The Old Country

My parents met in Budapest in the early 1940s, my father being a native Hungarian and my mother a Polish refugee. They met and worked at the still-standing Central Hospital in Buda, my mother as a nurse and my father a doctor. During World War II my father was a doctor in the Hungarian army, fighting on the Russian front. Toward the end of the war he obtained a leave and went awol, hiding out in Budapest.

During the siege of Budapest, in the winter of 1944-45, in which Germans and Russians fought all over the city, my parents remained inside the Central Hospital for several months. They bargained health care for the survival of the hospital staff and non-combatant patients. With cavalry still in use my father occasionally snuck outside to carve meat from a fresh horse carcass to supplement their meager diet. They once arranged for General Zhukov’s brother to obtain a suit from a good tailor as yet another barter. By 1946 both my parents had escaped from Hungary with my father arriving in Vienna on Good Friday 1946 hidden in a Russian railroad car. His suitcase contained ski medals and his tails. My mother had been across the border several times already posing as an Italian nurse and member of the International Red Cross.

By 1947 they were in New York city having made their way by Paris and the hospitality of members of the French underground they knew in Budapest during the War. With the birth of my older sister they became US citizens. They moved to California to take advantage of better employment prospects for my father, who would repeat his medical residency requirements and board examinations in English, studying in the sand dunes near Fort Ord where my godfather, Bela Maday, was teaching Hungarian to intelligence agents and would-be spies.

Education

I grew up in Long Beach in Southern California during the 1950s and 1960s, the expansionist and halcyon days of Governor Pat Brown. My father insisted "I am not a refugee," and he and my mother integrated themselves in a world influenced by Joe McCarthy and post-War consumer culture. They belonged to a broad circle of Hungarian ex-pats but were comfortable keeping the large Los Angeles Hungarian network at arms’ length.

There were some thirteen traffic lights between Long Beach and San Diego until late in the 1960s. I spent a great deal of time surfing and studied mathematics, psychology and philosophy as an undergraduate, first at the University of California at Irvine and then at the University of Leeds, England. At the latter I was lucky to fall into an excellent department of mathematical logic and prepared for my graduate studies at UC Berkeley.

At Berkeley I joined the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science . The Logic Group is an interdisciplinary program between the mathematics and philosophy departments started by the great Polish emigre mathematician Alfred Tarski. The Berkeley philosophy department included Paul Feyerabend whose lectures I attended frequently. Though a world-famous philosopher of science Feyerabend was not a member of the Logic Group, really intended for the study of mathematical logic. Generally only very formal philosophical approaches to science were tolerated, and the Berkeley philosophy department was much the same. Thomas Kuhn, author of the hugely influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions was once Feyerabend’s colleague but left Berkeley in 1964 for Princeton.

Feyerabend and the zeitgeist convinced me that good philosophy of science and mathematics required a significant role for the histories of those subjects. Along with several other students, I found the analytic alternatives to be pretentious uses of technical mathematics which substituted for substantive knowledge. Like many other PhD students I managed to pass my qualifying exams (two in math, one in philosophy) and seminars (one in math, one in philosophy), leaving myself but with a thesis to complete.

I decided around 1980 to learn some applied mathematics as a vocational hedge. I spent two years studying statistical theory, probability models, and combinatorial optimization. I was lucky, taking two courses with Richard Karp in the Department of Computer Science on combinatorics and the then new P=NP problem, still one of the great unsolved mathematical problems today. I had the opportunity to complete a PhD in the Department of Operations Research but found the subject more theoretical than applied. I dropped out of graduate school entirely and taught community college mathematics in Berkeley. I kept up my philosophical interests and wrote reviews for the Berkeley literary magazine, The Threepenny Review.

In 1981 I wrote a review for the Threepenny of Lakatos' new Collected Papers, published by Cambridge University Press and edited by two of Lakatos' students at the London School of Economics. The review was titled "Reconstructing Reason." Being curious about Lakatos' Hungarian background and his intriguing texts I began studying the work of the most famous Hungarian philosopher, Georg Lukacs, years before I learned Lakatos had a connection with him. Psychologically my goal was still to complete my PhD and one day I decided I understood just what was going on in Lakatos. Far from having "given up" his Hegelian-Marxist past, he was something of genius bridging East and West. I proposed the idea of a Lakatos thesis to Hans Sluga in the Philosophy Department. Sluga had written an historical book on Frege and was less ideologically inclined toward analytic dogma than others in the Philosophy department. I thought that if my idea was even roughly correct it would show Lakatos to have been a remarkable combination of the English-analytic and continental-historical traditions and therefore worthy of a PhD.

