(While the comment added by Noah Scales contains some interesting ideas, I don’t think it does anything to resolve this stalemate, since it is also focused on comparing & assessing predictive success for questions with a small set of known answer options)
Yes, that’s right that my suggestions let you assess predictive success, in some cases, for example, over a set of futures partitioning a space of possibilities. Since the futures partition the space, one of them will occur, the rest will not. A yes/no forecast works this way.
Actually, if you have any question about a future at a specific time about which you feel uncertain, you can phrase it as a yes/no question. You then partition the space of possibilities at that future time. Now you can answer the question, and test your predictive success. Whether your answer has any value is the concern.
However, one option I mentioned is to list contingencies that, if present, result in contingent situations (futures). That is not the same as predicting the future, since the contingencies don’t have to be present or identified (EDIT: in the real world, ie as facts), and you do not expect their contingent futures otherwise.
If condition X, then important future Y happens.
Condition X could be present now or later, but I can’t identify or infer its presence now.
Deep uncertainty is usually taken as responding to those contingent situations as meaningful anyway. As someone without predictive information, you can only start offering models, like:
If X, then Y
If Y, then Z
If W and G, then B
If B, then C
A
T
I’m worried that A because …
You can talk about scenarios, but you don’t know or haven’t seen their predictive indicators.
You can discuss contingent situations, but you can’t claim that they will occur.
You can still work to prevent those contingent situations, and that seems to be your intention in your area of research. For example, you can work to prevent current condition “A”, whatever that is. Nuclear proliferation, maybe, or deployment of battlefield nukes. Nice!
You are not asking the question, “What will the future be?” without any idea of what some scenarios of the future depend on. After all, if the future is a nuclear holocaust, you can backtrack to at least some earlier point in time, for example, far enough to determine that nuclear weapons were detonated prior to the holocaust, and further to someone or something detonating them, and then maybe further to who had them, or why they detonated them, or that might be where gaps in knowledge appear.
Sarah, you wrote:
Yes, that’s right that my suggestions let you assess predictive success, in some cases, for example, over a set of futures partitioning a space of possibilities. Since the futures partition the space, one of them will occur, the rest will not. A yes/no forecast works this way.
Actually, if you have any question about a future at a specific time about which you feel uncertain, you can phrase it as a yes/no question. You then partition the space of possibilities at that future time. Now you can answer the question, and test your predictive success. Whether your answer has any value is the concern.
However, one option I mentioned is to list contingencies that, if present, result in contingent situations (futures). That is not the same as predicting the future, since the contingencies don’t have to be present or identified (EDIT: in the real world, ie as facts), and you do not expect their contingent futures otherwise.
Deep uncertainty is usually taken as responding to those contingent situations as meaningful anyway. As someone without predictive information, you can only start offering models, like:
You can talk about scenarios, but you don’t know or haven’t seen their predictive indicators.
You can discuss contingent situations, but you can’t claim that they will occur.
You can still work to prevent those contingent situations, and that seems to be your intention in your area of research. For example, you can work to prevent current condition “A”, whatever that is. Nuclear proliferation, maybe, or deployment of battlefield nukes. Nice!
You are not asking the question, “What will the future be?” without any idea of what some scenarios of the future depend on. After all, if the future is a nuclear holocaust, you can backtrack to at least some earlier point in time, for example, far enough to determine that nuclear weapons were detonated prior to the holocaust, and further to someone or something detonating them, and then maybe further to who had them, or why they detonated them, or that might be where gaps in knowledge appear.