I was feeling the need for another source to flesh out my discussion and relate back to my main points. I think I found just the one!
The text deals with “uncomfortable knowledge,” which is what I feel like I have created with this automatic classifier. I have simplified and reduced the sky and weather to a few statistics but this does not mean the classifier is not useful. Communicating this kind of uncertainty in regards to policy is difficult. I think this relates really well to the points I have already made about hybridity and distanciation. I reduce the complexity of sky phenomena to statistics but this is necessarily further reduced for communication and in order to make policy decisions. It also relates to hybridity since clouds in the context of climate change are so tied up in political dilemmas and value conflicts. “Uncomfortable knowledge” bridges wicked problems and clumsy solutions (Raynor 2012, 111). BUT it is necessary for organizations to make reductions in order to come up with solution, just like the reductions I made are necessary to practice science and construct knowledge.
These quotes get at the main points in this article.
“To make sense of the complexity of the world so that they can act, individuals and institutions need to develop simplified, self-consistent versions of that world. The process of doing so means that much of what is known about the world needs to be excluded from those versions, and in particular that knowledge which is in tension or outright contradiction with those versions must be expunged. This is ‘uncomfortable knowledge’. ” (Raynor 2012, 107)
“Without organizational filters we would not have information at all, only noise. Lacking the capacity for editing sensory and informational input, humankind would be reduced, as Geertz (1973) has observed, to mental basket cases. Sense-making is possible only through processes of exclusion. Storytelling is possible only because of the mass of detail that we leave out. Knowledge is possible only through the systematic ‘social construction of ignorance’” (Raynor 2012, 110-111)
Steve Rayner (2012) Uncomfortable knowledge: the social construction of ignorance in science and environmental policy discourses, Economy and Society, 41:1, 107-125, DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2011.637335