I barely had an idea of what I was doing, though I did have clear goals. I wanted to document the "hidden Hegel" in Lakatos, which is exactly what Lukacs did for Marx in the 1920s. I also wanted to develop Lakatos' ideas further in the history of mathematics and science. I was naturally led to a combination of intellectual history, philosophy, and history of science and mathematics. My self-appointed task was to sort out Lakatos’ many historical claims, identify his implicit philosophical antecedents, and show how it all worked together. This was not standard fare for the Berkeley Philosophy Department nor the Logic Group. I was lucky again, convincing the intellectual historian Marin Jay to be an outside reader. Jay wrote the the classic history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination, and he was supportive of my project.

I spent a couple years writing my thesis and when I decided it was academically defensible and respectable, considering its interdisciplinary scholarship in the history of ideas, mathematics, and science, I announced I was done and pushed it through. The Logic Group still required an oral examination attended by Sluga, Jay, my third reader the mathematician Jack Silver, Bert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. The latter two were then becoming well-known interpreters of Michel Foucault. Philosophical history was alive at Berkeley at least that afternoon.

Having finally obtained that precious PhD, my wife and I were living in Houston, Texas, where she was teaching and I took my first consulting job.

The year was 1984 and the company was Arthur Andersen.

Consulting with coat and tie

To get work outside of academics I luckily had my mathematical background to fall back on. I barely used it at Arthur Andersen, except for a general facility with analytic thinking and computer programming. I learned to design mainframe computer systems for massive nationwide billing cycles and other financial services for large corporations. Part of the requirement was putting up with “Arthur’s” stultifying corporate culture which required a suit and tie, not even a sport coat, each day of the week. I was somewhat frustrated that so little real mathematics was involved, not to mention the sweltering Houston heat.

At the same time I was lucky to get introduced to the world of management consulting. For myself and others it was a convenient entree into the business world, one which today is quickly disappearing because of globalization. Today much of the same work is being shipped offshore where similarly, able young people are can quickly master the techniques needed to design computer applications for large businesses.

After a couple years, I insisted to my wife that we head back for California. She had a half-year sabbatical which we stretched to one year using our savings. I wanted a break from Arthur and intended to research several topics I had discovered through my Lakatos research and to write some academic papers. The topics included the history of skepticism, the origins of Greek mathematics, 19th-century history of mathematics and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. I knew Lakatos had survived the latter and wrote a few speculative pages in my thesis Introduction on Lakatos in the context of 1956. It would be several more years before the entire wicked story would be known by more than just a few people in Hungary.

I got a good start on several papers which were published over the following years, and started looking for a California job. My wife obtained a position at UC Santa Cruz so we didn’t have to return to Texas. We traveled together to Budapest in 1987 and met Lakatos’ teacher, the Greek philologist and historian of mathematics Arpad Szabo.

 Applied Decision Analysis

ADA was an outgrowth of the interest at Stanford University in the 1960s in decision theory and analysis. One of the founders, Pete Morris, was an early contributor to the theory of aggregate probability distributions. Another early joiner, Lee Merkhofer, wrote books on cost-benefit analysis and risk analysis and applied decision analytic methods to environmental problems. The company president for over 20 years, Dick Smallwood, was a world expert on the methods of conjoint measurement and their application to predicting consumer preferences for products from cars to laser printers and health care plans. Al Miller developed the influence diagram technique for representing decision problems and his brother Bill created the powerful Windows application DPL (for Decision Programming Language). I joined ADA when it was about thirty people including support staff and grew to about eighty when I left in 2000. The firm was expanding and I understood enough of the company world view and mathematical sensibility to get hired.

Like many northern California companies of the time, ADA saw its goals as equally to make a good living and pursue its own intellectual goals. The latter was to apply methods of quantitative management science to complex real-world problems. Everybody was at least competent with the applied mathematics of uncertainty and choice—applied decision analysis in a broad sense. Over the years I worked for many of the big private corporations, government organizations and research funding groups. Like others I ended up specializing in certain methods and application areas. For me this was large institutional environmental risk problems: toxic waste cleanups, electromagnetic field risk (now a so-called “phantom” risk), smog, fish protection. I learned the marvelous techniques of a poorly appreciated part of decision analysis called multiattribute utility theory, basically invented by Ralph Keeney and his mentor Howard Raiffa as a characterization of choices with competing, incommensurable values or outcomes, such as ecological benefits, health benefits, dollar costs, jobs, aesthetic impacts (e.g. visibility), and so on.

