Politics and Decision Making

Are you a Republican, a Democrat , or an Independent. Are you liberal or conservative. The answer to this question depends on the decisions you would make on various issues. Pro choice or pro life. For gay marriage or against gay marriage. For immediate withdrawal from Iraq against a too quick withdrawal. For keeping the Bush tax cuts against keeping the Bush tax cuts. Now my position is there are very few, if any, decisions which are clearly right or wrong. I have this position for two reasons.

1) Since the world is random and chaotic and the outcome of almost all decisions depend on uncertain factors even the best decision can work out badly.

2) Since different decision makers have different values with respect to the possible outcomes of a decision, the same decision with the same result can turn out to be wrong for one decision maker and right for a different decision maker.

My purpose on this blog is help people understand better both their own decisions and the decisions other people would make that might differ from their own decisions. My tool for this will a probabilistic modeling technique called Risk Analysis. At this point, I can hear the door slamming as everybody leaves the blog, but I promise you there will be very little mathematics on the blog, because the value of the technique is in how it makes you think about the factors that go into the decision more than the numeric results that come out of the model.

“Better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer,” said
English jurist William Blackstone.

Other people have suggested other ratios. Also related to this issue is the question of appropriate sentences, and reasons for reducing the sentence after conviction. This is the first decision, or set of decisions, I am going to look at through th eyes of the Risk Analysis technique.

I hope you will come back and at least give it chance. I won't say it will make you change your mind on any decision, but it should at least make you think about your position and see that perfectly reasonable and good people might have a different position than you.