Reflections from Fire Country: Scale Inversely Correlates with Actionability (the SICA Doctrine)

 

England no longer existed. He’d got that—somehow he’d got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger. He passed out.

- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Don't let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department.

- Ernest Rutherford

I've noticed, recently with some urgency, that the more local the media content*, the more actionable and concrete it is.

For the last week I've been hiding from the smoke in my house in Sonoma County California, deciding hour-to-hour whether it's time to go. (I got my things ready weeks back instead of waiting for this year's fire.)

Rather than just waiting for an emergency alert to come through from an agency, I scroll through Twitter. Those agencies are on there, along with people on the ground, linking to the agencies and to recently updated maps (within hours.)

The #LNULightningcomplex is now about 500 square miles. A fire that big (#LNULightningComplex) has multiple parts (like the #WalbridgeFire and #HennesseyFire.) What I care about is how the fire closest to my house (the #Walbridgefire) is acting, where the local winds are pushing it, whether there is air support available to try to hold them back. I recognize now more than ever that, regarding (for example) the parts of the fire south and east of Lake Berryessa which have all merged with the #HennesseyFire, my interest is an idle one. There is no immediate life-and-property decision I have to make based on that information.

So it was with interest that I noticed that when I searched on the #Walbridgefire, the mix of Tweets included more actionable, concrete (though often dry) facts-and-figures - as opposed to the gigantic #LNULightningComplex in its totality, which has a much higher proportion of news stations (both national and local), people making political statements or otherwise connecting the existence of the fire to their own interest, or people making emotional statements (granted, often supportive ones.)

But more than that, it shows that the more concrete, immediate, and specific something is, the more likely statements about it are going to be useful ones, that we can actually employ to help us make decisions. Likewise, the broader, the more general, the more abstract something is, the more likely statements about it will be vague, not actionable, more about the nervous system that's making the statements, than about the external world the nervous system is trying to model. In fact this is something of a tautology, since the more abstract something is, the more it exists in the nervous system rather than as an external empirical entity.

To boil it down, Scale Inversely Correlates with Actionability, or SICA (pronounced "seek-uh"). Here, "scale" doesn't just mean physical dimension as with the fires, but rather broadness of definition. And actionability doesn't mean whether you are able to do it right now; it means whether you can come up with a clear plan of action afterward. As an example: "they should fix the houses in my state so they can withstand an earthquake." As opposed to, "my brother should fix his house so it can withstand an earthquake." One of those is more obviously broad, and less clearly actionable. In fact, in this sense, "actionable" implies that a claim is both falsifiable and meaningful

SICA is quite closely related to the old saw in American local politics, that "there is only one way to pave a road, not a Republican way or a Democratic way." A country is an abstract enough place that you can spend a lot of time arguing about "things" which seem to be important, but in a city, at some point someone has to move dirt, in a specific way, from one place to another to build something. This is why it's a good idea to, as much as possible, keep discussions on the object- vs meta-level. Human skills and problem-solving are not nearly as generalizeable as we would like to think. (This is why for example I stopped trying to improve at chess.)

It's also related to the idea of operationalizing definitions. You don't need to operationalize concrete entities that can be simultaneously directly experienced on the scale of one meter and one second. The more abstract, the more rigorous the definition must be. Our built-in sense of "folk physics" is good enough to meaningfully make predictions about the behavior of fist-sized rocks. But E=mc^2 is one of the most general statements ever made, and in order to be actionable, it must be in a rigorous formalism. Because "broader" entities do trend away from actionability, it's exactly these statements about broad entities ("matter", "energy") that need to be formalized and defined operationally the most. Otherwise, when we talk about such things we're probably just barking at each other.

more concrete	more abstract, broader
actionable	idle speculation
specific	general
clear	vague
true or false	"not even wrong"
falsifiable	not testable
meaningful	pointless
effortlessly rule-bound (event itself follows obvious logic)	Must be grounded in rigid formalism to have a chance of being meaningful

*As a side observation, news organizations are in the business of keeping you watching so you see commercials, than public service agencies and individuals motivated by their missions. It's probably for this reason that I c an't think of a single instance of media reporting that I have used for decision-making during this time. I make this observation even as someone not particularly predisposed to dislike media institutions.

**The astute reader will note that I've made a big jump from concrete to abstract right here, starting from the very humble "news about my fire is more actionable the more local it is" to a conclusion about the nature of belief statements and psychology in general. All non-imitative learning involves generalization; the key is knowing when you're more likely to be doing it to try to scrutinize it better.