There is a general problem with forecasts and scenarios and
simulation
modem runs that is hard to deal with, btw, and raises interesting
ethical questions. That is, relatively unsophisticated users--and
some sophisticated ones--tend to reify forecasts as being more
meaningful than they were ever intended to be. In scenario planning,
in which I specialize, some people embrace one or another scenario
as the "most likely," which is not what scenarios are about at all.
The worst examples of this reification seems to occur in quantitative
business cultures with quantitative forecasts. Since the people
are used to thinking in terms of numbers, numbers become the real
thing. Or to put it more generally, the map gets mistaken for
the territory.
How to keep clients from falling into this trap is a real challenge
sometimes. The ethical issue is in how forecasts and scenarios
are presented. If you make presentations that *encourage* clients
to fall into the map/territory trap, that's unethical, in my
view.