Tearing down the "One Percent Doctrine"

It's been a while since I checked in with mathematician John Allen Paulos' column Who's Counting? I can credit him in part with my political wake-up call in the mid-90s, when I read his excellent book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper. In a lucid and engaging series of brief essays, Paulos points out (via basic but oft-forgotten mathematical concepts) the many ways in which facts can be skewed, misrepresented, and otherwise tweaked to push an agenda. Little did I know how relevant this knowledge would become in the 21st century.

Although the professor is best known for his efforts to popularize mathematics, and several books to that end, his column with ABC News is long-running and increasingly political. Scientists have been grumbling about this administration's policies since they took office, on issues ranging from the embarrassing evolution "debate" to global warming. In a recent column, Paulos turns the tables rather nicely on Dick Cheney's One Percent Doctrine of pre-emptive war-- and on the larger dangers of ideologues who disguise their agenda with nonsensical sloganeering.

Imagine what would happen in various everyday situations were the Cheney doctrine to be applied. A young man is in a bar and another man gives him a hard stare. If the young Cheneyite feels threatened and believes the probability to be at least 1 percent that the other man will shoot him, then he has a right to preemptively shoot him in "self-defense."

Or an older woman visits her Cheneyite doctor who, finding that the woman has suffered from a sore throat and fatigue for months, orders that she be put on chemotherapy since the likelihood of cancer is in his opinion at least 1 percent. Further tests, he might argue, would take too long.

A Cheneyite gambler would be a casino's dream. The chance of rolling a 12 with a pair of dice, for example, is 1/36, almost 3 percent, and hence would justify the gambler betting his house on rolling a 12. (. . .)

A companion to the Cheney 1 percent action doctrine (if the probability is at least 1 percent, act) is the administration's non-action doctrine (if the probability is less than 99 percent, then don't act). This latter doctrine is generally invoked in discussions of global warming, where it seems absolute certainty is required to justify any significant action. Ideology determines which of these two inconsistent doctrines to invoke.