Thanks for taking up this subject, Melanie. Misinformation and disinformation have been on my mind a lot lately. It seems that so much of our time and effort—for those of us working in the environment—is taken up with fighting misinformation and mendacity. I may touch on the subject myself sometime soon.
Regarding: "On the 26th of March, the world was horrified by news that a gargantuan container ship had crashed into a bridge in Baltimore, causing it to collapse. " Information is nuanced, sometimes in an extreme way (your example) sometimes not so extreme. But there is also something about beliefs and lies that is nuanced. Sometimes, we are led astray intentionally ... sometimes unintentionally.
I guess that "certainty" has nuance between science and something like trans-science. Citizens in general are not thinking in the same way scientists do which sometimes causes conflicts between most citizens' policy advocacy and scientists' and engineers' policy advocacy. Engineers and scientists create equations the require coefficients. Such coefficients are derived from observation of relevant experiments. One often hears engineers saying "Get me more data." The more data one can have that applies t specific situations, material types, connected systems of devices, the more certain one becomes about outcomes. Insurance companies make money by having actuaries collect large amounts of data for specific kinds of losses so that premium values can be set that makes the company money. These principles of risk and uncertainty have been understood since antiquity and started to become formalized in the more recent past in for example, Gerolamo Cardano's ”liber de Ludo Aleae” and even more recently, Jakob Bernoulli's "Ars conjectandi". It seems that Enlightenment brought together Newton's discovery of differential equations with an understanding that having large data sets, the future could be predicted with certainty. In modernity, Although coming later, Sven Ove Hansson's "From the casino to the jungle: Dealing with uncertainty in technological risk management" lays a good foundation to Ilya Prigogine's "The end of certainty".
Thinking about bridges for example, it is well understood what the terms "ultimate strength" and "yield strength" imply to design engineers about the behavior of a structural member. When the yield strength is exceeded, the member will begin to strain (deflect, move, ...) when the ultimate strength is exceeded, the member will fail (break in two). However, it depends on what material for example a steel alloy, is being subjected to a force inducing strain or stress. The only way to know where a meterial will yield or fail (yield strength, ultimate strength) is by collecting a lot of data where samples of the material are subjected to forces in a specific way such that the equation coefficients can be set. Depending on how much data are collected that apply to a SPECIFIC SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES, predictions of behavior can be expressed in mathematical formulae.
Uncertainty creeps in by unknowing that things will obey the assumed specific set of circumstances. Engineers are very familiar with danger of the unknowing part and they use "margins of safety" to compensate for their unknowing. Engineers understand that the data collected on materials, for example, may not include effects such as corrosion, higher loads than assumed, or effects that belong to physics yet to be discovered or that are revealed in operation. For example, the engineers who designed the first Plutonium breeder reactor were asked to design it using the data scientists had collected on fission up to that time. However, the engineers who designed the reactor added extra fuel tubes to "increase the margin of safety" in the design. It is well-known that the addition of this "margin of safety" was the only reason the reactor could reach criticality because the effects of Xenon poisoning had not been observed in the data taken by scientists using low power fission reactions (for example, https://b-reactor.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Lost_In_The_Telling-Rev_3.pdf).
Trans-science, a term coined by Alvin Weinberg in the article "The limits of science and trans-science". From his abstract:
"Many different limits to science have been identified, the most common being those between science and religion, or more generally between fact and value; between science and art; as well as the sociological limits imposed on science because it is becoming too large and unwieldy to be encompassed by a single mind. Here another realm is explored, lying beyond science: we call trans-science those questions which epistemologically are matters of fact, yet are beyond the proficiency of science. Trans-scientific questions consist of very rare occurrences and 'catastrophes' in the Thomian sense. It has been pointed out that unanswerable, trans-scientific questions are usually asked of science by policy makers. Consequently the scientist must concede that his[sic] proficiency is limited by this trans-scientific limit to science." (Weinberg 2013, online version)
Climate change and bridge building have trans-science in common. Experiments conducted by Joseph Fourier and Claude Pouillet showed that the broad spectrum energy (such as sunlight) when passed through carbon dioxide gas will be shifted towards blue. That is, the atmosphere retains the longer wave (closer to red) incident radiation from the sun. This is a fact that can, like the scientific fact that a that fissions will release a known amount of kinetic energy. Einstein's well-known equation, energy released equals the mass times the square of the speed of light required data from measurements made by for example, Ole Roemer. The mass of fissioning atoms must also be determined from experiments. And that scientific fact, when extrapolated to scale in the Hanford production reactor required more fissions than scientists expected because their experiments failed to include fission products that "steal" neutrons. So too did changing conditions: really, Really, REALLY big ships started going through the Francis Scott Key bridge that was designed (with safety margin) for much smaller ships.
Well, I guess what I am trying say in a round about way is that there is great uncertainty where we have little or no data. What are thought to be "scientific facts" may not account for uncertainty in either direction. Plus scientists, engineers, and particularly policy-makers should be humble enough to take into account all views when deciding policies. This should include understanding how much relevant data are available that can be applied to accurately predicting future outcomes.
Background on some of the points:
Hansson, Sven Ove. "From the casino to the jungle: Dealing with uncertainty in technological risk management." Synthese 168, no. 3 (2009): 423-432.
Weinberg, Alvin M. "The limits of science and trans-science." Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 2, no. 4 (1977): 337-342.
Cardano, Gerolamo. The book on games of Chance: the 16th-century treatise on probability. Courier Dover Publications, 2015.
Schneider, Ivo. "Jakob Bernoulli, Ars Conjectandi (1713)." In Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940, pp. 88-104. Elsevier Science, 2005.
