October 27, 1971

Dr. B. Warner North
Decision Analysis Group
Stanford Research Institute
200 East 42nd Street

New York, New York 10017

Dear Warner,

Thank you for sending me your Science manuscript. Although your
letter was dated October 6th, it only just arrived,

I don't have many comments and hope you will simply get this into
print as quickly as poasible.

A few possible typos.
Page 1 - damages "$40 million" or $400 million?
Page 2 ~ coming within 20 miles
Page 4 and generally for your discussion of H) etc. - We have here a
vather fundamental problem of scientific credibility, Your estimates
of Hy are based on conversations with Storm Fury Project people rather
than much by way of an independent Statistical analysis of the actual
experimental data, Then, while you accept their subjectivity in general
you then challenge it in the light of the Debbie results. But if their
views are so faulty there, why trust them at all?

This problem will come to a head as you may see from the attached
quotation from a ptece by Battan - I think I may have sent you the
manuscript of it some time ago. It would be unfortunate if the debate
then hinged on who were the sources of informed scientific opinion!
Now, I believe that Batten is making a policy as well as a scientific
judgment, and if you feelthhés strongly and confidently enough yourself
you might even quote his remarks to illustrate the problem. One way of
doing this More gently would be to quote one of your anonymous
corresponden¢g who might "favor the performance of more experiments"
but who would also advocate seeding a hurricane if it were in his hands
in order to protect his own family,

Page 34 - "excessively large" - I would advocate that you keep
your own value judgments out of the main body of the paper as completely
as possible and save this type of comment for your discussion labeled
as such. This would be consistent with your own analysis of the advésory
process and with the "authentic discourse", a useful phrase in Monod's book

over
ee
Dr. D. Warner North -2- 10/27/71

“Chance and Necessity",

In your general discussion of government responsibility cost
it might be useful to compute this as an annual tax on the population
actually at risks

Page 40ff - would it influence the asseasment of responsibility
cost to include also the value of the information achieved by an
operational seeding?

Page 41 top - I think this point deserves some clarification.
Consider language like “seed operationally now''which would itself
generate information, and other information derived by restricted
experiments would have a comparably low value.

Page 46 - What is your criterion of a "successful field experiment"?
What if the next trial is not "successful"? I may have missed it but I
don’t think you factor this contingency into evaluating the cost-benefit
of the information, or rather the experiment designed to acquire the
information,

Finally, I have to raise some questions, which go beyond the scope
of this paper, about the model of political decision making under which
both of us have been laboring. It would be interesting and important to
get the reactions of a cynnical political scientist to all this.
Is your discussion on Page 52 a factual description or an ideal expectation?

The actual behavior of “decision makers" does not exactly follow the
model, On Page 6 you say “the decision maker must select one or two
alternatives". In practice he may do a great deal to evade the decision
or shift the burden of responsibility to someoneed’ee or to leave the
situation sufficiently confused that it is not clear who should be held
responsible. There is a certain tautology here which might be discussed
in terms of the semantics of "decision maker" but one could then ask the
question whether that set is not an empty one in the real world. I can
hardly object to the formulation that you present in your paper. It might
be just as well to make the logical analysis of the situation more explicit
by stating the model as one of your postulates rather than taking it for
granted that it is universally understood and accepted. More concretely I
would also say that it is usually not at all clear exactly who is the
“decision maker", People often ask about such weighty questions; "Who
shall decide?" We could still do a lot of empirical research on "who is
deciding now?" We won't be lacking for things to do!

Sincerely yours,

Joshua Lederberg
Professor of Genetics

JL/rr
Enclosure