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By Root 505 0

for many other labels of success, and for those of failure. We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reasons. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions. I wrote this book in the belief that we can reorganize our thinking in the face of uncertainty. We can improve our skill at decision making and tame some of the biases that lead us to make poor judgments and poor choices. We can seek to understand people’s qualities or the qualities of a situation quite apart from the results they attain, and we can learn to judge decisions by the spectrum of potential outcomes they might have produced rather than by the particular result that actually occurred.

My mother always warned me not to think I could predict or control the future. She once related the incident that converted her to that belief. It concerned her sister, Sabina, of whom she still often speaks although it has been over sixty-five years since she last saw her. Sabina was seventeen. My mother, who idolized her as younger siblings sometimes do their older siblings, was fifteen. The Nazis had invaded Poland, and my father, from the poor section of town, had joined the underground and, as I said earlier, eventually ended up in Buchenwald. My mother, who didn’t know him then, came from the wealthy part of town and ended up in a forced-labor camp. There she was given the job of nurse’s aide and took care of patients suffering from typhus. Food was scarce, and random death was always near. To help protect my mother from the ever-present dangers, Sabina agreed to a plan. She had a friend who was a member of the Jewish police, a group, generally despised by the inmates, who carried out the Germans’ commands and helped keep order in the camp. Sabina’s friend had offered to marry her—a marriage in name only—so that Sabina might obtain the protections that his position afforded. Sabina, thinking those protections would extend to my mother, agreed. For a while it worked. Then something happened, and the Nazis soured on the Jewish police. They sent a number of officers to the gas chambers, along with their spouses—including Sabina’s husband and Sabina herself. My mother has lived now for many more years without Sabina than she had lived with her, but Sabina’s death still haunts her. My mother worries that when she is gone, there will no longer be any trace that Sabina ever existed. To her this story shows that it is pointless to make plans. I do not agree. I believe it is important to plan, if we do so with our eyes open. But more important, my mother’s experience has taught me that we ought to identify and appreciate the good luck that we have and recognize the random events that contribute to our success. It has taught me, too, to accept the chance events that may cause us grief. Most of all it has taught me to appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not—or have not yet—befallen us.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I ASSUME if you are reading this far, that you liked this book. For its good qualities, I’d like to claim all credit, but as Nixon once said, that would be wrong. And so I’d like to point out the people who, with their time, knowledge, talent, and/or patience, helped me to create a book that is better than any which I could have created alone. First, Donna Scott, Mark Hillery, and Matt Costello gave me constant encouragement. Mark, in particular, wanted me to write a book about entropy, but then listened (and read) patiently as I instead applied many of those same ideas to the everyday world. My agent, Susan Ginsburg, never wanted me to write a book about entropy, but, like Mark, was a source of unwaivering constructive input and encouragement. My friend Judith Croasdell was always supportive, and, when called upon, also worked a miracle or two. And my editor, Edward Kastenmeier, never grew tired of the long discussions I drew him into about the style and content of virtually