Decision Point

There is a moment where everything compresses into a single decision left to the competence of a person and not the safety of numbers or processes, manuals, and institutions. Risk and consequence all come to a single needlepoint decision with no institutional cover. This is the weight I crave. In the moment of a decision point, there is no one you can go to in order to get permission to make the next move that will affect the world. There is no one whose authority is greater than the one of competence in decision and the selection pressure they survived that resulted in them arriving there first. The selection pressure of being the one to arrive at that decision is the only authority that matters.

Many people do not recognize the decision point in front of them because it's too uncomfortable psychologically to confront. Doing so goes against the grain of 400 generations of evolutionary human biology. Instead, people move the decision to a committee, to a process, to a later time when more data feels safer. They preserve individual optionality and safety through numbers.They convert the moment into something manageable for them psychologically; they pace and diffuse accountability of it until they feel safe. They do wrong.

As a result of this fusion for the weight of the decision, the outcome is no longer shaped at the point of highest leverage. It drifts into the average of many hands, many opinions, deflecting and distributed accountability. The decision point is where selection pressure allows us to outpace the mean of the distribution because of our persistent competence. The courage to go into the dark of the outliers alone entitles us to the authority of the decision over those who feared to travel with us. We should not wait for them to see where we have gone before acting again and again without them.

The decision point is where a single move, made with clarity and speed, outweighs months of incremental process and deliberation. It is uncomfortable because it exposes the individual to a level of accountability those who grew up in institutions are unfamiliar with, whether that institution is religion, a corporate process, or government. At the decision point, there is no hierarchy to hide behind, no distributed responsibility, and no ability to say the system failed when the decision does not work out. The result traces directly back to the person who singularly sits at that decision point because they arrived there first through persistent effort against the grain and against the safety of the crowd.

This is why institutions slow down at the decision point. It is not because they are incapable, but because they are designed to distribute risk so that failure doesn't have a single point of accountability. This is where the credit default swap crisis comes from, and many other terrible decisions in history. It comes from the crowd, even if that crowd is 100 people on in a quant section focused on models in Wall Street between 2001 and 2007, or in offices in the Pentagon leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq. These incidents often happen because of a lack of single individuals arriving at decision points, instead replaced by accountability lost in a crowd we will never know.

This is obviously avoidable. To understand that we must see that many unjust wars occur when people widen the decision point until it no longer belongs to anyone. Instead, let us wish to not hide behind the cover of large numbers. Give us the weight of decision points with zero cover instead. This is true for me. I do not wish to hide behind the crowd or process. I wish to carry the full weight of the outcome from our decision. I believe selection pressure supersedes decision authority by other hierarchical means, including that of institutions, private and public. Where there is no road yet paved is the Wild West of decision points in the modern world I crave.