One of the anonymati offers the following comment on my post yesterday:
“As a longtime reader, I have read your account of the
zero-sum game at least twice before. Which leaves me curious: I can imagine it
being therapeutic to draft an argument or express an idea from scratch, but
what sort of a balm is it to cut-and-paste something you wrote long ago into
your blog? Repetition is a hallmark of this blog, you've been candid about
that, but I am genuinely unclear how this can be therapeutic.”
I sense a gentle rebuke lurking just below the surface of
this apparently innocent question, but I shall attempt to answer the question
nonetheless. First of all, just to be clear, there was no cutting and pasting
involved. I wrote the blog post from scratch – or rather, I dictated it into my
headphones. As it happens, this time around I connected the subject up with the
history of utilitarianism and responses to it, something I believe I have not
done before, but that is really neither here nor there.
Let me begin by noting that the entire post, including the
title, was a joke. Not a knee slapper, not a one-liner, not a gag, but a
complex ironic jest with layers of meaning.
I realize that is not the usual way in which people write for blogs, but
the blog is, after all, called The Philosopher’s Stone.
As Kierkegaard observes in Either/Or, the essence of the
aesthetic is novelty while the essence of the ethical is repetition. I will
also remind you (yet again, to be sure) of Socrates’ beautiful reply to
Callicles’ complaint in the Gorgias that Socrates says the same things over and
over again. Since you describe yourself as a long-time reader, I shall assume
that you recall the passage to which I refer.
So let me now respond directly to your question. How can it
be therapeutic to explain again something I have explained before, even if I do
so without, as you rather dismissively describe it, cutting and pasting? The
answer, quite simply, is that to me powerful ideas are beautiful. It soothes my
soul to hear a Beethoven quartet yet again (and even, back in the day, to play
it yet again, albeit imperfectly.) It gives me strength in my dotage to read
once more Dylan Thomas’s beautiful villanelle.
I spend an unexpectedly large amount of time in a normal day revisiting in my mind complex arguments the formulation and clarification of which caused me great effort
at some time in my life. Perhaps
mistakenly – I do not really know – I imagine that there are some people out there
on whom the precise, clear exposition of those arguments will have a similar
effect.
Not exactly comfort food or a nice nap snuggled under a
blanket, but as the old saying has it, different strokes for different folks.
19 comments:
Your love of the aesthetic sets you apart. Were more academics so inclined, "academic" wouldn't so often be understood as a pejorative. Your doing the aesthetic, if I may put it that way, is, I believe, performing humanity and quite Marxian at that.
I have almost no knowledge of game theory, but I'm curious if when you say a game is limited to "two people" does that actually mean two human beings, or can this mean two other entities? The reason I ask is because what little I know of game theory is that it really started to develop during the Cold War and was used to understand the situation between the Soviet Union and the United States, say in regards to how a war between the two would play out, with the use of nuclear weapons being of primary concern.
Can anyone who watched/followed the most recent Sunday Night Football explain the following statement to me? Just a remark I saw on FiveThirtyEight - I'm too rusty to try to unpack the metaphor:
joshua.hermsmeyer (Josh Hermsmeyer, NFL analyst): What a terrific game. It had a bit of everything, and is among the best I’ve ever watched.
neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): And what an amazing real-time example of the prisoner's dilemma!
Jason, the simple answer is that it is not limited to human beings.The misuse of the concepts of Game Theory by nuclear deterrence theorists in the 50s and 60s is actually an interesting subject. 60 years ago, I wrote a book about it called The Rhetoric of Deterrence, which I was unable to get published. Harvard University Press, which was in the process of publishing my book on The Critique of Pure Reason rejected it, saying it was too technical to be a political book and to political to be a technical book. Sigh.
Michael, I have no idea what the commentators were talking about (Nor did they come I suspect) but if you are really interested in The Prisoners Dilemma, You can go to my other blog, on the use and abuse of formal methods in political philosophy, where it is explained and analyzed at some length
Cool, thanks! I didn't know you had another blog. Here's a link to the (an?) entry on the Prisoner's Dilemma, if anyone else wants to check it out:
https://robert-wolff.blogspot.com/2010/06/applications-prisoner-dilemma-first.html
I didn't take the comment of copy-and-pasting literally, but metaphorically - as a kind of mental activity. As a teacher and lecturer myself, I often explain the same things over and over, and though I typically do so from scratch too, there's no denying that I also use mental 'templates' to construct the explanations.
Parables and oracular statements (e.g. 'I am that I am' or 'tat tvam asi') may have definitive statements, but I can't see how an argument, subject to the historical vicissitudes of what's taken for granted, what counts as an exemplar of it, and how it might be applied, could be. Along with the legend that Plato at his death had copies of Aristophanes and Sophron, there's the legend that he had was editing and re-writing The Republic, perhaps in response to new ideas and arguments emerging in the Lyceum, or to Praxiteles's stylistic shift in sculpture (although one fears what the author of The Laws might have done to the charm of the earlier work). And along with giving ever finer statements of the Prisoners Dilemma, re-visiting it might also induce reflection upon why it so much as seems illuminating about anything in actual human life.
