Framers

1: Decisions

The source of human power is neither muscle nor mind but models



Some threats are sudden and unexpected. Others are slow and smoldering. Both represent cognitive blind spots for which societies are unprepared. Whether pandemics or populism, new weapons or new technologies, global warming or gaping inequalities, how humans respond marks the difference between survival and extinction. And how we act depends on what we see.



Each year, more than 700,000 people around the world die from infections that antibiotics once cured but no longer do. The bacteria have developed resistance. The number of deaths is rising fast. Unless a solution is found, it is on track to hit ten million a year, or one person every three seconds. It makes even the tragedy of Covid-19 pale by comparison. And it is a problem that society itself has produced. Antibiotics work less and less well due to overuse: the very drugs that could once staunch the bacteria have turned them into superbugs.



We take antibiotics for granted, but before penicillin was discovered in 1928 and mass-produced more than a decade later, people routinely died from broken bones or simple scratches. In 1924, the sixteen-year-old son of American president Calvin Coolidge got a blister on his toe while playing tennis on the White House lawn. It became infected, and he died within the week neither his status nor wealth could save him. Today, almost every aspect of medicine, from a C-section to cosmetic surgery to chemotherapy, relies on antibiotics. If their power were to wane those treatments will become far riskier.



From her colorful, plant-strewn office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Regina Barzilay, a professor of artificial intelligence at MIT, envisioned a solution. Conventional drug development mostly focuses on finding substances with molecular "fingerprints" similar to ones that work. That generally performs well, but not for antibiotics. Most

Kenneth Cukier is a senior editor at The Economist and host of its weekly podcast on technology Babbage. He is also an associate fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Francis de Véricourt is professor of management science and the director of the Center for Decisions, Models, and Data at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin.

Although every moment of your life is filtered through your mental models, they re often invisible to you. This sharp book reveals how you can recognize the lenses that you re applying and rethink them as the world changes around you. It s an important read a steady hand for our turbulent times.
Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again

A tightly written prescription for smart thinking . . . A bold call to reinject pluralism and progressive human values into a decision-making process dominated by algorithms or gut instinct.
The Financial Times

A paean to cognitive agility and the elasticity of the imagination . . . Convincingly, Framers is a plea for diversity in all its forms. It argues for the importance of frame pluralism, in which ideas can compete vigorously yet still share space.
The Economist

The book is stuffed full of examples of how some frames are more effective than others, and how amending a frame, or adopting a new one, can lead to scientific, economic, and emotional breakthroughs. . . . Cukier and his co-authors have a more ambitious project than Kahneman and Harari. They don t want to just point out how powerfully we are influenced by our perspectives and prejudices our frames. They want to show us that these frames are tools, and that we can optimise their use. And we can change them when they become obsolete or misleading.
Calum Chace, Forbes

Framers provides an exciting intellectual tour of how people throughout history have developed mental models that have advanced human progress. It assembles research to support the idea that a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints leads to better outcomes. And the book suggests tactics that we all can use to get better at framing problems, something especially useful in this moment of change.
ResetWork.co

A fascinating look at what makes humans special in the age of algorithms and how people can improve the way they