“Welcome to the, Decision Making in Public Service course. My name is Justin Bullock and I will be the professor for this course

I have been very much looking forward to this course and preparing these lectures. Decision making is a topic that I have been fascinated with since grad school and up through my latest research in artificial intelligence. How and why decisions are made and how this process impacts public service and public servants

While I will give you a broad introduction lecture at the beginning of this course, much of the content of the lectures will be wrestling with and discussing the material from the four books that have been selected for this course.

These four books are also used to broadly structure the course. The first book that we will cover is Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. I would also recommend Ray Kurzweil’s How to create a mind: the secret of human thought revealed. Your brain structures your mind and who you identify yourself and how you make decisions, so we begin with developing a better understanding of what neuroscience and philosophy have to tell us about us, the individual decision maker.

We move from here to an extended treatment of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. It is here where the worlds of economics, psychology, and decision-making crash into one another. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel prize winning economist and does a wonderful job conveying much of his life’s work in this wonderful book. You will be introduced to system I and system II thinking, how systematically irrational and biased we are, how this has consequences for decision making, and much much more

From here we incorporate machines into the decision-making conversation, as machine intelligence or artificial intelligence has continued to develop and substitute for human intelligence. For this treatment, we will read Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence, which is a serious treatise on the decision-making space and how artificial intelligence performs in comparison to human intelligence and what that looks like. I will also pull from some of my own work with co-authors on this topic and how it influences public service decision making

Finally, we turn to the concept of administrative evil, and here we turn from individual behavior or market behavior to more specifically some of the factors or organizations that lead them to engage in behavior that needlessly harms people, or as Danny Balfour and Guy Adams put it in their book, administrative evil. This concept looks at how some of the factors that influence individual decision making can be broadly influence by professional norms, tribal identities, and dehumanization. It is at this level, that the role of decision making becomes unmistakably important in the delivery of public services

I intend to publish a lecture just before each class. For those of you taking the course, the expectation is that you listen to the lecture before class and come prepared to discuss the content along with the assigned readings for class that week. For those of you following along who are not taking the course. I hope you enjoy the content as well!

I will be publishing the first lecture on decision making which will be called Decision Making: Basic Concepts later this week. For the in-person students, you will need to listen to this as well before our first class. My general plan moving forward is to release the lecture on Sundays.

I hope you enjoy the lectures on decision making! Thanks for your time. “