Argument patterns | Abbe Boulah's Weblog

Archive for the 'Argument patterns' Category

EVALUATION IN THE PLANNING DISCOURSE — THE DIMINISHING PLAUSIBILITY PARADOX

Thorbjørn Mann, February 2020

THE DIMINISHING PLAUSIBILITY PARADOX

Does thorough deliberation increase or decrease confidence in the decision?

There is a curious effect of careful evaluation and deliberation that may appear paradoxical to people involved in planning decision-making, who expect such efforts to lead to greater certainty and confidence in the validity of their decisions. There are even consulting approaches that derive measures of such confidence from the ‘breadth’ and ‘depth’ achieved in the discourse.

The effect is the observation that with well-intentioned, honest effort to give due consideration and even systematic evaluation to all concerns — as expressed e.g. by the pros and cons of proposed plans perceived by affected and experienced people, –, the degree of certainty or plausibility for a proposed plan actually seems to decrease, or move towards a central ‘don’t know’ point on a +1 to -1 plausibility scale. Specifically: The more carefully breadth (meaning coverage the entire range of all aspects or concerns) and depth (understood as the thorough examination of the support — evidence and supporting arguments — of the premises of each ‘pro’ and ‘con’ argument) are evaluated, the more the degree of confidence felt by evaluators moves from initial high support (or opposition) towards the central point ‘zero’ on the scale, meaning ‘don’t know; can’t decide’.

This is of course, the opposite of what the advice to ‘carefully evaluate the pros and cons’ seem to promise, and what approaches striving for breadth and depth actually appear to achieve. This creates a suspicion that either the method for measuring the plausibility of all the pros and cons must be faulty, or that the approaches relying on the degree of breadth and depth directly as equivalent to greater support are making mistakes. So it seems necessary to take a closer a look at this apparently counterintuitive phenomenon.

The effect has first been observed in the course of the review for a journal publication of an article on the structure and evaluation of planning arguments [1] — several reviewers pointed out what they thought must be a flawed method of calculation.

Explanation of the effect

The crucial steps of the method (also explained in the section on planning argument assessment) are the following:

– All pro and con arguments are converted from their often incomplete, missing- premises state to the complete pattern explicitly stating all premises, (e.g. “Yes, adopt plan A because 1) A will lead to effect B given conditions C, and 2) B ought to be aimed for, and 3) conditions C will be present”).

– Each participant will assign plausibility judgments to each premise, on the +1 /-1 scale where the +1 stands for complete certainty or plausibility, the -1 for complete certainty that the claim is not true, or totally implausible (in the judgment of the individual participant), and the center point of zero expressing inability to judge”don’t know; can’t decide’. Since in the planning argument, all premises are estimates or expectations of future states — effects of the plan, applicability of the causal rule that connects future effects or ‘consequences’ with actions of the plan, and the desirability or undesirability of those consequences, complete certainty assessments (pl = +1, or -1) for the premises must be considered unreasonable; so all the plausibility values will be somewhere between those extremes.

– Deriving a plausibility value for the entire argument from these plausibility judgments can be done in different ways: The extreme being to assign the lowest premise plausibility judgment prempl to the entire argument, expressing an attitude like ‘the strength of a chain is equal to the strength of its weakest link’. Or the plausibility values can be multiplied: The Argument plausibility: for argument i

Argpl(i) = ∏ (prempl(i,j)) for all premises j of argument i

Either way, the resulting argument plausibility cannot be higher than the premise plausibilities.

– SInce arguments do not carry the same ‘weight’ in determining the overall plausibility judgment, it is necessary to assign some weight factor to each argument plausibility judgment. That weight will depend on the relative importance of the ‘deontic’ (ought) premises; and approximately expressed by assigning each of the deontic claims in all the arguments a weight between zero and +1, such that all the weights add up to +1. So the weight of argument i will be the plausibility of argument i times the weight of its deontic premises: Argw(i) = Argpl(i) x w(i)

– A plausibility value for the entire plan, will have to be calculated from all the argument weights. Again, there are different ways to do that (discussed in the section of aggregation) but an aggregation function such as adding all the argument weights (as derived by the preceding steps) will yield a plan plausibility value on the same scale as the initial premise and argument plausibility judgments. It will also be the result of considering all the arguments, both pro and con; and since the argument weights of arguments considered ‘con’ arguments in the view of individual participants will be subtracted from the summed-up weight of ‘pro’ arguments, it will be nowhere near the complete certainty value of +1 or -1, unless of course the process revealed that there were no arguments carrying any weight at all on the pro or con side. Which is unlikely since e.g. all plans have been conceived from some expectation of generating some benefit, and will carry some cost or effort, etc.

This approach as described thus far can be considered a ‘breadth-only’ assessment, justly so if there is no effort to examine the degree of support of premises. But of course the same reasoning can be applied to any of the premises — to any degree of ‘depth’ as demanded by participants from each other. The effect of overall plan plausibility tending toward the center point of zero (‘don’t know’ or ‘undecided’), compared with initial offhand convincing ‘yes: apply the plan!) or ‘no- reject!’ reactions will be the same — unless there are completely ‘principle’-based or ‘logical or physical ‘impossibility’ considerations, in plans that arguably should not even have reached the stage of collective decision-making.

Explanation of the opposite effect in ‘breadth/depth’ based approaches

So what distinguishes this method from approaches that claim to use degrees of ‘breadth and depth’ deliberation as measures justifying the resulting plan decisions? And in the process, increases the team’s confidence in the ‘rightness’ of their decision?

One obvious difference — that must be considered a definite flaw,– is that the degree of deliberation, measured by the mere number of comments, arguments, of ‘breadth’ or ‘depth’, does not include assessment of the plausibility (positive or negative) of the claims involved, nor of their weights of relative importance. Just having talked about the number of considerations, without that distinction, cannot already be a valid basis for decisions, even if Popper’s advice about the degree of confidence in scientific hypotheses we are entitled to hold is not considered applicable to design and planning. (“We are entitled to tentatively accept a hypothesis to the extent we have given our best effort to test, to refute it, and it has withstood all those tests”…)

Sure, we don’t have ‘tests’ that definitively refute a hypothesis (or ‘null hypothesis’) that we have to apply as best we can, and planning decisions don’t rest or fall on the strength of single arguments or hypotheses. All we have are arguments explaining our expectations, speculations about the future resulting from our planning actions — but we can adapt Popper’s advice to planning: “We can accept a plan as tentatively justified to the extent we have tried our best to expose it to counterarguments (con’s) and have seen that those arguments are either flawed (not sufficiently plausible) or outweighed by the arguments in its favor.”

And if we do this, honestly admitting that we really can’t be very certain about all the claims that go into the arguments, pro or con, and look at how all those uncertainties come together in totaling up the overall plausibility of the plan, the tendency of that plausibility to go towards the center point of the scale looks more reasonable.

Could these consideration be the key to understand why approaches relying on mere breadth and depth measurements may result in increased confidence of the participants in such projects? There are two kinds of extreme situations in which it is likely that even extensive breadth and depth discussions can ignore or marginalize one side or the other of necessary ‘pro’ or ‘con’ arguments.

One is the typical ‘problem-solving’ team assembled for the purpose of developing a ‘solution’ or recommendation. The enthusiasm of the collective creative effort itself (but possibly also the often invoked ‘positive’ thinking, defer judgment so as to not disrupt the creative momentum, as well a the expectation of a ‘consensus’ decision?) may focus the thinking of team members on ‘pro’ arguments, justifying the emerging plan — but neglecting or diverting attention from counterarguments. Finding sufficient good reasons for the plan being enough to make a decision?

An opposite type of situation is the ‘protest’ demonstration, or events arranged for the express purpose of opposing a plan. Disgruntled citizens outraged by how a big project will change their neighborhood: counting up all the damaging effects: Must we not assume that there will be a strong focus on highlighting the plan’s negative effects or potential consequences: assembling a strong enough ‘case’ to reject it? In both cases, there may be considerable and even reasonable deliberation in breadth and depth involved — but also possible bias due to neglect of the other side’s arguments.

Implications of the possibility of decreasing plan plausibility?

So pending some more research into this phenomenon, — if found to be common enough to worry about, — it may be useful to look at what it means: what adjustments to common practice it would suggest, what ‘side-stepping’ stratagems may have evolved due to the mere sentiment that more deliberation might shake any undue, undeserved expectations in a plan. Otherwise, cynical observers might recommend throwing up our arms and leaving the decision to the wisdom of ‘leaders’ of one kind or another, in the extreme to oracle-like devices — artificial intelligence from algorithms whose rationales remain as unintelligible to the lay person as the medieval ‘divine judgment’ validated by mysterious rituals (but otherwise amounting to tossing coins?).

Besides the above-mentioned research into the question, examining common approaches on the consulting market for potential vulnerability to provisions to overplay the tendency would be one first step. For example, adding plausibility assessment to the approaches using depth and breadth criteria would be necessary to make them more meaningful.

The introduction of more citizen participation into the public planning process is an increasingly common move that has been urged — among other undeniable advantages such as getting better information about how problems and the plans proposed to solve them actually affect people — to also make plans more acceptable to the public because the plans then are felt to be more ‘their own’. As such, could this make the process vulnerable to the above first fallacy of overlooking negative features? If so, the same remedy of actually including more systematic evaluation into the process might be considered.

A common temptation by promoters of ‘big’ plans can’t be overlooked: to resort to ‘big’ arguments that are so difficult to evaluate that made-up ‘supporting’ evidence can’t be distinguished from predictions based on better data and analysis (following Machiavelli’s quip about ‘the bigger the lie, the more likely people will buy it’…). Many people already are suggesting that we should return to smaller (local) governance entities that can’t offer big lies.

Again: this issue calls for more research.

[1] “The Structure and Evaluation of Planning Arguments” Thorbjoern Mann, INFORMAL LOGIC Dec. 2010.

— o —

EVALUATION IN THE PLANNING DISCOURSE: PROCEDURE EXAMPLE 2: EVALUATION OF PLANNING ARGUMENTS

Published January 28, 2020 Argument patterns , Design discourse , Discourse contribution rewards , Evaluation of plans , Public policy discourse , Rittel 1 Comment

An effort to clarify the role of deliberative evaluation in the planning and policy-making process. Thorbjørn Mann, January 2020. (Draft)

PROCEDURE EXAMPLE 2:
EVALUATION OF PLANNING ARGUMENTS (PROS & CONS)

Argument evaluation in the planning discourse

Planning, like design, can be seen as an argumentative process (Rittel): Ideas and proposals are generated, questions are raised about them. The typical planning issues — especially the ‘deontic’ (ought-) questions about what the plan ought to be and how it can be achieved — generate not only answers but arguments — the proverbial ‘pros and cons’ . The information needed to make meaningful decisions — based on ‘due consideration’ of all concerns by all parties affected by the problem the plan is aiming to remedy, as well as by any solution proposals, is often coming mainly via those pros and cons. Taking this view seriously, it becomes necessary to address the question of how those arguments should be evaluated or‘weighed’ . After all, those arguments are supporting contradictory conclusions (claims), so just ‘considering. is not quite enough.

Argumentation as a cooperative rather than adversarial interaction

The very concept of the‘argumentative view of planning is somewhat controversial because many people misunderstand ‘argument’ itself as a nasty adversarial, combative, uncooperative phenomenon, a ‘quarrel’ . (I have suggested the label ‘quarrgument’ for this). But ‘argument’ is originally understood as a set of claims (premises) that together support another claim, the ‘conclusion. For planning, arguments are items of reasoning that explore the ‘pros and cons about plans; and an important underlying assumption is that we ‘argue’ — exchange arguments with others because we believe that the other will accept or consider the position about the plan we are talking about because the other already believes or accepts the premises we offer, — or will do so once we offer the additional support we have for them. It is unfortunate that even recent research on computer-assisted argumentation seems to be stuck in the ‘adversarial’ view of arguments, seeing arguments as ‘attacks’ on opposing positions rather than a cooperative search for a good planning response to problems or visions for a better future.

‘Planning arguments’

There is another critical difference between the arguments discussed in traditional logic textbooks and and the kinds I call ‘planning arguments: The traditional argumentation concern was to establish the truth or falsity of claims about the world, and that the discussion — the assessment of arguments — will ‘settle’ that question in favor of one or the other. This does not apply to planning arguments: The planning decision does not rest on single ‘clinching’ arguments but on the assessment of the entire set of pros and cons. There are always real expected benefits and real expected costs, and as the proverbial saying has it, they must be ‘weighed’ against one another to lead to a decision. There has not been much concern about how that ‘weighing’ can or should be done, and how that process might lead to a reasoned judgment about whether to accept or reject a proposed plan. I have tried to develop a way to do this — a way to explain what our judgments are based on — beginning with an examination of the structure of ‘planning arguments.

The structure of planning arguments and their different types of premises

I suggest that planning arguments can be represented in a following general ‘standard planning argument’ form, the simplest version being the following ‘pro’ argument pattern:

Proposal ‘ought’ claim (‘conclusion’): Proposal PLAN A ought to be adopted
because
1. Factual-instrumental premise: Implementing PLAN A will lead to outcome B
given conditions C
and
2. Deontic premise: Outcome B ought to be pursued;
and
3. Factual premise: Conditions C are (or will be) given.

This form is not conclusively ‘valid’ in the formal logic sense, according to which it is considered ‘inconclusive’ and ‘defeasible’. There are usually many such pros and cons supporting or questioning a proposal: no single argument (other that evidence pointing out flaws of logical inconsistency or lacking feasibility, leading to rejection) will be sufficient to make a decision. Any evaluation of planning arguments therefore must be embedded in a ‘multi-criteria’ analysis and aggregation of judgments into the overall decision.

It will become evident that all the judgments people make will be personal ‘subjective’ judgments, not only about the deontic (ought) premise but even about the validity and salience of the ‘factual’ premises: they are all about estimated about the future — not yet validated by observation and measurement.

The judgment types of planning argument premises:
‘plausibility’ and weight of importance

There are two kinds of judgments that will be needed. The first is an assessment of the ‘plausibility’ of each claim. The term ‘plausibility’ here includes the familiar‘truth’ (or degree of certainty or probability about the truth of a claim, and the advisability, acceptability, desirability of the deontic claim. It can be expressed as a judgment on a scale e.g. of -1 to +1, with ‘-1’ meaning complete implausibility to +1 expressing ‘total plausibility’, virtual certainty, and the center point of zero meaning ‘don’t know, can’t judge’ . The second one is a judgment about the ‘weight’ of relative importance‘ of the ‘ought’ aspect. It can be expressed e.g. by a score between zero meaning (totally unimportant) and +1 meaning ‘totally important’, overriding all other aspects; the sum of all the weights of deontic premises must be equal to +1.

Argument plausibility

The first step would be the assessment of plausibility of the entire single argument, which would be a function of all three premise plausibility scores to result in an ‘Argument plausibility’ score.

For example, an argument i with pl(1) =0.5, pl(2) = 0.8, and pl(3) = 0.9 might get an argument plausibility : Argpl (i) of 0.5 x 0.8 x 0.9 = 0.36.

Argument weight of relative importance

The second step would be to assess the ‘argument weight’ of each argument, which can be done by multiplying the weight of relative importance of its deontic premise (premise 2 in the pattern above) with the argument plausibility: Argw(i) = Argpl(i) x w(i).
That weight will again be a value between zero (meaning ‘totally unimportant’) and +1 (meaning ‘all-important’ i.e. overriding all other considerations). This should be the result of the establishment of a ‘tree’ of deontic concerns (similar to the ‘aspects’ of the ‘Formal evaluation’ procedure in procedure example 1) that gives each deontic claim its proper place as a main aspect, sub-aspect, sub-sub-aspect or ‘criterion’ in the aspect tree, and assigning weights between 0 and 1 such that these add up to 1, at each level.

A deontic claim located at the second level of the aspect tree, having been assigned a weight of .8 at that level, being a sub-aspect to an aspect at the first level with a weight of +.4 at that level, would have a premise weight of w = 0.8 x 0.4 = 0.32. The argument weight with a plausibility of 0.36 would be Argw(i) = 0.36 x 0.32 = 0.1152 (rounded up as 0.12).

Plan plausibility

All the argument weights could the be aggregated to the overall ‘plan plausibility’ score, for example by adding up all argument weights:
Planpl = ∑ Argw(i) for all argument weights i (of an individual participant)

Of course, there are other possible aggregation forms. (See the sections on ‘Aggregation’ and ‘Decision Criteria). Which one of those should be used in any specific case must be specified — agreed upon — in the ‘procedural agreements’ governing each planning project.

It should be noted that in a worksheet simply listing all arguments with their premises for plausibility and weigh assignments, there is no need for identifying arguments as ‘pro’ and ‘con’, as intended by their respective authors. Any argument given a negative premise plausibility by a participant will automatically end up getting a negative argument weight and thus becoming a ‘con’ argument for that participant — even if the argument was intended by its author as a ‘pro’ argument. This makes it obvious that all such assessments are individual, subjective judgments, even if the factual and factual-instrumental premises of arguments are considered ‘objective-fact’ matters.

The process of evaluation of planning arguments within the overall discourse

The diagram below shows the argument assessment process as it will be embedded in an overall discourse. Its central feature is the ‘Next Step?’ decision, invoked after each major activity. It lets the participants in the effort decide — according to rules specified in those procedural agreements — how deeply into the deliberation process they wish to proceed: they could decide to go ahead with a decision after the first set of overall offhand judgments, skipping the detailed premise analysis and evaluation if they feel sufficiently certain about the plan.

Process of argument assessment within the overall discourse

The use of overall plan plausibility scores:
Group statistics of the set of individual plan plausibility scores.

It may be tempting to use the overall plan plausibility scores directly as decision guides or determinants. For example, to determine a statistic such as the average of all individual scores Planpl(j) for the participants j in the assessment group, as an overall ‘group plausibility score‘ GPlanpl, e.g. GPlanpl = 1/n ∑ Planpl(j) for all n members of the panel.

And in evaluating a set of competing plan alternatives: to select the proposal with the highest ‘group plausibility’ score.
Such temptations should be resisted, for a number of reasons, such as: whether a discussion has succeeded in bringing in all pertinent items that should be given ‘due consideration’; the concern that planning arguments tend to be of ‘qualitative’ nature and often don’t easily address quantitative measures of performance; questions regarding principles, the time frame of expected plan effects and consequences; whether and how issues of ‘quality’ of a plan are adequately addressed in the form of arguments; and the question of the appropriate ‘social aggregation’ criterion to be applied to the problem and plan in question: many open questions:

Open questions

Likely incompleteness of the discussion
It is argued that participation of all affected parties and a live discussion will be more likely to bring our the concerns people are actually worried about, than e.g. reliance on general textbook knowledge by panels or surveys made up by experts who ‘don’t live there’. But even the assumption that the discussion guarantees complete coverage is unwarranted. For example, is somebody likely to consider raising an issue about a plan feature that they know will affect another party negatively (when they expect the plan to be good for the own faction) — if the other party isn’t aware enough about this effect, and does not raise it? Likewise; some things may be expected to be so much matters ‘of course’ that nobody considers it necessary to mention it. So unless the overall process includes several different means of getting such information — systems modeling, simulation, extensive scrutiny of other cases etc. — the argumentative discussion alone can’t be assumed to be sufficient to bring up all needed information.

Quantitative aspects in arguments.
The typical planning argument will usually be framed in more ‘qualitative’ terms than quantitative measures. For example: in an argument that “The plan will be more sustainable’ than the current situation” this matters in the plausibility assessment: It can be seen as quite plausible as long as there is some evidence of sustainability improvement, so participants may be inclined to give it a high pl-score close to +1. By comparison, if somebody instead makes the same argument but now claims a specific ‘sustainability’ performance measure — one that others may consider as too optimistic, and therefore assign it a plausibility score closer to zero or even slightly negative: how will that affect the overall assessment? What procedural provisions would be necessary to needed to adequately deal with this question?

The issue of ‘quality’ or ‘goodness’ of a proposed solution.
It is of course possible that a discussion examines the quality or ‘goodness’ of a plan in detail, but as mentioned above, this will likely also be in general, qualitative terms, and often even avoided because to the general acceptance of sayings like’ you can’t argue about beauty’ , so the discussion will have some difficulty in this respect, if it does mention beauty at all, or spiritual value, or the appropriateness of the resulting image. Likewise, requirements for the implementation of the plan, such as meeting regulations, may not be discussed.

The decreasing plausibility ‘paradox’
Arguably, all ‘systematic’ reasoning efforts, including discussion and debate, aim a giving decision-makers a higher degree of certainty about their final judgment, than, say, just fast offhand intuitive decisions. However, it turns out that the more depth as well as breadth of discussion is done, the more final plausibility judgment scores will tend to end up closer to the ‘zero’ or ‘don’t know’ plausibility — if the plausibility assessment is done honestly and seriously, and the aggregation method suggested above is used: Multiplying the plausibility assessments for the various premises (which for the factual premises will be probability estimates). These judgments being all about future expectations, they cannot honestly be given +1 (‘total certainty’) scores or even scores close to it, the less so, the farther out in the future the effects are projected. This result can be quite disturbing and even disappointing to many participants, when final scores are compared with initial ‘offhand’ judgments.
Other issues related to time have often been inadequately dealt with in evaluation of any kind:

Estimates of plan consequences over time
All planning arguments are expressing people’s expectations of the plan’s effect in the future. Of course, we know that there are relatively few cases in which a plan or action will generate results that will materialize immediately upon implementation and then stay that way. So what do we mean when we offer an argument that a plan ‘will bring improve society’s overall health’ — even resorting to ‘precise ‘statistical’ indices like mortality rates, or life expectancy? We know that these figures will change over time, one proposed policy will bring more immediate results than another, but the other will have better effect in the long run; and again, the father into the future we look, the less certain we must be about our prediction estimates. These things are not easily expressed in even carefully crafted arguments supported by the requisite statistics: how should we score their plausibility?

Tentative insights, conclusions?

These ‘not fully resolved / more work needed’ questions may seem to strengthen the case for evaluation approaches other than trying to draw support for planning decisions from discourse contributions, even with more detailed assessment of arguments than shown here (examining the evidence and support for each premise). However, the problems emerging from the examination of the argumentative process do affect other evaluation tools as well. I have not seen approaches that resolve them all more convincingly. So: Some first tentative conclusions are that planning debate and discourse — too familiar and accessible to experts and lay people alike to be dismissed in favor of other methods — would benefit from enhancements such as the argument assessment tools, but also, opportunities and encouragement should be offered to draw upon other tools, as called for by the circumstances of each case and the complexity of the plans.

These techniques, methods, should be made available for use by experts and lay discourse participants, in a ‘toolkit’ part of a general planning discourse support platform — not as mandatory components of a general-purpose one-size-fit-all planning method but as a repository of tools for creative innovation and expansion: Because plans as well as the process that generate plans define those involved as ‘the creators of that plan’ , there will be a need to ‘make a difference, to make it theirs: by changing, adapting, expanding and using the tools in new and different ways, besides inventing new tools in the process.

References:
Rittel, Horst: “APIS: A Concept for an Argumentative Planning Information System” Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California at Berkeley, 1980 . A report about research activities conducted for the Commission of European Communities, Directorate General XIIA.
–o–

The World Is Not As It Ought To Be — And What To Do About It

Published July 9, 2019 'Next System' , Argument patterns , control of power , Design discourse , Discourse contribution rewards , Evaluation of plans , Governance , Public policy discourse , Uncategorized Leave a Comment

A Fog Island Tavern discussion
Thorbjørn Mann 2019

About: The aggravating spectacle of humanity’s inadequate response to challenges;
And countless confusing ideas and proposals and calls for a ‘New System’ — without convincing remedies for some key flaws of current systems such as poor communication, coordination, decision modes leading to agreements based on merit of discourse contributions and the adequate control of power; suggestions for a discourse platform with participation incentives, evaluation of contribution merit, new decision modes and provisions that serve as new tools for the control of power: following the principle of making key system provisions serve multiple purposes.

The aggravating spectacle of humanity’s response to its challenges

– Arrgh! I give up!
– Again, Sophie? What is it this time? Soft drinks? Men? GMO’s? Meditation? Politics?
– Oh stuff it, Vodçek. Make all the fun you want of it. But this is getting serious.
– I’m sure I’d agree. But it would help to know specifically what it is about? I have a feeling you’ve been doing too much surfing on the social networks…
– Guilty as charged. But where can we find out what’s really going on and what people are doing about it? And what really should be done about it?
– By ‘it’, I assume you mean the avalanche of crises and emergencies and disasters that the people on those networks are predicting will do us all in? Not even to mention the impending critical shortage of Sonoma Zinfandel if the folks over there don’t get the wildfires under control?
– Just keep it up, you zinical zinpusher. But it’s also the other guys, the ones that are getting all worked up about those predictions and just deny all of them, except the unpatriotic if not outright treasonous growing phenomenon of the doomsayers of course — who just spout foul language and curses all over the networks.
– Not that they have done any serious studies or investigations of their own, just projecting their own desire for taking over the government or keeping power and telling everybody what to do onto the other side…
– Now don’t you get started down that road too, Stephan. Isn’t it that kind of mutual mudslinging that’s making the problems worse rather than getting solutions?
– Well, you may be right, Sophie, but somebody has to point out the reasoning flaws and rhetorical dirty tricks and contradictions, to clear the way for finding better answers?
– Yes, I’m just as fed up about the contradictions and dirty rhetoric as you are, but when it just deteriorates into mutual accusations and name-calling, it isn’t helping, it’s making things worse.
– I agree, Sophie. But I’m curious: what are those contradictions you are worried about?
– Hi Bog-Hubert, glad you got here. Well: take the folks who are going on and on about participation and empowerment of the citizens. Power to the people, the downtrodden, the poor and disadvantaged. All good and justified — but in the next sentence, those same folks — or people in their networks — are complaining of lack of leadership on those issues. Leadership — the very thing they were railing against! Or the people on the other side — dismissing all the proposals and initiatives to cope with impending emergencies as just power grabs for big government that will take freedom away from the people — and relying on the most authoritarian bullies to run ‘their’ government and putting the progressives in their place… As if history isn’t full of examples of ‘free’ people electing themselves the most dictatorial and oppressive governments?
– Okay, Sophie, I think we share your worries. So what do you think ought to be done about all that?
– That’s what I came here to find out — are there any better ideas, some real solutions around? You guys have been talking and talking about things like this — have you got any answers? Where is Abbé Boulah now that we need him?

