Since one of our readers has broached the subject… I too have just watched The Trap (a polemical on BBC2). This is an attempt at a deconstruction of individualism which uses some of the most heavy handed propaganda tricks I have seen in a very long time.
I am sure some of our other writers will jump in with extensive articles so I will just set the stage. A presenter, recognizable by their voice… and I will leave the filling in of identity as an exercise to the listener, did interviews of assorted luminaries of the anti-statist fight. He then added voice overs along with music with a very threatening low frequency bass sound and interspersed ‘artistic’ troubling images to associate them in the minds of the audience with the ‘bad ideas’ of those nasty individualist anti-state persons.
He goes after Hayek, Laing and Buchanan among others; he demonizes game theory and the ‘Prisoners Dilemma’… without ever mentioning Dawkins and how individualistic co-operation falls out of the more realistic ‘Iterated Prisoners Dilemma’.
Have at it angry commentariat! There is much raw meat ready to be ground into hamburger and seared on the barbie!
Hmm, I too have just watched it and found it informative and thought provoking.
I didn’t get any of the propaganda that Dale mentions (though I will admit to some degree of ignorance in this respect) what I got from it was that the state had taken the idea of individual freedom and twisted it until they could use it to entrap us. Using our own self interest as a means of control.
When it got to the rise of Thatcher and what was going wrong with the economy and government of the late ’70s, I thought they had it spot on and could see many parallels between what happened then and what was happening now.
Replace the idea of ‘The Public Good’ with ‘Social Cohesion’ or ‘The Respect Agenda’ and you get the same result, only this time the various departments and offices of government are not working against each other but together against the citizenry. The game has stayed the same but the players have changed.
The downfall of American Psychiatry I found very interesting. The Medical establishment using definitions of mental illness based on what amounts to self diagnosis. Pressurizing people very subtly to conform to a non-existent standard of normality.
If anyone spots this on youtube or google I’d appreciate a heads up. I get the feeling I may need to watch it again.
This being a series it would be a mistake to jump on it immediately and say that its completely wrong and just another peice of propaganda. I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt until it reaches its conclusion. It may end up saying that no-one is really free any more and we all live in cages of our own making, which I would totally agree with. Or it may not.
The way the evil sounding music started the moment Hayek appeared on the screen I think we are all guessed what we were in for though 🙂
Seriously though is it me or does Adam Curtiss just make the same programmes again and again and again. I was surprised it took him so long to bring Lady Thatcher into it. He normally manages that within 10 minutes but this time it took a full half hour.
I think you need to read some of the source material they were twisting to fit and to see where they are going… basically ‘individualistm and capitalism bad, socialism and statism good’.
Buchanan and Public Choice Theory was a brilliant bit of work which showed, surprise, surprise, that public sector employees… act just like private sector employees! They try to maximize their income and their prestige and respect. He showed this leads to considerably different outcomes than were expected by the do-gooders who enacted legislation to create government programs.
Hayek was of course one of the key figures in bringing free market economics back into vogue. You will find his books on the table at just about any self-respecting libertarian event. If you have not read “The Road to Serfdom’ yet, you certainly should. It is an all time classic and a must read.
Prisoners dilemma… well game theory just plain works for zero-sum games. It gets more complex in non-zero-sum games. And in the case of long term interaction you get emergent behaviors that are very different from the starkness of the one time play zero-sum game they used to make their case. If you want to learn more, read some of Dawkins books.
I know little of Laing, but I do know he was not the only one attacking Psychiatry. I believe Robert Nozick, a libertarian, was also quite active in that battle.
I am sure that Maggie took up some ideas from the libertarian world, just as I know for a fact that quite a few libertarians were involved in the early days of the Reagan administration. They got forced out of the nest by the more conservative right elements however, but not before they had made a mark.
Oh, I forgot to add… they also brought in our good friends the Adam Smith Institute as associates in the evil cult of individualists who do not understand that slavery is freedom and Big Brother will save us all!
I am pretty sure I had a name wrong above. It was probably not Nozick but I cannot remember the name right now…
BTW: If anyone has a link to information on this show, Perry asked for one. Also, to our other writers… feel free to write a more in depth analysis. This was just a quick something to get the discussion started… I unfortuneately do not have much time at all right now, not nearly enough to do justice and deconstruct the deconstructor.
I have mentioned to Perry in the past that there should be a recommended reading list somewhere on Samizdata, for those who stumble across the site by accident (as I did) and whose interest is piqued. I’ve already got Hayek, Rand, Popper and a whole slew of others on my amazon wish list, give me more. I think its in The Selfish Gene which Dawkins mentions Game theory and the evolutionary benefits of co-operation and altruism, its been a while since I read it though. I’ve kind of gone off the man slightly over the last few years though as he has become more and more dogmatic in his atheism (something which I find very slightly hypocritical.)
In my view the fact that the prisoners dilemma was formulated by a paranoid schizophrenic completely discredits it, which seemed to be the point being made in the program. Or am I missing something?
At key moments it was desperately confused.
For instance it could never make up its mind whether the post-War state-socialist consensus was a new thing or an old thing.
Then, when talking about the free-ish market reforms of the 1980s, they came up with something like: “It became clear that some state services could not be privatised.” Really? Was it ever tried?
Where/how can I see this programme? Where was it aired?
I rarely succomb to the Idiot’s Lantern these days without something specific to watch.
