Abstract
My first installment in this series focused on the concept of bias, in particular how we often have a hard time putting aside our personal preferences when encountering problems that are defined by objective facts. Since I work mainly on environmental problems, I deal with these issues on a regular basis. Water quality, for example, is something that is objectively measured but also lives in a world of subjective preference. Most of us would agree the water we drink needs to be clean enough for human consumption; we don’t want the water we drink making us sick or doing something worse. Thus we can generally agree on some objective measure of what cleanliness means in this context. But what about the quality of water we don’t consume? How “clean” does water have to be for other uses like swimming, bathing, or for carrying off our unwanted waste? Many of us might agree that, at least from a human perspective, the quality of water for drinking is more important than the quality of water for less intimate uses — particularly so if we have to pay for cleaning the water.