What To Do When Things Get Complicated
Life’s wicked problems and how to solve them (or at least not to freak out)
Real life is nothing like school maths or board games — it is full of really wicked things, not clear and not easy to deal with.
Wicked problems are problems that are, “difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise.”
Learning to deal with their wickedness is essential to the art of living.
The first step to dealing with wicked problems in one’s life is recognising that they exist. Many people prefer to pretend that all wickedness can be removed by some elegant formalisation of the problem — and that those who disagree are wrong.
Philosopher and former AI researcher David Chapman argues that the things we experience in life always have a mixture of recognisable patterns and amorphous nebulosity. Although we always experience both, it’s 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.
Wicked problems undermine this view because they are, by nature, not formalisable in a way that everyone will agree upon. Although you can take a wicked problem…
