How do we know anything about the future, when it hasn’t happened yet?
This question was posed by Dr. Tony Janetos, Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and Professor of Earth and Environment at Boston University, to kick off the recent Summit on the Future of Communications Measurement. As the conference progressed, that question turned out to be essential to the very nature of our meeting. (That’s Janetos in the photo above and below, addressing the Summit.)
How Do You Think About the Future?
Virtually every discussion of the future of measurement devolves into a bitch session made up of war stories about the present. Janetos saved the Summit from that fate by adding a critical framework to our discussions. Most scientists, he suggested, tackle the future in one of four different ways:
1. The Gradualist
The gradualist assumes that, given any limited time-frame, the future won’t be that much different from the way things are now. This approach is familiar to most of us who have been fighting bad metrics for more than a decade. We’ve seen just enough progress to give us hope, but not enough to, say, actually kill off AVEs and move on.
2. The Black Swans
Another approach is to look for the black swans, the outliers in any environment, to see if they might predict what the future will be. Those people peer around corners to discern those things that the rest of us don’t see coming. These are the Ubers of the world. Our comms measurement equivalent is those who brought a nascent technology called Natural Language Processing into the arcane industry of cutting clips out of newspapers and manually analyzing their content.
3. A Collective Understanding
A third approach is to bring together people of different intellectual disciplines to find a collective way of understanding the processes that shape the world. I would argue that the measurement equivalents are those agencies and consultants who are bringing together representatives of all the various disciplines to talk about measuring the whole, not just the parts. Kind of like what happens at the Summit, come to think of it.
4. A Range of Scenarios
A fourth variation, and probably the most common, is to create a set of different projections of how the future might unfold. We may not know how to validate them when we begin the process, but the scenarios are at least plausible.
Pop quiz: How do you think about the future?
Language is Key
As with communications research, a big part of the climate change credibility problem lies in the language we use. “Our tendency is to talk in terms of our own technical jargon,” Janetos explains. “This creates situations that are fraught with the tension between intellectual honesty and our difficulty in describing methods.”
He cited Susan Joy Hassol’s work on 20 words scientists should never use. For instance:
- Enhanced means “improved” to the average citizen, as in “a product that enhances your appearance.” So “enhanced” to the general public implies a good thing. But to scientists, “enhance” means “intensify.” So when a scientist refers to “enhancing the greenhouse effect” it is generally a bad thing.
- Uncertainty generally means we do not know if something will happen, which scientists think of in terms of a range of possibilities, depending on a variety of factors. But to the layperson, “uncertainty” implies that something might not happen at all.
- Theory, to many laypeople, means “unsubstantiated speculation.” To scientists, “theory” means an evidence-based explanation, often well-tested and supported by plenty of proof.
Boy, are there lessons in there for us data geeks—especially as we struggle to explain the insights we have gleaned from an ever-increasing torrent of data. Anyone who has ever presented data from a survey can identify. When we explain to a client that “the difference between two data points isn’t significant,” the client hears it’s “irrelevant.” When, in fact, what we are saying is that the difference isn’t statistically different.
Janetos provided a great example of expressing the likelihood of a rare climate event in terms that most people can readily understand. “One chance out of 100 sounds pretty rare, but if it’s an annual chance, then the probability adds up. Consider the possibility that there’s a 1 in a 100 annual chance of some unacceptable environmental catastrophe happening to your house sometime within the life of your mortgage. If you have a 30-year mortgage, then the cumulative odds of that catastrophe happening are 1 in 4. But if you have a 50-year mortgage, then the odds go up to 1 in 1.” That’s the kind of language any homeowner can really connect with.
His advice to all summed up:
- Acknowledge that the world will not wait while we sort out the things we’re not so sure about.
- Understand that we are collectively managing risks as well as seeking to understand the world better.
- Balance being useful while being interesting. Expanding on this, Janetos says, “There’s a lot of peer pressure in science to be interesting, because that’s how you get grants and get papers published. But there are lots of fields of science, even environmental science, where you don’t have the same pressure to be useful. Because usefulness is sometimes interpreted as being equivalent to being pedestrian or routine. Your work can be useful in many different ways while you are also making fundamental contributions to our understanding of the world. This may sound routine in ordinary conversation, but it’s not routine at all in academic discourse.” ∞
