Are aliens implausible, or just not useful? Plausible futures and questioning assumptions
Intro to Futures, Week 3
As I see it, the field of futures studies has two interrelated credibility problems: first, by dealing with something that doesn’t yet exist, the work can look as disconnected from reality and rigor as the softest sciences or the kind of clickbait sociology that generates headlines and TED talks but not much insight1; second, because most historical methods of describing the future2 are ludicrous to Enlightment thinking, it’s easy to invoke the image of the “crystal ball” or whatever is conceptually adjacent to dismiss the whole enterprise. The material covered this week spoke to addressing these credibility gaps: first, by making clear that a key part of futures studies is understanding/exposing how people think about the future, and how that thinking can be systematically flawed; second, by litigating exactly how far into the implausible we should search and challenge others to search when imagining future scenarios.
The first article was Futures Fallacies: What They Are and What We Can Do About Them, by Irina Milojevic. This serves as an inventory about the common mistakes people make when imagining future scenarios, along with the adaptive benefit each of these fallacies may provide, the impact/cost, and approaches to reduce our vulnerability to each. As an example, the Planning Fallacy: when people plan for a project, from home remodeling to corporate initiatives to major civic infrastructure, the outcome is almost always significantly later and more expensive than when it was imagined. Even in situations without the principal-agent problem that often compounds this, for example in corporate software development teams that estimate their velocity, it manifests as an apparent result of some irreducible human optimism or myopia. Some of the suggestions for remedies strike me as grasping at straws; for example, reducing the tendency for people to believe that the future is being orchestrated by a sinister cabal by providing rational arguments and/or making people feel more hopeful, powerful, and secure in society - the first strategy seems wildly implausible, and the second seems massively impractical.
In this context, we took an assessment related to our own orientation to the past, present, and future: MindTime. I have no idea how valid this assessment is as a way to characterize the way people think in a way that would be consistent over time or in different contexts, but it’s certainly useful for seeding a discussion about how we relate to time and what biases/blindspots we might be especially susceptible to. If you take the assessment and want to compare to my scores, I got a 42% in past orientation, 50% in present orientation, and 62% in future orientation. This mild future orientation presents itself as a tendency toward anxiety rather than rumination, as a susceptibility to overestimate the importance of novel ideas or technology in the future, and an intense dislike of feeling constrained.
The second article was Crazy Futures: Why Plausibility Is Maladaptive, by Wendy Schultz. The basic idea here is that descriptions of the work of futurists increasingly state that it’s about generating or exploring plausible3 futures. At least part of the motivation for this bias appears to be protecting the reputation and respectability of the profession, as I mentioned at the beginning. In making the case for “crazy futures” outside the bounds of plausibility, Schultz argues that this trend is bad for everyone: by coloring within the lines of plausibility, we lose the opportunity to critically examine why the lines are there in the first place. Crazy futures4 push us to understand the assumptions and blind spots that feed into the consensus view of what’s probable. The trick is to transgress the bounds of plausibility far enough to find what Schultz calls “the knife edge of usability” - far enough to stretch the mind without breaking it. One useful trick is to create a crazy future with low enough resolution or with enough logical gaps/holes that participants can be invited to fill in the gaps - this is basically a generalization of the business exercise where people are asked “what would have to happen for our business model to be obsolete?” and then pressed until they find strategies that make them more resilient.
Both of these articles contain criticism of the work of futurists generally, in an attempt to strengthen the foundations of the profession. They point toward a common vision of how trained futurists can help the organizations and people they do work for: helping people understand how their visions of the future are dependent on a certain set of assumptions, what the limitations of those assumptions are and what blindspots they create, and what future scenarios might present themselves as those assumptions are relaxed or alternatives are adopted. In this way, futurists are less like someone encouraging you to brush your teeth every day, and more like an art teacher demonstrating how to draw the human form by understanding the skeleton and muscles underneath - we look at people and think about the future everyday, but the underlying structure eludes us without deep study.
Power pose, priming, and all the other things that Andrew Gelman would roll his eyes at.
Think visions, astrology, augury, or anything else covered in Divination at Hogwarts.
Shultz points out that one of the original meanings of “plausible” is “worthy of applause”. Again we see the focus on not seeming ridiculous, even in the language used by the field.
Schultz even defines a quantitative measure of craziness: the percentage of the population that finds the described future offensive to reason or decency.