Handbook of Decision Analysis, 2nd Edition

Foreword to the 2nd Edition

William J. Perry, former Secretary of Defense, holds a bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D., all in mathematics, but does not wear these credentials on his sleeve. At a university gathering after his retirement from the Pentagon, he was asked whether he had created mathematical models on the spot to aid in defense decisions on emergent issues. “No,” he replied, “there was never the time or the data to do that, but because of my training, I think differently about these issues.” Amen. Perhaps the greatest benefit of Decision Analysis (DA) is in terms of changing the way we think.

The first edition of this book was published in 2013 with an excellent foreword by Carl Spetzler, so what has changed since then? Plenty, as it turns out, in the form of technology, which makes DA more important than it was yesterday, and less important than it will be tomorrow. In this regard, I will consider the impact on DA of Ubiquitous Computer Power, Big Data on the Internet, and Artificial Intelligence. From the perspective of someone who has been exposed to DA for seven decades, each of these has changed how I think about the subject.

I got into DA on the ground floor in 1952, when my father, Leonard Jimmie Savage, referenced in Chapter 3 of this book, attempted to explain his axioms of decision theory in terms that a seven‐year‐old (me) would understand. I can't recall how many discussions at the dinner table in the ensuing years involved uncertainty, statistics, and ...