an essential justification: For more information on this, see: https://newrepublic.com/article/81990/obama-cost-benefit-revolution.
“linear value modeling”: “Mathematically, a linear value model represents an alternative’s performance score as the weighted sum of its consequences: Overall score = W1X1 + W2X2 + W3X3 + . . . where X1 is the score assigned to measure 1, W1 is the weight or importance assigned to measure 1, X2 is the score assigned to measure 2, W2 is the weight of measure 2, and so on. In order to calculate a meaningful overall score when individual performance measures are recorded in different units (e.g., dollars, hectares, jobs, etc.), the individual performance measure scores must first be ‘normalized’ and then weighted using some reputable method. Generally, the steps of quantitative value modeling involve: 1 Define the objectives and measures. 2 Identify the alternatives. 3 Assign consequences (or consequence scores) to each alternative on each measure. 4 Assign weights to the measures. 5 Normalize the consequence scores so that they can be aggregated. 6 Calculate the weighted normalized scores (sometimes called ‘desirability’ scores) to rank alternatives.” From Gregory et al, 217.
Google filed patent #8781669: The full text of the Google patent is available here: www.google.com/patents/US9176500.
4: THE GLOBAL CHOICE
The anti-METI movement: The argument for the inevitability of our first contact turning out to be with a far more advanced civilization is based on the following assumptions. First, we have been sending structured radio signals from Earth for only the last hundred years. The odds that the first sign of intelligent life would be coming from a society that had only been tinkering with radio for, say, fifty years would be staggeringly long. Think about what would be required for that to happen: on our planet, radio technology takes 13,999,999,880 years to appear, while on some other habitable planet across the galaxy radio just happens to take 13,999,999,930 years to be invented. That would be quite the cosmic coincidence. There may be some recurring progression to the way technological innovation unfolds, but even if there is, it doesn’t advance with that level of clockwork. Even a small adjustment in those numbers makes a tremendous difference in terms of technological sophistication. Imagine another planet that deviates from our timetable by just a tenth of 1 percent. If they are more advanced than us, then they will have been tinkering with radio (and successor technologies) for 14 million years. Of course, depending on where they live in the universe, their radio signals might take millions of years to reach us. But even if you factor in that transmission lag, if we pick up a signal from another galaxy, we will almost certainly find ourselves in conversation with a more advanced civilization.
5: THE PERSONAL CHOICE
“I have delightful plans”: Eliot, loc. 583, Kindle.
“With this good understanding”: Eliot, loc. 7555, Kindle.
Middlemarch never lets its reader: It is true that Eliot was not alone among the Victorian novelists in constructing imaginative forms that embraced multiple scales, from the individual all the way up to the macro movements of history. Dickens’s great novels of the 1850s and early 1860s—Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend—managed to build a vast urban network that connected the lives of street urchins, industrial magnates, withering aristocrats, rentiers and merchants, paper pushers, earnest laborers, and a criminal underworld—all shaped by the new historical forces of industrialization, growing bureaucracy, and metropolitan population explosion. From one angle, Dickens’s achievement (similar to Balzac’s and to Flaubert’s in Sentimental Education) is more impressive than Eliot’s in Middlemarch, given that he had to build a narrative that connected the lives of a city of two million people, as opposed to the small town settings that defined all of Eliot’s novels. But in straining to find a form that could make such complicated links of association, Dickens had to sacrifice a certain realism.
The turning points in the Dickensian plot almost never involve a character confronting a complex decision. Their lives change, as their fortunes surge and sag, bounced along by the fairy-tale revelations of secret parentage and hidden wills. But their lives are almost never changed by an individual choice. Where characters must choose between competing options, Dickens almost never pauses to unpack the “frustrating complexity” of the decision, in part because the decisions have all been preordained by his characters’ fixed type: the saints take the saintly path; the strivers take the striving path; the villains take the villainous path. Even when the characters have to make a choice, there’s nothing to decide. Compare that to Lydgate’s vote for the town vicar: the choice is hard precisely because Lydgate’s whole personality is in the throes of a slow but discernible transformation from ardent idealist to what we might now call a sellout, compromised by the “threadlike pressures” of a hundred small moral lapses. The drama in the scene—despite the five pages of interior monologue—gets its oxygen from the fact that we honestly don’t know what Lydgate will choose in the end, in part because he is a character in the process of changing his skin, but also because the decision is a genuinely hard one.
