DMDU aka Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty. What is this? I’ve just begun reading but so far it appears to be an analytical/decision making framework for the future.
From RAND:
Seventy-five years into the Great Acceleration—a period marked by unprecedented growth in human activity and its effects on the planet—some type of societal transformation is inevitable. Successfully navigating these tumultuous times requires scientific, evidence-based information as an input into society’s value-laden decisions at all levels and scales. The methods and tools most commonly used to bring such expert knowledge to policy discussions employ predictions of the future.
Deep uncertainty exists when experts or stakeholders do not know or cannot agree on:
appropriate conceptual models that describe relationships among key driving forces in a system
the probability distributions used to represent uncertainty about key variables and parameters, and/or
how to weigh and value desirable alternative outcomes.
DMDU provides concepts, tools, and multi-objective, multi-scenario decision support methods designed to inform and improve decisions that face such conditions.
Traditional “predict-then-act” methods demand that we predict the future to act upon it. This mindset contributes to hubris and myopic overconfidence among experts, excludes voices from the conversation, fosters distrust among the general public, and distracts attention from the main task at hand – using the best available science and evidence to help decision makers fashion creative solutions that enable a diverse society to pursue its common and sometimes conflicting goals in the face of transformational change. … DMDU enables experts to build trust by being honest about uncertainty, and makes uncertainty empowering rather than something to be feared. DMDU can restore trust in science by allowing experts to be humble in what they know yet confident in their recommendations.
So I suppose the goal of DMDU is to mend the disconnect between experts, decision-makers, and the public: it challenges the prediction-driven loop between policymakers and experts, and the false certainty that erodes public trust. This sounds especially crucial when societal transformation raises deeply value-laden questions such as what society do we want to be?
an uneasy correlation exists between uncertainty and human agency. We have the most potential for influence over the future at times when the future is most fluid and most uncertain. But people find doubt unsettling, so they grasp for certainty, which can then impede society’s ability to navigate effectively. We clutch at plans rather than the planning. Nonetheless, society has been stressed by decades of often welfare-enhancing but disruptive progress and its associated, growing risks. Good policy analysis is only one, generally minor, driver of societal transformations. But good analysis is a necessary condition for societal change that improves the human condition.
this trajectory of success has become unstable. On a material level, humanity has approached and trans- gressed what some scientists call planetary boundaries. Nine such boundaries represent critical Earth functions potentially stressed by human activity. Only three remain within safe levels: stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, and ocean acidification.
Insightful, I love the elucidation of the correlation between uncertainty and agency here.
Whether the world envisioned by prediction-based policy analysis ever existed, it is certainly not the world in which people now live.
Experts face increasing distrust and what some have called truth decay. Public perceptions of what is true correlate increasingly strongly with people’s identity and reject any expert evidence contrary to truth, as their identity groups define it.
Wow, does the following excerpt ever resonate, I hold similiar such views on science, it’s nice to see where some of my views originate from:
Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that traditional, deterministic views of science are insufficient to explain the behavior of natural systems, even much less so for systems involving humans.