Prisoner’s dilemma is a verbal formulation of a mathematical concept and it does not much matter whether a mathematician is mad or not (which from my own experience, most of them are!) a statement is either provable or not. Game theory is provable.
I used game theory in programing when I was a grad student in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology. Pretty much any program that has to compete uses minimaxing algorithms. You look at each possible move you have and then each possible move the opponent can make to that move and each reply you would make to that case… to what ever depth or ‘ply’ you can handle. You assign numbers to the nodes and when certain nodes show that their value can never rise above a certain level you can then ‘prune’ the search tree at that point and save much computational effort.
The attack on the mathematics of game theory is classical ad hominum attack. You discredit the person so that you do not have to deal with the correctness of the idea. This is also a propaganda technique.
Oh, and from my CogSci background at CMU, I can add that the simple (uniterated) Prisoners Dilemma zero-sum game is exactly the way subjects act in psychology experiments. That has been proven ‘six ways to Sunday’. I must emphasize though that this version of the game does not much represent normal life… that is why Dawkins and later experiments are so important. You get civil society out of the game, not some obnoxious ‘nature red in tooth and claw’.
Wasn’t the sinister music the theme to “Assault on Precinct 13”? I’m not sure if that was related to any point they may have been making.
“theory formulated by a Paranoid Schizophrenic”…..”entirely discredits”..
Who said he was one?And why?
Could it have been to make sure he was discredited in the eyes of people who still believe in mumbo-jumbo about how ‘mad’ people are no good(and it’s their own fault, naturally).
Two years ago I was made redundant with the minimum payoff plus ten pounds.
The ten pounds was for a £100 million a year cybernetic invention.
Apparently this was all ‘nice and legal’.
I was similarly diagnosed 15 years ago.
The boss knew this, and when saying goodbye in his £400k house in the country, said “Hang onto that council flat of yours, it’s served you well…”
Then the psych-war really began when he found he needed my signature. He lied, lied lied and threatened, all the while thinking that I would collapse because I am ‘mad’.
In fact I blew his collaborative deal out of the water by telling the genuine company he was hooked up with that the IPR was subject to a dispute.
At which point he threatened legal action and demanded money.
So who is discredited then? Me, the inventor whose idea was stolen, or the thief, a Grouse-shooting pillock of society?
This country deserves to perish.
I found a link to it here:
(Link)
I stopped watching 2 minutes in, when Curtis stated that the State trying to give us a failed version of freedom was the cause of Islamism. Such colossal ignorance of history, combined with the … arrogance? … of the idea that the flaws of Islam only exist with the West as a catalyst, means I don’t think Curtis’ memes deserve a chance to inhabit my brain.
Hmm, I too have just watched it and found it informative and thought provoking.
I didn’t get any of the propaganda that Dale mentions
Which was probably how you were supposed to see it. Unfortunately almost every one of the thinkers and politicians and theories name-checked (and not just the individualist ones) was systematically misrepresented. Even the description of a Prisoner’s Dilemma was made inaccurate by an overlay of drama.
Recall Curtis is a man who managed to traduce the Muslim Brotherhood as mere puppets of history in order to fit them into a conspiracy narrative of the “War on Terror”. Nobody, whether cast as hero or villan, manipulator or manipulated, gets represented as a competent moral agent.
My advice would be contrary to Dale’s. This is a suggestion I gave to some moderators in another place:
Why the BBC chooses to produce such tripe is more interesting than the tripe itself.
I think they really want to believe its implication that a Star Trek world full of sunny altruism, where there are no conflicts and no compromises, can come about and once (maybe during WW2, or the austerity years) we were nearer to it. The otherwise unaccountable popuarity of Oliver James is part of the same phenomenon.
The unusual characteristic of this Utopian current is that it doesn’t see itself as such, and it is suffused with nostalgia. Most previous Utopians have held the world to be flawed and full of evil, but improvable by revolution and progress; these are reactionaries more pessimistic – and paradoxically, given their rhetoric. more suspicious of the motives of others – than most conservatives.
More post-modernist twaddle from the beeb.
Sort of a cross between Panaroma and the Prisoner. from the same guy who told us al qaeda is a figment of our imagination.
Last year the blessed Beeb tried to tell us that Bhutan (— Life Expectancy: 53.99) was the most happiest place on earth.
LINK HERE(Link)
I thought the demonstration of Nash a man who has has mental health problems all his life was too low for words. (memo to PC/PM Journalists, schizophrenia or any other mental illness does not make you “Mad” all the time, for from it)
Curtis either does not understand game theory or does not want too, (I fancy the latter) to frame the argument as Game theory is all non-cooperative games is Crass.
Its not for from it.
LINK HERE(Link)
You get the impression that Curtis kind of wishes that nuclear holocaust had happened, in order to falsify Nash and Game Theory, it did not because the “evil logic of numbers” got it RIGHT!
As for “this is the cause of our suspicion of nice noble government” is a dead brain construct. How about it came about by 2 world wars, both caused by statism in one form or another.
Yes I know it was a subjective piece, But the psychiatric completely lost me, but I suppose from Curtis point of view it lead directly to the evil Thatch.
I watched it and liked it – but only because I found it uncomfortable. There were a number of times when he was contradicting my own beliefs, and that is a reason to watch something. If only to be able to do some more research and confirm if he was right or wrong.
