Real Life: Far More Complicated Than Any Game

 According to Wikipedia, "Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents."

Game theory has only limited usefulness for social scientists because society consists of many games, not just one, and these games interact with each other. The world is much more complicated than any single game.

Decades ago, I tried to make chess more like society, converting it into a more complicated game than it already is. On an ocean liner between Honolulu and San Francisco, I was accosted by guy who wanted to play chess. When I informed him that I was not a strong player, he claimed he wasn't either. He lied.

He clobbered me, having memorized standard approaches to chess moves. Mortified, I invented a chess version to force people like him to live by their wits, like I have to.

Flexichess begins like regular chess. But instead of moving a piece players can, within a few limits, change a rule, altering the whole balance of forces on the chessboard. No one can predict how rules will be changed, throwing rascals like my steamship companion off balance.

Later, I converted Flexichess into a team sport, Perplexichess. Teams consisting of 7 players play Flexichess on seven boards. On top of this a team's eighth member---a grand strategist---can move pieces to the same location on another board if it is unoccupied, without taking turns with the other grand strategist!. The grand strategist's goal is to win a majority of the boards.

Board players, playing Flexichess rationally, may be defeated because their team's grand strategist sacrificed their board by moving key pieces to a board where they were worth more.

Since it has many games going on simultaneously at two different levels, Perplexichess is very complicated. But it is still much less complicated than human societies are.

The world is made up of a vast number of different "games" simultaneously played by seven billion people. The main game many people play, especially in poor countries or among poorer people in rich countries, simply seeks physical survival.

Other people may be playing romantic games. And there are an endless number of games played by individuals in corporations, labor unions, churches, schools and universities, interest groups, hospitals, and charitable organizations.

Most individuals are playing several different games.

At a still higher level we find games played by politicians seeking appointment or election to high government positions.

The winners in these political games find themselves in games at a still higher level, seeking to protect themselves from challengers. While they remain in power, many of them may seek to advantage their own glory and their government at the expense of others, sometimes even getting their countries into wars.

As in Perplexichess, the games played at a higher level of society can throw the games of people playing at a lower level into total chaos. For example, a student planning to become a scientist might be drafted to fight a war in some country with which he (or she, in some countries) has no connection, concern, or knowledge.

On 9-11 many financial executives working in the Twin Towers found their professional games, and their lives, undone by a game played by the fanatics who crashed hijacked airliners into their buildings.

Lower level games can also confound those playing higher level games. National leaders attempting to minimize injuries caused by Covid have been frustrated by games played by governors, political opportunists, and foreign enemies who injected divisive social media memes into our society.

No wonder it is nearly impossible to predict what is going to happen next! And the complexity caused by the interactions of multiple games also makes it difficult to understand what has already gone on, creating opportunities for crazy conspiracy theories to catch on.

A conspiracy theory can be simple and consistent, whereas reality is often messy.

Bad translation of Vladimir Putin's "geopolitical catastrophe" statement

Putin did NOT say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.

 The official Russian government translation of Putin’s remark:

“Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century.”  (Emphasis added.  P.deL.)

Putin’s remark in the original Russian language (with the source in the following url):

Прежде всего следует признать, что крушение Советского Союза было крупнейшей геополитической катастрофой века.

http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_53088/

The Russian language does not have words for “a” and “the.”   Whether a speaker has said “a book” or “the book” must therefore be determined by context.   

The word   крупнейшей  is in the grammatical form that  Russian experts call a “simple superlative.”  As a leading textbook notes,  “The simple superlative does not show comparison, but rather indicates a high degree of the given quality.”  That is why the correct translation is “a major catastrophe” rather than “the greatest” catastrophe".  Putin clearly therefore did not say the Soviet collapse was “the greatest” geopolitical catastrophe.

There are enough troubling things about Mr. Putin’s recent behavior that there is no need to exaggerate, let alone to seriously mistranslate, things that he has said. Unfortunately,  when one googles the alternate translations, the incorrect ones outweigh the correct ones by ten to one!  This is probably because most people who quote Putin do not see the original Russian and probably do not speak Russian or don't speak it very well.

