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Notes
INTRODUCTION: MORAL ALGEBRA
“It was the grand resort”: William Duer, New-York as It Was During the Latter Part of the Last Century (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1849), 13–14.
Under the heading “Not Marry”: Randal Keynes, Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2002), loc. 195–203, Kindle.
“the Affair of so much Importance”: Mr. Franklin: A Selection from His Personal Letters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956).
“Problem 1”: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), loc. 4668–4672, Kindle.
“One idea was to throw”: Peter L. Bergen, Manhunt: the Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2012), loc. 1877, Kindle.
deliberative decisions involve three steps: Some decisions—jury decisions about guilt or innocence, the CIA’s decision about who was living in that mysterious compound—do not involve the second predictive phase, given that they are not really about the consequences of taking one path versus another, but rather about a question of fact: Is he guilty or innocent? Is Osama bin Laden living in this house?
“He did not like frustrating”: George Eliot, Middlemarch (MobileReference, 2008), loc. 191, Kindle.
the most meaningful moments of their lives: The literary critic Gary Saul Morson describes this property of the novel—and of human experience itself—as “narrativeness,” a way of measuring how readily a given phenomenon can be compressed down into a simple theory or maxim: “Although one could give a narrative explanation about the orbit of Mars—first it was here, and then it moved there, and then it skidded in over here—it would be absurd to do so because Newton’s laws already allow one to derive its location at any point in time. So I left the Center with a new concept in mind, which I called ‘narrativeness.’ Narrativeness, which comes in degrees, measures the need for narrative. In the example of Mars, there is zero narrativeness. On the other hand, the sort of ethical questions posed by the great realist novels have maximal narrativeness. When is there narrativeness? The more we need culture as a means of explanation, the more narrativeness. The more we invoke irreducibly individual human psychology, the more narrativeness. And the more contingent factors—events that are unpredictable from within one’s disciplinary framework—play a role, the more narrativeness.” (Morson, 38–39.)
1: MAPPING
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: “General James Cartwright, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recalls, ‘That was a good vehicle for us as we planned the various options to then sit down with that model and say . . . “This is how we would come at it; this is what would happen in this courtyard or this house. . . . Here’s how we would have more than one avenue of approach on what we thought were the target-inhabited buildings.”’” Bergen, 164–165.
“aquatic habitat, terrestrial habitat”: Robin Gregory, Lee Failing, Michael Harstone, Graham Long, Tim McDaniels, and Dan Ohlson, Structured Decision Making: A Practical Guide to Environmental Management Choices (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), loc. 233–234, Kindle.
Daniel Kahneman: Kahneman, loc. 1388–1397.
focus on shared information: Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), loc. 280–287, Kindle.
“Some group members are cognitively central”: Sunstein and Hastie, loc. 1142–1149.
non-whites in the jury room: www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter, accessed Sept. 2016.
“The whole pattern”: Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), loc. 466–469, Kindle.
“The fireman’s internal computer”: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2007), loc. 1455–1461, Kindle.
thirteen distinct species: Helen M. Regan, Mark Colyvan, and Mark A Burgman, “A Taxonomy and Treatment of Uncertainty for Ecology and Conservation Biology,” Ecological Applications 12, no. 2 (2002): 618–628. Gregory, et al, summarized the categories as follows: (knowledge) uncertainty “When we are uncertain about facts concerning events or outcomes in the world because . . . Natural variation . . . outcomes that vary naturally with respect to time, space or other variables and can be difficult to predict Measurement error . . . we cannot measure things precisely Systematic error . . . we have not calibrated our instruments or designed our experiments/sampling properly Model uncertainty . . . we do not know how things interact with each other Subjective judgment . . . we use judgment to interpret data, observations or experience. This results in uncertainty in individual judgments and uncertainty caused by differences across experts Sources of linguistic uncertainty When we are not communicating effectively because . . . Vagueness . . . language permits borderline cases. Vagueness can be numeric (how many ‘tall’ trees?, when does a population of algae become a ‘bloom’?) or non-numeric (how to define habitat suitability?) Ambiguity . . . words have more than one meaning and it is not clear which is intended: ‘natural’ environment, forest ‘cover’ Context dependence . . . descriptions are not used in context; an oil spill that is ‘big’ on my drivew
ay would be considered ‘small’ in the ocean Underspecificity . . . there is unwanted generality; ‘it might rain tomorrow’ vs ‘there is a 70% probability of rain at location tomorrow’ Indeterminacy . . . words used at one point in time mean something different.” Gregory et al., loc. 123, Kindle.