What would Abbé Boulah do?

– Ah Sophie — you’re beginning to sound like the folks who keep ranting ‘What would Reagan do’? And inadvertently admitting that they don’t have any ideas of their own about what to do… So now you’re asking ‘What would Abbé Boulah do’? I agree: it’s a better question, but…
– What you’re saying is: we should sit down and figure this out on our own, Bog-Hubert?
– I have a feeling that’s exactly what Abbé Boulah would say… Know anything better to do in this fog?
– All right. Let’s try to get started on it, at least. What’s the first step?
– Well, I’d say: have Vodçek get the air out of these glasses, for starters.
– Here you go, Bog-Hubert.
– Thanks, Vodçek. Okay, Let’s see. I’m not sure there’s a good rule about the sequence of steps we should follow. Discussions about plans, or problems can start anywhere: raising the issues about some problem, proposing some solution, etc. Anything can trigger the effort. So we can start anywhere we want.

Acknowledge: there are crises, problems, challenges.

– Sophie: You were talking about problems we face. Can we assume that there’s some agreement about that, as a starting point?
– Well, some people keep saying we should use different words. ‘Problem’: soo negative. And then there are those folks who say they’re just fear-mongering figments of power-hungry Big Government fans?
– Right, Dexter. So, avoiding that useless quarrgument: can we just acknowledge and describe those things as issues people get worried, annoyed, aggravated about? Getting hurt? Whatever those language purists want to call them instead?
– Sounds right. Whatever they want to call them: problems, challenges, emergencies, crises, ‘situations’ — when somebody feels that something ought to be done about them.
– I like that: Even for the folks who don’t think those worries are real — the fact that there are people who say there are problems aggravates them, for them that makes just one such item, even is they don’t agree on what they are and what they should be called. Aggravations?
– Makes my head spin already, but yes: Even whether something should be done about people who say something should be done that they call problems. So it’s a very inclusive concept. Everybody agrees that something should be done about something. Even visions of a better future that isn’t here yet but should be…
– Good. And Sophie was getting confused — is that the right word? — about all the things people already propose ought to be done:

Many ‘alternative’ efforts already proposed or underway

– Right. I don’t blame her. I was surprised to learn about all those groups that are already doing interesting and important things — alternative initiatives, theories about what to do and how to do it, experiments, projects. All over the globe, even in places you wouldn’t expect much alternative creativity.
– So what’s wrong with that, Bog-Hubert? Isn’t that grounds for hope? What’s confusing you, Sophie?
– Well, you’d think it’s an encouraging sign and trend. But if you look at them in more closely, say to decide which of those projects you should join to do your part, it becomes confusing. They all claim that they are working on THE answers, THE ‘New System’, THE collective future for the planet and humanity that everybody should join, calling for ‘unified’ teams, movements, efforts ….
– Or selling their brand of ‘approach’…
– Bog-Hubert, you cynic… Well, I guess many of them are, trying to make a living from their latest New Thing. But they are all so different, based on beliefs and prime principles that are so ‘unique’ and different, and, well, ‘competitive’ rather than unifying and cooperative. Didn’t I mention that a while ago — the curious fact that many are calling for participation, emancipation, empowerment, self-organizing governance systems, but either call for or claim ‘leadership’ for those efforts?
– I agree, Sophie. But what I am worrying about is less their diversity but their lack of mutual constructive communication. Yes, you mentioned competition. So what you see on their websites and other promotional material is all positive, success stories. What’s missing is critical information, not just successes but also shortcomings and failures.
– Stands to reason though, doesn’t it, Bog-Hubert: why would any such group boast about their failures?
– Ah Vodçek. How can we learn anything from just glorifying ads and videos? How can we ever get to common agreements about the ‘New System’ they are calling for, if we can’t learn what works and what doesn’t work? If we can’t reach a stage where acceptance of new ways of doing things is not achieved by force or coercion or brainwashing, against the conviction of those who are convinced of different ideas? The old ways of ‘revolution’, ‘throwing out the old corrupt systems’, ‘regime change’ by smart or stupid bombing and ballistic missiles or mass demonstrations don’t work anymore: To often they just result in putting new faces into old organizational structures with the same fundamental shortcomings, for all their different party flags and logos and acronyms.
– Good point, about learning from all those experiments. But I’m not sure I understand the thing about replacing corrupt or oppressive governments with new systems that have the same problems. Isn’t it better to establish democracy — or reinstating it where it has gone awry?
– Even at the cost of another bloody revolution or war? Well, sure, it depends on how bad the old regime has gotten. But the problem is really with democracy too, isn’t it? Hold on, Sophie, I’m not gone over to the Dark Side of authoritarian governments of any stripe. Let me explain.
– That better be a good explanation.
– Or else? Okay. There are two main issues with democracy now, in my mind. The first one is that for all its meritorious principle of ‘lets leave our weapons outside, let’s talk and listen to each other, and then decide’: — the great parliamentarian idea to replace conflict resolution by force with persuasion and reason. The way decisions are made now, when the talking stops, is still a crutch, a shortcut. One that you might even say betrays that very principle.
– What in Tate’s Hell are you talking about, Bog-hubert?
– Well, voting, of course, Sophie. Voting. Yes: the great democratic principle and human right. It’s only a crutch, a shortcut to decision. What is it really doing? The usual majority vote — 50 plus a tiny fraction percent — in effect is allowing the ‘winning’ party to say: Okay, you had your say and your vote, but the vote means that you can forget all your concerns and reasons: we the majority have the say now. It means that the real concerns and ideas of as much as nearly half the population can now be ignored. And the upshot of that is that when we are sure to win the majority vote, — perhaps because we have more money to buy campaign ads — we don’t even have to listen to your reasons and your speeches. If that is the best democracy can do, some people will feel very justified looking for other systems.
– You’ll have to tell us what other, better systems are on the market to fix that problem – the alternatives I know of that have been tried don’t make me eager for giving them another chance. But first tell us that second main flaw you mentioned?
– Sure. Now remember: I think the mature, well-designed democratic governance constitutions have the best provisions in human history against the abuse of power — the power of incumbent rulers installed by the voting rule. The election for limited time periods, the balance of powers of the different branches, the tools of impeachment or vote of no confidence, the role of the free press, the independent judicial branch, of freedom of information etc. The problem is that these provisions have increasingly been undermined by the power of money in the industrial and finance sectors of society, and often by these forces in combination with the military. That’s no news, no secret: elections are determined by campaign financing. Even candidates who have promised to restrain that influence — “Take on Wall Street”, “Rein in the big corporations” — are subtly or unsubtly pushed to toe the line when elected.
– I see: so any regime change where the ‘new system’ still leaves those two factors in play, is liable to become as bad as the previous one — is that what you are saying?
– Yes, as two major factors in the game. So whatever the current majority / minority constellation, it has become very difficult for any society governed by those forces to reach agreements even for issues that all parties agree should be fixed. Meaningful decisions that have been proposed by one party must be opposed by the other, even if it’s an idea than benefits everybody. Decisions based on the merit of the information contributed to the discourse? Impossible.
– If there is a meaningful discourse, which also seems to be in short supply these days: It’s all about power.
– Right: dIscussion is meaningless and just wasting time.
– I assume you are referring to the fact that while there is more information twittered and advertised about than ever before, with the new so-called information technology, the discourse seems to consist mainly of the parties talking to themselves, on their preferred channels or social media sites and followers. Talk show hosts blatantly refusing to allow callers critical to their positions to ask questions and engage in discussions on their shows?
– Right. We can go on and on about flaws of the current democracy systems, there are many issues contributing to these problems. But what I was getting to is this: While there is justified criticism of the current systems, what I don’t see in all the material about ‘new system’ and ‘throw out the old system’ groups are convincing ideas for addressing those two problems in our governance systems.

So again: what to do?

– You are making a convincingly depressing case here, Bog-Hubert. So do you have any better ideas for all this up your sleeve? Or do I have to cut you off and throw you out for making my customers miserable?
– More miserable than the daily news, Vodçek — if they even have the stomach for watching it before heading over here for distracting convivial comfort and conversation?
– Speak for yourself, my friend. But back to the issue. So what should be done, in your opinion?
– Well, we have talked about some interesting ideas here before. But maybe it’s useful to pull them together into a coherent, what do they call it in politics — ‘platform’? or ‘agenda’?
– That would be useful. ‘Story’ might be even more desirable, but maybe you could give us the main headings of it first?
– Wait, Vodçek. I know the commissioner was planning to come over, I’d like for him to hear this. Could we use a little break? Maybe you could refresh the life support stuff in our glasses and tend to your Grunt Bucket Stew or Fårikål, — pardon me, your ‘pot-au-feu’ or whatever you’ve got slow-simmering over in the corner?
– Sophie, watch your language, my dear. Okay, break it is. Give Bog-Hubert a chance to gather and diagram his confabulations. Here are some napkins for making notes, Bogmeister.
– Thanks, Vodçek. I’m touched to tears by your kind concern, may have to blow my nose. Where are you going, Sophie?
– Out on the terrace to see if the fog is lifting ’till the commissioner is showing up. Fresh air and all that…

—

A New Agenda?

– Welcome, Commissioner: we’ve been waiting for you. The usual?
– Good evening. Yes, thanks. Looks like you folks are in the middle of something important here?
– We’ll see; the middle or stuck in the muddle? Okay, Bog-Hubert: What have you got there on your napkin?
– Well, you asked for the main headings. It was a good idea — the important part is to see the connections between the different issues.
– Could you pass it around?
– Sure. You should really get a big screen for sharing napkin ideas here, Vodçek. Or at least a pink or greenboard. Blackboards are soo 19th century, and white soo 20th…, don’t you think? Well: The first items are the topics we have actually covered already here, that triggered this diabolical assignment: Your concerns about the sorry state of the world. The crises, conflicts, problems, disasters, emergencies you are afraid will spell the end of human civilization as we know it and ruin the oyster harvest in the bay if nothing is done about them.
– Yes; in short, like Rittel said: there is really only ONE Wicked Problem: the world is not as it ought to be.
– And you were waiting for lil’ ol me for this? That’s way above my local responsibilities: you should have called in some national or global fat cats for that!
– Well, we have to start somewhere, Commissioner. And the problems and what should be done about them are present at all scales, local to global, aren’t they?
– Okay, I guess. Go on, Bog-Hubert.

Issues and possible answers

– Well, what was expressed here was a a feeling that the current system of governance — at all levels — is not going to tackle those issues properly. So many hotheads out there, — so sorry, concerned citizens — are calling for throwing it out together with the swamp creatures who run it, and establish a new system.
– That’s nothing new: it’s the bread and butter of daily news and history book re-writers everywhere.
– Right, Commissioner. Now these folks here don’t seem to have much faith in all those ‘new system’ ideas.
– That’s not really what we were saying, is it? It’s that there are too many of them, and their are so different that it’s quite unlikely that there will be any commonsense agreement about just which kind of system we should adopt, in time to face the emergencies.
– Different way to put it, okay. And it seems that while there are innumerable well-intentioned ideas, efforts, projects, initiatives out there already, we — concerned humanity in general — do not know enough to agree on a global new system. And that was bringing up the question of what to do given that sorry state of affairs. Is that a good way to describe where we are?
– Sounds about right. But you seemed to think that some of the ideas we discussed here over several fogged-in sessions might be spun together into some kind of coherent agenda that folks like the revered Commissioner here should take a look at? And those bubbles on the napkin are your main steps of that agenda?
– I’m afraid so, yes. But ‘steps’ is not the right word. They should not be seen as a sequence of steps in a kind of systematic process but as issues to be addressed more or less simultaneously.

Acknowledge, embrace, support the different initiatives

– The first suggestion is that we should simply acknowledge all the different ideas and initiatives and accept the differences as a positive aspect. Not in spite but precisely because of their differences.
– Why? Isn’t that the problem? Isn’t it essential to work towards some kind of unified process?
– Good point. But if we do that by dismissing, denying the differences, but don’t have an adequate understanding and agreement of what the unified answer should be, we’d make at least two serious mistakes — again.
– Only two?
– Well — two main ones. There may be more. sure. One is that if we don’t know what the unified system really should be like, — do we? — but are jumping to premature conclusions based on some commonalities, we’d shut off what we could learn from the different experiments. So we should embrace, encourage, even actively support those experiments and ideas.
– Even if they are denouncing each other as the devils work? And support that?
– Even so. And yes, support them, on some conditions. A first condition would be an agreement to not get in each others’ way: to at least suspend the sentence to eternal damnation and destruction until we learn enough about what works and what doesn’t work from each. Part of that would be to abstain from labeling the ideas as the devils work and their proponents as his followers. Or idiots. Even if they are sure that it would be some superior being’s pleasure to see them destroyed, to leave sentence and punishment up to that almighty entity in the hereafter. Meanwhile, secondly: to agree to honestly share not only the superior aspects but all experiences of their efforts, successes as well as failures and obstacles. Don’t we urgently need that information?
– Okay, There’ll be much discussion about the details of those agreements. But that’s for later, I guess. What about the other mistake you mentioned, Bog-Hubert?
– Thanks for reminding me. It’s an important one. For all the hue and cry about unification, aren’t we all interested — to some degree or other — to ‘make a difference’ in our lives, to give it meaning? To become ‘better’ at something, that will define us as distinct individuals, — or groups? So shouldn’t perhaps part of our unified effort be to create many opportunities for everybody to make their differences in their lives? Not just becoming happy but indistinguishable cogs in the unified big machine, the big system?
– What you are saying is that there should be a deliberate balance in the collective aim, between the need for common projects such as remedies or responses to crises, and opportunities for individual differences?
– Yes, Sophie. Balance. Not one or the other. And that balance must be carefully negotiated and maintained. I’m not sure that there are general rules that apply to all situations — much as we might wish for a general ‘constitution’ that clearly governs all projects and conflicts.
– So we’d be seeing a lot of negotiation and haggling to achieve that balance, not even to speak of developing the solutions for projects or crisis response masers. How in the world… ?

Developing a Planning / Policy-Making Discourse Platform

– You are right, Sophie. How will that be done? If these assumptions are anywhere close to plausible, what we’ll need, as a priority, is a better platform that facilitates the various tasks:
o better communication between all the different initiatives and projects;
o developing and negotiating the common ‘road rule’ agreements;
o sharing the ideas and experiences;
o developing common solutions;
o evaluating the information and proposals;
o reaching better decisions, based on the merit of discourse contributions;
o and perhaps contributing to a better control of power…
– How would that platform be different from all the information systems, networks, platforms, data bases and ‘expert systems’ we have already?
– Good question. I guess its easiest to look at the specific tasks we want to improve, to see how much of that the current systems can provide, and what new provisions must be developed to tie them together.

Getting the information: participation: incentives?

– Consider a proposed project to prevent or mitigate some problem, undesirable trend or disaster: one that will affect many people in different countries or jurisdictions. The traditional information systems aim at supplying the data, the scientific and technical information that can be brought to bear on the issue. Simulation programs can help predicting future effects of past or current processes, for which we know the underlying ‘laws’ and forces. But for a project dealing with unprecedented features, that information is not in your textbooks or data bases — information must be obtained by observation in the situation and from the people affected by the consequences of the plan.
– Okay. That has become accepted theory if not always done right in practice. Opinion surveys, participation lip service. Many people don’t take advantage of their rights to participate.
– Why is that?
– Many reasons. An important one is that they don’t see how their contributions will be heard; don’t feel the expected outcome will be worth the needed effort — if the bigwigs and experts end up doing what they want to do anyway. Like ‘Voter apathy’, the sense that it won’t make a difference.
– So the missing ingredient is to provide better incentives (making it worth the effort) and better transparency of how everybody’s contributions affect the outcome?

Measures of merit of discourse contributions to guide decisions

– Right. Part of that task is to build a process into the platform that shows how the merit of contributions — ideas, arguments — will determine the decision.
– What’s the problem with that now? If the free press and free speech are guaranteed and working, won’t the discussion, the surveys and the votes bring out the merit of what’s being said?
– In theory, yes. Let everybody have their say, then decide. In practice: why do you think all election campaigns — as well as campaigns for or against some proposed legislation — are clamoring for contributions — but not meritorious information or arguments, but — you guessed it — money. And what’s the money for? Repeating and spreading the message. Emphasis on repeating. More ads and posters. But it’s always just messages cooked down into slogans, pretty pictures, 30-second visuals.
– Coming to think of it: I’ve seen TV ads for senate candidates — or was it the incumbent one himself? — just showing the candidate walking into his office and sitting down — no message or argument at all. As if they’re saying: you know what he’ll do. But he doesn’t even bother to say it. So he can’t be held to what he said?
– And all the yard signs — just the name, the logo.
– Yes: The message that so many of your neighbors support candidate x or policy y: is that an argument whose validity and merit can be measured? At best, the assumption is that the merit has come across in the ads and speeches — full of empty slogans, motherhood issue affirmations and promises that sound good but whose likelihood of being fulfilled is not even to be mentioned; Read my lips… The much touted ‘swarms’ in nature and humanity include lemmings and frenzied masses deluded by big audacious lies. No: what we need ia a better way to get a measure of the merit of discourse contributions. And we’ve made a start on that before, haven’t we, with the plausibility measures of planning arguments? And the suggestions for combining those with assessments of plan quality to form measures of plausibility-modified quality judgments?
– That’s a still a big task, to develop procedures for deriving those measures, that people will actually go through.
– Yes, but there are tools for improving that. And it can be done in such a way that the role of big money swaying voters just by buying more TV ads can be reduced.
– You need to describe that in some more detail, Bog-Hubert.
– Sure, Vodçek, but let’s go through the remaining provisions we want for the platform first.
– All right: what’s next?

Decision modes and procedures

– Okay, where were we? Let’s assume that we’ll be able to develop tools and methods for determining the merit of discourse contributions and derive overall measures of support for plans or policies or candidates from them. We’ve talked about some of those ideas. Now those measures must be either included in actual new decision-making modes or — in situations where traditional decision modes like majority voting must be used — to compare, confront those decision results with the merit measures.
– What do you mean, confront?
– Sophie, let’s assume that there is a decision-making body constitutionally charged with making a decision on a plan, and doing so by majority voting. All the talking heads on TV will predict the outcome based on the ratio of members from the competing parties in that body: party discipline — which does not relate to the merit of arguments in any way. It’s just about power. Now assume there is a parallel process of developing a measure of plan plausibility or quality based on assessment of plan quality and argument (pro and con) plausibility. If that result shows that the plan is questionable or implausible, should that group get away with a decision to approve the plan, without some explanations, or additional efforts to make the plan more acceptable? Or — the other way around: If the contribution merit measures show that plan as being meaningful, plausible, beneficial: should they be allowed to just turn the proposal down?
– Wait a minute. All this talk about measures of merit: how is that measured? And who does the measuring? If it’s just a kind of Benefit-Cost Ratio in disguise, with the benefits expressed in dollars by a bunch of experts who aren’t even affected by the consequences of a plan, forget it.
– Good question, Dexter. No, the plausibility and quality measures will be derived from the judgments made by participants in the public discourse. The participants should include members of the public who have seen/read/heard the contributions even if they haven’t made any themselves — their comments may have just been repeating arguments that have already been made — but the assessments should be given contribution rewards as well.
– There’s usually much reliance on teams of experts for such projects, or small ‘focus groups’ led or ‘moderated’ by experts — won’t that be enough?
– That’s a serious issue all by itself, Dexter. Yes, in this scenario, there will be experts, but their judgments will be assessed by everybody. The plausibility of a plan does not depend on just the support or probabilities of the factual and technical information — for which they will produce evidence judged by what you might call ‘scientific’ methods — but also on the meaning and importance assigned by everybody to the ‘ought’ – premises of arguments: what is felt to be good or bad about the consequences.
– And that will be judged by people’s concerns, fears, desires and principles about what’s good, bad, fair or moral? Subjective judgments all, of course. Though I guess there could be some AI-type check on consistency, on the extent of evidence or support for the claims involved.
– Yes, Vodçek: if you disagree with somebody’s take on a plan, you — or the ‘system’ — can ask for explanations of judgments, the reasoning behind it, the factual, technical, scientific evidence and other principles. But we have to realize and accept that some people will like and be in favor of what they see as ‘beneficial’ features of the plan, that to others appear as ‘costs’ and disadvantages. We have discussed those issues as well here, haven’t we? The efforts to declare something as ‘common good’ that everybody must accept, are often just attempts of one group to get everybody to accept their interests without question. There are new and better answers up for discussion than what is being done now. They just need to be discussed, tried out and fine-tuned. [ ] But yes, to develop better decision modes based on the merit of discourse contributions, we need some better measures of that merit? Do we have the tools for that?

Measures of contribution merit and the role of Artificial Intelligence Tools

– I remember some discussions we had here, about how discourse contributions might be more carefully evaluated to arrive at a kind of measure of plausibility and expected quality of plan proposals. Has there been more progress on that? I think there are people out there selling ‘AI’ — ‘Artificial Intelligence’ — for that?
– Good question. And a serious controversy, if you ask me.
– Controversy? Why is that?
– Well, Commissioner: I know you are one of the people wanting to enlist the power of new tools in artificial intelligence and information technology to support your governmental decision procedures. And you’re worried about people’s suspicions about that — the fear of machines taking over, not knowing how they work, and what they really are trying to do.
– Yes, I’m aware of that.
– Remember the comment just a while ago, about all this assessment on the merit of discourse contributions being ‘subjective’?
– Yes… We didn’t follow up on that, perhaps we should have done that right there.
– I understand. To your credit, I’d say, you’re worried about being accountable for your decisions, and would like to be able to point out that your judgments are based on objective facts and data. Not just your or others’ ‘subjective’ opinions, isn’t that right? Though your election campaign was stressing that you are a person of sound common sense and moral convictions, whose judgment could be trusted — even on decisions that stray into the area of intuitive subjective judgments?
– What are you trying to say?
– Nothing personal, Commissioner, sorry if you get any such impression. Just that there is another issue of balance involved here, that has a bearing on how we think about policy and plan proposals — and how AI tools can support us in those decisions.
– Explain: what’s the problem?
– Okay. Let’s put it this way: The folks who are trying to sell you their data, their data analysis tools, their AI programs, are banking on your sincere concern about basing your decisions on factually correct, complete, objectively ‘true’ information. And that is what expert systems, as they were called a generation ago, and Ai tools as they are promoted now, are offering: data, with programs based on scientific analysis and logic, to be reliably and objectively true.
– Yes: is there something wrong with that? I’d be irresponsible if I didn’t try to have data, a sound factual basis of truth for our decisions,wouldn’t I?
– Of course, Commissioner. But — as we also discussed: that’s only part of the judgment task. The planning arguments rest on premises — the ‘ought’-premises — that are not evaluated in terms of true or false, or even ‘probability’ (the basis of ‘risk’ assessment they also would want your to do), before deciding. The ‘ought’ claims about what we should try to achieve are not objective ‘true or false’ — no matter how much factual or probability evidence the algorithms are offering you about the likelihood of your proposals to succeed, and the desired or undesired consequences to occur. Whether we ought to pursue those goals, or avoid the possible side-effects, isn’t just a matter of objective measurement facts, but subjective, personal, intuitive judgments. So even if we could trust the big computers to give you all the necessary evidence and factual data for the factual and instrumental premises of planning arguments, — I’m not sure we should uncritically trust them to do even that — those judgments about what we ought to do are what we are worried about: what we will have to trust you with.
– So?
– So any measure of plausibility support of plans, policy proposals, common actions we can develop must be based on the individual judgments of those participating in the discussion and decision process. AI can perhaps help sorting things out, checking consistency and logic of supporting evidence, the specific sources of disagreements, relationships between claims in the discourse, keeping track. But any decision-guiding measures, as well as the decisions themselves, must be made by people, individuals.
– But there are proposed tools out there that claim to have ‘objective’ measures e.g. of depth and breadth of policy statements, aren’t there?
– Yes, Of course they all have to claim to be trustworthy and objective. But as long as they are just based on simple counts of topics mentioned and claims of relationships between them, they are not really evaluating true merit of the support. So an elaborate package of false, implausible, inconsistent claims might get a high ‘support’ score which you’d have to agree is meaningless. The cynical demagogues even rely on making their lies bold enough and repeating them often and loudly enough to get people to believe them…
– I understand that you have better techniques, methods for having participants make and evaluate arguments, and derive overall indicators for proposal support?
– Yes. They need to be tested and discussed, but they are ready for application as soon as the programming — for compilation, keeping track, displaying interim and final results etc. can be developed. Financing is what’s missing for that.

