Making Decisions

One of my favorite lecturers at Michigan was Professor Igor Dolgachev. He was one of the many talented people we were fortunate enough to inherit from the former Soviet Union (and its allies.) He seemed unsure of the US approach to education and its wide ranging requirements. "In Moscow," he told us, "once we decided we were studying math, we studied math. Nothing else!" Then he looked a bit sheepish and bobbed his head, "OK, also Marxism-Leninism, but the rest was math!"

I think what upset him was Michigan's requirement that you take two senior or graduate level courses in a department other than the one granting you your degree. The first course I took to fulfill this requirement was Southeast Asian History. Interestingly, it was taught by a Czech who studied that region because it was one of the few places sufficiently far removed from the concerns of the Czechoslovakian Communist party that he could engage in reasonably honest historical inquiry. It seems that one of the reasons why former Soviet professors and students were such excellent physicists and mathematicians is that it was relatively hard to politicize these disciplines, so the brightest people who wanted intellectual freedom were attracted.

The second course I took was in Industrial and Environmental Health Policy. This course was part of the School of Public Health, and the professor had actually been one of the architects of the Material Safety Data Sheet approach to dealing with toxic industrial chemicals. He contrasted this approach favorably with the more draconian and bureaucratic tack taken by the Superfund Legislation.

At one point in the class, we were talking about the process of legislation, rule making, and inevitably litigation which characterizes health policy in the US. When a rule finally makes it to court, the judge looks at precedent, and then he looks at the legislative history to determine whether the Government's interpretation of a rule is legal (and appropriate.) The actual phrasing of the legislation is also very important when there are confusing, ambiguous, or missing elements for interpreting the law.

When I heard this, I was thunderstruck. I don't spend a great deal of care on choosing prepositions when I write, but this could have a huge effect on how a judge interprets a rule. When you consider the size of some bills, or the generic patriotic, Mom and apple pie style of much legislation, I can't believe that Congress spends as much time as it should choosing its words carefully.

I was studying to be a mathematician when I heard this. My time was spent developing exacting proofs of the truth of exact statements. Natural language is too fluffy and ambiguous to easily lead to an understanding of truth (try reading the original statements of Newton's Laws), yet words carelessly chosen ten or twenty years earlier by a Congressional staffer at 2AM would decide the outcome of a $10billion lawsuit or the fate of a land preserve bigger than Rhode Island.

When I expressed this sentiment to the professor, he was sympathetic, but he pointed out that judges don't have the luxury of not making decisions. All parties expect a resolution in the courts, and the judge has to find some justification for their decision. If all else fails, they will fix on the wording and its legal interpretation, whether or not that was the interpretation of Congress.

I am still uncomfortable with this approach to making decisions, and I will return to it in the future. There are times when we are forced to make decisions without having all of the knowledge we require. This was just the first approach to making a choice I encountered where the goal seemed to be providing a plausible cover for the choice made.