The Meaning of It All: Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist (New York: Basic Books, 2009), loc. 26–27.
“Brennan pushed them”: Bergen, loc. 134–135.
And even when the idea: In Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), Irving Janis offers a case study analyzing the chain of oversight and false conviction that enabled the military commanders in Hawaii and Washington to be blindsided by the attack on Pearl Harbor. With hindsight, there was significant evidence that the Japanese might attempt a direct strike on the naval base, and indeed a number of intelligence briefings shared with Admiral Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, suggested that the attack was at least a possibility. And yet, as Janis describes it, a kind of fog of groupthink settled over Kimmel and his deputies. The group was convinced that the Japanese would strike somewhere; the question was whether they would declare war by attacking either British or Dutch territories in the Far East. The idea of a direct strike was so far from the consensus view that they made almost no attempt to defend against such an attack, even when they lost radar contact with the Japanese aircraft carriers in the first few days of December. Because the attack was considered low probability, no one bothered to argue for taking the risk seriously. (Janis, 76.)
“Advisers had a way of narrowing”: Mark Bowden, The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2012), loc. 159, Kindle.
2: PREDICTING
“One group tended to organize”: Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2015), loc. 68–69, Kindle.
“people who are not from Ghana”: Tetlock and Gardner, loc. 125, Kindle.
“absurd scenes of spaceship pilots”: Gary Westfahl, Wong Kin Yuen, and Amy Kit-sze Chan, eds., Science Fiction and the Prediction of the Future: Essays on Foresight and Fallacy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), loc. 82–84, Kindle.
imagine that human beings would colonize Mars: This same blind spot applies to the people who were actively creating the digital revolution in the 1940s and 1950s. The legendary scientist Vannevar Bush published a much-celebrated essay called “As We May Think” in The Atlantic in the late 1940s. It envisioned a new kind of research tool that many consider to be one of the first glimpses of the hypertext universe created by the World Wide Web fifty years later. But Bush’s device was not a computer at all; it was a souped-up microfiche machine, where researchers are only able to read static images of documents, and create simple links (Bush calls them “trails”) connecting related documents. All the things that make a network-connected computer so powerful—the ability to write your own words, to copy and paste text, to share and discuss with colleagues—were entirely missing from Bush’s vision. And this was coming from the man who had supervised the creation of the very first digital computers ever built.
George Orwell in the 1940s: Westfahl et al., loc. 195–202, Kindle.
“When his daughter was very ill”: Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging, 498.
the polluted chaos of London: The purity of the Malvern water has, in fact, been confirmed using modern scientific methods. The springs flow through unusually hard Precambrian rocks that keep the water largely free of minerals, and the small cracks in the rock function as a kind of natural filter for other impurities.
British ship doctor James Lind: Druin Burch, Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It (London: Vintage, 2010), 158.
He took to maintaining a ledger: “The first method was the ‘dripping sheet,’ a wet sheet, slightly wrung out, wrapped around the body and then rubbed vigorously for five minutes. The aim was ‘to stimulate the nervous and circulatory systems of the body.’ Dr. Gully wrote that ‘to very delicate persons I often apply, in the first instance, only friction of the trunk and arms with a wet towel; dry and dress those parts, and then have the legs rubbed in like manner.’” From Keynes, loc. 2888–2896, Kindle.
When a member of Parliament suggested: “The observations made . . . upon land as well as at sea would be collected, as, if that were done, he anticipated that in a few years, notwithstanding the variable climate of this country, we might know in this metropolis the condition of the weather 24 hours beforehand.” From John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, FitzRoy: The Remarkable Story of Darwin’s Captain and the Invention of the Weather Forecast (ReAnimus Press, 2016), loc. 4060–4062, Kindle.
