Teach WOT - Scientific thinking

Intro

Think in observations, hypothesis, analysis and synthesis
- A way to get new knowledge about the world
Think in term of science
Yet again, let's start with the stars

History

Science always tied to religion and cosmology
- Ancient Greece
  - Aristotle that suggested model Earth is at the center
    - Objects fall down, so must be the center
    - Earth feels stationary
- Medieval
  - Understanding nature as a way to glorify god
- Decisions to be made
  - Let me talk to God and I'll come back
Scientific revolution
- Where experiments replaced religious authorities
  - "proving" you're right - a defiance of the church
  - Copernicus - The sun, not the earth at the center
  - Galileo that confirmed the Copernicus model that was tried for heresy
  - Found guilty. Had to deny his claims publicly, house arrest for rest of his life
  - His book was banned
  - Only in 1992 (359 years later) that Pope John Paul II formally acknowledge the church's error in condemning Galileo
- Dissociation between knowledge and beliefs
Enlightenment was the application of the science advances into social, political and moral philosophy
- If the church was wrong about this, than, what else is it wrong about?
- But the critical did not stop there
  - Start to question other stuff
  - Monarchy
  - Social order
- Skepticism of authority of church, monarchy, and class systems
- Using observation and logic over tradition and faith
These ideas changed the world
- Rise of liberal ideas - individual rights, separation of powers (church and the state), democracy
- Lead massive revolutions of independence - the american and the french
- Constitution based on these ideas
- Now everything could be questioned
- Education became more widespread because it was a pillar in questioning
  - People become literate
  - More books in circulation
- Mercantilism challenged
  - What is it?
  - State has a strong control over the economy
    - Maximize it's wealth
  - Tariffs, subsidies, monopolies, colonial expansion
  - Replaced by free trade and capitalism
    - Paved the way to the industrial revolution
- These ideas were so strong they were taken up by other people, crossed the world
They evolved into scientific management
- But first, let's look at what science is

What is science

Is a process
- Question assumptions hypothesis
- Test claims, observation, measurements, analysis
- Separate fact from opinion -> synthesis
  - Like Galileo and Copernicus
    - Idea + hypothesis
    - Telescope + a way to measure + mathematic of geometry
    - Without telescopes and a way to measure the positions, Galileo would not be able to prove that the Earth was at the center
- Science build on each other. Without these other science, hypothesis cannot be tested
Attribute a cause to a measurement - Analysis
- Easiest way to do this? Is to reduce the system. Remove variations. Have a closed system. Controlled experiment
- Find causation, not correlation
- Example: Chemistry example. You change one reactant while the others are kept constant. Like a grandma improving her cookie recipe
What if you can't observe directly?
- Indirect observations
- Example: astronomers detecting exoplanets by observing dimming of the stars
Based on evidence, not authority
- Reproducible and verifiable
Things we forget about science
- Science happens over a long period of time
  - Experiments are reproduced with different results
  - Science acknowledge uncertainty
    - Models are refined over time. Like the theory of gravity of Newton into general relativity of Einstein and now Quantic physics
    - Some "science" was totally off
      - Like blood letting as a cure to treat illnesses
  - Those which stick are science
    - Science long enough, become common knowledge
  - Doesn't mean they're more true - still hypothesis backed by evidence

