Jan R. Thomas, working with Daniel Ellsberg's son, Michael Ellsberg, has published a selection of Daniel Ellsberg's writings. I am sort of taking for granted that anyone reading this blog posting will know who Daniel Ellsberg was, but click the link to his name if you don't, for a brief Wikipedia write-up.
The "short version" is that Ellsberg was a Defense Department analyst who made public The Pentagon Papers, a top-secret 1967 Department of Defense study that detailed America's political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Ellsberg, who helped write this study, faced years in prison for making these secret papers public, but he escaped a prison sentence (thanks to the improper activities of President Nixon). By letting the public know what was really going on in Vietnam, Ellsberg helped to bring the Vietnam War to an end, and is a hero to Vietnam-era antiwar activists and draft-resisters, like me, and to those who are working, now, to end the threat of nuclear annihilation.
The image at the top will provide you with the title of the recent book I mentioned above, which is a collection of hundreds of Ellsberg's thoughts, culled from his handwritten, personal notebooks. They are certainly worth reading!
Not extensively discussed in the book is "The Ellsberg Paradox." Here is how Wikipedia explains it:
In decision theory, the Ellsberg paradox (or Ellsberg's paradox) is a paradox in which people's decisions are inconsistent with subjective expected utility theory. John Maynard Keynes published a version of the paradox in 1921. Daniel Ellsberg popularized the paradox in his 1961 paper, "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms". It is generally taken to be evidence of ambiguity aversion, in which a person tends to prefer choices with quantifiable risks over those with unknown, incalculable risks.
Ellsberg's findings indicate that choices with an underlying level of risk are favored in instances where the likelihood of risk is clear, rather than instances in which the likelihood of risk is unknown. A decision-maker will overwhelmingly favor a choice with a transparent likelihood of risk, even in instances where the unknown alternative will likely produce greater utility. When offered choices with varying risk, people prefer choices with calculable risk, even when those choices have less utility (emphasis added).
To provide an example, suppose you will be paid $100 if you pick a white marble out of one of two different urns set before you. You only get one pick! You know that each urn contains 100 marbles, and you know that Urn #1 contains 50% black marbles, and 50% white marbles, with Urn #2 containing an unknown percentage of white marbles and an unknown percentage of black marbles. You can decide which urn to choose from; so, which urn do you pick? As it turns out, people will most often choose to pick from Urn #1, where the probabilities are certain, even if they're not that great. People intrinsically dislike situations where they cannot attach probabilities to outcomes, even if that is not, really, rational.
With respect to decisions about war and peace, we often think that we can estimate, pretty clearly, what our chances will be if we fight. We don't, though, have a very clear idea what our chances would be if we didn't fight - if we were to "give peace a chance," to quote John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
The Ellsberg Paradox relates to "decision theory," and what Ellsberg tells us - in his notes in the book, and by way of the "Ellsberg Paradox" - is that we need to take a chance on doing what we think is "moral," and "right," not what we think will "win."
Seems like a lesson worth learning, don't you think?
Image Credit:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/search/?q=truth%20and%20consequence
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