Initially the Met Office: A crude version of this idea had been proposed by Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry in 1847: “Realising that at least some storms travel from west to east across the North American continent, as early as 1847 Joseph Henry, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, proposed a network of telegraphic links to give warnings to citizens of the eastern States of storms coming from the west.” From Gribbin, loc. 4151–4153, Kindle.
“Prophecies and predictions they are not”: Peter Moore, “The Birth of the Weather Forecast,” www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32483678.
“no notes or calculations”: Katherine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 119.
They created charts: “Observers at each of his main stations recorded the temperature, pressure and humidity of the air, the wind speed both at ground level and (from studying cloud movements) at higher altitudes, the state of the sea, how all these parameters had changed since the previous observations, and the amount and kind of precipitation. The information was sent from each observing station at 8 a.m. At ten o’clock in the morning, telegrams are received in Parliament Street, where they are immediately read and reduced, or corrected, for scale-errors, elevation, and temperature; then written into prepared forms, and copied several times. The first copy is passed to the Chief of the department, or his Assistant, with all the telegrams, to be studied for the day’s forecasts, which are then carefully written on the first paper, and copied quickly for distribution. At eleven—reports are sent out to the Times (for a second edition), to Lloyd’s, and the Shipping Gazette; to the Board of Trade, Admiralty, Horse Guards, and Humane Society. Soon afterward similar reports are sent to other afternoon papers . . .” From Gribbin, loc. 4352–4363.
“Perhaps some day in the dim”: Lewis Fry Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xi.
“On the real mission”: Bowden, loc. 195.
“The game determined that Germany”: Jonathan Keats, “Let’s Play War: Could War Games Replace the Real Thing?” http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/lets-play-war.
The exercise made it clear: “Blue, with Saratoga at its center, would sortie from Hawaii and attempt to strike a strategic blow on Black, which was defending the West Coast with Lexington and Langley. As soon as Blue sortied, it was confronted with a screen of five Black submarines, all lying in ambush and tasked with reporting the Blue’s movements. Using its aircraft, Blue quickly scouted out and eliminated four of the five submarines, thus providing another early and important lesson on the use of aircraft to counteract submarine forces. It took only a few days for the opposing forces to find one another, yet neither force could gain a clear advantage. In the remaining days of the exercise, one force would attack the other in rolling, far-ranging battles across the seaways of the eastern Pacific, but the territory was too large for one force to dominate. It proved, however, (a) the viability of carrier airpower to project itself into the combat scenario and (b) the need for more of it.” From Phil Keith, Stay the Rising Sun: The True Story of USS Lexington, Her Valiant Crew, and Changing the Course of World War II (Minneapoli
s: Zenith Press, 2015), loc. 919–926, Kindle.
“The objective of the game”: http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/lets-play-war.
“plurality of options”: Paul Hawken, James Ogilvy, and Peter Schwartz, Seven Tomorrows (New York: Bantam, 1982), 7.
“[T]he way to solve this”: Pierre Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead,” Harvard Business Review, September 1985.
“A sustained scenario practice”: Pierre Wack, “Living in the Futures,” Harvard Business Review, May 2013.
Obama later explained: Bowden, loc. 191, Kindle.
“Our exercise,” Klein explains: Klein, loc. 954–956, Kindle.
Leiter told John Brennan: Bergen, loc. 191, Kindle.
“McRaven had a backup”: Bergen, loc. 183–184, Kindle.
No one realized it at the time: Bergen, loc. 171–172, Kindle.
3: MORAL ALGORITHMS
“It must necessarily be understood”: Quoted in Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 169.
“Nature has placed mankind”: Jeremy Bentham, “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation,” www.econlib.org/library/Bentham/bnthPML1.html, accessed May 2017.
It is easy to imagine why Bentham: That utilitarian framework was a cornerstone of George Eliot’s philosophical edifice, right next to Ludwig Feuerbach’s unconventional theories about love. (She knew the utilitarians well; the Westminster Review, where both she and George Henry Lewes published essays and translations, had been originally founded by Bentham himself.) But Middlemarch shows just how difficult the emotional calculus of the utilitarians turns out to be in practice.
“1. A description of the potential benefits”: Full text of Executive Order 12291 is available here: www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=43424.
“Reagan’s ideas applied”: Sunstein and Hastie, loc. 1675–1683, Kindle.
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