Voice Post
Now, I know at this point, I might have painted a pretty grim picture of game theory. Many who have learned a bit about the subject develop a certain contempt for it, and naturally so. As a mathematical topic, it inherently doesn’t care about morality or the wellbeing of others. You have to implement your own ways to not be an asshole when using the topic, and that’s ok. I appreciate the subject because it explains the world around us and the actions of intelligent beings, and those actions aren’t always good. Just reasonable, to a certain extent anyway. Few have expressed this with more finesse and subtle personality during my game theory blog search than Marli Wang. Her first post to her blog Nuclear Chicken Collusion (lol) is short and introductory, giving us a taste of the kind of blogger she is going to be. I’ve posted an image of it here:
She has this one blog titled What do kitten have to do with rising tuition? which brilliantly rebuttals an article posted by The Financial Times, no less. To summarize, her blog post explains (doesn’t defend) the reason why university tuition is on the constant rise in the United States, but also why its destined to stop rising and maybe even fall in the future. While her diction isn’t particularly colorful or bubbly (it’s actually pretty straight-to-the-point and rigid), she still has her moments when a personal, human element is expressed. For example, she turns her attention to the random kitten on a chart provided by the Financial Times explaining the proposed Prisoner’s Dilemma that colleges are in with regards to rising tuition costs. You don’t have to know what this is, but I’ve included the chart below to give an idea of what she’s referring to in the title of her post.
She concludes her post with “The lessons here are these: It’s not a Prisoner’s Dilemma in a strong sense if the cooperative result isn’t strictly preferred to the Nash equilibrium. Don’t model a tenuous game where the game isn’t relevant to the ultimate result (tuitions will stop rising at some point). Don’t assume that trends are linear, when they are definitively not linear. And, don’t put a kitten on your figure just because you have some white space — it really doesn’t help.” I’ll admit that I chuckled when I read her conclusion. Along with her title, it was a nice breath of fresh air in an otherwise dry-ass subject.
Her next blog post is more connected to her fair, yet still-human approach to the theory of games. Titled How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Game, she discusses the nuclear arms race during the mid-1950’s cold war. She describes John von Neumann, the father of game theory, as “an eccentric, wheelchair-bound genius with a thick European accent… on the verge of chemotherapy-induced dementia.” According to her, he was instrumental in the decisions made by President Eisenhower during the nuclear threat with the Soviet Union. Wang describes the nuclear situation that Neumann proposed as a game of chicken, shown below.
She compares this scenario with that of the film Dr. Strangelove, where the Soviets develop a weapon that would destroy all of humanity if they were bombed at all. Tying the game of chicken back to reality, she describes the game of nuclear chicken (lol 2.0) and constructs this chart:
While this post lacks the somewhat rare silliness found in some of her other publications, her point that game theory is not inherently evil is expressed beautifully. She concludes this article with, “Game theory is often criticized for its flippance toward irrationality. What about the General Rippers of the humanity, they ask? The whole point is far from lost if we keep it a secret, because rational choices are by their nature not a secret; they can be teased out and brought out into the light. Why not tell the world?” And I couldn’t agree more.
