ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS: GAME THEORY IN EVERYDAY LIFE
How I Came to Write It

WHY ARE WE SO BAD AT COOPERATING, when cooperation brings such obvious benefits? It’s a question that has been bugging me for the past 20 years or so i.e. from the ripe old age of 45, which is the sort of age when many of us start to think about these things.

AFTER A FEW YEARS OF FUTILE PUZZLEMENT, I turned to the academic study of philosophy in a search for answers. I soon found that the whole field of ethics (i.e. questions relating to how we should behave as members of a society) revolved around a classical logical problem known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, whose roots are to be found in the science of game theory. The attempts of all of the great philosophers, from Plato to Berkeley to the American John Rawls and his “New Theory of Justice”, to work out how societies should best operate to the benefit of all, turned out to be a series of futile attempts to get around the problems posed by the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

THE ROOTS OF THE PROBLEM lie in a genuine logical dilemma, whose consequences for our everyday lives I was eventually to explore in “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” For many years, though, having caught on to the dilemma, I simply contented myself with collecting examples from newspapers and anecdotes provided by my friends. It was fear that stopped me from writing – fear that I wasn’t an expert (although I did manage an M.A. in logic while I was studying philosophy), that others were better qualified, and even who did I think I was trying to change the world.

I EVENTUALLY DECIDED that if I couldn’t change the world, I could at least try to help and provide information forthose who might, by giving them the information about these underlying problems in digestible form. And that’s where it all started … …

NEW BOOK: ROCK. PAPER, SCISSORS

AFTER A GESTATION TIME considerably longer than that of an elephant, my new book is finally due for release by Basic Books in New York on November 11. It is the one that I have been building towards ever since I started writing - a book on the underlying problems that bedevil our attempts to cooperate, using the modern science of game theory to understand what these problems are and what we can do about them.

I KNEW LITTLE ABOUT GAME THEORY WHEN I STARTED - just that it seemed terribly important in understanding the problems that we face today, from global warming and resource depletion to terrorism and war. I took the advice of an American scientist called Charles Tanford, whom I met many years ago, and who told me that his way of understanding a new subject was to write a book about it.

I DIDN'T QUITE BELIEVE HIM, but now having done it in this new book, I understand exactly what he meant. In this occasional blog I will tell the story of how I went about it, in the hope that this might encourage other writers to do the same with topics that they believe are vitally important, but which they are worried that they do not know enough about. To quote Sylvanus P. Thompson, author of a marvellous little book "Calculus Made Easy"from which I learned calculus at an age when I wasn't supposed to be able to: "What one fool can do, another can."

Research

What does "research" mean? To many, it simply means looking things up. To me as a scientist it means trying to understand what is going on, partly by reading to see what other people have discovered, but mostly by doing experiments to check out my ideas. I am now translating this process into writing my latest book, which is about applying scientific thinking to social questions. People have done this before under various guises, and boy am I getting excited in reading what they have discovered. it's taken me back to my student days, and I am applying a method that I worked out for myself and which served me very well.
Instead of taking notes, I write out questions. Later, I give myself a little exam on those questions, and then I go back to my original reading to see whether I have remembered and understood it properly. Anything I have missed or got wrong gets noted in red beside the original answer. That way, I can't kid myself that I have understood something when I really haven't.
Later, I will try out some little social experiments to check and challenge my ideas and those of others. Should be fun!

Aiming for Gold

Writing (at least, the way I do it) can be compared to archery, with the storyline as the trajectory of the arrow, ending hopefully in the centre of the golden bullseye that is the point and culmination of the book. The problem is that the arrow has to be aimed accurately at the beginning, or it will miss the target. Luckily a writer , unlike an archer, has the option to grab the arrow before it has gone too far and put it back in the bow for another shot.
That is exactly what I have been doing during the past week, writing and re-writing the start of the book so that the storyline is heading in exactly the right direction. Time and again I have set it off in the wrong direction, but after a week of trying I have finally succeeded in pointing the arrow where I want it to go.
So that's half a page written. Now all I have to do is to write the rest of the book.

Contract!

Some writers can just keep going with writing a book, regardless of whether they have a contract or not. Me, I regard the long anxious wait, and the consequential writers block, as all part of the process. It's not without its benefits. The long gap (reflected in the gap in this blog) had me questioning my direction, planning other books for the future, and generally filing and tidying up my study and my mind, not to mention my e-mails and computer files.