Displays: concise overview

– You mention ‘display’ — what’s the issue with that?
– Good question. See: planning decisions do not rest on single ‘clinching’ arguments like the deductive syllogisms you study in the logic books: If an argument has a valid ‘deductive’ structure, and you believe all its premises, you must accept the conclusion. That doesn’t apply to planning: planning decisions depend on many ‘pro’ ad ‘con’ arguments; their structure is not deductively valid, and the premises — as we have seen — are not properly labeled ‘true’ or ‘false’ but more or less plausible and important. So any ‘due consideration’ of all those pros and cons, — and the relationships between them — really must take that entire network of reasoning into account. That should be assisted by visual displays: diagrams’ or ‘maps’ of the evolving discourse. Showing ‘the whole system’ rather than just one aspect or the last word in a debate. We can make such maps, — it takes a bit more effort than just listing the comments as they are posted. And it would be nice if the AI support could help constructing those maps to accompany the evolving discussion, and if it could show precisely where people have disagreements or misunderstandings that could be alleviated with more explanation, better evidence, or improving the plan.
– Sounds good. If you can get people to understand the tools and agree on using them to make decisions.
– Yes, I was going to ask about that aspect: how would those support indicators be used to get an agreement, a decision? What did you call it in your list decision modes?

Tools and rules for the use of decision guides based on merit

– You are right: just taking a vote doesn’t work anymore: In fact, just voting really could be disregarding all the evidence and pros and cons. Party discipline: any proposal of the other party gets voted down, regardless of its merit, — that’s the reality today. And for decisions that affect many people across existing governance borders, the issues of who’s entitled to vote, and what constitutes a majority etc. are going to be critical. So we must develop decision modes that give those measures an appropriate role in the decision process. And learn to use them properly.
– Something like what you mentioned earlier: Even if a decision-making body has to decide by voting (according to its constitution) — if that body has developed an overall positive plausibility score in favor of the plan, should it be allowed to vote it down?

Power and Accountability for Decisions

– Right. That has to do with accountability.
– Huh?
– Yes, Commissioner. Look — so far, it may look as if we’re saying that all important decisions should be made by a kind of ‘referendum’. Preceded by a more thorough deliberation and haggling process resulting in a measure that will determine the decision in some form. That’s unrealistic, of course. For one thing: In any kind of organization and community, society, there will always be situations calling for decisions that can’t wait for lengthy deliberations. Or just have to be made quickly according to prior agreements or rules and judgments about whether or which rules apply to the given situation. By people ’empowered’ to make those decisions, and have the training and experience to make those judgments.
– Oh. Of course: ‘Leaders’. Tell you the truth, I never really understood why there’s such a cry for better leadership, all the leadership improvement programs and seminars — even by folks who’ve just been to seminars touting ‘self-organizing’ teams and societies, or out demonstrating for more ‘power to the people’.
– Right. The balance problem, again. We need both. The problem is that leaders often become obsessed more with the power to make such decisions than with the quality of the results for the community. The old power problem. The observation that power becomes addictive and a goal in itself, to the point of insanity. The Romans knew that; their crazy emperor Caligula drove that point home. Sure, in the governance systems for most nations there are now provisions to control that power, make the power holders ‘accountable’ for what they are doing, to contain the addictiveness of power.
– Yes: you mentioned elections for limited time periods, the balance of powers between the different branches of governments — is that what you have in mind? Are you saying that’s not enough? We just want those things to be applied properly!
– Calm down, Commissioner. Didn’t we agree that it looks like all too often, they don’t work too well anymore? At least all the folks calling for ‘tossing out the system’, ‘revolution’, ‘New Systems’ seem to think so.
– ‘Regime change’?
– Hush, Sophie — that’s troublesome concept and a different power gang. But either way: what they are offering instead doesn’t really solve the power problem: Just getting different folks into power doesn’t get rid of its addictiveness. And pretty soon we see the same patterns of power abuse again, with even worse consequences if the ‘new system’ does not have better power control provisions. If they relied on the assumption that those valiant freedom fighters and revolutionaries just can’t become as corrupt as they folks they kicked out…

Paying for power decisions?

– So what’s the suggestion for dealing with that power issue, and what does it have to do with the discourse platform?
– Important questions. Hold on: This needs a bit of background. The first thing is to acknowledge that the desire for power is a common human trait. And as such, not illegitimate. At the low end, we call it ‘empowerment‘ for the disempowered; at the higher end we justify it by calling for ‘leaders‘. Isn’t that a little like other ‘human needs’ — like the need for food, water, shelter, security — which even the most ‘disempowered’ folks have to ‘pay’ for in one way or another? So why not having the powerful ‘pay’ for the power decisions they’ll make — instead of the people paying them to lord it over us?
– Good grief. Who’d they pay — with money somebody already gave them to get into their power positions, to help those donors to get even more money?
– Calm down, Sophie. Yes, you put your finger on the sore spot all right: money. The problem that the governance power control systems today have been overrun by the power of money from the industrial and financial systems — where power control is obviously not working as well, and not according to the governance controls.
– Until the money runs out…
– Right: So we agree the ‘currency’ for ‘paying for power decisions’ can’t be money. But what would be an ‘account’ that secures ‘accountability’? Here’s the idea: If the discourse process produces measures the merit of people’s contributions to the discourse, couldn’t we add up those merit measures — as assessed for plausibility and significance by the entire community — into contributors’ ‘merit’ accounts?
– You are talking about a kind of quantified reputation system? That people have to ‘earn’?
– You might call it that. If people contribute good ideas, well-thought out, plausible and well-supported arguments that indicate good judgment, they will ‘earn’ a reputation account that might be part of the assessment of their qualification for positions where they have to use that judgment for important decisions. People whose contributions are assessed as unsupported untruthful, will not accumulate enough merit points.
– I see: Now decision-makers will have to ‘invest’ their merit points with each decision that has to be ‘paid for’.
– Yes. I like the idea of ‘investing’ their merit points — into plans and projects, that would earn them future points — the closer the outcome turns out to be to the promised results. Or lose those points if it doesn’t turn out that well… And that depletes a decision-maker’s power over time. An automatic regulator of power? Well, at least an additional tool to combat the addictive feature and temptation to abuse power. And a challenge to revive and engage in that discussion and develop better tools.
– Couldn’t we — regular citizens — transfer some of our own merit points to leaders, to endorse their ability to make needed big policy decisions we’d like to see?
– Great idea, Sophie! Yes: some decisions are so important that no single person will have accumulated enough merit points to pay for them. So this feature of merit points that have to be earned by demonstrating sound and valuable judgments could be used to ’empower’ leaders to make those decisions on our behalf but also to control them. We — citizens — could specify what kinds of decisions or policies we endorse. And most importantly: if we see that officials are not doing what they promised — we could withdraw our supporting merit points before they have been wasted on decisions contrary to our interests.
– Once the decisions are made though, our points would be gone, used up, too — right?
– Yes: that’s the idea.
– That’s an interesting twist: It makes supporters as ‘accountable’ as the leaders? Sounds like a good thing: would it make them more responsible?
– It’s something to be explored. Too many related issues: will only people who have built up some account of merit points have the right to influence policy this way? Or should there be something like a ‘basic’ amount of points for every citizen, like the election vote, without any such conditions? And could merit points be ‘earned’ back as a result of the outcome of the decisions for which they were ‘invested’? Yes: let’s explore and discuss it!

Too complex solutions? Response options?

– I don’t know, you visionaries. This is all getting a bit too much for me to swallow in one sitting. Does it all have to be so complicated? Do we have time to experiment with this kind of esoteric schemes to face the emergencies and crises?
– I agree with your concern there, Commissioner. But let me ask you this: Do you have any better ideas for making the current systems work better? Because what you are saying is, in essence: Among the few options we have for dealing with unprecedented challenges, you seem to propose the one that has gotten us into the trouble: doing nothing? Business as usual, just according to the rules?
– That’s not a fair description of what I’m suggesting, Bog-Hubert: I’m saying let’s go back and fix and properly apply the tools we have and know how to use. Find the root cause of the problems we have and make the inherited system work as it was meant to — that you yourself have described as the best we’ve had in history, didn’t you, a while ago?
– Right. What the Commissioner is saying isn’t exactly ‘doing nothing’, is it, Bog-Hubert? What are the other options you said we have besides ‘doing nothing’? Isn’t what he’s suggesting one of those other options?
– Good point, Vodçek. The crude options I had in mind besides ‘doing nothing’ were, either to join the ‘New System’ proponents: Those who are clamoring to ditch the current system, but don’t have a good description of their new system that remedies the basic flaws we discussed that marred both the current system and the disastrous alternatives humanity has tried out, to make it appealing enough to justify the costs involved in ‘ditching’ the system. Or, to engage in developing, discussing and applying some new ideas. The ones we discussed here aren’t the only ones we can think of — we are simply saying: We don’t know enough to adopt a Big New System yet: so let’s encourage as many different small experiments as we can, try to learn from them, but put in place an addition to the system(s) we have that consists of provisions, processes for agreements to not get in each others’ ways and address the main ’causes’ of trouble with the current system.
– So is that not a ‘New System’?
– No, Sophie: it’s a strategy for getting there, not the vision of the New System. Yes, in a sense, it’s similar to the Commissioner’s ‘fix-it’ version of ‘doing nothing’, but more open to new and creative solutions. Solutions that really aim at realizing, for example, what the parliamentary principle promised but couldn’t deliver with the current decision modes: decisions truly based on the merit of our contributions to the discourse. And doing something about the problem of power.
– But why does it have to become so complicated? Your merit points ideas quickly became such a convoluted tangle of steps and calculations…
– We may be too used to the current system to realize how complex that current system really is. And therefore, vulnerable to manipulation.

– I agree. The innovations don’t have to be introduced all at once, and certainly not by violent wholesale ‘regime change’ or revolutionary overthrow of existing provisions. But looking at the whole network of interrelated features and uses is important for a different reason, I think. See, the Commissioner’s suggestion of ‘fix the root cause’ of a problem is a well intentioned example of a traditional way of looking at things, that try to sidestep the complexity of problems or problems networks that some wise systems people called ‘messes’ and ‘wicked problems’. The idea of a ‘root cause’ is a desperate, even delusional device to simplify a problem situation by imagining a simple problem source, so that a simple solution — one that can be provided by a short teamwork session led by some systems thinking consultant — will be seen as acceptable.
– A delusion? You’re not going to make many friends in the Systems Thinking World, my friend.

The principle of ‘multitasking’: making single provisions serve multiple purposes

– We are aware of that. But see: If we seem to begin to understand that some problems or emergencies are really quite complex, is it not a reasonable suspicion that simple isolated ‘fixes’ — hardware answers such as border walls for immigration issues, more and ‘smarter’ bombs for international conflicts, more and bigger weaponry for police to fight violent crime, to name but a few, — aren’t going to do the job: the solutions’ also will exhibit the same degree of complexity?
– You are talking about the old Ashby principle of ‘requisite variety’, right? That a control system of a complex problem must have the same degree of variety of response options as the problem? Lots of complex questions to think about.
– I agree. And the example of the merit point idea is really also an example of a kind of strategy we should consider: The principle of looking for initially single devices that can serve many different purposes in the affected system. Which will begin to look a bit more complex, sure. The merit points idea is an example of such s provision. But if such improvement to the discourse system could help alleviate the power problem in our societies, would it be worth a bit of complex effort?
– Even more to think about.
– Right, Commissioner: And if one such idea seems to be a little too complicated: the fact that it might work indicates that the problem can be dealt with better than we are doing now, so perhaps it might trigger and encourage efforts to conceive of and develop better answers?
– That’s a policy issue if I ever saw one. It really should be discussed and thoroughly evaluated.
– I’ll drink to that, Vodçek.
– Last call!

–o–

About public planning discourse contribution credits

Published April 9, 2019 Argument patterns , control of power , Design discourse , Discourse contribution rewards , Evaluation of plans , Governance , Public policy discourse 1 Comment

A Fog Island Tavern Discussion. Thorbjoern Mann 2019

– Bog-Hubert: Got a minute? I want to ask you something…

– Hi Sophie — sure — if it’s not too complex and involving long-term memory this early in the morning…

– Coffee hasn’t taken yet?

– Well, It’s the third cup, so there’s a chance…. What’s the question?

– Planning discourse contribution credit points. Remember the other day, there was a lively discussion here about the credit points in that planning discourse platform you guys — I mean Abbé Boulah and his buddy up in town have been cooking up — and I’ve been telling my email friend over in Europe about it. He is politely asking to get to know more about it, but I have a feeling he’s, well, not outright against it, but very skeptical about the idea.

– Well, I wouldn’t blame him; it is a bit involved, if you’d try to apply all parts of what it might be used for. Any feelings about what specifically is bothering him?

-It could be that I haven’t been able to explain it well enough; the discussion was mainly about the use of those credits outside of the planning discussions itself. The idea of those credits replacing the rile of money in the political process. I got the impression he sees it as elitist. So he may have lost sight of their basic purpose in the planning discourse itself, that as I understand it establishes their value in the first place. So maybe you can help me go through the basic benefits or uses of those points from the very beginning of the process? What they are for, again?

– Well, I’m glad you’re asking, because since that discussion, I’ve gotten kind of confused about it myself: it can get kind of complicated, and there are some questions that aren’t quite worked out yet, as far as I can see. So it gives me the chance to clarify things in my mind as well, I hope. As that old German professor said that Abbé Boulah keeps invoking: If you are not quite certain about something, it helps to give a lecture about it. Or better, a discussion, so you can interrupt and ask questions any time it’s getting derailed.

– Okay.

– Hmm. Let’s see. So we assume somebody has raised an issue, started a discussion about some problem or plan that needs attention; asking that something needs to be done about it, because it’s an an issue that affects, bothers, hurts many people in different ways. A community problem, perhaps even in a community that isn’t clearly defined — in that people in several different governance entities — state, countries — are affected and not at all clear what can be done about it and who is supposed to do it. And we optimistically assume that there is something like that discourse platform where all that can be discussed, eh?

-If you say so.

Participation: getting all pertinent information

– Well, there’s got to be some talk about it, whether it’s properly public and organized is a different question. Now the first thing that needs to happen is to get the information about that issue. What’s going on, who is getting affected, and how? And who has the knowledge, — call it expertise or just common sense — about what could be done about it — and then how that in turn would affect people. The common cry and demand is for public ‘participation’. The principle is that all the concerns of all the affected and interested parties must be brought into the discussion so that that can be given ‘due consideration’ in making plans and decisions, right?

– Right. Shouldn’t that be a matter of course, by now?

Credit points as incentives to contribute

– Sure. Well, governments don’t seem to like it much. But it’s also a bit of a problem for the public. You can make all kinds of provisions for citizen participation, but the fact is that that requires time and effort on the part of those citizens, time and effort that the ordinary citizen doesn’t always can afford and doesn’t get paid for, right? And some folks may have their suspicions about whether and how their concerns will actually make much if any difference in the decision. So shouldn’t there be some incentives — for everybody who has something meaningful to contribute to the issue, to contribute that information?

– Hmm. I see the problem: you can’t do it with money, it isn’t in anybody’s budget yet. So you are saying that it should be done with those credit points?

– Yes. At the very least, there should be some form of public recognition, appreciation for bringing in pertinent information. So you’d reward any such contribution with a ‘civic credit’ unit. And that credit should actually be ‘worth’ something, not just an empty and useless gesture. We’ll get to that later.

– Oh boy. That looks like more of a problem than a solution to me — now everybody comes in with all kinds of silly information, all the same ‘concerns’ or demands — what a mess.

Avoiding duplication, repetition

– You are quite right. That’s why full credit should be given only to the first entry of the same essential content — not to repetitions of the same point. This provision, incidentally, serves another purpose besides keeping the mass of incoming information manageable: it encourages people to enter the information fast, not to wait and let the discussion go around in circles missing a vital item of information.

– Okay, that makes sense. But is it a problem that some people who have made an effort to enter information but don’t get it in fast enough, will be annoyed at having their effort ignored?

Getting the information ‘fast’

– Good point. This makes it supremely important to have a good public display of information entered, updated as fast as possible, ideally of course, in ’real time’ so that a new item is instantly seen the moment it’s posted. The technology for doing that is available today, but if you want to allow information to get entered by different means — letters, phone calls, email etc. there will necessarily be some delay in getting it posted. So if there’s such a delay, you may want to have people who enter the same point before it gets posted for everybody to see, share that reward.

– Uh. Okay, but…

Decisions based on the merit of contributions

– Ah, I think I see what bothers you. It looks like something like restricting people’s ‘voting rights’ or ‘rights to free speech, does it? Yes. That impression would be bad, not necessarily justified. There must be a clear distinction between entering an information item, and making it ‘count’ in the decision. As long as decisions are made on the basis of vote counts, that impression is understandable, sure. But what we are after, is to reach decisions based on the merit of the information, not just on the number of votes — votes that may be un-informed , ill-informed, or deliberately ignoring the concerns of many other parties — the losing minority of the voting process. And to determine the merit of a piece of information or argument pro or con a plan, it only needs to the stated once. But now we have to deal with the issue of the method by which the merit of a piece of information can be determined.

– Yes. Just another question, before we get into that: what about intentionally ‘bad’ information? Wrong or unintentionally ill-informed claims, as you said — even deliberately false, misleading, confusing information? Trolls? Obscene language? Shouldn’t there be some boundaries on that in public discourse? — You agree, Vodçek?

– Well, Sophie, my responsibility as the keeper of this establishment is a little different than what’s going on in a public discourse. See, I am very much in favor of freedom of speech, in principle. But I also have a great interest in keeping this tavern somewhat civilized. So here, I feel entitled to ask people who start that kind of thing to please shut up or leave, before it degenerates into physical brawls. And I’m using my personal judgment on drawing the boundary, such as it may be, and I’m okay with some people thinking it’s not strict enough, and others steamed up about my stuffy old-timer attitude. Now in a public discussion, I’m not sure my standards should be imposed on everybody. So who’s entitled to set those standards? In fact, shouldn’t everybody have the right to publicly make fools or buffoons out of themselves?

– Huh. Never looked at it that way. Some people seem to get a kick out of doing that. A right to offend?

‘Empty’ acknowledgement points and later judgments

– I think Vodçek has a point there, Sophie. Whether you want to call it a right or not. But the platform process is actually dealing with that in a different way. It doesn’t try to finagle the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable entries — by language or content. So it accepts all entries as they come, stores them and makes them accessible in what it calls the ‘Verbatim’ file. And it acknowledges an entry as a contribution with a ‘point’ that is not much more than that: an acknowledgement: You participated. But then it gives all the other participants the opportunity to respond to it, either by making another verbal entry, or by assigning the original — offending — entry a judgment score. One on a scale of, say, minus 3 (for totally offensive, unacceptable, useless) to plus 3 for totally valuable and proper content. So if there is an actual ‘account’ for those contributions, that contribution point will add to — or diminish — a person’s public credit account, as judged by the public, by all participants in that discourse.

– Well, how will that be done? Are you saying that everybody gives every such contribution a judgments score?

– That would be one way, or a first step towards such a credit point account. Sure, it’s a little more involved that the current practice of ‘liking’ or adding another kind of emoticon to a person’s comment. But some such evaluation, actually a somewhat more specific evaluation, will be necessary further on in the process if the participants are going to be serious about getting a decision based on the merit of all contributions. Then the adjustment of a person’s initial entry will just be result of that systematic deliberation.

– Sounds good, but you’ll have to give me some more detail about that, Bog-Hubert.

Plausibility and importance judgments of argument premises

– Patience, Sophie. First let me ask you, were you here to listen to Abbé Boulah about his buddy’s method for evaluation planning arguments?

– You mean that story about looking at all the premises of those arguments and giving them plausibility scores?

– Right. Plausibility scores, on a scale of -1 (for ‘totally implausible’) to +1 (for ‘totally plausible, virtually certain) and the midpoint of zero (for ‘don’t know, can’t judge without more evidence…). But also weights of relative importance of all the ‘ought’ premises in the entire set of arguments pro and con a plan proposal. That one would be on a scale of zero (for totally unimportant) to +1 (for totally important) such that all the weights of all the ought-premises in that set of arguments will add up to 1.

– Right, I got that part. I remember there was some math involved in getting from that bunch of scores to an overall measure of plausibility of the plan being discussed — I’m not sure I really understand that.

– We can go over that part separately some other time. Can you have some faith, for now, that some such equations can be developed that explain how your overall plan assessment should depend on those scores for the argument premises?

– Well… I’m not sure I’m ready for buying that cat in a bag, but let’s hear the rest of the story about the credit points.

– Okay. Remember, a person’s comments to the planning discourse, that is, to a discussion about whether a proposed plan should be adopted for implementation, can be roughly distinguished as three kinds of claims, premises, of arguments: One that claims that the plan A (or some plan detail) will lead to some outcome, result, consequence. B, given some conditions C. Another claim is about whether B ought to be aimed for or not; and the third is about whether the conditions C under which A will produce B are actually present or will be present when the plan is implemented.

Premise plausibility and importance scores are merit judgments

– Yes I remember now. And the plausibility and importance scores actually are judgments about the merit of those claims — is that what you are saying?

– Bravo! That is precisely it: those assessment scores are another way of saying how much someone’s comment providing those claims is worth, in that planning discussion. So if we now get some overall statistic of the whole group’s assessment scores of those contribution items, we are not only getting a measure of that item’s merit or weight towards the group’s plan decision, which is also a measure of that entry’s merit in the entire discourse. And the original ‘credit point’ acknowledgement can now be adjusted up or down according to those scores. If the scores as plausible, truthful, supported by evidence, and the ought-premise is important, the entry credit will shift from just ‘present’ upwards to a positive value, but if the claims are less credible, untrustworthy, the entry credit will become negative.

– I see, It’s beginning to sound interesting. But won’t everything now depend on the math shenanigans you’ll use to add up or whatever you are doing to the scores?

– True. But as we said, let’s assume for now that this can be made to work. Because then, there are more interesting things that can be done with these credits.

– Well, go on.

Calculation of overall plan plausibility
Versus
Calculation of group’s judgment of premise merit

– Fine. Where were we? Okay. With a little help from our computers, we have calculated the overall judgment scores for the proposed plan, from all the personal scores of discourse participants. And along the way, the computer has stored and used all the judgment scores for the set of argument premises that the participants have made. So we can also calculate the group scores for each premise judgment, don’t you see? And that would be one way to express the value, the merit of that piece of information in the opinion of that group. So now the original contribution credit can be adjusted up or down according to that score.

Negative credit scores discouraging poor or unsupported contributions

– Ah, I see. So that will become part of the contributor’s credit point account. And you think that will be some kind of encouragement to make valuable, constructive comments?

– Yes. And discouraging information that is misleading, false, unsupported by evidence or further plausible arguments, that will reduce your credit account.

– So why should people care about that? Is that account made public?

– Good question. I guess that needs to be discussed, or left to each participant to decide, whether to make it public or not. But the real question is how that account can be really useful to a person, other than giving them the personal satisfaction of having made useful contributions. Can you think of ways that could happen?

– Credit points influence on overall decision?

– Well, now that you mention it: would it make any difference in how the decision is made for the plan?

– Hmm. I guess it could. It depends on how each decision has to be made, legitimately, in each case. You could argue, for example, that the total public score for a plan should determine the decision. In the sense that if that final score is positive (somewhere between zero and plus one, or above a threshold that must be agreed upon, the plan is approved. If it falls below that, it’s rejected? Then, of course an individual’s contribution merit will be part of that final score.

– But that’s not very visible, right? I remember those equations or ‘aggregation functions’, I think you called them, to somehow add up all the individual judgments to some overall score and then to a group score?

– Yes, that part needs discussion, sure. For now, let’s say that this overall score is just a recommendation to guide an official’s decision or elected committee’s final, traditional yes/no vote (that may be mandated by law or constitution), then somebody might suggest that the vote of each member of the voting entity could be ‘weighted’ according to that person’s credit score: If you have a high contribution credit score, your vote could be ‘worth’ more than the vote of somebody whose credit account is low or negative because of a lot of bad contributions to public discourse. Okay, okay, don’t hit me. That calls for a lot more discussion, and perhaps agreements in each case. But it offers some interesting possibilities that do need discussion, don’t you agree?

– Interesting, yes. I’m not sure I see how it would really improve things, perhaps I need to look at some actual examples. By the way, isn’t this why my friend was worrying about this scheme being, wait, what did he call it: some kind of meritocracy? Is that bad?

– Well, it’s a valid concern if in a society power and income is going mainly to people who have been declared as ‘meriting’, at the expense of all the other folks who never evened a chance to build up a merit for anything. Where ‘merit’ is mainly measures in financial terms. The kind of measure we are talking about here is a very different thing, isn’t it? Actually moving away from the power of money, wouldn’t you say? But I’ d say there is an issue of balancing the concern for getting decisions based on the merit — value, truth, plausibility, appeal, quality — of information brought into the discussion about plans, and making sure that the concerns of people who don’t have the time or opportunity to earn those credits aren’t being neglected.

– Yes, Bog-hubert: balancing is the problems sounds like the key. I agree that this open planning discourse platform seems to aim at making that easier. The concerns may be articulated and entered into the record to be considered by representatives of people who can’t do that for themselves for one reason or another — children, people too worn out by their work to get as well-informed as the democratic ideals want us to assume. But maybe there should be more robust safeguards to ensure that the meritocracy aspect doesn’t get out if line?

– I agree. As I said, there are many aspects that need more detail work and discussion, or better ideas…

Credit account use ‘outside of project discourse

– Now, those issues were all potential uses ‘within’ the discourse about a specific plan. Perhaps looking at how your contribution credits might be used ‘outside’ the particular project, in general, might be more useful?

– What do you mean?

– Well, think about it. Your financial credit score makes a difference in your ability to get a mortgage or a business loan. Could your public discourse contribution credit score make a difference in landing a job, say, or a public office? As part of your qualification for such offices? Sort of indicating how much you can be trusted to use sound judgment in decisions that can’t wait for a lengthy public discussion? A more quantitative indicator of your reputation?

