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 … …