[MD] BBC documentary 'the trap'

[david buchanan]

Ian said to dmb:
...I'm defending game theory (and system theory and network theory and social evolutionary models like the MoQ - well post-Darwin). What I'm not defending is people who put dumb objective (SOMist) assumptions about what the "rational agents" are in these models. I'm also, as is my habit, pointing out that demonizing Nash (or anyone else individually) as the sole creator of either the theories, or the defense and economic applications that took them up, as so simplistic that it is unhelpful.

dmb replies:

This is exactly the kind of thing that bugs me. It seems you want to have it both ways. You're defending game theory by condemning "people who put dumb objective (SOMist) assumptions about what the "rational agents" are in these models" and by objecting to the "demonization" of the man who won a Noble Prize for his mathematical model of that theory "as the sole creator". But the documentary you're objecting to has nothing to do with SOM and did not claim that it's all Nash's fault. The film explicitly connects game theory to a whole bunch of people including Hayek, Thatcher, Reagan, the neo-Cons, the Rand corporation and implicitly to Hobbes, Ayn Rand, just about every right-wing think tank in the country, the Republican party and, as I pointed out, it can be seen in the current health care debate. The film was produced for a general audience and it's scope was such that it is quite unreasonable to condemn it for being "simplistic". And what the heck does Darwin or SOM have to do with it? As I see it, you're just trying to weasel out of it by pretending you have a sophisticated MOQ version of the theory that based on the notion that people go around calculating how to screw the other guy and using strategies to cope with the other guy trying to screw you. That, sir, is nonsense. The MOQ isn't going to support anything like that, no matter how sophisticated it is. The whole thing is based on the idea that people self-serving monsters, as if poker players and prisoners accurately reflect what people are like. This is morally outrageous and I just don't see how a good person, let alone a MOQer, could defend any version of it.

Ian said:
Dave, if you can spare my sensitive soul your withering personally directed sarcsam, I would gladly debate the points in this thread in much further detail. They are very close to my heart, in fixing what is rotten in the state of global economics and politics - there is no other game in town for the foreseeable.


dmb says:

I don't think it's about your sensitive soul or what's close to your heart. I think it's about your ego and what's in your hairy brain. If you had a sensitive soul, you wouldn't be defending game theory. If you were interested in debating these points you'd offer some actual explanations of the various theories (game theory, system theory, network theory and social evolutionary models) instead of just naming them. Without that, you're not defending any theory so much as you're just defending your bruised ego. Intellectually speaking, your response was full of emptiness, almost entirely free of content.
You only saw two thirds of the film and refer to its content only in the vaguest most inaccurate way! Typical. I think "drivel" is the right word for that and I think that would bug anyone who cared about the subject matter.




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