– I see, yes. People are looking at a candidate’s voting record in previous positions, already — but that can be misleading, not very clear information. So yes, such a contribution credit record may be useful.

– Hey, I’m not so sure about that. One way of looking at it is how single incidents can destroy years of apparently trustworthy behavior and judgments: Like your famous Zinfandel: One glass of Zin poured into a sinkful of dishwater doesn’t do much to the essence of dishwater — but what do you get if you pour one glass of dishwater into a bottle of Zin, eh? One big case of defrauding Medicare by millions of dollars should make you ineligible for any job in the government’s health departments, shouldn’t it?

– You’d think.

– Well. Those details must be ironed out, but I’d say that’s one way your credit account can be come ‘fungible’ — worth something, in everyday social life. Can you think of other ways?

– I think I need more coffee to cope with all these unusual issues. Vodçek, can you help with that? Too early for Zin, anyway, after that story of yours.

– Sure, Sophie, here you go. I remember hearing Abbé Boulah mention some real unusual ways to apply that credit account — something about making officials pay for their privilege to make decisions?

Contribution credits versus money and power in public governance:

PAYING for power decisions?

– Right, I heard that too. I thought he and his buddy were really going out in utopia-land with those ideas. But it’s sticking in my mind: If you really are looking for ways to get some better control of the role of money and the temptations for less than beneficial public use of its power in public governance: do you see many promising innovative ideas out there? Better ideas than the traditional venerable ‘balance of power’, term limits, re-election, and in the extreme: impeachment tools? That all are more and more losing their effectiveness to the power of money from the private sector that is undermining those provisions? Because they don’t cover the relations between private sector money and public controls well enough?

– Well, how could ‘paying for decisions’ make a dent in that? You are making me curious.

– Okay. See, It’s really based on a different understanding of power. It’s not only the ability to make important decisions about your own life — where we call it ‘empowerment’, as a good thing, right? — but also about projects that involve others, that are too big for just one person to decide for themselves. So what if we look at the desire for power as a human kind of need, just like the need for food and shelter? Getting those are considered close to human rights — but we make folks pay for them. So why should we treat power differently from those needs? But we also need to find better ways of preventing power from becoming addictive and abusive. Now, can we say that the general social concern regarding needs is to first make sure that people will be able to earn the means to satisfy those needs, that is, to p a y for them, and then actually make them pay. So why not apply that pattern to the power issue?

– But, uh. But…

– But but. Yes, I hear you: Pay? But with money, no: that would just dig our hole deeper? Well, perhaps we can use a different currency? Now that we have one: what about paying for public power decisions with your discourse contribution credit points? The more important a decision, the more points you need as an office holder, to make it. And you use up your credits with each decision. There might be a way to treat it like a kind of investment by providing a way to earn credits back with the public appreciation of successful, beneficial decisions, which means that if it was a poor decision, you lost your credit investment and some of your power to make more decisions. If it’s all gone: time to step down from the power office, hmm?

– What about decisions that require more credit points than a single person can ever come up with?

– Good question! But doesn’t the very question contain the core of the answer? See, if you are a faithful supporter of an office holder, meaning that you’re confident that this person will make good judgments in power decisions, you can transfer some of your own hard-earned judgment credits to that person, to enable them to make those big decisions on your behalf. Not money: judgment credits. Instead of all the election financing ending up in the advertising media coffers…

– Hey, great idea! Perhaps I could even specify the kind of programs and decisions my points should be used for?

– Power to your kind of people! Yes! There might be a way to build that into the system — with the possibility of your taking your credits back if the person makes decisions you don’t approve of, huh?

– Bog-Hubert, Sophie, do I have to point out to you that this devious scheme will make you, the supplier of credit point power, just as a c c o u n t a b l e for the decisions you support? Because you too, would lose your points for poor decisions? With the possibility that you too might lose your credit investment in an incompetent power holder?

– Trying to scare us now, Vodçek? Yes, it makes sense: I guess it will make people more careful with their credit point contributions, besides being able to ‘punish’ politicians who win elections with promises like ‘no more taxes’ but then go ahead and raise taxes anyway once they are in office. If you can withdraw your credit points, that is.

Power and accountability

– Yes: If your glorious leader has squandered all his own and your points on lousy decisions, there may be nothing to get back. Unless we can make those fellows go back to regular status to earn more points to pay back their credit point debts… I guess the point is: all the talk about power and accountability is rather meaningless without an account whose wealth you could lose is you use your power unwisely or irresponsibly.

– This is getting way too futuristic to have a chance to be realized any time soon, Bog-Hubert, don’t you think?

– Well, that’s what they said about those crazy fools who said let’s build flying machines… Abbé Boulah says that the technology for doing these things is already available, so now it’s just about working out the details, getting the system programmed and set up, and getting public support for putting it into practice. But perhaps there are better ways to do those things — public planning discourse, better control of power, — could better ideas be triggered into the open by the very outrageous nature of these proposals?

The discourse platform as a first needed step

– Sounds like what we need as a first step is that planning discourse platform itself, to run the public discussion needed to reach agreement about what to do. And to work out the details?

– Couldn’t have said it better myself, Sophie.

Overview

–o–

Quarrgument Symposium — first night

Published October 23, 2018 Argument patterns Leave a Comment
Tags: Arguments, Dialogue, Quarrgument

The Fog Island ‘Quarrgument symposium’ — First night.

– Okay, ready for some serious dialogical systems thinking? Here’s the main agenda again, we agree to start with the first item there:

——————————————————————————————————-

The main issues:

1 Disentangling the ‘Dialogue versus Argumentation’ Quarrgument

Meaning of terms?

The case for/against dialogue versus argumentation?

2 Needed agreements / provisions for

a) ‘Social’ Communication?

b) Decision-oriented ‘Planning Discourse’?

3 Provisions for (2b) agreements in the

‘Planning Discourse Support System’ (PDSS) proposals?

——————————————————————————————————-

– What’s this, Vodçek — ‘serious’? didn’t you say it was just a kind of silly dust-up?

– The other side of silly can be serious, Bog-Hubert.

– Oooh. Into deep guruological pronouncements tonight? Okay, what exactly happened to bring this on?

– Well, I’m not sure. I think it started with our buddy posting some things about this planning discourse support system he’s been working on, that’s based on ol’ Rittel’s ‘Argumentative Model of Planning’. Or perhaps it was just somebody proposing a ‘discussion’ about some issue? Well, this fellow was getting all worked up about the pernicious ideas of ‘discussion’ and ‘argument’, and started berating everybody for even thinking about such concepts, saying that we should all use ‘dialogue’ instead.

– Somebody take him up on that?

– Some folks were getting, let’s say, a little concerned. Or just entertained, having fun? But didn’t voice much serious inquiry about it — maybe they didn’t want to come across as too — argumentative? Wanting to keep the dialogue ‘moving forward’?

– So did it move anywhere interesting?

– I don’t think so. Looked more like going around in circles. It looked like there were very different meanings attached to those terms, especially to the concept of ‘argument’, that apparently got tempers up on both sides, so that no meaningful resolution of the issue was in sight. This is why Abbé Boulah put clarification of those terms that were thrown about in that dustup, up as the first agenda task of this symposium:

——————————————————————————————————-

Clarifying the meaning of terms:

Dialogue

Conversation

Argument/ Argumentation

Discussion

Dispute

Debate

Discourse

——————————————————————————————————-

– Hmm. And doing it in a more ‘structured’ way — what did he mean by that, again?

– Good question, Sophie. I guess, to start with, examining the questions, one by one in some detail, to see if they were really talking about the same issues, the same problem? Using the results from one stage as the stepping-stone for the next one? Working towards some overall view and understanding of how all those questions and aspects are connected and form a coherent ‘whole system’?

– Sounds too involved already. Let’s just get started with the questions: the meaning of the words.

– Why don’t we just look up the definition of those words on some fat book dictionary? You have one here?

– That might be useful Renfroe, If Vodçek keeps one to check on the French words in his cookbook —

– Hey! You better watch it all the time!

– Sorry, Vodçek, couldn’t resist. But the fat book probably doesn’t cover all the ways those terms are used and understood by people in everyday tavern talk. Just take that word ‘argument’. The dictionary might tell you that an argument is a set or sequence of statements — called premises — that are connected together to support or even ‘prove’ another statement, the ‘conclusion’. But that’s not really what people mean when they say “Brother Joe had an argument with cousin Buddy”?

– I see. The situations where people have very different opinions about some thing, and are yelling at each other trying to end up ‘being right’, and the other fellow ‘wrong’. A quarrel?

– Right. And they may use real arguments of the dictionary kind, but also forms of speech the dictionary would call ‘fallacies’, such as the old ‘ad hominem’ pattern, which essentially consists of convincing everybody that the other guy’s opinion is wrong because he is just a scoundrel or a miserable sinner, or has been smoking pot and drinking beer in high school. Raising their voices and fists in doing so, and somebody ending up with a black eye or loose tooth.

– Which means the guy with the black eye was wrong, eh Renfroe?

– I don’t know about you guys, I kinda like a good brawl every once in a while … no matter who’s right or wrong..

– Good grief. I remember now, Abbé Boulah invented a word for that kind of thing: the ‘quarrgument‘?

– Yes, Sophie. It nicely acknowledges the common associations while making the distinction. We’ll see if it sticks… So what about ‘dialogue’?

– That’s where things got muddy. I understand that internet friend insisted that a dialogue is ‘amenable’, aimed at ‘win-win’ outcomes rather than ‘win-lose’ one, cooperative rather than antagonistic (I don’t think he used that term but that was the intent), aimed at creative and constructive inquiry, but does not consist of arguments. Even a kind of ‘systems thinking’. And therefore preferable? Even politically correct?

– Audacious claims. But aren’t those things, those reasons, actually arguments?

– Right, Sophie: statements like “dialogue is preferable because it doesn’t contain arguments” are arguments — of the dictionary kind, not necessarily of the quarrgument kind, that he seemed to have in mind.

– So he wasn’t doing ‘dialogue’ when he said that, making those arguments, was he?

– I don’t know — that wasn’t clear; he might complain that he was diabolically, I mean dialogically tricked into argument mode against his amenable dialog intention?

– I always thought ‘amenable’ had something to do with guiding cattle with some kind of special shouts. What do I know. But why did you say things got muddy — so far, the distinctions we made here between arguments and quarrguments would have cleared things up a bit, wouldn’t they?

– Well, it doesn’t look like it got that far. Now, if you looked at the other terms, your dictionaries — different editions — would come up with definitions or meanings and uses of those other terms — discussion, debate, discourse, conversation, even argumentation — that are more or less overlapping with that of dialogue. Sometimes even defining or explaining one in terms of the others. I don’t know of a commonly accepted view that any of them exclude or don’t need arguments (of the dictionary kind), and common acceptance of the danger of any of the forms deteriorating into the quarrgument version more than others. The only common feature is that they, especially ‘dialogue’ assumes people talking to each other. Which is a good start, no?

– Well; we’ll see if it con be used for online discussions. But first: How would you tell when it deteriorates?

– It usually starts with the use of fallacies and comments that fall into the general ‘ad hominem’ category, attacking the other person rather than the reasons offered. Linking the plausibility, probability, believability of the claim in question with alleged intents, benign or evil, or general character features and shortcomings of other participants in the process.

– Huh. Not even the aspect of preference for ‘positive’ features as opposed to ‘negative’ properties or effects of the disputed subject, Professor?

– No, nothing that says something like “If the talk is about positive aspects, it’s a dialogue, if not, it’s a discussion”? Even though some ‘dialogue’ partisans tend to make it sound like that.

– But aren’t there differences of, well, let’s say ‘moods’ or ‘flavors’ of the talk, depending on the intentions of the participants?

– What do you mean, Sophie?

– Well, take the famous ‘debates’ of candidates for public office, at election time. There, the purpose of the debaters is obviously to make themselves look good in the eyes of the audience, while making the other candidates look bad, or less good? Tripping up opponents into making statements that can easily be disproved, making them look like fools? So by virtue of the adversarial intentions involved, ‘debate’ can be seen as being closer to the ‘quarrgument’ end of the scale, than, say, some friendly tavern conversation to pass the time? Or just getting to know about the other, swapping stories and gossip?

– Good point, Sophie — but there isn’t always a clear line between the intentions and effects. In scientific discussions — say, about whether the correlation between effect X and Y is showing that X causes Y, or the other way around, or that both are caused by another force Z, — the concern is about the plausibility of the different hypotheses, not about the scientists proposing them.

– Sure — but if one of those hypotheses turns out to be ‘refuted’ by the evidence brought into the discussion, doesn’t that make the researcher who had proposed that one look less respectable as a scientist, than the one whose hypothesis keeps getting ‘corroborated’ by more evidence? Especially if he had wasted a lot of research effort and grant money on the refuted theory?

– In theory, it shouldn’t. The refutation of a hypothesis is a kind of contribution to knowledge, isn’t it? Now we know hypothesis Y –> X was not the answer? And shouldn’t that be valued, appreciated? But yes, it’s difficult to keep personalities and their egos or struggle for tenure or research grants out of the overall discussion. The difference is that science does have some useful guidelines for sorting that out. At least in the natural sciences that look at how things work, natural laws and such.

– As opposed to?

– As opposed to any processes involving human behavior and their interest in the outcomes. You might say that tenure or not is such an outcome, but whether an asteroid will strike earth, and where, is not that tightly linked to human affairs: if it does strike, whether the fellow gets tenure won’t matter too much, will it?

– So you don’t believe that prayer, for example, can help avert such outcomes?

– Well, you can pray that your scientists have done their calculations properly when they tell you what’s what, and maybe knowing how hard you prayed may just make him check the numbers one more time, — but try to get that across to the asteroid…

– All this talk on steroids aside — what about the kind of undialogue about human plans and policy-making — that our buddy is working on?

– Why do you say ‘undialogue’, Bog-Hubert?

– Obviously, because in that kind of talk, considering and ‘weighing’ all the pros and cons’ is a key concern, isn’t it? And those pros and cons are arguments, aren’t they? So therefore, according to the internet friend, it’s obviously not dialogue.

– By Abbé Boulah’s drooping mustache, you are right! But doesn’t that mean, if we all decide to engage in dialogue, that we couldn’t ever talk about plans and policies?

– Or, Vodçek, that we should only focus on the ‘pros’, and strive, cooperatively, try to improve, make the best plans possible?

– Sounds very sophistically correct — but isn’t that going against the tenets of planning projects, not even to speak of systems thinking?

– I agree: to the extent planning is in part finding solutions to problems — situations that are disagreeable or hurtful to some folks — understanding those disagreeable aspects is necessary, almost by definition. But why against systems thinking, Professor?

– Well, isn’t part of the catechism of ‘systems thinking’ the advice to always try to anticipate ‘unexpected’ consequences of system interventions? Especially of the unexpectedly unpleasant, undesirable kind? So I’d say the admirable claim that dialogue should only focus on the positive (and avoid the negative, the ‘cons’, the potentially undesirable side-and after-effects) is a bit at odds with this principle?

– Hmm. ‘At odds’ — spoken the way you did, with that British accent, sounds like a dialogical understatement. It begins to look like the issue ‘dialogue versus argument’ was a wrong question. Not a good basis for making those distinctions between dialogue and discussion and argumentation.

– So what’s the right, or better, question, Bog-Hubert?

– Well, let’s see: if all those ‘positive’ aspects as well as the arguments are all included in the general category of ‘discourse’, so trying to derive useful behavior or approach from the artificial distinction of the words is actually distracting from the needed focus on what’s being said? How about this one: The real issue is about the things that can make all those forms of talk deteriorate into ‘quarrguments’?

– Sounds good. I’m getting more confused about those different terms the more we try to sort them out — but yes, the question of how to keep all such talk constructive, productive, and not making the problems worse, is a more useful one to study.

– That actually looks like the second item on Abbé Boulah’s suggested agenda: for tomorrow’s talk — whatever you want to call it? The needed agreements for productive conversations — for friendly ‘amenable’ conversation, as well as for planning, decision-oriented discourse? So we’re done for today?

– I’ll drink to that.

– I hadn’t expected anything less, Renfroe. Though we didn’t really succeed in solving the question about the meaning of those different terms.

– Deciding it’s a non-issue, a wrong question, is a vastly more useful outcome, I’d say … if we have identified the better question.

– Right, Sophie. I’ll drink to that, too… Here’s to tomorrow!

=== o ===

Artificial Intelligence for the Planning Discourse?

Published March 26, 2018 Argument patterns , Design discourse , Discourse contribution rewards , Evaluation of plans , Pattern Language , Public policy discourse , Rittel , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: argument evaluation, Argumentation, Artificial Intelligence, evaluation of planning arguments, Planning arguments

The discussion about whether and to what extent Artificial Intelligence technology can meaningfully support the planning process with contributions similar or equivalent to human thinking is largely dominated by controversies about what constitutes thinking. An exploration of the reasoning patterns in the various phases of human planning discourse could produce examples for that discussion, leaving the determination of that definition label ‘thinking’ open for the time being.

One specific example (only one of several different and equally significant aspects of planning):
People propose plans for action, e.g. to solve problems, and then engage in discussion of the ‘pros and cons’ of those plans: arguments. A typical planning argument can be represented as follows:
“Plan A should be adopted for implementation, because
i) Plan A will produce consequences B, given certain conditions C, and
ii) Consequences B ought to be pursued (are desirable); and
iii) Conditions C are present (or will be, at implementation).

Question 1: could such an argument be produced by automated technological means?
This question is usually followed up by question 2: Would or could the ‘machine’ doing this be able (or should it be allowed) to also make decisions to accept or reject the plan?

Can meaningful answer to these questions be found? (Currently or definitively?)

Beginning with question 1: Formulating such an argument in their minds, humans draw on their memory — or on explanations and information provided during the discourse itself — for items of knowledge that could become premises of arguments:

‘Factual-instrumental’ knowledge of the form “FI (A –> X)”, for example (“A will cause X’, given conditions C;
‘Deontic’ Knowledge: of the form “D(X)” or “X ought to be’ (is desirable)”, and
Factual Knowledge of the form “F ( C)” or “Conditions C are given”.
‘Argumentation-pattern knowledge’: Recognition that any of the three knowledge items above can be inserted into an argument pattern of the form
D(A) <– ((A–> X)|C)) & D(X) & F( C)).

(There are of course many variations of such argument patterns, depending on assertion or negation of the premises, and different kinds of relations between A and X.)

It does not seem to be very difficult to develop a Knowledge Base (collection) of such knowledge items and a search-and-match program that would assemble ‘arguments’ of this pattern.

Any difficulties arguably would be more related to the task of recognizing and suitably extracting such items (‘translating’ it into the form recognizable to the program) from the human recorded and documented sources of knowledge, than to the mechanics of the search-and-match process itself. Interpretation of meaning: is an item expressed in different words equivalent to other terms that are appropriate to the other potential premises in an argument?

Another slight quibble relates to the question whether and to what extent the consequence qualifies as one that ‘ought to be’ (or not) — but this can be dealt with by reformulating the argument as follows:
“If (FI(A –> X|C) & D(X) & F( C)) then D(A)”.

(It should be accompanied by the warning that this formulation that ‘looks’ like a valid logic argument pattern is in fact not really applicable to arguments containing deontic premises, and that a plan’s plausibility does not rest on one single argument but on the weight of all its pros and cons.)

But assuming that these difficulties can be adequately dealt with, the answer to question 1) seems obvious: yes, the machine would be able to construct such arguments. Whether that already qualifies as ‘thinking’ or ‘reasoning’ can be left open; the significant realization is equally obvious: that such contributions could be potentially helpful contributions to the discourse. For example, by contributing arguments human participants had not thought of, they could be helping to meet the aim of ensuring — as much as possible — that the plan will not have ‘unexpected’ undesirable side-and-after-effects. (One important part of H. Rittel’s very definition of design and planning.)

The same cannot as easily be said about question 2.

The answer to that question hinges on whether the human ‘thinking’ activities needed to make a decision to accept or reject the proposed plan can be matched by ‘the machine’. The reason is, of course, that not only the plausibility of each argument will have to be ‘evaluated’, judged, (by assessing the plausibility of each premise) but also that the arguments must be weighed against one another. (A method for doing that has been described e.g in ‘The Fog Island Argument” and several papers.)

So a ‘search and match’ process as the first part of such a judgment process would have to look for those judgments in the data base, and the difficulty here has to do with where such judgments would come from.

The prevailing answers for factual-instrumental premises as well as for fact-premises — premises i) and iii) — are drawing on ‘documented’ and commonly accepted truth, probability, or validity. Differences of opinion about claims drawn from ‘scientific’ and technical work, if any, are decided by a version of ‘majority voting’ — ‘prevailing knowledge’, accepted by the community of scientists or domain experts, ‘settled’ controversies, derived from sufficiently ‘big data’ (“95% of climate scientists…”) can serve as the basis of such judgments. It is often overlooked that the premises of planning arguments, however securely based on ‘past’ measurements, observations etc, are inherently predictions. So any certainty about their past truth must at least be qualified with a somewhat lesser degree of confidence that they will be equally reliably true in future: will the conditions under which the A –> X relationships are assumed to hold, be equally likely to hold in the future? Including the conditions that may be — intentionally or inadvertently — changed as a result of future human activities pursuing different aims than those of the plan?

The question becomes even more controversial for the deontic (ought-) premises of the planning arguments. Where do the judgments come from by which their plausibility and importance can be determined? Humans can be asked to express their opinions — and prevalent social conventions consider the freedom to not only express such judgments but to have them given ‘due consideration’ in public decision-making (however roundabout and murky the actual mechanisms for realizing this may be) as a human right.

Equally commonly accepted is the principle that machines do not ‘have’ such rights. Thus, any judgment about deontic premises that might be used by a program for evaluating planning arguments would have to be based on information about human judgments that can be found in the data base the program is using. There are areas where this is possible and even plausible. Not only is it prudent to assign a decidedly negative plausibility to deontic claims whose realization contradicts natural laws established by science (and considered still valid…like ‘any being heavier than air can’t fly…’). But there also are human agreements — regulations and laws, and predominant moral codes — that summarily prohibit or mandate certain plans or parts of plans; supported by subsequent arguments to the effect that we all ought not break the law, regardless of our own opinions. This will effectively ‘settle’ some arguments.

And there are various approaches in design and planning that seem to aim at finding — or establishing — enough such mandates or prohibitions that, taken together, would make it possible to ‘mechanically’ determine at least whether a plan is ‘admissible’ or not — e.g. for buildings, whether its developer should get a building permit.

This pattern is supported in theory by modal logic branches that seek to resolve deontic claims on the basis of ‘true/false’ judgments (that must have been made somewhere by some authority) of ‘obligatory’, ‘prohibited’, ‘permissible’ etc. It can be seen to be extended by at last two different ‘movements’ that must be seen as sidestepping the judgment question.

One is the call for society as a whole to adopt (collectively agree upon) moral, ethical codes whose function is equivalent to ‘laws’ — from which the deontic judgment about plans could be derived by mechanically applying the appropriate reasoning steps — invoking ‘Common Good’ mandates supposedly accepted unanimously by everybody. The question whether and how this relates to the principle of granting the ‘right’ of freely holding and happily pursuing one’s own deontic opinions is usually not examined in this context.

Another example is the ‘movement’ of Alexander’s ‘Pattern Language’. Contrary to claims that it is a radically ‘new’ theory, it stands in a long and venerable tradition of many trades and disciplines to establish codes and collections of ‘best practice’ rules of ‘patterns’ — learned by apprentices in years of observing the masters, or compiled in large volumes of proper patterns. The basic idea is that of postulating ‘elements’ (patterns) of the realm of plans, and relationships between these, by means of which plans can be generated. The ‘validity’ or ‘quality’ of the generated plan is then guaranteed by the claim that each of the patterns (rules) are ‘valid’ (‘true’, or having that elusive ‘quality without a name’). This is supported by showing examples of environments judged (by intuition, i.e. needing no further justification) to be exhibiting ‘quality’, by applications of the patterns. The remaining ‘solution space’ left open by e.g. the different combinations of patterns, then serves as the basis for claims that the theory offers ‘participation’ by prospective users. However, it hardly needs pointing out that individual ‘different’ judgments — e.g. based on the appropriateness of a given pattern or relationship — are effectively eliminated by such approaches. (This assessment should not be seen as a wholesale criticism of the approach, whose unquestionable merit is to introduce quality considerations into the discourse about built environment that ‘common practice’ has neglected.)

The relevance of discussing these approaches for the two questions above now becomes clear: If a ‘machine’ (which could of course just be a human, untiringly pedantic bureaucrat assiduously checking plans for adherence to rules or patterns) were able to draw upon a sufficiently comprehensive data base of factual-instrumental knowledge and ‘patterns or rules’, it could conceivably be able to generate solutions. And if the deontic judgments have been inherently attached to those rules, it could claim that no further evaluation (i.e. inconvenient intrusion of differing individual judgments would be necessary.

The development of ‘AI’ tools of automated support for planning discourse — will have to make a choice. It could follow this vision of ‘common good’ and valid truth of solution elements, universally accepted by all members of society. Or it could accept the challenge of a view that it either should refrain from intruding on the task of making judgments, or going to the trouble of obtaining those judgments from human participants in the process, before using them in the task of deriving decisions. Depending on which course is followed, I suspect the agenda and tasks of current and further research and development and programming will be very different. This is, in my opinion, a controversial issue of prime significance.