What I did find interesting is the management systems mentioned at the end. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) as a method of control in business were always used very effectively in a sales environment – and I always understood this to be the reason it was introduced into the rest of society.
Ok, so it lines up quite nicely with game theory, but I think that was mainly a coincidence. We are certainly seeing that there is a huge problem with the way KPI’s are being used by different levels of management. The goals of the organizations are not being properly targeted into the KPI’s of the workforce – but that is an internal problem with not understanding the concepts of targets – which is possibly the biggest truth that can come out of this show.
I am looking forward to the rest of these programs to see if this gets covered in more detail or if it just goes off on another tangent completely.
Curtis seems to specialise in a kind of hidden hand material specialising in dazzling intellectual linkage between phenomena – public relations and freud, islamism and neo-conservatism and now (fashionably enough) liberal freedom and unhappiness – or whatever the Trap will prove to be about.
He does it kind of well, sinister music and all (I too heard the brilliant Assault on Precint music as well as a bit of Vaughan Williams). I bet it plays well with all those middle aged Robert Anton Wilson fans as it’s all a bit Illuminatus.
But it’s also very slippery, which leaves him open to misinterpretation – he whinged after Power fo Nightmares that he didn’t mean to say that Islamism wasn’t dangerous, yes but no but…
I think I prefer Richard Curtis. At least you feel good after his movies.
I must confess that I did not watch thisprogramme. I heard some of the ads for it (on radio) and decided it was standard B.B.C. propaganda and I could spend my time doing more interesting things. Besides which the name “Curtis” rang an alarm bell – I seem to remember him producing an antiAmerican propaganda series recently.
However, the term “individualism” is not quite right. What pro freedom people are in favour of is civil interaction (voluntary cooperation). It is the statist tradition that sees people as “atomized individuals” who can only coordinate their activities via the state.
As for the “Prisoners Dilemma” I have no idea of (or interest in) the mathematics of it (or of game theory generally). However, it was once explained to me as two criminals being asked about their crimes. The first one to confess (and testify against the other) will get a reduced punishment, but if neither confess the case against them can not be proved – so both will go free.
Supposedly one has to try and work out how likely it is that the other prisoner will confess (and then confess first if one thinks he is going to).
I could not see the point of the calculation. If one has violated someone’s body of goods one should confess (and accept just punishment) regardless of what the other prisoner is going to do.
And if one is being accused of something that is not a true crime (just a violation of some arbitary government statute) one should not implicate another person – even if it is likely that he is going to crack (as there is always a chance that he will not crack and it is dishonourable to let him down).
All in all the “prisoners dilemma” seened to be totally pointless.
On “Star Trek”:
If I remember rightly the original Star Trek was (in so far as it had any politics) L.B.J. style welfare state stuff at home (talk of providing “schools and hospitals” and so on), and limited war stuff in relation to external relations (for example providing equal military aid to a faction on a planet when the “Klingons” provided military aid to an opposing faction).
Even as a young person I did not agree with either the domestic or external policy of the “Federation” (although I still liked the show).
However, “Star Trek: New Generation” went further. Whole episodes attacking religion (not a particular bad religion – any religion), episodes attacking the concepts of trade and private property (and so on).
Of course this was in the early period of Star Trek – when they got terrible ratings the show tended to tone down its Hollywood left politics (although there were still irritating lapses – for example a time travel story had Mark Twain mouthing welfare statist opinions).
By the way it is not true that “once Riker [the First Officer on the “Enterprise” in the show) got a beard it was fine” (as some people claim), there were bad episodes even in the bearded Riker stage.
Before I leave the subject of “Star Trek” I must say something else (that will only be understood by people who know the show) – Die Wesley Crusher! Die! Die!
Just one last bit of nostalgia-as a youngster I attended the Royal Review of the Royal Airforce in 1977 and saw 150 RAF jets in the air at the same time, as well as a simultaneous 4 Vulcan scramble.
I’ve still got the pictures.
Now.
Just suppose-KPI was used as a link to public perception of performance in the Gumment Service.
How soon would we be confronted by the self-interest of the Civil Servants and their State Sponsors producing a torrent, a flurry of KPI figures, so many, in so many ways and from so many directions that they cynically exploited the ‘apathy’ of the public by frustrating the zealous in details and generally boring everybody else to the stage where they just found it easier to assume that everything was ‘pretty much okay, as the pretty straight kinda guys said’?
Oh! Hello Gordon! Are you going to be the next Prime Minister?
All aboard the Magic Roundabout!
Of course the above should read “if one has violated someone’s body or goods” not “if one has violated someone’s body of goods”.
I think they really want to believe its implication that a Star Trek world full of sunny altruism, where there are no conflicts and no compromises,
Slightly O/T, but maybe not.
Does anyone else see the Star Trek Federation as a militarist cryptofascist society?
Picard, a military officer, time and again demonstrates enforceable political authority. either implicitly or by explicitly having ambassadorial authority granted?
Ditto other military personnel.
The Prime Directive seeks to exert an authority over citizens which no free state could/should reasonably claim. Why the damn hell not should citizens be allowed to go where they will or trade with whom they will?
As a comparison, the US attitude to citizens dealing with Cuba springs to mind.
The Federation sounds like a dreadful place for a free person to live, but it is presented as being near Utopian.
