Thomas C. Schelling's "Strategy of Conflict"

In the post I tried pretty hard to show the applicability of the techniques to real life, and so did Schelling. Apparently we haven't succeeded. Maybe some more quotes will tip the scales? Something of a more general nature, not ad hoc trickery?

If one is committed to punish a certain type of behavior when it reaches certain limits, but the limits are not carefully and objectively defined, the party threatened will realize when the time comes to decide whether the threat must be enforced or not, his interest and that of the threatening party will coincide in an attempt to avoid the mutually unpleasant consequences.

Or what do you say to this:

Among the legal privileges of corporations, two that are mentioned in textbooks are the right to sue and the "right" to be sued. Who wants to be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be damaged. If suit does arise, the "right" seems a liability in retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business.

Or this:

If each party agrees to send a million dollars to the Red Cross on condition the other does, each may be tempted to cheat if the other contributes first, and each one's anticipation of the other's cheating will inhibit agreement. But if the contribution is divided into successive small contributions, each can try the other's good faith for a small price. Furthermore, since each can keep the other on short tether to the finish, no one ever need risk more than one small contribution at a time. Finally, this change in the incentive structure itself takes most of the risk out of the initial contribution; the value of established trust is made obviously visible to both.

Or this:

When there are two objects to negotiate, the decision to negotiate them simultaneously or in separate forums or at separate times is by no means neutral to the outcome, particularly when there is a latent extortionate threat that can be exploited only if it can be attached to some ordinary, legitimate, bargaining situation.

I'm not even being particularly picky on which paragraphs to quote. The whole book is like that. To me the main takeaway was not local trickery, but a general way of thinking about conflict situations; I started seeing them everywhere, all the time.

In other words, like most things that are counterintuitive, these findings are counterintuitive precisely because their applicability in real life is the exception rather than the rule; by all means let's recognize the exceptions, but without forgetting what they are.

The examples in the original post are not exceptions. It just takes a while to recognise them under the veneers of social norms and instinctual behaviours.

The broken radio, for example, is exactly what I see when attempting to communicate with those who would present themselves as higher status. Blatant stupidity (broken receiver) is often a signal, not a weakness. (And I can incorporate this understanding when dealing with said people, which I find incredibly useful.)

Terrible article in many ways - this is a very silly thing to say:

Schelling and McNaughton pondered the problem for more than an hour. In the end, they failed to come up with a single plausible answer to these most basic questions. So assured when writing about sending signals with force and inflicting pain to make an opponent behave, Tom Schelling, when faced with a real-life war, was stumped.

BTW, after a conversation with Eliezer at the weekend, I have just asked my employers to buy this book.

Thanks for that extra light.

I have the 1980 edition of "The strategy of conflict" from the library at the moment. It's a reissue of the 1960 edition with an added preface by Schelling. Despite the Slate article closing by saying "Tom Schelling didn't write much about war after that [the Vietnam War]. He'd learned the limitations of his craft.", in his 1980 preface he judges the book's content as still "mostly all right".

If it's common knowledge that both have read Schelling's book, the game is isomorphic to Chicken), which has been extensively studied.

The example was just to make an illustration, and I wouldn't read into it too much. It has a lot of assumptions like, "I would rather sit around doing absolutely nothing than take stroll in the wilderness," and, "I have no possible landing position I can claim in order to make my preferred meeting point seem like a fair compromise, and therefore I must break my radio."

I should've asked you to work it out for yourself, 'cause if you can't do that you really have no business commenting here, but... okay.

If it's common knowledge that both have read Schelling's book, the game has a Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies#Mixed_strategy). You break your radio with a certain probability and your buddy does the same.

Shelling was actually the less ruthless of the pioneers of game theory. The other pioneer was Von Neumann who advocated a unilateral nuclear attack on the USSR before they developed their own nuclear weapons.

By contrast, Shelling invented the red hotline between the US and USSR, since more communication meant less chance of WW3.

Basically he was about ruthlessness for the good of humanity.

Agreed. Unfortunately, my time is short and my book list is long.

It is free for a few pages... then you have to sign up which is not free.

I have a .djvu version that I found ages ago in some torrent, if anyone's interested PM me and I will email it to you (no webserver handy ATM, sorry).