Levels of assessment depth in planning discourse: A three-tier experimental (‘pilot’) version of a planning discourse support system

Published February 4, 2018 Argument patterns , Design discourse , Evaluation of plans , Public policy discourse , Uncategorized Leave a Comment
Tags: Combining plausibility and quality assessment, Levels of discourse depth

Thorbjoern Mann, February 2018

Overview

A ‘pilot’ version of a needed full scale Planning Discourse Support System (‘PDSS’)
to be run on current social media platforms such as Facebook

The following are suggestions for an experimental application of a ‘pilot’ version of the structured planning discourse platform that should be developed for planning projects with wide public participation, at scales ranging from local issues to global projects.

Currently available platforms do not yet offer all desirable features of a viable PDSS

The eventual ‘global’ platform will require research, development and integrated programming features that current social media platforms do not yet offer. The ‘pilot’ project is aiming at producing adequate material to guide further work and attract support and funding a limited ‘pilot’ version of the eventual platform, that can be run on currently available platforms.

Provisions for realization of key aims of planning: wide participation;
decisions based on merit of discourse contribution;
recognition of contribution merit;
presented as optional add-on features
leading to a three-tier presentation of the pilot platform

One of the key aims of the overall project is the development of a planning process leading to decisions based on the assessed merit of participants’ contributions to the discourse. The procedural provisions for realizing that aim are precisely those that are not supported by current platforms, and will have to be implemented as optional add-on processes (‘special techniques’) by smaller teams, outside of the main discourse. Therefore, the proposal is presented as a set of three optional ‘levels’ of depth of analysis and evaluation. Actual projects may choose the appropriate level inconsideration of the project’s complexity and importance, of the degree of consensus or controversy emerging during the discourse, and the team’s familiarity with the entire approach and the techniques involved.

Contents:
1 General provisions
2 Basic structured discourse
3 Structured discourse with argument plausibility assessment
4 Assessment of plausibility-adjusted Quality assessment
5 Sample ‘procedural’ agreements
6 Possible decision modes based on contribution merit
7 Discourse contribution merit rewards

—-
1 General Provisions

Main (e.g. Facebook) Group Page

Assuming a venue like Facebook, a new ‘group’ page will be opened for the experiment. It will serve as a forum to discuss the approach and platform provisions, and to propose and select ‘projects’ for discussion under the agreed-upon procedures.

Project proposals and selection

Group members can propose ‘projects’ for discussion. To avoid project discussions being overwhelmed by references to previous research and literature, the projects selected for this experiment should be as ‘new’ (‘unprecedented’) and limited in scope as possible. (Regrettably, this will make many urgent and important issues ineligible for selection.)

Separate Project Page for selected projects

For each selected project, a new group page will be opened to ensure sufficient hierarchical organization options within the project. There will be specific designated threads within each group, providing the basic structure of each discourse. A key feature not seen in social media discussions is the ‘Next step’ interruption of the process, in which participants can choose between several options of continuing or ending the process.

Project participants
‘Participants’ in projects will be selected from the number of ‘group members’ having signed up, expressing an interest in participating, and agree to proceed according to the procedural agreements for the project.

Main Process and ‘Special Techniques’

The basic process of project discourse is the same for all three levels; the argument plausibility assessment and project quality assessment procedures are easily added to the simple sequence of steps of the ‘basic’ versions described in section 2.
In previous drafts of the proposal, these assessment tools have been described as ‘special techniques’ that would require provisions of formatting, programming and calculation. For any pilot version, they would have to be conducted by ‘special teams’ outside of the main discourse process. This also applies to the proposed three-level versions and the two additional ‘levels’ of assessment presented here. Smaller ‘special techniques teams’ will have to be designated to work outside of the main group discussion, (e.g. by email); they will report their results back to the main project group for consideration and discussion.

For the first implementation of the pilot experiment, only two such special techniques: the technique of argument plausibility assessment, and the evaluation process for plan proposal ‘quality’ (‘goodness’) are considered; they are seen as key components of the effort to link decisions to the merit of discourse contributions.

—
2 Basic structured discourse

Project selection Group members post suggestions for projects (‘project candidates) on the group’s main ‘bulletin board’. If a candidate is selected, the posting member will act as its ‘facilitator’ or co-facilitator. Selection is done by posting an agreed-upon minimum of ‘likes’ for a project candidate. By posting a ‘like’, group members signal their intention to become ‘project participants’ and actively contribute to the discussion.

Project bulletin page, Project description

For selected projects, a new page serving as introduction and ‘bulletin board’ for the project will be opened. It will contain a description of the project (which will be updated as modifications are agreed upon). For the first pilot exercise, the projects should be an actual plan or action proposals.

Procedural agreements

On a separate thread, a ‘default’ version of procedural agreements will be posted. They may be modified in response to project conditions and expected level of depth, ideally before the discussion starts. The agreements will specify the selection criteria for issues, and the decision modes for reaching recommendations or decisions on the project proposals. (See section 5 for a default set of agreements).

General discussion thread (unstructured)

A ‘General discussion’ thread will be started for the project, inviting comments from all group members. For this thread, there are no special format expectation other than general ‘netiquette’.

Issue candidates
On a ‘bulletin board’ subthread of the project intro thread, participants can propose ‘issue’ or ‘thread’ candidates, about questions or issues that emerge as needing discussion in the ‘general discussion’ thread. Selection will be based on an agreed-upon number of ‘likes, ‘dislikes’ or comments about the respective issue in the ‘general discussion’ thread.

Issue threads: For each selected issue, a separate issue thread will be opened. The questions or claims of issue threads should be stated more specifically in the expectation of clear answers or arguments, and comments should meet those expectations.

It may be helpful to distinguish different types of questions, and their expected responses:

– “Explanatory” questions (Explanations, descriptions, definitions);
– “Factual’ questions (‘Factual’ claims, data, arguments)
– “Instrumental questions” (Instrumental claims” “how to do …”)
– “Deontic” (‘Ought’- questions) (Arguments pro / con proposals)

Links and References thread

Comments containing links and references should provide brief explanations about what positions the link addresses or supports; the links should also be posted on a ‘links and references’ thread.

Visual material: diagrams and maps

Comments can be accompanied by diagrams, maps, photos, or other visual material. Comments should briefly explain the gist of the message supported by the picture. (“What is the ‘argument’ of the image?) For complex discussions, overview ‘maps’ of the evolving network of issues should be posted on the project ‘bulletin’ thread.

‘Next Step?’
Anytime participants sense that the discussion has exhausted itself or needs input of other information or analysis, they can make a motion for a ‘Next step?’ interruption, specifying the suggested next step:

– a decision on the main proposal or a part,
– call for more information, analysis;
– call for a ‘special technique’ (with or without postponement of further discussion)
– call for modifying the proposal, or
– changing procedural rules;
– continuing the discussion or
– dropping the issue, ending the discussion without decision.

These will be decided upon according to the procedural rules ‘currently’ in force.

Decision on the plan proposal

The decision about the proposed plan — or partial decisions about features that should be part of the plan — will be posted on the project’s ‘bulletin board’ thread., together with a brief report. Reports about the process experience, problems and successes, etc. will be of special interest for further development of the tool.

—

3 Structured discourse with argument plausibility assessment

The sequence of steps for the discourse with added argument plausibility assessment is the same as those of the ‘basic’ process described in section 2 above. At each major step, participants can make interim judgments about the plausibility of the proposed plan, (for comparison with later, more deliberated judgments). At each of these steps, there also exists the option of responding to a ‘Next step?’ motion with a decision to cut the process short, based on emerging consensus or other insights such as ‘wrong question’ that suggest dropping the issue. Without these intermediate judgments, the sequence of steps will proceed to construct an overall judgment of proposal plausibility ‘bottom-up-fashion’ from the plausibility judgments of individual argument premises.

Presenting the proposal

The proposal for which the argument assessment is called, is presented and described in as much detail as is available.
(Optional: Before having studied the arguments, participants make first offhand, overall judgments of proposal plausibility Planploo’ on a +1 / -1 scale, (for comparison with later judgments). Group statistics: e.g. GPlanploo’ are calculated (Mean, range…) and examined for consensus or significant differences. )

Displaying all pro/con arguments

The pro / con arguments having been raised about the issue , displayed in the respective ‘issue’ thread, are displayed and studied, if possible with the assistance of ‘issue maps’ showing the emerging network of interrelated issues. (Optional:) Participants assign a second overall offhand plan plausibility judgment: Planploo”, GPlanploo”)

Preparation of formal argument display and worksheets

For the formal argument plausibility assessment, worksheets are prepared that list
a) the deontic premises of each argument (goals, concerns), and
b) the key premises of all arguments ((including those left unstated as ‘taken for granted’)

Assignment of ‘Weights of Relative Importance’ w

Participants assign ‘weights of relative importance’ w to the deontics in list (a), such that 0 ≤ wi ≤ 1, and ∑wi = 1, for all i arguments.

Assignment of premise plausibility judgments prempl to all argument premises

Participants assign plausibility judgments to all argument premises, on a scale of -1 (totally implausible) via 0 –zero – (don’t know) to +1 (totally plausible)

Calculation of Argpl Argument plausibility

For each participant and argument, the ‘Argument plausibility’ Argpl is calculated from the premises plausibility judgments. E,g. Argplod = ∏ (premplj) for all j premises of the argument.

Calculation of Argument Weight Argw

From the argument plausibility judgment s and the weight of the deontic premise for that argument, the ‘weight of the respective argument Argw is calculated. E.g. Argwi = Argplod * wi.

Calculation of Plan plausibility Planpld

The Argument weights Argw of all arguments pro and con are aggregated into the deliberated plan plausibility score Planplod for each participant. E.g. Planpld = ∑(Argwi) for all i arguments.

Calculating group statistics of results

Statistics of the Plan plausibility judgment scores across the group (Mean, Median, Range, Min /Max) are calculated and discussed. Areas of emerging consensus are identified, as well as areas of disagreements of lack of adequate information. The interim judgments designated as ‘optional’ above can serve to illustrate the learning process participants go through.

Argument assessment team develops recommendations for decision or improvement of proposed plan

The argument assessment team reports its findings and analysis, makes recommendations to the entire group in a ‘Next Step?’ deliberation.

—

4 Assessment of plausibility-adjusted plan Quality

Assigning quality judgments

Because pro / con arguments usually refer to the deontic concerns (goals, objectives) in qualitative terms, they do not generally generate adequate information about the actual quality or ‘goodness’ that may be achieved by a plan proposal. A more fine-grain assessment is especially important for the comparison of several proposed plan alternatives. It should be obvious that all predictions about the future performance of plans will be subject to the plausibility qualifications examined in section 3 above. So a goodness or quality assessment may be grafted onto the respective steps of the argument plausibility assessment. The following steps describe one version of the resulting process.

Proposal presentation and first offhand quality judgment

(Optional step:) Upon presentation of a proposal, participants can offer a first overall offhand goodness or quality judgment PlanQoo, e.g. on a +3 / -3 scale, for future comparison with deliberated results.

Listing deontic claims (goals, concerns)

From the pro / con arguments compiled in the argument assessment process (section 3) the goals, concerns (deontic premises) are assembled. These represent ‘goodness evaluation aspects’ against which competing plans will be evaluated.

Adding other aspects not mentioned in arguments

Participants may want to add other ‘standard’ as well as situation-specific aspects that may not have been mentioned in the discussion. (There is no guarantee that all concerns that influence participants’ sense of quality of a plan will actually be brought up and made explicit in a discussion).

Determining criteria (measures of performance) for all aspects

For all aspects, ‘measures of performance’ will be determined that allow assessment about how well a plan will have met the goal or concern. These may be ‘objective’ criteria or more subjective distinctions. For some criteria, ‘criterion functions’ can show how a person’s ‘quality’ score depends on the corresponding criterion.
Example: plan proposals will usually be compared and evaluated according to their
expected ‘cost’; and usually ‘lower cost’ is considered ‘better’ (all else being equal)
than ‘higher cost’. But while participants may agree that ‘zero cost’ would be
best so as to deserve a +3 (couldn’t be better’) score, they can differ significantly
about what level of cost would be ‘acceptable’, and at what level the score should
become negative: Participant x would consider a much higher cost to be still
‘so/so’, or acceptable, than participant o.
+3 –xo————————————————–
+2 ———–o–x—————————————
+1 —————-o—–x——————————-
+/-0 ——————o———x———————–
-1 ———————–o————x—————–
-2 ——————————o———x————-
-3 ——————————————————- ($∞ would be -3 ‘couldn’t be worse’)
$0 | | | | | | | | | > Cost criterion function.

“Weighting’ of aspects, subaspects etc.

The ‘weight’ assignments of aspects (deontics) should correspond to the weighting of deontic premises in the process of argument assessment. However, if more aspects have been added to the aspect list, the ‘weighting’ established in the argument assessment process must be revised: Aspects weights are on a zero to +1 scale, 0 ≤ w ≤ 1 and ∑wi = +1 for all i aspects. For complex plans, the aspect list may have several ‘levels’ and resemble an ‘aspect tree’. The weighing at each level should follow the same rule of 0 ≤ w ≤ 1 and ∑w=1.

Assigning quality judgment scores

Each participant will assign ‘quality’ or ‘goodness’ judgments, on a +3 to -3 scale (+3 meaning ‘could not possibly be better’, -3 ‘couldn’t possibly be worse’, with zero (0) meaning ‘so-so’ or ‘can’t decide’, not applicable) to all aspects / subaspects of the evaluation worksheet, for all competing plan proposals.

Combining quality with plausibility score for a ‘weighted plausibility-adjusted quality score Argqw

Each (partial) quality score q will be combined with the respective argument plausibility score Argpl from the process in section 3, resulting in a ‘weighted plausibility-adjusted quality score’ Argqplwi = Argpli * qi * wi .

Aggregating scores into Plan quality score PlanQ

The weighted partial scores can be aggregated into overall plan quality scores: e.g. :
PlanQ = ∑i (Argqplwi) for all n aspects. or
PlanQ = Min (Argqplw) or
PlanQ = ∏ (Argqpli +3)wi -3
(The appropriateness of these functions for a given case must be discussed!)

Group statistics: GArgqpl and GPlanQ

Like the statistics of the plausibility assessments, statistical analysis of these these scores can be calculated. Whether a resulting measure such as Mean (PlanQ) should be accepted as a ‘group judgment’ is questionable, but such measures can become helpful guides for any decisions the group will have to make. Again, calculation of interim results can provide information about the ‘learning process of team members, ‘weaknesses’ of plans that are responsible for specific poor judgment scores, and guide suggestions for plan improvements.

Team reports results back to main forum

A team report should be prepared for presentation back to the main discussion.

—

5 Sample procedural agreements

The proposed platform aims at facilitating problem-solving, planning, design, policy-making discussions that are expected to result in some form of decision or recommendation to adopt plans for action. To achieve decisions in groups, it is necessary to have some basic agreements as to how those decisions will be determined. Traditional decision modes such as voting are not appropriate for any large asynchronous online process with wide but unspecified participation (Parties affected by proposed plans may be located across traditional voting eligibility boundaries; who are ‘legitimate’ voters?). The proposed approach aims at examining how decisions might be based on the quality of content contributions to the discourse rather than the mere number of voters or supporters.

Default agreements.

The following are proposed ‘default’ agreements; they should be confirmed (or adapted to circumstances) at the outset of a discourse. Later changes should be avoided as much as possible; ‘motions’ for such changes can be made as part of a ‘Next step’ pause in the discussion; they will be decided upon by a agreed upon majority of participants having ‘enlisted’ for the project, or agreements ‘currently’ in place.

Project groups.

Members of the Planning Discourse FB group (Group members) can propose ‘projects’ for discussion on the Main group’s ‘Bulletin Board’ Thread. Authors of group project proposals are assumed to moderate / facilitate the process for that project. Projects are approved for discussion if an appropriate number __ of group members ‘sign up for ‘participation’ in the project.

Project Participants

Project participants are assumed to have read and agreed to these agreements, and expressed willingness to engage in sustained participation. The moderator may choose to limit the number of project participants, to keep the work manageable.

Discussion

Project discussion can be ‘started’ with a Problem Statement, a Plan Proposal, or a general question or issue. The project will be briefly described in the first thread. Another thread labeled ‘Project (or issue) ___ General comments’ will then be set up, for comment on the topic or issue with questions of explanation clarification, re-phrasing, answers, arguments and suggestions for decisions. Links or references should be accompanied by a brief statement of the answer or argument made or supported by the reference.

Candidate Issues

Participants and moderator can suggest candidate issues: potentially controversial questions about which divergent positions and opinions exist or are expected, that should be clarified or settled before a decision is made. These will be listed in the project introduction thread as Candidate Issues. There, participants can enter ‘Likes’ to indicate whether they consider it necessary to ‘raise’ the issue for a detailed discussion. Likely issue candidates are questions about which members have posted significantly different positions in the ‘General comments’ thread; such that the nature of the eventual plan would significantly change depending on which positions are adopted.

‘Raised’ issues

Issue Candidates receiving an agreed upon number of support (likes, or opposing comments, are accepted and labeled as ‘Raised’. Each ‘raised’ issue will then become the subject of a separate thread, where participants post comments (answers, arguments, questions) to that issue.
It will be helpful to clearly identify the type of issue or question, so that posts can be clearly stated (and evaluated) as answers or arguments: for example:
– Explanations, definitions, meaning and details of concepts to ‘Explanatory questions’;
– Statements of ‘facts’ (data, answers, relationship claims) to Factual questions;
– Suggestions for (cause-effect or means to ends) relationships, to Instrumental questions;
– Arguments to deontic (ought-) questions or claims such as ‘Plan A should be adopted’, for example:
‘Yes, because A will bring about B given conditions C , B ought to be pursued, and conditions C are present’).

‘Next step?’ motion

At any time after the discussion has produced some entries, participants or moderator can request a ‘Next Step?’ interruption of the discussion, for example when the flow of comments seems to have dried up and a decision or a more systematic treatment of analysis or evaluation is called for. The ‘Next step’ call should specify the type of next step requested. It will be decided by getting agreed-upon number of ‘likes’ of the total number of participants. A ‘failed’ next step motion will automatically activate the motion of continuing the discussion. Failing that motion or subsequent lack of new posts will end discussion of that issue or project.

Decisions

Decisions (to adopt or reject a plan or proposition) are ‘settled’ by an agreed-upon decision criterion (e.g. vote percentage) total number of participants. The outcome of decisions of ‘next step?’ motions will be recorded in the Introduction thread as Results, whether they lead to an adoption, modification, rejection of the proposed measure or not.

Decision modes

As indicated before, traditional decision modes such as voting, with specified decision criteria such as percentages of ‘legitimate’ participants, are going to be inapplicable for large (global’) planning projects whose affected parties are not determined by e.g. citizenship or residency in defined geometric governance entitites. It is therefore necessary to explore other decision modes using different decision criteria, with the notion of criteria based on the assessed merit of discourse contributions being an obvious choice to replace or complement the ‘democratic’ one-person, one-vote’ principle, or the principle of decisions made by elected representatives (again, by voting.)
Participants are therefore encouraged to explore and adopt alternative decision modes. The assessment procedures in sections 3 and 4 have produced some ‘candidates’ for decision criteria, which cannot at this time be recommended as decisive alternatives to traditional tools, but might serve as guidance results for discussion:
– Group Plan plausibility score GPlanpl;
– Group Quality assessment score GPlanQ
– Group plausibility-adjusted quality score GPlnQpl;
The controversial aspect of all these ‘group scores is the method for deriving these from the respective individual scores.

These measures also provide the opportunity for measuring the degree of improvement achieved by a proposed plan over the ‘initial’ problem situation a plan is expected to remedy: leading to possible decision rules such as that rejecting plans that do not achieve adequate improvement for some participants (people being ‘worse off ‘after plan implementation) or selecting plans that achieve the greatest degree of improvement overall. This of course requires that the existing situation be included in the assessment, as the basis for comparison.

Special techniques

In the ‘basic’ version of the process, no special analysis, solution development, or evaluation procedures are provided, mainly because the FB platform does not easily accommodate the formatting needed. The goal of preparing decisions or recommendations based on contribution merit or assessed quality of solutions may make it necessary to include such tools – especially more systematic evaluation than just reviewing pro and con arguments. If such techniques are called for in a ‘Next step?’ motion, special technique teams must be formed to carry out the work involved and report the result back to the group, followed by a ‘next step’ consideration. The techniques of systematic argument assessment (see section 3) and evaluation of solution ‘goodness’ or ‘quality’ (section 4) are shown as essential tools to achieve decisions based on the merit of discourse contributions above.
Special techniques teams will have to be designated to work on these tasks ‘outside’ of the main discourse; they should be limited to small size, and will require somewhat more special engagement than the regular project participation.
Other special techniques, to be added from the literature or developed by actual project teams, will be added to the ‘manual’ of tools available for projects. The role of techniques for problem analysis, solution idea generation, as well as that of systems modeling and simulation (recognizing the fact that the premise of ‘conditions’ under which the cause-effect assumption of the factual-instrumental premise of planning arguments can be assumed to hold, really will be the assumed state of the entire system (model) of interrelated variables and context conditions; an aspect that has not been adequately dealt with in the literature nor in the practice of systems consulting to planning projects.)

—

6 Decision modes

For the smaller groups likely to be involved in ‘pilot’ applications of the proposed structured discourse ideas described, traditional decision modes such as ‘consensus’, ‘no objection’ to decision motion, or majority voting may well be acceptable because familiar tools. For large scale planning projects spanning many ordinary ‘jurisdictions’ (deriving the legitimacy of decisions from the number of legitimate ‘residents, these modes become meaningless. This calls for different decision modes and criteria: an urgent task that has not received sufficient attention. The following summary only mentions traditional modes for comparison without going into details of their respective merit or demerits, but explores potential decision criteria that are derived from the assessment processes of argument and proposal plausibility, or evaluation of proposal quality, above.

Voting:
Proposals receiving an agreed-upon percentage of approval votes from the body of ‘legitimate’ voters. The approval percentages can range from simple majority, to specified plurality or supermajority such as 2/3 or 3/4 to full ‘consensus’ (which means that a lone dissenter has the equivalent of veto power.) Variations: voting by designated bodies of representatives, determined by elections, or by appointment based on qualifications of training, expertise, etc.

Decision based on meeting (minimum) qualification rules and regulations.
Plans for building projects will traditionally receive ‘approval’ upon review of whether they meet standard ‘regulations’ specified by law. Regulations describe ‘minimum’ expectations mandated by public safety concerns or zoning conventions but don’t address other ‘quality’ concerns. They will lead to ‘automatic’ rejection (e.g. of a building permit application) if only one regulation is not met.

Decision based on specified performance measures
Decision-making groups can decide to select plans based on assessed or calculated ‘performance’. Thus, real estate developers look for plan versions that promise a high return on investment ratio (over a specified) ‘planning horizon’. A well known approach for public projects is the ‘Benefit/Cost’ approach calculating the Benefit minus Cost (B-C) or Benefit-Cost ration B/C (and variations thereof).

Plan proposal plausibility
The argument assessment approach described in section 3 results in (individual) measures of proposal plausibility. For the individual, the resulting proposal plausibility could meaningfully serve as a decision guide: a proposal can be accepted if its plausibility exceeds a certain threshold – e.g. the ‘so-so’-value of ‘zero’ or the plausibility value of the existing situation or ‘do nothing’ option. For a set of competing proposals: select the one with the highest plausibility.

It is tempting but controversial to use statistical aggregation of these pl-measures as group decision criteria; for example, the Mean group plausibility value GPlanpld. For various reasons, (e.g. the issue of overriding minority concerns), this should be resisted. A better approach would be to develop a measure of improvement of pl-conditions for all parties compared to the existing condition, with the proviso that plans resulting in ‘negative improvement’ should be rejected (or modified until showing improvement for all affected parties).

Plausibility-adjusted ‘Quality’ assessment measures.
Similar considerations apply to the measures derived from the approach to evaluate plans for ‘goodness or ‘quality’ but adjust the implied performance claims with the plausibility assessments. The resulting group statistics, again, can guide(but should not in their pure form determine) decisions, especially efforts to modify proposals to achieve better results for all affected parties (the interim results pinpointing the specific areas of potential improvement.

—

7 Contribution merit rewards

The proposal to offer reward points for discourse contributions is strongly suggested for the eventual overall platform but one difficult to implement in the pilot versions (without resorting to additional work and accounting means ‘outside’ of the main discussion). Its potential ‘side benefits’ deserve some consideration even for the ‘pilot’ version.

Participants are awarded ‘basic contribution points’ for entries to the discussion, provided that they are ‘new’ (to the respective discussion) and no mere repetition of entries offering essentially the same content that have already been made. If the discussion later uses assessment methods such as the argument plausibility evaluation, these basic ‘neutral’ credits are then modified by the group’s plausibility or importance assessment results – for example, by simply multiplying the basic credit point (e.g. ‘1’) with the group’s pl-assessment of that claim.

The immediate benefits of this are:
– Such rewards will represent an incentive for participation,
– for speedy assembly of needed information (since delayed entries of the same content will not get credit).
– They help eliminate repetitious comments that often overwhelm many discussions on social media: the same content will only be ‘counted and presented once;
– The prospect of later plausibility or quality assessment by the group – that can turn the credit for an ill-considered, false or insufficiently supported claim into a negative value (by being multiplied by a negative pl-value) – will also discourage contributions of lacking or dubious merit. ‘Troll’ entries will not only occur but once, but will then receive appropriate negative appraisal, and thus discouraged;
– Sincere participants will be encouraged to provide adequate support for their claims.
Together with the increased discipline introduced by the assessment exercises, his can help improve the overall quality of discourse.