…there should be a recommended reading list somewhere on Samizdata…
If so, The Origins of Virtue ought to be on it somewhere.
i’d agree with the commenters who found it interesting; precisely because it is a clearly biased, intellegent person, putting foward a case. it isn’t like it on news 24 presented as unadulterated truth.
i’d also like to take issue with the “power of nightmares” bashing. it didnt say “al quaeda doesnt exist” – if you think that you clearly didnt watch the programme. his point was that islamism isnt a uniquely powerful threat that can bring about the end of the world as we know it, such as fascism or the soviet union were. the paralell origins of the neocons and islamists he looked at isnt going to be gospel history, but was an interesting way of looking at the history of ideas. ive seen far worse.
Dale Amon:
I am pretty sure I had a name wrong above. It was probably not Nozick but I cannot remember the name right now…
Thomas Szasz
Excuse me Rob,
This is Curtis in his own words.
“”There’s very little evidence that there actually has been the rise of an organised al-Qaida network,” he says.””(Link)
Thats just plain WRONG.
They’re everywhere! We’ve got a documentary-maker called John Pilger who takes things out of context, just to make things seem worse! A few years ago, he made a piece about the Aborigines, and made it seem as though the new Liberal government in Canberra had decided to victimise Aborigines by slashing the budget for their Department. He never mentioned that all budgets were slashed- that would have lessened the drama! All his shows seem similarly flawed.
However, he’s his own worst enemy- he does the narration himself, and he always manages to sound so bored by his own material that the audience is turned off. A few years ago, some people tried to have ‘To pilge’ added as a new verb in the dictionary, but he complained when he found it wasn’t complimentary.
So, though they’re out there, they seem to self-destruct. Just don’t be near them when they go off!
rob,
his point was that islamism isnt a uniquely powerful threat that can bring about the end of the world as we know it
No; that’s my point (when the subject comes up). Though sean’s link really doesn’t elucidate the matter, Curtis’s point was a too neat symmetry between Islamist paranoia and neo-Con paranoia, and marking down the latter as an organised conspiracy to inflate the threat of Islam for political advantage.
Just spotted this thread. Sadly I missed the programme, though I’m planning to catch up via the link provided above.
One thing however strikes me as obviously wrong about the programme’s assumptions (based on the various summaries of it I’ve read).
The Prisoner’s Dilemma model has been used in the social sciences primarily to ‘prove’ the opposite point from the one Curtis is associating it with. Pro-intervention economists (i.e. the majority of them, in my experience – at least in the UK) love PD because it’s supposed to illustrate a type of market failure. I.e. because the two prisoners can’t cooperate to generate the best possible outcome for their mini-society of two, the government has an excuse to intervene in analogous cases.
From my cynical point of view, this love of PD explains a good part of the popularity of game theory in economics, with all the negative fallout (in terms of gobbledygook-ing economic theory) which that has had.
F0ul,
What I did find interesting is the management systems mentioned at the end. Key Performance Indicators (KPI) as a method of control in business were always used very effectively in a sales environment – and I always understood this to be the reason it was introduced into the rest of society.
From the internal evidence of its dramatic placement I think we’ll find that is the theme to be developed in the rest of the series. I do think that it is an interesting matter, but I think Curtis has misprised it, as ever.
The history of the adoption of KPI is a fascinating study in first big business failing to understand itself, then the public sector distorting the faulty model by completely missing what point remained – as if, seeing tent-pegs knocked in with rifle butts, they had decreed the blunt ends of firearms to be the best tools for doing any job.
Chris Harper,
Does anyone else see the Star Trek Federation as a militarist cryptofascist society?
It is an interesting suggestion. Star Trek, like much other SF is often about the present or very near future. The Star Trek social vision slipped in some odd ways, and the sociological continuity was woeful. I’d suggest that the discontinuity was partly inadvertent, and partly deliberate audience segmentation.
I do think the society of The Next Generation is soft-fascist. (How BTW in Hollywood were the Ferenghi never called-out as an anti-semitic caricature?) Note its intense emphasis on feelings and honour. Data, though better than human in almost every respect, aspires to sentiment. The Federation there has an idea of virtue, and it is self-improvement, compatible with being very warlike.
The millitary discipline is much more apparent, and it is a big departure from Roddenberry’s original vision of a rather hippyish org in soft uniforms, that doesn’t kill if it can avoid it, is ambivalent about emotion, and is mainly out to discover and try new things.
GH: Yeah I never quite got why no one got ansy about the Ferengi either.
I always thought that Star Trek was statist bollocks and thus never liked it prefering Bab 5 and Firefly.
As far as the latest bit of capitalist bashing by the BBC I missed it as I was out with my betrothed. Didn’t miss much from what I have read here.
There have been several articles on Samizdata pointing our how the Star Trek ‘Federation’ is a ghastly communist police state (not to mention psychologically implausible).
A selection of diatribes: United Socialist Federation of Planets, The trouble with the Federation, Star Trek: the Post-Christian Generation! and TV with rocks in its head… and TV that rocks.
I probably should have elaborated on my point about the PD. What I should have said was that the fact of Nash’s Schizophrenia coloured his assumptions about how humanity behaves, which then affected how PD works with regard to people.
In assuming that no-one was trustworthy he skewed his results towards betrayal being the most rational choice. Reducing human behaviour to a series of calculations and numbers is never accurate and almost always relies on limited assumptions regarding what humanity is. One of our greatest traits is the ability to do the completely unexpected.
