"I don't have a particular recommendation other than that we base decisions on as much hard data as possible. We need to carefully look at all the options and all their ramifications in making our decisions"
About this Quote
Technocracy with a human face: Denning’s language is the calm voice of someone who has watched policy get hijacked by panic, politics, or shiny tools. “No particular recommendation” isn’t indecision so much as a refusal to play pundit. It’s a signal that the job isn’t to perform certainty; it’s to build a process sturdy enough to survive scrutiny after the fact.
The phrase “hard data” does quiet but heavy work. It draws a boundary against intuition, ideology, and the kind of anecdote-driven fear that often drives security and technology debates. Denning’s career context matters here: as a public servant closely associated with cybersecurity and information assurance, she’s speaking from a world where decisions are routinely made under pressure, with incomplete information, and where the costs of being wrong are asymmetric. Overreact, and you can entrench surveillance or brittle infrastructure. Underreact, and you leave systems exposed. “As much…as possible” concedes reality: perfect data rarely exists, but you can still demand standards.
The second sentence widens the frame from evidence to ethics and governance. “All the options” and “all their ramifications” reads like a rebuke to single-metric thinking: not just “Does it work?” but “Who pays for it, who benefits, what breaks later?” It’s also bureaucratic rhetoric with a purpose. By stressing careful review, she’s building legitimacy for decisions that will inevitably anger someone. The subtext is accountability: if you can’t defend the tradeoffs in daylight, you probably shouldn’t be making them in the dark.
The phrase “hard data” does quiet but heavy work. It draws a boundary against intuition, ideology, and the kind of anecdote-driven fear that often drives security and technology debates. Denning’s career context matters here: as a public servant closely associated with cybersecurity and information assurance, she’s speaking from a world where decisions are routinely made under pressure, with incomplete information, and where the costs of being wrong are asymmetric. Overreact, and you can entrench surveillance or brittle infrastructure. Underreact, and you leave systems exposed. “As much…as possible” concedes reality: perfect data rarely exists, but you can still demand standards.
The second sentence widens the frame from evidence to ethics and governance. “All the options” and “all their ramifications” reads like a rebuke to single-metric thinking: not just “Does it work?” but “Who pays for it, who benefits, what breaks later?” It’s also bureaucratic rhetoric with a purpose. By stressing careful review, she’s building legitimacy for decisions that will inevitably anger someone. The subtext is accountability: if you can’t defend the tradeoffs in daylight, you probably shouldn’t be making them in the dark.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|
More Quotes by Dorothy
Add to List
