Decisions.

The article above from last week's Wall Street Journal really gave me pause. And I'll tell you why.

It's about mechanizing decision-making. 

Which I think is impossible.

Because I think calculating the calculus of decisions is the hardest thing on earth and no one quite understands why people do what they do and when they do it and so on.

No one understands how decisions are made. Though everyone claims they do. As Matthew Cobb wrote in his book, The Idea of the Brain," "As to the human brain, with its 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates), the idea of mapping it to the synapse level will not become a reality until the far distant future."

Yet, we have whole agencies spieling their clients silly saying they can use data to great effect. (How come I can't think of one instance where it's worked on me? Or one time when I've seen it work?)

Advertising and marketing have tried to make sciences out of decision making and understanding the motivations and the complex processes of why someone chooses to buy something or try something or like something or switch to something. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to formalize our understanding of such complexity, but I'm not sure that anyone actually takes the time to understand the very complexity of the complexity they're trying to understand. 

In breaking down how people make decisions, we reduce the variables to a size we can understand, decrease our understanding along the way. It's hubris to think we can understand anything. The human brain consists of something like one-hundred-trillion synapses. Do we really know which leads to which and why we like one thing over another?

Can we ever?

Right now, I'm about three-quarters of the way through Ian Frazier's new book, "Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough". Wall Street Journal review here. 
New York Times review here.

If you grew up when and where I did--born in the late 1950s in the fourth largest city in New York, Yonkers, abutting the Bronx, the near death of the Bronx was a big story, maybe the biggest.

A million decisions led to the devastation of the borough. Not one of them was intentional. In most cases, decisions were made without people even realizing they were making decisions--or that decisions can have vast and unpredictable unintended consequences.

Many attribute the devastation of the borough to the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway. The decision to build that road was made in the hopes of speeding traffic to white suburbia.

Instead, it displaced upwards of 40,000 families. The road bisected the borough and wound up being most expensive road ever built anywhere. The 6.5-mile highway cost almost $2 billion to build, that's $4,800 an inch or about $58,000 a foot. The consequent loss of Bronx population was jaw-dropping in magnitude. During the 1970s, south of the Expressway, the borough lost 47-percent of its population.

Frazier writes, "People left the Bronx and so did jobs. The radio and the phonograph had put the piano factories out of business. Consumers stopped buying iceboxes when gas and electric refrigerators took over, so the icebox factories had closed... The garment industry began to leave, and what had been 354,000 garment center jobs in New York in 1948 declined to 150,000 jobs by 1984.... Moving the main port facilities to New Jersey erased thousands of longshoremen’s jobs in New York...

"...The Regional Plan’s recommendation that New York City get rid of its factories proved all too achievable. Just in the Bronx, the number of factories went from 2,000 to 1,350 between 1958 and 1974...

"How many jobs left New York City in the 1960s and ’70s is hard to say. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York City lost 660,000 jobs in just seven years in the sixties. Other sources estimate the loss at half a million jobs between the late forties and the mid-seventies....

"...Between 1934 and 1962, 98 percent of government-backed homeowners’ loans went to borrowers who were white."

Again, decisions set these events in motion. Ostensibly benign decisions. No one "decided" to destroy millions of lives and cause tens of thousands of fires and destroy billions in property. Those things happened based on decisions that had nothing to do with consequent occurrences.

I think most decisions unfold that way. Not that they're all disastrous. Just that they're all unpredictable. 

You make a decision.

You think and plan.

Then stuff happens.

Often unpredictable and uncontrollable.

We can pretend we know which way the wind blows. You don't need a weatherman for that.

But we're probably wrong.

That's life.