I was able to download a copy from http://www.manyebooks.org/download/The_Strategy_of_Conflict.html, which links to http://www.en8848.com.cn/d/file/soft/Nonfiction/Obooks/201012/8bbb35724dcac415a5ecd74a62b2ba97.rar as the actual download link. That version is a 4.8 MB PDF file. It has equivalent image quality to the 17.4 MB PDF file hosted by Alicorn and is a smaller file.

That link appears to lead to a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter".

It's amazing how good humans are at this sort of thing, by instinct. I'm reading the book Hierarchy in the Forrest, which is about tribal bands of humans up to 100k years ago. Without law and social structure, they basically solved all of their social equality problems by game theory. And depending on when precisely you think they evolved this social dynamic, they may have had hundreds of thousands of years to perfect it before we became hierarchical again.

http://www.amazon.com/Hierarchy-Forest-Evolution-Egalitarian-Behavior/dp/0674006917

If you look at rationality on a spectrum, this type of game theory isn't on the most enlightened/sophisticated form of it. Thugs, bullies, despots and drama queens are very good at this sort of manipulation. Rather it's basically the most primitive instinctive part of human reasoning.

However, that's not to say it doesn't work. The original post's description of not wanting to look yourself in the mirror afterwards is very apt.

It can be difficult to pretend to be unable to hear someone on the other end of a two way communication. The impulse not to interrupt is strong enough to cause detectable irregularities in speech. Actually breaking, or at least turning off, the receive capability might be essential to maintaining the impression on the other end that it's broken.

Even if I distrust that you have a broken radio, as long as I prefer going to meet you (accepting the additional cost therein entailed) to never meeting you or meeting after an indefinitely long time, I will still go to wherever you say you are. If both people's radios are unbroken after the crash, whoever transmits the "receiver broken" signal probably gets the easier time of it.

This game is essentially the (repeated?) game of chicken, as long as "claim broken receiver and other person capitulates" > "both players admit unbroken" > "capitulate to other person's claim" > "neither player capitulates while both claim broken receivers".

Conveniently, this appears to be the broader point Schelling was trying to make. Flamboyant disabling of one's options often puts one in a better negotiating position. Hence, the American garrison in West Berlin.

Actually the book tells about a psychological experiment conducted similarly to the situation I described, but there the subjects were told outright by the trustworthy experimenter that their partner couldn't learn their whereabouts. But I still think that average-rational humans would often fall for the radio trick. Expected utility suggests you don't have to believe your partner 100%; a small initial doubt reinforced over a day could suffice.

And yep, the problem of making your precommitments trustworthy is also discussed in much detail in the book.

What do you mean by "enforced"?

I don't quite see how conferring immunity on foreign spies would degrade the information they could access. Deliberately and openly feeding them information is going to be pointless, as they obviously can't trust you. But encouraging foreign spies by not prosecuting them should not negatively affect their ability to obtain and relay information.

You're not aiding spies in getting information, you're just lowering the risk they take, which encourages more spying. Someone in high position could leak information, only risking being fired, not being shot. This does not change the reliability of the information, which, in spying, is always in question anyway.

Of course some real world zero-sum games are ruthless too, but I haven't seen anything as bad as the nuke game, and it is variable-sum. Peace benefits everyone, but if one side in an arms race starts getting ahead, both sides know there will be war which harms both. If the game was zero-sum, war would've happened long ago and with weaker weapons.

The book gives an example of both Soviets and Americans expending effort on submarine-detection technologies while both desperately hoping that such technologies don't exist, because undetectable submarines with ICBMs are such a great retaliation guarantee that no one attacks anyone.

Just remember that once you nuke (that is destroy) something, you have left the bounds of zero-sum game and quite likely entered a negative sum game (though you may end up having positive outcome, the sum is negative).

In two player zero sum games, vengeance (hurting self to hurt other more) is impossible, as are threats and destruction in general -- because the total score is always the same. They are ruthless in that to gain score you must take it from the other player (also eliminates cooperation), but there can be no nuking. If the game is variable sum (or zero sum with extra players), you again gain the ability to unilaterally and unavoidably lower someone's score (the score can be destroyed in variable sum games, or transferred to the other players in zero sum games, allowing for vengeance, punishment, destruction, team cooperation, etc.

Because both people are competent and capable of survival alone, but its more work to travel; by having a radio that transmits but doesn't receive, you can transmit your location and the fact that you can't receive, and the other person is forced to come to you rather than come to the point halfway between the two of you.