answers couched in contextual constraints and hindered by probabilities. But you can't get an answer. There is no such thing.

Further exacerbating the challenge is the problem of consensus objectives. It is challenging to reach consensus about facts among participants within a domain. It is even harder to reach consensus on goals within a domain. And virtually impossible to reach consensus among stakeholders across domains. They have different understandings of different facts based on different assumptions and different projected probabilities against different goals.

But the press wants simple answers.

We see this playing out right now with Covid-19. There is no single reliable forecasting model. Our data is still grossly inadequate. We see patterns of manifestation that are not only inconsistent with one another but inconsistent with what we thought normal. Not only is there no deterministic, empirically valid answer, there isn't even a consensus within individual domains as to what the answer ought to be much less across those domains.

The mainstream media is desperate for experts or scientists to provide straight-forward answers. But when we deal with issues arising from strategic, non-domain-specific, complex, chaotic, loosely coupled systems, there are no experts, there is no "right" answer. This is not a rejection of science. Science is there in each of the domains. This is an observation that we do not yet have the norms and standards for dealing with complex, multi-domain issues in environments of uncertainty.

And yet the MSM keeps trying to force fit complex, multi-domain, probabilistic issues into the simple, tactical, domain-specific world of “who,” “what,” “where,” when,” “why” and “how.”

Economic growth, innovation, global climate, pandemics, human migration, national economic development - all these are complex, multi-domain, probabilistic issues. They dominate our attention. And we keep trying to understand them by asking “who,” “what,” “where,” when,” “why” and “how.” We have to do a lot better in having those conversations.