Adventures With Cassiopaea

Chapter 35

Now, back to Games: Game theory stands on two theorems: von Neumann's "min-max theorem" of 1928, and Nash's equilibrium theorem of 1950. Von Neumann's ideas are the cornerstone of games of pure opposition, or "two-person zero-sum games" as they call them in mathematical terms. As it happens, two person games have no real relevance in the real world. It wasn't until Nash came along, that the distinction between cooperative and noncooperative games was introduced.

Cooperative games are games in which players can make enforceable agreements with other players. That is to say, as a group they can fully commit themselves to specific strategies. Noncooperative games posit that collective commitment is impossible. There are no enforceable agreements. By expanding the theory to include games that involve a mix of cooperation and competition, Nash opened the door to applications of game theory to economics, political science, sociology, and even evolutionary biology. We have noted that Morse Peckham must have been seriously influenced by the ideas of games in his role as a "social historian."

In general, the outcome of a game for any one of the players depends on what all the other players choose to do and vice versa. This means that such games are "interdependent." Games like tic-tac-toe, hangman, and chess involve one kind of interdependence because each of the players moves in turn and has a chance to be aware of the moves of the other and to analyze them before making his or her own move. In such cases, each player will look ahead to possible moves and how they will affect him, he will try to assess the likelihood of these various moves by the other player, and will then reason "back" to his current situation, and pick a move based on these analyses. In such games, the players have to anticipate and assume not only the strategy of the other player, but how that other player will respond to his next move, and so on. The players best strategy can be determined by looking ahead to every possible outcome. In chess, these calculations are too complex, so the players only look ahead a few moves at a time and constantly adjust their strategy based on their experience of the other player.

Games like poker, on the other hand, consist of simultaneous plays wherein the players are ignorant of the other player's current state or possible actions. They are forced to think "I think he thinks that I think that he thinks that I think…" and so on. Each must figuratively put himself in the place of the other player and try to calculate the outcome, including his own move.

Such games, where there is a lack of information which leads to a logical circle that just goes around and around, are what is dealt with by Nash's concept of equilibrium wherein each player picks his best move based on the idea that each of the other players will also pick a "best move," or will have a "best situation" from which to play.

The problem is: the way the theorem is described is very confusing because of the jargon. Nash defined equilibrium as "a situation in which no player could improve his or her position by choosing an alternative available strategy, without implying that each person's privately held best choice will lead to a collectively optimal result." But the bottom line is this: Nash's equilibrium states that each player ought to assume that the other player is out to screw him royally, is probably in a position to do so, and he must therefore use the strategy that is optimal - which is either to submit completely because he knows he doesn't have a good position or a good move available, and the other guy is going to decimate him, or - assuming his position is such that he just can't lose - to screw the other player firstest and mostest.

Today, Nash's concept of equilibrium from strategic games is one of the basic paradigms in social sciences and biology. And he got a Nobel prize for coming up with this idea.

Nash, Shapley, Shubic, and McCarthy, along with another student at Princeton invented a game involving coalitions and double-crosses. Nash called the game "Fuck You, Buddy." It was later published under the name "So Long, Sucker." Nash and the gang created a complicated set of rules designed to force players to join forces with one another to advance, but ultimately to double-cross each other in order to win. The point of the game was to produce psychological mayhem, and apparently, it worked. Sylvia Nasar records that McCarthy remembers losing his temper after Nash cold-bloodedly dumped him on the second-to-last round and Nash was absolutely astonished that McCarthy could get so emotional. "But I didn't need you anymore," Nash kept saying over and over again.

Keep this game in mind because it is the essence of Nash's ideas: to force cooperation to advance, followed by a big double cross in which only one player is the winner.

Sounds a lot like the current day craze of "survival" shows, yes? Which of course, leads us to wonder what kind of "programming," or example such things are setting up as models for human behavior. More importantly: why?

Nash's game theory was all the buzz at RAND even before he arrived there under contract. RAND had been, prior to Nash's ideas, preoccupied with games of total conflict between two players, as defined by von Neumann, since that seemed to fit the problem of nuclear issues between two superpowers. However, as weapons got ever more destructive, the idea of all-out war was seen as a situation in which both players might have a common interest. Bombing the enemy back to the Stone Age no longer made any sense because it could lead to a war of complete extermination on both sides.

Von Neumann had long believed that RAND ought to focus on "cooperative games." That is, games ought to be played "sequentially." Games should involve "moves" based on information, such as in chess or tic-tac-toe. Players ought to communicate and discuss the situation and agree on rational, joint action. In such games, there is cooperation and collaboration, and an umpire around to enforce the agreement.

Economists, however, did not like Von Neumann's ideas. They said that it was like saying that our only hope for preventing a dangerous and wasteful arms race lay in appointing a world government with the power to enforce simultaneous disarmament. As it happens, a One World Government, composed of member nations, was a very popular idea among mathematicians and scientists at the time.

But the social scientists, the economists, were doubtful of the idea that any nation, much less the Russians, would cede sovereignty to such an organization. In other words, in cooperative game theory, who's going to force the other side to cooperate?

But Nash came along and solved the problem. He demonstrated that noncooperative games COULD have stable solutions. In short, one "player" could have a strategy in which they "force players to join forces with one another to advance, but ultimately to double-cross the other players in order to win."

To put this in practical terms: a One World Government might be advocated by a major player, promoted, setup, and all the other players might follow the rules - but that one player has every intention of BEING the One World Government and overthrowing the powers of all the other players at the last instant.

Now, just what government in the world today seems to be playing Nash's strategy? Take your time. There's no hurry.

