And thank you for sharing your thoughts on this matter!
Indeed, focusing on hyper-unrealistic worst cases would be counter-productive in my view. Your arbitrary-objection is a justified one! However, there is some literature in this field engaging with the question of how to select or discover relevant scenarios. I think, there are some methods and judgment calls to handle this situation more gracefully than just waving one’s hand.
And I agree with your statement and linked post that the weaker claim is easier to accept. In practice, I would probably still go beyond and use decision-making under deep uncertainty to inform the policy-making process. This seems to be a still better approach than the default.
What you can also do is still handcrafting scenarios as it is done for climate change mitigation. You have various shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) created by a lot of experts. You could attempt to find policy solutions that would perform sufficiently well for SSP4 or SSP5. But in the end, it might be just very useful to involve the stakeholders and let them co-decide these aspects.
And thank you for sharing your thoughts on this matter!
Indeed, focusing on hyper-unrealistic worst cases would be counter-productive in my view. Your arbitrary-objection is a justified one! However, there is some literature in this field engaging with the question of how to select or discover relevant scenarios. I think, there are some methods and judgment calls to handle this situation more gracefully than just waving one’s hand.
And I agree with your statement and linked post that the weaker claim is easier to accept. In practice, I would probably still go beyond and use decision-making under deep uncertainty to inform the policy-making process. This seems to be a still better approach than the default.
What you can also do is still handcrafting scenarios as it is done for climate change mitigation. You have various shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) created by a lot of experts. You could attempt to find policy solutions that would perform sufficiently well for SSP4 or SSP5. But in the end, it might be just very useful to involve the stakeholders and let them co-decide these aspects.