You probably don’t want it Pietr, but you have my sympathy for what its worth. There are some real bastards out there who will take advantage of any situation. This just goes to illustrate my point that human beings very rarely behave as rationally or ethically as we would like to believe and self interest does not always lead to the best outcome.
It is, in the sense that theorems follow from axioms, but how useful are these axioms in modelling human behavior?
Clearly a lot of people think they are useful. It is interesting in the context of the vilifcation (if that is the right word) of Nash, RAND, etc. to look at how game theoretic approaches have in the last quarter of a century infused mainstream economics, e.g. industrial economics thinking about competition in oligopolistic markets, cartel behaviour and tacit collusion, and the implications. And economists are much more concerned with empirical testing of their theories than they were when Buchanan, Hayek et al. were in their prime.
Presumably (by implication) the documentary makers wish to vilify the larger part of the economics profession too.
Game theory is actually complete tosh as a way of predicting human behaviour.
Also take the ‘Prisoners dilemma’: all you have to do is find the myriad of example of where people have ‘unexpectedly’ shown solidarity rather than naked self-interest, i.e. acted based on simply on trusting some other party to also trust them.
‘Social wisdom’ (experience and example) shows many people that trust makes sense more often than it does not. The refutation of the ‘prisoners dilemma’ is that there often is indeed ‘honour amongst thieves’. If everyone keeps their mouth shut, the potential upside makes risking the downside of someone ratting you out a worthwhile gamble.
Why would people show solidarity in this way? I can think of quite a few reasons (not mutually exclusive). All of these come down to the fact that a lot of situations are not adequately represented by a (one-shot) PD game).
1. The payoffs may differ from that of a PD: this one game has received disproportionate attention in the literature, especially the popular/elementary stuff because it shows some interesting paradoxes. Other simple games–chicken, battle of the sexes, assurance–can capture the incentives in other simple situations.
2. What we observe may be but one iteration of a repeated game. It may (for example) be rational to co-operate in order to encourage others to co-operate in future (this is the Folk Theorem, I think); reputational effects may be decisive.
3. Actors may be genuinely altruistic or, for that matter, genuinely vindictive. While self-interest is the usual assumption in game theory, it is not always necessary.
4. Institutions may mean that games do not take place in a ‘state of nature’ as it were. The state or the mafia or a pre-defined and enforceable arbitration agreement or some such may change the payoffs from a game.
5. One may have information about what moves other actors have made. In other words, moves may be sequential rather than simultaneous.
But still this doesn’t demonstrate that game theory more broadly is not sometimes helpful in predicting behaviour. Game theoretic models may be useful or not depending on how well they capture an underlying situation, but showing that a particular model is poor is not the same as falsifying a theory or discrediting a particular framework. And clearly simple models will never capture all of the complexity of human behaviour. But they may capture a relevant or impartant part of it for particular purposes.
I watched the whole “Power of Nightmares” series Rob – and it was anti American propaganda. It was not blatent over-the-top North Korean style propaganda – but that made it worse (not better).
Donald Rumsfeld presented as a neo-conservative (which he is not and never has been) and so on.
The true origins of the neo conservatives (social democrats who came from the Democrat party when it rejected the J.F.K. – L.B.J. line) were not covered well at all.
As for the implied claim that the neo Conservative Scoop Jackson types were much the same sort of people as O.B.L. and the Islamic fanatics who wish to exteminate or enslave all who oppose their interpretation of Islam – well there is no point in repeating things I said at the time.
The news that Curtis has got another show (a whole series it seems) shows just how disgusting the B.B.C. is (rather irritating as I have just paid my television tax – “license fee”). But then it has been going this way since “That Was The Week That Was” in the early 1960’s (David Frost was the presenter of that – who is now to be found on Head Hacker T.V.).
I will not bother to watch the series as the B.B.C. just toss letters of complaint in the bin (and watching it for specific facts to complain about would be the only point in watching it). But I can quess what it will be like – high production values (Curtis and co are professionals) and subtle (rather than blatent) propaganda.
For example, it will not say things like “F.A. Hayek used to eat babies”, it will give a clip of Hayek saying something against the Welfare State and then show a pictures or poor children – pretending that the ideas of Hayek (and others) led to cuts in the Welfare State (no such cuts happened) and these “cuts” led to an increase in poverty.
It will also pretend that pro freedom people support “atomized individualism” whereas (in reality) pro freedom people tend to support voluntary cooperation. It is the statist tradition that wants to “atomize” people – so there is nothing between individuals and the state, with the only “fraternity” being fraterity in state guided activity. This has been an aim of the statist tradition since at least the French Revolution.
But then I (and so many others) have been over this ground again and again.
Now to turn to more important matters:
I do not think that the “Federation” of “Star Trek” was either Fascist or Communist. If I had to choose a word it would be “daft”.
For example, the Federation (of “New Generation”) has signed a deal with a rival power (“The Romulian Empire”) not to use technology to make its space ships invisible – but agrees to let the Romulans continue to use this technology for their own ships.
Of course, the “Romulans” would then invade and take over the “Federation” – but somehow they do not.