Instead of focusing primarily on the uncertain and probabilistic side of risk, this theory provides an analytical framework for correctly codifying values and their comparisons. A good deal of folklore has developed, such as techniques for developing one-of-a-kind measurement scales for describing, say, the ecological changes expected in the San Francisco Bay Delta under a very limited set of changes. There’s a recognition that in all kinds of situations, nobody can provide greatly improved precision, so you really only need to worry about fundamental differences between choices possible. This is completely the reverse of a “scientific” approach in which it is assumed you need perfect information before acting. This methodology of “constructive” choice has been discussed and defended ably by cognitive researchers, and many excellent projects have made use of the techniques. The analytic framework is highly conducive for use in public participation or stakeholder processes, and that heuristic benefit to promote coherent debate is often the benefit of using the approach. Digerati are disappointed because the mathematics often becomes a scaffolding more than a slick analytical tool.

In addition to project work I designed and taught multi-day workshops and training programs in decision analysis, decision analysis software, a fad called “real options,” risk communication, and multiple value methods. ADA did all this while providing support for staff to write articles, attend conferences and the usual activities needed to maintain beltway or consultant status and visibility. A couple other firms near Stanford was similarly organized but ADA was compared to them ADA was either more varied, more laid back, or less willing to look like the big high-priced management consulting firms. The world of management consulting is like that of the ancient sophists, made up of cadres of able and quick learners willing to take on all kinds of intractable problems as long as you go along with their methods and unswerving direction.

At some point ADA decided it needed to get bigger to provide more opportunities for young people on the way up. After a couple of failed corporate alliances, one with an engineering company, the other with a rival consulting firm, we sold ourselves to PriceWaterhouseCoopers in 1998. The idea was that PwC would provide a gravy train of projects and we would not longer have to market—every consultant’s dream—with prefect growth potential. We’d do our thing for the PwC clients who found it useful. We would also help PwC build decision analytic methods into their corporate valuation approaches. None of this ever happened. The culture clash was complete and unforgiving. The decision was a disaster. The company basically fell apart after a few years. ADA has since been bought and resold a couple times, and is now a mere shell of its once vibrant, unique and reasonably profitable self.

 Discovering Lakatos’ Past

In early 1998 I discovered new articles on Lakatos’ life in Hungary up to the 1956 Revolution. I had learned in the early 1980s from one of Lakatos’ best-known students, the late Ferenc Feher, that Lakatos had been a “first generation” student of Lukacs after World War II. Now it turned out Lakatos had an incredible Hungarian life full of drama, intrigue, and sinister treachery of the highest order. He also had even written a Hungarian doctoral thesis at the University of Debrecen. No copies of the thesis now exist, but Laszlo Ropolyi has reconstructed the thesis content based on a series of articles Lakatos wrote in the late 1940s. These articles show that his thesis was strongly influenced by Georg Lukacs, although the content sounds like an embarrassingly simplistic application of Marxist ideas to the sociology of science. All this history had been kept secret partly by Lakatos who had no interest in making his nefarious past known in England where he had become a politically conservative world-famous academic. In Hungary Lakatos still had enough enemies so that a 199x academic conference on him was moved to Vienna.

Having filled out my understanding over the years with the intellectual and scientific history needed to lay out Lakatos’ philosophical achievement, these revelations about Lakatos' past were the motivation I needed to put it all together as a book. I was convinced more than ever that Lakatos was one of the most remarkable philosophers of the 20th century.

My original impulse, hatched over 15 years earlier in Berkeley, was coming to fruition. With the chaos at ADA I saw no reason to worry much about what happening with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the big dumb company that now controlled our every movement down to tasteless PowerPoint templates. Luckily there was room for me to maneuver as a part-timer. I would work on my book for half the day or more, then go to the office and put in a half day or less. Somehow I fit in business trips to England and Australia where I was sent by PwC as a missionary to convert the company's valuation practices. The entire purchase of ADA had been predicated on spurious beliefs in a new miracle methodology called real options analysis, a valuation paradigm incorporating concepts from financial options theory, then all the rage because of the dot com stock run ups. Indeed we visited the holy of holies, Enron, who were building futures markets in the energy markets, weather events and anything else you can imagine. Real options theory has its merits but it also was an ideological expression of the "new valuations" nonsense pervading the media.

After six months I had enough of a book draft to go back to work and keep the book going with less energy. ADA, as I said, was breaking up with many at the company looking for late potential in the dot com mania thriving around us. Every day seemed to bring a new email resignation. My favorite was Dan Brooks', who wrote that decision analysis companies seemed best suited for those challenged by making choices in their lives.

I resigned in early 2000 and started my own consulting shop, Policy and Decision Science. My book Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason was published the next year, in March 2001.