Lewes was “famously ugly”: Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), loc. 3386–3393, Kindle.
But over time, a profound bond: Quoted in Hughes, loc. 134, Kindle.
a journal entry from 1859: Quoted in Hughes, loc. 143, Kindle.
“I am sure you retain enough”: Cited in Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (New York: Crown/Archetype, 2014), loc. 77, Kindle.
“My life has deepened unspeakably”: Cited in Mead, loc. 80–81, Kindle.
“[O]rganisms should have”: John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts,” SubStance 30, no. 1/2 (94/95: 2001): 6–27.
As Rebecca Mead writes: Mead, loc. 223, Kindle.
“a keen vision and feeling”: Eliot, loc. 207, Kindle.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Index
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. The link provided will take you to the beginning of that print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.
Afghanistan, 124–25, 141
Ahmed, Ibrahim Saeed “al–Kuwaiti,” 17–20, 42, 63–64, 121, 144
alien intelligence:
Drake equation and, 173–74
existential decisions and, 159–60
global decision-making and, 157–60, 163, 171–75
sending messages to, 157–60, 171–74, 232n–33n
al-Qaeda, 17, 20, 63–64, 73, 117, 121, 125, 145
analyses, 75, 78, 107, 188, 209
bin Laden and, 18–19, 22, 62–64, 74, 147
in complex decisions, 25–26
cost-benefit, see cost-benefit analysis
environmental impact, 7, 44, 55
predictions and, 84–85, 93, 97, 115
regulatory impact, 129–33
Andreasen, Nancy, 78–79
animal extinctions, 154–55, 160, 169, 174–75
antibiotics, 92–93, 103
Archilochus, 85
Arecibo Message, 158, 172
artificial intelligence (AI), 157, 163–72
“As We May Think” (Bush), 228n
Austen, Jane, 191, 194–95
autonomous vehicles, 136–40, 142, 161
Balzac, Honoré de, 187–88, 233n
Barajas, Count of, 6
Baumeister, Roy, 80
Beagle, HMS, 7–8, 96
Bentham, Jeremy, 128–29, 133, 136, 139, 142, 166
Bergen, Peter, 20, 22, 64, 121
Berlin, Isaiah, 84–85
Bezos, Jeff, 65
Biden, Joe, 145
Binder, J. R., 79–80
bin Laden, Osama, 17–22
; certainty and, 62–66, 73
predictions and, 26, 104–6, 116–17, 119–21, 123–25
raid and death of, 18–22, 25–26, 42, 62–66, 73–75, 104–6, 116–21, 123–26, 140–41, 143–47, 225n–26n
red-teaming and, 120–21, 145
risk and, 74, 124, 140–41, 145
scenario planning and, 116–17, 119, 123–26, 146
simulations and, 105–6, 116, 120–21, 124
Bismarck, Otto von, 108
blind spots, 28, 120
certainty and, 61, 65
and maps and models, 59, 61, 75
predictions and, 88–89, 100, 119, 228n
Blink (Gladwell), 13, 56, 58–59
Bostrom, Nick, 165–67, 175
bounded rationality, 24, 28–29, 65, 129, 142, 144, 169
Bowden, Mark, 73, 106
brain, 13–14, 22, 30–31, 38, 40, 77–82, 129, 166, 204
in complex decisions, 24–26
daydreaming and, 80, 122, 210, 214
default network of, 79–80, 82, 122, 142–43, 210, 214, 216
Dorothea’s choice and, 190, 194
education and, 206, 214–15
evolution and, 82, 181, 210–11
future orientation of, 80–82
global, 86
and Johnson’s move to California, 207–8
and maps and models, 42–43, 206–8
mulling and, 142–43
