NASA, Zero Pox, and Weather Report

This post is about sticking with an issue long enough to see what history has to say about otherwise very uncertain pronouncements in tough situations. One reason Barack Obama did so well in the primary against Hillary is that both politicians had made a decision about the Iraq war, Hillary for and Barack against, and Barack turned out to be substantially correct (or did he? A longer time horizon maybe revealed that he was the one who was wrong, but things change as time stretches on).

Thus,  one really good character trait is judgment, which is the ability to get things right when complete information is lacking.

I bring this up because I want to brag a little bit. In this post I argued that the government would win handily in a national security / privacy case called NASA v. Nelson. Basically, the government was requiring some background checks for some contract engineers at a jet propulsion lab, and they complained about it. Well, I am proud to say that I was right and that the government won a UNANIMOUS VICTORY. Now I don’t know if this ruling is good in the sense that it makes our system of law more just or fair, but I am saying that after reading the facts of the case, I thought it was a clear victory for the government.

Ok, but really, this is a small point. The bigger point is that we need to study history to learn about our capacity for judgment. Inevitably we face hard choices, and so we go with one option over the other. The only way to sharpen our ability to make those type of choices is to go back, and do some history to see how our process of decision-making is successful or not.

Here I talked about a book I’m reading called Scourge. This book has something to say about judgment and history as well.

In the 90’s smallpox had been eliminated from the world and only existed in the laboratories of the CDC and some Ex-Soviet bio-weapon facility. The question was, what to do with these viruses. Some people advocated destroying them and so, seemingly, ending the existence of that virus on earth (since it cannot survive outside of humans). Others thought it would be worth keeping the ‘ole virus around to learn things from it. This debate was very hard to resolve at the time that it was brewing most fiercely. “Destructionists” thought that nothing could be learned from smallpox because it did not have a suitable animal model from which results could be extrapolated from. They also argued that there was a risk in keeping the virus around to be stolen or for an accident to happen.

Those on the other side thought that the virus could be used to learn about the human immune system as well as to create new drugs and more sophisticated vaccines. They argued that other countries had secretly preserved the virus and that the U.S. as well as the rest of the civilized world should do the same.

Well who was right? History gives a partial answer. Not only did research discover a suitable animal model for further research, but there were significant strides made in finding antibiotics that attacked the virus as well as new vaccines that would work for immunosuppressed people.

The importance of these innovations can be seen by considering 9/11.  The pessimists seemed to get a lot of credibility for their assertion that there were bad people that would not hesitate to use biological weapons if they could get their hands on them, especially after the anthrax scare right after 9/11.

Of course, history may reverse and trick us again. What if the next attack takes place using stolen viruses from the CDC or from a decaying Soviet biowarfare lab? Then the decision to retain the virus is going to look pretty stupid, and the “right decision” may continue to change depending on what actually happens.

Thus there is a difference between what is in fact the best decision and what is the best decision at the time and given the available facts. Only smart thinking can make the latter, but only history can teach us what the former was.

What I mean is that there is a difference between what happens and what was calculated to happen. If the risk of having the virus stolen was, objectively, 1/1000000, then it made sense to store the virus, even if history takes the path of that extremely minute percentage and it gets stolen and then used. The right decision at the time would be storing the virus, but history would teach us that it would have been better to destroy it.

Also, just found out about this song “Birdland” by Weather Report. It’s quite good.

Making decisions

I’ve been working intently on a paper recently so I had to take a break from posting. Amazingly, traffic to this blog didn’t really fall as I took a break, a sure sign that people, old and new are making their way through the posts.

I want to talk about making decisions, but I also want to share this awesome invention.

Back to decisions then. Philosophers distinguish between practical reason and theoretical reason. In theoretical reason, we decide what to believe, and even the word “decide” is deceptive, because we can’t just believe anything we want. Rather, we judge what we should believe on the basis of evidence and by concluding our judgment, we create a new belief in ourselves. If you don’t believe me, try to believe something that you think that all the evidence, taken together, supports. You can’t do it. Belief follows judgment.

Practical reason is about reasoning about what to do. Here things are much more open ended. In theoretical reason, we know what we want, which is the truth. If we judge something to not be true, we cannot believe it. But in practical reason all sorts of values can be relevant.

Anyway, my friend sent me this article about making decisions (thanks Jesus), and I think in many ways it’s spot on. There are people who always have to think every decision to death and there are those who are more comfortable just surveying things and quickly deciding, in a dramatically decisive fashion, what to do. According to the article, this is a psychological feature about humans. Some people like to keeping thinking and others prepare to act.

There are many interesting things to note. One is that making detailed decisions requires taking time and time has a cost. So, when doing research on a decision, one has to try and weigh the cost of one’s time against the likely value of the new information that will be gained by the decision. Weighing of this kind is really hard to do because by definition you don’t know the information you will discover by doing more research. So imagine you’ve been doing research on where to apply to law school for 5 hours. Should you go for another hour? You know what the hour will cost you: your hourly wage if you have a job or an hour of fun with friends, however you rate that, or an hour of sleep which I personally rate very highly. What you don’t know is what the hour will gain you. In that time you might find something about the UVA that will effectively decide the matter of where to apply or you might decide you don’t want to be a lawyer at all, a discovery that is worth TONS of saved time, money, and stress.

Things are doubly hard though because not only do you not know what you’ll find out in the marginal hour of research, but you don’t even know if returns to research increase or decrease over time. As with all things, its most likely that research becomes less valuable the more you do of it. If this is true, then the stuff you discover during hour eight (the names of Professor so and so’s pet dog) is going to be much less important than the things you figured out in the first hour of research (say, the average LSAT score of the school you’re applying to).

Importantly though, new information is different than the skill with which one puts together ideas. So even if returns to research decrease over time, returns to thinking might actually increase. One thing is for sure, snap decisions, even with perfect information are usually pretty bad, which returns me to this article. I don’t think the complexity of decisions is MERELY psychological. Rather, I think complexity is a FEATURE OF THE WORLD, meaning that on average, more thinking results in a much better life lived. As a general rule, when I’m asked a question, I respond with “Let me think about it.” This small rule I’ve found helps me make enormously better decisions.

Still, as I’ve said on this blog many times, sometimes snap decisions are better, especially when interacting with the opposite sex. Thinking something through might help you find a good job or write a good article, but thinking about what to say to someone you like is almost a recipe for failure. Instead, instinct and intuitive understanding is what’s prized.

But I digress. I was talking about thinking longer about something versus thinking shorter. In philosophy, there are INCREASING returns to thinking so that what you figure out in hour 10 is almost guaranteed to be better than what you figured out in hour 1. This is why a) most philosophers do their best work when they’re older, unlike mathematicians who often reach the peak of their abilities early (prodigy phenomenon) and b) most philosophers spend their whole lives on seemingly silly problems. B is more interesting to me I think, because it often explains why its necessary to obsess about a problem and think about it night and day for many years (possibly one’s whole lifetime) before real progress can be made. Then again though, making a philosophical theory is not practical reasoning (about what to do) but merely theoretical.

Almost certainly, practical reasoning starts to give decreasing returns to thought after some, probably short, amount of time (like 20 minutes).