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Just out from Prometheus Books . . .
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Democracy
titanic
Titanic
challenger
Shuttle Challenger
threemile
Three Mile Island
medical
Medical Errors
towers9/11 Warnings
iraqInvasion of Iraq
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A month before its catastrophic failure, Wall Street analysts rated Enron a “buy.” In 2001, at the CIA, FBI, and Department of Defense, a squabbling bureaucracy buried warnings of the looming terrorist attack. And Congress and the country were talked into war against a collapsing dictatorship on the basis of detailed and compelling intelligence, which turned out to be false. How could all the experts be so wrong?

In Deadly Decisions, Christopher Burns, one of the country’s leading authorities on modern information management, searches the biology of the brain, the behavior of groups, and the structure of organizations for practical answers to the problem of “virtual truth”—elaborate constructs of internally consistent evidence and assumptions that purport to describe reality, yet can often be dead wrong.

Burns suggests that as individuals we must learn to be skeptical of our own sly and beguiling minds. As members of a group we need to be more wary of the omissions, inventions, and distortions that come all to naturally to everyone. And as consumers of information, we have to hold professionals, politicians and the media more accountable. To make successful decisions in the Information Age, we have to trust each other.

"The Titanic was so large that it could not be stopped or significantly turned in less than a mile with engines full astern. Even a lookout with excellent vision could not have spotted the iceberg at that distance on a clear night. So at full speed the ship was effectively traveling blind: by the time Fleet saw the iceberg, it was already too late to turn the ship. The collision had occurred downstream in time and nothing in his power could then undo it."
"20,000 years ago our ancestors learned that they needed to work together in order to bring down the big game. The whole village was involved tracking the herd, preparing the weapons, making the kill, cutting the meat, and tanning the hide; and the idea of the lone hunter stalking his prey faded into myth. We are at a similar juncture in human history when the big truths that matter are no longer within reach of a single person. We need to approach modern knowledge in groups, and to make successful decisions - in fact, to survive - we must be able to trust each other."
"Testifying to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Robert D. Walpole, National Intelligence Officer for Strategic and Nuclear Programs, said there were troubling questions about the accuracy of the National Intellignce Estimate claims, particularly about Iraq's nuclear weapons. Senator Graham, furious at the sanitizing of the NIE, challenged CIA Director George Tenet on whether the “White House is telling the truth, or even has an interest in knowing the truth."
"In 2001 the United States fought and lost the first information war. At a cost of 19 lives and less than a million dollars, the enemy smuggled a handful of terrorists past a poorly coordinated military, past the jealous in-fighting of undisciplined intelligence services, and past a government without leaders to succeed in the greatest attack ever made on American soil. This was not like any other wartime attack. In a fight between what the enemy knew about us and what we knew about them, the enemy was audacious and resourceful, and America was confused."
"Betsy Lehman's dosage was correct because the doctor said it was correct, and in the truth system in place, the doctor was the final judge, even though the blood levels, the electrocardiogram, and the patient’s adverse reaction all seemed to indicate a massive overdose. Several of the people involved including the pharmacists and the EKG technician were concerned. But there was no acceptable mechanism for questioning the prescription without insulting the doctor and running the risk of looking hysterical."
"Most disagreements over information accuracy are not resolved, they are only silenced. Roger Boisjoly did tell someone, though. He said later that he went home that night, exhausted and afraid. When his wife asked him what was wrong, he told her 'Oh, nothing, honey. I had a great day. We're going to launch tomorrow and kill the astronauts. That's all.'"
"At Three Mile Island a special light had been installed to indicate whether the sticky valve was open or closed. It was the brightest indicator on the panel of more than 6,000 lights and meters. But the light had been wired to the switch, not to the valve, and it indicated whether the switch had been thrown, not the valve’s real position. It was “true” because the operator wanted it to be true, but it ignored the condition of the real world."