Optimism Bias – “Things will work out okay” or “things will work out better for me than the next guy” or, simply, “It won’t happen to ME!” – is one the mental games we play in order to do the things we want to do even when those choices come with costs or danger. 

            If you devote the patience necessary to finish this short post, you will end up a better decision maker. But then, as you will discover in the paragraphs below, […]

     So you think you’re pretty smart, huh? Intelligent. Able to think critically, to reason, to weigh all the evidence and come up with the right answer and know what’s […]

    Oh, the swell of hope. The hope that the bipartisanship so critical to progress might somehow arise from the post-election ashes of a rancorous and divisive national election. The […]

            If you look east from most places in Seattle, you can see majestic Mt. Rainier looming tall and snow covered 80 miles to the west. Mt. Rainier is not […]

            Seven years ago, FEMA was a four letter word. Public faith in the Federal Emergency Management Agency was decimated by the agency’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina. President Bush […]

Different audiences will try to answer the question “Did climate change cause Superstorm Sandy?” in significantly different ways. I am thinking of two; the ‘thought’ community of scientists and policy […]