Although, to be fair, in “Deep Space Nine” (the only Star Trek franchise show that was sometimes in danger of making sense), it was shown that the Federation really did use “cloaking” technology – it just did not tell people like “Captain Picard” that it was using it (which rather made a nonsense of the episode in Stat Trek New Generation where the noble Picard manages to prevent naughty people in the Federation military-intelligence structure from having cloaking technology).
I forget the name of the Federation intelligence organization that the viewers get to know in “Deep Space Nine” but it was one of the elements of this show that put it in danger of making sense.
However, I still would much rather watch Babylon Five or Firefly.
As for the “Prime Directive”.
Yes it did go much further than a libertarian “non aggression principle”.
In theory it forbad not only aggressing against another culture but the Federation (and any Federation citizen)helping a culure that had not already made contact with aliens (or had developed warp drive – the show never seemed to be quite sure which).
So if one spotted a planet where the population were dying of some terrible sickness it was criminal offense to help them.
If they had some important mineral deposit one had to wait for them all to die before one started mining for it. One could not trade for it – as this would contaminate their culture.
Of course “Captain Kirk” of the original show used to break the “Prime Directive” in quite a few episodes (in other episodes he was a fanatic about it – the script writers clearly could not get things straight).
Even “Captain Picard” (who in one episode tried to stop a scientist from saving people who were being exterminated on their planet by geological problems or something) violated the Prime Directive in other episodes.
On private proerty and trade.
It is clear that in “New Generation” the main script writers wanted to show a society without them (unlike the original Star Trek which, as I have pointed out before, was basically an “All the way with L.B.J.” vision of social democracy). However, the viewers hated it and the vision got toned down (otherwise even Science Fiction fans like me would not have watched the show).
Deep Space Nine (supposedly the same universe) had private property and trade all over the place.
I know there are two other shows in the Star Trek franchise – but they are not relevant to the points raised, so I have not discussed them.
Nice of you to say so Mandrill.
Frankly after two years driving newspaper trucks I am quite sanguine about it; not that I will do anything, but with the friends you make working in the guts of a 250 year-old company, people like my ex-boss start to appear in their real context, to put it mildly;it is a miracle he has survived all these years.
Meanwhile, all this ‘game theory’ is intriguing but seems to me like a load of ‘fish and bicycles’; why ever would you wish to attempt to turn human behaviour into maths, unless you intended to control it via prediction?
Adam Curtis is clearly trying to demonise self-interest as selfishness. It would be nice to put this man up against a hard core libertarian of the Ayn Rand variety, who would then make the following sort of argument in defence of man’s right to pursue happiness, rationally and over the long-run. Here’s a sort of try at it:
“Man wants to be happy. There are some who crave being miserable but they are a tiny minority and rational people avoid them, or if need be, shoot them. To be happy requires man to produce, to use his reason. This is not an automatic process, as it is for an animal that just breeds, lives, eats, defecates and dies. For Man, to pursue happiness requires the effort to think, which in turn must be disciplined by the values of justice, productiveness, rationality, integrity. A country full of ardent happiness-chasers will, therefore, be a virtuous one. Yes, some people who think they can take a short-cut by cheating, robbing and killing will try to get away with it, but the chances are slim in a society where people have the right to defend their lives with deadly force if necessary and catch wrongdoers.”
I’d love to see that on a BBC discussion show. Not a chance, of course.
I remembered the name of the other key book on game theory and human behavior: “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod.
I believe Dawkins the expanded on his work. It was Axelrod who showed how iterated prisoners dilemma leads to a cooperative society and that the best long term strategy for individuals who live as a group to follow is ‘tit for tat’. In the prisoners dilemma game they would cooperate by default and if the other player ‘defects’ on this round, then they will retaliate by defecting on the next round… and then return to cooperation on the following round.
The reason iterated prisoners dilemma has explanatory power is due to evolution. That is where Dawkins comes in. Evolution does not give a damn about morals and ethics per se. That survives which is able to most efficiently fill its niche and hold it against competitors. If creatures are social, then the best survival is ‘tit for tat’, a default cooperative strategy. Those which follow it will prosper.and be more successful at begatting.
This is somewhat complicated by what Dawkins calls an ESS, or evolutionary stable strategy. This means there are stable mixes of different strategies. In human terms it means that society will always have a certain number of parasites who do not cooperate but instead take advantage. The majority will always be cooperatiors.
I have no wish to reprise the work of Axelrod, Dawkins and others here. I suggest anyone who is interested go off and do the reading and think about it.
Re power of nightmares, Curtis also talked an awful lot of nonsense (re-hashed from Hersh) about everyone’s favourite evil genius, Leo Strauss. The guy is clearly an ass and his argument in the trap is about as tight as clown pants. “Game theory… Hayek… Thatcher… ugh… now everyone is selfish and self-destructive”.
>>Adam Curtis is clearly trying to demonise self-interest as selfishness. It would be nice to put this man up against a hard core libertarian of the Ayn Rand variety, who would then make the following sort of argument in defence of man’s right to pursue happiness, rationally and over the long-run. Here’s a sort of try at it:<<< OR YOU AND HE COULD TRY THIS!(Link)
I cannot back this up with references (not here, not now, anyway) but I seem to recall that this is important from a formal point of view, because once one allows for mixed strategies, it can be proved that every game has an equilibrium (i.e [at least one] optimal mix of responses). That is, one can derive predictions for any strategic interaction (or ‘game’). Again, whether such predictions are observed is an empirical question, but they seem to work tolerably well for many purposes.
