Three things I’ve been thinking about: managing for means vs. extremes, slowing down, and divisiveness
Here are three things I’ve been thinking about this week – 30/12/2025
Hi friends,
Here are three things that have been rattling around my head this week. Ideas I’m sitting with, questions I’m pondering, or threads I might pull on in future posts.
These aren’t polished arguments. They’re the thoughts behind the scenes, the ones that shape what I write and how I think.
We’re managing for means, not distributions.
I’ve been working on the final proofs of a paper that will be coming out in Nature Reviews Biodiversity in February focused on extreme events and river biodiversity under climate change. This was a huge effort that took a couple of years to put together, but what struck me during the process is not how much we already know but actually how much we still don’t know.
The thing I’m most concerned about is that we’re often fixated on means when the real world runs on variance and extremes.
Ecological impacts are rarely driven by the middle of the distribution. They come from tail events — floods, droughts, heatwaves — whose probability is shifting under climate change. As the means shift, so too do the variances and the chances of encountering extreme conditions. If we continue to manage for the middle, we’ll be unprepared for the real threats — extreme events, which can have irreversible impacts on ecosystems and humans alike.
Managing for the mean is choosing to be surprised by extremes.
(In the paid section: two more things I’ve been thinking about — one about slowing down as an intellectual strategy, and one about why I’m resisting pressure to be more divisive.)
