On decision making - Sarah Scoles in NYT:

‘In a crisis involving nuclear arms, Ms. Younis said, the president would probably meet with the secretary of defense, military leaders and other aides. Together, they would evaluate intelligence and discuss strategy, and the advisers would present the president with possible actions.
“Which could range from ‘let’s do nothing and see what happens’ to ‘let’s full-scale nuclear attack,’” said Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and head of a research project called “The President and the Bomb.” In the end, though, only the president makes the call — and they can forgo guidance from advisers. A president could just press the proverbial button.’

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‘Dr. Cerf has the rapid cadence of a TED Talk speaker. Born in France and raised in Israel, he went to college for physics, got a master’s in philosophy, joined a lab that studied consciousness at Caltech and then transitioned to and completed a Ph.D. there in neuroscience.
Along the way, he did mandatory military service in Israel, worked as a white-hat hacker, consulted on films and TV and won a Moth GrandSlam storytelling competition.
Dr. Cerf said his primary critique of the system for starting a nuclear war is that despite advances in our understanding of the fickle brain, the status quo assumes largely rational actors. In reality, he says, the fate of millions rests on individual psychology.
One of Dr. Cerf’s suggestions is to scan presidents’ brains and gain an understanding of the neuro-particulars of presidential decision making. Maybe one commander in chief functions better in the morning, another in the evening; one is better hungry, the other better sated.’

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‘Another of Dr. Cerf’s studies involves climate change. It found that when people were asked to stake money on climate outcomes, they would bet that global warming was happening, and they were more concerned about its impact, more supportive of action and more knowledgeable about relevant issues — even if they began as skeptics. “You basically change your own brain without anyone telling you anything,” Dr. Cerf said.
He thinks the results could be applied to nuclear scenarios because you could use bets to make people care about nuclear risk and support changes to policy. The findings could also be used to evaluate the thinking and prediction of aides who advise the president.
Some scholars of decision science don’t agree on such extrapolations.
“To go from there to giving advice on the fate of the world — I don’t think so,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist who studies decision making at Carnegie Mellon University.
Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and president of the nonprofit Decision Research, said that no psychological inquiry can stop at the experiment.
“You have to go back and forth between the laboratory studies, which are very constrained and limited, and looking out the window,” he said.’

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‘Dr. Slovic has also researched factors that tend to make people — including presidents — more likely to favor a nuclear launch. In one experiment, for instance, he found that the more punitive domestic policies a person supported — like the death penalty — the more likely the person was to approve of using the bomb.
Other researchers, like Janice Stein, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, have looked into scenarios where military officers show a reluctance to pass information up the chain of command that may trigger a nuclear launch.
That actually happened in 1983, when Col. Stanislav Petrov’s command center near Moscow received data suggesting the United States had launched intercontinental ballistic missiles. Colonel Petrov thought it could be a false alarm and decided not to send the warning to his superiors. He was right. Because the colonel feared a nuclear war fought under false pretenses more than he feared not retaliating, a third world war did not begin.

In the past, Dr. Wellerstein says, nuclear launch plans have adapted to changing circumstances, philosophies and technologies. And presidents have changed the protocols because of fears that emerged in their historical moments: that the military would launch a nuke on its own, that the country would experience a nuclear Pearl Harbor or that an accident would occur.
Perhaps today’s fear is that individual psychology governs a world-altering choice. Given that, working to understand how brains might work in a nuclear crisis — and how they could work better — is worthwhile.
What comes after the science — how to change policy — is complicated, but not impossible. Nuclear protocols may have a sense of permanence, but they’re written in word processors, not stone.
“The current system that we have didn’t fall out of the sky fully formed,” Dr. Wellerstein said.’

Read the complete article here.

Perhaps neuroscience will replace democracy.

And chaos is king, in the meantime e are dependent on luck, sound decisions and protocols that will help the decider to become not too unsound.

George W. Bush toyed with the idea that you could bet where and when the next terrorist attack takes place in order to help security services, after all the markets know a lot.

Perhaps we should be able to bet when Armageddon will take place. So we have time to pack our suitcases.