Finally, though, I have been offered a contract based on the synopsis and sample chapters that have been going the rounds of the publishers. If I had started writing, most of my effort would have been wasted, because my new editor effectively wants me to scrap the first three-quarters of my planned book and focus on the last bit, which she regards as having all the liveliness and interest.

She's right, and I never saw it for myself. That's why showing your work to others is so useful, and the more professional the "other", the better. Writers, like scientist, are only too apt to fall for their own bullshit, especially when working on their own.

Writing and the Art of Self-trepanation 2. Getting on with it.

Here’s a question for you. A man is working at the top of a tall ladder when the ladder starts to tilt sideways. If he can’t stop it moving, should he jump off the ladder or hang on to it?

This is one of the titbits that I discovered when I was sorting through bookmarked websites for my current book. It reflects how I feel at the start of a book – the tension between wanting to jump off or hanging in there and going for an exhilarating ride. At the moment I am hanging in there, going back through the huge pile of references that I have accumulated and putting them into categories relevant to different chapters. It points up the advice that my Ph.D. supervisor gave me: “Just keep going”. In other words, do something rather than nothing. If you don’t start, you will never finish. This is what Wendy has been saying, although heaven knows she has enough trouble getting started with writing tasks. I just wonder what she is going to say when I bring a box full of references with me on our holiday in Cornwall next week?

Writing and the Art of Self-trepanation 1. Getting Started

The eccentric Joey Mellen performed a self-trepanation in the Spring of 1970 in an attempt to enhance his consciousness. "He applied the drill to his forehead, but after half an hour’s work the cable burnt out ..... next day he set out to finish the job. ‘This time I was not in any doubt. The drill head went at least an inch deep through the hole. A great gush of blood followed my withdrawal of the drill. In the mirror I could see the blood in the hole rising and falling with the pulsation of the brain.' "

John Michell “Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions”.

Mellen could have achieved the same effect with much less danger simply by becoming a writer, which can feel very much like self-trepanation with the difficulty of starting the job, carrying it through, and the subsequent effect on the brain.

Getting started can be a major problem, as many writers have found. When Jean Tangye began to write about her life at Minack in Cornwall, she only got started after her husband Derek, an author himself, locked her in a shed with her permission, a typewriter, a pile of paper and absolutely nothing else.

Wendy hasn’t had to go to those extremes with me, but she certainly gets exasperated when I ask her to comment on the 50^th version of Chapter 1 before I get started on Chapter 2. It’s very important to do this sort of polishing when preparing a synopsis and sample chapter for a publisher, and an amplification of the old journalist’s maxim always to put a piece aside after you’ve written it, even for half an hour, and then come back and edit it. It really blocks the path of progress, though, when it comes to writing the rest of the book.

Or does it? Most writers are singularly coy about how they go about writing (Somerset Maugham, for example, in his “Writer’s Notebook” doesn’t say a word about the subject), but Bertrand Russell tells a story which indicates that my approach might have its merits. I polish, not to improve my prose, but because every time I read what I have written I find things that I have glossed over rather than thinking them right through. Then suddenly something becomes unblocked and I can write subsequent chapters much faster through having put in all that thinking. Compare Russell:

“Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my sub-consciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation. The most curious example of this process, and the one which led me subsequently to rely upon it, occurred at the beginning of 1914. I had undertaken to give the Lowell Lectures at Boston, and had chosen as my subject "Our Knowledge of the External World". Throughout 1913 I thought about this topic. In term time in my rooms at Cambridge, in vacations in a quiet inn on the upper reaches of the Thames, I concentrated with such intensity that I sometimes forgot to breath and emerged panting as from a trance. But all to no avail. To every theory that I could think of I could perceive fatal objections. At last, in despair, I went off to Rome for Christmas, hoping that a holiday would revive my flagging energy. I got back to 'Cambridge on the last day of 1913, and although my difficulties were still completely unresolved I arranged, because the remaining time was short, to dictate as best as I could to a stenographer. Next morning, as she came in at the door, I suddenly saw exactly what I had to say, and proceeded to dictate the whole book without a moment's hesitation.”

Actually, I don’t believe him. I think it was the deadline that did the trick. I need the rest of his advice like I need a hole in the head.