Michael, as I recall the Raiders and Chargers would have both made the playoffs if they tied their game, but if one of them won (as did happen for the Raiders), then the winner would make the playoffs and the loser would miss out. So all they had to do was work together to ensure a tie, and both would get what they want. (In fact it was a tad more complex, because the Raiders get an easier first round matchup because of their win than they would have gotten with a tie.) But if they both try for the win, because they do not trust each other, they run the risk of losing. It's not a precise prisoner's dilemma for a few reasons, but it's close enough to serve as a decent starting illustration
The Sunday Night Football game was interesting because the way that tie breakers work in the NFL for who gets into the playoffs and who doesn't if they have identical records at the end of the season. Both teams playing in that game (the very last game of the season for any team) could have both gotten into the playoffs if they had tied (a game finishing in a tie is quite uncommon in the NFL, happens less than 1 time per season). However, winning by one team meant they would go to the playoffs and the loser would be out of the playoffs.
It literally came down to the final 2 seconds on the clock where the Las Vegas Raiders could have kneeled down and both teams go to the playoffs guaranteed, or they attempt a field goal for the win. That second choice is not guaranteed, the first one is. With only 2 seconds on the clock attempting a field goal in that situation has 3 outcomes: the team attempting the field goal wins by making the kick, they tie if they miss the kick, or if the kick is blocked or otherwise disrupted and returned for a touchdown by the defensive team then the kicking team loses (this last scenario is exceedingly rare but not impossible).
I will not attempt to explain how that maps to the prisoners dilemma! :)
Thanks, guys. :) That really was an incredible game...
Also, this paragraph from Prof. Wolff's other blog (see link in previous comment) is worth quoting.
That payoff matrix contains the totality of the information relevant to a game theoretic analysis. Nothing else. But what about those jail terms? Those are part of the outcome matrix, not the payoff matrix. The payoff matrix gives the utility of each outcome to each player, and with an ordinal ranking, the only utility information we have is that a player ranks one of the outcomes first, second, third, or fourth [or is indifferent between two or more of them, of course, but let us try to keep this simple.] But ten years versus going scot free, and all that? That is just part of the little story that is told to perk up the spirits of readers who are made nervous by mathematics. We all know that when you are introducing kindergarteners to geometry, it may help to color the triangles red and blue and put little happy faces on the circles and turn the squares into SpongeBob SquarePants. But eventually, the kids must learn that none of that has anything to do with the proofs of the theorems. The Pythagorean Theorem is just as valid for white triangles as for red ones.
Tony Couture posted a couple of interesting comments regarding anarchism in response to the January 6 blog post ("Anarchism, Sort of").
Here's a very funny riff on prisoner's dilemma: quiz show example
You do a great job! Very entertaining blog.
A movie recommendation. “Don’t Look Up,” on Netflix, is a satire about the failure of the U.S. to deal with climate change, except the threat to the world’s survival is a comet which is predicted to collide with the Earth within six months. The all-star cast includes Leonardo Decaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, playing two astronomers from Michigan State University whose prediction is not taken seriously, and Meryl Streep, who plays a sassy President with a libido, more concerned about the mid-term elections and the fact that her Supreme Court nomination is in jeopardy.
DDA,
The British game show you link to, Golden Balls, has its version on American TV, Friend or Foe. My observation, which I have shared in previous comments, is that a majority of the contestants choose Foe, in order to keep all of the money.
@ Another Anonymous
I have seen the film "Don't Look Up". Basically a frightening version of an apocalypse.
One could claim that in a certain sense, physics is the only really predictive science we have. Assuming that such a comet will be observed one day, then, with sufficient observation time and after precise measurement, one does not need any more statistics and certainly no prophets to be able to say with final certainty whether such an object will hit the earth or not. Regardless of Popper's "black swans", almost every person on this planet entrusts his life to the validity of the laws of physics, at least as soon as he gets on the next bus.
The film plays, in view of this for a rational person unquestionable fact, with the unbelievable ignorance to which humans are capable. The plot of the film reminded me of Monty Python's film "the meaning of life". In one episode, death knocks on the door of a small country house. Inside, three couples are having dinner. Death visits them to tell them that they have all just died of a fish poisoning. Unfortunately for the Grim Reaper, none of the people understand what he wants. With their ignorance they drive the nice Mr. Death so far that he thinks of looking for another job.
Adam,
As I indicated in my comment, I interpreted "Don't Look Up" to be a metaphor for the failure to deal with global warming and the rejection of science by many on our planet.
Sorry, that should have been Achim.
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