Fact-Finding Amid Irreducible Uncertainties

3. Factors That Make Conflict Intractable

This introductory article was written by ChatGPT at the direction of Heidi Burgess, who reviewed, edited, and approved the final content.
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Many factual disputes cannot be resolved by finding a single, definitive answer. This is especially true because societies and their natural environments are complex adaptive systems, with many interacting parts, feedback loops, delays, and unintended consequences. In such settings, experts may be able to say that one outcome is more likely than another, that some risks are large and others are small, or that some courses of action are more robust than others. But they often cannot say exactly what will happen, when it will happen, or how serious the consequences will be. This creates a major conflict overlay problem: citizens and policymakers often want "the answer," while responsible experts can only offer conditional, probabilistic judgments.

Scientists deal with uncertainty by trying to make it explicit, rather than pretending it does not exist. They use confidence intervals, probability ranges, sensitivity analyses, competing models, scenarios, peer review, and continuing observation to identify what is well-established, what is plausible but uncertain, and what remains speculative. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for example, uses formal guidance for the consistent treatment of uncertainties, distinguishing between levels of evidence, degrees of agreement, confidence, and likelihood. This kind of disciplined uncertainty is not a weakness of science. It is one of the ways science protects itself against false precision and premature certainty.

The difficulty is that uncertainty is easily misunderstood or exploited in public debate. When scientists say that a conclusion is "likely," "very likely," or "supported by the weight of evidence," some people hear that as a confession that the experts do not really know. Others use uncertainty as a reason for delay, arguing that no action should be taken until all doubts have been eliminated. But in public policy, waiting for certainty is, itself, a decision, often one with serious risks. Climate change, pandemic response, wildfire management, water planning, ecosystem protection, economic forecasting, and national security all require decisions before all the evidence is in. Researchers who study decision making under deep uncertainty emphasize the need for approaches that can perform reasonably well across a wide range of plausible futures rather than depending on a single prediction being correct.

Communicating uncertainty well is therefore a crucial part of trustworthy fact-finding. Experts can lose credibility if they speak with more certainty than the evidence supports, especially if later events force them to revise their advice. But they can also lose credibility if they present uncertainty in ways that seem vague, evasive, or disconnected from the practical choices people face. The National Academies' report on Communicating Science Effectively stresses the importance of tailoring scientific communication to the needs and concerns of the audience, especially on contentious issues. Research on communicating uncertainty and public trust also suggests that being open about uncertainty does not necessarily destroy trust; in many cases, transparency about limits can make experts seem more honest and credible.

For conflict resolution purposes, the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to manage it constructively. This means asking better questions: What do we know with high confidence? What are the major uncertainties? What outcomes would be unacceptable? What options are reversible? What warning signs should trigger a change in policy? What evidence should be monitored over time? Approaches such as adaptive management are designed for precisely this situation, allowing decision makers to act, learn, monitor results, and adjust as conditions change. In polarized conflicts, good fact-finding should help parties distinguish between uncertainty that is unavoidable, uncertainty that can be reduced through further inquiry, and uncertainty that is being exaggerated for strategic purposes. That distinction can make it possible to move forward without pretending that complex problems have simple, certain answers.

This page was created by ChatGPT in response to this prompt. It was then reviewed, edited, supplemented and approved by Heidi Burgess. More information about how and why we are using AI in this way, and about the growing number of ways in which Beyond Intractability is using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems to generate content and build out the BI system, is available on our BI/AI Overview Page.