Thanks for taking up this subject, Melanie. Misinformation and disinformation have been on my mind a lot lately. It seems that so much of our time and effort—for those of us working in the environment—is taken up with fighting misinformation and mendacity. I may touch on the subject myself sometime soon.
Regarding: "On the 26th of March, the world was horrified by news that a gargantuan container ship had crashed into a bridge in Baltimore, causing it to collapse. " Information is nuanced, sometimes in an extreme way (your example) sometimes not so extreme. But there is also something about beliefs and lies that is nuanced. Sometimes, we are led astray intentionally ... sometimes unintentionally.
I guess that "certainty" has nuance between science and something like trans-science. Citizens in general are not thinking in the same way scientists do which sometimes causes conflicts between most citizens' policy advocacy and scientists' and engineers' policy advocacy. Engineers and scientists create equations the require coefficients. Such coefficients are derived from observation of relevant experiments. One often hears engineers saying "Get me more data." The more data one can have that applies t specific situations, material types, connected systems of devices, the more certain one becomes about outcomes. Insurance companies make money by having actuaries collect large amounts of data for specific kinds of losses so that premium values can be set that makes the company money. These principles of risk and uncertainty have been understood since antiquity and started to become formalized in the more recent past in for example, Gerolamo Cardano's ”liber de Ludo Aleae” and even more recently, Jakob Bernoulli's "Ars conjectandi". It seems that Enlightenment brought together Newton's discovery of differential equations with an understanding that having large data sets, the future could be predicted with certainty. In modernity, Although coming later, Sven Ove Hansson's "From the casino to the jungle: Dealing with uncertainty in technological risk management" lays a good foundation to Ilya Prigogine's "The end of certainty".
Thinking about bridges for example, it is well understood what the terms "ultimate strength" and "yield strength" imply to design engineers about the behavior of a structural member. When the yield strength is exceeded, the member will begin to strain (deflect, move, ...) when the ultimate strength is exceeded, the member will fail (break in two). However, it depends on what material for example a steel alloy, is being subjected to a force inducing strain or stress. The only way to know where a meterial will yield or fail (yield strength, ultimate strength) is by collecting a lot of data where samples of the material are subjected to forces in a specific way such that the equation coefficients can be set. Depending on how much data are collected that apply to a SPECIFIC SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES, predictions of behavior can be expressed in mathematical formulae.
Uncertainty creeps in by unknowing that things will obey the assumed specific set of circumstances. Engineers are very familiar with danger of the unknowing part and they use "margins of safety" to compensate for their unknowing. Engineers understand that the data collected on materials, for example, may not include effects such as corrosion, higher loads than assumed, or effects that belong to physics yet to be discovered or that are revealed in operation. For example, the engineers who designed the first Plutonium breeder reactor were asked to design it using the data scientists had collected on fission up to that time. However, the engineers who designed the reactor added extra fuel tubes to "increase the margin of safety" in the design. It is well-known that the addition of this "margin of safety" was the only reason the reactor could reach criticality because the effects of Xenon poisoning had not been observed in the data taken by scientists using low power fission reactions (for example, https://b-reactor.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Lost_In_The_Telling-Rev_3.pdf).
Trans-science, a term coined by Alvin Weinberg in the article "The limits of science and trans-science". From his abstract:
"Many different limits to science have been identified, the most common being those between science and religion, or more generally between fact and value; between science and art; as well as the sociological limits imposed on science because it is becoming too large and unwieldy to be encompassed by a single mind. Here another realm is explored, lying beyond science: we call trans-science those questions which epistemologically are matters of fact, yet are beyond the proficiency of science. Trans-scientific questions consist of very rare occurrences and 'catastrophes' in the Thomian sense. It has been pointed out that unanswerable, trans-scientific questions are usually asked of science by policy makers. Consequently the scientist must concede that his[sic] proficiency is limited by this trans-scientific limit to science." (Weinberg 2013, online version)
Climate change and bridge building have trans-science in common. Experiments conducted by Joseph Fourier and Claude Pouillet showed that the broad spectrum energy (such as sunlight) when passed through carbon dioxide gas will be shifted towards blue. That is, the atmosphere retains the longer wave (closer to red) incident radiation from the sun. This is a fact that can, like the scientific fact that a that fissions will release a known amount of kinetic energy. Einstein's well-known equation, energy released equals the mass times the square of the speed of light required data from measurements made by for example, Ole Roemer. The mass of fissioning atoms must also be determined from experiments. And that scientific fact, when extrapolated to scale in the Hanford production reactor required more fissions than scientists expected because their experiments failed to include fission products that "steal" neutrons. So too did changing conditions: really, Really, REALLY big ships started going through the Francis Scott Key bridge that was designed (with safety margin) for much smaller ships.
Well, I guess what I am trying say in a round about way is that there is great uncertainty where we have little or no data. What are thought to be "scientific facts" may not account for uncertainty in either direction. Plus scientists, engineers, and particularly policy-makers should be humble enough to take into account all views when deciding policies. This should include understanding how much relevant data are available that can be applied to accurately predicting future outcomes.
Background on some of the points:
Hansson, Sven Ove. "From the casino to the jungle: Dealing with uncertainty in technological risk management." Synthese 168, no. 3 (2009): 423-432.
Weinberg, Alvin M. "The limits of science and trans-science." Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 2, no. 4 (1977): 337-342.
Cardano, Gerolamo. The book on games of Chance: the 16th-century treatise on probability. Courier Dover Publications, 2015.
Schneider, Ivo. "Jakob Bernoulli, Ars Conjectandi (1713)." In Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940, pp. 88-104. Elsevier Science, 2005.
Lewens, Tim, ed. Risk: philosophical perspectives. Routledge, 2007.
Great piece Melanie. Thanks.