Limitations of science

There are some places it cannot reach
- Spirituality as an example.
- The energy you feel when you enter a room
- What happens after death
- Why?
  - How do you observe God, or measure someone's spirit
  - Because there are things that cannot be measured or observed
    - Forests
Standard science not good for complex systems
- Social science is not the same as pure science
  - Pure science, physics, chemistry, easy to isolate a variable
  - Social science impossible to detach the person or group you're observing from their beliefs, societies, personal experiences.
    - These systems cannot be reduced
      - When you hear: People who play tennis, before any other sport live longer. Shows correlation, not causation.
      - People who play tennis tend to live longer
      - If you start playing tennis, you will not live longer
      - No control for socio-economic status (wealth), dietary habits
      - In Danish culture. Be the same in another culture?
    - What does it mean? We already know that sport is good. Find a sport that is consistent. No need of a multi-million dollar study to tell you that.
    - Complex systems should not be optimized
  - Cannot dissociate researcher from research
    - Bias
    - Statistics can be manipulated
      - Same dataset, different results
- Delays between an action and reaction
  - Hard to attribute one thing to the other
  - Things become apparent in retrospection
  - Example: Anything climate change
    - CO2 and temperature change
    - Forests, coral reefs
Does that mean that science cannot understand complex system?
- No!
- Needs more organized and takes much longer
  - Need continuous observation
- Need to be local because all context specific
  - Rarely can be generalized. This is not physics
- Cannot use statistics the same ways
  - Complex systems do not follow bell curve
  - Follow a power law - where extreme events are expected
    - Outliers are generally removed from normal science
- Pattern recognition over measurements
  - Difference if you study the effect of singular stimuli, or compound effect
    - Like just eating better, or exercising on health separately or together
That's what scientific management does
- Continuously observe the system, and what do we measure? The GDP

Science is for knowledge, not for management

GDP is an indirect measure
- Total monetary value of all goods and services produce within a country's border
  - Using that measure, the Mordor would have a higher GDP than the elves
  - Which world would you rather live in?
- What is it trying to measure?
  - It tells us something — but not everything.
    - It captures activity, not quality; growth, not well-being.
  - Over time - measure growth
- What should we measure instead?
  - That's a whole other question
    - Many people tried to answer that question, and I'm not sure.
    - Measure, to me, need to reflect sustainability, in fact the topic of next episode
If GDP is our measure of success, we're doomed
- There are limits to growth
  - More is not always better. More is not sustainable
- The map becomes the territory
  - GDP meant to describe, not to define
- But not the only place where we're measuring things and forget the goal
When governments wants to manage seek legibility
- Make society readable from above
- Simplified categories
  - Seek uniformity -> remove diversity
- Standardized data
- Uniform systems
- Example: forest become timber resources. Number of trees in an excel sheet
  - People become taxpayers in a database
- Book seeing like a state by James C. Scott
  - Don't measure the right thing
    - Example: Planting billion trees, but all same species, too close together, create unhealthy forests and go up in smoke. Not planting forests, we're making a plantation
  - Data can be manipulated
    - Example: deforestation
      - Change the definition of forest, more forest, less % of deforestation
      - Water quality only in cities, but forgetting rural
      - Removing outliers, or mask them by averaging over large areas
      - Sample only where conditions are better
    - Means power dynamics play a role
    - Who pays for the study? How baby formula is better than breast milk?
Data is king
- Justify anything with data -> Science says this
- Scary because data says whatever you want it to say
- Filtered through the media
- Filtered at the source -> publication no correlation or disproving
- Scientific system is broken. Supposed to gain knowledge, now hear opposite things from the same source, so we're confused
- Science should be more orchestrated
Simplifies management but at the cost of complexity
- Like the library example. Every new special case need to be integrated in this top-down system
  - Creates bureaucracy, red tape.
    - Everything that is inefficient because we need to account for all cases within those uniform systems
- Examples:
  - Housing permits that take years because each exception needs a different stamp
  - Healthcare systems where forms matter more than patients
  - Schools standardized around test scores instead of learning
Simplify reality of management, but also erase reality of what life is about
- Is a paradox
  - Manageable in the short-term but fragile in the long term
  - Works in small systems, but fails when applied at large
- Until systems collapse on the weight of own rigidity
  - Rigid system lose ability to learn and adapt
  - Systems need flexibility, no one size-fit all
YET, that is how the world works
- Every pieces of this society is manage with this lens
  - Standardization
    - Rules that apply to everything or everyone
  - Measuring proxies that remove the humans from the equation
    - How companies see that too.
    - Like Ford that decided not to retrofit their cars even if they knew that rear collision could rupture the fuel tank and cause deadly fires.
      - Doing a cost-benefit analysis, fixing all cars was costing 137$ million, but the legal payout from burn deaths and injuries was estimated to 49.5$ million
    - Business managed by profits. All that matters. Customers are just a bunch of dollar bills.
    - Proxy of the vision of the company, to offer good and safe cars to the people, was profit and it missed the mark
    - Same for Volkswagen cheating emission tests for their diesel cars
- We've become numbers in the matrix
  - A part in the machine, a brick in the wall

