922: 7/8 Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity, by Nick Bunker
Image: Franklin turned his attention to the optimal method of decision-making. An early use of a decisional balance sheet was by Benjamin Franklin. In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, Franklin described his own use of the method, which is now often called the Ben Franklin method. It involves making a list of pros and cons, estimating the importance of each one, eliminating items from the pros and cons lists of roughly equal importance (or groups of items that can cancel each other out) until one column (pro or con) is dominant. Experts on decision support systems for practical reasoning have warned that the Ben Franklin method is appropriate only for very informal decision making: "A weakness in applying this rough-and-ready approach is a poverty of imagination and lack of background knowledge required to generate a full enough range and detail of competing considerations." The social psychologist Timothy D. Wilson has warned that the Ben Franklin method can be used in ways that fool people into falsely believing rationalisations that do not accurately reflect their true motivations or predict their future behavior. Young Benjamin Franklin: The Birth of Ingenuity, by Nick Bunker (https://www.amazon.com/Nick-Bunker/e/B002R0IKYO/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) From his early career as a printer and journalist to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world, where he fought many battles with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of forty-one, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker goes behind the legend to reveal the sources of his passion for knowledge. Always trying to balance virtue against ambition, Franklin emerges as a brilliant but flawed human being, made from the conflicts of an age of slavery as well as reason. With archival material from both sides of the Atlantic, we see Franklin in Boston, London, and Philadelphia as he develops his formula for greatness. A tale of science, politics, war, and religion, this is also a story about Franklin's forebears: the talented family of English craftsmen who produced America's favorite genius. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078LPMVZW/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2