Four Decades of Transformation in Decision Analytic Practice for Societal Risk Management
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The formal mathematical structure for decision making under uncertainty was first expressed in Savage's axioms over 60 years ago. But while the underlying normative concepts for decision making under uncertainty remain constant, the practice of applying these concepts in real-world settings, as conducted by decision analysis (DA) specialists working with agencies and interested parties, has seen a major transformation in recent decades. The purpose of this article is to provide perspectives that characterize and interpret how DA practice for societal risk management questions has grown and is being transformed over the last 40 years. It addresses a series of themes for parsing changes in how DA has evolved toward more flexible approaches, moving beyond strict theoretical assumptions and constrained settings, and addresses multiple interested parties to provide insights rather than a single correct answer. The article clarifies the path from the initial DA formulation as a set of normative axioms, through gradual change into what is now the most flexible and least restrictive form of policy analysis. The article shows how the practice of DA for societal risks has become more attuned to a wide array of interests and perspectives, more behaviorally informed, more creative, and more informative for governance process. It addresses the following themes: the evolution in the basic orientation of DA, the increasingly important role of stakeholders in DA practice, the importance and value of key problem-structuring techniques, and evolution in approaches for eliciting values and technical judgments.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it