9. Too many cooks in the kitchen: decision paralysis

If there are 20 scientists who have 20 different, equally plausible-sounding accounts of global risks, decision paralysis (also called analysis paralysis or option paralysis³) may set in and there is the temptation to do nothing. A.P. Chekhov wrote, “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.” If too many remedies are prescribed for global risk, it may be that we cannot come up with a “cure”. More simplistically, there may be a large pool of experts and we just listen to the wrong ones.