How Kofi Annan Can Stop The War

 

Published on Tuesday, March 11, 2003 by CommonDreams.org

How Kofi Annan Can Stop the War

by Paul F. deLespinasse

According to recent reports, the United States may be about to warn
the U.N. inspectors and reporters to leave Iraq within three days. The purpose
of this warning will be to protect the inspectors and reporters from harm when
U.S. forces attack Iraq, perhaps late next week.

The situation provides an interesting opportunity for U.N. Secretary
General Kofi Annan. If the U.S. issues the expected warning, he can and should
announce that the U.S. has no authority to evict the inspectors, who  are
United Nations employees. Furthermore, Annan can say that he will not withdraw
the inspectors from Iraq unless he is ordered to do so by the U.N. Security
Council or the inspectors report that they are not being allowed to do their job.

Any effort to get the Security Council to order the inspectors out
under current circumstances would undoubtedly fail, and if by some miracle it did
get the needed nine votes it would certainly be vetoed by France, Russia, or China.

Such an announcement by the Secretary General would have three very beneficial
consequences. First, it is unlikely that President Bush and his advisors would     

proceed with an attack, which would be a public relations nightmare as long as

the inspectors are still in Iraq.

Second, the announcement would not undermine the work of the
inspectors, but could even increase their clout, and that of the Secretary General,
vis-à-vis Saddam Hussein. As long as they remain, the inspectors would protect Iraq
from an American attack, but if not given carte blanche to do their work they will
leave.

Third, the announcement would become a precedent for greatly enhanced power to be 

exercised by the Secretary General of the United Nations. This person is the closest 

thing we have to a chief executive for the world, and he is in a position from which

it is natural to consider the welfare of the people of the world as a whole.

Until now, the veto power enjoyed by the five permanent members of the
Security Council (U.S., Great Britain, France, Russia, and China) has
generally been considered to be a limit on the power of the United
Nations. However by assuming the power to act on behalf of the human race
unless the Security Council tells him he cannot, the Secretary General can make
the veto work to increase his own power, and thus the power of the United Nations.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if today's tragic world conditions provided the opening for a 

great leap forward in our world institutions! If he
seizes the opportunity fate has given him, Kofi Annan may well go down in history
as a  "Machiavelli for peace," one of the greatest people of the twenty first
century.

And it will be the Bush Administration that made it all possible!
**************************************

Paul F. deLespinasse is professor emeritus of political science at
Adrian
College in Michigan. He can be reached at pdeles@proaxis.com

Periodic table of human associations

 

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WAS A MISTAKE

 

Wars and revolutions are terrible ways to achieve political goals. Yet America's principal political holiday celebrates our war for independence.

A fundamental error in U.S. political doctrine is our assumption that nations and "peoples" ought to have a right to independence and "self-determination." Although this principle was best articulated by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, its roots go clear back to the Declaration of Independence and the war by which we shook off British rule.

A major problem with claiming a right of self-determination is that such a right is incompatible with the essential nature of government. Political philosophers have long understood that government's essence is its power to impose sanctions, to deprive people of life, liberty or property. St. Thomas Aquinas was pointing out this unpleasant fact when he noted that "Taking away justice, then, what is government but a great robber band?" The relationship between a robber and his victim clearly is an involuntary association.

Since nobody will consent to be executed, imprisoned, or fined, our basic relationship with government is like that between robber and victim: an involuntary association, not a voluntary one. A right to voluntarily select the people with whom we are going to be involuntarily associated would be a strange right indeed.

American critics of Israeli expansion after the Six Day War in 1967 claim that the land seized by Israel when it won the war is “occupied territory” and therefore illegitimate. But these critics need to remember that all territory is only under any government's jurisdiction because it was seized by force or threat of force, or obtained from another government which itself was based on force or its threat. Ironically, the 1967 war only happened because Israel was attacked.

During the 1982 war between England and Argentina, someone asked me which country had the right to govern the Falkland Islands. My reply was that I wouldn't know until we saw who won the war. The Falklands are still British since England won that war. Likewise, Crimea is again Russian because of Russia's threatened use of force. (The results of the plebiscite in which Crimea residents ratified Russia's seizure of the area might have been honest, but there is no way to tell. The election was also irrelevant, since Russia intended to keep Crimea anyway.)

