Risk taxonomy
|
Risk Anatomy™
|
A fine occupation for the idle lawyer: Describing, and grouping in relation to each other, the entire catalog of risks that face your undertaking, as if unrealised legal hazards can be ranked, boxed and sorted like the phyla of butterflies, tits or thrush.
This exercise can occupy as little — a breakout session on an away-day — or as much — the permanent task of a dedicated division in the department — of your firm's intellectual capacity as you have going spare: organisations that run to the bureaucratic[1] may become so swooned by this notion that they can find little time to do anything else. For how can one asses the risks of a transaction if one doesn't know from which family of what genus in what species it hails?
The problem with risk taxonomies
Jolly Contrarian has two reservations about risk taxonomies:
The false comfort blanket
Any taxonomy, like a map, can only document the territory you know, have raked over, surveyed and measured. Stables from which the horse has bolted, so to say. This is of a piece with the common lawyer’s usual mode of reasoning, the doctrine of precedent, whose organising principle is to move forward by exclusive reference to what lies behind. This is all very well in times of plenty, when the tide is rising, all boats are floating, those swimming nude are safely concealed from the neck down and all is well in the world. Here, the world behaves according to the narrative we have supplied it — we are in a period of “normal science”[2]. But by the same token, the acute risks are in abeyance. Aslan is not on the move. Even if you left the door open, the horse has a nosebag full of hay and is’t going anywhere.
But what happens when our carefully constructed narrative falls apart? Those stressed scenarios in which, as the old saw has it, I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone, and black swans will be angrily flapping about. Then, your paradigm has failed. People around you are losing their heads and blaming it on you and your stupid taxonomy, which suddenly isn’t working.
See also: known knowns
It’s a narrative
Any taxonomy is a narrative. Like any hierarchical organising system, a taxonomy commits you to one way of looking at the world, at the expense of all others. Now this a necessary evil when it comes to concrete physical things, like books: the Dewey decimal system is a single hierarchy by necessity: a physical thing cannot be in two places at once. So all library users agree a common taxonomy (subject matter, not author, or title, or publisher) and, for better or worse, stick to it. This has a consequent effect on how everyone thinks about the world: if you want to find the book you're looking for, you need to buy in to the taxonomy (what good is using another taxonomy, however suitable, if it means never being able to find the book you are after? Since book storage has changed, the Dewey decimal system has more or less disappeared from use. Boolean search means you can search on any keyword you fancy.
The Dewey decimal system divides the universe, known and unknown[3] into a subdivisions of 1,000. In its way, it offers infinite particularity, but only by subdivision of ten major categories:
- 000: General Reference
- 100: Philosophy
- 200: Religion
- 300: Social Sciences
- 400 Language
- 500 Natural Science
- 600 Applied Science
- 700 Arts & Recreation
- 800 Literature
- 900 History
As with all taxonomies, these major categories carve nature in an idiosyncratic way — not to get all post-structuralist on you, but a way that is inevitably rooted in the western intellectual tradition in which Dewey, universities and their libraries operate. They produce arbitrary dis-juxtapositions: Why is Logic (part of Philosophy) nowhere near Mathematics (a part of Natural Science) or even Language? Why do Religion and Philosophy — intimately connected in many ways — have two categories, but all of Natural Science only one? And so on.
But we have to physically arrange our libraries somehow, and that forced Dewey into an intellectual commitment to some kind of order, privileged over all the others. But in our crazy, sugar-coated post-modern world, that’s not really how we see things any more. To taxonomise is to narratise, is to commit to a certain paradigm. To narratise is, arbitrarily, to prefer one story over all others, with no logical grounds for doing so.[4]
This has a consequent effect on how one thinks about the world: if you want to find the book you’re looking for, you must accept the prevailing taxonomy (what good is using another taxonomy, however suitable, if it means never being able to find the book you are after?)
But we are in the information age now. Since the need for physical book storage has changed — we can now enforce a Cartesian split between the book as intellectual concept and as physical artefact, and the physical artefact isn’t the interesting bit — the Dewey decimal system has more or less disappeared from use. Boolean search means you can search on any keyword you fancy.
A Boolean methodology does not require any such juxtaposition. It is open-ended and infinite, and agnostic to rules where in the same way that a full-blown taxonomy is closed-ended and finite.
A Boolean methodology does not require any such juxtaposition. It is open-ended and infinite, and agnostic to rules where in the same way that a full-blown taxonomy is closed-ended and finite.
See also
References
- ↑ You know who you are.
- ↑ Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. If you take one book recommendation from the JC, make it this one. Or The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
- ↑ 001.9, as any fule kno.
- ↑ Paradigms are incommensurable, in other words: you cannot judge one in terms of another, and nor are there naturally-occurring “neutral” criteria independent of both by which they may be compared: all criteria for any judgment are a product of some paradigm or other.