Credit point accounts built up in this fashion are of little value if they are not ‘fungible’, that is, have value beyond the participation in the discourse. This may be remedied
a) within the process: by considering their uses to adjust the ‘weight’ of participant’s ‘votes’ or other factors in determining decisions;
b) beyond the process: By using contribution merit accounts as additional signs of qualification for employment or public office. An idea for using such currencies as a means of controlling power has been suggested, acknowledging both that there are public positions calling for ‘fast’ decisions that can’t wait for the outcome of lengthy discussions, and that people are seeking power (‘empowerment’) almost as a kind of human need, but like most other needs we are asked to pay for meeting (in one way or other), introducing a requirement that power decisions will be ‘paid for’ with credit points. (One of the several issues for discussion.)

—ooo—

A hypothetical ‘perfect’ artificial argumentative systems planner — D R A F T

Published July 31, 2017 'Next System' , Argument patterns , Design discourse , Governance , Public policy discourse , Rittel , Systems Modeling , Systems Thinking 1 Comment

A tavern discussion looking at the idea of an artificial planning discourse participant from the perspectives of the argumentative model and the systems thinking perspectives, expanding both (or mutually patching up their shortcomings), and inadvertently stumbling upon potential improvements upon the concept of democracy.

Customers and patron of a fogged-in island tavern with nothing better to do,
awaiting news on progress on the development of a better planning discourse
begin an idly speculative exploration of the idea of an artificial planner:
would such a creature be a better planning discourse participant?

– Hey Bog-Hubert: Early up and testing Vodçeks latest incarnation of café cataluñia forte forte? The Fog Island Tavern mental alarm clock for the difficult-to-wakeup?

– Good morning, professor. Well, have you tried it? Or do you want to walk around in a fogged-in-morning daze for just a while longer?

– Whou-ahmm, sorry. Depends.

– Depends? On what?

– Whether this morning needs my full un-dazed attention yet.

– Makes sense. Okay. Let me ask you a question. I hear you’ve been up in town. Did you run into Abbé Boulah, by any chance? He’s been up there for a while, sorely neglecting his Fog Island Tavern duties here, ostensibly to help his buddy at the university with the work on his proposals for a better planning discourse system. Hey, Sophie: care to join us?

– Okay, good morning to you too. What’s this about a planning system?

– I’m not sure if it’s a ‘system’. I was asking the professor if he has heard whether Abbé Boulah and his buddy have made any progress on that. It’s more like a discourse platform than a ‘system’ – if by ‘system’ you mean something like an artificial planning machine – a robot planner.

– Oh, I’m relieved to hear that.

– Why, Sophie?

– Why? Having a machine make our plans for our future? That would be soo out of touch. Really. Just when we are just beginning to understand that WE have to take charge, to redesign the current ‘MeE’ system, from a new Awareness of the Whole, of our common place on the planet, in the universe, our very survival as a species? That WE have to get out from under that authoritarian, ME-centered linear machine systems thinking, to emerge into a sustainable, regenerative NEW SYSTEM?

– Wow. Sounds like we are in more trouble than I thought. So who’s doing that, how will we get to that New System?

– Hold on, my friends. Lets not get into that New System issue again – haven’t we settled that some time ago here – that we simply don’t know yet what it should be like, and should try to learn more about what works and what doesn’t, before starting another ambitious grand experiment with another flawed theory?

– Okay, Vodçek, good point. But coming to think about it – to get there, — I mean to a better system with a better theory — wouldn’t that require some smart planning? You can’t just rely on everybody coming to that great awareness Sophie is taking about, for everything just to fall into place? So wouldn’t it be interesting to just speculate a bit about what your, I mean Abbé Boulah’s buddy’s planning machine, would have to do to make decent plans?

– You mean the machine he doesn’t, or, according to Sophie, emphatically shouldn’t even think about developing?

– That’s the one.

– Glad we have that cleared up… Well, since we haven’t heard anything new about the latest scandals up in town yet, it might be an interesting way to pass the time.

– Hmm.

– I hear no real objections, just an indecisive Hmm. And no, I don’t have any news from Abbé Boulah either – didn’t see him. He tends to stay out of public view. So it’s agreed. Where do we start?

– Well: how about at the beginning? What triggers a planning project? How does it start?

Initializing triggers for planning?

– Good idea, Sophie. Somebody having a problem – meaning something in the way things are, that are perceived as unsatisfactory, hurtful, ugly, whatever: not the way they ought to be?

– Or: somebody just has a bright idea for doing something new and interesting?

– Or there’s a routine habit or institutional obligation to make preparations for the future – to lay in provisions for a trip, or heating material for the winter?

– Right: there are many different things that could trigger a call for ‘doing something about it’ – a plan. So what would the machine do about that?

– You are assuming that somebody – a human being – is telling the machine to do something? Or are you saying that it could come up with a planning project on its own?

– It would have to be programmed to recognize a discrepancy between what IS and what OUGHT to be, about a problem or need, wouldn’t it? And some human would have had to tell him that. Because it’s never the machine (or the human planner working on behalf of people) hurting if there’s a problem; its only people who have problems.

– So it’s a Him already?

– Easy, Sophie. Okay: A She? You decide. Give her, him, it a name. So we can get on with it.

– Okay. I’d call it the APT – Abominable Planning Thing. And it’s an IT, a neuter.

– APT it is. Nicely ambiguous… For a moment I thought you meant Argumentative Planning Tool. Or Template.

– Let’s assume, for now, that somebody told it about a problem or a bright idea. So what would that APT do?

Ground rules, Principles?
Due consideration of all available information;
Whole system understanding guiding decisions
towards better (or at least not worse) outcomes
for all affected parties

– Wait: Shouldn’t we first find out some ground rules about how it’s going to work? For example, it wouldn’t do to just come up with some random idea and say ‘this is it’?

– Good point. You have any such ground rules in mind, professor?

– Sure. I think one principle is that it should try to gather and ‘duly consider’ ALL pertinent information that is available about the problem situation. Ideally. Don’t you agree, Sophie? Get the WHOLE picture? Wasn’t that part of the agenda you mentioned?

– Sounds good, professor. But is it enough to just ‘have’ all the information? Didn’t someone give a good description of the difference between ‘data’ (just givens, messages, numbers etc) and ‘information’ – the process of data changing someone’s stat of knowledge, insight, understanding?

– No, you are right. There must be adequate UNDERSTANDING – of what it means and how it all is related.

– I see a hot discussion coming up about what that really means: ‘understanding’… But go on.

– Well, next: wouldn’t we expect that there needs to be a process of developing or drawing a SOLUTION or a proposed PLAN – or several – from that understanding? Not just from the stupid data?

– Det er da svœrt så fordringfull du er idag, Sophie: Now you are getting astoundingly demanding here. Solutions based on understanding?

– Oh, quit your Norwegian bickering. I’ll do even more demanding: Mustn’t there be a way to CONNECT all that understanding, all the concerns, data, facts, arguments, with any proposed DECISION, especially the final one that leads to action, implementation. If we ever get to that?

– Are you considering that all the affected folks will expect that the decision should end up making things BETTER for them? Or at least not WORSE than before? Would that be one of your ground rules?

– Don’t get greedy here, Vodçek. The good old conservative way is to ask some poor slobs to make some heroic Sacrifices for the Common Good. “mourir pour des idées, d’accord, mais de mort lente…” as George Brassens complains. But you are right: ideally, that would be a good way to put the purpose of the effort.

– All right, we have some first principles or expectations. We’ll probably add some more of those along the way, but I’d say it’s enough for a start. So what would our APT gizmo do to get things moving?

Obtaining information
Sources?

– I’d say it would start to inquire and assemble information about the problem’s IS state, first. Where is the problem, who’s hurting and how, etc. What caused it? Are there any ideas for how to fix it? What would be the OUGHT part — of the problem as well as a bright idea as the starting point?

– Sounds good, Bog-Hubert. Get the data. I guess there will be cases where the process actually starts with somebody having a bright idea for a solution. But that’s a piece of data too, put it in the pile. Where would it get all that information?

– Many sources, I guess. First: from whoever is hurting or affected in any way.

– By the problem, Vodçek? Or the solutions?

– Uh, I guess both. But what if there aren’t any solutions proposed yet?

– It means that the APT will have to check and re-check that whenever someone proposes a solution — throughout the whole process, doesn’t it? It’s not enough to run a single first survey of citizen preferences, like they usually do to piously meet the mandate for ‘citizen participation’. Information gathering, research, re-research, analysis will accompany the whole process.

– Okay. It’s a machine, it won’t get tired of repeated tasks.

– Ever heard of devices overheating, eh? But to go on, there will be experts on the particular kind of problem. There’ll be documented research, case studies from similar events, the textbooks, newspapers, letters to the editor, petitions, the internet. The APT would have to go through everything. And I guess there might have to be some actual ‘observation’, data gathering, measurements.

Distinctions, meaning
Understanding

– So now it has a bunch of stuff in its memory. Doesn’t it have to sort it somehow, so it can begin to do some real work on it?

– You don’t think gathering that information is work, Sophie?

– Sure, but just a bunch of megabytes of stuff… what would it do with it? Don’t tell me it can magically pull the solution from that pile of data!

– Right. Some seem to think they can… But you’ll have to admit that having all the information is part of the answer to our first expectation: to consider ALL available information. The WHOLE thing, remember? The venerable Systems Thinking idea?

– Okay. If you say so. So what to you mean by ‘consider’ – or ‘due consideration’? Just staring at the pile of data until understanding blossoms in your minds and the solution jumps out at you like the bikini-clad girl out of the convention cake? Or Aphrodite rising out of the data ocean?

– You are right. You need to make some distinctions, sort out things. What you have now, at best, are a bunch of concepts, vague, undefined ideas. The kind of ‘tags’ you use to google stuff.

– Yeah. Your argumentation buddy would say you’d have to ask for explanations of those tags – making sure it’s clear what they mean, right?

– Yes. Now he’d also make the distinction that some of the data are actual claims about the situation. Of different types: ‘fact’-claims about the current situation; ‘ought’ claims about what people feel the solution should be. Claims of ‘instrumental’ knowledge about what caused things to become what they are, and thus what will happen when we do this or that: connecting some action on a concept x with another concept ‘y’ – an effect. Useful when we are looking for x’s to achieve desired ‘y’s that we want – the ‘ought’ ideas – or avoid the proverbial ‘unexpected / undesirable’ side-and after-effect surprises of our grand plans: ‘How’ to do things.

– You’re getting there. But some of the information will also consist of several claims arranged into arguments. Like: “Yes, we should do ‘x’ (as part of the plan) because it will lead to ‘y’, and ‘y’ ought to be…” And counterarguments: “No, we shouldn’t do ‘x’ because x will cause ‘z’ which ought not to be.”

– Right. You’ve been listening to Abbé Boulah’s buddy’s argumentative stories, I can tell. Or even reading Rittel? Yes, there will be differences of opinion – not only about what ought to be, but about what we should do to get what we want, about what causes what, even about what Is the case. Is there an old sinkhole on the proposed construction site? And if so, where? That kind of issue. And different opinions about those, too. So the data pile will contain a lot of contradictory claims of all kinds. Which means, for one thing, that we, –even Spock’s relative APT — can’t draw any deductively valid conclusions from contradictory items in the data. ‘Ex contradictio sequitur quodlibet’, remember – from a contradiction you can conclude anything whatever. So APT can’t be a reliable ‘artificial intelligence’ or ‘expert system’ that gives you answers you can trust to be correct. We discussed that too once, didn’t we – there was an old conference paper from the 1990s about it. Remember?

– But don’t we argue about contradictory opinions all the time – and draw conclusions about them too?
– Sure. Living recklessly, eh? All the time, and especially in planning and policy-making. But it means that we can’t expect to draw ‘valid’ conclusions that are ‘true or false’, from our planning arguments. Just more or less plausible. Or ‘probable’ – for claims that are appropriately labeled that way.

Systems Thinking perspective
Versus Argumentative Model of Planning?

– Wait. What about the ‘Systems Thinking’ perspective — systems modeling and simulation? Isn’t that a better way to meet the expectation of ‘due consideration’ of the ‘whole system’? So should the APT develop a systems model from the information it collected?

– Glad you brought that up, Vodçek. Yes, it’s claimed to be the best available foundation for dealing with our challenges. So what would that mean for our APT? Is it going to have a split robopersonality between Systems and the Argumentative Model?

– Let’s look at both and see? There are several levels we can distinguish there. The main tenets of the systems approach have to do with the relationships between the different parts of a system – a system is a set of parts or entities, components, that are related in different ways – some say that ‘everything is connected / related to everything else’ – but a systems modeler will focus on the most significant relationships, and try to identify the ‘loops’ in that network of relationships. Those are the ones that will cause the system to behave in ways that can’t be predicted from the relationships between any of the individual pairs of entities in the network. Complexity; nonlinearity. Emergence.

– Wow. You’re throwing a lot of fancy words around there!

– Sorry, Renfroe; good morning, I didn’t see you come in. Doing okay?

– Yeah, thanks. Didn’t get hit by a nonlinearity, so far. This a dangerous place now, for that kind of thing?

– Not if you don’t put too much brandy in that café cataluñia Vodçek is brewing here.

– Hey, lets’ get back to your systems model. Can you explain it in less nonlinear terms?

– Sure, Sophie. Basically, you take all the significant concepts you’ve found, put them into a diagram, a map, and draw the relationships between them. For example, cause-effect relationships; meaning increasing ‘x’ will cause an increase in ‘y’. Many people think that fixing a system can best be done by identifying the causes that brought the state of affairs about that we now see as a problem. This will add a number or new variables to the diagram, to the ‘understanding’ of the problem.

– They also look for the presence of ‘loops’ in the diagram, don’t they? – Where cause-effect chains come back to previous variables.

– Right, Vodçek. This is an improvement over a simple listing of all the pro and con arguments, for example – they also talk about relationships x – y, but only one at a time, so you don’t easily see the whole network, and the loops, in the network. So if you are after ‘understanding the system’, seeing the network of relationships will be helpful. To get a sense of its complexity and nonlinearity.

– I think I understand: you understand a system when you recognize that it’s so loopy and complex and nonlinear that its behavior can’t be predicted so it can’t be understood?

– Renfroe… Professor, can you straighten him out?

– Sounds to me like he’s got it right on, Sophie. Going on: Of course, to be really helpful, the systems modeler will tell you that you should find a way to measure each concept, that is, find a variable – a property of the system that can be measures with precise units.

– What’s the purpose of that, other than making it look more scientific?

– Well, Renfroe, remember the starting point, the problem situation. Oh, wait, you weren’t here yet. Okay; say there’s a problem. We described it as a discrepancy between what somebody feels Is the case and what Ought to be. Somebody complains about it being too hot in here. Now just saying: ‘it’s too hot; it ought to be cooler’, is a starting point, but in order to become useful, you need to be able to say just what you mean by ‘cooler’. See, you are stating the Is/Ought problem in terms of the same variable ‘temperature’. So too even see the difference between Is and Ought, you have to point to the levels of each. 85 degrees F? Too hot. Better: cool it to 72. Different degrees or numbers on the temperature scale.

– Get it. So now we have numbers, math in the system. Great. Just what we need. This early in the morning, too.

– I was afraid of that too. It’s bound to get worse…nonlinear. So in the argumentative approach – the arguments don’t show that? Is that good or bad?

– Good question. Of course you can get to that level, if you bug them enough. Just keep asking more specific questions.

– Aren’t there issues where degrees of variables are not important, or where variables have only two values: Present or not present? Remember that the argumentative model came out of architectural and environmental design, where the main concerns were whether or not to provide some feature: ‘should the entrance to the building be from the east, yes or no?’ or ‘Should the building structure be of steel or concrete?’ Those ‘conceptual’ planning decisions could often be handled without getting into degrees of variables. The decision to go with steel could be reached just with the argument that steel would be faster and cheaper than concrete, even before knowing just by how much. The arguments and the decision were then mainly yes or no decisions.

– Good points, Vodçek. Fine-tuning, or what they call ‘parametric’ planning comes later, and could of course cause much bickering, but doesn’t usually change the nature of the main design that much. Just its quality and cost…

Time
Simulation of systems behavior

– Right. And they also didn’t have to worry too much about the development of systems over time. A building, once finished, will usually stay that way for a good while. But for policies that would guide societal developments or economies, the variables people were concerned about will change considerably over time, so more prediction is called for, trying to beat complexity.

– I knew it, I knew it: time’s the culprit, the snake in the woodpile. I never could keep track of time…

– Renfroe… You just forget winding up your old alarm clock. Now, where were we? Okay: In order to use the model to make predictions about what will happen, you have to allocate each relationship step to some small time unit: x to y during the first time unit; y to z in the second, and so on. This will allow you to track the behavior of the variables of the system over time, give some initial setting, and make predictions about the likely effects of your plans. The APT computer can quickly calculate predictions for a variety of planning options.

– I’ve seen some such simulation predictions, yes. Amazing. But I’ve always wondered how they can make such precise forecasts – those fine crisp lines over several decades: how do they do that, when for example our meteorologists can only make forecasts of hurricane tracks of a few days only, tracks that get wider like a fat trumpet in just a few days? Are those guys pulling a fast one?

– Good point. The answer is that each simulation only shows the calculated result of one specific set of initial conditions and settings of relationships equations. If you make many forecasts with different numbers, and put them all on the same graph, you’d get the same kind of trumpet track. Or even a wild spaghetti plate of tracks.

– I am beginning to see why those ‘free market’ economists had such an advantage over people who wanted to gain some control of the economy. They just said: the market is unpredictable. It’s pointless to make big government plans and laws and regulations. Just get rid of all the regulations, let the free market play it out. It will control and adapt and balance itself by supply and demand and competition and creativity.

– Yeah, and if something goes wrong, blame it on the remaining regulations of big bad government. Diabolically smart and devious.

– But they do appreciate government research grants, don’t they? Wait. They get them from the companies that just want to get rid of some more regulations. Or from think tanks financed by those companies.

– Hey, this is irresponsibly interesting but way off our topic, wouldn’t you say?

– Right, Vodçek. Are you worried about some government regulation – say, about the fireworks involved in your café catastrofia? But okay. Back to the issue.

– So, to at least try to be less irresponsible, our APT thing would have systems models and be able to run simulations. A simulation, if I understand what you were saying, would show how the different variables in the system would change over time, for some assumed initial setting of those variables. That initial setting would be different from the ‘current’ situation, though, wouldn’t it? So where does the proposed solution in the systems model come from? Where are the arguments? Does the model diagram show what we want to achieve? Or just the ‘current state’?

Representation of plan proposals
and arguments in the systems model?
Leverage points

– Good questions, all. They touch on some critical problems with the systems perspective. Let’s take one at a time. You are right: the usual systems model does not show a picture of a proposed solution. To do that, I think we’ll have to expand a little upon our description of a plan: Would you agree that a plan involves some actions by some actors, using some resources acting upon specific variables in the system? Usually not just one variable but several. So a plan would be described by those variables, and the additional concepts of actions, actor, resources etc. Besides the usual sources of plans, — somebody’s ‘brilliant idea’, some result of a team brainstorming session, or just an adaptation of a precedent, a ‘tried and true’ known solution with a little new twist, — the systems modeler may have played around with his model and identified some ‘leverage points’ in the system – variables where modest and easy-to-do changes can bring about significant improvement elsewhere in the system: those are suggested starting points for solution ideas.

– So you are saying that the systems tinkerer should get with it and add all the additional solution description to the diagram?

– Yes. And that would raise some new questions. What are those resources needed for the solution? Where would they come from, are they available? What will they cost? And more: wouldn’t just getting all that together cause some new effects, consequences, that weren’t in the original data collection, and that some other people than those who originally voiced their concerns about the problem would now be worried about? So your data collection component will have to go back to do some more collecting. Each new solution idea will need its own new set of information.

– There goes your orderly systematic procedure all right. That may go on for quite some time, eh?

– Right. Back and forth, if you want to be thorough. ‘Parallel processing’. And it will generate more arguments that will have to be considered, with questions about how plausible the relationship links are, how plausible the concerns about the effects – the desirable / undesirable outcomes. More work. So it will often be shouted down with the usual cries of ‘analysis paralysis’.

Intelligent analysis of data:
Generating ‘new’ arguments?

– Coming to think of it: if our APT has stored all the different claims it has found – in the literature, the textbooks, previous cases, and in the ongoing discussions, would it be able to construct ‘new’ arguments from those? Arguments the actual participants haven’t thought about?

– Interesting idea, Bog-Hubert. – It’s not even too difficult. I actually heard our friend Dexter explain that recently. It would take the common argument patterns – like the ones we looked at – and put claim after claim into them, to see how they fit: all the if-then connections to a proposal claim would generate more arguments for and against the proposal. Start looking at an ‘x’ claim of the proposal. Then search for (‘google’) ‘x→ ?’: any ‘y’s in the data that have been cited as ‘caused by x’. If a ‘y’ you found was expressed somewhere else as ‘desirable or undesirable’ – as a deontic claim, — it makes an instant ‘new’ potential argument. Of course, whether it would work as a ‘pro’ or a ‘con’ argument in some participant’s mind would depend on how that participant feels about the various premises.

– What are you saying, professor? This doesn’t make sense. A ‘pro’ argument is a ‘pro’ argument, and ‘con’ argument is a ‘con’ argument. Now you’re saying it depends on the listener?

– Precisely. I know some people don’t like this. But consider an example. People are discussing a plan P; somebody A makes what he thinks is a ‘pro’ argument: “Let’s do P because P will produce Q; and Q is desirable, isn’t it?” Okay, for A it is a pro argument, no question. Positive plausibility, he assumes, for P→Q as well as for Q; so it would get positive plausibility pl for P. Now for curmudgeon B, who would also like to achieve Q but is adamant that P→Q won’t work, (getting a negative pl) that set of premises would produce a negative pl for P, wouldn’t it? Similarly, for his neighbor C, who would hate for Q to become true, but thinks that P→Q will do just that, that same set of premises also is a ‘con’ argument.

– So what you’re saying is that all the programs out there, that show ‘dialogue maps’ identifying all arguments as pro or con, as they were intended by their authors, are patently ignoring the real nature and effects of arguments?

– I know some people have been shocked – shocked — by these heretical opinions – they have been written up. But I haven’t seen any serious rebuttals; those companies, if they have heard of them have chosen to ignore them. Haven’t changed their evil ways though…

– So our devious APT could be programmed to produce new arguments. More arguments. Just what we need. The arguments can be added to the argument list, but I was going to ask you before: how would the deontic claims, the ‘oughts’, be shown in the model?

– You’d have to add another bubble to each variable bubble, right? Now, we have the variable itself, the value of each variable in the current IS condition, the value of the variable if it’s part of a plan intervention, and the desired value – hey: at what time?

– You had to put the finger on the sore spot, Vodçek. Bad boy. Not only does this make the diagram a lot less clean, simple, and legible. Harder to understand. And showing what somebody means by saying what the solution ought to achieve, when all the variables are changing over time, now becomes a real challenge. Can you realistically expect that a desired variable should stay ‘stable’ at one desired value all the time, after the solution is implemented? Or would people settle for something like: remaining within a range of acceptable values? Or, if a disturbance has occurred, return to a desired value after some reasonably short specified time?

– I see the problem here. Couldn’t the diagram at least show the central desired value, and then let people judge whether a given solution comes close enough to be acceptable?

– Remember that we might be talking about a large number of variables that represent measures of how well all the different concerns have been met by a proposed solution. But if you don’t mind complex diagrams, you could add anything to the systems model. Or you can use several diagrams. Understanding can require some work, not just sudden ‘aha!’ enlightenment.

Certainty about arguments and predictions
Truth, probability, plausibility and relative importance of claims

– And we haven’t even talked about the question of how sure we can be that a solution will actually achieve a desired result.

– I remember our argumentative friends at least claimed to have a way to calculate the plausibility of a plan proposal based on the plausibility of each argument and the weight of relative importance of each deontic, each ought concern. Would that help?

– Wait, Bog-hubert: how does that work, again? Can you give us the short explanation? I know you guys talked about that before, but…

– Okay, Sophie: The idea is this: a person would express how plausible she thinks each of the premises of an argument are. On some plausibility scale of, say +1 which means ‘totally plausible’, to -1 which means ‘totally implausible; with a midpoint zero meaning ‘don’t know, can’t tell’. These plausibility values together will then give you an ‘argument plausibility’ – on the same scale, either by multiplying them or taking the lowest score as the overall result. The weakest link in the chain, remember. Then: multiplying that plausibility with the weight of relative importance of the ought- premise in the argument, which is a value between zero and +1 such that all the weights of all the ‘oughts’ in all the arguments about the proposal will add up to +1. That will give you the ‘argument weight’ of each argument; and all the argument weights together will give you the proposal plausibility – again, on the same scale of +1 to -1, so you’d know what the score means. A value higher than zero means it’s somewhat plausible; a value lower than zero and close to -1 means it’ so implausible that it should not be implemented. But we aren’t saying that this plausibility could be used as the final decision measure.

– Yeah, I remember now. So that would have to be added to the systems model as well?

– Yes, of course – but I have never seen one that does that yet.

‘Goodness’ of solutions
not just plausibility?

– But is that all? I mean: ‘plausibility’ is fine. If there are several proposals to compare: is plausibility the appropriate measure? It doesn’t really tell me how good the plan outcome will be? Even comparing a proposed solution to the current situation: wouldn’t the current situation come up with a higher plausibility — simply because it’s already there?

– You’ve got a point there. Hmm. Let me think. You have just pointed out that both these illustrious approaches – the argumentative model, at last as we have discussed it so far, as well as the systems perspective, for all its glory, have both grievously sidestepped the question of what makes a solution, a systems intervention ‘good’ or bad’. The argument assessment work, because it was just focused on the plausibility of arguments; as the first necessary step that had not been looked at yet. And the systems modeling focusing on the intricacies of the model relations and simulation, leaving the decision and its preparatory evaluation, if any, to the ‘client.’ Fair enough; they are both meritorious efforts, but it leaves both approaches rather incomplete. Not really justifying the claims of being THE ultimate tools to crack the wicked problems of the world. It makes you wonder: why didn’t anybody call the various authors on this?