One of the classics of the literature is Thomas Schelling, ‘The Strategy of Conflict’. It is (alas) sitting sadly on my shelf, awaiting the moment when I can do it justice.
If Adam Curtis is so against “selfishness” he will campaign against the television tax (the “license fee”) and refuse to accept payment from the B.B.C. whilst it is funded by tax.
Or is it that getting payment by voluntary trade is evil and “selfish”, but taking money by the threat of violence (such as with the “license fee”) is noble and “unselfish”.
Game theory can be proved from its axioms. Sadly, those axioms are false (in the sense that they do not describe real people) despite being self-consistant. Saying that your experiance in AI is evidence for the applicability of GT carries no weight at all as AI is a sterile field with almost no progress seen for 40 years of work.
The second programme in the series demonstrated the flaw in Buchanan very clearly: the man simply has no idea what he’s talking about for the simple reason that he is a socio-path. No wonder he made such appallingly bad models of society – he doesn’t know what it is! He needs treatment. Unable to grasp the concept of idealism himself (which he states himself in the programme) he dismisses it in others. How pathetic a figure he cuts as he rants about the hypocracy of people he admits to not being “able to get a handle on”.
That is the real point “The Trap” is making: by ignoring culture the individualists were (and are, judging by the comments here) unable to see that what “the pursuit of happiness” means is not fixed. If one is raised to value the social good then working for that social good will produce its rewards; if people generally value that sort of behaviour then the individual can achieve prestige etc. in that way. Where “free market” supporters went awry was in thinking that people who espouse things they (the free marketeers) can’t imagine must be lying. Pretty ironic when the “free market” is an imaginary construct!
The TV license is a classic social construct: we all pay to receive something which the market could not produce on its own. Ofcom – the visible hand of the not-very-free-market – is constantly waging a war against the BBC for being too good. They, and the private industry they represent, know that the BBC is better than anything self-interested magnates like Murdoch or Branson could possibly come up with.
I’ve no problem with private TV or private companies in general, but they have to be regulated or they will simply collapse the market down to a singularity – a monopoly – at which point the consumer, both as an individual and a society, is screwed. All truely free markets always collapse in this way and always will.
Social construct? Wrong on every level. It is a political construct. Markets are social because they are several relationships that I do or do not enter into (rather like having sex or buying this brand of cheese rather than that one or friendship or trips to the pub and all the other social things we do). Nothing compelled by law is social.
The British state forces me to pay for the BBC and that is a political imposition, not a social construct.
And the point is flawed because what “The Trap” describes as “culture” is nothing of the sort. When they say “culture” they mean laws that impose stasis (the opposite of “culture” really). It is the collectivists who cannot accept that the pursuit of happiness” is not fixed because they want to impose their version on others.
Most of the free market people I know do not ignore culture, but then they also know what the word actually means.
Oh, and there is nothing imaginary about a free market. Real transactions take place involving real products and real money.
Gah – i’ve posted my rebuttal(Link) on the next thread.
The BBC is good? Ah, OK, now I get it.
Rubbish. In as much as markets “collapse” into monopolies, it is becaus states help that situation come about. Left alone, we get the following sort of pattern instead:
a, small startup firms trying to make an impact;
b, that firm starts to grow very strongly,
c, that firm becomes mature, its margins thin and it starts to become slower and more bureaucratic;
d, the firm goes into decline, new firms eat into its share,
e, the firm either goes bust, or is taken over, or whatever.
We have seen this pattern in autos, computers, aviation, finance, you name it. The idea that markets “always” end up as monopolies is illiterate nonsense of the sort that even the late JK Galbraith might have found embarrassing.
Firstly I’d like to fish for congratulatory compliments on using a sick-day to recover my transport, and create a dual boot installation with which I am writing this; I am using ‘Ubuntu’ Server (Linux) which is gradually shaping up.
The only problem I have with regulation is that it serves the purposes of smarmy little ‘modoms'(male and female) who suffer from the unfunny delusion that they are better than everybody else and can tell them what to do.
Naturally, they veer away from the overt recognition of this by entrancing themselves into transports of public spiritedness, but that only enhances their essential corruption.
‘OFCOM’ and the BBC should be disbanded and their constituent collaborators placed in Secure Units for enforced study and drug therapy using carefully tailored doses of major tranquilisers.
When that happens, the asylums will really be taking over the lunatics.
Now, back to my video driver.Colour depth next.
Its been interesting reading this page regarding The trap. I enjoyed the programme and found it thought provoking. I did feel that on the whole the show was fairly accurate, but reality is not quite as black and white as Curtis suggests. I have felt the effects of many of the subjects he discussed, the kpi being an obvious example. Game theory to my mind seems to be a very flawed descriptor of human interactions as there is no room the unpredictable. It could be argued that everything is done for the self interest of the individual, but I really don’t believe that we are that predictable except perhaps on a base level.
The comparisons between the Curtis’s Ideal and that of Star Trek are flawed. Star Trek is a television show which has the primary purpose of entertainment and as such the plotting and politics of the show will change as the writers see fit. This of course makes it unsuitable material for comparison. As regards to the “BBC tax” It is not a tax as it is optional, don’t want to pay the fee? don’t watch television. The fee is to pay for the ability to receive television signals. I personally enjoy watching programmes without them being broken up with adverts for youth restoring lotions and loans for people who have bought more crap than they can afford. I find this society we live in currently quite depressing as it is totally market driven and just one more purchase will make you happy, which it won’t. There appears to be no room for anything with a bit of thought behind it, everything is tied up with targets and indicators. It is oppressive and as “The Trap” suggests I certainly do not feel free.