predictions and, 81, 118, 122–23
reading novels and, 208–9
science of, 77–80, 82, 94, 213–14, 216
simulations and, 122–23, 206
and theory of mind, 206, 208
Brand, Stewart, 82, 149, 170
Breakthrough Listen, 157
Brennan, John, 63–64, 120
Brin, David, 158
Brontë sisters, 195
Brooklyn, N.Y., 1, 35–40
and Johnson’s move to California, 182–86
Revolutionary War and, 36–40, 43, 61, 68, 146
Browne, Janet, 179
Bulldog Tools, 111
Burden, Amanda, 70
Burgman, Mark, 60
Bush, George W., 17, 20–21, 116–17
Bush, Vannevar, 228n–29n
California, 23, 27
Johnson’s move to, 182–87, 207–8, 216
carbon, 154
climate change and, 151, 163–64, 169–71
regulatory impact analysis and, 131–32
careers, 122, 201, 206, 214–15
decision-making on, 10, 12, 14
Dorothea’s choice and, 191, 194, 200
and Johnson’s move to California, 182, 185–86
Carter, Jimmy, 21, 74
Cartwright, James, 226n
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA):
bin Laden and, 17–19, 21–22, 63–65, 119, 147, 225n
uncertainty and, 63–64
certainty, 60–66, 128
bin Laden and, 62–66, 73
levels of, 62–63, 65–66
and maps and models, 60–61, 65, 227n
predictions and, 23, 60–61, 84–85, 112, 114–16, 140
risk and, 65, 140–41
scenario planning and, 112, 114–15
uncertainty and, 10, 24, 27, 34, 56, 60–66, 71, 85, 112, 114–16, 140–41, 215, 227n
variations of, 60–61
challenges, 2, 24, 55, 71, 91, 111–12, 142, 159, 171, 181, 193, 205–6, 215–16
bin Laden and, 19, 63–64, 126, 144–45, 147
certainty and, 60, 63
complex decisions and, 22, 27, 29
and maps and models, 44, 65, 75
novels and, 210–11
personal decision-making and, 182, 186
predictions and, 121, 126
changes, 5–6, 46, 72, 75, 132, 145, 161, 170, 181, 233n–34n
Dorothea’s choice and, 188, 190–91, 193
and Johnson’s move to California, 183, 207
predictions and, 83–84, 88, 103
and science of brain, 77–78
see also climate change
charrettes, 7, 49–50, 55, 58, 71, 135, 143, 157, 161, 181, 186, 202
Cheney, Dick, 117
Cheyenne, 150–51, 163, 172
choices, 12–16, 34, 38, 43–44, 55, 91, 132, 142–43, 153–54, 156, 161, 163, 172, 175, 185–86, 199–206, 213–14
bin Laden and, 18, 21, 25, 73–74, 117, 145–46
cataloguing real–world decisions and, 66–67
certainty and, 61, 65
climate change and, 168–69
Collect Pond and, 181–82
in complex decisions, 24–25, 27–28
computers and, 168–69
Darwin and, 8, 181–82
deliberation and, 29–31
of Dorothea, 188–95, 199–201, 204, 209
of Eliot, 195–201, 205–6
happiness and, 128–29, 200, 209
High Line and, 70–72
LVM and, 133–36, 143
and maps and models, 43, 48, 66, 75
Middlemarch and, 233n–34n
novels and, 210–11
predictions and, 81, 89, 95, 101, 104, 106–7, 117, 123, 140
rational, 23–25, 129
risk and, 137, 140
Christianity, 179–81
climate change, 29, 72, 131, 167, 211
computers and, 151, 163, 168, 170–72
global decision-making and, 151–52, 155–57, 160, 163–64, 168–72
Paris accord on, 151–52, 155–56, 160, 171
cognitive centrality, 51–52
cognitive periphery, 51
Cold War, 107, 149
Collect Pond (Freshwater Pond), 2–7
decision-making on, 3–7, 13–14, 23–26, 44–46, 48–49
