Blind Man's Bluff

Dear Children:
If you ever get the chance, read the book A Beautiful Mind about Nobel Laureate John Nash and his battle with paranoid schizophrenia. It’s only covered tangentially in the book, but John Nash also helped popularize Game Theory, a branch of mathematics that examines the success, or lack of it one experiences because of the decisions of others in strategic situations. Game Theory is quite powerful in modeling decisions to cooperate with or resist the actions of others.

Some of our best minds are at work in this field including my personal favorites, the guys who figure out what’s going on in Texas hold ‘em. You may know the game. Its poker, we’re assured, but so esoteric, spooky and cultish that it’s super stars qualify as an alien life form.
In game theory, the concept of equilibrium is the goal. Please allow some over-simplifications here: The best we can do is to set up a circumstance under which one has a 50/50 chance of a satisfactory outcome. In no other human endeavor is this idea more manifest than the poker bluff. The best poker minds, using the snazziest computers and the latest social science research* have confirmed that among equal players, using the best bluff techniques to maximum advantage will not put one additional chip on the pile. The best one can do with a careful bluff strategy is to prevent an opponent from overwhelming one’s overall strategy. In a zero-sum game like poker, that is no mean feat.
So what is Congress doing with all this bluff and counter bluff? Certainly there’s more at stake here than some chips in a zero-sum game. The calculus is impossible. There is no way to model or understand it. There are no experts for this state of affairs. There are not likely to be any winners. Right on this spot is where paranoid schizophrenia meets alien life.
We now have abundant evidence that all the parties to this mess are thrashing about in a furious game of blind man’s bluff. In this case, the blind fold is ideological intransigence and injudicious bluffing. If it weren’t so serious (watching our leaders trip over the furniture and crash into the walls) this might be something we could look forward to laughing about later. That is, all the possible outcomes (save divine intervention) are unattractive.
If that weren’t enough, we have rioting in the streets outside Whitehall of all places. The natives are restless in Greece, Ireland and France over many of the same issues. We have some vandal spilling the contents of diplomatic pouches all over the countryside. Iran and North Korea are about to get strapped with a nuke or two. Pirates and slavers are operating openly at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Public education sucks. There are several troublemakers lying in the weeds ready to run for president two years hence. Oh, and lest we forget, Oprah’s last show is just months away.
I’m just sayin’,
Poppy
http://www.poppylbs.blogspot.com/
*Eight Nobel economics prizewinners use some form of game theory