I also found it thought provoking in the same sense that listening to Hitler’s speeches and then marvelling at how people swallowed that shit is also indeed ‘thought provoking’.
Actually the political back-story in Star Trek is very consistent from the ‘Next Generation’ onwards. The Federation is highly collectivist, has a military institution (Star Fleet) which is closely involved in policy making (i.e. the military is not under strict civilian control) and it has a command economy which does not allocate resources with money (only non-Federation people like the Ferengi use money). That is quite consistent throughout the shows. Moreover in shows like Next Gen and Enterprise, there are many episodes in which characters declaim in ways that can only be described as ‘New Socialist Man’ in the most literal sense.
You are simply wrong (i.e. semantically incorrect, so it is not just a matter of opinion). That is like saying “because you only pay stamp duty if you buy a house, stamp duty is not a tax because you don’t have to buy a house” or “VAT is not a tax because if you don’t want to pay it, don’t buy anything”. Sorry but that is nonsensical.
I am being forced to pay for the BBC, an institution that I despise, even if I only ever watch the BBC’s competitors. That is a tax.
I watched all three programs. I’m not too sure about the direct connection of Game Theory and how individuals have been represented in current society, or how this has been used to build a predictive system that may create a stable society and help us achieve happiness.
However what is noticeable in my experience of the current life as a citizen in London, UK, is the belief by the government that all aspects of life are measurable. Not only measurable (and there are many disputes about metrics in the metrics community which tries to tackle the issue of measurement), but also once measured can be relied upon as an accurate representation of reality. How well a system concerned with helping people can be evaluated in terms of quality of its provided service is extremely complicated since that quality in itself is extremely difficult to define.
Particularly in terms of public services it seems dangerous to base the primary concern of institution solely on measures (I will not use the term metric since I believe it to be too strong a term) such as how many have been provided the service or have been operated on, per say. Let me give you an example, not so long ago my car was broken into where they broke one of the back windows as well as stole my car stereo. When I called the police to report the crime they informed me that they have abandoned the visitation of the crime scene as part of the investigation process. Regardless of how frustrating the idea of injustice maybe, it was also reported soon after that the rate of many crimes (including car crime) in my residential area had fallen to new targets. This maybe true, however doubtful since I also noticed many similar incidents in the area, based on crazy notion of reported of investigated car crimes in the area, but it does not change the fact that I don’t feel improvement in the quality of my life when no one seems concerned with finding the individual or people responsible for damaging my car and stealing my stereo.
The government seems to use statistics as proof of concept every time any questions are raised about the effectiveness of their implemented plans. In my opinion this is misleading and dangerous as it can eventually lead to misinformation and mistrust of the public in any feedback the government provides.
This program “the trap” did not raise the issue of faith, perhaps for good reason, but this form of absolute belief in guiding society by numbers is not too far from what I would interpret as (blind) faith. Regardless of the correctness of the assumption of the program discussion about game theory as the root of all evil (and please remember it is a theory), and even if one was to accept this theory as fact, caution should be taken in interpreting the results as well as the accuracy of the inputs. One would hope that if governments are to direct society based on any all encompassing theory (or system of mathematically proven facts based on given axioms), to keep in mind not to treat them as absolute and consider the complications that may arise due to the complexity, unpredictability and difficulty in measurement of the world around us.
Uh, Dale Amon, the Prisoners’ Dilemma is not a zero-sum game. In fact it is probably the canonical example of a NON zero-sum game.
I have just watched all three parts of the documentary series, “The Trap,” (BBC, March 2007). Though it was interesting, there were several serious errors and omissions in its portrayal of “Game Theory” and its affect on the future of humanity.
The chief of these was the casting of game theory as a tool of evil, and the insinuation that it is the weapon of a deliberate and elitist conspiracy. Game Theory is no such thing. It is simply a way of looking at reality. Game Theory has a scientific basis and is basically values neutral. It does not suggest a consequent ideology rooted in any of the ideologies of “positive” or “negative” freedom, though it does expose the consequences of various types of transactions and the environments in which they occur.
Game theory is the theory of how events transpire among the actors in the overall matrix (“Game Space”) of reality. It is a series of studies of how and why “players” relate and interact, or fail to do so. It is the study of the “shape” of transactions, and the strategies that might be suggested for the “players” by that shape.
Its basis is the philosophers’ “monistic” concept of a unitary reality—the same basis that underlies the notion of scientific inquiry: That there is a reality that can be studied and that all things affect each other, (therefore, all reality can be modeled). Game theory seeks to study the actions and alternatives involved in transactions of all scale. The players can be animate (people), inanimate (molecules), free (not strategically committed), or entrapped (strategically committed).
One must remember, that whatever their personal condition, they are still players capable of influencing the outcome of the games in which they take part.
The propounding of conspiracy theories tends toward the disempowerment of players by reinforcing notions of helplessness. Such notions are far more dangerous than the bogyman of “Game Theory.” Game theory is ultimately empowering to persons of independent mind as it provides them with the ability to understand and play the games of life.
(By: Bill Churchill March 8, 2008.)