{"id":8663,"date":"2019-02-25T10:00:43","date_gmt":"2019-02-25T18:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=8663"},"modified":"2019-02-13T14:50:08","modified_gmt":"2019-02-13T22:50:08","slug":"wicked-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2019\/02\/25\/wicked-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Life’s Wicked Problems (and How to Get Past Them)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wicked problems<\/a> are problems that are, \u201cdifficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.\u201d<\/p>\n

The classic example of a wicked problem is running a country. The problem is wicked because, nobody can even agree as to what counts as a solution! One person\u2019s solution is another\u2019s failure. Values conflict, and even if we could agree on that, it\u2019s hard to know whether a plan was as effective as it could have been.<\/p>\n

Non-wicked problems are typical in school. You\u2019re given a setup of pulleys and incline planes, and asked to calculate friction. You\u2019re given an essay, told how many pages to write, what to write it about and when to submit it. The constraints are known, and even if success is difficult, it\u2019s possible to know whether you\u2019ve passed or failed.<\/p>\n

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Real life, in contrast, is full of wicked problems. Learning to deal with their wickedness is essential to the art of living.<\/p>\n

Dealing with Life\u2019s Wicked Problems<\/h2>\n

The first step to dealing with wicked problems in one\u2019s life is recognizing that they exist. Many people prefer to pretend that all wickedness can be removed by some elegant formalization of the problem\u2014and that those who disagree are wrong.<\/p>\n

Philosopher and former AI researcher David Chapman argues that the things we experience in life always have a mixture of recognizable patterns and amorphous nebulosity<\/a>. Although we always experience both, it\u2019s a common human reaction to reject the nebulousness of things and want to insist that there really is a deeper pattern that we do not yet understand.<\/p>\n

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Wicked problems undermine this view because they are, by nature, not formalizable in a way that everyone will agree upon. Although you can take a wicked problem like running a country, protecting the environment or becoming \u201csuccessful\u201d and transform it into a non-wicked problem\u2014enacting Communism, setting zero emissions targets or earning a lot of money\u2014such transformations risk sweeping away some of the original problem.<\/p>\n

Ignoring nebulosity doesn\u2019t eliminate wicked problems, it merely ignores their wickedness.<\/p>\n

A Proof of Wickedness<\/h2>\n

The wickedness of social problems may be a mathematical inevitability. Kenneth Arrow showed in his 1951 book, Social Choice and Individual Values<\/em>, that in some cases it can be impossible to enact a solution that most people will agree with<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Consider an individual choice\u2014say where to go eat lunch. You may prefer Mexican, but if you can\u2019t have that choice you\u2019ll go out for sushi, Thai or last, eating at the hot dog stand.<\/p>\n

Suppose when you go to the Mexican restaurant, you find out it is closed. Common sense would say that you should want to go to sushi now, not eat at the hot dog stand. When your #1 choice was eliminated, you should go to #2, not #3 or #4.<\/p>\n

Except, when you consider groups of people, say five friends all trying to eat lunch, such things can occur! No matter what mechanism you use to make a decision (rank-ordered preferences, first-pass the post voting, etc.) it\u2019s possible to have these inconsistencies. <\/p>\n

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Wickedness, therefore, can show up even in simple matters as choosing a voting system! The naive expectation is that if we had the right system, these kinds of weird paradoxes would be eliminated. <\/p>\n

Life\u2019s Wicked Problems<\/h2>\n

Social problems are frequently wicked, for the very reasons Arrow illustrated\u2014it\u2019s not clear how to take a bunch of individual preferences and aggregate them into a single decision without creating some surprising inconsistencies.<\/p>\n

However, you face wicked problems in your private life as well. Problems where:<\/p>\n

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  1. What counts as a solution is hard to define.<\/li>\n
  2. The problem can never be definitively solved.<\/li>\n
  3. Even if you are successful, it\u2019s not clear what would have happened without your action. Therefore, it\u2019s hard to know whether the actions you took were best.<\/li>\n
  4. You can only attempt the problem once. Therefore you can\u2019t learn to solve the problem.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In this sense, deciding whom to marry, whether to have kids, which career to pursue, where to live and what to value in life, are all problems with elements of wickedness. While we are forced to answer these questions at some point, what counts as a correct choice may be hard to say.<\/p>\n

    Overcoming Wicked Problems<\/h2>\n

    There\u2019s no step-by-step solution to wicked problems. That\u2019s by definition, not out of ignorance. Yet, there are tools. These can\u2019t be said to guarantee better solutions to the problem, or ensure you\u2019ll arrive at the correct choice, but do tend to work better.<\/p>\n

    Some of these tools include:<\/p>\n

    1. Cultural learning. <\/h3>\n

    Individually, you may not have the ability to live your life over and over again, thus learning how to make correct choices for the decisions that can really only ever be made once. However, collectively, our culture functions in this way. Adaptive social strategies persist. Less effective solutions fall away.<\/p>\n

    The defaults provided by your culture (or other cultures, if you search more broadly) to the wicked problems life foists upon you, can offer solutions that may not be obvious from your personal experience alone. <\/p>\n

    2. Multiple perspectives.<\/h3>\n

    If a single formalization for wicked problems is too simplistic (e.g. \u201cI want to be successful\u201d = \u201cMake lots of money\u201d), then making several such formalizations can give you multiple perspectives to judge the problem.<\/p>\n

    Although different formalizations aren\u2019t guaranteed to arrive at the same answer, there will be some problems where most ways you formalize them land at similar suggestions. Thus you can more safely approach your problems with one way of thinking about them, since different assumptions point in the same direction.<\/p>\n

    Read my article here about twenty-five different thinking tools<\/a> to get an idea on how different perspectives can help solve difficult problems.<\/p>\n

    3. Genuine choice.<\/h3>\n

    If one option you have of many is indisputably better, then what does it really mean to say that you chose it? If a single career choice is the obvious correct one for you, then, to some extent, there isn\u2019t really much of a decision needed to pursue it.<\/p>\n

    In this sense, the wickedness of life is also what allows for creativity and freedom. If all choices have a systematic method for arriving at the \u201ccorrect\u201d answer, then there\u2019s no real need for human judgement.<\/p>\n

    Genuine choices, those which don\u2019t have clear answers or evaluation criteria, may be frustrating and puzzling, but there also a chance at creativity and self-expression. If all art could be judged by a perfect rubric, determining its value, would it still be art? Similarly, if all life problems could be dissolved into a simple logic puzzle, would there be any life in them?<\/p>\n

    Regardless of how you choose to approach the wicked problems in your life, admitting their existence may be the first step to embracing them.<\/p>\n

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