– But haven’t there long been methods, procedures for people to evaluate to the presumed ‘goodness’ of plans? Why wouldn’t they have been added to either approach?

– They have, just as separate, detached and not really integrated extra techniques. Added, cumbersome complications, because they represent additional effort and preparation, even for small groups. And never even envisaged for large public discussions.

– So would you say there are ways to add the ‘goodness’ evaluation into the mix? We’ve already brought systems and arguments closer together? You say there are already tools for doing that?

– Yes, there are. For example, as part of a ‘formal’ evaluation procedure, you can ask people to explain the basis of their ‘goodness’ judgment about a proposed solution by specifying a ‘criterion function’ that shows how that judgment depends on the values of a system variable. The graph of it looks like this: On one axis it would have positive (‘like’, ‘good’, desirable’) judgment values on the positive side, and ‘dislike’, ‘bad’, ‘undesirable ‘ values on the negative one, with a midpoint of ‘neither good nor bad’ or ‘can’t decide’. And the specific system variable on the other axis, for example that temperature scale from our example a while ago. So by drawing a line in the graph that touches the ‘best possible’ judgment score at the person’s most comfortable temperature, and curves down towards ‘so-so, and down to ‘very bad’ and ultimately ‘intolerable’, couldn’t get worse’, a person could ‘explain’ the ‘objective’, measurable basis of her subjective goodness.

– But that’s just one judgment out of many others she’d have to make about all the other system variables that have been declared ‘deontic’ targets? How would you get to an overall judgment about the whole plan proposal?

– There are ways to ‘aggregate’ all those partial judgments into an overall deliberated judgment. All worked out in the old papers describing the procedure. I can show you that if you want. But that’s not the real problem here – you don’t see it?

– Huh?

The problem of ‘aggregation’

of many different personal, subjective judgments
into group or collective decision guides

– Well, tell me this, professor: would our APTamajig have the APTitude to make all those judgments?

– Sorry, Bog-Hubert: No. Those judgments would be judgments of real persons. The APT machine would have to get those judgments from all the people involved.

– That’s just too complicated. Forget it.

– Well, commissioner, — you’ve been too quiet here all this time – remember: the expectation was to make the decision based on ‘due consideration’ of all concerns. Of everybody affected?

– Yes, of course. Everybody has the right to have his or her concerns considered.

– So wouldn’t ‘knowing and understanding the whole system’ include knowing how everybody affected feels about those concerns? Wasn’t that, in a sense, part of your oath of office, to serve all members of the public to the best of your knowledge and abilities? So now we have a way to express that, you don’t want to know about that because it’s ‘too complicated?

– Cut the poor commissioner some slack: the systems displays would get extremely crowded trying to show all that. And adding all that detail will not really convey much insight.

– It would, professor, if the way that it’s being sidestepped wasn’t actually a little more tricky, almost deceptive. Commissioner, you guys have some systems experts on your staff, don’t you? So where do they get those pristine performance track printouts of their simulation models?

– Ah. Huh. Well, that question never came up.

– But you are very concerned about public opinion, aren’t you? The polls, your user preference surveys?

– Oh, yeah: that’s a different department – the PR staff. Yes, they get the Big Data about public opinions. Doing a terrific job at it too, and we do pay close attention to that.

– But – judging just from the few incidents in which I have been contacted by folks with such surveys – those are just asking general questions, like ‘How important is it to attract new businesses to the city?’ Nobody has ever asked me to do anything like those criterion functions the professor was talking about. So if you’re not getting that: what’s the basis for your staff recommendations about which new plan you should vote for?

– Best current practice: we have those general criteria, like growth rate, local or regional product, the usual economic indicators.

– Well, isn’t that the big problem with those systems models? They have to assume some performance measure to make a recommendation. And that is usually one very general aggregate measure – like the quarterly profit for companies. Or your Gross National Product, for countries. The one all the critics now are attacking, for good reasons, I’d say, — but then they just suggest another big aggregate measure that nobody really can be against – like Gross National Happiness or similar well-intentioned measures. Sustainability. Systemicity. Whatever that means.

– Well, what’s wrong with those? Are you fixin’ to join the climate change denier crowd?

– No, Renfroe. The problem with those measures is that they assume that all issues have been settled, all arguments resolved. But the reality is that people still do have differences of opinions, there will still be costs as well as benefits for all plans, and those are all too often not fairly distributed. The big single measure, whatever it is, only hides the disagreements and the concerns of those who have to bear more of the costs. Getting shafted in the name of overall social benefits.

Alternative criteria to guide decisions?

– So what do you think should be done about that? And what about our poor APT? It sounds like most of the really important stuff is about judgments it isn’t allowed or able to make? Would even a professional planner named APT – ‘Jonathan Beaujardin APT, Ph.D M.WQ, IDC’ — with the same smarts as the machine, not be allowed to make such judgments?

– As a person, an affected and concerned citizen, he’d have the same right as everybody else to express his opinions, and bring them into the process. As a planner, no. Not claiming to judge ‘on behalf’ of citizens – unless they have explicitly directed him to do that, and told him how… But now the good Commissioner says he wouldn’t even need to understand his own basis of judgment, much less make it count in the decision?

– Gee. That really explains a lot.

– Putting it differently: Any machine – or any human planner, for that matter, however much they try to be ‘perfect’ – trying to make those judgments ‘on behalf’ of other people, is not only imperfect but wrong, unless it has somehow obtained knowledge about those feelings about good or bad of others, and has found an acceptable way of reconciling the differences into some overall common ‘goodness’ measure. Some people will argue that there isn’t any such thing: judgments about ‘good or ‘bad’ are individual, subjective judgments; they will differ, there’s no method by which those individual judgments can be aggregated into a ‘group’ judgment that wouldn’t end up taking sides, one way or the other.

– You are a miserable spoilsport, Bog-Hubert. Worse than Abbé Boulah! He probably would say that coming to know good and bad, or rather thinking that you can make meaningful judgments about good or bad IS the original SIN.

– I thought he’s been excommunicated, Vodçek? So does he have any business saying anything like that? Don’t put words in his mouth when he’s not here to spit them back at you. Still, even if Bog-Hubert is right: if that APT is a machine that can process all kinds of information faster and more accurate than humans, isn’t there anything it can do to actually help the planning process?

– Yes, Sophie, I can see a number of things that can be done, and might help.

– Let’s hear it.

– Okay. We were assuming that APT is a kind of half-breed argumentative-systems creature, except we have seen that it can’t make up either new claims nor plausibility nor goodness judgments on its own. It must get them from humans; only then can it use them for things like making new arguments. If it does that, — it may take some bribery to get everybody to make and give those judgments, mind you – it can of course store them, analyze them, and come up with all kinds of statistics about them.
One kind of information I’d find useful would be to find out exactly where people disagree, and how much, and for what reasons. I mean, people argue against a policy for different reasons – one because he doesn’t believe that the policy will be effective in achieving the desired goal – the deontic premise that he agrees with – and the other because she disagrees with the goal.

– I see: Some people disagree with the US health plan they call ‘Obamacare’ because they genuinely think it has some flaws that need correcting, and perhaps with good reasons. But others can’t even name any such flaws and just rail against it, calling it a disaster or a trainwreck etc. because, when you strip away all the reasons they can’t substantiate, simply because it’s Obama’s.

– Are you saying Obama should have called it Romneycare, since it was alleged to be very similar to what Romney did in Massachusetts when he was governor there? Might have gotten some GOP support?

– Let’s not get into that quarrgument here, guys. Not healthy. Stay with the topic. So our APT would be able to identify those differences, and other discourse features that might help decide what to do next – get more information, do some more discussion, another analysis, whatever. But so far, its systems alter ego hasn’t been able to show any of that in the systems model diagram, to make that part of holistic information visible to the other participants in the discourse.

– Wouldn’t that require that it become fully conscious of its own calculations, first?

– Interesting question, Sophie. Conscious. Hmm. Yes: my old car wouldn’t show me a lot of things on the dashboard that were potential problems – whether a tire was slowly going flat or the left rear turn indicator was out – so you could say it wasn’t aware enough, — even ‘conscious?’ — of those things to let me know. The Commissioner’s new car does some of that, I think. Of course my old one could be very much aware but just ornery enough to leave me in the dark about them; we’ll never know, eh?

– Who was complaining about running off the topic road here just a while ago?

– You’re right, Vodçek: sorry. The issue is whether and how the system could produce a useful display of those findings. I don’t think it’s a fundamental problem, just work to do. My guess is that all that would need several different maps or diagrams.

Discourse –based criteria guiding collective decisions?

– So let’s assume that not only all those judgments could be gathered, stored, analyzed and the results displayed in a useful manner. All those individual judgments, the many plausibility and judgment scores and the resulting overall plan plausibility and ‘goodness’ judgments. What’s still open is this: how should those determine or at least guide the overall group’s decision? In a way that makes it visible that all aspects, all concerns were ‘duly considered’, and ending up in a result that does not make some participants feel that their concerns were neglected or ignored, and that the result is – if not ‘the very best we could come up with’ then at least somewhat better than the current situation and not worse for anybody?

– Your list of aspects there already throws out a number of familiar decision-making procedures, my friend. Leaving the decision to authority, which is what the systems folks have cowardly done, working for some corporate client, (who also determines the overall ‘common good’ priorities for a project, that will be understood to rank higher than any individual concerns) – that’s out. Not even pretending to be transparent or connected to the concerns expressed in the elaborate process. Even traditional voting, that has been accepted as the most ‘democratic’ method, for all its flaws. Out. And don’t even mention ‘consensus’ or the facile ‘no objection?‘ version. What could our APT possibly produce that can replace those tools? Do we have any candidate tools?

– If you already concede that ‘optimal’ solutions are unrealistic and we have to make do with ‘not worse – would it make sense to examine possible adaptations to one of the familiar techniques?

– It may come to that if we don’t find anything better – but I’d say let’s look at the possibilities for alternatives in the ideas we just discussed, first? I don’t feel like going through the pros and cons about our current tools. It’s been done.

– Okay, professor: Could our APT develop a performance measure made up of the final scores of the measures we have developed? Say, the overall goodness score modified by the overall plausibility score a plan proposal achieved?

– Sounds promising.

– Hold your horses, folks. It sounds good for individual judgment scores – may even tell a person whether she ought to vote yes or no on a plan – but how would you concoct a group measure from all that – especially in the kind of public asynchronous discourse we have in mind? Where we don’t even know what segment of the whole population is represented by the participants in the discourse and its cumbersome exercises, and how they relate to the whole public populations for the issue at hand?
– Hmm. You got some more of that café catawhatnot, Vodçek?

– Sure – question got you flummoxed?

– Well, looks like we’ll have to think for a while. Think it might help?

– What an extraordinary concept!

– Light your Fundador already, Vodçek, and quit being obnoxious!

– Okay, you guys. Lets examine the options. The idea you mentioned, Bog-Hubert, was to combine the goodness score and the plausibility score for a plan. We could do that for any number of competing plan alternatives, too.

– It was actually an idea I got from Abbé Boulah some time ago. At the time I just didn’t get its significance.

– Abbé Boulah? Let’s drink to his health. So we have the individual scores: the problem is to get some kind of group score from them. The mean – the average – of those scores is one; we discussed the problems with the mean many times here, didn’t we? It obscures the way the scores are distributed on the scale: you get the same result from a bunch of scores tightly grouped around that average as you’d get from two groups of extreme scores at opposite ends of the scale. Can’t see the differences of opinion.

– That can be somewhat improved upon if you calculate the variance – it measures the extent of disagreement among the scores. So if you get two alternatives with the same mean, the one with the lower variance will be the less controversial one. The range is a crude version of the same idea – just take the difference between the highest and the lowest score; the better solution is the one with a smaller range.

– What if there’s only one proposal?

– Well, hmm; I guess you’d have to look at the scores and decide if it’s good enough.

– Let’s go back to what we tried to do – the criteria for the whole effort: wasn’t there something about making sure that nobody ends up in worse shape in the end?

– Brilliant, Sophie – I see what you are suggesting. Look at the lowest scores in the result and check whether they are lower or higher than, than …

– Than what, Bog-Hubert?

– Let me think, let me think. If we had a score for the assessment of the initial condition for everybody (or for the outcome that would occur if the problem isn’t taken care of) then an acceptable solution would simply have to show a higher score than that initial assessment, for everybody. Right? The higher the difference, even something like the average, the better.

– Unusual idea. But if we don’t have the initial score?

– I guess we’d have to set some target threshold for any lowest score – no lower than zero (not good, not bad) or at least a + 0.5 on a +2/-2 goodness scale, for the worst-off participant score? That would be one way to take care of the worst-off affected folks. The better-off people couldn’t complain, because they are doing better, according to their own judgment. And we’d have made sure that the worst-off outcomes aren’t all that bad.

– You’re talking as if ‘we’ or that APT thing is already set up and doing all that. The old Norwegian farmer’s rule says: Don’t sell the hide before the bear is shot! It isn’t that easy though, is it? Wouldn’t we need a whole new department, office, or institution to run those processes for all the plans in a society?

– You have a point there, Vodçek. A new branch of government? Well now that you open that Pandora’s box: yes, there’s something missing in the balance.

– What in three twisters name are you talking about, Bog-Hubert?

– Well, Sophie. We’ve been talking about the pros and cons of plans. In government, I mean the legislative branch that makes the laws, that’s what the parties do, right? Now look at the judicial branch. There, too, they are arguing – prosecutor versus defense attorney – like the parties in the House and Senate. But then there’s a judge and the jury: they are looking at the pros and cons of both sides, and they make the decision. Where is that jury or judge ‘institution’ in the legislature? Both ‘chambers’ are made up of parties, who too often look like they are concerned about gaining or keeping their power, their majority, their seats, more than the quality of their laws. Where’s the jury? The judge? And to top that off: even the Executive is decided by the party, in a roundabout process that looks perfectly designed to blow the thinking cap off every citizen. A spectacle! Plenty of circenses but not enough panem. Worse than old Rome…

– Calm down, Bog-Hubert. Aren’t they going to the judiciary to resolve quarrels about their laws, though?

– Yes, good point. But you realize that the courts can only make decisions based on whether a law complies with the Constitution or prior laws – issues of fact, of legality. Not about the quality, the goodness of the law. What’s missing is just what Vodçek said: another entity that looks at the quality and goodness of the proposed plans and policies, and makes the decisions.

– What would the basis of judgment of such an entity be?

– Well, didn’t we just draw up some possibilities? The concerns are those that have been discussed, by all parties. The criteria that are drawn from all the contributions of the discourse. The party ‘in power’ would only use the criteria of its own arguments, wouldn’t it? Just like they do now… Of course the idea will have to be discussed, thought through, refined. But I say that’s the key missing element in the so-called ‘democratic’ system.

– Abbé Boulah would be proud of you, Bog-Hubert. Perhaps a little concerned, too? Though I’m still not sure how it all would work, for example considering that the humans in the entity or ‘goodness panel’ are also citizens, and thus likely ‘party’. But that applies to the judge and jury system in the judicial as well. Work to do.

– And whatever decision they come up with, that worst-off guy could still complain that it isn’t fair, though?

– Better that 49% of the population peeved and feeling taken advantage of? Commissioner: what do you say?

– Hmmm. That one guy might be easier to buy off than the 49%, yes. But I’m not sure I’d get enough financing for my re-election campaign with these ideas. The money doesn’t come from the worst-off folks, you know…

– Houston, we have a problem …

—

A paradoxical effect of thorough examination of planning pros and cons

Published July 5, 2017 Argument patterns , Design discourse , Public policy discourse , Uncategorized 2 Comments
Tags: Certainty of planning decisions

In the Fog Island Tavern:

– Bog-Hubert, I hear you had a big argument you had in here with Professor Balthus last night? Sounds like I missed a lot of fun?
– Well, Sophie, I’m not sure it was all fun; at least the good prof seemed quite put out about it.
– Oh? Did you actually admit you haven’t read his latest fat book yet?
– No. Well, uh, I haven’t read the book yet. And he knows it. But it actually was about one of Abbé Boulah’s pet peeves, or should i say his buddy’s curious findings, that got him all upset.
– Come on, do tell. What about those could upset the professor — I thought he was generally in favor of the weird theories of Abbe Boulah’s buddy?
– Yes — but it seems he had gotten some hopes up about some of their possibilities — mistakenly, as I foolishly started to point out to him. He thought that the recommendations about planning discourse and argument evaluation they keep talking about might help collective decision-making achieve more confidence and certainty about the issues they have to resolve, the plans they have to adopt or reject.
– Well, isn’t that what they are trying to do?
– Sure — at least that was what the research started out to do, from what I know. But they ran into a kind of paradoxical effect: It looks like the more carefully you try to evaluate the pros and cons about a proposed plan, the less sure you end up being about the decision you have to make. Not at all the more certain.
– Huh. That doesn’t sound right. And the professor didn’t straighten you out on that?
– I don’t think so. Funny thing: I started out agreeing that he must be right: Don’t we all expect decision-makers to carefully examine all those pros and cons, how people feel about a proposed plan, until they become confident enough — and can explain that to everybody else — that the decision is the right one? But when I began to explain Abbé Boulah’s concern — as he had mentioned it to me some time ago — I became more convinced that there’s something wrong with that happy expectation. And that is what Abbé Boulah’s research seems to have found out.
– You are speaking strangely here: on examination, you became more convinced that the more we examine the pros and cons, the less convinced we will get? Can you have it both ways?
– Yeah, it’s strange. Somebody should do some research on that — but then again, if it’s right, will the research come up with anything to convince us?
– I wish you’d explain that to me. I’ll buy you a glass of Zinfandel…
– Okay, maybe I need to rethink the whole thing again myself. Well, let me try: Somebody has proposed a plan of action, call it A, to remedy some problem or improve some condition. Or just to do something. Make a difference. So now you try to decide whether you’d support that plan, or if you were king, whether you’d go ahead with it. What do you do?
– Well, as you said: get everybody to tell you what they see as the advantages and disadvantages of the plan. The pros and cons.
– Right. Good start. And now you have to examine and ‘weigh’ them, carefully, like your glorious leaders always promise. You know how to do that? Other than to toss a coin?
– Hmm. I never heard anybody explain how that’s done. Have to think about it.
– Well, that’s what Abbé Boulah’s buddy had looked at and developed a story about how it could be done more thoroughly. He looked at the kinds of arguments people make, and found the general pattern of what he calls he ‘standard planning argument’.
– I’ve read some logic books back in school, never heard about that one.
– That’s because logic never did look at and identified let alone studied those. Not sure why, in all the years since ol’ Aristotle…
– What do they look like?
– You’ve used them all your life, just like you’ve spoken prose all your life and didn’t know it. The basic pattern is something like this: Say you want to argue for a proposed plan A: You start with the ‘conclusion’ or proposal:
“Yes, let’s implement plan A
because
1. Plan A will result in outcome B — given some conditions C;
and we assume that
2. Conditions C will be present;
and
3. We ought to aim for outcome B.”
– It sounds a little more elaborate than…
– Than what you probably are used to? Yes, because you usually don’t bother to state the premises you think people already accept so you ‘take them for granted’.
– Okay, I understand and take it for granted. And that argument is a ‘pro’ one; I assume that a ‘con’ argument is basically using the same pattern but with the conclusion and some premises negated. So?
– What you want to find out is whether the decision ‘Do A’ is plausible. Or better: whether or to what extent it is more plausible than not to do A. And you are looking at the arguments pro and con because you think that they will tell you which one is ‘more plausible’ than the other.
– Didn’t you guys talk about a slightly different recipe a while back — something about an adapted Poppa’s rule about refutation?
– Amazing: you remember that one? Well, almost: it was about adapting Sir Karl Raimund Popper’s philosophy of science principle to planning: that we are entitled to accept a scientific hypothesis as tentatively supported or ‘corroborated’ as they say in the science lab, to the extent we have done our very best to refute it, — show that it is NOT true, — and it has resisted all those attempts and tests. Since no supporting evidence’ can ever conclusively ‘prove’ the hypothesis but one true observation of the contrary can conclusively disprove it. It’s the hypothesis of that all swans are white — never proved by any number of white swans you see, but conclusively shot down by just one black swan.
– So how does it get adapted to planning? And why does it have to be adapted, not just adopted?
– Good question. In planning, your proposed plan ‘hypothesis’ isn’t true or false — just more or less plausible. So refutation doesn’t apply. But the attitude is basically the same. So Abbé Boulah’s buddy’s adapted rule says: “We can accept a plan proposal as tentatively supported only to the extent we have not only examined all the arguments in its favor, but more importantly, all the arguments against it — and all those ‘con’ arguments have been shown to be less plausible or outweighed by the ‘pro’ arguments.”
– Never heard that one before either, but it sounds right. But you keep saying ‘plausible’? Aren’t we looking for ‘truth’? For ‘correct’ or ‘false’?
– That’s what Abbé Boulah and his buddy are railing against — planning decisions just are not ‘correct’ or ‘false’, not ‘true’ or false. We are arguing about plans precisely because they aren’t ‘true’ or ‘false’ — yet. Nor ‘correct or ‘false’, like a math problem. Planning problems are ‘wicked problems’; the decisions are not right or wrong, they are ‘good or bad’. Or, to use a term that applies to all the premises: more or less plausible, which can be interpreted as true or false only for the rare ‘factual’ claims or premises, or more likely ‘probable’ for the factual-instrumental premises 1 and factual claims, premise 2, but as just plausible, or good or bad, for the ought claims, premise 3, and the ‘conclusion’.
– Okay, I go along with that. For now. It sounds… plausible?
– Ahh. Getting there, Sophie; good. It’s also a matter of degrees, like probability. If you want to express how ‘sure’ you are about the decision or about one of the premises, just the terms ‘plausible and ‘implausible’ are not expressing that degree at all. You need a scale with more judgments. One that goes from ‘totally plausible’ on one side to ‘totally implausible’ on the other, with some ‘more or less’ scores in-between. One with a midpoint of ‘don’t know, can’t decide’. For example, a scale from +1 to -1 with midpoint zero.
– Hmm, It’s a lot to swallow, all at once. But go on. I guess the next task is to make some of your ‘plausibility’ judgments about each of the premises, to see how the plausibility of the whole argument depends on those?
– Couldn’t have said it better myself. Now consider: if the argument as a whole is to be ‘totally plausible’ — with a plausibility value of +1 — wouldn’t that require that all the premise plausibility values also were +1?
– Okay…
– Well — and if one of those plausibility values turns out to be ‘less that ‘totally plausible, let’s say with a pl value of 0.9 — wouldn’t that reduce the overall argument plausibility?
– Stands to reason. And I guess you’ll say that if one of them had a negative value, the overall argument plausibility value would turn negative as well?
– Very good! If someone assigns a -.8 plausibility value to the premise 1 or 3, for example, in the above argument that is intended as a ‘pro’ argument, that argument would turn into a ‘con’ argument — for that person. So to express that as a mathematical function, you might say that the argument plausibility is equal to either the lowest of the premise plausibility values, or a product of all those values. (Let’s deal with the issue of what to do with cases of several negative plausibilities later on, to keep things simple. Also, some people might have questions about the overall ‘validity’ or plausibility of the entire argument pattern, and how it ‘fits’ the case at hand; so we might have to assign a pl-value to the whole pattern; but that doesn’t affect the issue of the paradox that much here.)
– So, Bog-Hubert, lets get back to where you left off. Now you have argument plausibility values; okay. Weren’t we talking about argument ‘weight’ somewhere? Weighing the arguments? Where does that come in?
– Good question! Okay — consider just two arguments, one ‘pro’ and one ‘con’. You may even assume that they both have good overall plausibilities, so that both have close to +1 (for the ‘pro’ argument) and -1 (for the ‘con’ argument). You might consider how important they are, by comparison, and thus how much of a ‘weight’ each should have towards the overall Plan plausibility. It’s the ‘ought’ premise — the goal or concern of the consequence of implementing the plan, that carries the weight. You decide which one is more important than the other, and give if a higher weight number.
– Something like ‘is it more important to get the benefit, the advantage of the plan, than to avoid the possible disadvantage?
– Right. And to express that difference in importance, you could use a scale from zero to +1, and a rule that all the weight numbers add up to +1. The ‘+1’ simply means that it carried the whole decision judgment.
– That’s a whole separate operation, isn’t it? and wouldn’t each person doing this come up with different weights? And, coming to think about it, different plausibility values?
– Yes: All those judgments are personal, subjective judgments. I know that many people will be quite disappointed by that — they want ‘objective’ measures of performance, about which there’s no quibbling. Sorry. But that’s a different issue, too — we’ll have to devote another evening and a good part of Vodçek’s Zinfandel supply for that one.
– Okay, so what you are saying is that, subjective or objective, we’re heading for the same paradox?
– Right again. First, let’s review the remaining steps in the assessments. We have the argument plausibility values — each person separately — and the weight or relative importance for each of the ‘ought premises. We can multiply the argument plausibility with the weight of the goal or concern in the ‘ought’ premise, and you have your argument weight. Adding them all up — remember that all the ‘con’ arguments will have negative plausibility values — will give you one measure of ‘plan plausibility’. You might then use that as a guide to making the decision — for example: to be adopted, a plan should have at least a positive pl-value, or at least a pl-value you’ve specified as a minimum threshold value for plan adoption.
– And that’s better than voting?
– I think so — but again, that’s a different issue too, also worth serious discussion. Depending on the problem and the institutional circumstances, decisions may have to be made by traditional means such as voting, or left to a ‘leader’ person in authority to make decisions. A plan-pl value would then just be a guide to the decision.
– So what’s the problem, the paradox?
– The problem is this: It turns out that the more arguments you consider in such a process, the more you examine each of the premises of the arguments (by applying the same method to the premises) and the more honest you are about your confidence in the plausibility of all the premises — they’re all about the future, remember, none can be determined to be 100% certain — the closer the overall pl-result will approach the midpoint ‘don’t know’ value, close to zero.
– That’s what the experiments and simulations of such evaluations show?
– Yes. You could see that already with our example above of just two arguments, equally plausible but one pro and the other con. If they also have the same weight, the plan plausibility would be zero, point blank. Not at all what the dear professor wanted to get from such a thorough analysis; very disappointing.
– Ahh. I see. Is he one of those management consultants who advise companies how to deal with difficult problems, and get the commissions by having to promise that his approaches will produce decisively convincing results?
– Oh Sophie — Let’s not go there…
– So the professor, he’s in denial about that?
– At least in a funk…
– Does he have any ideas about what to do about this? Or how to avoid it?
– Well, we agreed that the only remedy we could think of so far is to tweak the plan until it has fewer features that people will feel as ‘con’ arguments: until the plan -pl will at least be more visibly on the plus side of the scale.
– Makes you wonder whether in the old days, when people relied on auspices and ‘divine judgments’ to tip the scales, were having a wiser attitude about this.
– At least they were smart enough to give those tricks a sense of mystery and ritual — more impressive than just rolling dice — which some folks can see as a kind of prosaic, crude divine judgment?
– Hmm. If they made sure that all the concerns leading affected people to have concerns about a plan, what would be wrong with that?
– Other than that you’d have to load the dice — and worry about being found out? What’s the matter, Vodçek?
– You guys — I’ll have to cut you off…

Systems Models and Argumentation in the Planning Discourse

Published October 11, 2015 Argument patterns , Design discourse , Public policy discourse , Systems Modeling , Systems Thinking , Uncategorized Leave a Comment

The following study will try to explore the possibility of combining the contribution of ‘Systems Thinking’ 1 — systems modeling and simulation — with that of the ‘Argumentative Model of Planning’ 2 expanded with the proposals for systematic and transparent evaluation of ‘planning arguments’.
Both approaches have significant shortcomings in accommodating their mutual features and concerns. Briefly: While systems models do not accommodate and show any argumentation (of ‘pros and cons’) involved in planning and appear to assume that any differences of opinion have been ‘settled’, individual arguments used in planning discussions do not adequately convey the complexity of the ‘whole system’ that systems diagrams try to convey. Thus, planning teams relying on only one of these approaches to problem-solving and planning (or any other single approach exhibiting similar deficiencies) risk making significant mistakes and missing important aspects of the situation.
This mutual discrepancy raises the suggestion to resolve it either by developing a different model altogether, or combining the two in some meaningful way. The exercise will try to show how some of the mutual shortcomings could be alleviated — by procedural means of successively feeding information drawn from one approach to the other, and vice versa. It does not attempt to conceive a substantially different approach.

