(2012-04-11) Rao Trigger Narrative Decision Making

Venkatesh Rao examines Trigger-NarratIve Decision Making. *The nuclear option is the most extreme example of a special kind of decision narrative that I call a trigger narrative: one built around a major decision requires an explicit triggering action after all the preparation is done: things like proposing marriage, submitting a manuscript to an editor or issuing a press release. Not all major decisions are framed by trigger narratives, but for those that are, the nuclear trigger narrative has much to teach.

In Tempo I focused on narrative-driven decision-making: managing the stream of individually inconsequential, but cumulatively consequential and irreversible, decisions that make up our lives. In this stream, true “fork in the road” trigger moments are actually quite rare.

But where a trigger does exist, the challenge is to script a narrative around it that reduces it to the equivalent of a coin toss. An absolutely pure decision-fork where all relevant information has already been factored in as intelligently as possible, leaving you with only a stark leap of faith into an Unknown Unknown future. When the moment comes, there should be no more arguments left to debate. No cost-benefit calculations left to make, no probabilities left to estimate. No personality issues or psychological factors left to consider. No moral or ethical issues left to ponder. Just you, a trigger and a future where the unknowable consequences are the most important ones.

So let’s talk about trigger narratives in terms of the building blocks of narrative-driven decision-making: archetypes, doctrines, tempo, key climactic events and so forth. I’ll be focusing specifically on the American trigger narrative during the Cold War.* Hmm, that seems like a bizarrely High Risk Zero-Sum case to expand from...