This panel had both intensly over complicated presentation (almost textbook examples of how not to present) and fantastically relevant ideas to collective risk management under high levels uncertainty. Cox is someone who it might be very interesting to talk to further. His motto was Discover, don't guess what works best. While not directly talking about collaborative adaptive managent he alluded to two important dimensions- how when risks are highly uncertain, a voting majority will often result in suboptimal decision making. And two, that experimentation and revision is key to responding to uncertain outcomes- we must continually learn from our previous decisions. The other speak whose presentation was highly relevant was yang - he came from the marketing world - he asserted that in situation of high vulnerability, individuals rely more heavily on anecdotal evidence that analytics (statistics). During the break I talked to him a fair bit to see if -1) these relationships (or trends) might be consistent in collective decisions and 2) what the role of social capital or network might play in tempering these affects.
There was a third presenter from Finland who was difficult to understand and had highly complex slides - but I think his article would be very useful to take a closer look at- he talks about ideals of decision making - respond more to theory than practice.
Panel 2. Issues of omission
Again, two presenters stood out - bansback talked about testing the impact the including imprecision measures has on public opinion (stated preferences for treatment). It was shown that the exclusion of precision was more effective than quantitative inclusion. Falzer discussed how treatments generally fall into three categories - recommend (white area), don't recommend (black area) and everything else (grey area). He discussed alternative methods for making decisions within the grey area, including aleatory decisions, judgment, and epistemic analysis. He explained how the traditional model relies only in epistemic analysis which does not necessarily reflect the gap in findings that needs to be addressed- In other words, the treatment passes the test, but it's the wrong test to apply. During the discussion section we discussed the importance of changing the cultural expectation around precision and certainty. Teaching patients to expect adjustments and to question implications.
Panel 3. The last session I attended focused on transportation and occupational hazards - one of the speakers was Sadiq, the rest, whole interesting were not highly televant to my thinking. During his talk he discussed the benefit of risk managers for institutions. I actually found issue with his method and results, but found his work very relevant and hope to look further into his article. Afterwards we spoke for a while, about everything from scenario planning to adaptive management and improvisation. I have his card and I want I plan to contact him for some follow up questions about strategies he sees for coping with uncertainty (I'll expand more on this idea in another blog)
Lastly, I sat next to michael hand from the usfs - actually from Missoula! So your neck of the woods ;) we talked a bit about this idea of scales, resilience and adaptation - we used the example of fire suppression to discuss how scales of intervention and risk perception can have Unintended consequences. We discussed the problem of 'selection bias' (I put this in quotes because it isn't quite this, so that term is just my place holder) but the idea that with large scale events, you are usually wrong much more often than you are right - and more to the point, very rarely right when you need to be. And that this has implictions on adaptation vs mitigation interventions.
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