Where to go next

Depressing, but I'm an optimist.
Don't blame the people, blame the system.
- What system do we need? Where do we go next?
Decentralization
- Uniformity is a trap - one we're taught
  - One that the plantations of trees going up in smoke are teaching us
- Get away from rigid and widespread rules from centralization
  - Less big policies that affect everything
- Network structure that avoids the trap of legibility -> good at handling special cases
  - Local decisions by local people
For that, need a new management method
- Counterintuitively, less accountability
  - We make mistakes
  - Instead we blame the data or don't do anything
- Based on implicit knowledge / intuition
  - Things we understand but can't fully put into words
  - Know how to do, without saying how you do
  - You just know - it's the know how
  - Examples:
    - Riding a bike
    - A baker who knows when the dough feels right
    - Forest specialist that recognize when a stand a trees needs thinning or which species should be replanted - not from formulas or categories
      - From subtle cues of soil smell, topography, diversity
  - Implicit knowledge, something hard to put into words, are good at managing complex systems.
    - Then rigid rules will never work, because we can't put a singular reason in one decisions, but a mix of reasons that are interconnected and hard to see from inexperienced people
How to create it?
- Intuition built with experience
  - People who rely on forest for survival to decide what to do with those forests
- But also with humility
  - Humility is a sharing of power
  - Humility toward nature = stop and listen to it
    - Learn to hunt a moose by the moose itself
    - Learn to log a forest by the forest
  - Humility toward citizen = stop and listen to them
  - Humility toward life = stop trying to control it or capture it in measurements
- Balanced with respect
  - Respect of oneself
This is different than science
- The goal is not to 'understand' the system
  - To model it, even put equations
- The goal is to get a 'feel' for the system
- Even if the feel is local, that's where we need to start with complex systems
Then bring in science for understanding, not deciding
- With understanding that you build better "feel" for things
  - Guide what we should seek knowledge from - hypothesis should come from those feelings
- Because a well-developed feelings can beat the best model any day.
  - A master tracker will predict the position of the moose better than anything.
  - A wildfire expert will predict the behaviour of a wildfire better than any model
  - Take it to another level by bringing multiple masters and experts to talk together and make a prediction
  - Respect for expertise again, not a diploma that tells you want to do in which situation
Maybe our ancestors had something right about taking the time to talk to the spiritual before making a decision. They were using their feelings.

About your life

Don't make decisions because a device tells you
- Make a decision because you feel it's right
- The body is never happy with doom scrolling

Exercise

What if the past was a test? A hypothesis? What conclusion could we draw? Use your feeling. Your pattern recognition. Don't need an explanation.
Example: Science -> should not be used for management or decision

Science and implicit knowledge in this course

Observing how I think
- Implicit knowledge of how I do
- How I got these episodes out
Gut feeling is what brought me here
- Felt like I needed to do it
- Hypothesis that the world is about to change

Analogy

River and the fisherman
- Science is studying the river
  - Measuring its flows, mapping its course, modelling how water moves
- Implicit knowledge is the fisherman who knows, without instruments where salmon will swim today - by the smell of the air, the color of the current, and the wind direction.
We need to change the way we manage our world
- We need both scientists and fisherman
- The scientist might not notice one thing that the fisherman has, and the opposite is true as well
- because not everything can be measured
- Because we need some expert's gut feeling to better decisions than any measured system could
- Gut feeling is you knowing you're right without being able to understand why

Thanks for listening. Tell two people about this podcast.

You are part of Earth's deep breath,
Where life is spun in birth and death.
We're not apart but born within
A creature shaped by time and kin

Good decisions don't always have a logical explanation

6 - Why we need more than knowledge to manage