Although force is the only way a government's jurisdiction over territory can be maintained, wars

and revolutions are very poor ways to bring about political changes. Peaceful reforms are much to be preferred. Unlike the United States, Canada gained its independence from Great Britain gradually and peacefully. It celebrated its 150^th anniversary as a unified country last week, though complete independence came much more recently. Black people in America historically suffered intolerable injustices, but mainstream black leaders correctly resisted the bad precedent set by the Declaration of Independence and demanded reforms guaranteeing equality before the law rather than separation.

No one would suggest repudiating the Declaration of Independence and submitting once again to British rule. But the vigor with which the United States stomped on attempted secession by its southern states shows that we recognize no right to self-determination when directed against our own government. It is high time that we explicitly admit that our revolution was a mistake, and refrain from supporting efforts to secede from other countries, too.

Of course Independence Day remains our most important political holiday, and the muddled philosophical foundations of our revolution need not prevent us from celebrating it. And had it not been for its unhappy experience with our independence, Great Britain might not have acted as reasonably as it did with Canada. Sometimes people learn from experience.

Happy Fourth of July!

Countries, Too, Can Have A Split Personality

Some people suffer from a condition where two different personalities apparently inhabit one body, contending for control. This was famously illustrated in Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Recent developments suggest that whole countries can also develop split personalities. Senator Mitch McConnell recently warned that we are "drifting apart into two separate tribes with a separate set of facts and separate realities with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share."

If everybody was just getting the same news but splitting into very different personal interpretations of it, their differences would probably not line up along party lines. But a poll before the second impeachment trial found that more than 90% of Democrats said they believed that Donald Trump bore major responsibility for inciting the attack on the Capitol, while only 30-some percent of Republicans agreed.

Today's proliferation of digital media allows people to select only news sources that reinforce what they already think. Many apparently try to avoid reports or interpretations that disagree with their current opinions, limiting their ability to reconsider them. .

After Fox News recognized Joe Biden's election, many Trump supporters switched to TV outlets whose reports they considered more congenial. If there's a market for anything, someone will always supply it, and that includes nonsense.

As a part-time Kremlinologist, I used to assume that rigorous censorship---controlling all information available to its people---was essential if a totalitarian regime was to retain power. The Soviet government ran short wave jamming transmitters to prevent people from hearing dissonant information from the BBC or the Voice of America. Glavlit, a government organization employing 80,000 censors, issued permits which were required even for messages on a book of matches. Its 300 page manual listed things that could not be mentioned, including existence of an agency called Glavlit!

But recent American developments suggest censorship is not essential to prevent large numbers of people from getting reliable information. Although the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and press in the U.S., we are free not to listen to information and perspectives which conflict with our current opinions. Recently so many people have chosen to do so that we now have public opinion about facts divided into two substantial parts---- a collective split personality.

Thoughtful citizens, however, still have the power to stay, or get back, in touch with reality. We can deliberately get news from more than one source, thereby becoming aware of conflicting ways of interpreting what is going on. Important facts ignored by one news source may be reported by other sources. We can evaluate the compatibility of conflicting factual claims and interpretations with evidence and common sense.

In a word, more Americans could learn how to be critical thinkers who are unwilling to have our view of the world handed to us in a package deal by some demagogue or by spin-doctors.

The Internet is, in general, a wonderful thing. In the past, when we had limited sources of information, editors protected us from utter nonsense, but they also "protected" us from worthwhile perspectives they considered too far off the beaten path.

Life is tough, and all political discourse is a mixture of sense and nonsense. Since we can no longer depend on editors to sort out the sense from the nonsense for us, we all need to figure it out for ourselves, individually, as best we can.

In the internet age a broad liberal education ("liberal" in the classical sense, not in the political sense!) and the ability to think critically are more important than ever if we want to be responsible citizens.

 

The Donald Trump Club Song

"Franklin Carpenter Gregg" (not her real name) wrote this parody.

Who can post the best solo or small group performance of it? For a printable arrangement: Click here.