‘Keep It Complex’: perspectives on risk, uncertainty and ambiguity

When uncertainty and ignorance is abound on risk, should we ‘keep it simple’? Or keep it complex by debating multiple perspectives and embracing uncertainty and ambiguity?

Extracts:

· “When knowledge is uncertain, experts should avoid pressures to simplify their advice. Render decision-makers accountable for decisions”

· “Expert advice is often thought most useful to policy when it is presented as a single ‘definitive’ interpretation”

· “Even when experts acknowledge uncertainty, they tend to do so in ways that reduce unknowns to measurable ‘risk’”

· “An overly narrow focus on risk is an inadequate response to incomplete knowledge. It leaves science advice vulnerable to the social dynamics of groups — and to manipulation by political pressures seeking legitimacy”

· “For Knight, “a measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper … is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all”

· “There are still times when ‘risk-based’ techniques are appropriate and can yield important information for policy … [like] for consumer products in normal use, general road or airline-safety statistics”

· The author believes an improved approach is “in supporting more plural and conditional methods for science advice (the non-risk quadrants shown in ‘Uncertainty matrix’)” (image 2)

· “These are plural because they even-handedly illuminate a variety of alternative reasonable interpretations”

· “And conditional because they explore explicitly for each alternative, the associated questions, assumptions, values or intentions”

· “Under Knightian uncertainty, for instance, pessimistic and optimistic interpretations can be treated separately, each explicitly associated with assumptions” etc.

· Instead of endless debates with unmeasurable uncertainty and “negotiating a single interpretation”, it can be more useful to “accept these divergent expert interpretations and focus instead on documenting the reasons”

· Hence, the author proposes moving beyond simple ‘risk’ conceptions to deeper challenges of ambiguity and ignorance, and the “neglected areas of uncertainty (in Knight’s strict sense)”

· When “the intrinsically plural, conditional nature of knowledge is recognized” science advice “can become more rigorous, robust and democratically accountable”

· And this approach can help “”avoid erroneous ‘one-track’, ‘race to the future’ visions of progress”

Ref: Stirling, A. (2010). Keep it complex. Nature, 468(7327), 1029-1031