destruction of, 4–7, 14, 23, 26, 44–46, 49, 60, 70, 133, 150, 154, 164, 181–82
influence diagrams and, 44–46
L’Enfant and, 3, 5–6
Colyvan, Mark, 60
communities, 27, 69–70, 123, 151, 155, 179, 202, 206
bin Laden and, 18–19, 74
Collect Pond and, 3–5
Dorothea’s choice and, 194, 200, 204
group decisions and, 15–16
and Johnson’s move to California, 185
LVM and, 136
and maps and models, 48, 50
predictions and, 104, 115
competition, 9, 28, 45, 50, 109, 119–20, 136, 157, 233n
computers, 13, 78, 95, 137, 149–51, 184
AI and, 157, 163–72
climate change and, 151, 163, 168, 170–72
global decision-making and, 163–72
and maps and models, 42–43, 151, 163
networked personal, 86–89, 228n
predictions and, 85–89, 100, 113–14, 150–51, 170, 204–5, 211, 228n–29n
scenario planning and, 113–14
supercomputers and, 150–51, 163–72, 175, 215
threats posed by, 164–67, 169–71
confidence, 16–17, 40, 56, 61–65, 146, 151
bin Laden and, 63–64
certainty and, 62–65
overconfidence and, 118–19
predictions and, 84, 87, 115, 118–19
confirmation bias, 28, 118–20
Congress, U.S., 152
Conrail, 69–70
consequences, 5, 13, 23–24, 132, 156, 159, 161, 175, 181, 193, 232n
bin Laden and, 20–21, 74, 145, 225n
brain and, 210–11
Eliot’s choice and, 205–6
predictions and, 122–23
Continental Congress, 37, 43
cooperative movement, 191–92
Corrections, The (Franzen), 188
Cosmides, Leda, 203–5
cost-benefit analysis, 23, 154, 184
regulatory impact analysis and, 130–32
crime, 4, 6, 16, 45, 54–56, 63, 186, 233n
Darwin, Annie, 177–80
Darwin, Charles, 7–12, 32, 96, 104, 144, 164, 177–82, 201
and daughter’s illness and death, 177–80
LVM and, 133–35, 141
marriage and, 8–11, 15, 25, 29, 31, 71, 90, 104, 133–36, 139, 141, 178–81, 184
religion and, 179–81
water cure of, 90–91, 94, 150, 177–78
Darwin, Emma Wedgwood, 9–10, 104, 141, 178–81
David, Joshua, 70, 72
daydreaming, 80, 122, 210, 214
decisions, decision-making:
binary, 5, 28, 31, 70–71, 193, 197
cataloguing them in real-world, 66–68
complex, 11–12, 15–17, 19, 22, 24–29, 32–34, 41, 49–50, 59, 63, 66, 71, 95, 112, 140, 142, 147, 149–51, 153, 187–88, 202–3, 207, 210–11, 214–15, 233n
existential, 8, 159–64, 167–69, 174–75
failures in, 21, 28–29, 38–41, 60–61, 67, 119
global, 151–75
improvement of, 6, 21, 104, 161
long-term, 7, 13, 28, 32, 44, 89, 151–52, 156–59, 167–68, 170–71
observing people in, 56–57
personal, 8, 29–31, 67, 181–211
phases and steps in, 21–22, 28, 52, 65–68, 130, 132, 225n
skills and, 13, 16, 21, 167, 208, 214
speed of, 56, 137, 147
successes in, 67, 89, 146
techniques and processes in, 8–12, 15–17, 19–21, 25, 29, 31, 71, 110, 133–36, 139, 141, 147, 184, 186, 202
uniqueness of, 32, 202
Decisive (Heath and Heath), 67–68, 71
default networks, 101, 142–45
of brain, 79–80, 82, 122, 142–43, 210, 214, 216
novels and, 210–11
Defense Science Board Task Force, 120
deliberation, 58, 136–37, 155, 195
bin Laden and, 19, 145–46, 225n
climate change and, 156–57
in decision-making, 7, 13, 15–17, 21, 29–31
diversity and, 53–54
groups and, 51, 53–55, 186
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