“When was it decided? Was it yesterday, when I sent Platov the order to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I dozed off and told Bennigsen to give the orders? Or still earlier?” Unlike the capture of Moscow by Napoleon, the birth of my son was a joyous occasion. “Can it be that I allowed Napoleon to get as far as Moscow?” Tolstoy’s General Kutuzov wonders. In “ War and Peace,” Tolstoy writes that, while an armchair general may imagine himself “analyzing some campaign on a map” and then issuing orders, a real general never finds himself at “the beginning of some event” instead, he is perpetually situated in the middle of a series of events, each a link in an endless chain of causation. If I made a decision, it wasn’t a very decisive one. ![]() Did I, though? I never practiced any prudential algebra rather than drawing up lists of pros and cons and concluding, on balance, that having kids was a good idea, I gradually and unintentionally transitioned from not particularly wanting children to wanting them, and from wanting them to joining my wife in having them. His existence suggests that, at some point, I decided to become a father. This past summer, my wife and I had a baby boy. I’ve never had to decide whether to launch a covert raid on a suspected terrorist compound, but I’ve made my share of big decisions. He thinks that we should apply such techniques to our own lives. ![]() He examines a number of complex decisions with far-reaching consequences-such as the choice, made by President Barack Obama and his advisers, to green-light the raid on Osama bin Laden’s presumed compound, in Abbottabad, Pakistan-and then shows how the people in charge drew upon insights from “decision science,” a research field at the intersection of behavioral economics, psychology, and management. We’re hardly more advanced than the ancient Persians, who, Herodotus says, made big decisions by discussing them twice: once while drunk, once while sober. We agonize over what to stream on Netflix, then let TV shows persuade us to move to New York buying a new laptop may involve weeks of Internet research, but the deliberations behind a life-changing breakup could consist of a few bottles of wine. But how do we actually make those choices? One of the paradoxes of life is that our big decisions are often less calculated than our small ones are. We say that we “decide” to get married, to have children, to live in particular cities or embark on particular careers, and in a sense this is true. “The craft of making farsighted choices-decisions that require long periods of deliberation, decisions whose consequences might last for years,” he concludes, “is a strangely under-appreciated skill.” and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies,” Franklin explained to a friend.) Even this approach, Johnson writes, is slapdash and dependent upon intuition. ![]() (“If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three . . . He points out that Benjamin Franklin used a more advanced pro-and-con technique: in what Franklin called “Prudential Algebra,” a numerical weight is assigned to each listed item, and counterbalancing items are then eliminated. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps.”īeneath his lists, Darwin scrawled, “Marry, Marry, Marry QED.” And yet, Steven Johnson writes, in “Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most,” “we have no evidence of how he actually weighed these competing arguments against each other.” Johnson, the author of “ How We Got to Now” and other popular works of intellectual history, can’t help but notice the mediocrity of Darwin’s decision-making process. Home, & someone to take care of house.” He noted that it was “intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working. . . . Constant companion (and friend in old age). . . . Perhaps my wife won’t like London then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool.” On the second, he wrote, “Children (if it Please God). To figure out what to do, he made two lists. Darwin was considering proposing to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but he worried that marriage and children might impede his scientific career. Two years earlier, he had returned from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle with the observations that would eventually form the basis of “ On the Origin of Species.” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem. ![]() In July of 1838, Charles Darwin was twenty-nine years old and single.
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