[lbo-talk] John Nash, R.I.P.

MM marxmail00 at gmail.com
Sun May 24 07:55:35 PDT 2015



> On 24 May 2015, at 4:42 PM, Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote:
>
> US mathematician John Nash, whose life story was turned into the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, has died in a car crash, local media has reported.

Also subject of Adam Curtis’ “The Trap”:

"In the mid-1950s, with the cold war growing chillier, paranoia seeped through the corridors of the Rand Corporation, the fabled military thinktank in California. After all, to the hotshot young analysts paid to devise America's strategy in the nuclear standoff with Moscow, paranoia seemed to make perfect sense. If you assumed that you couldn't trust your enemy - and you assumed that your enemy felt the same about you - then whatever noises you made about disarmament, you'd always stockpile weapons, because you'd assume your enemy was doing the same. Nobody would dare attack, and an edgy stability would result. Act with trust and co-operation, on the other hand, and you risked a situation where both sides would claim to be willing to disarm, but then only you actually did so, spelling instability, then doom.

"This was what the thinktank's logicians called the "prisoner's dilemma", and the more ambitious among them - inspired by John Nash, the mathematical genius and Rand Corporation scholar portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind - had high hopes for their newborn theory. Could it be, they wondered, that stability in everyday human relations was achieved by the same kind of self-centred suspicion and distrust? To test their ideas, they recruited the nearest everyday humans they could find: the Rand Corporation's secretaries. In experiments, they posed various dilemmas for pairs of secretaries, in which they could co-operate or betray each other. (A typical question involved the purchase of a Buick; one imagines women in knee-length dresses, gamely tolerating questions from clipboard-wielding men in horn-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved shirts.) The theory predicted they'd choose betrayal, because they couldn't trust the other one not to. Every single time, however, they chose to co-operate.”

Full: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/mar/03/broadcasting <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2007/mar/03/broadcasting>



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