Nash's theory inspired the most famous game of strategy of all social scientists called The Prisoner's Dilemma, which goes as follows: Imagine that the police arrest two suspects and interrogate them in separate rooms. Each one is given the choice of confessing, implicating the other, or keeping silent.

No matter what the other suspect does, each suspect's outcome - considered alone - would be better if he confessed. If one suspect confesses, the other ought to do the same and thereby avoid the harsher penalty for holding out. If one of them remains silent, the other one can confess, cut a deal for turning state's evidence, and the one who remains silent gets the whammy. Confession, or "cooperation," is the "dominant strategy." Since each is aware of the other's incentive to confess, it is "rational" for both to confess.

And here we come to the realization of the power of the psychopath and how Game Theory is being "used" against us. You see, the psychopath, having no conscience, does not have the ability to "imagine" the consequences of the noncooperation in terms of being able to "feel" it. Without this ability to imaginatively feel the consequences, he is virtually fearless, and can therefore direct his behavior according to his own fantasized outcome with no regard whatsoever to reality, remembered experiences, the imagined experiences of others, and so forth. That is to say, for the psychopath, rationality is determined by virtue of the idea that it is self-serving to the max. "Rationality" is the assumption that everyone else is looking out for number 1, and to hell with everybody else.

NEVER confessing, thus becomes the psychopath's "dominant strategy."

The reader will probably immediately see the dynamic of human relations involving a psychopathic personalities and a "normal" human. Psychopaths, having no conscience, always play their dominant strategy which is totally "rational" without the influence of emotions conjured up by imagination. They do not modify their behavior or choices based on emotion or consideration for the feelings or motivations of others. They will implicate the normal person in the "prisoner's dilemma," and will refuse to confess their own guilt, because they simply have no ability to perceive hurting another as morally reprehensible. This is the psychopath's "dominant strategy." They will never, in such a situation, consider cooperation.

Normal people, on the other hand, having conscience and emotion, will make choices based on imagination reinforced by emotion. In some cases, in the prisoner's dilemma, they will refuse to confess out of loyalty to the other, never realizing that the other might be a psychopath who has not only refused to confess his own guilt, has undertaken to make a deal for himself by implicating the other. Some people may even confess in order to "save" the other person from suffering pain, never realizing that they have been manipulated into this role by a psychopath who is all the while saying "Yes, he did it! I am innocent!" when, in fact, the truth is the exact opposite.

It's easy to see that in any interaction between a psychopath and a normal person with full range of emotions, the psychopath will always "win."

Two of the scientists at RAND set up some experiments using a couple of other scientist-contractors as "guinea pigs. They wondered if real people playing the game would be mysteriously drawn into the "equilibrium strategy. They ran the experiment 100 times. Nash's theory predicted that both players would play their "self-serving" strategies even though playing their "cooperative" strategies would have left both better off. As it turned out, the results of these trials did not turn out according to Nash's theory. Why? Because the two scientists tended to choose cooperation more often than cheating. Once they had realized that players ought to cooperate to maximize their winnings, that is the strategy they chose.

When Nash learned of the experiment he wrote:

The flaw in the experiment as a test of equilibrium point theory is that […] there is too much interaction. […] One would have thought them more rational. [Quoted by Nasar, op. cit.]

In short, the players had consciences and this contributed to their choice of maneuvers.

At RAND, Nash devised a model of negotiation between two parties whose interests neither coincide nor are exactly opposed. It is a classic example of what we see taking place in our world today:

Stage One: Each player chooses a threat and says "this is what I'll be forced to do if our demands are incompatible and we can't make a deal."
Stage Two: The players inform each other of the threats.
Stage Three: Each player chooses a demand that he thinks is worth agreeing for. If the deal doesn't guarantee him that, at least, no deal.
Stage: Four: If the deal is made (under threat, mind you), both players get what they want. If not, the threats must be executed. This means, don't threaten what you really can't deliver, and always deliver what you threaten.

Nash showed that each player has an "optimal threat," or the threat that ensures the deal no matter what the other player chooses.

Again, do we see this style of play in operation today? Either in terms of politics, or in terms of the relations between government and the people?

Now, coming back to psychopaths: it is fairly easy to see that they often manipulate others to join forces with them in order to help them to advance, but ultimately, when they don't "need them anymore," they double-cross the other in order to win. The result is deliberate psychological mayhem.

In short, it isn't even necessary for a grand and logistically complex government mind control program to be in operation in order to produce the conditions necessary to ultimately enforce total controls on humanity. It is only necessary to have strategically placed psychopaths in the population, to train and influence selected ones in particular ways through what would be seen on the surface as "ordinary means," and simply calculate the fact that they will always operate with their dominant strategy - serving self.

I expect that the reader is beginning to make all kinds of connections regarding how Game Theory may be being utilized to bring the world to heel.

In December of 1994, Vice-president Al Gore announced the opening of the "greatest auction ever." What was being auctioned was "thin air." Billions of dollars were bid for licenses to broadcast airwaves for things that employ wireless communications. (Think about Ma Bell and her connection to Morse Pinkham, Ira Einhorn, Uri Geller, and others.) When the auction finally closed in March of 1995, the winning bids totaled more than seven billion bux, making it the biggest sale in American History. And it was, in fact, the sale of public assets. By the late spring, another three billion dollars had been raised in Washington in similar auctions. The press and the politicians were ecstatic. The corporate giants had been able to protect themselves from competition, and they all called it a "triumph for Game Theory." Governments from Australia to Argentina have used Game Theory to sell scarce public reprocess to buyers "best able to develop them."

Enron.

Continue to page 305

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