Starting from a very basic situation: Somebody complains about some current ‘Is’-state of the world (IS) he does not like: ‘Somebody do something about IS!’

The call for Action (A plan is desired) raises a first set of questions besides the main one: Should the plan be adopted for implementation: D ?:
(Questions / issues will be italicized. The prefixes distinguish different question types: D for ‘deontic or ‘ought-questions; E for Explanatory questions, I for Instrumental of actual-instrumental questions, F for factual questions; the same notation can be applied to individual claims):

E( IS –>OS)?              What kind of action should that be?
which can’t really be answered before other questions are clarified, e.g.:
E(IS)?                Description of the IS-state?
E(OS)?              What is the ‘ought-state (OS) that the person feels ought to be? Description?
(At this point , no concrete proposal has been made — just some action called for.)
D(OS)?              Should OS become the case?
(This question calls for ‘pros and cons’ about the proposed state OS), and
I(IS –> OS)?    How can IS be changed to OS?

Traditional approaches at this stage recommend doing some ‘research’. This might include both the careful gathering of data about the IS situation, as well as searching for tools, ‘precedents’ of the situation, and possible solutions used successfully in the past.

At this point, a ‘Systems Thinking’ (ST) analyst may suggest that, in order to truly understand the situation, it should be looked at as a system, and a ‘model’ representing that system be developed. This would begin by identifying the ‘elements’ or key variables V of the system, and the relationships R between them. Since so far, very little is known about the situation, the diagram of the model would be trivially simple:

(IS) –> REL –> (OS)

or, more specifically, representing the IS and OS states as sets of values of variables:

{VIS} –> REL(IS/OS) –> {VOS}

(The {…} brackets indicate that there may be a set of variables describing the state).

So far, the model simply shows the IS-state and the OS-state, as described by a variable V (or a set of variables), and the values for these variables, and some relationship REL between IS and OS.

Another ST consultant suggests that the situation — the discrepancy between the situation as it IS and as it ought to be (OS), as perceived by a person [P1] may be called a ‘problem’ IS/OS, and to look for a way to resolve it by identifying its ‘root cause’ RC :

E(RC of IS)? What is the root cause of IS?
and
F(RC of IS)? Is RC indeed the root cause of IS?

Yet another consultant might point out that any causal chain is really potentially infinitely long (any cause has yet another cause…), and that it may be more useful to look for ‘necessary conditions’ NC for the problem to exist, and perhaps for ‘contributing factors’ CF that aggravate the problem once occurring (but don’t ’cause’ it):

E(NC of IS/OS)?     What are the necessary conditions for the problem to exist?
F(NC of IS/OS)?     Is the suggested condition actually a NC of the problem?
and
E(CF of IS/OS)       What factors contribute to aggravate the problem once it occurs?
F(CF of IS/OS)?

These suggestions are based on the reasoning that if a NC can be identified and successfully removed, the problem ceases to exist, and/or if a CF can be removed, the problem could at least be alleviated.

Either form of analysis is expected to produce ideas for potential means or Actions to form the basis of a plan to resolve the problem and can be put up for debate. As soon as such a specific plan of action is described, it raises the question:

E(PLAN A)? Description of the plan?
and
D(PLAN A)? Should the plan be adopted / implemented?

The ST model-builder will have to include these items in the systems diagram, with each factor impacting specific variables or system elements V.

RC       –> REL(RC-IS)      –> {V(IS)}
{NC}   –> REL(NC-IS)    –> { V(IS) } –> REL    –> {V(OS)}
{CF}    –> RELCF-IS)        –> {V(IS)}

Elements in ‘{…}’ brackets denote sets of items of that type. It is of course possible that one such factor influences several or all system elements at the same time, rather than just one. Of course, Plan A may include aspects of NC, CF, or RC. If these consist of several variables with their own specific relationships, they will have to be shown in the model diagram as such.

An Argumentative Model (AM) consultant will insist that a discussion be arranged, in which questions may be raised about the description of any of these new system elements and whether and how effectively they will actually perform in the proposed relationship.

Having invoked causality, questions will be raised about what further effects, ‘consequences’ CQ the OS-state will have, once achieved; what these will be like, and whether they should be considered desirable, undesirable (the proverbial ‘unexpected consequences’ or side-effects, or merely neutral effects. To be as thorough as the mantra of Systems Thinking demands, to consider ‘the whole system’, that same question should be raised about the initial actions of PLAN A: It may have side-effects not considered in the desired problem-solution OS: should they be included in the examination of the desired ‘Ought-state? So:

For {OS} –> {CQof OS}:

E(CQ ofOS)? (what is/are the consequences? Description?)
D(CQofOS)? (is the consequence desirable/ undesirable?)

For —> CQ of A:

E(CQ of A)?
and
D(CQ of A)?

For the case that any of the consequence aspects are considered undesirable, additional measures might be suggested, to avoid or mitigate these effects, which then must be included in the modified PLAN A’, and the entire package be reconsidered / re-examined for consistency and desirability.

The systems diagram would now have to be amended with all these additions. The great advantage of systems modeling is that many constellations of variable values can be considered as potential ‘initial settings’ of a system simulation run, (plan alternatives) and the development of each variable can be tracked (simulated) over time. In any system with even moderate complexity and number of loops — variables in a chain of relationships having causal relationships of other variables ‘earlier’ in the chain — the outcomes will become ‘nonlinear’ and quite difficult and ‘counter-intuitive’ to predict. Both the possibility of inspection of the diagram showing ‘the whole system’ and the exploration of different alternatives contribute immensely to the task of ‘understanding the system’ as a prerequisite to taking action.

While systems diagrams do not usually show either ‘root’ causes, ‘necessary conditions’, or ‘contributing factors’ of each of the elements in the model, these will now have to be included, as well as the actions and needed resources of PLANS setting the initial conditions to simulate outcomes. A simplified diagram of the emerging model, with possible loops, is the following:

(Outside uncontrolled factors (context)

/ / | | | \ \ \

PLAN->REL -> (RC, NC, CF) -> REL -> (IS) -> REL -> (OS) -> REL ->(CQ)

\ \ \ | | | / / /

forward and backward loops

A critical observer might call attention to a common assumption in simulation models — a remaining ‘linearity’ feature that may not be realistic: In the network of variables and relationships, the impact of a change in one variable V1 on the connected ‘next’ variable V2 is assumed to occur stepwise during one time unit i of the simulation, and the change in the following variable V3 in the following time unit i+1, and so on. Delays in these effect may be accounted for. But what if the information about that change in time unit i is distributed throughout the system much faster — even ‘almost instantaneously’, compared to the actual and possibly delayed substantial effects (e.g. ‘flows’) the diagram shows with its explicit links? Which might have the effect that actors, decision-makers concerned about variables elsewhere in the system for reasons unrelated to the problem at hand, might take ‘preventive’ steps that could change the expected simulated transformation? Of course, such actors and decision-makers are not shown…

Systems diagrams ordinarily do not acknowledge that — to the extent there are several parties involved in the project, and affected in different ways by either the initial problem situation or by proposed solutions and their outcomes — those different parties will have significantly different opinions about the issues arising in connection with all the system components, if the argumentation consultant manages to organize discussion. The system diagram only represents one participant’s view or perspective of the situation. It appears to assume that what ‘counts’ in making any decisions about the problem are only the factual, causal, functional relationships in the system, as determined by one (set of) model-builder. Thus, those responsible for making decisions about implementing the plan must rely on a different set of provisions and perspectives to convert the gained insights and ‘understanding’ of the system and its working into sound decisions.

Several types of theories and corresponding consultants are offering suggestions for how to do this. Given the particular way their expertise is currently brought into planning processes, they usually reflect just the main concerns of the clients they are working for. In business, the decision criterion is, obviously, the company’s competitive advantage resulting in reliable earnings: profit, over time. Thus for each ‘alternative’ plan considered (different initial settings in the system), and the actions and resources needed to achieve the desired OS, the ‘measure of performance’ associated with the resulting OS will be profit — earnings minus costs. For government consultants (striving to ‘run government like a business?’) the profit criterion may have to be labeled somewhat differently — say: ‘benefit’ and ‘cost’ of government projects, and their relationship such as B-C or the more popular B/C, the benefit-cost ratio. For overall government performance, the ‘Gross National Product’ GNP is the equivalent measure. The shortcomings and problems associated with such approaches led to calls for using ‘quality of life‘ or ‘happiness‘ or Human Development Indices instead, and criteria for sustainability and ecological aspects All or most such approaches still suffer from the shortcoming of constructing overall measures of performance: shortcomings because they inevitably represent only o n e view of the problems or projects — differences of opinion or significant conflicts are made invisible.

In the political arena, any business and economic considerations are overlaid if not completely overridden by the political decision criteria — voting percentages. Most clearly expressed in referenda on specific issues, alternatives are spelled out, more or less clearly, so as to require a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ vote, and the decision criterion is the percentage of those votes. Estimates of such percentages are increasingly produced by opinion surveys sampling just a small but ‘representative’ number of the entire population, and these aim to have a similar effect on decision-makers.

Both Systems Thinkers and advocates of the extended Argumentative Model are disheartened about the fact that in these business and governance habits, all the insight produced by their respective analysis efforts seem to have little if no visible connection with the simple ‘yes/no’, opinion poll or referendum votes. Rightfully so, and their concern should properly be with constructing better mechanisms for making that connection. From the Argumentative Model side, such an effort has been made with the proposed evaluation approach for planning arguments, though with clear warnings against using the resulting ‘measures’ of plan plausibility as convenient substitutes for decision criteria. The reasons for this have to do with the systemic incompleteness of the planning discourse: there is no guarantee that all the concerns that influence a person’s decision about a plan that should be given ‘due consideration — and therefore should be included in the evaluation — actually can and will be made explicit in the discussion.

To some extent, this is based on different attitudes discourse participants will bring to the process. The straightforward assumption of mutual trust and cooperativeness aiming at mutually beneficial outcomes — ‘win-win’ solutions — obviously does not apply to all such situations. Though there are many well-intentioned groups and initiatives that try to instill and grow such attitudes, especially when it comes to global decisions about issues affecting all humanity such as climate, pollution, disarmament, global trade and finance. The predominant business assumption is that of competition, seeing all parties as pursuing their own advantages at the expense of others, resulting in zero-sum outcomes: win-lose solutions. There are a number of different situations that can be distinguished as to whether the parties share or have different attitudes in the same discourse with the ‘extreme’ positions being complete sharing the same attitude, having attitudes on the opposite ends of the scale; or something in-between which might be called indifference to the other side’s concerns — as long as they don’t intrude on their own concerns, in which case the attitudes likely shift to the win-lose position at least for that specific aspect.

The effect of these issues can be seen by looking at the way a single argument about some feature of a proposed plan might be evaluated by different participants, and how the resulting assessments would change decisions. Consider, for the sake of simplicity, the argument in favor of a Plan A by participant P1:

D(PLAN A)!         Position (‘Conclusion’) : Plan A ought to be adopted)
because
F((VA –>REL(VA–>VO) –> VO) | VC      Premise 1: Variable V of plan A will result in (e.g. cause) Variable VO , given condition C;
and
D(VO)                   Premise 2: Variable VO ought to be aimed for;
and
F(VC)                     Premise 3: Variable VC is the case.

Participant P1 may be quite confident (but still open to some doubt) about these premises, and of being able to supply adequate evidence and support arguments for them in turn. She might express this by assigning the following plausibility values to them, on the plausibility scale of -1 to + 1, for example:
Premise 1: +0.9
Premise 2: +0.8
Premise 3: +0.9
One simple argument plausibility function (multiplying the plausibility judgments) would result in argument plausibility of +0.658; a not completely ‘certain’ but still comfortable result supporting the plan. Another participant P2 may agree with premises 1 and 2, assigning the same plausibility values to those as P1, but having considerable doubt as to whether the condition VC is indeed present to guarantee the effect of premise 1, expressed by the low plausibility score of +0.1 which would yield an argument plausibility of +0.07; a result that can be described as too close to ‘don’t know if VA is such a good idea’. If somebody else — participant P3 — disagrees with the desirability of VO, and therefore assigns a negative plausibility of, say, -0.5 to premise 2 while agreeing with P1 about the other premises, his result would be – 0.405, using the same crude aggregation formula. (These are of course up for discussion.) The issue of weight assignment has been left aside here, assuming only the one argument, so there is only one argument being considered and the weight of its deontic premise is 1, for the sake of simplicity. The difference in these assessments raises not only the question of how to obtain a meaningful common plausibility value for the group, as a guide for its decision. It might also cause P1 to worry whether P3 would consider taking ‘corrective’ (in P1’s view ‘subversive’?) actions to mitigate the effect of VA should the plan be adopted e.g. by majority rule, or by following the result of some group plan plausibility function such as taking the average of the individual argument plausibility judgments as a decision criterion. (This is not recommended by the theory). And finally: should these assessments, with their underlying assumptions of cooperative, competitive, or neutral, disinterested attitudes, and the potential actions of individual players in the system to unilaterally manipulate the outcome, be included in the model and its diagram or map?

While a detailed investigation of the role of these attitudes on cooperative planning decision-making seems much needed, this brief overview already makes it clear that there are many situations in which participants have good reasons not to contribute complete and truthful information. In fact, the prevailing assumption is that secrecy, misrepresentation, misleading and deceptive information and corresponding efforts to obtain such information from other participants — spying — are part of the common ‘business as usual’.

So how should systems models and diagrams deal with these aspects? The ‘holistic’ claim of showing all elements so as to offer a complete picture and understanding of a system arguably would require this: ‘as completely as possible’. But how? Admitting that a complete understanding of many situations actually is not possible? What a participant does not contribute to the discourse, the model diagram can’t show. Should it (cynically?) announce that such ‘may’ be the case — and that therefore participants should not base their decisions only on the information it shows? To truly ‘good faith’ cooperative participants, sowing distrust this way may be perceived as somewhat offensive, and itself actually interfere with the process.

The work on systems modeling faces another significant unfinished task here. Perhaps a another look at the way we are making decisions as a result of planning discussions can help somewhat.

The discussion itself assumes that it is possible and useful towards better decisions — presumably, better than decisions made without the information it produces. It does not, inherently, condone the practice of sticking to a preconceived decision no matter what is being brought up (nor the arrogant attitude behind it: ‘my mind is made up, no matter what you say…’) The question has two parts. One is related to the criteria we use to convert the value of information to decisions. The other concerns the process itself: the kinds of steps taken, and their sequence.

It is necessary to quickly go over the criteria issue first — some were already discussed above. The criteria for business decision-makers discussed above, that can be assumed to be used by the single decision-maker at the helm of a business enterprise (which of course is a simplified picture): profit, ROI, and its variants arising from planning horizon, sustainability and PR considerations, are single measures of performance attached to the alternative solutions considered: the rule for this decision ‘under certainty’ is: select the solution having the ‘best’ (highest, maximized) value. (‘Value’ here is understood simply as the number of the criterion.) That picture is complicated for decision situations under risk, where outcomes have different levels of probability, or complete uncertainty, where outcomes are not governed by predictable laws, nor even probability, but by other participants’ possible attempts to anticipate the designer’s plans, and will actively seek to oppose them. This is the domain of decision and game theory, whose analyses may produce guidelines and strategies for decisions — but again, different decisions or strategies for different participants in the planning. The factors determining these strategies are arguably significant parts of the environment or context that designers must take into account — and systems models should represent — to produce a viable understanding of the problem situation. The point to note is that the systems models permit simulation of these criteria — profit, life cycle economic cost or performance, ecological damage or sustainability — because they are single measures, presumably collectively agreed upon (which is at least debatable). But once the use of plausibility judgments as measures of performance is considered as a possibility, — even as aggregated group measures — the ability of systems models and diagrams to accommodate them becomes very questionable, to say the least. It would require the input of many individual (subjective) judgments, which are generated as the discussion proceeds, and some of which will not be made explicit even if there are methods available for doing this.

This shift of criteria for decision-making raises the concerns about the second question, the process: the kinds of steps taken, by what participants, according to what rules, and their sequence. If this second aspect does not seem to need or require much attention — the standard systems diagrams again do not show it — consider the significance given to it by such elaborate rule systems as parliamentary procedure, ‘rules of order’ volumes, even for entities where the criterion for decisions is the simple voting percentage. Any change of criteria will necessarily have procedural implications.

By now, the systems diagram for even the simple three-variable system we started out with has become so complex that it is difficult to see how it might be represented in a diagram. Adding the challenges of accounting for the additional aspects discussed above — the discourse with controversial issues, the conditions and subsequent causal and other relationships of plan implementation requirements and further side-effects, and the attitudes and judgments of individual parties involved in and affected by the problem and proposed plans, are complicating the modeling and diagram display tasks to an extent where they are likely to lose their ability to support the process of understanding and arriving at responsible decisions; I do not presume to have any convincing solutions for these problems and can only point to them as urgent work to be done.

Evolving ‘map’ of ‘system’ elements and relationships, and related issues

Meanwhile, from a point of view of acknowledging these difficulties but trying, for now, to ‘do the best we can with what we have’, it seems that systems models and diagrams should continue to serve as tools to understand the situation and to predict the performance of proposed plans — if some of the aspects discussed can be incorporated into the models. The construction of the model must draw upon the discourse that elicits the pertinent information (through the ‘pros and cons’ about proposal). The model-building work therefore must accompany the discourse — it cannot precede or follow the discussion as a separate step. Standard ‘expert’ knowledge based analysis — conventional ‘best practice’ and research based regulations, for example, will be as much a part of this as the ‘new’, ‘distributed’ information that is to be expected in any unprecedented ‘wicked’ planning problem, that can only be brought out in the discourse with affected parties.

The evaluation preparing for decision — whether following a customary formal evaluation process or a process of argument evaluation — will have to be a separate phase. Its content will now draw upon and reflect the content of the model. The analysis of its results — identifying the specific areas of disagreement leading to different overall judgments, for example — may lead to returning to previous design and model (re-)construction stages: to modify proposals for more general acceptability, or better overall performance, and then return to the evaluation stage supporting a final decision. Procedures for this process have been sketched in outline but remain to be examined and refined in detail, and described concisely so that they can be agreed upon and adopted by the group of participants in any planning case before starting the work, as they must, so that quarrels about procedure will not disrupt the process later.

Looking at the above map again, another point must be made. It is that once again, the criticism of systems diagrams seems to have been ignored, that the diagram still only expresses one person’s view of the problem. The system elements called ‘variables’, for example, are represented as elements of ‘reality’, and the issues and questions about those expected to give ‘real’ (that is, real for all participants) answers and arguments. Taking the objection seriously, would we not have to acknowledge that ‘reality’ is known to us only imperfectly, if at all, and that each of us has a different mental ‘map’ of it? Thus, each item in the systems map should perhaps be shown as multiple elements referring to the same thing labeled as something we think we know and agree about: but as one bubble of the item for each participant in the discourse? And these bubbles will possibly, even likely, not being congruent but only overlapping, at best, and at worst covering totally different content meaning — the content that is then expected to be explained and explored in follow-up questions? Systems Thinking has acknowledged this issue in principle — that ‘the map (the systems model and diagram) is NOT the landscape‘ (the reality). But this insight should itself be represented in a more ‘realistic’ diagram — realistic in the sense that it acknowledges that all the detail information contributed to the discourse and the diagram will be assembled in different ways by each individual into different, only partially overlapping ‘maps’. An objection might be that the system model should ‘realistically’ focus on those parts of reality that we can work with (control? or at least predict?) — with some degree of ‘objectivity’ — the overlap we strive for with ‘scientific’ method of replicable experiments, observations, measurements, logic, statistical conformation? And that the concepts different participants carrying around in the minds to make up their different maps are just ‘subjective’ phenomena that should ‘count’ in our discussions about collective plans only to the extent they correspond (‘overlap’) to the objective measurable elements of our observable system? The answer is that such subjective elements as individual perspectives about the nature of the discourse as cooperative or competitive etc. are phenomena that do affect the reality of our interactions. Mental concepts are ‘real’ forces in the world — so should they not be acknowledged as ‘real’ elements with ‘real’ relationships in the relationship network of the system diagram?

We could perhaps state the purpose of the discourse as that of bringing those mental maps into sufficiently close overlap for a final decision to become sufficiently congruent in meaning and acceptability for all participants: the resulting ‘maps’ along the way having a sufficient degree of overlap. What is ‘sufficient’ for this, though? And does that apply to all aspects of the system? Are not all our plans in part also meant to help us to pursue our own, that is: our different versions of happiness? We all want to ‘make a difference’ in our lives — some more than others, of course — and each in our own way. The close, complete overlap of our mental maps is a goal and obsession of societies we call ‘totalitarian’. If that is not what we wish to achieve, should the principle of plan outcomes leaving and offering (more? better?) opportunities for differences in the way we live and work in the ‘ought-state’ of problem solutions, be an integral element of our system models and diagrams? Which would be represented as a description of the outcome consisting of ‘possibility’ circles that have ‘sufficient’ overlap, sure, but also a sufficient degree of non-overlap ‘difference’ opportunity outside of the overlapping area. Our models and diagrams and system maps don’t even consider that. So is Systems Thinking, proudly claimed as being ‘the best foundation for tackling societal problems’ by the Systems Thinking forum, truly able to carry the edifice of future society yet? For its part, the Argumentative Model claims to accommodate questions of all kinds of perspectives, including questions such as these, — but the mapping and decision-making tools for arriving at meaningful answers and agreements are still very much unanswered questions. The maps, for all their crowded data, have large undiscovered areas.

The emerging picture of what a responsible planning discourse and decision-making process for the social challenges we call ‘wicked problems’, would look like, with currently available tools, is not a simple, reassuring and appealing one. But the questions that have been raised for this important work-in-progress, in my opinion, should not be ignored or dismissed because they are difficult. There are understandable temptations to remain with traditional, familiar habits — the ones that arguably often are responsible for the problems? — or revert to even simpler shortcuts such as placing our trust in the ability and judgments of ‘leaders’ to understand and resolve tasks we cannot even model and diagram properly. For humanity to give in to those temptations (again?) would seem to qualify as a very wicked problem indeed.

—
Notes:

1 The understanding of ‘systems thinking’ (ST) here is based on the predominant use of the term in the ‘Systems Thinking World’ Network on LinkedIn.

2 The Argumentative Model (AM) of Planning was proposed by H. Rittel, e.g. in the paper ‘APIS: A Concept for an Argumentative Planning Information System’, Working paper 324, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, 1980. It sees the planning activity as a process in which participants raise issues – questions to which there may be different positions and opinions, and support their positions with evidence, answers and arguments. From the ST point of view, AM might just be considered a small, somewhat heretic sect within ST…

Abbe Boulah’s Weblog