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A Lil' Bert Can't Hurt: Words and Wisdom for Daily Life

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Bert McCoy

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“A popular misconception is that decision analysis is unemotional, dehumanizing, and obsessive because it uses numbers and arithmetic in order to guide important life decisions. Isn’t this turning over important human decisions “to a machine,” sometimes literally a computer — which now picks our quarterbacks, our chief executive officers, and even our lovers? Aren’t the “mathematicizers” of life, who admittedly have done well in the basic sciences, moving into a context where such uses of numbers are irrelevant and irreverent? Don’t we suffer enough from the tyranny of numbers when our opportunities in life are controlled by numerical scores on aptitude tests and numbers entered on rating forms by interviewers and supervisors? In short, isn’t the human spirit better expressed by intuitive choices than by analytic number crunching? Our answer to all these concerns is an unqualified “no.” There is absolutely nothing in the von Neumann and Morgenstern theory — or in this book — that requires the adoption of “inhumanly” stable or easily accessed values. In fact, the whole idea of utility is that it provides a measure of what is truly personally important to individuals reaching decisions. As presented here, the aim of analyzing expected utility is to help us achieve what is really important to us. As James March (1978) points out, one goal in life may be to discover what our values are. That goal might require action that is playful, or even arbitrary. Does such action violate the dictates of either rationality or expected utility theory? No. Upon examination, an individual valuing such an approach will be found to have a utility associated with the existential experimentation that follows from it. All that the decision analyst does is help to make this value explicit so that the individual can understand it and incorporate it into action in a noncontradictory manner.”

Decision MakingRationalityPersonal ValuesDecision ScienceUtility MaximizingDecision Analysis
Book:Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making
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“Freud described three great historical wounds to the primary narcissism of the self-centered human subject, who tries to hold panic at bay by the fantasy of human exceptionalism. First is the Copernican wound that removed Earth itself, man’s home world, from the center of the cosmos and indeed paved the way for that cosmos to burst open into a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces. Science made that decentering cut. The second wound is the Darwinian, which put Homo sapiens firmly in the world of other critters, all trying to make an earthly living and so evolving in relation to one another without the sureties of directional signposts that culminate in Man. Science inflicted that cruel cut too. The third wound is the Freudian, which posited an unconscious that undid the primacy of conscious processes, including the reason that comforted Man with his unique excellence, with dire consequences for teleology once again. Science seems to hold that blade too. I want to add a fourth wound, the informatic or cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well.”

ScienceInformation AgeCyborgAnthropoceneHuman ExceptionalismInformaticsCyborgianHistorical WoundsScientific Age
Book:When Species Meet
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“Kein Toter nützt seinem Vaterland, und die Menschen fallen bestenfalls für ldeen, die sie nicht begreifen und deren Konsequenz sie nicht übersehen. Die geschundenen Krieger auf den Schlachtfeldern, die geplagten Völker waren die Opfer zänkischer, überaus eigensinniger, rechthaberischer und gänzlich unfähiger Denker, die in ihrem verdrehten armen Kopf keine Klarheit schaffen konnten und die sich außerdem gegenseitig nicht verstanden und nicht ausstanden.”

KriegNationalismus
Book:The Hothouse
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